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

now clad in fur-lined gloves, Warburton knew the doctor had lost the tips of several fingers to
frostbite. Being a mammoth hunter in the twenty-first century didn't entail the same risks as it had for
our mammoth-hunting ancestors, but it was no picnic, and it took you to climates that could kill just as
surely as a wounded and enraged mammoth.

"It never entered my mind that you would bring me up here as part of a joke, Doctor,"
Warburton said. Now that the green light had come on over the inner door, Rostov ushered the group
inside. The interior was well lit, and not nearly as warm as Warburton had hoped, but at least it was
out of the wind.

"We keep it heated to only about four degrees below zero to protect the specimen," Rostov
said. Warburton translated from the Canadian centigrade scale: high to mid twenties.

In the center of the tent was the excavation into the side of the hill, a rectangular area about
twenty by twenty feet. It was well lit by floodlights on tripods. The crew had dug out the mammoth's
head and back and most of one side, but those parts were covered with protective cloth. Christian
wanted this frozen creature intact, and that meant excavation was a painfully deliberate process,
starting with small ice axes, moving to hammers and chisels, getting down to warm brushes and
toothpicks before the hairy pelt was reached. And even then, when a section of hide was bared, it
was refrozen in distilled water. It would be absurd for this creature to have survived for ten, fifteen
thousand years, perfectly preserved to the point that its flesh was probably still edible, and then to
have it rot in a few days of digging. The plan was to free the creature from the permafrost and then
quickly airlift it to a large refrigerated facility where further actions could be contemplated at leisure.

"Seven is by far the best and the largest primigenius we have yet investigated," Rostov said. "In
fact, it is so large I have begun to wonder if it might be an actual hybrid, possibly with Mammuthus
imperiori, which was quite a bit larger than primigenius. The flesh is in wonderful shape. The nuclei
we've tested so far have yielded promising DNA, though of course we have yet to reach the sexual
organs."

Warburton had learned a lot about mammoths in the last four years. He always had to learn
things to keep up with his boss's newest manias. He knew Mammuthus primigenius was the Latin
name for the woolly mammoth. He'd learned a bit about cloning, too, though he had no aptitude for
science. But the basic facts were easy enough to absorb. If one wished to re-create a mammoth, one
needed some DNA that was reasonably intact. No perfect specimens had ever been discovered, but
as the years went by, the criteria for "reasonably intact" had steadily lowered, as new techniques for
reassembling genetic material had been discovered and elaborated. Four years ago he had dismissed
the whole project as highly unlikely. It hadn't been the first time his boss had pursued a chimera.

The best mammoth cells to use for cloning would be an egg from a female or a sperm cell from a
male. The resulting embryo could then be implanted in a female elephantтАФnot an easy project in itself,
as the reproductive cycle of elephants was complicated and not completely understood.

But maybe it could be done, and that was why orders had come from Mr. Christian to
concentrate on the rear of the giant corpse, to gain access to the testicles. Or, as Christian had put it
in a phone call to Rostov that Warburton had overheard, "I want that bull's balls by next Monday,
Doctor, or I'll find somebody else to dig 'em out."

This was the following Wednesday, and Warburton presumed he was about to be shown
something astonishing concerning mammoth reproduction. It wasn't a prospect he relished, but he'd