Mammoth

22

SUSAN had been contrite about the blow. It was inexcusable for one person to hit another except in self-defense, she said, and he told her he figured if anybody ever had good reason to strike another, she was it. She didn't have anything to say to that, but after a long pause during which he felt like a specimen under a microscope, and not a very appetizing one, she unlocked the front door and invited him in.

And then it was... awkward.

He had a million things he wanted to tell her and another million things he wanted to ask her, but he had been far from sure he'd even be invited in the door, and, once in, his tongue seemed tied in knots. So... what have you been up to? He knew most of that; Susan's life had been well documented from the time Fuzzy came into her life. She was famous, had been on the television many times in the early years. Hell, she was a character on a Saturday morning animated television show, she had been played by Andrea de la Terre in the movie version of Little Fuzzy.

There was only one question worth asking, and he couldn't just come right out and ask it, certainly not with the cold look in her eye as she sat stiffly on a big cane chair opposite him, one leg curled up under her and the other one, the bad one, carefully extended. No, you'd have to work up to that one, if you ever had the guts to ask it at all, and she sure wasn't giving anything away.

What little conversation there was soon died away, and she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands and neither did he, so finally she asked, in a tone of voice that sounded to him a little like one you might use if your least favorite uncle had plopped himself down in your living room and just wouldn't go away, if he wanted something to eat. And he wasn't proud, no sir, he'd use any excuse to stretch his time with her until what he was beginning to feel would be the final and inevitable outcome, himself trudging once more down that lonesome road outside.

So he showered, and hacked away at his unruly and scraggly beard until it was almost presentable, dressed in the only change of clothes he had, and descended the stairs again to find her in the kitchen just pouring spaghetti into a colander.

"You know I'm not a cook," she said, wiping the condensed steam from her forehead with the back of her hand in a gesture that made him almost weep with longing. "But there's nobody around here that delivers except a so-so pizza shop, and I did make this sauce—spaghetti sauce is one of the five things I know how to make. Anyway, it's from the freezer, and so is the bread, and there's no salad because I'm hardly ever here and I just can't keep the refrigerator stocked with fresh things." She shrugged, and set the bowl of noodles and the bowl of bubbling red sauce on the simple pine table. "Anyway, here it is. Do you want some wine?"

He did, and she selected a red from a walk-in cellar with rack space for hundreds of bottles, only a dozen of them occupied.

He was hungry, he hadn't had anything since an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, having spent the whole day pacing or sitting on her front deck, and the food was good, when he could bring his attention to it, but most of the time it tasted like nothing in his mouth, just something to choke down until they could move on to the next stage, which was finding out if she was at all interested in listening to his story or if she'd shake his hand on the way out the door.

It was the tensest meal he ever ate, consumed in absolute silence.

Then they retired to the vast living room with glasses of wine and she invited him to sit on a plush couch with some sort of Indian art pattern, facing the fire ring, which was an artful arrangement of native stones, no mortar, set on glistening white beach sand in the center of the room. A copper funnel hung from the ceiling high above to catch the smoke. She struck a long match and touched it to several places around the stack, then sat in the same chair she had been in before she had invited him to dinner. She reached over to the small table beside her chair and picked up a small stack of postcards, shuffled them idly through her fingers before tossing them onto the small coffee table that separated them, where they fanned out in accusation. He reached out and picked up the topmost card, saw the picture of the Big Sur coast, waves crashing on huge rocks. He turned it over and could barely read his own indecipherable scrawl:

I am well, but cannot contact you as yet.

Will explain later.

I love you.

Matt

His face flushed as he flipped rapidly through them. Had anything ever sounded so lame? But he didn't know how else to say it.

He looked up, and saw her drain her glass of wine. He realized it was her third glass, and the bottle sitting beside her was almost empty. She gave him a twisted smile, then tossed her empty glass at the stones, where it shattered.

She laced her fingers around her good knee and leaned back.

"So, Matt. What have you been doing with yourself?"

And the words began to spill out of him.

MATT fled the scene of slaughter that night with only one thought in his mind: He had to find a quiet place to gather his thoughts, order the events of the last hour, write it all down. His grasp on what he had seen in the depths of the time machine was so tenuous it made the waking residual images of a dream seem as solid as a slap in the face. He needed to retreat from the storm he could see coming. He was standing beside a brand-new pickup truck whose door was wide open, the owner fled who-knew-where. He saw the key was in the ignition.

