Mammoth

23

SUSAN had been raised to offer food and drink to any guest, even if she'd really like to leave him out on the front porch looking in like a pathetic waif. But he was with Andrea de la Terre, and Susan liked Andrea. She had liked her before the woman—amazingly!—fell in love with Howard, first as a fan, later as an acquaintance. She knew a lot of famous people now and had learned that, for the most part, they were no better and sometimes a lot worse than your ordinary citizen.

Andrea was different. She was one of those rare ones that could somehow transcend her celebrity, get close to just about anyone quickly, so that in no time at all you felt you'd known her all your life, and might even think of her as a friend. So she'd shown Andrea where to hang that ridiculous mammoth-fur coat in the front closet, and hurried into the kitchen to see if she had anything suitable to serve to a multibillionaire and the most famous movie star on the planet.

Howard was easy. She knew that a handful of stale beer nuts would satisfy him. What she had was a bag of chips that was only three days past the sell-by date and an unopened bowl of pretty good guacamole dip that didn't smell bad.

So what wine goes with chips and salsa, red or white? She dithered a while over the bottles, hearing the vague buzz of conversation from the living room behind her, wondering what the hell they could be talking about, given the fact that Howard hated Matt. But it wasn't her problem, she decided. Screw Howard. She grabbed a bottle of red and went back to the living room.

Everyone had sat down again, Howard and Andrea side by side and facing Matt across a low glass table, the fire crackling off to one side. Susan set the tray down and opened the bottle in dead silence. Nobody reached for any chips. Oh, well, the important thing was to offer it. She poured wine into four glasses.

"What should we drink to?" Andrea asked. "How about the return of old friends?" Howard suggested, glaring at Matt.

"Disclosure of what?" Andrea said, brightly. She looked from Susan to Matt to Howard, obviously realizing she was way behind everybody else here, but not seeming too concerned about it.

"I'd go for that," Howard said, looking back to Matt.

"You first," Matt said. "Was that your dirty bomb?"

Howard drained his wine and set the glass down on the table, hard.

"You have entirely too high an opinion of me," he said. "Or too low, depending on how you look at it."

"Can somebody catch me up here, please?" Andrea said.

Matt kept staring at Howard, but finally sighed and looked away.

"Might as well, I guess. Let's see, where was I? Oh, yes. After the people who may have been government agents or may have been employed by a certain Mr. Warburton couldn't get anything out of me with drugs..."

CAUSE-and-effect was at the heart of the paradoxes of time travel, and Matt had had occasion to ponder the concept often in his ruminations while trying to construct a time machine for Howard Christian.

A Jew from Germany observes an atom of a heavy metal split into two parts, releasing energy.

Effect: The best minds of a nation are assembled in strict secrecy. A certain rare ore is mined at a fever pitch and trucked to Tennessee, where the infinitesimal fraction of it that is of any use is painstakingly extracted. A city rises out of the sand of the New Mexico desert. A device is constructed and flown first to a remote island in the Pacific, then to a much larger island where, one fine August morning, it is detonated in the air over a city, incinerating eighty thousand Japanese, mostly civilians.

A man sitting at a table in a room points to a particular spot on a map and says, "I last saw it here." In an adjoining room needles on a machine jump and twitch in a way that suggest the man is probably telling the truth.

Effect...

Three days later the operation had been planned out and preparations made. A truck was driven into position, a bomb threat was called in. When the local television news eyes in the sky were in place with good camera angles, the bomb in the truck was detonated, right in front of the old May Company building in the neighborhood known as Museum Row. Damage to the building was minimal. A cloud of smoke formed and drifted slowly eastward, toward the area where there had been that big hullabaloo two weeks earlier. Soon the police and special Homeland Security troops in their radiation gear were swarming all over the site, picking up every piece of wreckage.

But still no cause for alarm. And, oh, yeah, we're evacuating six blocks in every direction now.

No more "official" reports were really necessary after that. The only problem was to keep Angelenos from voluntarily evacuating the whole metropolitan area. Once again, someone had seriously underestimated the fear the public had of radiation, and of government reassurances.

For twenty-four hours the traffic on the freeways was a complete nightmare. Seven people died from natural causes, just sitting there, ambulances unable to get to them. Airplanes arrived at LAX virtually empty and left full. The next day traffic was better than it had been since 1947, at the opening of the Pasadena Freeway. Every hotel room from San Francisco to Reno to Las Vegas to Phoenix to San Diego was taken, some of them double-booked. For a mile in every direction from the point where Matt's finger had touched the map, there was hardly a human soul in residence. There was a cordon around the whole area.

