Polar Shift (NUMA Files 6)

The Russian nodded. "You know what we are trying to do with this expedition?"

"Yes," Karla said. "You are trying to find the remains of a mammoth that will lend itself to cloning."

"Correct," Arbatov said. "The seeds for this project were planted in 1999, when a multinational expedition unearthed some promising remains in a block of frozen mud."

"The Zharkov mammoth," Karla said. The remains had been named after the Siberian family that owned the land where they were found.

"That's right. There was a great deal of interest in the beast from a number of genetic research facilities from all parts of the world. They said that if DNA could be extracted from the soft tissues it might be used to clone a woolly mammoth."

"The mud yielded only bones and no soft tissue, as I recall."

"With no soft tissue, the cloning attempt died, but not the interest. Experiments continued," Arbatov said. "A group of Japanese and Chinese researchers cloned two cows, using skin cells from a dead cow embryo that was kept frozen at the same temperature as the Russian permafrost. Since then, expeditions have continued to search for suitable remains in Siberia. My wife and I work for a Siberian wildlife park that plans to impregnate a female Indian elephant as a surrogate to produce a partial-mammoth offspring, then repeat with its offspring as well. They hope to have a creature that is eighty-eight percent woolly mammoth in fifty years."

"This is a joint venture with the Japanese," Dr. Sato said, picking up the thread of the explanation. "Students from Kinki University and veterinary experts from Kagoshima, where Dr. Ito is from, have been looking in Siberia for DNA samples since 1997. There are estimated to be ten million mammoths buried beneath the Siberian permafrost, so we came here hoping to find what we need."

"How would the cloning be done?" Karla said.

"It's extremely complicated. Every step has to work perfectly," said Ito, the veterinary expert. "We would extract a complete DNA strand from soft tissue, remove an egg from a female elephant, which would be irradiated to destroy its DNA. We would replace it with mammoth DNA and insert it in the elephant. The elephant's normal gestation period is twenty-two months, but we have no idea what it would be for this creature. Nor do we know how to care for the baby hybrid."

"Any one of those obstacles would be formidable by itself," Karla said.

"Finding the soft tissue has been the most difficult obstacle to overcome," Maria said.

"Up to now," Karla said.

"Ideally, we would like to have found a pregnant mammoth," Maria said, "but this may do very nicely."

"I'm puzzled," Karla said. "It seems to me that you have a surplus of riches locked in the body of the young animal in the shed."

The exchange of glances among the four scientists was almost comical.

Dr. Sato said, "There is a jurisdictional dispute. Like two parents fighting over the custody of a child."

"You don't need possession of the whole body. A sample of DNA should be sufficient."

"Yes," Sato said. "But you know how competitive the scientific world is. Whoever brings the specimen home will get a major boost to his or her career and wealth."

"Who found it?"

Arbatov shrugged. "Sato and Ito, but we claimed ownership because we helped remove it to the shed and it's on Russian soil."

"Wasn't there an agreement to govern this sort of thing?"

"Yes, but no one thought we'd ever find a specimen so perfect," Maria said.

"We're all rational people," Arbatov said. "Maria was instrumental in helping us curb our male tempers. We've had some spirited discussions, and talked at great length whether we should even tell you. We decided that it would be impractical to hide it from you, as well as intellectually dishonest. We are still at a loss at what to do."

"You're right. You do have a problem," Karla said.

Four heads nodded in agreement.

"But it's not an unsolvable problem," she added, and the heads froze in midnod.

"Please, don't tell us to play Solomon and split the baby down the middle," Arbatov said.

"Not at all. The answer seems fairly obvious. Go out and find another specimen. There may be others like this in the same vicinity. I'll help you. I've done extensive topographical studies of Ivory Island going back to the Pleistocene period, when the steppes here teemed with the creatures. I think I can place you at the areas of greatest concentration and environmental conditions, increasing the odds in your favor."

Dr. Sato said, "In our country, we value consensus over confrontation. I propose that we look for second specimen. If we have not found it when the ship returns, we will tell our respective sponsors about the situation and let them fight it out in court."