Mammoth

by John Varley

  "I can do picnics," Matt had said, and headed for the mall. He'd been intending to buy something from Sears, but halfway there he remembered he was rich, turned around, and found a shop in Beverly Hills that sold him a beautiful basket complete with Waterford glasses and fine china and linen napery and a chill compartment for white wine for a price that only made him a little light-headed.

  Any of the fine restaurants in Santa Monica or Westwood were happy to oblige when Matt dropped the basket off in the evening and told them, "We will be two for lunch. Surprise us."

  They ate together two or three times a week while Matt gathered the courage to ask her out on a real date. They tried to visit a different park each time. Today they were on the grounds of the George C. Page Museum, overlooking the tar pit, and Matt was trying to explain the dimensions of his problem.

  "Allotropes are different ways the same element can arrange itself, different crystal structures," he said.

  "Right, graphite and coal and diamond. All pure carbon, different arrangements."

  "Yes. Some of the metals have several allotropes. In the marbles, the zirconium and... sorry, Howard wants me to call them temporal spheres."

  "Sounds like Howard," Susan laughed.

  "Okay, call 'em marbles. Listen, I could explain this easier if I showed you, back at the lab."

  "Suits me. I have to get back anyway." A big table had been set up in one part of the warehouse away from the glove box containing the actual gadget. On it was a very long rack of wooden cubbyholes, set at a forty-five-degree angle for easy access. They had bought the box from a Chinese language typesetter, who often had over five thousand characters to keep sorted. This one was thirty cubbies deep and one hundred wide, and all but the top few rows were full of the marbles they had assembled, marked 0001 to 2401. Each cubby held twenty identical marbles. Matt was going to make ten identical time machines and hope that one of them worked. If not, he'd try a few more things and use the ten spares of each type.

  It was a problem with no easy solution. Say you have a sphere of zirconium, one-half inch in diameter. How can you be sure it's zirconium clear through? You know the surface is pure zirconium, but that might be a shell covering a layer of iron or copper.

  They had probed each marble with X rays, sonic imaging equipment, and magnetic resonance and had found no obvious anomalies. The pure zirconium sphere seemed to be pure right to the center.

  "There's no way we could exactly duplicate some of them," he said. "You ever look through a bag of marbles?"

  "Sure. Girls can play marbles, too."

  "Then you know there are no two cat's-eyes perfectly alike. We've sorted through thousands and found some that are amazingly close... but who knows? And the glass of most of them is marked up, scratched, tiny little chips. One of them, number 451, has a fairly large chunk out of it."

  "You know them all by number?"

  "No, but it feels like I do. And if I never saw another marble in my life I would be a happy man."

  THE next evening Matt completed the first assembly and called Howard's office to see if he wanted to take a look at it. Howard did, and showed up that night in another of his vintage automobiles, an olive-green 1939 Talbot-Lago hardtop racer that had barely room for one person in its streamlined cockpit.

  Matt led him inside and showed him the opened assembly. Beside it were a few numbered glass dishes containing metal marbles, or temporal spheres, of varying hues. "We wanted to reproduce the gadget exactly," Matt said. "Because we don't know just what it does, much less how it does it, assuming it does anything at all... we don't know what's important. But if we have to duplicate it at the subsubatomic level, we're screwed. No way we can analyze the neutrons and protons within the spheres for up-quarks and down-quarks, spin, strangeness, charm, all those too-cute words they use to describe properties nobody can really visualize.

  "So then there's the nuclear level. Some of the spheres are ninety-nine point nine nine percent pure. But each element has isotopes—you know, different numbers of neutrons with the same number of protons—"

  "Sorry, Howard, I keep forgetting..."

  That I'm smarter than you are, except in the really rarefied realms of math, Howard thought. It grated on him, but he kept quiet about it because he needed Matt. Matt was a professor, after all, used to lecturing. And he'd probably been doing a lot of it lately, on his daily dates with Susan Morgan. Was there love in the air?

