Mammoth

by John Varley

  "How are you doing over there?" she called to Matt.

  He glanced up, and shrugged.

  "I've got a good program roughed out for the computer to run. But I'm flying blind. Give me another few minutes."

  She went back to her list.

  The ax would be handy for cutting firewood, if they needed heat. As far as building a shelter, she thought staying in the warehouse would be the best idea, unless water was too far away.

  There had not been a vehicle within range of whatever force had taken them through time. She thought a mid-sized SUV would be able to handle most of the primeval terrain of Los Angeles. Hell, with the machines Howard had installed in Matt's lab, he could probably build an SUV, given time. She hoped they wouldn't have that much time.

  She looked across the room to the door to the giant refrigerator. She wondered if she should add that to her list: FOOD: TEN TONS OF MAMMOTH MEAT. In a few days it would be thawed and rotting.

  She couldn't stand it anymore, so she got up and stood behind Matt. He had the case open, and was carefully pushing the hypercube here and there, in different combinations. Nothing was happening, nothing at all. She got the impression he could keep at it for hours, maybe days.

  "What do you say we get moving?" she said.

  He looked up at her, and closed the case. "You're right. Let's go."

  LEARNING to get on the back of an elephant wasn't as easy as Susan had hinted. He had stepped on Queenie's trunk, as instructed, and then felt she was going to toss him right over her back, the ride upward was so swift, his weight so negligible to the giant animal. He ended up sprawled across the elephant's head, which couldn't have been too comfortable for her, but she displayed endless patience as Susan grabbed his arm and helped him get seated behind her. Then, off they went, at the head of a row of pregnant pachyderms that would have made P. T. Barnum proud. The view was spectacular, and the ride wasn't too uncomfortable. He already preferred it to his one ride on a horse.

  "This is no good," Susan said, giving Queenie the touch command that made her stop. "We're going to have to walk."

  "And I was having such a good time. Why not ride?"

  "Too many reasons. These are all former circus elephants, but I didn't train them, and they're all rusty. Queenie is responding to most of my commands, but she's slow, I think she's forgotten some. And she's edgy."

  It was a new environment, and he imagined it was full of new and exciting and probably disturbing smells. He had noticed all the elephants were raising their trunks frequently. It stood to reason that with ten feet of nose, they smelled things he couldn't even imagine. What if something scared her?

  "You've convinced me," he said.

  So they got down, and Matt quickly found the elephants set a pace a lot quicker than he had realized. So high off the ground, it didn't seem so fast.

  Susan walked alongside Queenie, guiding the great beast with touches of a wooden broom handle, trying to slow her down. But the other elephants weren't having any of it.

  "I was hoping they'd accept her as the herd leader," Susan told him. "She's the oldest. But Queenie has never been dominant. They won't follow her."

  "So who's the leader of the pack?" Matt asked, already starting to pant from the pace the

  elephants were setting.

  "That would be Becky, the one with the notch in her left ear."

  "Why not go to Becky, slow her down?"

  "Becky doesn't like me. We never hit it off."

  She tried to slow Becky, but soon the great gray moving wall of flesh had had enough, and

  ignored further commands. She set her own pace, which was too fast for the humans to keep up with.

  "They're getting away," Matt observed, bent over trying to catch his breath.

  "Probably for the best."

  "You think so?"

  Susan shrugged, but he could see she was upset. "Matt, they had to go free sooner or later. I can't feed them, I can't water them. They'll have to fend for themselves. Which shouldn't be hard; this land is full of things they can eat, so long as they find water."

  She pointed to the retreating tails of her former charges. A fleet of trucks might have just passed, tearing up shrubs, breaking branches off trees, leaving deep indentations in the soil. Tracking a herd of elephants didn't require the services of Tonto.

  "I'm pretty sure they're on the scent of it. All we need to do is follow, and hope it's not a three-day trip."

  So they set off at a comfortable walking pace. Soon the elephants disappeared over a rise, and when they got to the top of it, the herd was nowhere to be seen.

  THEY stopped several hills later and sat down to eat a few bags of peanuts and candy bars and wash it down with cans of warm root beer. Susan kept watch for predators while Matt opened the time machine once again to glare uselessly at the gleaming, frozen innards. There had been no change. He shut it again in disgust.

