Mammoth Dawn Read Free Page B

She greeted Alex with a broad smile, but when she saw Kinsman follow him into the corral, she immediately adopted a more businesslike expression.
    “Helen, this is Geoffrey Kinsman. Remember, he was a grad student back—”
    “Oh yes. And now a member of our loyal opposition.” Her voice was neutral, neither friendly nor antagonistic.
    “I came to see your mammoths. I didn’t know whether I could believe the appalling—”
    Helen immediately clued herself in with just a glance at her husband. “Actually, these are ‘mammophants.’ Just a first-generation hybrid, still far from being an actual mammoth, Mr. Kinsman.”
    “Please, it’s Doctor Kinsman. I got my degree at—”
    “This one is Short Stuff,” she continued without the slightest hesitation and stepped close to the oldest of the mixed-breeds, a docile gray-haired beast with rumpled skin and big eyes, a trunk shortened to a few feet, and no tail. “We used mammoth DNA from Siberia, inserted it into a female elephant’s egg, and let the mother bring the baby to term with a lot of uterine monitoring.”
    Playfully, Helen reached up and slapped Short Stuff’s rump, and the tall beast ambled a few feet, then stopped to munch from a pile of sage-green hay piled near a corrugated water trough. “And she’s a sweetie.”
    Alex knew the details, had lived with them for a decade. Short Stuff was not a pure mammoth because she had spent twenty-two months in an Asian elephant’s womb, sharing the chemical and hormonal bath evolved for elephants alone. But the womb had proved similar enough to a mammoth’s, or the hybrid would have spontaneously aborted.
    “We’re learning the hard way that there’s a critical conversation between the genes and the womb,” Helen said. “Call it feminine knowledge. So we’re still working to get the right dialog between the mammoth genes and the wombs of each new generation.”
    Indeed, Short Stuff’s womb had turned out to be a much better approximation, and using the sperm of the first male, Middle Man, their offspring was even closer.
    “You can sure see the original elephant genes showing through.” Helen lifted Short Stuff’s leathery left ear, as big as a blanket. “No woolly mammoth had this large an ear. It would lose too much heat in an Ice Age climate. Most of Short Stuff’s body was designed for the tropics—she’s got a hide that stands up under strong sun. Still, you can see the beginnings of hair, an extra coat to keep her warm. A step in the right direction.”
    She talked faster as Kinsman’s frowning displeasure became more obvious. Helen moved to the other big animal in the corral, the first hybrid male. He snorted, curled his trunk, but she fearlessly thrust a hand into the sparse pelt beneath the massive mouth to reveal stubby, gray-brown shafts. “See Middle Man’s tusks? Pretty short for now, but they’ll grow longer than any elephant’s.”
    Helen rubbed her hands along Middle Man’s midsection, eliciting a pleased sort of grunt.
    Kinsman ground his teeth—the first time Alex had ever seen anyone do that, outside of movies. “And what is the point of this nonsense animal? The pure species died out long ago, and your interbreeding process creates only a succession of polyglot monstrosities.”
    Helen gave him her patented I-don’t-suffer-fools-gladly expression. “Exactly. Did you think species just jumped in one shot to a completely different form? That’s why it’s called evolution .”
    Kinsman eyed the two hairy elephants in the corral. “Evolution didn’t make these forms—”
    “Right. We did,” Helen shot back. “Unlike evolution, we have a goal. Short Stuff and Middle Man are investments for the next generation.”
    Alex smiled; his wife was a better debater than he could ever be. And she wasn’t giving away anything technical, either, trying to swamp Kinsman with pizzazz. He did not need to know how far the plan had already progressed.
    Mammoth DNA was a heritage