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

undertaken tasks much less appetizing in his work for Christian.

One of the things he had not learned was the precise location of mammoth testicles, but he had
assumed they were pretty much where they would be on other quadrupeds, like horses, sheep, cattle,
and probably elephants, though he had never actually seen an elephant's family jewels. But Rostov
didn't take him all the way around the massive beast, but to its left side. The mammoth was sitting
more or less upright, with its legs folded under it.

Now Rostov indicated a lump by the hind legs that did not fit with any picture of a mammoth
Warburton could come up with, unless its left hind leg was twisted grotesquely out to one side. The
lump was covered with the same protective material that concealed the rest of the mammoth.

Warburton looked at Rostov, waiting, and Rostov sighed and pulled back the cover.

The lump was a man.

He was huddled tight against the side of the mammoth, still partly buried. Only his head and
torso had been chipped out of the ice. Most of his face and part of his upper arm had been eaten
away, gnawed at by animals. Where Warburton could see the chest, the skin was yellow and
shriveled and looked like wax.

Warburton looked at Rostov again.

"No joke," the man assured him, with a helpless shrug.

"How old?"

"Around twelve thousand years," Rostov said.

What was left of the man's hair was long and wispy and gray. There were scraps of gray beard
lying on his chest. Because of the tissue shrinkage and what Warburton could only think of as an
extreme case of freezer burn, it was hard to estimate his age, but he got the impression the man was
old. Many of his teeth were missing, or blackened, or brown stumps. But that didn't prove much, did
it? Without dental care a young man's teeth could rot out, too, and he supposed the best dental care
available where this man had come from was a whack in the mouth with a stone ax.

"I am not an anthropologist," Rostov said. "What I can see of his clothing is consistent with what
I know of the era."

Warburton didn't think you'd need a Ph.D. to figure that out. What clothing he could see was
made from fur and leather. What else would the man be wearing on a mammoth hunt? Spats and a
school tie?

His mind was racing now. He worked for Howard Christian, who was a complex man of many
interests, but none of them exceeded his interest in money, so Warburton immediately was thinking of
ways to turn this into a lot of cash. A mummified Stone Age man? Good money to be made, no
question. Get National Geographic out here, have them document the removal, show the film on
Discovery Channel or PBS.

"If you lean over just a bit," Rostov said, "you can just see the top of the head of the second