“This is what a fully grown woolly mammoth looked like,” Jill said. “Can anybody tell me what animal it’s related to that is living today?”
“Elephants,” the children shouted.
“Right. And they are about the size of African elephants. Do you know why they have all that fur?”
“Because it was real cold?” a girl named Teresa said.
“Exactly. They lived during the last ice age, starting about 400,000 years ago, and they survived up until fairly recently, by geological standards. The last ones died on an island near Siberia about four thousand years ago.”
“Why did they die?” K’Neisha asked.
“That’s a good question. The answer is we really don’t know. There were humans around then, and they hunted mammoths, so that was part of it. But it’s not like the dinosaurs, where we can point to some big event like a comet striking the earth. The changing climate probably had a lot to do with it. The planet got warmer more quickly than they could adapt.”
In the center of the room was a baby mammoth. “Ohh!” K’Neisha cried. “It’s so cute!”
“She’s real, not a model,” said Jill. “The sign says she’s on loan from Russia. Her name is Lyuba.”
“Hello, Lyuba,” K’Neisha said.
The baby mammoth was too young to have grown fur, so every wrinkle in her skin was clearly delineated, making her look all the more like a baby elephant. Even her eyelashes were preserved. “It says Lyuba was born about 42,000 years ago, in Siberia, and lived for about thirty-five days,” Jill said. “It says she fell into a mud hole. She must have frozen very quickly to be so perfectly preserved. It’s because of her and other mammoth remains that scientists are considering actually cloning a mammoth and bringing it back to life. Can you imagine what that would be like, to have mammoths roaming the earth again?”
The children nodded eagerly at this thrilling thought, then the boys raced back to the dinosaur exhibit.
* * *
—
“MARIA, CAN YOU SEE the body?” Henry asked. Henry had taped Dr. Champey’s laptop to an IV stand and hooked it up to his satellite phone. The young doctor’s naked corpse now lay on the examining bench, one arm bent above her head, the other reaching out as if to shake hands. Her knees were in the air, with her torso slightly thrust forward by a medical book Henry had placed between her shoulder blades. Her unblinking eyes stared at the light bulb above her. The blue lady.
Henry allowed himself a moment of pity for this last indignity, but such was medicine, and he knew this young doctor would have been willing to make the sacrifice. He wished he could have met her in life, to have felt the warmth of her offered hand. He was always taken aback by how cold the dead were.
“Yes, Henry, we have a good signal.”
In Geneva, Henry’s broadcast was displayed on a screen in the same auditorium he had been in only a day before.
“Unfortunately, we do not have even rudimentary equipment here to perform a proper autopsy,” Henry said. “But we must have tissue from the organs. So I will do what I can.”
He stood back for a moment and looked at the corpse with a dispassionate, analytical eye. “She appears to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Well-developed musculature, perhaps an athlete or a runner. As you see, the cyanosis is entirely encompassing, indicating lack of oxygen, with pronounced emphasis in the upper torso. She is approximately 165 centimeters in height, difficult to say because of the contortion caused by the rigor mortis. We have no scale on this table, but I estimate the weight at fifty-four kilos.” He examined the crusted blood on the dead doctor’s eyes and nose, and the frothy sputum around the mouth. “Epistaxis,” he said. “Probable heavy internal bleeding.”
Cholera didn’t bleed.
He lifted her lip. Her teeth were white, well maintained. No evidence of jaundice.
“Dr. Parsons, any lesions on the surface?” one of the doctors in the auditorium asked.
Henry noted a small scar on the woman’s chin, and the mark of a smallpox vaccination on her left shoulder. Otherwise, she was flawless, he thought sadly. He could barely make out a tattoo on her wrist—what looked like a horseshoe.
There were no autopsy tools, so Henry had to improvise, using the only implements available. Instead of a scalpel, he found a pocketknife in a drawer. This will be messy, he thought as he tested the blade. He would