Mammoth

29

MATT left the unit at eight that morning, and saw the rain had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear. Bad luck. He walked to the truck and pulled the trailer around the block and into the storage yard. Susan was waiting to direct him, and they lowered the ramp.

Susan had noticed that most places like this were virtually deserted most of the time. This one had half a dozen rows of buildings with garage doors facing each other. Her two units could not be seen from any road or house in the area. There was always a chance somebody would pick that morning to visit a unit close to theirs, but if that happened they would just have to wait.

Matt walked to the end of the row where he could see the entrance gate. He signaled to Susan, and she opened the garage door and led Fuzzy out and up the ramp, and closed the ramp, then the door. Thirty seconds, total.

Matt hurried back and entered the trailer through the side door. Susan was strapping a leather harness around Fuzzy's middle. She attached it to each side of the trailer with heavy chains.

"He traveled a lot before Fuzzyland opened, you know," she said. "He had his own private train. He's been in the back of trucks, too, going to and from the shows. Pachyderms are pretty good at keeping their balance, a lot better than you'd think. But we always used an arrangement like this as a sort of seat belt. I'd appreciate it if you tried not to stand on the brake, though, okay?"

"I'll keep way back from the cars ahead."

They went back outside and carefully peeled off the red contact paper Susan had applied in a big red swoosh after painting the rig a uniform beige. She grimaced as she touched the long indent where a tree branch had scraped the side.

"I did that last week. A computer recognition program would pick that out pretty quick, even from high up, don't you think? I was going to paint over it but then I thought it might be better to leave it that way until I was through the security gate." "Good thinking. Now they may be looking for it. Did you bring the paint?"

Over the Interstate Bridge traffic eased up, and they headed north. Just south of Tacoma traffic backed up again. They crept along, nervously watching the sky.

THEY missed the ferry they wanted in Tacoma, at Point Defiance, which put them an hour behind where they had hoped to be. It was a short hop to Vashon Island, at Tahlequah.

Vashon Island was pretty, still partly rural. They weren't able to make up any time; in fact they missed another ferry. Every minute sitting still in the parking lot was agony, but eventually they were waved aboard and undercover again.

This was a larger ferry and they were on the lower deck. They stayed close to the trailer in case Fuzzy started to bellow—which he hardly ever did, but he was in strange surroundings and, besides, Susan didn't want to get more than about fifty feet from him. Through a wide opening on the starboard side they could see planes on approach to Sea-Tac Airport from the north, then the city of Seattle itself. These waters were teeming with boats, many of them other ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound. They pulled into the terminal at Kingston, far behind schedule, knowing they would not get to the last departure of the ferry they wanted. When they drove past the terminal, they could not even see the departing ferry. It was long gone.

Susan had a backup plan, but she was discouraged. They pulled into a big RV park where Susan had booked a space a week earlier under another name. Matt found their space, was relieved to see it was a pull-through, and they parked as the sun was going down. There were trees around them, but not the complete cover they would have liked. Neither of them was sure if the satellites could spot them through trees, anyway.

But there was nothing for it. They would have to spend the night, and hope the search was, by now, focused far away to the north and east.

THEY made a meal from cans and ate it in silence. They hadn't bothered to hook up anything, not even the electricity, but the refrigerator and stove used propane. There was no reason not to turn on all the lights and have a party—Susan had stocked some beer. But the instincts of the hunted left them huddling beneath a single light over the kitchen table. Susan sat facing the back, where Fuzzy stood, maybe ten feet behind Matt's back. Every once in a while she got up to pet him or feed him a treat. He seemed tired of this whole bye-bye business by now.

"He's restless," she said as she sat back down opposite Matt. "He missed his daily run. Hell, he's probably even missing doing his show." "He's a creature of habit," Matt said. "He'll get used to new habits. You did the right thing."

"I hope you can stay awake a little longer. There are some things I have to tell you."

She looked up, more alert.

"The rest of your story?"

He smiled.

"Yeah. The good parts... well, the better parts. Anything would have felt good after getting out of that cell. And some things you need to know."

