"Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

"Come on," said Dr. Fred Luntz. We're buying."
Arnaud smiled a big smile.



-<*>-



"It's all wrong," said Dr. Fred. "They're treating them like circus elephants, only shaggy, instead of what
they are. The thing with the rock is more like it, if they're going to have to perform."
Arnaud was eating from nine or ten plates -- two trays -- at the cafeteria a kilometer or so from the
exhibition hall. The four of us had only eaten a couple of pieces of pie, Jell-o salads, and some
watermelon because we were so full of circus junk food. Arnaud's metabolism must have been like a
furnace. Occasionally he would look up from eating.
"Better that, than them not being around at all," said Dr. Bob.
"Well, yes, of course. But, Sir Harry Tusker. African white-hunter archetype. All wrong for
mammoths."
"Yeah, well, what do you want? Siberians? Proto-Native Americans?" asked Bob.
"I mean, there was enough grief twenty or so years ago, when they were first brought back -- the
Russians tried taking frozen mammoth genes from carcasses in the permafrost late last century, putting
them in Indian elephants, their nearest living relatives--"
"This is your friend, Dr. Bob, the paleonologist, Fred...." said Dr. Bob.
"Okay. Okay. But didn't work last century. Suddenly, it works. Exact same procedure. Suddenly, we
have mammontelephants, all female of course. Big outrage; you can't bring back extinct animals to a time
they're not suited for; it's cruel, etc. Like the A-Bomb and physicists; geneticists could bring back the
dead, so they did. Or purt-near, anyway. So we give in. They're in zoos at first, then circuses. Ten,
twenty, thirty at first, now maybe one hundred, two hundred -- only a few are in the game preserves in
Siberia run by the World Wildlife Fund and the Jersey Zoo (and there was a big fight about that). Then,
five years ago, hey presto! There's males. Someone went into a male completely buried in the frozen
ground and retrieved the whole system (and how's you like that for a job, huh Bob?) and then we have
viable sperm, and now there are five or six males, including the one up in Baltimore, and more on the
way. What I'm saying is, turn 'em loose somewhere, don't just look at them, or make 'em act."
"Like loose where? Like do what?" asked Bob.
"Like, I don't know," said Dr. Fred.
Arnaud continued shoveling food into his face.
"What did you think about the mammoths, Jason?" I asked him.
"Neat!" he said.
"Me, too," I said.
"Look, you know as well as I do what the real reason people want to shut all this down is," said Dr.
Bob. "It's not that they don't want extinct animals brought back into a changed climate, that they have an
inability to adapt from an Ice Age climate -- you go up or down in altitude and get the climate you want.
Mammoths in the high Rockies, in Alaska, in Siberia. Sure, no problem. And it ain't, like they say, that
we should be saving things that are going extinct now first: they're still here, they'll have to be taken
somewhere to live, and people will have to leave them alone -- island birds, rare predators, all that.
That's their big other argument: Fix now now, then fix then. The real reason is the same since the
beginning: we're playing God, and they don't like it."
"Sure it has a religious element," said Fred. "But that doesn't mean you have to put the
mammontelephants in some sort of zoo and circus limbo while you decide if there's to be more of them or
not. Nobody's advocating bringing back smilodons (even if you could find the genetic material), or