Mammoth by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page A

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.