Mammoth

by John Varley

  dangerous as time travel in the first place?"

  "Satisfying your scientific curiosity. I don't see anything wrong with that."

  "That's exactly what Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi and a few dozen other physicists

  were doing in the early 1940s."

  "So does that make the atomic bomb their fault?"

  "People will probably debate that forever. One thing I'm sure of, if they hadn't researched those

  questions, if they had opted out from fear of the consequences... somebody else would have found the same answers."

  "No question. It's the same with cloning research. We can try to keep it in control, but the answers will come."

  "Yes. I know it's foolish to worry too much about the effects of what you might discover. We'd stop discovering anything at all. Still..." He leaned back in his chair and sighed, wondering if he needed to get into this. But there wasn't much they could do until the sun came up, which could be hours yet. He went on. "When I was very young, I discovered science. I couldn't get enough of it. I read everything. I figured I'd continue doing that until I knew everything about everything. Chemistry, biology, physics, math, astronomy, you name it, it was all the same to me. In fact, I didn't see any distinction."

  "That's true. In many ways, there isn't any difference. You can't do biology without chemistry, you can't do astronomy without physics... and you can't do any of them without math. That's what I kept coming back to, after I realized there was too much knowledge for any one person to learn in a hundred lifetimes. So when I reached the point where I had to specialize, I asked people what I seemed to be the best at, and they all said math. Which was good, because that's what I thought, too.

  "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."

  "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.

  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.

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

  "I gue
ss 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.

  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.

  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.

  And then a very, very strange thing happened....

  3

  SUSAN was a list maker. While Matt made a last attempt to make the time machine work again, she sat down at her laptop and listed their assets:

  2 laptops

  1 tera-mainframe computer

  1 generator (diesel fuel for 4 days of operation)

  WATER: about 500 gallons in elephant tanks about 40 gallons in toilet tanks 97 soft drinks (Coke, 7-Up, root beer)

  CLOTHING: what we're wearing

  SHELTER: 1 large warehouse

  WEAPONS: 2 fire axes 8 fire extinguishers 1 tranquilizer gun 1 elephant gun

  TOOLS: 2 butane lighters

  3 boxes mechanic's tools

  1 box woodworking tools

  1 electron microscope

  1 mass spectrometer

  She supposed the laptops might be useful for something other than the list she was currently making, but she couldn't at the moment figure what that might be. As for the state-of-the-art computer Howard Christian had provided to Matt for analyzing the possible permutations of the time machine... Matt had told her it would take even that monster millions of years to make a dent in the problem. And, when the generator stopped working, the big computer would become nothing more than a very complex piece of junk. So would the generator itself, and everything inside the warehouse that ran on electricity... which was almost everything.

  The food and water situation could have been better, and it could have been worse. It was too bad there wasn't a commissary of some kind, or a lunch wagon parked on the grounds when the wormhole opened and swallowed them, but there wasn't. On the other hand, the snack and pop machines had only been there a few
weeks, and Susan had no idea why they had been installed. She'd never seen anyone buy anything from them, and she'd bet the coin boxes were empty or nearly so. It would stretch for some weeks, with care, though they'd surely get very tired of Pop-Tarts and tiny bags of potato chips.

  Every few minutes Susan had to stop herself from asking Matt how long he thought it would take to put the machine into reverse and step on the gas, floor the son of a bitch full-speed into the twenty-first century. If he had any idea, she knew he would have told her, and simply to ask the question was to invite the impossible answer, the answer she didn't think she could bear to hear: How long? It will be thousands of years before we, or our bones, reach the twenty-first century.

  Clothing could be a problem. They didn't know what time of year it was now. Who could even tell if summer would be hot or winter cold? The climate had changed a lot in thousands of years. Both of them were lightly dressed in what they had thrown on when Matt got the call. It seemed pleasant enough for now, but it had been chilly last night, Susan remembered. What if this was summer? What if the Los Angeles Basin got a lot of snow in December? What about tonight, for that matter? They must find water soon, and that meant that if the elephants didn't find some close by, they would likely be spending the night in the open, on the ground, and they didn't have so much as a blanket.

  More frightening than the idea of getting cold, though, was the idea of getting eaten. Susan had spent some time years ago camping out, but Matt had hardly ever slept outside of a building. Neither of them knew much survival lore. And there were sure to be things out there happy to make a meal of them. She looked at the big elephant gun lying there on the table, and almost wanted to laugh.

  Five years ago, an ill-treated elephant had run amok in Los Angeles. It killed three police officers and soaked up a ton of LAPD lead before a weapon powerful enough to kill it had been brought to the scene. The city council enacted a law requiring anyone keeping elephants to have such a weapon handy at all times. Susan had scoffed at the time, but dutifully took the thing—she had no idea of the maker or the caliber, except that it fired bullets that seemed almost as big as beer cans—to an indoor range and fired it... twice. The first time knocked her down and badly bruised her shoulder. The second shot was to prove to herself she could master it. She had, and never intended to fire it again.