  Susan looked around at the empty landscape. So far they hadn't seen so much as a prehistoric bunny rabbit, but any one of those clumps of trees could conceal a whole herd of saber-toothed cats. Did cats come in herds? Prides? She vaguely remembered reading of a North American lion, which had been bigger than the saber-tooths. Her fingers worked nervously on the stock of the elephant gun. Did the big cats hide in trees and jump down on their prey? Or did they wait in ambush on the ground, or stalk and pounce? Did they hunt at night, or during the day? She didn't know, and didn't think even an archaeologist could have told her. But she'd have given a lot to have one around just then.

  "You know, Matt, I could really use some good news here."

  He looked up at her. "The red light flickered a while ago."

  "It did? Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I don't know what it means. I'm hoping it's detecting something. Some fluctuation in space-time. If the green light comes on, maybe it will work again."

  "How do we make it come on?"

  "Trial and error, I guess. That's the best I can say. Keep moving."

  Susan glanced at the sun, then to the west. She gazed longingly in that direction, then back to the elephant trail, which still led steadfastly eastward. She looked at Matt helplessly, and shrugged.

  "First things first," he agreed. "Find a water supply before we start to get thirsty. It made sense this morning, and it still makes sense."

  NEITHER of them had a great picture of Los Angeles in their heads. As new arrivals who had spent most of their time working, they knew the neighborhoods where they had lived and worked, and some other places where people of good income went to shop and dine: Santa Monica, Westwood, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Venice. They had made a few excursions into Valley communities. But except for a trip or two to the airport neither of them had ever driven as far south as Century Boulevard, and in fact had seldom been south of Venice. In the same way, Western Avenue was the eastern limit of their known territory. Neither had ever set foot in downtown Los Angeles, though they knew where it was, had seen its skyscrapers in the distance.

  Matt wasn't sure how much good it would have done them, considering that the things an urban dweller would note about his surroundings would be streets and buildings, all of which were now gone... that is, none of which were here yet... but he didn't see how it could have hurt. Twelve thousand years wasn't enough to have changed the large features of the area. No new mountains had been built in that time, and the canyons would be only slightly less eroded now than they had been in the twenty-first century. The Santa Monica Mountains had been then, and were now, visible from anywhere in the basin, and were basically unchanged as to their gross outlines. Yet even there, his memory was not much help. You looked at those mountains, and what you noticed was the Hollywood sign, and thus knew your position roughly. With the sign gone, with all roads and houses gone, the Hollywood Hills were fairly nondescript. He could see several low points. Was that one where Laurel Canyon would be, or was it Coldwater Canyon? Without knowing where such prominent features of the terrain were, how could he hope
to venture a guess as to their present position?

  And did it really matter?

  He knew there was something over to the east called the Los Angeles River, but he seemed to recall it was something of a joke. In the twenty-first century it was a wide, flat, concrete ditch, a favorite of Hollywood film directors for staging car chases, dry most of the year except for a trickle down the middle.

  Los Angeles was a desert then, and it looked like a desert now. The shallow arroyos they had crossed were all bone dry. That might be seasonal. In some thousands of years a man named Mulholland would dig a long series of aquaducts and L.A. would bloom with imported palm trees and tropical flowers, but right now the dominant vegetation was sagebrush and scrawny live oaks.

  He didn't know how far they had come. He had tried counting steps, and quickly lost count as his mind drifted to other things. Maybe he could estimate the length of their journey by time... but how many miles could a man walk in an hour? He had only a vague idea of their speed.

  And to make it even more hopeless, the path chosen by the elephants was far from a beeline. Susan seemed to think they were on the scent of water, but if they were, the scent must be coming from several directions, maybe shifting with the wind. They had meandered north for a while, then turned back east, then north again, then east. He hoped they knew what they were doing. ONE good thing: though the trail was growing colder as they fell farther behind, there was little danger of it vanishing overnight, or even over the next two or three days. And Susan said the elephants would surely stop to browse, whether they found water or not. He was wrapped up in thoughts like that when he almost ran into the giant yellow bear.

  He stopped in his tracks and Susan ran into him.

  "What's the..." Then she got a look at it. It must have been twenty feet tall. Susan whispered

  something.

  "What?" Matt whispered back.

  "Sloth. Giant ground sloth."