Now there was room to work. The trouble was... work on what?

The results of Matt's interrogation had been very frustrating to those in power. The spectrum of drugs known collectively as "truth serum" were very sophisticated these days. Something could be mixed up that would force anyone to spill everything they knew in only a few hours. Thus the interrogators were used to getting the information they needed, pronto, and being able to deny later that any coercive methods had been used. Matt's hysterical aphasia was a new one to the interrogators, and one that drove them to distraction.

There were older, more distasteful ways of getting information, and back in Washington there were those who began to advocate them. What the heck? This guy holds the secret to something that makes the hydrogen bomb seem like a flint arrowhead, we must have it, and if a little blood gets spilled, it will be in a good cause. Always bearing in mind, of course, the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg. Because it is well known, it is axiomatic among students of this kind of thing, that everybody talks under torture. The only question is how soon, and the answer is that with most people you only have to lay the instruments of torture out there on the table. The tougher cases will sell out mothers, mates, and children after less than an hour of pain. Just give the word, Mr. President, and we will know everything this man knows by this afternoon.

The president was not one to enter into such an enterprise lightly, however, and the decision was not entirely up to him, anyway, and so the searchers were sent back to the transcripts to pore over them for a clue as to the location of the device.

The transcripts were maddening.

Q: When did you last see the device? A:A: (Analysis: He's telling the truth. Probability 90%.)

Q: Where did you last see the device? A: The question has very little meaning. I showed you on the map where I was the last time I saw it. (Analysis: True, 90%)

Q: Where did you put it? A: As I said, the question has no meaning. (Analysis: True, 55%)

He was waffling, he was concealing something, but not once in his interrogation did he make a statement that could be demonstrated to be false.

And so the search went on.

It was known that he had not had a great deal of time to conceal the device, so most of the analysts figured the device had to be somewhere on the grounds of the park that contained the tar pits and the museum. And so the park was taken apart.

Magnetometers found many, many things buried on the grounds, from water and electric lines to loose change. The walls of the museum were torn out, the plumbing was torn out, the floors torn up, even the mammoth skeletons on display were disassembled and x-rayed, under the theory that the device had been made of many small parts, and they might no longer be hidden as a single unit. Nothing was found.

But all that was easy. The nasty part was draining the tar pits themselves.

The pits went down a long way, but were not bottomless. The problem was that, anything with any weight that was tossed into the pits sank into the goo, just like a trapped mammoth. People had been tossing old wagons and cars and horseshoes and coins and cans and nails and just endless junk into the pits for over a hundred years, so a magnetic scan was useless. The only way to search the tar was to bring it out, bucket by bucket, and go through it by hand. They dug down one hundred feet, and found no time machine. Then they had to put it all back.

At the same time the National Guard was searching house to house in a one-mile radius. It was impossible to keep a search like that a secret, of course, with so many soldiers involved. The object of the search quickly leaked out, television stations were soon showing the pictures that had been handed to the searchers, so the public's help was enlisted, with the cover story that the metal briefcase being so urgently sought was thought to contain three pounds of weapons-grade plutonium smuggled by the same terrorists who had set off the dirty bomb.

"If you find this briefcase do not touch it! Do not attempt to open it! Call 911 immediately and get out of the area!"

MATT knew none of this at the time. He only knew that Albert and Argyle stopped showing up for the twice-daily interrogations. They put in an appearance now and then, at no predictable intervals, and asked some new questions, few of which made much sense to Matt, but never stayed longer than an hour.

Time crawled by, with no way to measure it. It might have been two weeks or it might have been six weeks. Meals arrived, sometimes when he was hungry, sometimes when he was not. After an hour they were taken away, whether he had eaten them or not. He had all the water he needed, and much more light than he desired, as the overhead fixture was never turned off. There was nothing to read, no television to watch, absolutely nothing to do but lie on the bunk or exercise. He jogged around the room, did push-ups and sit-ups, and soon was in the best shape of his life.

He slept a lot at first, and then hardly at all, to the point where he was surprised to wake up lying in the bunk.

Before long he came to actually look forward to the visits from A&A, something he would have sworn would never happen. He realized it meant they were wearing him down, and knew there was not much he could do about it. In spite of himself, he found himself asking them questions. Stupid, desperate questions.

How is the weather today?

Where are you from?

Is Susan okay?

Do you have more than one pair of argyle socks, or do you wash those every night?

