Mammoth

4

"MATT, something's coming!"

He sat up quickly. There was a red glow far away through the trees. He heard the sound of breaking branches and what might have been a trumpeting elephant. Had Susan's herd returned? "What is it?"

They were both standing now, looking in the direction he knew was west because he had seen the sun set over there. A wind had come up, blowing from that direction, and it brought with it the smell of smoke.

"A brush fire," Susan said.

"Los Angeles," Matt groaned. "Always either burning down or shaking apart."

Then the wind brought a sound different from the mammoth's trumpeting. The sound was answered, again and again.

"Tell me that wasn't a human voice," Matt said.

"I think it was. It sure sounded like a war cry."

"Or a hunting cry." He paused. "I think it's coming this way."

They both stared into the west. Part of the land was indeed burning, but there were also isolated points of firelight on the top of the next ridge, moving quickly down. They looked like torches.

"Somebody's herding the mammoths," Susan said in an awed whisper.

It was hard to see. It must be something like being in the heat of battle, Matt thought. He had read that confusion was the norm, that one seldom had a clear idea of what was happening, there was not a godlike perspective like you had in the movies. Night made it worse, and so did unfamiliar terrain.

Everything seemed to be happening at a distance of about a mile. What little they could see of it was on the top of a small rise, and it seemed to be moving down into the draw, getting swallowed up in the vegetation. Beyond that... was that a moving shape in the darkness? Was that another? It was hard to see them, though from the trumpeting they knew they must be out there.

"I think we ought to get out of here," Susan said.

"Me, too. Just take the guns, we may not have much time."

He didn't like leaving their gear, but the sounds of the mammoth hunt were getting closer pretty fast. He picked up the tranquilizer gun from the ground, wishing he had more confidence that he could hit anything with it if he needed to, or that it would bring down a mammoth faster than ten or fifteen minutes. But it was better than chucking rocks, he supposed. With the gun in one hand and the time machine in the other, he fled into the night.

Like a nightmare, he didn't know where he was, he didn't know where he was going. He wasn't sure what was behind him. About all that was missing was the sense of running in place, of being stuck to the ground, working hard and not getting anywhere. And before they had traveled a mile, he had that, too.

"I know where we are," he shouted to Susan.

She was already some distance ahead of him, but she reluctantly hurried back.

"What's that on your shoe?"

"Tar. We're where the intersection of Wilshire and La Brea will be. We're in the tar pits." At that moment a bull mammoth crashed through the trees and faced them across a mirror-smooth pond.

He was enormous. He had to be fifteen feet high at the head, with a big hump behind that. He was covered with short fur, and his tusks extended so far from his face that he could not have pointed his head straight down without poking them into the ground. They flared out, then curved back and almost crossed each other in front of him. He was no more than fifty feet away from them, and there was nothing between them but the pond, which did not look deep.

His surprisingly small ears flared out and he lifted his trunk and bellowed. He turned in a half circle, every massive muscle in his body flexing, knocking over a tree and tearing up the ground. He trumpeted again, and charged at them. Within four steps he was up to his knees, unable to move, and rapidly sinking deeper into the tar that lay just beneath the surface of the pool.

Matt and Susan stood, frozen in place, and watched as the creature's struggles mired him ever deeper in the tar. He bellowed, he raged, he thrashed about, and nothing did any good. Soon his legs were completely below the surface.

"They're driving the mammoths into the tar pits," Matt said, in awe. The hunters could end this bull's struggles with arrows, or spears, or whatever weapons they had, or wait until it died, and carefully climb onto its back and cut away the parts they could use. An animal like this could feed a tribe for a year, if they dried the meat.

He was going to tell Susan this when he happened to glance down at the time machine. The red light was on.

"Susan..."

"Matt! Look!"

He looked up, and a herd of mammoths appeared on the other side of the pond. They milled around in agitation, turning back and forth between the fire and the water where the big bull was trapped. One took a tentative step into the water, sank down to her massive ankle, and pulled back out.

