Fred Saberhagen A Spadeful of Spacetime

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when it was the girl he was supposed to love and why I was so sure he'd be able to take my hand and
not hers and what the hands meant, and whether after all they could have saved him.
Your hands do not seem to be saving me. What was I supposed to see in the story, dear Dr. Ann?
Whose hand was I supposed to take? And how come the moon, distant and beautiful and kind, how
come she looked just like you?
How does one deal with the new problems brought on by a new probing of the past? It is only to be
expected that some of these difficulties will be very grim. And others not what one expects at all.
GRAIN OF TRUTH
Charles Spano, Jr.
Klaus Memorial Primate Research Center
April 1, 1990
My dear sister Virginia,
I want to thank you for the wonderful week you allowed me at your home last month. Your cooking is
truly delightful; Mother would have been pleased. I can only hope my brother-in-law appreciates what a
fine woman you are. On the subject of him, dear sister, please accept my apologies for the scene at the
table. It was rude of me to call him a mentally undisciplined, credulous cretin.
I make no apologies for my position, however, and you must understand that. Easter bunnies, fairies,
leprechauns and UFO's (it makes my pressure rise just to write these words!) are utter bunk and wish
my nephew and niece weren't exposed to such sloppy thinking!
I am glad our mutual inheritance makes us more able than the average to see through that trash.
Anyway, Virginia, my main reason for writing is to give you some good news. Remember that proposal I
told you I was presenting to the Director? Well, they approved it!
Tonight I pack and tomorrow I shall be going to the Brooks Range in Alaska to choose sites. The
expedition will follow next week. It was tough getting them to go along with the idea that if ancient man
crossed the Bering Strait some groups may have adapted to the environment and left traces, perhaps
near extinct volcanoes. The data from the Burmese ape find in 79 was what convinced them, I'm sure.
I'm off then and will be incommunicado for some time. I'll send the children something.
Your brother,
Josh
VIDEOFAX INSTAMESSAGE-VIDEOFAX
INSTAMESSAGE-VIDEOFAX INSTAMESSAGE
subsidiary of Western Union
Anchorage, Alaska
31 May 1990 Ginny
Great news made find stop Pithicene skull type with flesh adhering stop New species says anthropologist
As geneticist have brilliant idea good for Nobel at least end
Josh
Klaus Memorial Primate Research Center
June 4, 1990
Dear Virginia,
By now you've no doubt seen all the media coverage of our find but there is one thing we did not release
which I alluded to in my previous letter (by the way, I hope you don't mind my using 'Ginny', I was very
excited. Still am.).
My idea hit me as soon as I saw that flesh. If you remember what I told you when I saw you last, I've
been pushing recombinant DNA techniques to their limits. I've always felt like a fifth wheel here at Klaus
being a geneticist among so many non-geneticists that I had to have something to do with my time.
I've gotten terrific results with plasmid splicing and production of very long synthetic DNA. Fragments so
far, but I've worked out a technique to make a full chain of DNA that won't break up.
You're probably ahead of me now. Yes, I intend to use my techniques to reproduce the DNA in that
frozen flesh. I will implant the molecule into a chimpanzee ovum and in a few months the first
borealipithicene in half a million years will again walk the earth.
We haven't released that bit of news because if the experiment fizzles the Director doesn't want the
Center embarrassed. I think he was never happy with me and is a little leery of my project.
When we dug up that Northern ape skull we found a lot of grains and spores. The biologists and
climatologists are reconstructing the Alaskan environment from them as it must have been back then.
We plan to build a compound here to house the creatures and study them. Obviously the scientific data
will be tremendous and I see myself picking up a Nobel in less than the usual time.
I'll stop now. I have a lot of work to do just identifying the fragments of DNA and attempting to learn
their proper order before I let the E. coli do their work. Write soon.
Your brother,
Josh
Klaus Memorial Primate Research Center
July 4, 1990
Dear Virginia,
It's good to hear from you again. I'm glad the children liked the books on Alaskan geohistory and biology [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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