  "Okay. Different isotopes have different weights, per atom. The ratio of isotopes found naturally is fairly standard; a lot of them decay into something else. Almost all the single-element spheres are what you'd expect, not some exotic variation. You follow?"

  Howard nodded.

  "But a few were a little odd. Take osmium. Atomic number, 76. Atomic weight, 190 and change. Seven stable isotopes, six radioactive ones, but with half-lives so short there'd be almost none in a normal sample. Commonest isotope, Os-192. Seventy-six protons and one hundred sixteen neutrons. A bit over forty percent of osmium ought to be Os-192. But our little ball only has thirty-five percent. To compensate, there's more Os-188 than there should be."

  "Is it a radioactive decay thing?" Howard asked. "One form of osmium emits an alpha particle—"

  "No, no. Osmium decays into rhenium and iridium, a little tungsten later on. Those are all there, in trace amounts, what we'd expect. No, somebody, the builder, made sure the osmium ball had a different isotopic ratio from normal. So we have to duplicate that ratio, because it's so weird it just has to be something important." He stopped, and looked at Howard for a moment. "Don't you think?"

  Howard laughed. "That's what I'm paying you the big bucks for. If you think it's important, I will, too."

  Matt took one of the spheres of the odd osmium, shiny as mercury, and slipped it into a little metal rack, then snapped it into place. He stood back and regarded it.

  "There we are," he said. "The Howard Christian Time Machine, Mark One."

  Howard looked surprised.

  "You mean it's finished?"

  "It's assembled. What comes next is anybody's guess."

  "I'm paying you to guess." Matt sighed. "Yes, you are. But I don't have the foggiest idea what to do at this point. I can manipulate it...." He flipped the assembly of marbles onto its side and slid a row of them to the left, then pushed another row back. Several other slides, and it was back together, ten by twelve by twenty, but the marbles were in a slightly different arrangement.

  Howard clapped him on the shoulder. "You'll figure it out."

  "Well, I intend to spend the next year trying, anyway."

  "Maybe you should just bash it. That usually works." He thumped the case with his fist. Nothing happened. He shrugged, turned, and started back to his car.

  "Oh, by the way...," Matt said. Howard stopped and turned back toward him. "If you're going to take some of the marbles with you, it would be a lot easier on us if you'd let us know which ones you're taking. I mean, so we can restock."

  Howard stared at him for a long moment.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

  "Oh, it's not a problem, I mean, not a bad one. And you can do what you want, I know that, you already own all the marbles... so to speak." Matt laughed, but it sounded a little hollow, even to him. What was the problem here?

  Silence from Howard.

  "Didn't you just put a couple of marbles in your pocket?" Matt asked.

  Howard had learned an important lesson at the age of eight: Never admit anything. His father had sent him into a supermarket with instructions to select a good steak and put it under his winter parka. "If you get caught," his father had said, "don't say anything. Don't answer any questions, and above all, don't admit anything. Never admit anything:'

  Howard did get caught, and when they found his father in another part of the store and brought his errant child to him, Christian Senior had scolded the boy, threatened to give him a good whipping when they got home, even threatened to tan his hide right
there until one of the cops advised him not to. Howard had cried and cried and cried.

  They laughed about it when they got back to the ramshackle trailer with no wheels that Howard's father called home. Christian Senior praised the boy for his acting. "Never saw it done so good," the old man chuckled. Howard was glad to hear what he had done was acting; he'd thought he was scared to death. Howard got better at it, until one day he was too old to pull it off, and his dad sent him back to live with his mom, who hardly noticed.

  "How many times have you had Susan Morgan in here?"

  Matt was speechless.

  "It doesn't matter," Howard said. "Once is enough to invalidate your contract and make you liable for everything I've paid you, plus damages."

  "I'm sorry, I thought that since she's right here and..."

  Howard smiled and relaxed. He had him. Once they apologize, they are lost. Matt had caved in at once. But what did he expect from a little wimp who had spent his entire career in a university, free to research just about anything he wanted, a man who had had his entire top-rank education handed to him while Howard labored and borrowed to put himself through a state university system, first in computer science, then in business.