Matt thought her because, though they were gigantic, none were as big as the doomed bull. Say, ten feet high, tops. One big cow made her decision, and was heading around the water. The others hesitated, not seeming to want to leave the bull, terrified of the fire, pulled to follow what seemed to be the herd leader. But they soon fell into line behind her. In a few moments they would be right on top of Matt and Susan.

"Susan, there's..." He looked again at the time machine. The green light was on.

"What? What? We've got to get moving, Matt!"

"It's on," he said, simply.

Susan frowned at him, licked her lips, and raised the elephant gun to her shoulder.

"Do what you can," she said.

Matt squatted down and opened the box.

The seven by seven by seven array of clear marbles was glowing with a pearly internal light. It was hypnotic, and strangely soothing. He could almost forget where he was, what was going on....

He touched the cube with his finger. It was warm, and hummed with energy. He felt his eyes going out of focus, felt the rippling patterns of light playing with his mind. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling... but he knew time was running out. Or moving by, or he was moving down time's arrow in a way he couldn't completely understand. What is time? Can it be experienced any other way? There were mathematical systems that said it was possible. He brought those equations to mind, some of them reaching as far back as Albert Einstein, others new and untried.

He thought he was beginning to see a pattern.

"Matt, they're heading this way."

"Quiet. I've got to think."

"Quiet? Damn it, Matt..." But she shut up, and aimed the gun toward the approaching mammoths. He looked up in time to see her elevate the barrel and fire over their heads. The report was deafening, and the mammoths stopped in their tracks. But, possibly more important, it broke Matt's concentration.

I'm going crazy, he thought. I'm twelve thousand years from home, kneeling on the edge of a deadly tar pit, a dozen seven-ton behemoths bearing down on us while the land burns and unseen savage hunters lurk somewhere out there ready to kill us and cook us if the mammoths somehow miss... and I'm worried about a little box of marbles.

But he knew he was right. It was the little box of marbles that had got them here, somehow, and somehow it would get them out. So he concentrated.

Soon he was back into whatever zone he had started to enter. He didn't know how to describe it, but it was a place he had learned to access when he was about six. At first it was arithmetic. He could stare at a page full of numbers and see relationships among them. Adding them up or finding percentages was just the start; the longer he stared, the more he saw. He felt the numbers were speaking to him.

Now this hypercube was speaking to him, not in words, but in patterns that almost made sense. His mind whirled, a few steps behind, then a step behind, then half a step.

Without thinking too hard about it, he picked up the cube and twisted it, just like a Rubik puzzle. The top layer rotated easily, and locked into place. The pattern of chasing lights changed, but nothing else did.

This is crazy. But he ignored the small voice, and twisted again.

The cube became filled with light, and Matt felt his eyes crossing as it collapsed in on itself in a way impossible to describe, and suddenly it was six by six by six.

The cube went through another iteration that twisted Matt's stomach. It happened in a series of quick steps, each one of them seeming logical and inevitable, yet when it was done the cube was five marbles on a side, and there simply wasn't any place the... six cubed minus five cubed equals ninety-one... the ninety-one marbles on the outer surface to have gone. But they were gone, either compressed into the middle of the cube or turned through another dimension to a place his mind couldn't follow.

When Susan fired the gun again, Matt barely heard it. He was committing the events he had just seen to memory, though already he felt them fading, in the manner of a vivid dream losing its grip on reality with the return of consciousness.

"Matt, we've got to run."

"Three more seconds." He wasn't sure where the figure came from, but he knew it was accurate. He hoped it would be enough time.

Twist. Four by four by four. Sixty-four marbles left.

Twist. Twenty-seven left. It had to be getting tight in there.

Twist. Only eight now.

Twist.

He looked up to see a Los Angeles city bus bearing down on him.

16 THE herd of mammoths appeared on the Miracle Mile at 10:18 P.M. on a Thursday night, almost two days after a building belonging to Howard Christian vanished in Santa Monica.