Matt had always been a loner, but he found to his surprise that he did not seem to actually be hermit material. He found himself hungering for the barest hint of contact, and even though he was aware that Albert was probably doling out these hints with complete calculation, with the goal in mind of making Matt emotionally dependent on him, he soaked up the tiny bits of data like a sponge.

It's warm and sunny. Perhaps you can get out and enjoy it soon. It's entirely up to you, Matt.

I'm from Oregon. Yes, I know you are, too.

Susan is fine. Would you like to write her another postcard, tell her you're okay? Argyle never answered about the socks. Argyle never answered anything. And of course that was calculated, too.

But about halfway through his ordeal (as he estimated later), he began to adjust. He spent more and more time simply sitting. Sometimes he cleared his mind, went into a state of meditation, inventing for himself the basics of yoga. Other times his mind was very busy indeed, thinking over what had become the central problem of his life: time travel, and how to accomplish it.

It was during these times of meditation that he decided on his future course.

If he ever got out alive.

THEN one day Argyle showed up without Albert. Another well-known fact about prisoners in solitary confinement is that any change in routine, while it may be welcome in some ways, is also upsetting. When you are utterly in the power of someone else, and you don't even know who that someone else is, there is a superstitious feeling that any change is probably going to be for the worse. Matt swallowed hard, and got up from his seat on the bed.

"Am I ever going to learn your name?" he asked, trying to put on a brave face. Argyle ignored the question, as he had ignored every question Matt had ever asked. He walked up to within a pace of Matt and put his hands on his hips.

"I want you to know something," Argyle said. "I know you've been lying, right from day one. I know how to get the truth out of you, I could have you talking in fifteen minutes, tops. I could have you telling me things you didn't even know you knew. I just wanted you to know that." And he hit Matt in the nose with a right hook before Matt was even aware the man was moving. On his way down Matt caught a left jab to the stomach that explosively brought up the powdered eggs and greasy bacon and coffee he had eaten a few hours earlier. After a moment of blackness Matt found himself on his knees staring at a mixture of vomit and blood on the floor between his hands. The vomiting had stopped, but the blood was still spurting.

So this is how it begins, Matt thought. From the first he had been expecting this. In fact, he'd expected it a lot sooner. He had dueled with them for a long time, doing his best to conceal the one nugget of information that might, might, be of some use to them, and did it while always telling the truth. Always, and it hadn't been easy. He hadn't fooled them—the punch in the nose was proof of that—but he hadn't given them anything useful, either. He wasn't going to give it all up now, not after two punches, not simply because he was petrified at the very concept of torture. He had to hold out longer than that, didn't he?

So what would a movie hero do? What would Indiana Jones do? Come out with a snappy line, that's what he'd do.

Matt stared at the brown wingtips inches from his face, and at the argyle socks he had come to hate so much. "I get it," he said. "You don't wash them at all." Well, it wasn't Hasta la vista, baby, but he wasn't an indestructible machine, either.

The door was still open when Howard came in and stopped dead in his tracks. His face flushed bright red and he turned on his heel and leaned out the door.

"I want that man charged with assault and battery!" he screamed, so angry his voice came out at the high-pitched squeak that had been the bane of his school years. "I'm a witness! I want him fired, and I want him in prison!"

Howard came back into the room, shaking with fury, and strode over to the sink, where he grabbed a towel and hurried back to kneel beside Matt. He started to mop at the blood on Matt's face, but Matt pulled away and Howard just handed the towel to him. Matt used it to scrub at the back of his head.

"He spit on me," Matt explained.

There seemed to be two Howards kneeling before him. He realized his eyes were starting to swell up. He squinted one eye closed, which probably gave him the dubious expression he was going for.

"Took you long enough to get here."

"Matt, I..."

"Never mind. So what is this? Stage three of the interrogation? Start out soft, go hard, then try sweet reason? Or is there more brutality to come?"

"There was never supposed to be any brutality in the first place. That man was taking out his own frustrations, and I promise you he's going to pay for it. Here, let's go sit down and we'll talk about it." He grabbed Matt under the arm and Matt submitted, letting himself be helped to his feet, where he staggered to the table and fell heavily into a chair. The flow of blood had dried to a trickle but his nose hurt like hell. He busied himself wiping his face, giving himself time to think about this new development.

Was this staged for his benefit? Rough him up, then bring in a familiar, if not exactly beloved face, and go at him again while he's presumably at his most vulnerable?

You could sure make a case for it, but Matt couldn't buy Howard Christian as that good an actor. He looked across the table and saw a man who might be a real bear at a conference table doing a business deal, but who simply didn't have it in him to simulate the shaking hands, the sick expression.