Ten minutes later he was on the San Diego Freeway, heading north.

He didn't sleep, he didn't dare, he knew it would all go up in smoke and blow away if he slept; the only way he could keep it all in his head was to invent mathematical mnemonics to trick himself into remembering, so he sat there in the parking lot of a McDonald's, the first restaurant he had seen, and when it opened he bought six cups of coffee and drove carefully down the street to a Bank of America and waited for it to open. When it did, he went inside and, not without some difficulty, withdrew a hundred thousand dollars from his account, worrying every minute that Howard or some federal agency would be looking for him, putting a flag on his account or his credit cards. But he walked out with the cash in a canvas bag and, gulping coffee, found a large consumer electronics store and purchased three personal computers for six hundred dollars. Then he drove around town looking for a used car lot, abandoned the stolen pickup after wiping the steering wheel and door handles and everything else he might have touched. He knew he must have left DNA traces inside, but hoped that for a routine stolen car the police would only dust for fingerprints. He walked to the car lot and paid four thousand in cash for an anonymous gray sedan that looked reliable enough, then drove it to Ventura, where he checked into a Motel 6 at noon under the name of Kevin Moore, paying an extra hundred-dollar bill for the privilege of not showing his driver's license.

At first it was dense with mathematical symbols, as he tried to document and somehow rationalize the things he had seen in that little metal box on that fateful night twelve thousand years ago... or was it really fifteen thousand years ago? Was that too linear a way of thinking? It made it sound as if the Pleistocene was in some... direction, a place you could point to, or a vector whose length and orientation was the sole possible result of a specific equation.

He knew he had seen something that a human eye is not really equipped to see... and yet how could that be? It was a contradiction in terms, but so was everything else from the moment they went into the past. It could not happen, yet it had happened. Which meant that he, Matt Wright, mathematical genius, was missing something.

On the second day he began to get some inkling of a new direction. At first it was no more than an itch at the back of his mind, something he had experienced before when a new idea was struggling to be born. He knew he couldn't force it to come, so he did what he always did at times like that. He went to bed. Maybe his subconscious mind would give him a boost.

But he woke up no wiser, and knew it was time to move on. He was rested, felt up to driving now. So he checked out and drove on up the coast, up US 101, then California Route 1 until he got to Big Sur, where he pulled over and found a place where he could sit and watch the ocean pounding the shore.

After a while he noticed a collection of buildings not too far away from him. There were tents, yurts, a pool, gardens, a large green lawn, odd-shaped buildings with an impromptu, weathered look, all set in the rugged, up and down, rocky and deeply forested surf-battered terrain for which Big Sur was famous. It looked peaceful, secluded, open to the air and the sea. Some sort of resort, maybe. Possibly just the sort of thing he needed to get his thoughts together.

He got back in his car and soon was driving by a sign that said ESALEN INSTITUTE.

IT took a moment to penetrate, then Susan sat forward.

"Esalen?"

"That's right."

"That place where rich people go to get massages and soak in hot tubs?" "Well, they're not all rich, though it's not cheap. And there are hot tubs and massages, but there are classes, too, and discussions of... well, all sorts of things."

"Let me get this straight. While I was... while I... you were soaking in a hot tub in Big Sur?"

Susan felt she was right on the edge. She had loved him, she had worried about him, she had gotten angry at him as years rolled by with nothing but his maddening monthly postcards. She had briefly thought she hated him, and then she had tried her best to forget him. God knows she had enough to deal with, between Howard, Fuzzy, her unwanted fame, and Big Mama, goddamn Big Mama, who had damn near killed her. Now here he was, and the reason he hadn't come back to her was...

Esalen?

In that moment she felt she could hate him again.

"I couldn't just walk right in the door," he was saying. "You have to have reservations. But I got lucky, there was a cancellation. I got in after waiting three days at a motel in Monterey. I enrolled in

'Gestalt and Evolutionary Psychology' and 'An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy.' "

"What, no massage?"

"Well, yes, in the evenings." He glanced up at her, and hurried on.

"I almost quit after the first day. I had no idea what I was doing there, but I had this persistent feeling that I was on the trail of something important. But the courses were stupid. There was no logic to them. Things were posited with no empirical proof, then accepted as true with no further discussion. Or, none from anyone but me, that is. I began to realize that no one there but myself had any training in math or science... or what I think of as science, anyway. It was another culture entirely, couldn't have been more foreign to me if I'd been dropped off in the fourteenth century."

