"John Varley - Mammoth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

person."

Second person? Warburton leaned over the corpse—noting it smelled a little like the inside of
his refrigerator when he returned from a long trip—and could just make out what might be the top of
a human head through a thin rime of ice.

"You're sure?"

"Oh, yes. When we got this far we stopped and did a close-range sonogram scan. There is a
second person between this one and the mammoth. It is somewhat smaller. Possibly a woman, or a
child."

Two people? Woman or child? Better and better, Warburton thought. Alley Oop and... what
was her name? Ooma? Oona? The cartoon strip was a bit before his time, but he had to figure that a
Stone Age couple was twice as interesting as a lone mammoth hunter. As for a man and his son or
daughter, sheltering behind the massive corpse of a freshly killed woolly mammoth while a savage
blizzard froze them solid... well, you couldn't do much better than that.

And then, because he was a troubleshooter and not really in the business of turning out
made-for-cable documentaries or television movies, he thought about what sort of troubles he might
be called upon to shoot.

When you got into the area of North American antiquities there was always the Indian question
to consider. A lot of tribes considered the study of any old dead bones, much less a couple of more
or less intact corpses, to be grave robbing. What's more, governments lately had begun agreeing with
this, and museums were being forced to return bones for proper burial on tribal lands. What was the
name of that ten-thousand-year-old skeleton they'd found in Oregon or Washington? Kennebunk
Man, something like that? They'd hassled over that one for years. He made a mental note to find out
what Canadian law had to say on the subject.

For the first time, he noticed that the other man who had accompanied Rostov and himself into
the pit had an Inuit look about him. Warburton looked at him, then at Charlie, and both of them were
looking solemn. Could be a problem, definitely could be a problem.

"How many people know about this?" Warburton demanded.

"Just the five of us on the team, Mr. Christian and whoever he told, and you and whoever you
told," Rostov replied.
 "Nobody else? None of you called home and talked about it?"

They all shook their heads.

"Here's what we do, then. Talk to no one. Not your mom, not your wife. If you think you might
make a little money tipping off CNN or Hard Copy, forget about it. I promise you I will make it
worth your while, you'll all be getting substantial bonuses. If, on the other hand, you do talk to
someone, and I find out... well, Howard Christian has about forty billion dollars, and he could make
your lives miserable in ways you can't even begin to imagine. Do you follow me?"

Charlie and the other Inuit nodded. But Rostov clearly had something else to say.