Mammoth (5 page)

“‘Haring off after a wild hair,’ that’s what somebody once said about it.”

“There was that rigid-frame airship you were talking about a while back,” Matt said. “What ever happened to that?”

“That’s still in development,” Christian said, a bit defensively. The neozeppelin project, code-named Zipper, was actually in the prototype stage, and had thus far eaten well over a hundred million of Howard Christian’s dollars and returned nothing.

“Twice the length of the Hindenberg, was it?” Matt asked.

“Just about.”

“Pretty expensive to fill it with helium.”

“We’re using hydrogen.”

Matt laughed in real admiration.

“That will be a real heavy lifter. So long as you can keep it from exploding.”

“Not a problem. There won’t be anything aboard that can make a spark. Carbon composite construction, throughout.”

“I also heard you’re trying to clone a mammoth. Anyway, knowing just these things about you, I asked myself what a man like you would want from a man like me. You offer a lot of money and a ride in a fancy car and a fine meal”—Matt gestured with half a hamburger—“and then you casually ask if I believe time travel is possible. The conclusion I draw is that you may want me to make you a time machine and get you a mammoth. It’s wild, but it’s all I can think of. Now tell me where I went wrong.”

Christian didn’t say anything for a few moments.

“First, answer my question. Is time travel possible?”

“Without question.”

“You’re talking about something on the subatomic level, aren’t you?”

“Sure. There’s a type of quantum entanglement whereby two particles can influence each other even though they’re separated by many light-years of distance and thousands of years of time.”

“Okay. Hypothetically, then. Is it possible to build the kind of time machine, the kind that”—Christian spread his hands wryly—“that a man like me would want to buy?”

“You’re talking about a fancy bicycle with a crystal handle and rotating thingamabobs and so forth like in a movie.”

“More or less. Something that can get a useful mass from Time B to Time A—”

“Without killing it.”

“Sure.”

“I’d have to say no. See, the theory allows for moving in any direction through time…but it forbids the transfer of any information that way, whether the information is a single 1 or 0 bit, or the information in, say, strands of mammoth DNA, or the rather more complex information that is the molecular makeup of a living body. And Howard, I really hate to tell you that, because I was getting to like this lifestyle, and
now I have to say I can’t take your money. That is, if building a time machine
was
what you wanted to hire me for. Was I right?”

Christian looked at the sea, and the big Ferris wheel, and when he turned back to Matt there was a measure of satisfaction there.

“You were on the right track, but not on the money,” he said. “Excellent. That’s where you learn things. So how did I go wrong?”

“Not enough information.”

“There’s always that danger.”

Christian turned the key in the ignition and the V-12 engine rumbled powerfully. He put the Duesenberg in gear.

“I don’t want you to make me a time machine, Matt. I already have one. I want you to see if you can fix it.”

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”

That same summer in what would one day be called Canada there was a male woolly mammoth we will call Tsehe.

Tsehe was in musth in a very bad way.

Just as human females are affected in different ways by their menstrual cycles, male elephants react to musth in different ways. For some women, getting their period is no big deal. For others, it means days spent being sick in bed and getting angry at everyone.

Tsehe was like that.

The long, thick fur on his head was sticky and matted from smelly stuff that oozes from a gland male mammoths have on their temples. It was irritating.

His
penis
, which he normally kept tucked safely away in a
sheath
like horses or dogs do, was now erect almost all the time. Sometimes it dragged on the ground (mammoths had very long penises!), which was irritating.

He urinated constantly and that made a green alga grow on his most sensitive parts, and that irritated him. He took to rubbing himself against rocks and trees because it itched so badly, but this only made it hurt worse.

No wonder mammoths in musth were cranky!

He had a bad headache, like what we would call a
migraine
, so that colors looked too bright and every movement around him made him feel dizzy.

At the same time, he was very sexually aroused.