He decided to trust him, tentatively. Matt knew himself to be a poor judge of character, not having spent a lot of time studying the human species, but he felt he'd learned a lot during his weeks in here when there was nothing at all to do but study his interrogators. He'd certainly read Argyle correctly.

"Who is it?"

Howard grimaced.

"All right, I understand you haven't told any lies, so I won't either. Part of the deal that got me in here is that I can't tell you that. Think of them as the NNSA."

"Americans, right? What's it stand for?"

"The No Name Spook Agency. That's all you need to know about them, because there's absolutely nothing you can do about your detainment here, or the treatment you've received. Have you been physically abused before today?"

"No. Well, they never turn off the lights, and they drugged me."

"I'm not surprised. Again, nothing to be done about it. It took me another two weeks to find out

where you were."

Matt raised an eyebrow, and regretted it. It hurt.

"New Jersey," Howard said.

"They kidnapped me in California."

"It's taken me until now to get in to see you. Matt, believe me when I tell you that I've been

working on nothing but the mammoths, and your situation, and my situation, from the moment this happened."

"Your situation?"

"You think I'm immune? It's possible that the only reason I'm not in your situation is that I didn't run afterward."

"Right," Matt said. "That, and forty billion dollars."

"Probably thirty-nine now, after my expenses since the mammoths showed up." Matt realized it was an attempt at humor, but he didn't find it amusing, and after a moment neither did Howard. He hung his head briefly.

"You're right, of course. My questioning was done with my lawyer at my side. But don't think it was pleasant. My wealth shielded me from all this"—he waved his hand at the room, glanced once more at the pool of vomit and blood—"but make no mistake about it, the government wants the time machine, and they intend to have it. I've convinced them that I don't have it. Hell, I don't have my warehouse, my frozen mammoth, my caveman, or any of the things you were working on. But Matt, I told the government everything. I told the truth, and they tell me they can't prove you ever told them a lie. But we both know you're hiding something. And I'm not sure I can get you out of here unless you tell them."

"Howard... I'm still not sure there is a 'them.' It might be you, keeping me here."

Howard looked Matt straight in the eyes.

"Maybe I deserve that. I can see how you might think it, anyway. There's no way I can disprove it, because the people who do have you are never going to reveal themselves to you, they're not going to come in here and say, 'Howard Christian has had nothing to do with this; in fact, he's been using every ounce of influence he has to stop this travesty.' All I can do is tell you it's not me, it's not my people."

Matt sighed. "Let me go through it all once more. I don't have the time machine. I don't know where it is. I have told you the last place I saw it, but I don't know where it went after that. I might be able to find it if I was out of here, but I'm not even sure of that.

"There is only one hope here. If I am allowed to leave this place, if they cut me loose and don't bother me, I might be able to figure out how it works. Or how it worked, anyway. I am on the track of something... but Howard, it is so crazy, it is so ephemeral, that it goes away every time I look at it. I haven't even tried to explain this to the questioners, whatever their names are, because I can't explain it to myself. I need time to think. I need time to explore new avenues. The answer will not be where we expect to find it, I know that much. This requires a new way of thinking, and I don't know if my brain, if any human brain, is equipped to think about it. It needs new tools. Mathematics isn't enough. Science isn't enough. And... that's about all I can tell you." Matt spread his hands, and looked toward the one-way mirror.

"So ask them, when you leave here, ask them if I told one single lie just now. Will you do that, Howard? Examine what I said, see for yourself that it's all the truth, and ask yourself... what could I possibly be hiding?"

Howard studied Matt's face for a while, then glanced over his shoulder at the one-way mirror, and smiled wryly at the unseen observers.

"How about this," he said. "I can set up the lab again. No problem. You know we have tapes of everything you did, we have all the data you stored on our outside servers. You can get right to work on building another time machine."

Matt clucked his tongue and shook his head sadly, until a stab of pain reminded him that wasn't such a great idea.

"Howard, Howard, you've been accusing me of not telling all the truth, and now look at you. That lab is already set up, has been since a few days after the incident, and whoever was your number two choice to build your time machine is hard at work duplicating it with all that data you're talking about. Since I voluntarily gave these government people all the data in my files, they're doing it, too."

"Of course he is. But now you can take over."

"How's he doing?"

"Getting nowhere. Oh, he's built twenty more machines, and we can't turn on a single one of them."

"Have you tried whacking them?"

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. My machines didn't work, either, until that nut started hitting one of them with a hammer."

"You can't be serious."

"I'm dead serious. The answer, if there is one, may be just that crazy. It might be that this was all a one-time event, impossible to duplicate. Hitting that box may have shifted something temporally, randomly, in a way that couldn't be duplicated in a billion years."

