Mammoth (6 page)

The animal was still largely in situ, reminding her of a museum diorama. The base was wrapped in black plastic, and it looked like they had brought a large chunk of frozen tundra with the animal.

It didn’t smell very good. No matter. Susan was used to working in elephant houses, which weren’t very sweet, either.

She took in the humps on top of the head and on the shoulders. She moved around the front of the animal and inspected the tusks, which were fifteen feet long and turned like a corkscrew. She had never heard an explanation of why mammoths had needed tusks that big; surely they would be a hindrance in many things.

She took off her glove and ran her hand over the ancient ivory, and smiled.

“The only work we’ve done on him so far is back here, of course,” Christian said, and guided her around the mammoth’s left side. Then she was peering into the incisions that had been made to get at the beast’s testicles. Mammoths carried them internally.

“We removed one,” Christian said. “Left the other in place in case we screw up the first one, then we’d rethink before we took the other. Two men are in charge of recovering and preparing the spermatozoa. They are well versed in animal in vitro fertilization…but they don’t know elephants. That’s where you come in.”

Susan took a deep breath, but there was really no sense in beating around the bush. The only question was pretty much as Warburton had expressed it: Did she want to be involved in the experiment of the century?

“How do I join up?” she said.

*    *    *

THE
well-versed men turned out to be Leland and Roger, the Abbott and Costello of veterinary medicine. But they were competent enough when it came to manipulating the genetic material recovered from the mammoth carcass. Very soon they were ready to implant some reconstructed DNA into elephant eggs cells.

But first, you needed to gather the elephant eggs, and these were in the middle of full-grown cow elephants, eight tons of flesh that might not be eager to surrender them.

Leland and Roger read some papers, called some colleagues. They figured they had a handle on it. They explained what they wanted to Queenie’s handler, a lad who worked at the game farm in Simi Valley who had been given just enough instruction to lead the animal into a stall or onto a truck. He saw no problem with it; Queenie had never given him any trouble in the nearly three months he had worked with her.

Queenie’s previous handler could have told them that Queenie was touchy, and lazy. She would put up with a lot until a brink was reached, and then she would act. So it worked well, in preparation. They carefully inserted the ultrasound probe, which was narrow, unobtrusive, and really could hardly be felt by an animal as large as Queenie.

That first entry was for test purposes, to calibrate the equipment as well as accustom the elephant to the process. Encouraged, the handler and the vets decided to go after eggs the very next day. The extraction process, called transvaginal oocyte retrieval, involved locating the ovaries with ultrasound, then extending a narrow probe through a needle inserted into the interior of the vagina. They had done it countless times with horses and cows, and expected no trouble because there were no nerve endings inside the vagina.

Queenie must have felt
something
, because she turned around and knocked Leland sprawling forty feet over the messy concrete floor with one massive thrust and shake of her head. She picked up the ultrasound machine with her trunk and smashed it on the floor, over and over, until it came apart. Then she went back to her manger and resumed placidly eating the delicious green alfalfa.

“Could have been a lot worse,” Susan told them when she heard the story on her first day at work, which was the very next day after her cross-country trip. “Some of them store up their bad feelings. Then one day you do something she doesn’t like and she pays you back all at once. Next day, she’s fine.”

Two days after that, when the quarters and examining and operating rooms were fixed to her satisfaction, they went in again with Queenie in the press and under mild tranquilizers. They harvested six ooctyes that had been primed and ready for ovulation by two weeks of hormone therapy. Under the microscope they looked good, and two of them began to divide after being injected with the mammoth DNA. They decided to try an implant. They were well into the procedure when Howard Christian walked into the lab with a guy wearing a lot of fishing lures stuck into his clothes.

“This is the mammoth-cloning project everybody seems to have heard so much about,” Christian said, perhaps a little petulantly. It had not exactly been top secret, but he didn’t like his projects to become the object of too much speculation before they showed results. That was because his projects had, fairly frequently, failed to show any results. He introduced Leland and Roger to his guest.