All around him for many miles were herds of woolly mammoth females coming into season. They were calling out to him. And they were doing it in an amazing way.

Since mammoth females could only become pregnant during four or five days out of the entire year, it was important that males and females get together for courtship and mating during those few days.

But because males and females lived apart and didn’t really have that much to do with one another during most of the year, this could be a problem.

Mammoths had very good noses (just look how long they are!), but this was not always enough to bring males and females together at the right time.

Mammoths could bellow very loudly, just as elephants can, but normal sound can only travel so far before it becomes too quiet to hear.

However, evolution had provided mammoths with a way. It was a sort of long-distance telephone, many years before humans invented the telephone. Mammoths could make sounds that would have been below the range of human hearing. Imagine the deepest musical note you have ever heard…and then try to imagine a note twice as low as that! (Musicians call this an
octave.)

Scientists call these very low notes
infrasound
, and it travels much farther than normal sound.

When male mammoths heard these infrasound songs, they became very excited. In mammoth language, the females were singing:

“I’m ready!”

And the males sang back:

“I’m on my way!”

LELAND
said, “How do you give an enema to an elephant?”

“Diplomatically,” Roger suggested.

Susan Morgan sighed and scowled at them from the other side of Queenie. “Will you boys get serious long enough to get this done? There’s a lot at stake here.”

“Especially for Queenie,” Leland responded. Roger giggled.

Susan didn’t know why she bothered. Leland and Roger were in fact both older than she was. But they were unable or unwilling to repress what she thought of as their frat-boy/med-student tendency toward the gross-out…what they would have described as irreverent humor.

The procedure they were about to undertake wasn’t an enema but, as Leland had observed yesterday, it was close enough for rock and roll. What they were getting ready for was the last stage of a process Susan was pretty sure had never been tried on an elephant, in vitro fertilization. If it was successful, in about twenty-two months Queenie would give birth to a baby that was half
Elephas maximus
and half
Mammuthus primigenius.

In laymen’s terms, half Indian elephant, half woolly mammoth.

SUSAN
Morgan had been working for Howard Christian for almost eight years, but had never thought of it that way. She was circus people, third generation, and she worked for the circus. If that circus was owned by a network, which was owned by an Internet service provider, which was owned by some vast
tax-evading offshore holding company that was owned by Howard Christian, who gave an elephant fart?

She had worked with elephants all her life, had begun actual training at age six under the stern eye of her grandfather, and there had never really been any question about what she wanted to be when she grew up. To her, the circus really was the greatest show on Earth, that was not just a slogan, and circuses were about elephants. All that other stuff, the wire walkers and trapeze fliers and lions and tigers and bears and clowns and human cannonballs, was just window dressing for the elephants. When twenty elephants came thundering into the big top, when those elephants reared up in their bright silk finery and placed their forefeet on the back of another elephant and curled their trunks up…well, that was what living was all about. If that didn’t give you goosebumps, you might as well get back to your video game.

Susan was often at the head of that thundering parade, trotting along beside the leader, but she was not a performer. The spotlight never sought her out. She had no stage presence, and didn’t want any. There was a Russian known as the Great Kristov who handled the glamorous part of the show, who wore the spangled tights and flashed the perfect teeth. Kristov was touted as the world’s greatest animal handler, but the truth was that if it hadn’t been for Susan and two big cat behaviorists doing the endless training behind the scenes, Kristov wouldn’t have lasted a week in his big finale, which included four elephants, eight lions and tigers, and eight white horses.

There were those who said the day of animal acts was, or at least should be, over. They said it was barbarism to teach our animal cousins unnatural behavior, or to have them in captivity at all. Susan understood their point of view and had witnessed abuses, but as long as she was in charge her twenty-six elephants would lack nothing, and would get only the best treatment while working, and guaranteed care in retirement. She preferred to think of her relationship with her animals as a partnership, as it was with the best mahouts in Thailand and India and Sri Lanka, where she had spent three years teaching and learning after getting her D.V.M. She was the first in her family to go to college, a great source of pride to her grandfather.