"Do you think so?"

"I don't know! It's one of the things I've been thinking about, when I'm able to think of anything at all. Clearly something odd happened, and it wasn't my doing. I think you're all barking up the wrong tree here, thinking that if you just pressure me enough I'll be able to give you the secret. I don't know the secret! I don't know how many more ways to say that. But, one more time... I may be able

to find it. If you leave me alone."

"Would you go to my lab to work on it if they let you out?"

"Of course I'd go. I'd do almost anything to get out of here." He looked again at the mirrored window. "Pay attention in there! Test this statement for truth! I'd go, I'd spend day after day tinkering with your useless boxes. But it would be a total waste of my time and your time. What I need to find out won't be found by playing with a fistful of high-tech marbles with a lot of government monkeys looking over my shoulder. I have to look elsewhere."

Howard shrugged, and spread his hands.

"Where?"

"Esalen was a good start."

"You want to go back to Esalen?" "No. I want to be let loose. I want to explore new avenues. I want to find new tools. Because the answer, if there is one, will not be found in your lab."

"It'll be found up here. If that thug hasn't damaged it too much."

THE fifth face Matt saw in his cell was a woman who might have been a doctor. She wore no credentials and gave no name or title, but she carried the tools of the trade: stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, reflex hammer, one of those little flashlights with a lens for looking into eyes, ears, nose. She did a routine exam, carefully checking his pupils and telling him he didn't have a concussion. She checked his nose and examined the bruising on his abdomen.

Two things struck him while she worked. One was that it took a relatively short time without them for a prisoner to become almost astonished by the very idea of a female. He was acutely aware of the smell of her, the look of her, the feel of her skin when she took his pulse. He fell head over heels in love, though she was not really that attractive, and not even very nice.

The other was not so charitable. What kind of doctor would work in a place like this? Had she had occasion to treat injuries far more debilitating than his? Had there been bodies to dispose of?

She left. Three more meals were delivered. Then Howard returned, possibly twenty-four hours later, with a cardboard box under one arm.

"I've got good news," he said with a big grin.

"For me, or you?"

"Both of us, I hope. You're outta here." He dropped the box on the table and Matt joined him.

"They ruined some of your stuff," Howard said, taking out the wallet which Argyle had torn apart in front of him. "Your computers seem to be intact. I didn't access anything in them, but I turned them on."

"You have all the data anyway," Matt said, and Howard didn't deny it. "That's fine with me. If somebody else finds the answers in there, so be it. I'd welcome the chance to stop thinking about it." He pawed through the remains of his things. "Where's the marble?"

"Marble? Oh, right. They wanted to keep that. I told them it belonged to you." Howard smiled, and reached into his pocket. He came up with the marble encased in its little wire cage. He held it out to Matt, and Matt knew that if he hadn't mentioned it, Howard would have kept it forever. "Keeping it as a souvenir?"

"Sort of," Matt said, taking it and turning it against the light. It was a superb little agate, red in color, with a swirling imperfection in the center that refracted brilliantly. "It's all that's left of the glorious experiment." "That, and the time machine," Howard reminded him, hopefully.

"Catch?"

"What are the conditions? I can't believe I'm simply being cut loose. I expect this will be more

like parole."

Howard looked uncomfortable.

"You're probably right. They haven't told me anything about that, but I suspect they'll be keeping

an eye on you."

"So that's it, right? I just walk out of here? No releases to sign? No bills to pay for the room and board? No mighty oaths of secrecy to swear?"

"How can they ask for a release when you haven't even been here? As for secrecy, if you start talking about this you will be punished severely; it will make what that monster did to you today seem

mild."

"Killed?"

"I honestly don't know, and very much do not want to know. My opinion? I doubt it. But they

could make you sorry you're alive." "I already am."

MATT was thirsty, and he didn't want any more wine. He realized he'd done more talking in the last few hours than he'd done in the last few... months? Years, even? He stopped, and there was a long silence in the room.

"Most of this is new to me," said Andrea de la Terre.

"I kept meaning to tell you," Howard said, uneasily. "I never could seem to find the right time."

Andrea looked at him skeptically.

"Or how to go about it," she suggested.

"Honey, everything he just said is the truth."

She thought about that. "Okay. But what he said is that you told him you had nothing to do with

his kidnapping and imprisonment. I can believe that's the truth. What I need to hear now is you telling me that you didn't have anything to do with it."

Howard looked hurt. "You don't believe me?" "Howard, I don't know yet, because you have chosen not to tell me anything about it. I want you

to tell me now."