"Which I guess is no longer just a figure of speech."

"What? Oh, sure, I guess we proved it's possible."

"I didn't prove anything, Matt. I was just along for the ride."

"So was I. More than you'll ever know." He sighed heavily, and drank the last of the wine from

his glass. "Anyway, I stuck it out, and by the third day I felt I was beginning to get a handle on something."

"What, that Buddhism is the true faith? Did we travel with a Zen time machine?"

She had thought he would laugh, but he merely looked thoughtful, then slowly shook his head.

"I began to see that there was a tool there... or maybe a set of tools, that could... what I was looking for, you see, was a new perspective. My scientific one, all my mathematical tools, had failed me.

He stared into the fire for a while.

"Go on," she said. "I'm hanging on the edge here. Did you discover the secrets of the universe?"

"Not right then," he admitted. "On the fourth night they came for me."

HE was never entirely sure just who they were.

Oh, he had a general idea. They were Americans. They represented the government... which theoretically represented the people, but the people would never be consulted on anything this group did, nor informed of the results of their actions.

He gathered that the people he came into contact with had been assembled from the myriad of law-enforcement and hush-hush and they-don't-exist agencies for the sole purpose of investigating this time travel phenomenon... which meant investigating Matt Wright, as he was the only one who seemed to know anything about it.

It began in the middle of the night. He had a vague memory of waking up in a panic, unable to breathe. He'd had dreams like that before, but this time it turned out to be true. He had a brief glimpse of a face blackened with soot, big white staring eyes and grinning teeth above him in the darkness, a sharp smell, the taste of a rag in his mouth.

Later, he figured it was good old chloroform. The old ways are the best.

When he woke up he might have been a few miles down the road or he might have been in Patagonia. He didn't know how long he had been out. He was in a sparsely furnished room—cot, steel sink with tin cup and a bar of soap, steel toilet, table with three chairs bolted to the floor, no windows to the outside, a steel door with a six-by-six mesh-reinforced window at eye level, a long mirror set into another wall.

A cell, no getting around it. Larger than most cells, he supposed, never having seen one except in the movies, maybe thirty feet square, room for some serious pacing. Only someone who had never seen a television cop show would fail to realize that the big mirror was partially silvered—the infamous one-way mirror. The ceiling was at least twelve feet high. A small camera was mounted in each of the four corners. It wasn't particularly clean. The linoleum floor was cracked and peeling in a few places, scuffed here and there, in need of mopping. Dust kitties had accumulated in the floor corners, and there were cobwebs in the ceiling corners. There were smudges on the walls that looked like they had been made by hands, as high as hands could reach. Overhead an ordinary fluorescent light fixture flickered and clicked maddeningly. Exploring the entire place, seeing absolutely everything there was to be seen, took a total of ten minutes.

He took encouragement from what was not there. No car batteries or generators with genital clamps attached. No manacles, ropes, whips, thumbscrews, vats of boiling oil, rubber hoses, or billy clubs. Any of those things could be brought in, of course.

Only one feature of the room worried him, and that was a dark brown stain on the floor near the table. He tried to convince himself it was spilled food or drink. As the hours went by he kept looking at it, wondering if it was the source of the smell that tickled at his nostrils, over the sourness of the sheets and blanket and the gathering odor of his own fear. Was it blood?

He later estimated they held him there for twenty-four hours before anyone came to question him. He couldn't be sure. The lights never went off. It could have been as little as twelve hours, or as many as forty-eight, he supposed.

They fed him three times. It was the same each time: the door opened and a man in white coveralls and wearing a white bandanna over the lower part of his face entered with a steel tray and set it on the table.

The first time Matt sat up from his reclining position on the cot.

"I want to speak to a lawyer," he said.

The man didn't even glance at him. He slammed the door behind him, and Matt heard a key turning in a lock.

The food was a hamburger steak with gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, bread and butter, a slice of melon, and a cup of coffee. He ate it with the only utensil provided, a plastic spoon. The next two meals were pretty much the same.

THE second time he woke up it was to find two men in suits sitting at the table.

They were fairly unremarkable, with more of the bureaucrat than the cop or the torturer in their appearance and demeanor, perfect FBI types. One was blond, midthirties, tall and clean-cut, the only thing out of place about him being the argyle socks Matt could see above his black wingtips. The other was sixtyish, short and rather portly, with a rim of feathery white hair around a shiny pink dome of baldness, thick glasses, and a look of perpetual puzzlement on his smooth baby face. Matt felt somehow that he should know him. Later, when the questioning began, it was clear he was conversant with the higher mathematics needed to ask intelligent questions about time travel, so it was entirely possible Matt did know him; it was a small world. But he could never place the face with a name, and he finally put it down to a slight resemblance to Albert Einstein.