Big Mama was pissed.

First it was the pipsqueak bipeds with their annoying little spears, too small to do much damage to a mammoth but hurtful if one dared get in close enough to jab, carrying the hateful bright hot light, setting the world on fire. Then a long rush through the night, blinded and stumbling and terrified. Then Big Daddy sinking up to his belly in the sticky pit. It was at that point Big Mama began to get angry.

Big Mama wanted to try to help Big Daddy out of the black goo, and would have, even at the risk of getting caught herself... but the world was on fire. So for a few minutes she had dithered, swayed back and forth by conflicting duties and impulses and instincts, until something inside her finally broke and she left Big Daddy to his fate. It was a moment that seldom came to domesticated elephants, but trainers dreaded it like nothing else, because when an elephant's normally placid temper broke, she was capable of doing almost anything.

What Big Mama wanted to do was kill a few of these pesky bipeds. As she rounded the tar pit she could actually feel biped bones crushing under her mighty feet. It was a good feeling.

The explosion of sound startled her and stopped her in her tracks. Another member of the herd, the one with the notch in her left ear, mother of the third child to be born last birthing season, actually collided with her, something that would have been unthinkably rude normally, and would have earned her a big cuff on the head. Big Mama hardly noticed it. She had no idea a slug of lead big and fast enough to have torn through her massive skull had passed a few feet over her head. She only knew she hated that sound. She didn't want to go toward it.

But what was she to do? Behind her the land still burned, and she could smell the approaching hunters even over the stench of smoke. After another few moments she lowered her tusks, aimed at the two bipeds, and charged.

Before she had taken three steps, everything changed.

SUSAN was between Matt and the bus, with her back to it, her whole concentration on the herd of mammoths bearing down on them. As the brakes of the bus began to shriek, Matt got up and dived at her, his arms extended, and lifted her right off her feet, thrusting her out of the path of the bus. Then there was no time to do more than put out his hands as his feet got tangled under him. He was falling backward when the bus struck him, the bike rack on the front missing him by an inch. The back of his head hit the pavement and his vision was filled with bright points of light for a moment... then he looked up to see the bottom of the front bumper of the bus just above his face and, inches from his head, a massive gray foot smelling of urine and tar and elephant shit. Just above that, he had an astonishing worm's-eye view of a full-grown Columbian mammoth as she thrust forward with all the strength in her body. Glittering cubes of safety glass showered down all over him as he closed his eyes, hard, and hoped for the best. SIGHT is the fastest sense, and the first thing that assaulted Big Mama was a scene in which she recognized nothing. A human could not have been more baffled if she had been instantly transported to the bottom of the sea.

Scent information was the last to arrive in her brain with her first massive inhalation, but it was the most important to her, and the most awful of all, because there were literally thousands of smells in the night air that were perfectly alien to her. In her normal surroundings just one strange scent made for an exciting day, and she might linger over it for many minutes, fixing it in her comprehensive library of smells, far more vast than a human mind could comprehend.

There was a crumpled McDonald's cup lying in the gutter, which had held a strawberry shake; she smelled that, had a pretty good idea where it was, no idea what it was, though she knew it was edible as it was related to her mental folders labeled milk and berries. On the other side of the street a woman was walking a German shepherd on a leash and Big Mama smelled that, too. It was something like the dire wolves she had always ignored in her world, puny little animals, but also wildly different, and mixed with a hundred other smells she could separate but not identify: shampoo, his mistress's perfume, dog food containing the cooked flesh of several different animals plus carrots, grains, charcoal, and the metallic smell of the tin the food had come in.

There were dozens of restaurants a short whiff away, each emanating a thousand smells, very few of them pleasant. There were a thousand people on the street each with an odor as distinctive as a face, each wearing clothing made of alien substances, laundered in harsh detergents, and shoes made from canvas and rubber and leather.

