Mammoth by John Varley Read Free Book Online

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 handlerand 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.
    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