“And this is Dr. Susan Morgan. Susan, Dr. Matthew Wright.”

“Just Matt, please.”

“And just Susan.”
Doctor of what?
she wondered.

“Susan worked for the circus until a few weeks ago. Now, if this fertilization is successful she’ll be a nursemaid to this elephant for two years.”

“Must be quite a change after the glamour of the circus,” Matt said with a smile. Susan thought he might be putting her on.

“I don’t know. Shoveling elephant shit is just about as glamorous here as it is under the big top.”

“We have a better grade of elephant shit here in California,” Leland offered.

“No, that’s bullshit you’re thinking about,” Susan said.

“I knew it was some sort of shit.”

It was obvious that Howard Christian was eager to move on, but Matt asked a question, then another, and Christian
paused to listen to the answer, and before long he found himself observing the entire implantation procedure. Matt seemed utterly fascinated with every aspect.

The three vets finished the implantation with Matt watching the ultrasound image over their shoulders as they positioned the probe and delicately inserted the tiny mass of tissue that hardly qualified as an embryo, but which in two years might grow to be the wonder of the century.

Leland pulled the probe out of Queenie, sighed, and stretched.

“Was it good for you, Roger?”

“I could use a cigarette.”

“Oh, sure,” Leland said. “Then you’ll turn right over and snooze, when what Queenie wants right now is a little cuddling.”

Susan was busy injecting a dose of doxapram to bring Queenie back to full consciousness, but she looked up in time to see Wright and Christian going through a door in the wall that divided the building roughly in half, a door they’d all noticed and whose handle all of them had tried at one time or another, with no result.

Susan wondered what was on the other side.

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

Tsehe heard the song, and he came calling. Even though it was the wrong song.

Woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths were very much alike, but they were different in some important ways. One of these were the songs they sang during the mating season.

We can’t understand the songs whales sing, but a
humpback whale
knows the difference between a
dolphin
song and a
sperm whale
song. Canaries sing one way, and crows sing another. Usually these different species ignore the songs of other species.

But the two types of mammoth were very closely related, and Tsehe was feeling very confused and out of sorts, so the song sounded okay to him. When he found the female who was singing the song she didn’t look quite right, either. She didn’t have enough hair, for one thing. Since mammoth females kept growing until they were thirty years old or so, a mammoth could guess another mammoth’s age by her size, and since Columbian mammoths were a bit larger than woolly mammoths, Tsehe took the female mammoth to be older than she really was. Aside from her sparse coat, she looked like a real prize to Tsehe!

Tsehe approached the female and began his courtship.

Mammoths liked to stroke each other with their trunks, just like elephants do. They rubbed against each other and smelled each other, paying a lot of attention to the urine. We find this smell unpleasant, but mammoths found it very exciting!

Right away Tsehe noticed this female smelled funny. His eyes told him this was a female mammoth, and his nose told
him she was in estrus. His nose also told him there was something different about her.

But it was all too much for his aching head.

Tsehe hadn’t been near the herd very long when Big Mama became aware of him and decided to call a halt to the whole business before it got out of hand. The female Tsehe had chosen was a grand-niece to Big Mama, and she wasn’t about to let this intruder trifle with the youngster’s affections. Big Mama had her standards. No member of her family was going to consort with long-haired, smelly, tiny-eared trash from the wrong side of the tundra!

Even though he was angry, confused, and irritable, Tsehe knew when he was outclassed. Big Mama was by far the largest mammoth he had ever seen, even if she didn’t have much hair. Her tusks were enormous, and her ears were huge! They were like the wings of a giant bird. As if that wasn’t enough, there were half a dozen other females behind her as she charged at him in a cloud of dust.

He stood his ground only for a moment. One swipe of Big Mama’s tusks to his aching head and he turned tail and ran!

