Mammoth (35 page)

At the bottom someone had written in cursive, with a pen,
Piece of cake!

And now it was time.

He looked around the room, which had fifteen stations similar to his, which was raised and behind the others, as befitted a shift manager. All the stations faced a long wall with every inch covered in surveillance screens, able to display almost every camera in Fuzzyland at one time. The pictures were constantly changing. There was no earthly reason for such a thing, Jack knew, since each operator looked only at his own twenty-four screens, but display screens were cheap and it made impressive wallpaper to show off to big shots getting a behind-the-scenes tour. It looked like a Hollywood version of a high-security installation. People expected it.

In Vegas, all the stations would be manned 24/7, covering every square inch of public area. At Fuzzyland, after the park closed, there was no need for anything like that level of paranoia. Most of the park had coverage, and every inch of Fuzzy’s compound, but there was no need to monitor every camera all the time. Most of them showed nothing but cleaning crews, and after about one
A.M
. even those guys would go home. Motion detectors would key in a particular camera if something larger than a cat moved anywhere in the park, and Jack or one of his two assistants would take a look and deal with the situation. It was very boring work on the night shift, and boredom is the bane of any security system.

He glanced at his two companions for the night, seated at consoles directly in front of him and just below. To work this shift they didn’t exactly have to be the two sharpest pencils in the cup, and they weren’t. Security work tended to attract two types: retired cops, and guys who liked to wear police-style uniforms and hoped to one day get a job that would let them carry a gun.

Ed Crane was a perfect example of the first type, a veteran patrolman from the Beaverton force, sixtyish, thick around
the middle, more than happy to find a job that let him sit in a soft chair all night and exercise his remarkable ability to sleep soundly with his eyes wide open. Darryl Mosely was the wanna-be: a gangly redhead with bad skin who never failed to show up in the crisply pressed khakis his position entitled him to wear, even though the guys in the pit, including Jack, usually wore street clothes. Darryl was a new hire, had worked there for only a week, and clearly had his eye on bigger things, working his way up in the organization. He was earnest and hard-working, and Jack sort of hated to do this to him. If Susan pulled this off, Darryl was forever going to be one of the guys who let a mammoth be stolen right out from under his nose.

Jack sighed and reached down to his left to open a panel on the side of his console. Consulting his list, he punched a button and a plastic recording card was ejected partway. He plucked it out and inserted card 1, punched it home, and quickly did the same with the rest of the new cards. He was about to close the console when Darryl spoke up in his clipped, military fashion, almost making Jack jump out of his skin.

“Got a camera glitch here, chief!”

Jack looked up slowly—
It’s no big deal, it’s just a little problem; we get one every night, don’t act strange!
—and saw that one of Darryl’s twenty-four screens was black.

“Ah…try keying it in again.”
What the hell was going on?

Darryl did as instructed, and for good measure, flicked the screen a few times with his fingernail on the well-established principle that giving a balky machine a whack or two was apt to fix it. But it didn’t.

“Camera’s in Fuzzy’s compound,” Darryl said. “Other two in there look okay, though. Critter’s eatin’ his way through another bale of hay.”

Jack could see that on his own screens.

“How about I go down there and take a look?”

“No!” Jack said, a little too loudly. “Uh…you know we aren’t supposed to disturb the big boy unless it’s an emergency. He’s got his night keeper watching him.” He realized he was explaining too much. “Let me see if I can do anything from here.”

Do something, do something.

Following a corollary of the same principle Darryl had used earlier, Jack pressed his thumb against each of the nine cards he had replaced…and felt a click on number 9.

“Oops! There we are, back on line,” Darryl said.

Jack let his breath out very slowly. He hadn’t realized he had been holding it.

“TELL
me about this Jack guy,” Matt said. “Why’s he doing this?”

“Isn’t the better question why am
I
doing this?”

“I’ve got a feeling that’s a much longer story. I just asked because when my mouth is moving my teeth can’t chatter.”

