Mammoth

21

HOWARD Christian reached into his pocket and took out a peanut, cupped it in his palm, and held it through the heavy horizontal steel I-beams toward the most famous animal that had ever lived, the most beloved creature that ever walked on four legs—or maybe even on two, for that matter.

Little Fuzzy. His Little Fuzzy.

In the darkness of the far side of the enclosure a darker shadow stirred, as Howard had known it would. This was supposed to be Fuzzy's sleep time, though neither elephants nor mammoths needed a lot of sleep, sometimes having to feed as much as twenty hours per day to support their enormous bulk on the low-energy foods they consumed—and as much as sixty percent of that went right through their sixty-foot guts undigested to emerge as a cornucopia for dung beetles.

Fuzzy slept lightly and his hearing or sense of smell was uncanny.

He always knew when Howard had entered the building, and he always smelled the peanuts.

Now he shambled over to the mammoth-proof fence and the soft, moist tip of his trunk probed Howard's hand with infinite delicacy. There was a snuffling sound and the peanut was sucked up, the nostrils pinched, and the trunk snaked up above the pendulous lower lip and Fuzzy blew the tiny morsel into his mouth and crunched it. Immediately his trunk was held out for more.

Life is good, Howard thought. Life is very good.

THERE had been some dodgy days there at first, five years ago, when Fuzzy and Big Mama and the herd had appeared like magic on Wilshire Boulevard.

The first twenty-four, forty-eight hours had been critical, as he had known they would be right from the moment he shut down the big laser. His claims to ownership of the mammoths were tenuous at best, but that was what lawyers were for. By noon of the second day, with the media maelstrom swirling undiminished, Howard's legal team had filed no fewer than seventeen lawsuits in five separate jurisdictions outlining why the prehistoric creatures belonged to Howard Christian and no one else, under no fewer than three legal theories, each of them contradictory to the other two. His public relations team was hard at work selling the proposition that not only was Howard entitled to the spoils, it would be a travesty of justice, a blight on the free enterprise system, an insidious undermining of the basic principles that made this country the greatest democracy in the world if ownership of these poor defenseless creatures was awarded to anyone other than the man who was responsible for their arrival in the twenty-first century, i.e., the aforesaid Howard Christian.

Unfortunately, that ultimately entailed the revelation of the means whereby they had arrived in the twenty-first century, something Howard would very much have liked to have kept close to his vest, but that was the cost of doing business. You never got everything you wanted, so you concentrated on the main attraction and gave a little here and there.

It was a lot sexier story than cloning, and that would have been sexy enough. That was the angle his PR teams took: Howard the time travel pioneer, Howard the techno-wizard, Howard the man who was going to revolutionize the world once again. And that was fine, too. Wasn't a man entitled to the fruits of his labors?

There was also the matter of actual physical possession. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, or something like that. That was how his father had put it, anyway, and Howard could remember the exact circumstances when he'd first heard it, as Dad stuffed a boombox into a gaffed shopping bag and sauntered casually out of a Wal-Mart, "avoiding the unconstitutional state sales tax," as he had put it.

Six months later he had legal possession as well, over the protests of the Sierra Club, the Fund for Animals, the State of California and County of Los Angeles, and many others. On the day the appeals court issued its ruling Howard gave the go-ahead to his planning team, which had already been working on tentative proposals for the circus that was to display Fuzzy and Big Mama: Full steam ahead, boys!

Yes, life was indeed sweet, or as sweet as it ever gets. There's always a little lemon peel in the lemonade, and there are three things you can do about that: minimize it, add more sugar, and/or learn to like a little bitterness. Howard did all three things, at various times.

There was the question of the slaughter of the fleeing mammoths.

There was no way simply to make that ugly event just go away; billions of people had seen it on live television. Not that anyone wanted to arrest anybody over it, the animals were clearly out of control, and if somebody had killed them that was more or less all right... but how? Exactly what had happened out there that bloody night?

