Mammoth

15

WHEN Howard Christian arrived at the warehouse—in a red 1950 Crosley Super Sport because it had been closest to hand when the emergency call came in—there were two Santa Monica police cruisers on the scene in addition to three Rapid Response Blazers from Robinson Security. One of the Blazers had a crumpled front fender. Not far away, at the intersection nearest to the warehouse, was a van lying on its side.

He parked next to the blue Ford he knew belonged to Matt Wright. He knew because he had bought it and presented it to Matt, one more perk of the job. He hurried over to the Robinson man with the most braid on his uniform, who was standing with a police sergeant and two men in handcuffs. Warburton and two other bodyguards, seriously outdistanced by the Crosley, parked their bulletproof SUV nearby, got out, and scanned the area nervously, fearing a trap of some sort.

That first unit had been driven by Agent Dawson, an ex-cop who, when he witnessed a dark van leaving the scene at a high rate of acceleration, didn't hesitate to pull up behind it and nudge it on the left side just as the driver was screeching around a corner. The van had lifted up on two wheels, hung there a moment, and crashed onto its side. Dawson had removed the driver at gunpoint as the second Robinson car arrived and apprehended the other two suspects inside the building.

"You say there were three suspects?" Howard asked, looking around.

"Third one was injured in a fall," Kraylow said. "We've got him on the way to the hospital right now."

He examined the remaining suspects. Suspects? Hell, no need to think like a cop. They were guilty until they proved their innocence, simple as that. The first one stood there defiantly in his manacles. He had a bloody nose and an old burn scar on one side of his face. But Python was actually feeling anything but defiant. He was thinking about his fingerprints and DNA getting into the system at long last, and about where he might have left those samples of himself in the past.

Calm had returned, belatedly, to the Martyr. He stood in his customary position, feet together, eyes to the heavens, but now in shackles. He was prepared to do time. He was prepared to suffer anything, and intended at all costs not to tell any of these people of the bomb inside, even if it swept him away with everyone else. Perhaps the arch blasphemer, Howard Christian, would be inside when the bomb went off.

HOWARD entered the building and saw Matt Wright and Susan Morgan coming through the connecting door from the elephant compound. As he walked, he kicked some of the scattered marbles and they clattered across the floor. He looked around at the damage, and he knew he had screwed up. And he knew why.

Not too long after making his first fortune, he had watched an old documentary about Michael Jackson on late-night television. At one point Jackson had gone on a shopping spree, in a shop that sold very ugly antiques. The dude had strolled along, pointing to things he wanted. When the bill was totaled, it came to six million dollars.

Howard had bolted from the bed and thrown up before he reached the toilet.

Why? Not long before seeing the program Howard had spent a million dollars for a car, and in fact would within a month or two spend seven million dollars on another car, and never have a nervous moment about it, much less a full-blown panic attack.

What he could not do was pay $2.65 per gallon for gasoline when he could get it a few miles away for $2.63. He would break out in a sweat, his hands would start to tremble. He knew it was stupid, and for that reason he never fueled his own cars anymore, he never bought consumer items of any sort. He had staff that did that, and they never told him the prices. But every once in a while he made a decision on the basis of this ravenous miserliness, something he should have known to be a false economy, such as deciding to go with only one guard at night at the time machine project site, when Robinson had strongly recommended two so one could always remain in the shack just outside the door.

He looked over the chaos again, and knew this was the very picture of false economy.

"The elephants are all okay," Susan was saying. Elephants? God, he'd forgotten all about them. He wondered if Susan had any inkling of just how far onto the back burner he had shoved the cloning project in favor of this incomprehensible mess trying to become a time machine. "Looks like they never got into that part of the building."

"That's good," Howard said.

"They came here because they think cloning is evil," Matt said, with a small smile. "What do you figure they made of all this?" Howard didn't reply. Matt sighed. "The damage isn't as bad as it looks. Give me another week, we can probably be right back where we were."

"Keep at it, then. I'll have all the labor you need out here in the morning to get this cleaned up and sorted out."

"It won't take much. I've got one unit assembled, that one over there, and it wasn't opened. As for the rest... might as well wait until the first unit fails before we start assembling the beta version." He stooped over and picked up a clear crystalline sphere from the floor. He tossed it to Howard, who caught it in one hand. "As for the rest, it's mostly just sorting."

Howard's eyes met Matt's for a moment. Both of them knew the incident of the purloined marble would never be mentioned between them again, and that it would affect their relationship forever.

"Do what you have to do," Howard said, turning away. "Call me when you're ready to switch it on."

They watched him leave, slamming the door behind him. Susan looked around.

"All that work...," she said. "I'm so sorry, Matt."

"It's not a big deal. Lucky those idiots didn't let your herd loose. Imagine the mess that would have made. I'm going over to look at the alpha gadget. Looks like somebody whacked it with something."

He went to the table where the alpha unit lay, went around it, and regarded it from the front for the first time.

One of the little lights was on. It was the red one.

"What does that mean?" Susan asked.

"That's what I'd like to know."

He ran his hands carefully over the case, which was cool and smooth to the touch, and now sported three dimples that looked familiar. If he connected the dots with a pen they would form a tall right triangle. As far as he could tell, the three dents were identical to the dents on the original unit recovered with the mammoth and the caveman, now safely stored away in some subterranean vault beneath the Resurrection Tower.

"Is it working?" Susan asked. She stood close, which was probably the only thing that could have distracted him from the gadget at that moment.

"There's a little chip inside, but I never programmed it for anything. Now it looks like it's programmed itself, enough to turn on this light, anyway."

"That's weird."

"That's way beyond weird and right into the occult. Let's take a look inside."