Argyle went first.

He started by emptying a box he had brought with him. It contained the things that had been in Matt's possession when he was abducted. He spread out the change, took every card and scrap of paper and dollar bill from the wallet, then opened the Swiss Army knife and meticulously opened all the seams of the wallet, searching for things that might be concealed there—a small display of arrogance and power that was not lost on Matt. He dumped the banded stacks of money from the canvas bag, riffled idly through them, and tossed them aside. He set out the three computers and turned them on.

The last item to emerge from the box was an ordinary glass marble, red in color, in a tiny square cage. He held it up to the flickering overhead light and squinted at it, turning it this way and that. At last he put it down and pushed it toward Matt with his index finger, and for the first time looked Matt in the eye.

"What is this?" he said.

"It's a marble in a steel cage," Matt said.

Neither Albert nor Argyle said anything for almost a minute, both of them looking down at the object on the table. Then Argyle looked up again.

"What is this?" he said.

Matt sighed. It was looking like it would be a long day. He had done nothing wrong, but he knew somehow that that would not matter to these people. He didn't really have a lot to hide, either.

Just one small thing. But, of course, that was what they were after.

"It is a component of a device I was hired to re-create for Howard Christian. He believed it would make it possible to travel backward in time. So to speak."

Albert jumped in.

"Explain that last sentence."

"It's hard to. I mean, the phrase 'travel backward in time' is an attempt to put into language a concept that the language is not equipped to describe. 'Travel' is almost certainly not the correct verb, 'backward' may or may not be a useful modifier to the concept of traveling, and 'time' is a concept that I've come to realize is far from adequately defined." "But you did go somewhere."

Albert was nodding. Argyle was gazing fixedly at Matt, mouth slightly open, apparently about as

sentient as a cow. Argyle took over again.

"Where is the time machine?"

"I don't know." Truth.

There was another pause.

"Where is the time machine?"

"It went somewhere I can't follow." Truth.

"Or somewhen?" Albert asked.

"Possibly."

Another long silence. Matt had never been interrogated before. But no literate human in America could be totally unaware of a few interrogation techniques. He supposed he was meant to feel a kinship to Albert, who at least seemed to know a little math and was conversant with some of the quantum dichotomies present in the idea of time traveling, and it was plain as could be that Argyle intended to be menacing with his silent contempt and simple, repeated questions.

Matt found he was indeed frightened of Argyle, very frightened. The man stank of suppressed violence and Matt felt sure that, if orders came from his superiors, Argyle would do absolutely anything to obtain the location of the missing time machine.

If he was supposed to like Albert, though, the man wasn't doing his job.

Albert spoke again.

"Matthew, are you aware that it is no longer necessary to hook a man up to a lot of wires and

clamps and springs to run a polygraph test on him?" "No, I wasn't, but I'm not surprised. Everything's high-tech these days, isn't it? I don't guess you

need rubber hoses or thumbscrews or anything so primitive to torture a man today, either, do you?"

Albert looked elaborately around the room, as if searching for instruments of torture.

"Have you been threatened in any way?" Matt laughed.

"You don't need a lawyer. You haven't been accused of anything. It's all perfectly legal. Haven't

you heard of the Patriot Act? We just want you to answer some questions."

"I have. You have more questions?"

"Yes, but there's no point going on with them right now. Your responses have not been entirely

forthcoming."

"You mean you think I'm lying?"

"No. You're telling the truth, but not all of it. You're hiding something." He gave Matt a small

smile. "I'm afraid I need to regroup a little, too. It's just possible I'm not getting the right answers because I don't know how to ask the right questions."

"Join the club," Matt said.

The inquisitors put everything back into the cardboard box and left.

MATT was not surprised when they drugged him. It was the logical next step.

There was nothing to prevent them from simply tying him down and jabbing a needle into him, but they elected to put it into his food, or his water. And what could he do? He had to eat and drink,

so he ate and drank, and then felt the strange feeling of euphoria overcome him.

He laughed.

They let him laugh for an hour, Albert and Argyle, and then came back in again. All they brought

this time was his computers.

