Mammoth

by John Varley

  Mammoths were great swimmers. They loved to romp and splash in the water. It was Fuzzy's favorite thing, and whenever the herd went to a watering hole he and the other calves joyously slid down the muddy banks and down into the muddy water, where he would churn around with only the tip of his little trunk showing.

  Other creatures came to the watering holes. It was there that Fuzzy first saw the great saber-toothed cats that lived in California at that time. These cats had great fangs that they used to rip and tear at their prey and they were bigger than Fuzzy. They could have killed him easily, but when the big cats were near the rest of the herd bellowed and snorted and stamped at the ground and waved their big flat ears, and the saber-tooths went away. They knew better than to challenge Big Mama and her herd!

  Fuzzy was half woolly mammoth and half Columbian mammoth, and this is what scientists call a hybrid. That means he was a cross between two species.

  Though animals stick to their own kind, sometimes two species are enough alike that they can breed.

  When horses breed with donkeys the baby is called a mule or a hinny.

  When a lion breeds with a tiger the baby is called a liger or a tigon! Ligers are bigger than either lions or tigers. They have stripes only on their hindquarters!

  Horses and zebras can breed, and so can cattle and buffalo. Nature is full of examples of

  hybridization.

  Usually, the offspring of these matings are sterile. That means they can't have any babies. But not always.

  Life was good!

  12

  MATT was never quite sure why he invited Susan Morgan into the restricted lab. In the end, he supposed, it was because he was lonely.

  It had been two months, and progress was maddeningly slow. He was spending time mostly with Jim, the metallurgist, and Anthony, the master machinist. They were all nice enough people, delighted to be so well paid and not inclined to ask a lot of awkward questions. But Matt didn't have a lot in common with any of them.

  Truth be told, Matt didn't have a lot in common with anybody.

  It was the story of his life. Labeled as the next Einstein early in childhood, he had found his peers to be either confused by his intellect or actively hostile to it. Even his teachers were often intimidated. He had achieved his doctorate at Cal Tech at the age of fifteen, and felt his real studies didn't begin until then. And by then there were precious few who could keep up with him, and even fewer who could guide him.

  At the age of twenty-five he had what was pretty close to a mental breakdown. He just... stopped talking. He didn't decide to. He found himself unable to speak.

  It was almost a week before anyone noticed.

  It was not as though he had a social life. Arriving at college at the advanced age—for a prodigy—of twelve was a bit of a social handicap to a boy who hadn't had any real friends since elementary school. The philosophy of mainstreaming, both of the handicapped and of the precocious, pretending everyone had the same gifts and potentials, was then out of fashion at his school. Accelerated programs were back, and the almost equally disastrous current wisdom had become to let students proceed at their own pace, regardless of their social progress.

  As for girls, the business of offering Susan half his sandwich actually rated as a pretty good line, by Matt's standards. More often he would utter something awkward or inappropriate, or simply stay silent. His only real liaisons in thirty-four years of life had been with two girls even more studious than himself, and neither he nor they had known how to keep the relationships going.

  In a word: lonely.

  So here he was, still smelling faintly of elephant dung from his recent tour of the cloning facility, showing Susan Morgan something he had no business showing her and she had no business seeing. And enjoying the hell out of it.

  "I'm not much of a jokester," Matt admitted. "Setting this up would be way beyond my skills."

  "Yeah, but pulling the wool over my eyes as to what it actually is... that would be pretty easy."

  Matt looked at her seriously.

  "No, I don't think so. I don't think you'd be that easy to fool, even if I was good at it. And anyway, look at it. Can you imagine a mundane use for something like this? And think about Howard Christian, and ask yourself, would he be pouring money into anything less wacky than a time machine?"

  She did look at it again, frowning even more than she had the first time.

  "Maybe he's designing a super Rubik's Cube. One that only he has the solution to. I think Howard would like that."

  "Ah, yes, but I wouldn't help him build one. There are limits to what I'll do, even for money. And there are things mankind wasn't meant to know."

  He said it so seriously that Susan had to look up to be sure he was kidding. She laughed, a sound Matt liked at once. He wanted to say something about that, but was afraid she would take it wrong. Story of my life. So he turned back to the window in the big glove box and regarded the gadget, for possibly the ten thousandth time.

  She got it right the very first time. Inside the aluminum box was a puzzle in three dimensions. Or maybe four...

  When it was first opened Matt was reminded of a toy he was given when he was three. It was a flat plastic plate containing thirty-five plastic tiles, each with part of a picture printed on it. Since the plate had room for thirty-six tiles, six by six, there was one empty space, and other tiles could be moved into it. By sliding them around properly the puzzle could be solved. Matt had solved it in two minutes. He would have been quicker but for his clumsy child's fingers. His parents looked at him strangely. It was the first time he really knew he was different from other children.

  That puzzle showed a kitten when he was done. This puzzle was a bit more complicated. The heart of it was an array of spheres, each one-half inch in diameter, no two looking exactly alike. A box of marbles, but not just dumped in. Stacked together.

