The Best of L. Sprague de Camp
- Автор: Де Камп Лайон Спрэг
- Год: 1978
- Язык: английский
- Год: Del Rey / Ballantine
- ISBN: 0-345-25474-0
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Best of L. Sprague de Camp». Краткое содержание книги:
When the mass in the tank stopped changing, it had the form of a huge wolf, about the size of a Great Dane, but twice as muscular and ten times as mean-looking.
They fished the brute out of the tank, emptied the solution out of him, and applied an electric starter to his heart. After three hours of this, the wolf shuddered and began coughing the remainder of the Ringer's solution out of his lungs. It occurred to the experimenters that they had no place to keep the wolf, who would make a rather formidable house pet. They tethered him to a tree while they prepared a pen. But for a few days the wolf hardly moved at all. When he did, he was like a man who has been a year in the hospital, and is having to learn to walk all over again.
But at the end of two weeks he was eating of his own accord. His hair, which had been a mere fuzz at first—the process being effective in recreating the hair roots, but not the hairs, which are dead structures—rapidly grew to normal length. At the end of three weeks he was enough his old self to snarl at Staples when the geologist entered his cage. It was a most impressive snarl, sounding rather like tearing a piece of sheet iron in two.
After that I was careful about getting too near him or turning my back on him. But he didn't give us much trouble, though he never became what you'd call friendly. I always liked him for one reason: Platt's daughter had a fluffy dog that liked to bite people's ankles—no provocation necessary. After one of my kids had been nipped, the girl and I had a real row about the excrescence. Before we could have another, the dog went out one day and yapped at the dire wolf. Mr. Wolf sprang against his bars and growled—once. That was the last we saw of that accursed pooch.
Six months later, Platt and Staples hoisted out of its tank a specimen of Arctotherium, the immense bear from the California Pleistocene. Staples had had the busiest six months of his life, between helping the preparation of patent applications and getting the reification of more fossils started. There had been several failures—important parts of the skeletons missing, or insufficient organic matter in the surrounding rocks, or reasons unknown. This proved to be one of the last: the bear looked normal enough, but refused to come to life. Staples confessed that, looking at the thing's bulk, he had been more afraid of success than of failure. It was later mounted in the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
They had made things as easy as possible by starting with the Canis, a moderate-sized species of recent date. They worked in two directions from there: backward in time, and upward in size. Platt had a number of fossils from the Miocene of Nebraska. They were successful in reifying a Stenomylus hitchcocki, a small guanacolike ancestral camel. Seeking a more exciting specimen, they went to work on Platt's pride and joy, a new species of Trilophodon, the smallest and oldest proboscidean found in America. It was probably the first member of the elephant group to arrive from Asia. The animal turned out to be a female, rather like a large shaggy tapir, with long tapering jaws and four tusks.
After their partial failure with the Arctotheriuin, they succeeded with a bear-dog, Dinocyon gidleyi. When Staples looked at the result his throat felt a little dry. The thing was built on the general lines of a polar bear, only bigger than even the Kodiak grizzly. Its large ears gave its head a wolfish appearance, and it had a long bushy tail. It weighed 1,978 pounds, and it didn't like anybody. Platt was delighted. "Now if I could only get an Andrewsarchus!" he beamed. "That's a still bigger carnivore, an Asiatic Oligocene creodont. One skull measured thirty-four inches."
"Yeah?" said Staples, still looking at the bear-dog. "You can have him. I haven't lost him. This thing we have here is quite big enough for me."
They had hired an old circus man named Elias to help them with their growing zoo. They had built a concrete barn for the animals with a row of cages down one side. It looked strong enough, until one afternoon Staples went out to investigate a racket from the cages. He found the bars of the bear-dog's cage bowed out—the lower ends had come out of the green concrete easily—and no Dinocyon. Staples had a horrible vision of the bear-dog wandering over Kosciusko County and eating everything he could catch.
The beast was not, however, far away. He was, in fact, just around the corner looking for a way to get into the Stenomylus cage. In a few seconds he reappeared. He looked at Staples. The geologist could have sworn that the expression in his big yellow eyes said: "Ah, dinner!" The bear-dog growled like a distant thunderstorm and started for Staples.
Staples knew that the animal could run circles around him on level ground, and moreover that if he caught him he wouldn't be satisfied to run circles around him. Staples' best idea was to swarm up the bars around the Trilophodon's enclosure. He couldn't have climbed those bars ordinarily, but he did this time.
Arrived at the top, he couldn't stay there unless he wanted the beardog to rear up and scoop him off his perch. On the other hand, the inside of the cage didn't look inviting. The "little" mastodon—standing five feet at the shoulder and weighing slightly over a ton—was half crazed with fear. She was gallumping around the enclosure making noises like a pig under a gate. An elephant's fear of dogs is not unreasonable when the elephant and the dog are about the same size.
Just before the bear-dog arrived, Staples jumped off and landed astride the Trilophodon's neck. He didn't feel like a movie hero who jumps off a balcony onto his horse. He was scared stiff. He got a good grip on his mount's scalp hair and hung on desperately, knowing that he'd be trampled to jelly in no time if she bucked him off.
Staples heard a rifle go off, several times, and got a glimpse of Gil Platt shooting out of the workshop doorway. The Dinocyon gave a coughing roar and went over to see about it. Staples was too busy to watch closely, but got a few glimpses of the bear-dog running around the shop, trying to climb in the windows—which were too small. He finally settled down to dig under the house. All this time Platt was popping out of doors and windows to fire and popping back again. Staples had time to reflect that the bear-dog's insides must be taking a terrible beating from the soft-nosed bullets, but that such was his vitality that you could shoot holes in him all day before he'd give up.
He made wonderful progress with his digging; he took the earth out like a bucket chain. Staples remembered that the shop had a thin wooden floor, which wouldn't offer much resistance if the animal got under the house. They needed a .50-caliber machine gun, which they didn't have.
Before it came to that, Elias climbed out on the, roof and dropped a stick of dynamite alongside the bear-dog. That did the trick. The effect was rather like hitting a cantaloupe with a mallet. Staples had just gotten his animated calliope calmed down, and the explosion started her off again. It was a question of which would collapse from exhaustion first. The geologist won by a hair.
When he examined the remains of the Dinocyon, he asked Platt:
"Why didn't you shoot him in the head?"