“I know what you mean.” Susan was at a desk, opening and shutting drawers. She found what she needed—one of the ubiquitous plastic cards that a few years ago would have been a CD and a few years before that a floppy disk, and a cobbled-together thing that looked as if it had been started out as a remote control for a model airplane—and they went back to the first Fuzzy. Excuse me,
Fuxxy.
Fuxxy Mark Two, according to Susan.

“I didn’t screw him, if that’s what you were wondering.”

“Never entered my mind.” It hadn’t. Matt had wondered, from time to time, if Susan had had any male companionship during his long absence. It would only have been reasonable and natural, and he really didn’t care and didn’t want to know unless she wanted to tell him. He had only cared if she would take him back, and she had. No, he knew she hadn’t gone to bed with Jack because she had said she had only met him once, and it wasn’t in her nature to use people that way, to get something from a guy with sex. If she
had
screwed Jack, it would have been because she liked him, not to enlist him.

“Jack Elk is a lurker around the edges of the animal rights movement. He’s a member of the Audubon Society and several other middle-of-the-road animal and conservation groups…pretty much like me. When he was young he went to a few protest marches and such, he was offered the chance to help ‘liberate’ some minks from a fur farm and declined—which was a good decision, because most of them got arrested
and one had a finger bitten off. He’s not a joiner and not an activist, at heart.”

She lifted the amazingly realistic flap of one of Fuxxy Mark Two’s ears and found a slot there to insert the card. When it was in you couldn’t even see the slot.

“He is anticircus and antifur and antizoo and a vegetarian, but he’s never done much about it, and we were very lucky to find him, because if he’d joined any of the more radical groups he’d never have got past the security checks here. Now hang on a minute here, I only saw this demonstrated once, and I don’t want us to get trampled by a mechanical mammoth.”

She concentrated on the controller. A green light came on. She punched a few buttons…and Fuxxy Mark Two began to breathe.

I swear it, if it wasn’t too late already I’d run to my car and not stop driving until I got to the Nevada state line.

But it was far too late. On screen 1 he could see Susan and Matt and that goddamn contraption coming down the hall. He had to stick it out. Half an hour, just half an hour, that’s how long she said it would take.

He got up from his chair, idly walked along the back gallery, stretched his arms and cracked his neck as he did a dozen times every shift…and casually glanced down at Ed Crane’s console where, if things were not working, two people and a mechanical mammoth would come around a corner in about five seconds. Not that Ed was likely to notice it, staring glassy-eyed into space. But Darryl certainly would, and soon.

Nothing happened on the screen, and he went and sat back down. On his own screen he could see Susan and Matt and Fuxxy. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the Unknown Hacker.
Piece of cake, my ass.

Slowly, as he watched them move from one screen to another, he calmed himself down, reminded himself why he was doing this, reminded himself that it was a
good
thing to do and about time he got up off his lazy, uninvolved ass and did it.

All his life—or since the age of eighteen, anyway, when he had been horrified by the pictures and stories he had seen at a
booth at a career fair at his high school—he had hated the exploitation of animals. It had been like a born-again moment for a Baptist; from that day his outlook on life had changed.

His outlook…but not his actions. He was basically lazy, didn’t interact well with people, and had found the perfect niche for himself in a job that allowed him to sit down all day and spy on people he didn’t have to talk to. He figured in another ten years his ass would be a yard wide and he’d have a hard time walking from the car to the front door, but he didn’t particularly care. It was the life that suited him.

But he spent his spare time—where else?—sitting at his home computer connecting with some pretty radical groups, following their exploits, cheering them on from his comfortable safe seat in the grandstands of life.

Then one day the word had gone out that an operational group—what the straight media would call “terrorists”—was looking for someone with skills that could have been culled perfectly from a reading of his resume. From some dark well of guilt in his soul, carefully kept covered for the last decade since that almost-debacle with the minks, he felt the sudden urge to stand up and be counted, to put his ass on the line, to
do something
about the terrible evils he read about every day. Cautiously, he sent out a feeler, and, cautiously, an approach was made. One thing led to another…

And here he was, participating in what would probably become known as the heist of the century.

“HE’S
on what they call ‘come-along’ mode,” Susan said. “He’ll follow the controller wherever it goes, never get closer than five feet.”

