Mammoth

2

MATT and Susan never felt a thing.

The lights flickered briefly, almost too quick for the eye to see. Something changed in the atmosphere and it took a moment for Matt to realize it was the faint, distant sound of the emergency generator coming on. Then he heard something he'd never heard in the building before: the trumpeting

of Susan's elephants.

"Why did you push the button?" Susan asked.

Matt held his hands up in a pose of innocence.

"I didn't push anything. That thing just sank into the cube on its own."

They both looked at it, now a perfect cube of small glass spheres. As they watched, the central

sphere rose again. "This is way beyond spooky," Susan said.

"The lights went out, the generator went on."

"Let's go outside and see if Howard felt anything."

"You go. I've got to see what's upsetting my elephants."

Susan headed for the interior door. Matt walked slowly, thoughts of cleaning up pushed aside now. Where did all those other marbles go?

His initial reaction, that they might have been folded through space-time somehow, that they were all somehow still there, packed into a seven by seven by seven volume that looked too small from our three-dimensional perspective but was plenty roomy in, say, five or six dimensions, had quickly paled. He was embarrassed that he'd even mentioned it to Susan. What must she think?

Question: Was there a way to explain the vanished spheres without resorting to extradimensional geometry?

Answer: Ask any magician. Ask any thief. Ask any prankster. Ask the gods of coincidence, chance, error, forgetfulness, and spiteful human nature.

So the box hadn't been opened. So what? The vandals got through the gate. All the data needed to build the structure now in the box was in Matt's computer; maybe he had been hacked.

Howard was pissed at him. Maybe he hired the vandals, arranged all this as a cruel hoax, maybe he liked to toy with men's minds that way. He could afford it.

Matt's mental state, though greatly improved since meeting Susan, was sometimes delicate. Maybe he'd simply replaced the alpha assembly himself while in a fugue state, and forgot.

Maybe he had been kidnapped by flying saucer men from Venus and brainwashed and this whole evening—even the whole last year—was a virtual reality experiment of surpassing cleverness.

Any of those things and many more now seemed more likely than multidimensional gymnastics. Matt felt considerable relief that he had blurted out his first theory to Susan rather than to Howard. It would be a lot easier to live down.

He reached the door, opened it, and saw that Santa Monica was gone.

SUSAN was not as frightened as Matt had feared she would be, at least not at first. The possibility had existed, they had talked about time travel in the abstract, she knew he was working on a time machine. But she had not expected to travel through time. If she did, she might have expected the journey to be more dramatic. They made a circuit of the building. They felt they had to do at least that much, even before the sun came up. In an unknown situation, Matt said, step one is to establish the parameters of your problem. For all he knew, he could turn the corner of the building and find that Santa Monica was still there... or Shangri-La, or an alien spaceship landing on Devil's Tower, or the first steps of the Yellow Brick Road.

"Is that a light over there?" Susan asked. Matt could barely see her hand, pointing toward what he figured must be the Hollywood Hills. He thought he might see the tiniest imaginable orange spark against the blackness.

"Somebody built a fire?" he wondered. "Maybe there's people around here."

Who could tell? But at that moment they got evidence that there was something sharing the night with them. It was a blood-curdling screech, very far away, but so powerfully malign that Matt felt his knees begin to shake. He turned the light back on, and they soon found themselves running around the last corner and into the pale but warm square of light, the door leading back inside the steel building.

"Can you get us back home?" Susan asked, breathing hard and afraid to look at him.

"I don't know. I think we'd better put that question aside for a few hours and figure out how long I have to solve that problem. How long we can expect to live."

"What do you mean? You think time traveling is harmful?"

"Not so far as I know. No, I mean how long we can survive."

IT quickly came down to water.

They sat together in the quiet warehouse and batted it around. The first thing that became clear was how utterly dependent people of the twenty-first century had become on the vast, interlinked network of goods and services and transportation that they called civilization. The second thing they recalled was that the Los Angeles Basin was a desert.

The taps were dry, of course. Matt assumed they were cut off abruptly, underground, just like the asphalt and concrete surrounding the building ended about five feet away from the sides.

They did an inventory. It didn't look good. Each of the five elephants had a drinking trough, and they varied from full to half empty. That wouldn't last long and there was no way to refill them. There were four rest rooms, two on each half of the warehouse, with two toilets in the ladies' rooms and one each in the men's. That was a good supply in the six tanks, but it wouldn't last long, either.

"I wish we'd put in one of those water coolers with the ten-gallon jugs," Matt said. "There's always a dozen full ones sitting around."

"Again, I haven't any idea."

The best news was the Coca-Cola machine. It was a big one, with a curved, lighted front.