He opened the catches and lifted the lid. Inside was a perfect cube, seven marbles on each edge... with one marble sticking out in the dead center of the upper surface. All of the 194 visible marbles were clear as tiny crystal balls. Susan had found a Maglite on the floor where Python had abandoned it as he fled; she turned the beam on the array, just three and a half inches on each side. It sparkled magnificently, and somehow, a little ominously. Something about it didn't look right. Something about it hurt her eyes, like a distorting mirror in a funhouse.

"Can I have that?" Matt took the flashlight from Susan and ducked down, squinting as he shined the beam between the rows. He tentatively prodded the cube here and there. Nothing moved. It was securely attached to the bottom of the case, and the array of little crystal spheres resisted all his efforts to move them. He avoided, for the moment, the conspicuous single marble sitting on the top. He had the weird idea that it might be some sort of trap, that he was meant to press that marble, and that whoever had first designed and built this puzzle didn't have Matt Wright's best interests at heart.

"Refraction?" Susan suggested.

"I don't think the light could be scattered that much in such a short distance. Now, what I had assumed, looking at it, was that there would be... five cubed, one hundred and twenty-five more marbles inside, in orderly rows. That doesn't seem to be the case. So... there are more compact ways of arranging spheres, but if the ones in the center were packed like that, the ones here on the outside would reflect that crystalline structure if they were packed as solidly as they seem to be. I think they are packed in there very tightly indeed. And you know why I think so?"

"It's way beyond me, Matt. You're the mathematician."

"Not anymore. Now I'm the student. Because when I locked this box up and went home with you, there were two thousand, four hundred and one marbles in it, arranged in a stack ten high, twelve wide, and twenty long, with one orphan sticking out of the top. I think we can be pretty sure nobody opened the box to play a prank on us.

"Now we've got a cube seven by seven by seven. That's three hundred forty-three."

"So where are the..."

"Two thousand fifty-seven." He looked back at the shining cube.

"I think they're all still in that cube, in a multidimensional crystal structure. I think we're seeing just one side of an object folded through space."

HOWARD was walking toward Kraylow with the intent of giving him instructions for the rest of the night, when the man's jaw dropped open in amazement. Howard frowned... and something like a big black snake flashed past him, not a foot from his right shoulder. Kraylow saw it coming and dived to his right. The snake hit the ground and popped and hissed for a moment. Howard realized it was a severed power line, now drooping from a pole directly in front of him. He turned around. The warehouse was gone.

FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

Elephants love to splash around in pools and mud. Mammoths were very much like elephants, and they loved to bathe, too. Fuzzy liked it so much that when he smelled a watering hole he got very excited, and wanted to dive in as soon as he could!

Mammoth children were just like any other children. Sometimes they didn't think before they ran. And sometimes they ran off when their mother wasn't looking. That was when they could get into big trouble!

Then he saw it, a big circle of trees with the shimmer of water in the middle! There was also the smell of mud baking in the sun. Fuzzy loved to roll in the mud! He started walking faster.

About this time Temba noticed that little Fuzzy was nowhere to be seen. She turned in a circle, looking for him. She flapped her ears, listening for him, and lifted her trunk, trying to smell him.

She caught his scent on the wind, and another scent that she remembered, a bad smell that meant death and suffering. She trumpeted loudly!

Come back, little Fuzzy! her cries rang out.

Then she called to the herd. Every ear turned to her at once! She was already moving, walking very fast toward the bad scent.

Fuzzy had come to the pond. It was peaceful and quiet. Ducks were swimming on the water. Fuzzy stood for a moment at the top of a small muddy hill and looked at it.

Maybe, just for a moment, he wondered if he should go back to his mother and tell her about the water and the whole herd could bathe in it.

But the day was hot and many flies were buzzing around his head, and little Fuzzy hated that, like all elephants and mammoths. He wanted a nice cool coating of mud matted into his too-long fur to keep the bugs away. So he started down the slope, and soon he was slipping and sliding, feet out in front of him, down on his knees.

Wheeeee!

He hit the water with a splash... and he stuck fast! There was some bad-smelling sticky black stuff beneath the water. He was in it up to his chest. He struggled, he tugged, he pulled, he slapped the water with his trunk and almost got that stuck, too. He was as stuck as Br'er Rabbit with the Tar Baby.

And that was what it was! Little Fuzzy was stuck in a tar pit!

If you go to California even today, to where the city of Los Angeles is now, you can see these tar pits. They look cool and inviting, just as they did that day long ago, but just beneath the surface the tar is still there. Natural gas, what scientists call methane, still bubbles out of the water, and that is what Fuzzy and Temba smelled. Not only mammoths got stuck in the tar. Just about everything that walked or crawled or flew at that time came to the pond to drink, and a lot of them got stuck, couldn't get out, and died. Scientists are still digging out their bones.

If Fuzzy had been a woolly rhinoceros or a giant elk or a dire wolf, he certainly would have died there in the tar pit. But Fuzzy was a mammoth, even though he was still quite a small mammoth, and mammoths did not abandon members of the herd when they were in trouble.

Temba and Big Mama and the others appeared on the top of the low hill and saw little Fuzzy struggling and heard him calling out. He was only working himself deeper.

They hurried down the slope, slipping and sliding, and it was a miracle that some of them didn't get stuck, too! But they carefully reached around little Fuzzy with their trunks, and they pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and Fuzzy's legs came free.

Poor little Fuzzy was a mess!

There was sticky tar all over his legs, and under his trunk. Temba and Big Mama and the others picked at it, and they got tar all over their trunks, too. It was matted in their hair. It was awful!

For weeks after that the tar dried out on Fuzzy's legs, and Temba continued to pick at it. It came away bit by bit, with clumps of his hair.

Ow! Ow! Ow!

Little Fuzzy had learned his lesson. He would never step into a tar pit again!