Mammoth (15 page)

“And I’d given some thought to the responsibility of the researcher. Astronomy seemed fairly safe…until you started thinking about the power inherent in stars, in neutron stars, black holes, quasars. Same with physics. Biology gets into the realm of really hairy moral questions, like biological or genetic war, which in some ways is scarier than nuclear bombs. I’ll tell you, it got to the point, if I’d been any good with the harmonica, I’d have dropped out of school and started a blues band. Unfortunately, I have no talent for music, or sports, or business, or sales, or fishing…no talents at all, really, except for memory and logical thinking. So I concentrated on math. Math seemed safe.”

“You were how old?”

“Twelve.”

Susan smiled. “Prodigies. When I was twelve I was learning how not to fall off when an elephant was lifting me on her trunk.”

“I wish I knew how to do that.”

“I’ll teach you. But go on.”

Matt wasn’t sure he wanted to, but he’d started down the road.

“Well…I got my Ph.D. in mathematics. Even in math you’re expected to specialize, but I tried to stay as broadly based as possible. One month I’d be working on the most theoretical things I could find, another I’d get interested in what we call ‘real-world’ problems. About a year ago I was noodling around some equations concerning superstrings. Do you know what that is?”

“Sure. It’s that goop you squirt out of a can at parties. Sticks to stuff.”

“Right. But the other sense of the word concerns what quarks are made of.”

“Quarks being the particles that make up protons and neutrons and such.”

“Yes. So far there is no real evidence of their existence, just some interesting mathematical theories. If they do exist, they are very small. Anyway, superstrings seemed as remote in one direction as quasars are in the other. I didn’t think it was likely anything I discovered would have a lot of real-world applications.”

“You should have remembered that, in 1939, protons and neutrons seemed incredibly tiny.”

“Yes, but Einstein and others knew the potential for great energy release was there, and had some idea of the mechanisms to let it loose. Superstrings are about as close to a totally abstract thing as I can think of. They are so tiny, it was hard to see how they could ever have much relevance to our lives, given quantum constraints. I mean, the fundamental quantum fuzziness of things shows up on a level trillions of times larger than superstrings. At the quantum level, certainty is no longer possible. How much less certain could we be of anything I might postulate concerning a superstring?”

“I gather it didn’t work out that way.”

“At first, it was fine. Lovely speculation. Good response to the papers I was publishing, interesting feedback from the three or four people around the world looking into the same thing.

“Then I stopped publishing. I didn’t even realize I had done it at the time. I thought I was just organizing my thoughts, I’d put them down and send them in later.

“A year went by, and I started sleeping badly. I was getting an inkling of something that was…frightening me. I’m still not sure why. It got to be hard to do the math; sort of like writer’s block, I guess.

“Then one day I stopped talking.” Matt swallowed hard, and suited action to his words. After a minute had gone by, Susan spoke, cautiously.

“That must have been awful.”

Matt laughed.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Actually, it wasn’t so bad, at first. The weird thing was to discover I could get through the day pretty easily without speaking at all. I never had a lot of human contact at work, math is a lonely game sometimes. Casual contact could be handled with a nod or a smile. Hell, it’s not like I was the office clown
before
that; people didn’t expect a lot of words out of me. But gradually it became clear that I wasn’t
choosing
not to speak, but that I
couldn’t
speak. I’d open my mouth to say something, and nothing would come out. I wrote notes, memos, and emails to cover myself in most things…then I realized I was having trouble writing, too. I knew it was time to get help.

“And that’s sort of where I was when Howard found me. I’d spent a month in a very nice, quiet facility in the country, mildly sedated, and after a while I could talk to a therapist. I was advised to take a few months off to think things over. I didn’t need a lot of time to decide one thing: I wouldn’t publish my results on the superstring research. There was too much potential danger. In fact, I knew I had to destroy the equations.”