  Howard had never liked Matt very much. No surprise; he hardly liked anybody. But from that moment, he hated him.

  "It's all right," he said. "I'm not going to do anything." But I could, always remember that, Matt. "Still, you'll have to be more security conscious from now on. And, of course, you must stop bringing Ms. Morgan into the lab. It might even be best if you stopped seeing her."

  "We're not—"

  "I know, just friends. Don't imagine there is much about these projects I don't know. I could show you pictures of you lunching at the tar pits."

  Matt had assumed he was usually on camera while at work. That he might be spied on during his private hours had not occurred to him.

  Howard smiled again.

  "Yes, I knew when you first brought her in here."

  "I thought you didn't mind."

  "If you had left it there, I might have ignored it. But you continue to discuss your theories with her. Why not print out a copy of all your work here and give it to her?" Howard smiled again. "As it happens, it's not going to be a problem. We're moving the mammoth operation to a ranch near Paso Robles. I think the elephants will be happier, and I know Susan will. She's never stopped complaining about the L.A. traffic."

  He turned on his heel and left. "WHERE is Paso Robles, anyway?" Susan asked that night.

  They were in the large, airy Venice apartment Howard had rented for Susan during her work in southern California. It was the first time Matt had been there, though he had dreamed of visiting under different circumstances. Now he was in a black depression.

  "If you don't want to move, you could threaten to quit," he suggested.

  "I can't threaten him with anything. In fact, I'm hoping he won't fire me. I'd be easy enough to replace. Not like you."

  Matt snorted. "If only Howard knew how little of the special talents he hired me for have come in handy so far. Any competent engineer could have done what I've done. In fact, my engineering team has been responsible for what progress we've made so far."

  "Yeah, but that's all been preparation, right? Step one. Now you've got the new machines assembled, you can really get to work... right?"

  "That's the theory. I only wish I knew what step two is." He hesitated, but was helpless to stop himself. "You could quit."

  "I mean to see this through to the end," she said, raising her voice.

  "Of course you do. I didn't mean it, I... well, yes, I meant it, but I can see now it wouldn't work. I mean, you're dedicated to your work, and all...."

  "Matt, I like you," she said, and touched him lightly on the cheek. "I wish I could go on seeing you. But understand this. Unless Howard cans me, I intend to be there when that mammoth is born."

  "How about weekends?" he asked. "I could fly up on weekends."

  "Sure, you could do that." She smiled. So maybe it wasn't the end of the world. His cell phone rang.

  "Yeah?" He listened for a moment. "I'll be right there." He hung up, and looked at Susan. "That was Ramon, the night guard," he said. "There's been a break-in at the laboratory."

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

  In little Fuzzy's world, there were not many creatures that went around on two legs. There were birds. There was the giant ground sloth, which sometimes lumbered around on two legs. And there was a troublesome species that went around on two legs all the time. They looked very much like us. They were humans. But who were these people? Were they Indians? Well, they had their own name for themselves, but we don't know what it was, since they didn't have a written language. They were the ancestors of the tribes who would later live in the area and call themselves names like Chumash, Gabrieleno, Serrano, Luiseno, and Cahuilla. They had crossed over a land bridge that used to exist during the Ice Ages between the places we would later call Siberia and Alaska. Scientists call this land bridge Beringia.

  One day the herd was munching its way through a big field full of tender green grass and a few scattered, twisted oak trees when suddenly the ground collapsed beneath the feet of Big Mama's younger sister!

  Younger Sister trumpeted her alarm, and the rest of the herd came running!

  At the same time small, almost hairless creatures began dropping from the trees. They had been hiding in the branches, upwind from the trap they had dug and covered with branches and grass, so the herd would not smell them! They wore the skins of dead animals. They walked on their hind legs, like birds. And they were shouting, making an awful racket, and throwing sticks and rocks!

  Fuzzy hurried to Temba's side and cowered there, barely daring to peek around his mother's thick, tree-trunk leg. Some of his aunts herded all the younger mammoths around Fuzzy and Temba and then made a wall of mammoth flesh around them. They bellowed at the chattering two-legs!