"Why don't we get to that part first? We'll have plenty of time to catch up on the rest, even if we have to do it by mail from our separate prisons."

"I need to build up to it. I'll keep it as short as possible. I'm pretty sleepy, too."

FOR most of the first year after his release, Matt hadn't been able to do much but dodge reporters and continue his researches with his computer on the Internet.

He tried a few times to elude them, managed to shake them off once in a while, got into the habit of withdrawing money from his bank accounts when he had the chance and never using his credit cards, but they always found him again. It wasn't hard to do in this day and age. Few people had the skills to stay hidden for long, and Matt finally admitted it wasn't worth the effort. He decided to wait them out. He had plenty of money, his needs were modest. He stayed at inexpensive hotels and moved every few nights, just to inconvenience the media. Time travel was a very big story, he was one of only two people known to have done it, and the world wanted to know all about it.

At first there were actual satellite trucks that followed him around as he drove from city to city. Those gradually dwindled to a few pool vehicles with cameras recording him every time he got out of his car or left his hotel. One shot or another of him showed up on most newscasts for almost a month. If he sneezed, it would likely get on the air. A stumble was apt to cause a flash newsbreak.

He tried to go to Europe, which was a mistake. A good percentage of his fellow passengers were reporters, and they weren't shy about crowding around and asking questions. When he got off the plane in London he was facing a whole new set of reporters, even more aggressive than the ones at home. You would have thought he was a rock star or the president of the United States. He walked straight to the airline counter and bought a ticket back to America.

Gradually, as he continued his silence—he learned early that even saying "no comment" only encouraged them—the crowds lessened. It helped that Susan was giving accounts of their adventure—always on tape, never live, and always carefully controlled by Howard's spin doctors. The story she told was the truth, in the sense that she didn't lie about anything, but there was much she did not or would not tell.

"It must have been awful."

"Not as bad as what you went through. I watched them hounding you. I did more interviews than I wanted to so maybe it would take some of the pressure off you."

Matt smiled. "You know, I thought it might be something like that. Thanks."

"I have no idea if it did any good." She looked down at the table. "I have a confession to make." She looked up again. "It was during that first year, after wondering where you were while they had you locked up, and then seeing what they were doing to you... it was then that I realized that I loved you."

Matt said nothing. She took his hand.

"I liked you a lot when we were working together. I liked making love to you, it made me less afraid of what was happening to us. But I was always a little afraid of you."

Matt was genuinely shocked.

"How could you be afraid of me? I didn't think you were afraid of anything."

"Oh, there's plenty of things that scare me. I just try not to show it. You were just so... so damn smart. You were so much smarter than me I just couldn't keep up with you. When you started talking about quantum physics and like that, I felt like such a dope."

"Last time I checked, they weren't graduating any dopes from veterinary school. Seems to me you need the same skills as somebody who becomes a doctor, only your patients can't even tell you what's bothering them."

"Wrong word, maybe. I know I'm smart, but it's... relative, like Dr. Einstein said. I felt like a dope." She smiled briefly. "I'd never met a supergenius."

Matt grimaced. "I've had that trouble all my life. I try not to talk shop, explain what it is I'm researching, but with you, we were both working, and you wanted to know. I probably shouldn't have, but as a conversationalist, I am a dope."

"I'm not blaming you, Matt. I wanted to know what you were doing. And you're a good explainer. But you'd lose me."

"Like you say, it's all relative. I happen to have a mind that's quick with numbers. And you know what? There are people with an IQ of 60, people who can't even tie their shoes, who can do anything with numbers I can do." "Is what you've got to tell me more about the time machine? More quantum theory and chaos theory and stuff like that?"

"I began to realize that my point of view was entirely too provincial to explain the universe as I had encountered it."

THE media circus that his life had become gradually abated, though it never entirely folded its tent. There was a flurry of activity at the one-year anniversary and from time to time an enterprising intern for a television show would approach him, usually in restaurants while he was eating, in the vain hope that he'd suddenly decide to spill his guts. But a circus can't go on forever if the trapeze artist won't swing.

