"John Varley - Mammoth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

ones. The one he was sitting in now was a Sikorsky HB-53F, the civilian version of the military Sea
Stallion, probably the largest passenger-carrying chopper outside of Russia. It could be configured to
carry fifty soldiers with full combat gear. This one had only two rows of seats bolted to the floor up in
the front, the rest of the cavernous interior was empty. With so little cargo the Sikorsky's range was
enormous, more than enough to make it from Churchill, where the Air Canada flight had dumped him,
to the site known to only a handful of people as Mammoth Seven.

It was damn cold inside, but it didn't seem to bother Charlie. The little Inuit had pushed the hood
of his parka back, revealing straight black hair that looked to have been groomed with rendered
walrus blubber. His gnarled brown hands were bare. His coat had a handmade and hard-used look to
it, but his boots looked like L.L. Beans. He seemed to feel Warburton's gaze, looked across the
helicopter and smiled, revealing widely spaced but strong, brown teeth. Didn't they chew reindeer
hides to soften them? Or was that just the women? Warburton's own outfit, purchased at
Abercrombie & Fitch during his layover in Toronto and guaranteed by the salesman to protect him
from a polar blizzard, was providing him no more warmth than a Banlon shirt.

He looked out his window and saw the first spot of color he had seen for more than five
hundred miles. The heavily insulated modular dwellings that had been flown in dangling from the cargo
hook of this very helicopter were almost the same color as the snow. But a short distance from them
was a large half-cylinder tent, like a Quonset hut, made of blue and red canvas panels, strongly
anchored with yellow poly ropes, near the bottom of a large, bare hill. This was Mammoth Seven.

Warburton saw people emerge from one of the trailers. One looked up and waved. Then they
were setting down on a big red X in the middle of a red circle that had been painted on the snow.
Warburton and Charlie unfastened their belts and waited for the pilot, another Inuit, to open the door
and lower the ramp.

Once outside, Warburton realized he hadn't really been cold at all inside the damn helicopter.
This, now this was cold.

There were two people hurrying out to meet him, all but indistinguishable in their puffed-up nylon
and Gore-Tex outfits, hoods over their heads, eyes hidden by big blue sunglasses against the icy glare.
Warburton followed them toward the big pressurized tent looming like some high-tech circus big top a
hundred feet up the side of the hill. They trudged up the path and entered through a zipper in its side.

Inside, hoods off, Warburton recognized Dr. Rostov, formerly of the St. Petersburg Museum of
Natural History, now the head of the Mammoth Seven recovery. They were in a square room about
the size of a hotel elevator, which he knew from visits to previous mammoth sites to be a sort of air
lock. The tent was held up by internal pressure, so the outer and inner doors of the room could not be
opened at the same time.

Rostov started to open the inner door, then cleared his throat. Warburton realized the man was
nervous.

"Now, I know what your first reaction is going to be," Rostov said. "It was my first reaction, too.
You're going to think this is some kind of joke."

Rostov had just a trace of an accent. He looked the part of a university professor, with an
unkempt mane of white hair and a goatee that was more salt and pepper. But his face was almost as
weathered as Charlie's, and he had an alarming red nose shaped like a potato. Though his hands were