There were smells of creosote from phone poles, paint and plaster and brick from the buildings, a monstrous panoply of chemicals used in processing paper and plastic and cloth and electronic devices and metals and ceramics, a phantasmagoric stench that could be summed up in a word no puny Pleistocene biped had yet used in Big Mama's world: civilization.

Over it all, a vast enveloping presence, was the apocalyptic smell she classified as burning tar, the petrochemical miasma humans constantly swam through, as oblivious to it as a fish to water. The burned tar products belched from the tailpipes of the bright, low, shiny animals that darted past her on all sides, sweated off the oil-coated sides of their roaring guts, oozed off the hard asphalt surface she stood on. It was a smell antithetical to everything her heart knew as wholesome, and she hated it. Hated it.

Now here came another animal, an animal actually larger than Big Mama, a unique and affronting experience in itself and one she normally would have run from, being at her center a peaceful and cautious beast. But her capacity for caution was gone and there was nothing left but a red and blinding rage. She turned, faced the creature, and lunged at it. Her tusks went right through its eyes, which were hard and brittle and no match for ten feet of ivory. Inside the beast she could see other creatures, more of the damned bipeds, screaming and fleeing toward the back of the thing's bright alien belly. This made no sense, but she was far beyond any concept of sense. She roared again, and tried to flip the creature onto its back. It was too heavy, so she put one huge foot into the broken eye socket and stomped down on it.

"Matt, you've got to get up!"

He scrambled to his feet. He was vaguely aware of people spilling out the back door of the bus, tumbling over each other. Susan pulled him away and they staggered together to the sidewalk and Matt watched as Big Mama did battle. Still backing up, he hit something metal, turned, and realized he was backed up on the iron fence surrounding the tar pit. In addition to the animatronic mammoth that had been mired in the tar for many years, there was now a live one, still struggling and trying to free himself.

How could that be? He had to accept that it had happened, just as the building and its contents had been swept into the past by whatever forces the machine had unleashed... but did the tar the mammoth was mired in come along with him—was he stuck in Pleistocene tar, or twenty-first-century tar? How can I think about a thing like that with half a dozen mammoths raging through modern-day Los Angeles?

If Susan was being bothered by such questions she gave no sign of it. She raised the elephant gun to her shoulder and fired it at Big Mama. It made a pathetic little chunk, with no recoil at all, and Matt realized it was the tranquilizer gun. She must have picked it up when he dropped it. She racked another dart into it and fired again, and then a third time, before lowering the barrel toward the ground.

"I'm afraid any more might kill her," she told Matt.

"Susan... you may have to kill her."

"No," Susan said. "If that has to be done, you do it."

As he took the gun from her, he noticed for the first time that tears were running from her eyes. He realized with a shock that this must be the realization of an elephant trainer's worst nightmare: one of her charges running berserk, too angry to reason with and too big to be stopped by anything short of deadly force. He imagined she had envisioned this situation in nightmares, on sleepless nights.

He raised the gun and aimed it at the mammoth, then wondered where the brain was in that massive head. Should he try for the heart? And where was that?

"A little to the left, Matt," she sighed. "But don't shoot unless you have to."

"I wouldn't dream of it." But if the mammoth turned this way and took... what, two steps?... he knew he would have to. Make it three steps. And one more for Susan.

Now all officers carried 9mm Glocks with twenty-cartridge magazines. Most patrol cars had military assault rifles and concussion grenades in the trunk. Stationed around the city were special weapons vehicles that could be anywhere with ten minutes' notice. And if all else failed, if howitzers and helicopter gunships were called for, there were arrangements with National Guard units that could be brought to bear anywhere in no more than half an hour.

A herd of half-crazed mammoths was a problem, but not an insoluble one.

