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patent attorney. He returned looking thoughtful.
"Ken," he said, "let's play hooky for a few days."
Staples looked at him with a wary eye. "I suppose you mean to drop the prospector and work
on your fossils for a while?"
"That's it exactly."
Thus it happened that the following day found them in the shop breaking a young Hyracodon-
small hornless rhinoceros-out of its matrix. Staples remarked on what a dull piece the work was
from a zoological point of view, compared to what it had been in times past.
"To some extent, yes," replied Platt. "Hand me the shellac, please. Though there may be a
few whales left that haven't been turned into margarine and gun oil. We're living at the close of
one of the many periodic extinctions of the larger forms. The only places you can find a fauna
comparable with those of the Pleistocene is on a few preserves in Africa. And with our own
bloodthirsty species infesting the earth, it's getting worse all the time. Hm-m-m. The left
clavicle and left radius seem to be missing." He carefully chipped slivers of sandstone away with
his needle. Being much more of a talker than his assistant, he continued: "I have an idea which,
if it works, may do much to relieve the drabness of our present faun~. You heard
Wilhelmi tell about restoring oxidized metal by the anode process. Well, why couldn't we work
something like that on fossils?"
"You mean to grow a complete animal, hair and all, from a skeleton?"
"Why not? You know what extraordinary things they do in medicine nowadays-growing arms and
legs on people who have lost their own."
"With all due respect, my dear employer, I think you're screwbox."
"We'll see about that. I'm going to try some experiments, anyway. We'll keep them to
ourselves, of course. If they didn't work, a lot of our colleagues might agree with your opinion."
Platt began his work with rabbits-modem rabbits, that is. He would kill a rabbit, remove
various parts, and hook it up in a Ringer's solution bath to a current source. To build up the
missing parts he used bio-charged amino acids, which will combine to form proteins and, in the
presence of other cells, form whole new cells.
After many failures, he one day observed that the tissues of one of the rabbits were
building up. He pointed the phenomenon out to Staples.
The geologist protested: "But it can't be that one. I turned the juice off in that tank."
"Yes?" replied Platt. "Let's see. Ah! You thought you turned it off, but look at this
switch!"
Staples saw that he had accidentally struck the open knife switch so that the bars barely
touched the contacts.
Platt said: "Now I know; we've been using too much voltage. It wants something like point
oh one volts." And the little man was off like a chipmunk with a bunch of nuts, changing the
rheostats to one calibrated for higher resistance.
They perfected their methods of reifying recent animals, which later proved of great value
in surgery. Their results were not, however, so incredible when you consider that every cell in an
animal's body contains a complete set of chromosomes with all the genes that determine the
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animal's form. It is as if in each cell there was a complete blueprint of the entire animal.
Their first attempt with fossils-the fragmentary remains of the Castoroides-failed.
Staples wasn't sorry. He was worrying about the effect of the news of this bizarre experiment on
his professional reputation.
Then at dinner one night Platt jumped up and began orating. He waved his knife and fork so
that he almost speared his daughter's boy friend, who slid below the edge of the table until the
storm had passed. "Ken!" cried the paleontologist. "I know what to do now! You've got to have a
lot of the original organic matter of which the organism was composed, in the solution along with
the bones. The current makes the original atoms resume their former places, and they serve as a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]