"de Camp, L Sprague - Employment UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)
Wilhelmi tell about restoring oxidized metal by the anode process. Well, why couldn't we work something like that on fossils?"
"You mean to grow a complete animal, hair and all, from a skeleton?"
"Why not? You know what extraordinary things they do in medicine nowadays-growing arms and legs on people who have lost their own."
"With all due respect, my dear employer, I think you're screwbox."
"We'll see about that. I'm going to try some experiments, anyway. We'll keep them to ourselves, of course. If they didn't work, a lot of our colleagues might agree with your opinion."
Platt began his work with rabbits-modem rabbits, that is. He would kill a rabbit, remove various parts, and hook it up in a Ringer's solution bath to a current source. To build up the missing parts he used bio-charged amino acids, which will combine to form proteins and, in the presence of other cells, form whole new cells.
After many failures, he one day observed that the tissues of one of the rabbits were building up. He pointed the phenomenon out to Staples.
The geologist protested: "But it can't be that one. I turned the juice off in that tank."
"Yes?" replied Platt. "Let's see. Ah! You thought you turned it off, but look at this switch!"
Staples saw that he had accidentally struck the open knife switch so that the bars barely touched the contacts.
Platt said: "Now I know; we've been using too much voltage. It wants something like point oh one volts." And the little man was off like a chipmunk with a bunch of nuts, changing the rheostats to one calibrated for higher resistance.
They perfected their methods of reifying recent animals, which later proved of great value in surgery. Their results were not, however, so incredible when you consider that every cell in an animal's body contains a complete set of chromosomes with all the genes that determine the animal's form. It is as if in each cell there was a complete blueprint of the entire animal.
Their first attempt with fossils-the fragmentary remains of the Castoroides-failed. Staples wasn't sorry. He was worrying about the effect of the news of this bizarre experiment on his professional reputation.
Then at dinner one night Platt jumped up and began orating. He waved his knife and fork so that he almost speared his daughter's boy friend, who slid below the edge of the table until the storm had passed. "Ken!" cried the paleontologist. "I know what to do now! You've got to have a lot of the original organic matter of which the organism was composed, in the solution along with the bones. The current makes the original atoms resume their former places, and they serve as a framework for the amino acid molecules in their building-up work. We need a fairly complete skeleton, with considerable organic matter in the surrounding rock-if possible, with impressions of the soft parts. We'll have to analyze the rock, because if the fossil's at all old the original atoms will be scattered through the surrounding rock as to show no visible traces."
The next day they spent in the storehouse, unwrapping the burlap from fossils and testing their matrices for organic material. They picked a specimen of Canis dirus embedded in a big block of sandstone, strung the block up with a chain hoist, and dumped it into one of the tanks.
Nothing happened for a long time. Then the sandstone decomposed into mud, and in its place was a blob of jelly through which they could see the skeleton. The jelly became more and more opaque, and you could see the organs forming as the original atoms took their places, and the others, from the amino acids, polypeptides, and other substances that were introduced into the tank, lined up alongside them. It was uncannily as though the atoms had definite memories of where they belonged in the animal's body back in the Pleistocene.
When the mass in the tank stopped changing, it had the form of a huge wolf, about the size of a Great Dane, but twice as muscular and ten times as mean-looking.
They fished the brute out of the tank, emptied the solution out of him, and applied an electric starter to his heart. After three hours of this, the wolf shuddered and began coughing the remainder of the Ringer's solution out of his lungs. It occurred to the experimenters that they had no place to keep the wolf, who would make a rather formidable house pet. They tethered him to a tree while they prepared a pen. But for a few days the wolf hardly moved at all. When he did, he was like a man who has been a year in the hospital, and is having to learn to walk all over again.
But at the end of two weeks he was eating of his own accord. His hair, which had been a mere fuzz at first-the process being effective in recreating the hair roots, but not the hairs, which are dead structures-rapidly grew to normal length. At the end of three weeks he was enough his old self to snarl at Staples when the geologist entered his cage. It was a most impressive snarl, sounding rather like tearing a piece of sheet iron in two.
After that I was careful about getting too near him or turning my back on him. But he didn't give us much trouble, though he never became what you'd call friendly. I always liked him for one reason:
Platt's daughter had a fluffy dog that liked to bite people's ankles-no provocation necessary. After one of my kids had been nipped, the girl and I had a real row about the excrescence. Before we could have another, the dog went out one day and yapped at the dire wolf. Mr. Wolf sprang against his bars and growled-once. That was the last we saw of that accursed pooch.
Six months later, Platt and Staples hoisted out of its tank a specimen of Arctotherium, the immense bear from the California Pleistocene. Staples had had the busiest six months of his life, between helping the preparation of patent applications and getting the reification of more fossils started. There had been several failures-important parts of the skeletons missing, or insufficient organic matter in the surrounding rocks, or reasons unknown. This proved to be one of the last: the bear looked normal enough, but refused to come to life. Staples confessed that, looking at the thing's bulk, he had been more afraid of success than of failure. It was later mounted in the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
After their partial failure with the Arctotheriuin, they succeeded with a bear-dog, Dinocyon gidleyi. When Staples looked at the result his throat felt a little dry. The thing was built on the general lines of a polar bear, only bigger than even the Kodiak grizzly. Its large ears gave its head a wolfish appearance, and it had a long bushy tail. It weighed 1,978 pounds, and it didn't like anybody. Platt was delighted. "Now if I could only get an Andrewsarchus!" he beamed. "That's a still bigger carnivore, an Asiatic Oligocene creodont. One skull measured thirty-four inches."