There wasn’t much he could add that wouldn’t get into more specificity than Susan could handle, and she seemed to recognize that. They were silent for a while, until Susan looked toward the door they had left propped open, and realized there was pale gray light coming through it.

They approached the door cautiously. Outside, there were entirely unremarkable trees and shrubs. The analytical side of Matt’s mind noted there was no sign of whatever trees and
shrubs had occupied the ground the time-traveling building now sat on. Were those trees now growing from Howard Christian’s land in Santa Monica? Something to think about later, after they had made a plan.

A plan. It was surprisingly hard to do. There was a strong impulse to just bar the doors of the warehouse and huddle inside, let the outside world take care of itself. But time was pressing, events would not wait. So, step one when in new territory was to define the lay of the land. There was a ladder bolted to the side of the warehouse, and Susan started up immediately, followed by Matt.

At the top, they looked out over a primeval Pleistocene landscape, untouched in any way by the hand of man.

To the west, the Pacific was still gray in the morning light. To the north they could see what had to be the Hollywood Hills, surprisingly green and covered with scrub oaks. To the east the sky was orange, the sun about to burst over the horizon…and the mountains over there seemed to be frosted with snow. To the south, just rolling country and, far in the distance, what looked like a herd of horses.

“Maybe horses, maybe camels,” Susan said. “I can’t tell from this far away.”

“Camels?”

“Sure, there were several species. And the horses may have three toes.”

“And the tigers have big teeth.”

“Not really tigers, Matt, they were a lot more like lions.”

“You’re the expert. But we’d probably better watch out for them. I’ll bet they could hide pretty well in all this underbrush.”

“If we stick with the elephants, we shouldn’t be bothered much by saber-toothed cats.”

“Right. The elephants. What are we going to do about the elephants?”

“Water them, obviously.”

“And how do we do that?”

“I think we leave it to them.” They were silent again as the first rays of the sun reached them. “That is so beautiful,” Susan said, with a catch in her voice. “I wish I’d brought my camera.”

Matt was thinking about saber-toothed cats and wishing he’d brought a gun…a very
large
gun.

“So…,” Susan said. “Where did you hide your superstring data?”

“It’s in my safe-deposit box, in Portland.”

They looked at each other, and laughed.

“Well, I
should
have destroyed it,” Matt said.

“You wouldn’t be much of a scientist if you did.”

Matt looked into the distance again, and decided to say nothing.

“I guess we’d better get to work,” Susan said. “I think we’ve got an interesting day ahead of us.”

ABOUT
twelve thousand years in the future, Howard Christian was finally at the end of the most interesting day of his life, and one of the more expensive ones.

He had heard somewhere that the New York City police department used to have an informal code for the offering of bribes, a way to avoid the awkwardness of just coming out and saying “Would you take a bribe?” Instead, you could say, “You look like you could use a new hat.” What that meant was: “Would twenty dollars make this problem go away?” Sometimes it took a new suit to do the job: one hundred dollars.

Tomorrow a half dozen Santa Monica patrolmen would be driving around in brand-new Land Rovers. Kraylow, Vasquez, Dawson, and probably a few others at Robinson Security had just earned themselves new homes in Simi Valley.

According to Howard’s lawyers, there was nothing illegal, in itself, in making a large metal warehouse vanish from the face of the Earth, and that was all the police officers had witnessed. The money they would receive, very discreetly, was simply for not talking about what they had seen. Howard was confident the matter could be buried easily enough, especially since each of the superior officers in the department would be getting the price of two or three Land Rovers.

The price was steeper for the Robinson people because they were the only ones who knew there had been two people inside the building when it ceased to exist.

Howard’s lawyers weren’t quite so sure of the ramifications of that one. Unless it could be determined just what had caused the warehouse to evaporate it would be difficult to
charge Howard or any of his enterprises with anything that might have befallen Matt and Susan…and who could even prove they had been harmed? Perhaps they were fine…wherever they went. Still, they had been there, and now they were gone, and the Robinson people knew it, and not mentioning it to the police might be seen as negligence, at the very least, and so they had earned the price of a house in Simi Valley, the dream of every Southland cop and ex-cop.