"I had nothing to do with it," Howard said.

Andrea looked at him for a very long moment, then nodded and patted his hand.

"I believe you." She turned to Matt. "Do you?"

"Yes. I still do." He was going to add that it didn't really matter, it was a long time ago, let bygones be bygones, but decided she didn't need to hear any doubt in his voice. He could give Howard that much help. Watching the expression of relief on Howard's face, Matt realized the man really was deeply in love with his movie star girlfriend, just like the tabloid headlines said. For a moment he thought Howard was going to kiss her, but he turned instead to Matt.

"So, Matt, you're back at last. I guess you know what my next question is."

"Should I speak real loud for the NNSA mikes?" Matt asked.

"Doesn't matter much. They're watching me, too. They'll find out what you say."

"All right, then, Albert, or Mister Argyle Socks, or whoever else has this place bugged, I'm sorry

to bring bad news... but I haven't learned anything." Howard looked at Matt blankly. The words didn't seem to have any meaning for him. He said

what people often do when a statement is unacceptable to them:

"What do you mean, you haven't learned anything?"

"I. Haven't. Learned. Anything. You want me to say it again?"

Howard couldn't seem to come up with a response.

"Howard... it was always an iffy thing. I told you I had a... a notion. A hint. A glimmering of something, if you will. I thought it might lead somewhere. It didn't. I'm at a dead end. It was either a fluke, an act of God, a cosmic joke, or something that is just beyond the capacity of my poor, abused brain. I'm through. I give up. I quit."

Matt looked theatrically around the room, and held his arms out, wrists together.

"You hear that, Mr. President? Come on, arrest me again, run me through the wringer. Fuck you all!"

Matt found himself shaking with rage. He knew he had suppressed it for a long time. Maybe it was being near Susan again, the bitterness of the five years without her that had been lost, gone and impossible to get back, and the very strong possibility that he would never get her back at all, and who could blame her? He got himself back under control again quickly, sat back and glanced at Susan, who was smiling strangely at him, then at Howard.

"Well, that's just not good enough, goddamnit. I know you're lying."

Matt couldn't think of anything to say to that.

"Howard," Andrea said, gently, "if he hasn't found the answer, it will have to be good enough."

"No, goddamn it! You lost my warehouse, all my pregnant elephants, the original time machine and all the duplicates, my frozen mammoth, my caveman and my cavewoman, my—"

"Cavewoman?" Matt asked. "You never mentioned any cavewoman."

Howard seemed to realize he had said more than he intended. He really had been shaken up.

"It was none of your business. After we got the mammoth sperm there wasn't any pressure to deal with the rest of it. The woman had no metal objects on her. So I deferred to Rostov, my mammoth expert, who wanted to do the recovery properly. Very, very slowly. Then Rostov came down with pneumonia from working in the cold, and the work was shut down for a while. Then he died, and I was looking for a new mammoth expert when... well, when the whole project vanished."

"A woman," Matt said.

"Probably a woman."

"You should have told me about that."

"I didn't see it was relevant to your work."

"You should have told me."

Never defend yourself. Attack. "Screw that. I'm telling you I think you're lying, and I'm

going—"

"Howard, you owe him an explanation."

He took a moment to calm himself. Andrea was trying to teach him a more forgiving outlook on

things and he was trying to learn. He took a deep breath.

"I didn't tell anybody, because Indian tribes have been raising such an uproar over the remains of what they claim were their ancestors. They have been burying priceless anthropological specimens,

bodies we could learn a lot from, and... well, you get in the habit of secrecy."

"It might have had a bearing on my research."

"How?" "You just don't hamstring a researcher that way. You tell me everything, and you let me decide what's important."

"I don't work for you anymore, Howard," Matt pointed out. "And I don't particularly like being called a liar."

"How do I know you haven't been lying right from the start? We all knew you were hiding something but we could never figure out what it was. I've wondered for a long time if those government people were a bit too heavily invested in their lie detection technology. I've been wondering if you just happen to be so good a liar that the machines can't catch you. I've had it researched, it is possible to fool them."

"My understanding is that psychotics are best at it," Matt said.

Howard was about to reply to that when Susan stood up.

"That's the third time you've called Matt a liar. Get out of my bouse."

"Your house? This house belongs to me, and you know—"

"It may belong to you, but it's my legal residence, and as long as it is I determine who is welcome in it. Matt is my friend, and I won't have him insulted in my house. If he says he's telling you the truth, he's telling you the truth. Now, please leave."

