Congo

by Michael Crichton

was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success—or the most to lose from failure.

The rate of sign acquisition could be taken as a measure of either the scientist’s skill or the animal’s intelligence.

“If a man has to do something dangerous,” he said later, “it helps to be angry. It’s for his own protection, really. Better he should hate someone than fall apart. I wanted Elliot to hate me all the way down.”

Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

“But you can’t give up control,” Elliot said. “We’ve been doing it for centuries,” Ross said. “What’s a domesticated animal—or a pocket calculator—except an attempt to give up control? We don’t want to plow fields or do square roots so we turn the job over to some other intelligence, which we’ve trained or bred or created.”