  Meanwhile, Big Mama and four or five others charged at the two-legs, who quickly turned and scattered and ran away. Big Mama could not chase them all, but she caught one with one of her huge tusks and threw him into the air! When the two-leg fell to the ground again he didn't move. Big Mama trod him into the dirt. The other two-legs retreated to a nearby hilltop and stayed there. They watched the herd.

  When things had calmed down the others went to help Younger Sister, who was still struggling in the pit. It was a very nasty thing. It was not very deep, but the Clovis hunters had sharpened tree limbs and set them into the ground at the bottom of it.

  Younger Sister had fallen on several of the sharp points. She was struggling, and crying out in pain, and Fuzzy was frightened to see it and hear it. After a while Younger Sister struggled out of the pit. She had several deep wounds on her legs and her belly, and one sharp branch had broken off in her side.

  On the hilltop, the two-legs settled in to wait.

  14 THE man Susan knew as the Martyr was not what you'd call a man of action.

  The leader of the duet of pickets at Howard Christian's warehouse of sin was the man in the aluminum lawn chair, the one Susan knew as Droopy. Though these days he looked about as peripatetic as the average barnacle, in his younger days Droopy had been a pistol. He had spent part of his youth in the merchant marine, and part in the pen. He drank a lot and fought a lot, and on his fortieth birthday he found God and devoted himself to God's work with the same energy he formerly brought to a fistfight. In fact, God's work in those days often did involve a fistfight. Many a depraved abortionist had spent a lot of money at the dentist's office after a run-in with Droopy... and Droopy spent many more nights in jail as a result.

  But now the bones of his spine had turned into something as light and hole-ridden as pumice, with the tensile strength of a stick of chalk. His chin practically sat on his chest, and when he turned his head he could hear sounds that more properly should come from a mill making stone-ground wheat than from a human body. All he was good for
now was to sit day after day in his lawn chair, the base of a big picket sign jammed between his legs, and hold the sign where passersby could read it.

  But Droopy, though a God-fearing man, wasn't big on Hail Marys. As he sat there, and as he had sat over the last five years at many another site of Satan's work, he planned. He plotted. He tried to think of ways to do God's work that would get more attention than sitting there holding a sign rising from his crotch like his pecker used to but hadn't in over twenty years now.

  To make any of his plans work, he had to have an accomplice, as his physical condition limited the amount of mayhem he could work against Satan's tools. The Martyr was useless, nothing but a pious pissant, in Droopy's estimation. But every time he had tried to enlist others into his schemes they had turned him down. That was probably because they were pretty stupid plans, on the order of kidnapping the children of abortion butchers and keeping them until the "doctor" swore never to kill an unborn child again.

  But sitting outside Mr. Multibillionaire Tool-of-Satan Howard Christian's house of ungodly horrors day after day, he had decided he had to do something. This gene-tampering business was almost as bad as abortion. It had to be stopped.

  And this time he had a plan—and an ally, known only as Python. He was a member of the Action Wing of the Soldiers of the Animal Kingdom. SAK was antifur, antimeat, and antivivisection. They specialized in actions like the liberation of lab animals, arson attacks on the property of circuses and rodeos, and even the bombing of butcher shops. They went so far as to oppose horseback riding and the keeping of pets—which they called slaves—of any kind.

  Their common ground was cloning, which Python and SAK saw as just one more way to abuse our animal brothers. And their meeting ground was the Internet.

  While the Martyr had learned only enough computer skills to access the rich lode of Bible discussions to be found online, Droopy had taken to cyberspace instantly. On the Net, he was a strong, young, active man again. In person it was easy to discount the views of a tired old fart who could no longer raise his voice above a hoarse rattle. In antiabortion chat rooms and newsgroups, he was Swordofthelord, a powerful and well-respected voice in the movement. He met Python on an anticloning message board, they corresponded for a time, and Droopy got the impression of a young man who wasn't too worried someone might get hurt. Droopy had always felt that way. If you didn't hurt them, why would they pay attention to you?