Howard stood there, stunned. In his youth he had been all too familiar with being ordered around, but it had been quite a long time since anyone had done so, and even longer since someone had told him he couldn't have something once he had set his sights on it. He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Matt watched him, interested but not particularly afraid of what he would say next, while one phrase went around in his mind: Matt is my friend. Friend? Just what did she mean by that?

Andrea stood up and took Howard's hand.

"Howard, let's go," she said quietly. Matt thought she looked a little confused and conflicted. There had been a lot for her to absorb in the last hour, much more than for any of the rest of them. She needed time to think it all over. In the meantime she was shrewd enough to know nothing good could be accomplished here tonight by dragging out an unpleasant scene.

Howard seemed to realize that too, finally, and his posture gradually softened and he looked away from Matt and allowed himself to be led toward the door. But he couldn't resist a parting shot.

"You haven't heard the last of this," he said.

Matt stayed silent until they had gone. Then he stood and turned to Susan.

"Have I cost you your job here?" he asked. "Hah! Doesn't he wish?" She saw his uncomprehending look, and shook her head wearily. "I haven't filled you in on my wonderful life yet, have I? No, don't worry, I'm not angry, I was a lot more interested in hearing your story than telling mine. But I'm going to fall asleep right here on the carpet if I have to talk or listen any more tonight. We'll have to save the rest for tomorrow, okay?"

She looked away from him.

"There's a guest room at the end of the hall upstairs. Nobody's used it since I moved in—I don't have much of a life, outside of the park—so there are no sheets on the bed. I'll go up and—"

"It's not a problem, Susan. I've slept on much worse, believe me."

"You'll have to tell me all about it tomorrow." She suppressed a yawn. "Well, are you okay for tonight, then?"

Other than having a broken heart? "I'm fine," he said.

She moved to him a bit awkwardly and gave him a sisterly kiss on the cheek, which hurt more than a punch in the nose. But she lingered for a moment and whispered in his ear.

"You were lying to Howard, weren't you?"

He kissed her cheek, and whispered, "Yes."

MATT stood for almost an hour by the luminous dial of the watch he had worn religiously since the first day of his release from the prison cell in New Jersey, something he had not done in his earlier life. The moment he hit the street he had been seized by a powerful desire to know what time it was, to always know what time it was. Eight weeks in a cell where the lights were never turned off could do that to you. It was a Seiko solar-powered radio chronometer with a stainless steel case and embedded electronics; you could drop it from the Resurrection Tower and run over it with a tank and it would still keep perfect time from the Naval Observatory atomic clock.

He spent the time doing what he often did when confronted by a situation he felt inadequate to deal with. He asked himself what the hero of a romantic comedy would do. He remembered Clark Gable erecting a sheet—the walls of Jericho, he called it—in a motel room, and assuring Claudette Colbert that the wall would not be breached, correctly following the mores of the 1930s. But it was Susan who had put up the sheet, hadn't she? And this wasn't the twentieth century.

What would a modern hero do? Probably never have gone meekly to the guest bedroom in the first place, Matt guessed. But if he did he sure wouldn't have slept there. He would have strode confidently down the hallway at some romantic hour of the night to his lover's room, opened the door, and she would either have been eagerly waiting for him or he would have slipped into her bed and she would have been pretending to be asleep, and then pretend to be overpowered. Both of them would have bright, witty, sexy things to say to each other. Rudolph Valentino would have ridden all night on his camel and sneaked into her tent and ravished her, even if she resisted at first.

Nevertheless, the wee hours of the morning found him making his way carefully over the plush carpeting, his heart throbbing in the back of his throat. What's the worst she could do? Scream and shout? Throw things? He'd slink back to his room, or even out the front door and into the night, humiliated, but at least aware of where he stood.

The door would be locked, he was sure.

It wasn't. It turned easily under his hand. Now the alarm will go off, he told himself. But it didn't. He pushed the door slowly open and a wedge of light gradually widened and fell across the king-sized bed, where the covers had been turned back. Susan was lying there on her side, nude, her back to him. She rolled over and sat up on one elbow, then swung her legs over the side and sat up, facing him.

"Took you long enough," she said.

"THERE seems to be so much we need to talk about," Matt said, later, "and I can't seem to think of a damn thing to say."

"I've visualized it many times," Susan said, as she nestled herself a little more snuggly under Matt's protective arm. "I saw myself screaming and shouting for, oh, hours and hours. Then kicking your miserable ass right out the door. Then crying all night long."

"Did I say I'm sorry yet?"

"I think you did. Several times. I was a bit too busy there for a while to listen very carefully."