  Each marble was encased in a cunningly machined cage made of thin stainless steel. Each cage could attach to adjoining cages and slide up or down, left or right, back and forth. When opened they had been arrayed in a polygon ten marbles high, twelve marbles wide, and twenty marbles long, making the dimensions of the entire structure five by six by ten inches. That made a total of 2,400 spheres.

  Plus one sphere. Since there were 2,401 little marbles, there was no way to stack them so that they made a neat ten by twelve by twenty hexahedron. One cube always stuck out. This had mightily offended Matt's sense of order, at first, but he didn't tell Susan that.

  "Of course, all that came later," Matt said. "For the first week, we just probed it with everything we could bring to bear. This object has been measured more intensely and accurately than just about anything that exists on the planet."

  "I'm surprised it lasted so well. I mean, you say it was down there in the ice for thousands of years."

  "We cleaned it up a lot. The box had a rubber seal, but naturally that had degenerated. Dirt and water had gotten in. Our conservator took two weeks to wash it out—she wanted to take a year, but Howard couldn't wait that long—and then we were finally able to move it around. Now all the balls will turn in their sockets. There was a bit of lubricant left, which turned out to be ordinary 3-in-One oil, so we've used that to make the rows of balls slide easily." He reached into one of the gloves and pressed on a row at the left side. One ball on the right side clicked out of the stack.

  "We had it completely apart for the first time last week, when we were sure we could put it back exactly the way we found it. We had to set up some pretty stringent protocols to make sure we never got one ball exchanged with another without knowing it. If that ever happened, our chances of getting it back the way it was would be slim."

  "I can see it would take a long time, trial and error," Susan said.

  Matt snorted.

  "Trial and error? Susan, there literally would not be enough time to do it. I mean, not enough time before the heat death of the universe. The universe is fifteen billion years old. If we'd started
trying out patterns at the Big Bang, and tried out one per second, we would not even have made a beginning on the permutations by now."

  "I guess I always thought a time machine would be something you sat in, and pushed a lever or something... maybe with a steering wheel." She laughed. "I guess that's pretty silly."

  "I don't think so. I felt the same way, when I thought about it at all. Like what Rod Taylor used in that movie, with a big spinning wheel in the back."

  "Or a DeLorean with a Mister Fusion on the trunk."

  "Sure. And it would have some sort of odometer on it... call it a temporometer, maybe, like 'It is now December 4, 54,034 A.D.,' and it's spinning like crazy." He gestured again to the thing in the glove box. "What we got here in the way of instruments instead is a couple of wires attached to the framework, two little lights, red and green, and what turned out to be the remains of two double-A Duracell batteries. All I could figure is, if the light is lighted, that means it is on. So I replaced the bulb and the batteries, and absolutely nothing happened. If there's an on/off switch, I can't find it. And I don't even think it's a time machine... most of the time, anyway."

  "I thought you just told me—"

  "I said I was going to show you what Howard thought was a time machine. And I thought he might be right, at first."

  "What else could it be?"

  Matt threw up his hands, and paced in a small circle.

  "We may never know. Look, it seems certain that the man traveled in time. That is, unless Howard is playing a very expensive joke on poor old Warburton and me, because no one else knows about it... or Warburton is playing a suicidally stupid joke on Howard. I've considered those possibilities long and hard, believe me I have, and concluded I don't have the resources or the will to find out one way or the other. If that's what's happening, I'll end up wasting six months, a year, something like that, and go home with a lot of money. Most of which is already in the bank. I insisted on getting it up front when I realized what he wanted me to do."

  "Me, too," Susan said.

  "So, why would he want to make us rich? I can't find a reason. And beyond that... I see it in his eyes. He believes in this thing.

  "So. The mammoth man is a time traveler. Furthermore, he probably started off from right around here... that is, right around now. The aluminum case is made in Belgium; you can order as many identical ones as you want. I've got three dozen of them. But maybe he got there... I don't know, through a 'time gate' of some sort. You've seen those in the movies, too. You step into a big bright noisy thing, and next thing you know you're in the old Roman Empire. Or aliens abducted him and took him through time and dropped him off in the last Ice Age, and left this thing behind, and it's really an alien child's toy, like building blocks. Or it was some sort of natural or occult phenomenon. A rift opens in space-time, and he falls through it. Or a witch puts a curse on him. Take your pick. Rip van Winkle. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein or Steven Spielberg. There must be a thousand ways people have imagined to travel through time, all of them about equally impossible. None of them demand that you take a lunchbox full of marbles to get where you're going."

  He realized he had almost been shouting. He stopped himself, deliberately calmed down. Susan didn't seem disturbed by it, but she did glance at her watch.

  "It's feeding time. I'll have to go now."

  "Sorry about that." "No, it's not a problem. But really, Queenie'll get cranky if she doesn't get her feed on time. One thing you don't want to deal with is a cranky elephant."

  "Thanks for showing me this." She seemed about to say something else, maybe about the chance she knew he was taking by bringing her here, but she thought better of it. She waved, and started for the door.

  When she was almost there, she turned.