Matt deliberately tried to lead as boring a life as possible, in part to discourage the hordes of the curious. In other words, he sometimes realized wryly, he tried to return to the kind of life he led before Howard Christian barged into it. He thought about returning to a university somewhere to continue his researches, plenty of places would have jumped at the chance of having the guy they thought of as "the man who invented time travel" on the faculty, no questions asked, no pressure applied, here's your lab, Matt, and do whatever you want in it... but he realized that didn't appeal to him anymore. His quest was taking him in other directions.

He entered a monastery in New Mexico for a while. Partly it was so he could look out the window and see the forlorn press pool, only a handful at that point, forced to stake out the building in the blistering heat. But he really was in need of a quiet, cloistered lifestyle.

This was sort of a Club Med monastery, nondenominational, catering to people with emotional problems to resolve or deep doubts about existence to work out. Matt put himself in the latter category. The quarters were Spartan, the food was plain, the brothers wore robes, and you chanted and sang at appointed hours, but nobody demanded that you believe in God. Sort of religion lite.

Things eased up greatly when the biggest male box office star in the world was arrested for murdering his wife and two children. He claimed to be innocent and there were no eyewitnesses but his story was Swiss cheese. He hired a team of high-powered lawyers—some of them lured away from Howard's school of piranha—and suddenly there was hardly room on the news for coverage of the war in Indonesia, much less a nontalking has-been quasicelebrity like Matt Wright. The news organizations took to checking in on him weekly, then monthly, and then he was gone.

Not lost. They found him again easily enough. And during the brief period when there had been no reporters aware of his whereabouts, Matt noticed that two men he had thought were reporters were still dogging him. One was a very large man with very little fat on him, maybe an ex-marine. The other was wiry, moved smoothly as a lizard, and had eyes like stones. He called them Jarhead and Snake. He decided they were probably Howard's agents, and knew they would never give up, but they never interfered with him so he ignored them.

"He was easy. Some of the ones before him were tougher." He grinned.

"OH, Matt, that's awful."

"Scared me a little, I admit it. He told me they'd 'taken down' three men who were trying to do me harm, and foiled one kidnap attempt. Said they'd heard rumors that one foreign government was thinking about trying to get their hands on me."

"What did you do?"

Matt shrugged. "What could I do? I felt claustrophobic enough with the press corps following me around. I didn't like Jarhead and Snake following me, for that matter, but I never complained after that. I didn't want to lock myself away behind walls. I enjoyed the monastery for a month, but I wouldn't have wanted to stay longer. I decided to take my chances.

"Anyway, it was just about two years before I thought things had cooled off enough that I could move around freely. It wasn't wasted time; I was reading and thinking. I read everything I could find about time travel theories. I read every science fiction story I could get my hands on, from H. G. Wells to some ridiculous thing about taking people off of airplanes that were about to crash. But there were places I wanted to go, people I wanted to talk to, and I needed to travel...."

MATT became a globetrotter. For almost three years he sought out people who might have insights that had been denied him in his education, which had been the best possible in the sciences but quite deficient in everything else.

He wandered India, speaking to the holy men of that country's thousand religions. He bathed in the Ganges. He went to Tibet, to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Mecca. He climbed Mount Fujiyama, sought out eremites in Ethiopia and Egypt. He sat in a sweat lodge in Arizona and chewed peyote and tried LSD.

Since the days of Einstein, scientists had been searching for a "Theory of Everything," a paradigm that would tie together all the known forces in the universe. Much progress had been made, but every time humanity seemed on the verge of being able to write it all down in an equation as elegant as E=mc2, something else came along that made the results more complicated rather than less, requiring more theories to explain the new data.

Matt had begun to wonder if everybody was looking in the wrong direction. "YOU'RE not going religious on me, are you, Matt?" Susan smiled at him.

"Listen, I know you don't want to hear more about string theory, but bear with me a minute. You'll be relieved when I get through it, I promise you.

"What we call a 'string' is a sort of loop of pure energy. They would be very small. Imagine the sun, one million miles across. Now imagine a proton in the center of the sun. Expand that proton until it is the size of the Solar System, out to the orbit of Pluto. A string within that proton would be the size of the proton before we expanded it."