The female watched his retreat sadly. Normally, this would have been the end of things. Vanquished males do not mate in mammoth society.

But he had been driven off by females, not by a larger male who would obviously make a better mate.

And it wasn’t as if there was a long line of suitors vying for the trunk of this female mammoth. In fact, there hadn’t been a single one.

With a guilty look back at Big Mama, still bellowing her triumph, the female started toward the low hill where Tsehe had gone. Soon she was farther from the herd than she had ever been.

As you’ve probably already guessed, the female was Temba.

IT
looked like a briefcase.

It was fifteen inches long by twelve inches wide by six inches thick. It was made of aluminum, with two metal latches. The top fit snugly to the bottom, and there was a rubber gasket between the two parts. When it was built, it was probably waterproof. Now, in the shape it was in, all bets were off.

Matt had finally been admitted to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, after almost an hour touring the facility. The only part of the tour he had enjoyed was the artificial insemination of the elephant, and that had little to do with his own project. Still, it wasn’t every day you saw a possible half-mammoth embryo implanted in an elephant.

The object that Christian had assured him was a broken time machine rested on a long lab table in a big room protected by a keypad-locked door. It had been set there on the table and someone with a sense of the dramatic had positioned a baby spot over it, as if it were a bit of sculpture in a museum.

Matt had been looking at it for half an hour now. He had moved all around it, he had repositioned the light several times, he had moved a bit closer and squinted at this or that detail, but he had not touched it. He hadn’t been told not to touch it, the thing was his project, after all, and he would have to be allowed to do what he thought best or what was the point of hiring him in the first place? But he didn’t want to rush things.

So he looked at it, and tried to think like a time machine.

FIRST
there had been the frozen mammoth carcass, and that had been pretty interesting, too. Christian pulled the plastic
back and showed him the frozen man, huddled up against the mammoth’s flank. It was gruesome.

“Can you imagine?” Howard almost whispered it. “I wish I’d been there. Amazing enough to find the frozen man,
with the mammoth
! Did he shelter up against a mammoth that was already dead, or did he kill it? Or is it possible he domesticated it? But then…they see the briefcase. Frozen under ice that had to have formed ten to twenty thousand years ago.”

“Or a few weeks ago,” Matt said.

Christian nodded, reluctantly.

“It’s a possibility I can’t completely deny. Rostov knows what a hoax like that would do to his reputation, he’d have to find a new life’s work, and I don’t think he’s ever cared about anything much except prehistoric creatures. He admitted to me that, when he saw the briefcase, his first impulse was to beat a confession out of his workers, but then he saw how scared they were. He’s having horrible and wonderful thoughts right now; he knows this could destroy him if he’s been swindled somehow.”

“Or win him the Nobel Prize, if they had one in archaeology.”

“Exactly. It wasn’t hard to persuade him to keep quiet about it. As for the rest of the crew”—he smiled with half his face—“some families in Nunavut are driving around in brand-new snowmobiles and Humvees.”

“So I won’t have to worry about pressure from the media.”

“Or the government, so far.” Christian held up crossed fingers. “My influence can only work so far in that direction. If some spook agency gets wind of this and wants it, ‘in the national interest,’ I don’t know if I could hang on to it. I’d hire enough lawyers to gag a mammoth, of course, but this is so revolutionary…”

“You don’t have to convince me. In fact, I wonder if you realize just how revolutionary it could be.” Matt was wondering if anyone, anywhere, at any time, would
ever
grasp the revolutionary nature of this thing as well as he did. Like Howard had said, not many people were equipped to do the math.

*    *    *

“MAYBE
we could use a specialist from a museum,” Matt said, still contemplating the box. “Someone who knows how to approach the exploration of old artifacts. Things recovered from the bottom of the sea, things that will crumble if exposed to the air. Someone who knows how to remove a layer of unknown substance without damaging whatever layers may be beneath it. I don’t know anything about that. I could use some advice.”