She had heard of Howard Christian and his mammoth-cloning project and wasn’t sure she approved, though the thought of getting to know an actual mammoth was almost too seductive to contemplate.

When Howard Christian sent out the emergency call for the world’s best elephant handler, he was informed that there were many who were about equally good, but he already employed one of the best at the winter headquarters of the circus, in Sarasota, Florida.

A few hours later a man named Warburton picked his way carefully through piles of elephant dung and made Susan an offer she couldn’t refuse.

NOW
Susan checked the tension on the elephant press as the two mad doctors prepared their diabolical instruments of torture down at Queenie’s other end.

The procedure actually would have been more of a discomfort than torture, but it was academic. Queenie wouldn’t feel a thing. Susan had administered a dose of azaperone an hour earlier as a calming agent, to assist the sometimes touchy process of getting her into the sling without alarming her. Then she was led into the elephant press, which was basically like a cattle chute with sides that could compress around an elephant and hold her immobile even if she got frisky.

Once in the press, Queenie was attached to an overhead winch that took the weight off her feet but did not lift her free of the ground.

After that, all Susan had to do was administer the big dose of carfentanil and assist the operation by monitoring Queenie’s vital signs, standing ready to pump doses of diprenorphine and/or naltrexone into her if she got in any respiratory trouble.

The comedy team of Leland and Roger had been lucky. They were very experienced at the process of in vitro fertilization with cattle and horses. With an elephant, all you’d need was a bigger probe, right?

Wrong. They had made an attempt to inseminate Queenie without the press and the lift and the drugs, and were lucky to be alive. And so the call had gone out for an elephant handler
and a vet, and Howard had found both in the person of Susan Morgan.

SUSAN
had been flown to Los Angeles in a black private jet. At LAX she was limoed to a helicopter which deposited her at the base of the Resurrection Tower, then whisked to Howard Christian’s office. It finally began to seem real to her, shaking hands with the man whose face she had seen on many magazine covers.

“You want to clone a mammoth, right?” she said. Christian sailed a copy of the secrecy agreement over his desk and sat back in his chair. Susan signed.

Howard Christian had driven her to Santa Monica in a car he said was a 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow V-12. She had no reason to doubt him. The front looked a lot like a Rolls-Royce to her and the rear was a ’30s version of a car of the future. The inside was luxurious enough, with a lot of maple wood trim. Cars didn’t do much for her, though she tried to feign interest.

Their destination was a large but ordinary steel-sided warehouse in a district near the airport that had dozens of warehouses just like it. He drove through a big open door and parked beside a dozen trucks making deliveries. Then they dodged guys with hand trucks and dollies and forklifts unloading and stacking an amazing variety of stuff, most of it new in the box. Everybody was in a huge hurry. Howard Christian was used to paying big bonuses for work done
very
quickly.

Christian dug in one of his vest pockets and came up with a laminated I.D. badge with Susan’s picture on it. She was pretty sure it was her driver’s license photo, probably obtained from the Florida DMV. These people worked fast.

In one corner was a big concrete cube, and in it was a door of the type used on refrigerated meat lockers. It wasn’t cold on the other side, but there was a second door at the end of a long room with a dozen heavy parkas on hooks and insulated boots and gloves in cubbies. They donned the cold-weather gear and Christian punched a code into a pad beside the inner door.

In the center of the big room was a dark, shapeless structure lit from inside. It was canvas draped over a framework of scaffolding. Howard Christian held a flap of canvas back for her, but they both had to duck to get inside.

And there it was. Sitting back on its massive haunches, leaning a little to the right against a support that was no longer there, a looming mass of long, tangled, reddish gold hair. The first specimen of
Mammuthus primigenius
Susan had ever been close to, but judging from the many photos she had seen, possibly the most complete carcass ever recovered.