Looking at it, Matt suddenly felt very thirsty. He searched his pockets and came up empty.

"You have any change?"

"My purse was in the car."

Matt looked around and found the crowbar abandoned by one of the vandals. He set the end of

it against the door of the Coke machine and started to pull. The door popped open and he took out a cold can of Coke. "You want something?"

"Is there any Mountain Dew?"

"All we have here that's clear is Sprite."

"That'll do."

They popped the tops and drank, then were silent for a moment. They had worked for several hours on the inventory, not having to talk about the central fact of their dilemma, but Matt knew it was unavoidable.

"Look...," he said, and had to stop. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry about this. I'm so sorry about it."

"About what?"

"About... well, about getting you thrown down a temporal wormhole to what might very well be the year 13,000 B.C."

"Is that what happened? A temporal wormhole?"

"You know what I mean."

"Sure. The part I don't see is why any of this was your fault."

"I thought it was sort of... obvious."

"Not to me." She sighed. "Okay, you were trying to build a time machine."

"Trying to duplicate something that was found that might be a time machine."

"Don't get technical. You built it, some ignorant yahoos came in and did something to it—" "We scientists call that 'whacking the shit out of it.' "

"I keep elephants. I keep them in strong, secure stockades, and I keep people away from them. But what if those yahoos got in there, opened the gates and the outside doors, and threw a bunch of firecrackers into the paddocks? And the elephants stampeded down Wilshire and hurt a lot of

people? Is that my fault?"

"Well..."

"Don't think about it too long." There was a tiny edge to her voice.

"No, of course not. Not if you took reasonable precautions. But did I?"

"I don't think anybody could tell what 'reasonable' was, before this happened."

"Maybe. Maybe not. I keep thinking I could have done more."

"Howard sure could have. He could have splurged on two or three guards, around the clock. I

think we ought to take that up with him... when we get back."

He noticed it was when, not if, and was grateful for her confidence... or was she just whistling past the graveyard?

"I think I will. But there's a larger question. What was I doing fooling around with something as

dangerous as time travel in the first place?"

"Satisfying your scientific curiosity. I don't see anything wrong with that."

"That's exactly what Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi and a few dozen other physicists

were doing in the early 1940s."

"So does that make the atomic bomb their fault?"

"People will probably debate that forever. One thing I'm sure of, if they hadn't researched those

questions, if they had opted out from fear of the consequences... somebody else would have found the same answers."

"No question. It's the same with cloning research. We can try to keep it in control, but the answers will come."

"Yes. I know it's foolish to worry too much about the effects of what you might discover. We'd stop discovering anything at all. Still..." He leaned back in his chair and sighed, wondering if he needed to get into this. But there wasn't much they could do until the sun came up, which could be hours yet. He went on. "When I was very young, I discovered science. I couldn't get enough of it. I read everything. I figured I'd continue doing that until I knew everything about everything. Chemistry, biology, physics, math, astronomy, you name it, it was all the same to me. In fact, I didn't see any distinction."

"That's true. In many ways, there isn't any difference. You can't do biology without chemistry, you can't do astronomy without physics... and you can't do any of them without math. That's what I kept coming back to, after I realized there was too much knowledge for any one person to learn in a hundred lifetimes. So when I reached the point where I had to specialize, I asked people what I seemed to be the best at, and they all said math. Which was good, because that's what I thought, too.

"And I'd given some thought to the responsibility of the researcher. Astronomy seemed fairly safe... until you started thinking about the power inherent in stars, in neutron stars, black holes, quasars. Same with physics. Biology gets into the realm of really hairy moral questions, like biological or genetic war, which in some ways is scarier than nuclear bombs. I'll tell you, it got to the point, if I'd been any good with the harmonica, I'd have dropped out of school and started a blues band. Unfortunately, I have no talent for music, or sports, or business, or sales, or fishing... no talents at all, really, except for memory and logical thinking. So I concentrated on math. Math seemed safe."

"You were how old?"

"Twelve."

Susan smiled. "Prodigies. When I was twelve I was learning how not to fall off when an elephant was lifting me on her trunk."

"I wish I knew how to do that."

"I'll teach you. But go on."

Matt wasn't sure he wanted to, but he'd started down the road.

"Well... I got my Ph.D. in mathematics. Even in math you're expected to specialize, but I tried to stay as broadly based as possible. One month I'd be working on the most theoretical things I could find, another I'd get interested in what we call 'real-world' problems. About a year ago I was noodling around some equations concerning superstrings. Do you know what that is?"

"Sure. It's that goop you squirt out of a can at parties. Sticks to stuff."