"Pretty damn small."

"The technical term for it is 'teeny weeny weeny weeny weeny weeny.' Now, the thing is, string theory has been around a long time now... but no one has come up with any experiment that could prove or disprove it. No one has thought of a way to detect a string, to shine a light on it. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that there is no way for us to detect them. We keep fiddling with the theory because the math is intriguing, it works out elegantly... but we have no way to know if it connects with reality." Matt snorted. "As if we even had a useful definition of 'reality.' "

Susan frowned. "I need a beer. You want one?"

"Sure."

She got up and walked the few steps to the refrigerator, glad to have a chance to turn her back on him for a moment. What he had said earlier had settled her mind a lot, but she supposed she would never be entirely comfortable when he was in his professorial mode.

You'd better learn to get comfortable with it, girl. A professor is what he is, that's the guy you've fallen in love with, so get used to it.

She popped the tops on two cans of Henry Weinhard's and handed one to Matt, then sat back down in the little lecture hall and tried to look alert.

"So you're saying it could all be just a mental game," she said.

"What we mathematicians call 'jacking off,' " Matt agreed. "Nothing wrong with that. Much of mathematics has nothing to do with the 'real' world. But don't worry about it. String theory has nothing to do with it, I'm just showing you some examples. Say we could prove string theory. Strings are made of pure energy. Okay, but what is the nature of energy? Don't answer that, it doesn't matter."

"Very likely. We've been reaching dead ends all over the realm of physics. Don't get me wrong, there is a vast amount still to learn, and if the past is any guide, a lot of what we think we know now is wrong.

"But look at the other end of the scale. We can now see out to the theoretical end of the universe. It's fourteen or fifteen billion light-years away, and it seems we can't see any farther than that because there is no 'farther than that.' Space is curved, and what we see out there is what was happening fifteen billion years ago. If somebody is out there, on the edge of the universe, looking at us... what they are seeing is an infant universe. Quasars, protogalaxies."

"You've lost me again."

"Don't worry about it. The point is, it's another limit. One more example. Black holes. They were postulated a long time ago, and then we found them. A triumph for astrophysics. We can observe their effects, we can make a good stab at describing the conditions that exist around them, we can construct a theoretical model of what might be inside them, if that term has any real meaning with a black hole... but we can never, never look into one. Another dead end.

"What I'm saying is, we're reaching end points everywhere in what I have believed in all my life, what you might call rational science. So what's left?"

"Irrational science?"

Matt laughed.

"That's a good term for it. I like it better than mysticism, or pseudoscience, or 'wacko New Age stuff.' There are irrational numbers in math, and they are quite useful.

"Susan, we experienced something that, in a rational universe as I thought I understood it, simply could not happen. Therefore, a lot of my assumptions were wrong. I've been looking for answers in other places."

"And have you found anything?"

Matt spread his hands and sighed. "I'm ashamed to tell you just how little."

"Don't be ashamed. I've got a feeling you've found out more than anyone else would have."

"Maybe so, maybe not. Look... we all travel through time. We think of it as a train traveling at a steady speed on a straight track. Somebody buys us a ticket—"

"Are you talking about our mothers, or... God?"

"I don't know. We come into existence, we come into consciousness, we ride the train for a while, not knowing what our destination is, and then we get off. Not only do we not know what's outside the train, what's at the station, we don't even know what we are. What is consciousness? Would time exist without consciousness to appreciate it? Could consciousness somehow be the basis of it all? Would there be a universe at all without an aware being to witness it? These are the questions I've tried to answer."

Matt smiled. "Maybe 'finding an answer' was the wrong way to put it. I never expected that. I was exploring the concept of a creator, among other things. Different cultures have come up with very different ways of looking at the idea. I just wondered, do any of them have a better way of looking at it than the one I was taught?"

"Do you have a religion? I never asked you that."