"Good morning, Matt," Albert said. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling great," Matt said... and then realized he hadn't said anything at all. He had opened

his mouth, he had taken a breath, he had sent the signals to his lips and tongue that should have produced words, but something had short-circuited and no words had come out.

He laughed again. It was very funny.

"You know you have to answer these questions, don't you?" Albert said.

"Yes, I know," Matt didn't say, and laughed again. What was so funny was, he wanted to answer the questions. Oh, there was a part of him, a part that seemed to have been deeply suppressed by the drugs—and what was this stuff? It was very good!—that wanted to keep his secret, that still felt it was important, but most of him was eager to spill everything. He knew it would make him feel very good to tell these fellows everything he knew. But, on the other hand, not telling them, not being able to tell them, didn't make him feel bad... so he laughed.

"Where is the time machine?" Argyle asked.

Matt tried to tell them. Without success.

Albert drummed his fingers on the table, then abruptly got up and left the room.

Matt and Argyle sat there for ten minutes, staring at each other. Argyle had absolutely no expression on his face, and no nervous mannerisms. Somehow, Matt found this scarier than if he had shown overt hatred, hostility, menace, even frustration. He felt Argyle could rip out his guts with absolute indifference.

But he was not capable of worrying about such things at the moment. Thoughts, observations, conclusions entered his mind and were filed away impartially, with no emotional component. If Argyle had told him he intended to cut off Matt's arms and legs he would have filed that way, too, with no fear. Maybe Argyle knew that, and was saving his venom for a time Matt could appreciate it.

Albert came back with a huge stack of paper under one arm. He slapped it down on the table in such a way that Matt could see what was printed on the front of the file: DR. MATTHEW WRIGHT. More psychology, Matt figured. All that paper could obviously have been put onto a computer and Albert could have consulted that. Albert wanted Matt to see the amount of documentation available to him.

Albert flipped through the file and reached the page he wanted.

"Aphasia," he said. "You've suffered from it before."

Matt nodded.

"He's faking," Argyle said.

Matt shook his head.

"I don't think he is," Albert sighed. "I think he really wants to tell us where it is. Don't you,

Matt?"

Matt nodded.

"Then we'll just have to play twenty questions, won't we?" Albert said.

BIG as the dossier with his name on it was, there was still more. They brought in stacks and boxes of paper, spread things around on the table. They made no attempt to hide any of it from him.

Results: zero.

The Esalen Institute had been—was still being—searched. When the government was done they'd have to rebuild the place practically from the ground up. Matt regretted bringing all that trouble on them.

Every police force and fire department and National Guard unit and Boy Scout troop and, probably, the Brownies and Bluebirds, were beating the bushes along his entire route from Los Angeles to Big Sur, looking for a steel attache case. They had been joined by thousands of civilians spurred by a million-dollar reward.

Results: a big pile of garbage. Thus the game of twenty questions.

It can be an effective tool in the hands of a skilled questioner, and Albert was no slouch. But you have to know the right questions to ask, or you never even get on the right track.

First they brought out a map. Did you leave the time machine here? No? Did you leave it here? Here? No, no, and no. All the way down the map, town by town.

Albert thought about it.

Well, did you last see it here? No, no, no, no... yes.

The yes was Los Angeles. Albert brought out another map. Pointed to the tar pits.

Yes.

"OH, man," Susan said. "That was..."

"About a week after our little adventure. I'm not sure precisely, since I didn't have a clock and the drugs screwed up my time sense a bit."

"That was when they sealed off that whole area. A square mile, evacuated and decontaminated

because of that dirty bomb."

"I read about it later," Matt said. "It was a while before I added it up."

"You think... the government set off the bomb?" "If there was a bomb."

"What I meant was, if there was a dirty bomb. A radiological bomb, one that would take a while to decontaminate after it went off. The way I'd do it, I'd put some dynamite in a truck, call in a warning so the immediate area can be evacuated. Then I'd blow it up and release a small amount of some relatively harmless radioactive gas, enough to set off the Geiger counters. The story was the terrorists chose that area because of all the publicity with the mammoths. Then seal off and evacuate a square mile and ban all overflights because of the radiation danger, to give yourself a little privacy, and get to work looking. When I heard about it I figured it was too much for coincidence. What was it, three weeks before they let anyone back in? That's long enough to do quite a search."

"Almost four weeks," came a voice. Susan gasped, turned, and saw Howard Christian standing on her deck, looking through her huge front windows.