  "I wouldn't mind sharing a sub sandwich with you again one of these days, though. Maybe you can tell me more."

  "Sub sandwich," he snorted. "Listen, I'd like to take you out for a real meal. Kentucky fried

  chicken."

  "I don't know if I could deal with luxury like that. But I'll try."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow."

  He waited until he was sure the door was closed behind her, and then did something he seldom

  did. He danced.

  FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

  Life was not all fun and games for the mammoth herd. There were dangerous things, and not just saber-toothed cats.

  One day when Temba was browsing in a big tree, pulling down branches with sweet tender leaves on them and thrusting them into her mouth, Fuzzy wandered off a little ways to another tree.

  Baby mammoths, like baby elephants, were born knowing how to stand up, how to walk, how to nurse, and they probably know how to swim, too. But they had to learn to use their trunks, just like baby humans have to learn to use their hands. A mammoth's trunk contained many thousands of muscles and a grown-up mammoth could use it to pick up a single leaf or twig!

  The way they learned to use their trunks was the same way people or animals learn to use anything: practice!

  Fuzzy picked up a branch with his trunk, like he had seen his mother do. He swung it around, hitting things with it.

  He hit the trunk of the tree. He hit a big stone.

  And the big pile of straw reared up and screamed at him!

  It was big! Bigger than Temba, taller than Big Mama! From the tips of its three curved claws to the top of its little, angry head, it was fifteen feet tall.

  It was a giant ground sloth.

  There is nothing alive today that is anything like a giant ground sloth. Its only living cousin is small and lives in the trees where it hangs upside down and sleeps almost all day. But the giant ground sloth was huge, and there were many of them in California at the time little Fuzzy was born.

  Giant ground sloths were plant eaters, like mammoths, and usually they gave the herd no trouble. But they could be cranky, and they didn't like being rudely awakened any more than most animals do. This one took a swing at Fuzzy with his mighty arms, and sent the poor little mammoth tumbling over the dusty ground.

  Fuzzy was very frightened, and he cried out for his mother.

  Well! In no time at all not only Temba but all the sisters and cousins and aunts and nieces and the young bulls who had not yet left the herd were thundering toward the ground sloth, trumpeting their rage!

  They came between Fuzzy and the giant sloth and stomped and flapped their ears and lifted their trunks. The sloth stood his ground, roaring back, and it could have gotten bloody, but finally the sloth turned around and lumbered away.

  The mammoths did not chase him.

  Fuzzy cowered in Temba's shadow for a while until everybody was calmed down. He would remember the smell of the giant ground sloth, and he would run away if he ever saw one again!

  13

  THERE was still much work to do. From the start Matt had decided there were basically two ways to go about this. One: Repair this machine. Two: Build another just like it. On his third day of work he had put the question to Howard Christian. Which approach do you

  favor, Howard? "Do 'em both," Howard had replied.

  Easier said than done.

  NO two of the marbles were alike.

  Some of them appeared to be pretty much exactly that: marbles. They were glass, always of a uniform color. Basically silicon, with various impurities. Over a thousand were minerals, almost anything that could be shaped into a sphere and polished to close tolerances. Any geology student in the world would have loved to have these; many were quite beautiful. Among them were precious and semiprecious stones, including a diamond sphere and others of emerald and sapphire. The remainder were metals, sometimes pure and sometimes alloys.

  Full analysis of all 2,401 balls took almost a month after the day Matt first invited Susan into his lab. It was quite a job, and nobody could say it was dull.

  "Since coming to work for you," said Jim, the metall
urgist, "I've run into stuff that sent me running for the textbooks. It's like a final exam, from a sadistic teacher. It's not every day you come across some praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, dysprosium, and ytterbium. Some guys will go a whole career and never deal with some of those."

  That's exactly what Matt was coming to feel, too, that the device was not so much a practical, working thing as a one-time assemblage put together just to frustrate him. Something for him to look at, three paper cups for him to study while the real action with the hidden pea was happening somewhere just out of his sight.

  Prestidigitation. Misdirection.

  Nevertheless, he couldn't proceed on that assumption until he'd ruled out as many other possibilities as possible. What was important here?

  "IN a problem like this," he told Susan, "the first thing you do is try to limit the variables. Too many variables, you never get anywhere."

  "Like your twenty-four hundred marbles."

  "Twenty-four-oh-one."

  "Who's counting?"

  "Two thousand, four hundred and one is seven to the fourth power."

  "Really? Is that important?" "I wish to hell I knew."

  About once a minute the baby mammoth squealed what Matt supposed was the mammoth word for "Mommy!" All three pachyderms waved their trunks helplessly.

  They were on the grounds of the La Brea Tar Pits, and the mammoths were robots. Within walking distance was a working excavation. A stone's throw in the other direction, six lanes of traffic whizzed by on Wilshire Boulevard.

  There were a thousand very good restaurants within an easy drive of the mammoth warehouse, and he took her to two before she admitted she didn't really enjoy eating in restaurants that much. It turned out that what she liked was picnics.