Once out of the building, they crossed over to the park beyond and ambled along one of the gravel paths. Each of the university city’s high-rise apartment buildings were surrounded by approximately a square mile of parks, pools, woods, and small streams, somewhat reminiscent in Julian’s eye of a combination swank golf course and the gardens of the country estate of a British duke. There were quite a few other pedestrians taking advantage of the superlative day, but the area was large enough that it was in no sense crowded.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
She grinned mischievously. “Somewhere you’ll never believe. To the Mythological and Prehistoric Zoo.”
“Sounds something like Disneyland.” When he saw that struck no chord, he said, “It was the largest of the amusement parks in my day. For kids, actually. At least, so they said.”
“This is for young people too, but also for older scholars.”
“When do we get to it?”
“We’re already there. Look,” she pointed.
His eyes popped. At first, he thought the small herd grazing in an attractive glen to be horses, but then he realized that each had a single horn projecting from its forehead and that they seemed more delicate, more gentle than the average horse.
He laughed at himself, at his surprise, and said,
“What a clever job. Attaching those horns so that they look like unicorns.”
She smiled at him. “They are unicorns. Those are real horns.”
“Come off it! The unicorn was a mythical beast.”
“I told you this is the Mythological and Prehistoric Zoo.”
He looked at her, then the unicorns, then back at her.
She laughed at him in such a way that it was obvious that she had expected to laugh at him at this stage. She said, “Come over this way. We’ll see the mammoths.”
“Mammoths! They’ve been extinct for… for a million years!”
“No. Not really. We have cave paintings depicting Cro-Magnon Man hunting them. Mastadons, too. We’re particularly proud of the job we’ve been able to do on the mammoths. Four were found, frozen in the ice, in Siberia, in almost perfect condition. So perfect that the meat was actually edible. At any rate, the specialists in that branch of biology didn’t have to guess and were able to reconstruct them just about perfectly.”
He stopped in his tracks. “What in the name of everything are you talking about?”
“Jule, Jule, come along. Man has been changing animals around since prehistoric times. Look at the dog. Heaven only knows what he originally looked like. But centuries before we had ever heard of genet-ical engineering, we had bred the dog from the size of a Pekingese to a Great Dane and back again. They’re the same species, of course. You can cross a Peke and a Great Dane.”
“What’s that got to do with a mammoth? This I’ve got to see!”
“Let’s go, then. They’re over here. In actuality, there isn’t much to see. They look like elephants with hair and overgrown tusks.”
“You just let them run around?”
She laughed. “They’re not carnivorous, you know. Now, the saber-toothed tiger is another thing. So is our tyrannosaurus. You’ll be amazed at the size of the pit and cage we’ve had to put him in. The brontosaurus is something else again. Herbivorous, of course, so we have him in a duplication of the environment he must have lived in, sort of a swamp. They had to guess a lot about the dinosaurs; all we have are skeletons to work with. The same with the dragons. The biologists made them herbivorous too, just to make them easier to handle.”
“Dragons! I suppose they breathe fire?” Julian added sarcastically after his initial reaction. “Who are you trying to kid, Edie?”
She had to laugh at that. “Well, no, they don’t breathe fire, much to the disappointment of some of the children. The Pegasus also has the scientists stumped. You simply can’t get enough wingspread on an animal as big as a horse to enable it to fly. There—over there are your mammoths.”
Julian gaped. There were six of them, and Edith had been right. They were about the size of Indian Elephants, had long tusks possibly ten feet in length which curved in a unique spiral, and were covered with yellowish brown woolly hair which reached almost to the ground. They seemed docile enough.
Julian shook his head and turned his stare to her. “All right, at least brief me. Are these things living, or are they just clever robots, like they had in that Disneyland I mentioned?”
“No, they’re living. We’ve come a long way since that immunochemist Oswald Avery came up with deoxyribose nucleic acid, or DNA, and the scientists of your period created life in the laboratory.”
“Nobody had created life in the laboratory in my day. Not to speak of dragons.”
“Oh,” she said, frowning. “My memory was that in 1965 a team at the University of Illinois, under a Professor Sol Spiegelman, succeeded in putting together the non-living nucleic-acid message which produced a virus which would go on and multiply indefinitely. Their artificial virus was completely indistinguishable from a natural virus. Of course, it’s a matter of whether or not you consider a virus alive. At any rate, progress was geometric in the field from then on.”
He said weakly, “Let’s sit down on this bench for awhile. I could use a little breather before being taken to see a Tyrannosaurus. Are you telling me that your modern biologists can create, in the laboratory, just about any type of life form you want?”
“Why, yes. For over ten years now.”
“Even a man?”
“Yes. Though that’s in the way of being a taboo. We tread very carefully in this field, Jule. The scientists are possibly a bit more humble today than they were a third of a century ago. But cloning has become a reality. You see, every cell in the body of any organism carries all the information needed to construct whole organs, or indeed, the body itself. I believe Father told you that we no longer transplant organs. The geneticists simply take a few cells from any part of a sick man and grow duplicates of his defective organs from them. They call it autoplantation. That, of course, is a somewhat different field than the making of new life forms.”
“I’m completely confused. I read a little about this sort of thing in articles in
She said, scowling slightly, “It’s all possible, but not usual. For one thing, our cousin the chimpanzee isn’t practical. That is, not as efficient as a robot. He doesn’t have an opposed thumb. And he is shortlived and clumsy. Talking dogs or, say, horses? Who wants to talk to a horse? Dogs? In actuality, I have seen a few talking dogs, but I’ve never been comfortable with them, even those who have also had their intelligence increased. I love dogs the way they have always been, man’s comrade. It always sets me back to have them tell me good morning. However, there are other things that make more sense.”
“Such as?”
“Growing arms and hands on dolphins, so that they can perform underwater tasks.”
He closed his eyes in pain. “Why not just switch man around so that he has gills and can breathe underwater?”
“That too is quite possible. However, man is a land animal, Jule. I told you how much we fear playing God.”
He said, “My mind is reeling. Look, in this mythological zoo things do you have, say mermaids and centaurs?”
“No, nor the sphinx—a man’s head on a lion’s body—though it would be possible to create them. However, we have no desire to make such mockeries of men. Theoretically, I suppose, they could come up with a vampire of the Dracula school.” She thought about it, her mouth twisted in amusement. “The basic requirements would be a man-type creature that was allergic to daylight and who could live on blood.”
“Live on blood! Come on now. No mammal could live on a blood diet.”
“Vampire bats do, don’t they? Those down in the tropics of Mexico. Also that tribe of Africans, the Masai, or whatever their name was… didn’t they live on an exclusive diet of cow’s blood and milk? That’s fairly near to it. Perhaps they’d have to feed our artificially manufactured vampire vitamin and mineral supplements or
