Mammoth (29 page)

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.

He had to admire their thoroughness. They had re-created his path from Wilshire Boulevard to Esalen in amazing detail. There were transcripts of interviews with everyone he had spoken to. They must have canvassed every business within a mile of US 101 to find them all. The interrogations were thorough, asking every imaginable question, but they all boiled down to “Did you see this man hide anything?”

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 attaché 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.”

“Oh, there was a bomb. They showed a helicopter shot of it going off, blowing up that truck it was in—”

“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 it 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.

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.

“How about full disclosure?” Susan said.

“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.

The first reports of radiation came three hours after the explosion and stated that the levels were low, nothing to be alarmed about. As a precaution people were being evacuated in a three-block radius. The next bulletin was three hours later, and stated that radiation levels were a bit higher than had been initially believed.

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: I have probably not yet seen it for the last time.

(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!”

Virtually every field and pond and swimming pool and basement and closet and toolshed in southern California was searched by someone, either in the spirit of public service or in hopes of landing the huge reward. Many thousands of suspicious objects were examined by police. None contained any plutonium, nor a time machine.

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.