Best answer, five years later: Nobody knew. Leading theory: It was some side effect of the time traveling itself. Some invisible force seemed to have seized them when they got a certain distance from the point of "temporal translation," as one of Howard's experts put it. It worked like this:

Forces are accumulating as a person travels through the temporal continuum. Those forces are strongly localized to what the expert called a "six-dimensional synclastic infundibular space-time nexus" (i.e., the site of the temporal breakthrough), and increased as the cube of the distance from this nexus to the location of the time traveler, decreasing only as the square of the interval between temporal translation and "present" time X, measured in seconds. If not enough time is allowed between temporal translation and movement away from the space-time nexus, this expert testified to five separate investigation boards and a committee of Congress (with a degree of chutzpah that had serious mathematicians chuckling in admiration even five years later), the accumulated forces discharged, with the awful results everyone had seen repeated endlessly on videotape.

Or some such bullshit.

Howard, who was no math slouch, could not follow all the man's equations, but that was what he was being paid for. Obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, intended to make the ordinary viewer, simple congressperson, or even educated layman drop his jaw and say... duuuuuh, okay, if you say so.

Knowing the public would never be completely comfortable with an explanation like that, Howard's PR firm suggested how the whole bucket of lemons could be sweetened a bit, and so a second expert was hired. This one was a well-known populizer of science with the stature and stage presence of the late, great Isaac Asimov but without Asimov's scruples. That worthy came up with the following analogy:

Ouch!

Well, yeah... but why didn't the same thing happen when Big Mama and Fuzzy and the corpse of Big Daddy were removed? Easy. What happens if you don't reach for that doorknob? What if you wait a minute or two before trying to open the door? Why, the static charge bleeds off into the air.

Viola!

This was all said with such conviction, reasonableness, and aplomb that even Howard almost found himself ready to believe it. And the public and the investigatory boards, knowing that there was a solid basis of mathematical gobbledygook underlying this rampant flummery, accepted it, too.

The biggest reason everyone, scientist and layman alike, pretty much had to accept Howard's version of events was that there was absolutely no proof that it was wrong. Other than to reveal that time travel had been accomplished, that a time machine existed, Howard had revealed a sum total of... nothing.

He knew there were those who viewed his exploding mammoth hypothesis as the sheer claptrap that it was. There were alternative explanations, of course, some of them wacky enough to make amusing reading, most just stupid. The Internet was rife with websites claiming to have the straight dope on that fateful night, from UFOs to communists to vast conspiracies of animal-hating capitalists to the Wrath of God Himself. There were even a few that got it right, but who was listening? They all faded into that vast babble of nuts that everyone was so used to by now, the online riffraff, the crazies with an ax to grind who drowned each other out in their relentless paranoia.

Then there were the handful of people capable of following the highest of higher mathematics, who knew that a few decimal points had been dropped, a few numbers divided by zero, a few Riemannian terms sneaked into the Lobachevskian continuum presented with such gusto. But how were they going to explain that to those who couldn't even spell continuum, much less understand what it meant?

Better yet, even many of those who could spot the bad shuffle simply assumed it was deliberate disinformation given out not to cover up anything Howard had done, but to conceal what he knew. So what if somebody had his thumb on the scales of the equations submitted publicly? The incontrovertible fact was that time travel had happened, that human beings had gone back in time and returned to the present day with living—and dead—proof that they had been there.

How they had done it was proprietary, far too closely held even to risk applying for a patent. Howard was assumed to be protecting his interests until he had everything sewed up, until he had figured out how to squeeze every dollar out of this revolutionary new technology, until every conceivable piece of it and application for it was wholly owned by Mr. Howard Christian. In short, he was doing exactly what they would have done if they had discovered time travel. And nobody could do a damn thing about it.

He didn't have a clue how to make a time machine.

It was enough to make a billionaire weep.

"Howard, darling, it's getting late."

Just like that, all thought of time machines and defeats and that bastard Matthew Wright and that ungrateful bitch Susan Morgan fled from Howard's mind. He turned, smiling, and drank in the face of Andrea de la Terre.

Andrea de la Terre, head of Terra Firma, the conservation group she had founded and nurtured into a force to rival the Cousteau Society or Friends of Nature. Terra Firma was heartily disliked by the semi-radical groups, who sometimes viewed her as wishy-washy—Andrea was not a vegetarian, for instance—but they had to deal with her because she got things done and she knew everybody. Everybody that counted, that is, which is to say all the "green" stars in Hollywood and the music business. A dozen phone calls from her could bring out more star power to a rally, and more money into organizational coffers, than a year of hard work by any lobbying group other than the NRA.