"Yeah?" said Staples, still looking at the bear-dog. "You can have him. I haven't lost him. This thing we have here is quite big enough for me."
They had hired an old circus man named Elias to help them with their growing zoo. They had built a concrete barn for the animals with a row of cages down one side. It looked strong enough, until one afternoon Staples went out to investigate a racket from the cages. He found the bars of the bear-dog's cage bowed out-the lower ends had come out of the green concrete easily-and no Dinocyon. Staples had a horrible visioh of the bear-dog wandering over Kosciusko County and eating everything he could catch.
The beast was not, however, far away. He was, in fact, just around the corner looking for a way to get into the Stenomylus cage. In a few seconds he reappeared. He looked at Staples. The geologist could have sworn that the expression in his big yellow eyes said: "Ah, dinner!" The bear-dog growled like a distant thunderstorm and started for Staples.
Staples knew that the animal could run circles around him on level ground, and moreover that if he caught him he wouldn't be satisfied to run circles around him. Staples' best idea was to swarm up the bars around the Trilophodon's enclosure. He couldn't have climbed those bars ordinarily, but he did this time.
Arrived at the top, he couldn't stay there unless he wanted the beardog to rear up and scoop him off his perch. On the other hand, the inside of the cage didn't look inviting. The "little" mastodon-standing five feet at the shoulder and weighing slightly over a ton-was half crazed with fear. She was gallumping around the enclosure making noises like a pig under a gate. An elephant's fear of dogs is not unreasonable when the elephant and the dog are about the same size.
Just before the bear-dog arrived, Staples jumped off and landed astride the Trilophodon's neck. He didn't feel like a movie hero who 'umps off a balcony onto his horse. He was scafed stiff. He got a good grip on his mount's scalp hair and hung on desperately, knowing that he'd be trampled to jelly in no time if she bucked him off.
Staples heard a rifle go off, several times, and got a glimpse of Gil Platt shooting out of the workshop doorway. The Dinocyon gave a coughing roar and went over to see about it. Staples was too busy to watch closely, but got a few glimpses of the bear-dog running around the shop, trying to climb in the windows-which were too small. He finally settled down to dig under the house. All this time Platt was popping out of doors and windows to fire and popping back again. Staples had time to reflect that the bear-dog's insides must be taking a terrible beating from the soft-nosed bullets, but that such was his vitality that you could shoot holes in him all day before he'd give up.
He made wonderful progress with his digging; he took the earth out like a bucket chain. Staples remembered that the shop had a thin wooden floor, which wouldn't offer much resistance if the animal got under the house. They needed a .~o-caliber machine gun, which they didn't have.
Before it came to that, Elias climbed out on the, roof and dropped a stick of dynamite alongside the bear-dog. That did the trick. The effect was rather like hitting a cantaloupe with a mallet. Staples had just gotten his animated calliope calmed down, and the explosion started her off again. It was a question of which would collapse from exhuastion first. The geologist won by a hair.
When he examined the remains of the Dinocyon, he asked Platt:
"Why didn't you shoot him in the head?"
"But if I'd done that I'd have smashed the skull, and we mightn't have been able to reify him!"
"You mean . . . you're going to-" But Staples didn't finish. He already knew the answer. They gathered up the bear-dog, put him back together more or less the way he had been, and hoisted him into the biggest tank again. Some days later Staples was sorry to observe that the animal was making a record recovery. But Platt had a new cage built that not even this monster could break out of.
But with his size and enormous appetite, Platt decided that he was too expensive and dangerous to keep. He sold him to the Philadelphia Zoo. After the zoo people became acquainted with him they probably regretted their bargain.
The sale attracted some attention, and the Philadelphia Zoo for a while had a capacity audience. Platt inquired about the market for more of his reified animals.
A couple of weeks after the sale, a sunburned man called at Piatt's. He said his name was Nively, and that he represented the Marco Polo Co. This, he explained, included all the wild-animal importers and dealers in the country. It was a membership corporation instead of a stock corporation, to get around the antitrust laws.
Feeling that they could now afford some publicity, Platt and Staples showed him the place. He was duly impressed, especially with their new Dinohyus, a lower Miocene elothere. It was a piglike animal the size of a buffalo, with a mouth full of teeth like those of a bear. It ate practically anything.
Elias was assembling their biggest tank. Platt explained: '░That's for Proboscidea. We haven't one big enough for them now. And out in the storehouse I've got a magnificent Parelephas jeffersonhi. You know, the Jeffersonian mammoth. That's much bigger than the ordinary or woolly mammoth that the cavemen made such pretty pictures of. The woolly mammoth was a rather small animal, not over nine feet high."
"That so?" said Nively. They were on their way back to the office. "My word! I thought all mammoths were huge things. I say, Dr. Platt, I have a little matter I'd like to discuss in private."
"You can go right ahead, Mr. Nively. I haven't any secrets from Staples."
"Very well. To begin, is this process of yours protected?"
"Sure it is. At least, as far as you can protect any invention by patent applications. What are you getting at, Mr. Nively?"
"I think the Marco Polo might have a proposal that would interest you, Dr. Platt."
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