"Right. But the other sense of the word concerns what quarks are made of."

"Quarks being the particles that make up protons and neutrons and such."

"Yes. So far there is no real evidence of their existence, just some interesting mathematical theories. If they do exist, they are very small. Anyway, superstrings seemed as remote in one direction as quasars are in the other. I didn't think it was likely anything I discovered would have a lot of real-world applications." "You should have remembered that, in 1939, protons and neutrons seemed incredibly tiny."

"I gather it didn't work out that way."

"At first, it was fine. Lovely speculation. Good response to the papers I was publishing, interesting feedback from the three or four people around the world looking into the same thing.

"Then I stopped publishing. I didn't even realize I had done it at the time. I thought I was just organizing my thoughts, I'd put them down and send them in later.

"A year went by, and I started sleeping badly. I was getting an inkling of something that was... frightening me. I'm still not sure why. It got to be hard to do the math; sort of like writer's block, I guess.

"Then one day I stopped talking." Matt swallowed hard, and suited action to his words. After a minute had gone by, Susan spoke, cautiously.

"That must have been awful."

Matt laughed.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, it wasn't so bad, at first. The weird thing was to discover I could get through the day pretty easily without speaking at all. I never had a lot of human contact at work, math is a lonely game sometimes. Casual contact could be handled with a nod or a smile. Hell, it's not like I was the office clown before that; people didn't expect a lot of words out of me. But gradually it became clear that I wasn't choosing not to speak, but that I couldn't speak. I'd open my mouth to say something, and nothing would come out. I wrote notes, memos, and emails to cover myself in most things... then I realized I was having trouble writing, too. I knew it was time to get help.

"And that's sort of where I was when Howard found me. I'd spent a month in a very nice, quiet facility in the country, mildly sedated, and after a while I could talk to a therapist. I was advised to take a few months off to think things over. I didn't need a lot of time to decide one thing: I wouldn't publish my results on the superstring research. There was too much potential danger. In fact, I knew I had to destroy the equations."

There wasn't much he could add that wouldn't get into more specificity than Susan could handle, and she seemed to recognize that. They were silent for a while, until Susan looked toward the door they had left propped open, and realized there was pale gray light coming through it.

They approached the door cautiously. Outside, there were entirely unremarkable trees and shrubs. The analytical side of Matt's mind noted there was no sign of whatever trees and shrubs had occupied the ground the time-traveling building now sat on. Were those trees now growing from Howard Christian's land in Santa Monica? Something to think about later, after they had made a plan.

At the top, they looked out over a primeval Pleistocene landscape, untouched in any way by the hand of man.

To the west, the Pacific was still gray in the morning light. To the north they could see what had to be the Hollywood Hills, surprisingly green and covered with scrub oaks. To the east the sky was orange, the sun about to burst over the horizon... and the mountains over there seemed to be frosted with snow. To the south, just rolling country and, far in the distance, what looked like a herd of horses.

"Maybe horses, maybe camels," Susan said. "I can't tell from this far away."

"Camels?"

"Sure, there were several species. And the horses may have three toes."

"And the tigers have big teeth."

"Not really tigers, Matt, they were a lot more like lions."

"You're the expert. But we'd probably better watch out for them. I'll bet they could hide pretty

well in all this underbrush."

"If we stick with the elephants, we shouldn't be bothered much by saber-toothed cats."

"Right. The elephants. What are we going to do about the elephants?"

"Water them, obviously."

"And how do we do that?"

"I think we leave it to them." They were silent again as the first rays of the sun reached them.

"That is so beautiful," Susan said, with a catch in her voice. "I wish I'd brought my camera."

Matt was thinking about saber-toothed cats and wishing he'd brought a gun... a very large gun.

"So...," Susan said. "Where did you hide your superstring data?"

"It's in my safe-deposit box, in Portland."

They looked at each other, and laughed. "Well, I should have destroyed it," Matt said.

Matt looked into the distance again, and decided to say nothing.

"I guess we'd better get to work," Susan said. "I think we've got an interesting day ahead of us."

ABOUT twelve thousand years in the future, Howard Christian was finally at the end of the most interesting day of his life, and one of the more expensive ones.

He had heard somewhere that the New York City police department used to have an informal code for the offering of bribes, a way to avoid the awkwardness of just coming out and saying "Would you take a bribe?" Instead, you could say, "You look like you could use a new hat." What that meant was: "Would twenty dollars make this problem go away?" Sometimes it took a new suit to do the job: one hundred dollars.

Tomorrow a half dozen Santa Monica patrolmen would be driving around in brand-new Land Rovers. Kraylow, Vasquez, Dawson, and probably a few others at Robinson Security had just earned themselves new homes in Simi Valley.