But where
did
Matt and Susan go?

That was a question Howard was determined should never be asked. Everyone who knew that Matt was working on a time machine had either vanished with the building or was in Howard’s employ, so that was under control.

It would have been a lot cheaper for Howard if he could have simply stonewalled: My building disappeared, I don’t know why, and I don’t know where it went. End of story. But there would never be an end to it, and he knew it. Reporters would be all over the story, and soon the bugs would start crawling out of the baseboards. Roswell flying saucer bugs, crop circle bugs, Area 51 bugs. Alien abductees.

Howard wasn’t having any of that. The last thing he needed was to be seen as having screwed up again, or having let an experiment get out of control. No, hushing up everyone involved was going to be expensive, but cheap at the price.

It took all morning, but at last he felt he had it under control. He was exhausted, but willed himself to drive back to the scene of the disaster. He took one of the Robinson Blazers this time, not wishing to draw attention to himself in one of his antique cars.

There was another Robinson vehicle parked outside the gate, manned by Kraylow, who nodded at Howard but did not get out. There was a small group of people, mostly men who worked in the area, standing around with puzzled looks on their faces. Luckily, there were not many of them. No explanation would be offered to them, and what were they going to think, anyway? That the building had fallen into a temporal wormhole?

No, they would conclude, sensibly, that somehow Howard Christian, the eccentric billionaire, had had the structure demolished
overnight, right down to the concrete pad, and replanted in scrubby-looking oak trees.

Howard drove around to the far side where there were no people. He got out, walked to the chain-link fence, and grabbed it with his hands. He scowled at the trees inside, trees that had obviously grown right where they now stood, for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years. He shook the fence in frustration.

Where did you take my building, Matt?

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”

Mammoths did not sleep a lot. Most nights they would sleep only four or five hours, and only for an hour or so at a time. Somebody was always awake, watching for danger.

Sometimes they slept standing up. This wasn’t uncomfortable for mammoths, as it would be for us. Many animals sleep standing up. But sometimes they liked to lie down on their sides for a while and sleep that way.

One night a few weeks after Fuzzy got into big trouble at the tar pits, he was sleeping lying down. There were still hard balls of tar clinging to his front legs and he didn’t like that. He rubbed his legs against trees and on the ground, trying to get them off. Maybe he dreamed. What would a mammoth dream about? We don’t know.

But just after the night was darkest, when the moon had just risen over the hills to the east, Fuzzy was awakened by the urgent touch of Temba’s trunk. He opened his eyes to see a strange light.

The herd was all awake, and milling around nervously. Fuzzy got to his feet and huddled close to his mother’s side, where he felt warm and safe and secure.

Then the quiet of the night was broken by the high, horrible cries he had heard once before. He remembered them well.

Two-legs!

They came from the south, waving burning sticks that were so bright they hurt the eyes of the mammoths.

Most animals don’t like fire, and mammoths were no different. They ran away!

But the two-legs were determined, they kept coming. The mammoths would stop for breath, and once again the two-legs would be almost on them.

And now they were touching their flaming sticks to the ground, and the yellow grass itself began to burn. It raced toward the herd, and the two-legs were close behind.

On and on the mammoth herd ran, into the night, trying to stay one step ahead of the inferno on the ground. Little Fuzzy began to get very tired.

Then he smelled something that made his young heart beat even faster. It was a smell he would never forget, the smell of that awful day when he was almost swallowed up in the thick black goo that lurked just beneath the surface of that quiet, inviting pool.

It was the smell of tar!

Fuzzy wanted to turn back. He looked back at the fire. It was impossible to go that way. Temba and Big Mama and the rest of the herd kept going, onward toward the tar pits.

Then they were joined by other mammoths. These were big bulls, the biggest mammoths Fuzzy had ever seen! They were panicked, too, rushing forward as fast as they could go.