As in any such situation, the first minutes were chaos. The word "mammoth" was never uttered over a police radio until long after the crisis was past; these were not paleontologists who were called upon to be the first line of defense against the creatures, they were police officers, and to a man and woman they referred to the animals as elephants, according to the well-known principle that if you hear hoofbeats your first thought should be horses, not zebras. If it's gray, twelve feet tall, weighs ten tons, has tusks and a trunk, anyone could be forgiven for calling it an elephant. In the end, it didn't really matter. Mammoths were just as vulnerable as elephants to the firepower the LAPD could bring to bear in an escape situation, and that firepower was being assembled.

To their credit, the responding officers did not immediately set about wiping out the animals. Their first priority was the protection of human life, but a strong second to most of them was to capture the elephants alive, if possible. Protection of property was clearly in third place, so the first officers at the scene stood by as Big Mama demolished the city bus, once it was clear there was no one inside and all nearby pedestrians and motorists had fled the scene.

Roadblocks were quickly established a block away in all directions from the site of the temporal breakthrough, and lines of cops stood behind them pointing shotguns and handguns at what might have been six, might have been eight milling and confused pachyderms. It was hard to tell in the dark, which had been made worse when several streetlight poles were knocked over by confused mammoths.

When two of the animals started to make a charge for freedom the officers in their path first tried firing into the air, and unleashed such a fusillade that the mammoths turned quickly and rejoined the milling herd.

Things remained in a standoff for almost five minutes. HOWARD Christian was not physically suited to being the only thing he had ever really wanted to be: a superhero. He knew it was childish and so he had never told anyone of his ambition, not even when he actually was a child. What he really wanted to do was swing through the concrete canyons of New York on fibers of mutated spider silk, or grow steel claws like his favorite X-Man mutant, Wolverine.

But what was the Green Lantern without his ring, or Batman without his gadgets? Just guys in spandex suits, that's what. When he finally convinced himself of that he set about playing to his strengths instead of bemoaning his weaknesses. He began building his own Fortress of Solitude, his Bat Cave in the sky.

Now the Dark Lord of Los Angeles, also known as Howard Christian, sat in the control seat of the Eagle of Vigilance and surveyed his realm.

He came here a lot, mostly at night, and most of all when he was upset. It was a good feeling, almost reclining in the soft leather of the chair custom-built to his body, his feet on the pan and tilt controls, no less than three keyboards arrayed in easy reach, the large red joystick with its array of buttons built into the right armrest. Before him were eight large hi-def video screens butted together so that they could display eight separate scenes or one sweeping panorama.

He liked the term Dark Lord, but that didn't mean he was bad. He felt he was up here in the tallest building in the world to do good, not evil. The dark part came from the fact that he was a creature of the night, unknown to the populace that lay spread out below him. But the night meant nothing to the Dark Lord. He had a thousand eyes: L.A.'s armada of traffic helicopters, security cams on almost every light pole in the city, and satellites that could read a newspaper from space.

If that was all he had, he would be nothing but the world's most high-tech voyeur. No, he had his own secret weapon concealed in the basement, known to only a few of his most trusted employees. Its purpose was to shoot down suicide bombers approaching the Resurrection Tower in hijacked airplanes. Travelers arriving and departing LAX didn't know it, but in addition to the FAA and Homeland Security, their planes were being tracked by Howard's secret death ray.

It was, so far as he knew, the world's most powerful microwave laser. If the military had something bigger, they weren't talking about it. It could burn a hole through armor plate, and cut an airplane in half in a microsecond. Of course, it was there only as a last resort. It had never been used. But it gave him comfort to sit here in his chair, following car chases with the crosshairs centered on some fleeing sack of shit, knowing he could vaporize the bastard with one squeeze of the trigger.

Matthew Wright. Matt and Susan and a whole goddamn warehouse full of elephants and the frozen corpse of a mammoth. Where did they go? Howard turned his thoughts away from that, for the hundredth time that day. That's what he'd come up here to the Eagle of Vigilance for, to get his mind off this insoluble problem.

"Stop it," he said, then was startled that he had spoken aloud.

He roamed the night with his thousand eyes, his finger on the trigger, his ears tuned to the police radio.