According to Howard's lawyers, there was nothing illegal, in itself, in making a large metal warehouse vanish from the face of the Earth, and that was all the police officers had witnessed. The money they would receive, very discreetly, was simply for not talking about what they had seen. Howard was confident the matter could be buried easily enough, especially since each of the superior officers in the department would be getting the price of two or three Land Rovers.

The price was steeper for the Robinson people because they were the only ones who knew there had been two people inside the building when it ceased to exist.

Howard's lawyers weren't quite so sure of the ramifications of that one. Unless it could be determined just what had caused the warehouse to evaporate it would be difficult to charge Howard or any of his enterprises with anything that might have befallen Matt and Susan... and who could even prove they had been harmed? Perhaps they were fine... wherever they went. Still, they had been there, and now they were gone, and the Robinson people knew it, and not mentioning it to the police might be seen as negligence, at the very least, and so they had earned the price of a house in Simi Valley, the dream of every Southland cop and ex-cop.

But where did Matt and Susan go?

That was a question Howard was determined should never be asked. Everyone who knew that Matt was working on a time machine had either vanished with the building or was in Howard's employ, so that was under control.

It would have been a lot cheaper for Howard if he could have simply stonewalled: My building disappeared, I don't know why, and I don't know where it went. End of story. But there would never be an end to it, and he knew it. Reporters would be all over the story, and soon the bugs would start crawling out of the baseboards. Roswell flying saucer bugs, crop circle bugs, Area 51 bugs. Alien abductees.

It took all morning, but at last he felt he had it under control. He was exhausted, but willed himself to drive back to the scene of the disaster. He took one of the Robinson Blazers this time, not wishing to draw attention to himself in one of his antique cars.

There was another Robinson vehicle parked outside the gate, manned by Kraylow, who nodded at Howard but did not get out. There was a small group of people, mostly men who worked in the area, standing around with puzzled looks on their faces. Luckily, there were not many of them. No explanation would be offered to them, and what were they going to think, anyway? That the building had fallen into a temporal wormhole?

No, they would conclude, sensibly, that somehow Howard Christian, the eccentric billionaire, had had the structure demolished overnight, right down to the concrete pad, and replanted in scrubby-looking oak trees.

Howard drove around to the far side where there were no people. He got out, walked to the chain-link fence, and grabbed it with his hands. He scowled at the trees inside, trees that had obviously grown right where they now stood, for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years. He shook the fence in frustration.

Where did you take my building, Matt?

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

Mammoths did not sleep a lot. Most nights they would sleep only four or five hours, and only for an hour or so at a time. Somebody was always awake, watching for danger.

Sometimes they slept standing up. This wasn't uncomfortable for mammoths, as it would be for us. Many animals sleep standing up. But sometimes they liked to lie down on their sides for a while and sleep that way.

One night a few weeks after Fuzzy got into big trouble at the tar pits, he was sleeping lying down. There were still hard balls of tar clinging to his front legs and he didn't like that. He rubbed his legs against trees and on the ground, trying to get them off. Maybe he dreamed. What would a mammoth dream about? We don't know.

But just after the night was darkest, when the moon had just risen over the hills to the east, Fuzzy was awakened by the urgent touch of Temba's trunk. He opened his eyes to see a strange light.

The herd was all awake, and milling around nervously. Fuzzy got to his feet and huddled close to his mother's side, where he felt warm and safe and secure. Then the quiet of the night was broken by the high, horrible cries he had heard once before. He remembered them well.

They came from the south, waving burning sticks that were so bright they hurt the eyes of the mammoths.

Most animals don't like fire, and mammoths were no different. They ran away!

But the two-legs were determined, they kept coming. The mammoths would stop for breath, and once again the two-legs would be almost on them.

And now they were touching their flaming sticks to the ground, and the yellow grass itself began to burn. It raced toward the herd, and the two-legs were close behind.

On and on the mammoth herd ran, into the night, trying to stay one step ahead of the inferno on the ground. Little Fuzzy began to get very tired.

Then he smelled something that made his young heart beat even faster. It was a smell he would never forget, the smell of that awful day when he was almost swallowed up in the thick black goo that lurked just beneath the surface of that quiet, inviting pool.

It was the smell of tar!

Fuzzy wanted to turn back. He looked back at the fire. It was impossible to go that way. Temba and Big Mama and the rest of the herd kept going, onward toward the tar pits.

Then they were joined by other mammoths. These were big bulls, the biggest mammoths Fuzzy had ever seen! They were panicked, too, rushing forward as fast as they could go.

And then a very, very strange thing happened....