Andrea de la Terre, until recently the very definition of Hollywood Liberal, who had turned down a multimillion-dollar cosmetics endorsement over the issue of animal testing, and prevailed in a brand-libel suit brought against her when she publicly burned boxes of eyeliner, lipstick, and rouge. Andrea de la Terre, the former Melba Horowitz of Queens, New York City. Top female box office draw for the last three years, maker of politically and environmentally responsible epics that also made pots of money, much of it for Howard Christian's studio.

Howard had never actually met her until two years ago. He did not mix with movie stars, even when they worked for him. They had ended up facing each other across a long conference table where he had sat down with groups opposed to Cenozoic Park in an attempt to iron out their differences. That was Andrea's stated intent, anyway. Howard viewed it as a wasted afternoon. He had intended to sit politely and smile politely and nod politely, and then go back to doing exactly what he had been doing before. The nerve of the woman, she and her bigshot famous Hollywood idiot friends, people with perfect teeth and skin and chiseled features, the very guys who had hammered him in the playground from the time he was five, the very girls who had sneered openly at his shitty clothes, his big ears, his zits, his stammer. Screw them all.

Until Andrea de la Terre opened her mouth and spoke, and then he was lost. ANDREA had brought grapes.

Let's don't get into that, Howard thought.

She stood there, every man's fantasy, every woman's unattainable ideal, and Howard marveled again at a thought he would never express to her: she was not really beautiful. She was attractive, no question about it, and no single part of her face was anywhere near grotesque... it's just that the parts were not assembled in a way that would normally qualify a girl as gorgeous. Howard was reminded of Judy Garland, or of Barbra Streisand, though Andrea looked nothing like either of them. If she was sitting in a bus station or on a stool at Schrafft's you'd walk right by her.

But in the same way that, when Streisand began to sing, you forgot all about the nose and she became the most wonderful thing in the universe, when Andrea looked at you, when she spoke, when she moved... you were lost. From the moment she started talking, Howard would have given her anything she wanted. (Lucky for him, she never realized that, but he did concede half a dozen points he had not intended to budge on.)

Howard was in love.

He had never expected to be, not at his age, not at this point in his life. He had had the usual crushes on the prettiest girls in school, those times when he had been in school and not self-educating in an anonymous trailer park or a juvenile hall in one state or another. They were purely sexual attractions, since he had seldom exchanged so much as two words with any of those prom queens and cheerleaders. That had lasted right on through college. Then he was working, inventing, devoting himself to his computers, and there was no time for romance, even in the event he believed any of the engineering majors he met in the pathetic thing he called a social life would respond to him.

Then one day he looked around and realized he was rich. It really seemed to happen overnight. And when others realized it, the girls began to show up. He went so far as to marry one, and the divorce a year later had cost him (and he got a lot of satisfaction every month when he wrote her a check that seemed pitifully small to him now, and must have seemed miniscule to her avaricious heart when she saw what he was worth now), and he learned the lesson all rich, homely men learn if they intend to stay rich: Your bank balance is the most attractive thing about you.

Then he was a billionaire, and one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet, and everything he had learned applied doubled, tripled, squared, and cubed. When you have billions, the pool of possible women who might actually love you for yourself narrows enormously. Basically, they had to be either rich or famous, or both, and he simply didn't move with any ease in that social milieu.

He had made a few halfhearted moves to spruce himself up, hired an image consultant who gave him a new haircut and chose his wardrobe for him, but he soon drifted back to his old familiar cowlick and comfortable clothes. He even tried plastic surgery, electing to fix, of all the disastrous features the sawbones swore he could tidy up, his unfortunate nose which, he had always thought, could adorn Mount Rushmore with very little alteration in scale if George Washington ever lost his. But he felt the new schnozz didn't look all that much better than the old one, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, he was sure it was enough different that everyone who knew him saw nothing else but the nose, and were snickering behind his back.