"I never asked you, either. I was raised in the Christian world, therefore I see the world through that prism, even if I don't believe in it. Christianity and Islam, the great monotheistic religions, see God as omniscient and all-powerful. With Christianity, God is good and Satan is evil... but as I understand it, the game is rigged. At Armageddon a great battle will be fought, and the outcome is already known. I mean, we don't call him God for nothing. Which means that even God's fate is predestined. By himself, I guess, though I can't imagine why he'd bother to play the game if he knows the outcome."

Susan laughed. "I hate to say this, but you're losing me even quicker with this stuff than you did with the physics."

"That's exactly how I felt. So I looked around. The older religions, what we look down our noses at and call 'mythology,' like the Romans and Norse and Greeks, had a different worldview. Hindus today still see the universe like that. Their gods duke it out from time to time. They are willful, vain, childish, vindictive, quite willing to play dice with human lives."

"So's the Christian God, in my opinion."

"I couldn't agree with you more. But we put all those attributes into one being. Animists and others give different attributes to different gods." Matt sighed heavily. "What I'm going to tell you is that I've begun to get a... a hint of an inkling of an intuition of an enigma. Remember the old fable of the blind men and the elephant? One feels his trunk and says an elephant is like a snake. Another thinks he's like a tree, from feeling his leg. Another thinks an elephant is like a wall.

"What's happened to me is like... like I'm blind, deaf, and have no hands, and you gave me one hair off Fuzzy's back and asked me to deduce a mammoth from that."

"At last." Susan laughed. "A metaphor I can understand. How far have you gotten?"

"About as far as you'd expect. How about the railroad metaphor? I thought that one was pretty good."

"You're right. I got that one."

"Then try this. We think time is a long, straight train ride at constant speed. Actually, it can turn into a roller coaster. It's got big loops in it. It turns upside down now and then, and sometimes it goes forward and then backward. Why? I don't know. But it could be that during human history we've been riding on an abnormally straight stretch of track, that what we think of as universal laws concerning time are really only local. Maybe in the next galaxy down the block time runs backward. Maybe out there in empty space there are lots of loops, and we have no way to detect them.

"You've given me a lot of maybes."

"Best I can offer. I've got a million more. Maybe these loops in time open up more often than we let ourselves admit. What if the Loch Ness monster is an aquatic dinosaur that fell through a hole in time and swam around long enough to get spotted a few times, create a legend, and then died? What if the Sasquatch and the Yeti were time travelers? What if some—some, mind you, ninety-nine percent of them are swamp gas—some UFOs are lost astronauts from the future?"

"I've heard some of this stuff before. There are websites devoted to it."

"Sure. And until I traveled in time I dismissed them. I have no proof of any of them now, for that matter. As you say, all I've got is a lot of maybes."

Susan took another drink of her beer and thought it over.

"You're disappointed, aren't you?" Matt asked.

"A little," she admitted. "I was hoping you'd found some answers."

"I'm a long way from that. But I did learn to do a trick, and I did make a discovery. You may like the trick, but I don't think the discovery is going to be easy for either of us to accept. Watch this."

Matt reached into his pocket and took out something she immediately recognized as one of the marbles he had tinkered with five years earlier, when he was trying to duplicate the time machine. It looked like ordinary red glass, in a square cage with ridges that could be interlocked with other cages to slide over each other in any direction.

He held it between thumb and forefinger and started twisting it in the air. Left, right, right some more, forward, left again... she soon lost track of the permutations. It was like watching a safecracker twisting the dial, only he turned it through three axes. Then he stopped. Nothing happened.

"Nice trick," she said.

"It doesn't work every time. That's what's so frustrating. In science as I knew it, repeatability is everything. With this stuff... well, like my grandfather used to say, 'It don't work unless you hold your mouth right.' " He went through the motions again, and she was amused to see that he actually had screwed up one side of his mouth in an odd way, though she didn't think he was aware that he was doing it. Then he set it down on the table between them... and this time the little wire cube with the clear red glass ball in it seemed to be seized by a mysterious energy. It began to spin.

It... unfolded itself. Watching it, incredulous, Susan thought each move was as logical as unfolding a paper airplane or taking a flattened box and turning it into an assembled one... but neither of those operations hurt her eyes. This was an evolution that she felt instinctively that human eyes were not equipped to witness. Now there was a larger cube, three marbles on a side, now four, now five... and in a few eye-popping seconds there was the whole array, and the box that contained it, laid out like an opened suitcase in front of her.