"In case I didn't, I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be. In a way, it's a good thing Howard showed up when he did. Just listening to you tell it like you did explained so much. I wondered why you never contacted me but through those damn postcards. I had no idea you'd been arrested."

"I never was, actually."

"You know what I mean. Abducted? Kidnapped? Whatever you want the call the atrocity they put you through. I lost a lot of faith in America tonight." "You want to know something funny?" Matt said, and laughed quietly. "In a way, it made me feel better about this country."

"I am. Think about it. There are a lot of places where, if the government thought I knew something they just had to have... well, I'd still be in that cell, or a lot worse one, and they'd be torturing me every day. Lots of other places they might not torture me, or at least not much, but they'd never let me loose."

"I can't believe this."

"I've had five years to put it in perspective. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it. It was wrong, it was immoral. Unconstitutional—though probably not illegal, if you can follow that reasoning. Bad form, poor sportsmanship, nasty and rotten and not fair, all of that. But I'm alive, and I'm out, and I never thought that would happen. Movies and books and television shows have convinced us of

that. What I found out is that some people in the government have some scruples."

"If you have a billionaire on your side," Susan snorted.

"There's that, that sure helped. I also don't doubt that even this NNSA has forms to fill out and oversight of some kind, a bureaucracy to answer to. Nobody operates with total impunity, everyone worries about a paper or electronic trail that may one day bring them in front of a congressional committee."

"Covering their asses."

"Don't knock it. There are lots of ways to cover your ass, but the best one is to not do the

crime."

Susan nestled herself back against his chest, nuzzled his neck.

"You've changed, Matt."

"Is that good, or bad?"

"It's just different. I think I like it. I think you've learned a lot."

"I have learned a lot about myself. That's a big part of what this whole crazy journey has been

about."

"I've changed some, too," she said, in a different tone.

"I want to hear all about it. Every detail."

"And I want to tell you," she said, then whispered in his ear, "but not here, and not now."

He frowned, then realized what she meant. "You think they might—"

"Sounds good to me," he said, hoping he sounded casual.

THERE was a dirt trail leading down the hill where Susan's house sat, that soon reached a small stream that bubbled over rocks and snags.

Matt followed Susan, who seemed familiar with the place. He noticed her slight limp more here than he had in the house. She seemed to pick her way over the stones a bit more carefully than he would have.

Last night in the dimness of her bedroom he had felt the puckered scar on her thigh where the bone had been shattered and poked through the skin. Her hand had immediately grasped his and tried to move it away, but he had resisted, and eventually she had let him explore the length of it. She hadn't wanted to talk about it, but eventually he got out of her that there had been three operations to put her leg back together, that there was a titanium rod where most of her femur used to be.

She wouldn't let him look at it with the light on.

Gradually they lost the magnificent view of Mount Hood and the pine forest closed around them. She stopped, and kissed him fiercely. Then she broke away and gestured toward a fallen log. "Let's sit here for a minute, Matt. There are some things I have to tell you."

He waited.

"Matt, you said you have changed. You're not the only one. When I went into this, all I wanted to do was be a part of a great experiment. I don't care about getting my name in the history books. Howard could have that, him and the gene-pushers that fertilized the eggs."

It took Matt a moment to realize that she was talking about the original project, the production of a mammoth/elephant hybrid, the job she had been hired to do. So much, so very much had happened since then; that project was ancient history, supplanted with the arrival of two live mammoths and a supply of fresh egg cells and sperm from the rest of the herd and from Big Daddy.

"I grew up in the circus. I love elephants, I loved training them, I felt I was doing some good keeping the species alive. There aren't many left alive in the wild and I felt—still do feel—that zoos and circuses were doing valuable work breeding, preserving the gene pool. I know a lot of people disagree, but that's what I felt."

"But you've changed your mind."

"Partly. Things happen." She was rubbing her thigh, not seeming to be aware she was doing it, and he wondered if it was just because it was sore from the hike. "Go on."

"I guess there's really no way to do this but to just come out and say it. I'm going to steal Fuzzy.

I'm going to do it tonight. Do you want to help?" There were so many things Matt might have said.

You're going to steal the most famous and valuable animal on the planet.

The animal belongs to a billionaire, one of the most powerful men on the planet, and one who is not always too fussy about his methods.

Fuzzy is rather... large. Why not steal the Golden Gate Bridge while you're at it?

There were just about as many questions he could have asked:

How will you hide him?

Where are you going to take hint?

What will you do with him?

Are you crazy?

And simply, Why?

But what he said was, "Yes."