The week after that conference they were dating, and a month after that they were sleeping together and dodging the tabloid photographers because, let's face it, though Howard had never been of much interest to the celebrity-mad masses, being at least as nerdy and homely as Bill Gates and twice as boring, Andrea was right up there with Liz and Di and Michael and Elvis and Jackie, who were all dead now except for Elvis, and maybe Michael, and then there was the Romeo and Juliet angle, not the star-crossed lovers part or the teenage mad infatuation though it sometimes felt that way to Howard, but the fact that they were from warring houses, the putative rapist of the environment versus the Queen of Green.

Now they were to be married, Andrea up to her unlinered eyebrows in preparations for the Wedding of the Century on a remote Pacific atoll whose name and location were the most closely guarded secret since the Manhattan Project, a place the paparazzi couldn't reach if they tried to fly in on a cruise missile, with a guest list part Billboard Top Twenty, part Variety box office leaders list, part Who's Who in Washington, New York, Paris, and Geneva, and Howard spent a few minutes every day with his lawyers, honing the language of the prenuptial agreement so it would be generous but not profligate, conservative but not insulting, because no matter how infatuated Howard might be his permanent adolescent doubts lingered in an atavistic corner of his brain and he sometimes woke in the middle of the night silently screaming She couldn't possibly love me!

But it really seemed she did. There she stood in her high-heel sneakers, her red dress, with her wig hat on her head, and over it all a full-length coat of Columbian mammoth fur, one of only twenty such coats on the planet, a gift from Howard valued at well over a million dollars and the subject of endless controversy among animal lovers worldwide (Is fur murder if the animal was already dead? Would a roadkill possum coat be okay? Is it moral to wear a century-old mink?)... feeding grapes to Fuzzy.

Fuzzy loved the coat. It was possible that the pelt had come from his mother, though Howard had been adamant about never doing the DNA testing to determine just which Curson Avenue carcass was the mother.

Until the events on Wilshire Boulevard no one had known anything about the skin and possible furriness of a Columbian mammoth. It turned out that Columbians did have hair, three to four inches in length. This was nothing like the luxurious coat of the woolly, up to three feet long in some places, black or reddish brown, but it would do, it would do, and Howard found the very best tanners and furriers in Russia, who worked wonders with the coarse and lifeless material they were given, ending with a small number of coats, hats, and stoles that sold for unbelievable prices.

Now Fuzzy momentarily ignored the offered handful of grapes and reached through the bars of the enclosure to rub the sensitive tip of his trunk over Andrea's coat, from her shoulders down to the hem at her knees... and what must he be thinking? Howard wondered.

So who knew what was going through that large brain? Though there could be little of mammoth scent or of mammoth texture on the hairs Fuzzy was so fondly stroking, who knew what Fuzzy's incredibly superior nose and extremely sensitive trunk tip smelled and felt? Howard looked into the old, wise eye—and all mammoth eyes were old and wise, just like elephants, even when they were infants—and he looked at the slight figure of Andrea standing there, looked at the two beings most beloved to him in the universe, and he felt himself smile.

THE feeling persisted out of the mammoth house and into a slow Oregon drizzle, Warburton carefully holding a big umbrella over Andrea and a bodyguard holding open the door of the pearl-gray 1936 Cord Cabriolet convertible. Howard was about to get behind the wheel when Warburton leaned over and said something into his ear, and Howard's mellow mood vanished at once. He got in the car and slammed the door and just sat there for a moment, until his fiancee looked at him with a brow wrinkled in a way only Andrea de la Terre could wrinkle an eyebrow.

"Something wrong, darling?" she asked.

For a moment Howard could only sit there, the oversized steering wheel in his hands. It had been five years, five long frustrating years since that face had loomed in his sights, so close he had felt he could reach out and touch it, and in those five years he had never again felt that feeling of utter omnipotence, never held a man's life in his hands so intimately. And for the first two years he had felt, at best, ambivalence about his decision not to shoot because, after all, there might be answers to secrets locked up in that head, the secrets of how the universe was really put together, if answers there were.

Over the next years, as Matt Wright wandered the globe like some demented Diogenes looking for an honest philosophy, Howard had come to believe the man knew no more than he himself did, that the answers didn't exist. For the last year, Howard had devoted himself to pure and simple hatred.

At last, he sighed and started the car.

"Andrea, Matt Wright has returned."