She got up and hurried to the bathroom.

"FEELING better?" Matt asked when she got back.

"I didn't actually lose the beer," she said. "But for a minute there I felt sick as a dog."

"I told you it was a roller-coaster ride."

"Matt... what did you just do?"

"The only thing I've learned to do. That night, the night that began with the mammoths about to stomp us, and ended up back in Los Angeles... I watched this thing do its stuff. I ended up with that one little glass ball, and then I got hit by a city bus. I knew I had seen something and I thought I could remember it, and I knew I had to get out of there. It wasn't until later that I found the ball in my pocket. I don't remember putting it there. We were sort of busy, if you recall. Later, I figured out that the ball was still somehow attached to the rest of the machine. I did computer simulations on the model I had stored in my computer, and eventually came up with an algorithm that... that sort of pries up the lid on the place where the rest of the machine is."

"So you've had it all the time."

"That's right. All through the interrogation. But I didn't know what to do with it. I still don't."

"Why not just give it to Howard?"

Matt sighed. "I would love to do that. I don't want this thing. It's like... it's like you own a gun and you know how to fire it, but you haven't figured out how to aim it yet, and it can shoot in any direction, totally at random. How often are you going to shoot that gun? It's even worse, though, because sometimes it just goes off by itself, when it wants to, when the conditions are right, when God or Coyote wills it... I don't know."

"All the more reason to get rid of it. Give it to Howard." "Susan, Howard is a collector. That's what he wanted a time machine for in the first place. He wanted me to get him a mammoth, or the means to get one. We did, accidentally. He was fixated on mammoths at the time... but you think he'd be satisfied with that? Why not dinosaurs? He could build a real Jurassic Park."

"Believe me, if I thought it was that simple I'd go back with a big-game trapper and bring some more mammoths forward in time. But..."

"But what?"

"But I think it might be very dangerous."

Susan chewed it over for a time.

"You're talking about changing the past, right?"

"Yes. I don't know if it's possible. Maybe we could change the past and make a better world. Maybe we could make a worse one. Or maybe the way things have happened, are happening, and will happen is written in stone, and can't be changed. I lean toward that last possibility."

"Predestination."

"If you want to call it that. It could be that free choice is illusion. I don't think I have the right to test it."

"I see what you mean. But there's one question I've been meaning to ask you, ever since, ever

since you made that... that thing appear. Who made it?"

"I made it."

"No, no, I know you made that one. Who made the original one?"

"There is only one. I made it. You watched me."

"But that's... that's crazy! The only way you knew how to make it was you took it apart and

found out how to make it."

"Yeah. It's a puzzler, isn't it? Time travel is full of stuff like that."

"But... where did it come from? Why is it here? What's the point of it?"

Matt smiled.

"That's the big question, isn't it? Why? All my life I've been much more concerned with what and how. Science in the main doesn't attempt to tackle the meaning of things. I hardly even know how to phrase the questions I need to ask. I'm still learning my ABCs, and I've got a sneaking feeling that nobody, nobody has even gotten as far as Z yet, much less learned to read. That's been a comfort to me, trying to understand this, that just about everyone else is almost as ignorant as me.

"The right thoughts? You mean..."

"I think it was my mind that sent us back, and brought us home. But it doesn't work all the time. You have to be in the right place, too. We appear to be on an unscheduled loop on the roller coaster of time.

"But one of the few things I know for sure is... that if that loop hadn't happened, we never would have met. That's the most important thing in the world to me."

Susan wondered if she was going to cry. She held it in, because there were still more questions she had to ask. She was starting to be disturbed.

"What else are you sure of? You said you had a trick, which you showed me, and that's good enough, please don't turn it on. And you made a discovery. And... I thought the roller-coaster ride through time was over."

Matt looked down at the table, then met Susan's eyes again.

"Not quite. To make the discovery, I had to go back to the beginning. I had to go to northern Canada, to Nunavut."