Five feet felt entirely too close for Matt, who kept looking back over his shoulder to see if the damn thing was still back there, and was never quite sure if he was happy or not to see that it was, at a steady, dependable five feet, lumbering along as naturally as any actual living beast he had ever seen.

“So it’s for use in the…what do they call that part of the park? With all the mechanical critters?”

“No, he’s for the center ring…maybe.”

“You can’t be serious. Howard plans to palm off a mechanical substitute for the real thing?”

“I said maybe. There’s still a lot of bugs to be worked out. Can’t have ‘Fuzzy’ falling over during the show and just lying there, trying to walk. So they figure they’re about a year away from being able to chance it, not with this one, but with Mark Three or Four, which you saw back there being put together.”

Susan sighed heavily.

“It’s partly my fault. Howard and I have been head-to-head over this thing practically from day one. He wanted three shows a day, I wanted one; we settled on two. I wanted two days off per week, we settled on one. Howard had power over me, because he’s sure it would take a
lot
to make me quit here. Fuzzy is…like a child to me. It would be very hard to leave him. But I’ve got some power over him, too.”

“What’s that?”

Susan grinned.

“Fuzzy won’t work for anybody but me.”

Matt laughed out loud, then looked nervously at the camera they were just passing. (Not far away, Jack wondered what the hell the idiot found so funny.)

“You’re kidding.”

“He imprinted on me that night, or he loves me, or he’s just ornery, look at it any way you want to. He lost his mother, and never attached to any of the wet nurses we provided for him. In fact, he didn’t seem to like elephant milk much. He preferred to suck the stuff that I mixed up from a bottle. He has other handlers who groom him and can lead him around from place to place if they don’t get in the way of what he really wants to do, but he only fully cooperates with me. Howard didn’t find that out until the first time he fired me, three years ago, and he was apoplectic.”

“Fired you ‘the first time’?”

“Oh, he’s fired me several times since then, but it lasts about an hour or two. Actually, a while after Andrea came along, he stopped firing me. She’s been a good influence on him.”

“He could use one.”

“Sometimes he seems almost human. Anyway, this robot was supposed to take some of the burden off the real Fuzzy.
Do the early show, sub three or four times a week, something like that. But it’s one thing to make a titanothere that can walk around a predetermined track with a human operator inside, and something else to make a robot that can do tricks and really fool the eye under bright lights. The project is way behind schedule. I’m sure they’ll get it right one day soon…and by then I really,
really
hope they’ll need it badly…because here we are, and this is the last chance to turn back.”

JACK
watched them on his screen as they opened the gate to Fuzzy’s enclosure and Susan entered, alone. Fuzzy had heard her or smelled her, and he turned from his manger and greeted her with his trunk. She patted his big flanks, gentling him, offering him a treat which he snarfed up. Fuxxy had come to a halt when Susan turned off the follow-me button on her controller. Now she turned it on again, and the imposter lumbered through the open gate and into the enclosure, stopping faithfully just behind her.

Fuzzy was fascinated.

He explored the newcomer with his trunk. Jack wondered what the beast was thinking. Surely Fuxxy didn’t smell like a mammoth, but he sure looked like one. But when Susan touched his side gently with the ankus, Fuzzy turned and went with her outside the stall, and when she touched him again and spoke to him he stood beside Matt, apparently incurious about this new guy. And why not? Fuzzy met a hundred new people every day, and was friendly to them all. Fuzzy was everybody’s friend, but only took orders from Susan.

Susan got the mechanical monstrosity positioned just where Fuzzy usually spent the night. Later, Fuzzy might normally lie down for an hour or two, seldom longer than that. If he didn’t lie down—which Fuxxy couldn’t do—neither Darryl nor Ed would think anything of it. Jack watched as Susan did something with the controller. Fuxxy began the slow, back-and-forth swaying that was a normal behavior for Fuzzy when he was content, or asleep on his feet. The mechanical trunk curled from time to time. It looked pretty lifelike to Jack. He looked over his board and down at Darryl’s. The kid was still getting the tape loop of the real Fuzzy on his screen.
It was very, very close to the real-time picture now on Jack’s. He wiped sweat off his brow.