  "Sloth? Like those things that hang in trees? You gotta be—"

  "Related," she hissed. "Be quiet. I don't think it sees us."

  The thing was turning, ponderously. Way, way up there was a head—it had to be a head, it was at the end of a neck like a tree trunk—that was comically small for its gargantuan body. But small is a relative thing. Matt figured the tree branch it held in its jaws was about the size of his thigh, and it didn't look very big there.

  About the time he had that thought, the creature bit through the branch like a toothpick, and spit out the remains. It was facing them now, looking down with big, soft brown eyes that held no fear.

  "Let's back away," Susan suggested, in a whisper.

  "Good idea."

  They began a slow retreat, and the sloth watched them. Then it took a step in their direction.

  "Should we run?" Matt asked.

  "Best not to, unless we have to," Susan decided. "I figure he could catch us if he wanted to."

  The animal took another step, then another... and Matt realized that it was running toward them. Its huge size made the movements seem slow, but each stride was enormous, and it was suddenly a lot closer to them.

  "Run!" Susan hissed. Matt didn't need any prodding. He took half a dozen quick backward steps, afraid to turn away, then he did turn, and ran as fast as he had ever run in his life. Behind him he heard the sloth crashing through brush, and the sound of Susan's footsteps. Wait a minute. Guys didn't run ahead of girls, that just wasn't done. He half turned as he ran, and Susan nearly ran over him. He was so startled that he tripped over his own feet and hit the ground, hard.

  "You okay?"

  "Skinned my elbow," he said. "Nothing serious."

  They watched the sloth, who seemed to have completely lost interest in them.

  "Just scaring us off, I guess," Susan said. "It's so big I'll bet it doesn't have any predators, at least

  not when it's full-grown."

  "Looks like it could pretty well crush a saber-tooth."

  "No kidding. Did you see the size of the claws on that thing?"

  "Three on each hand. Long as my arm."

  "He's pretty well tearing up that tree."

  They watched, from a good distance, as the giant sloth stripped leaves and bark from a tree.

  "Wonder why he came after us?" Matt asked.

  "Maybe it's a female, maybe there's a cub nearby."

  IN the next two hours they encountered a lot of wildlife, though none as dramatically. Several times they saw what looked to be ordinary jackrabbits darting in and out of bushes. Once a wolf regarded them for a while from a distance of a hundred yards, then trotted off. Twice they encountered small herds of deer. They looked like ordinary deer to Matt. He supposed a man who had spent a lot of time with deer in the crosshairs of his rifle might have spotted differences in these animals and modern ones.

  He had never hunted. He might have to learn. Could he figure out how to make a useful bow and arrows? A spear? Could he learn to throw it hard and far enough to bring down a swift, alert deer? He suspected he could get mighty hungry while acquiring that skill. Maybe traps would be better. How did one make a rabbit trap?

  Stop it, he told himself. Keep a positive attitude. You will figure out how the machine works. We will get out of here. THE sun was still above the horizon when Susan looked around and said this would be a good place to stop. Matt didn't like it.

  "You'd be surprised how quickly that will go away," she said. "There's things we need to do, and it's best to be familiar with the immediate area before it gets dark. We need every advantage we can get if there are night-hunting predators around."

  Matt still didn't look convinced, so she added, "Do you really want to gather firewood in the dark with saber-tooths prowling around?"

  There was plenty of wood lying around, both dead branches blown down by the wind and a couple trees that had been devastated by large herbivores, probably sloths or mammoths. They worked at it for half an hour, and when they were done it was getting harder to see. They arranged a fire and lit it with the lighter they had found in a desk drawer. Soon it was crackling, and Susan's spirits soared with the sparks that leaped into the air. She looked at Matt, who was sweaty, soot-streaked, and grinning.

  "Fire is the basic unit of civilization," he said.

  "I never thought of it that way... but you may be right."

  "It's the first thing that really set us off from other animals," Matt said. "And it still does. Other animals have languages, other animals use tools. We're still the only animal that manipulates energy."

  Susan had felt something like that before, sitting around a campfire. Out in the woods, just you and your family or some other Girl Scouts... you realized that the bad things feared the light, that as long as you were in the light, you were okay. If the fire went out, if the darkness closed in, that was when you were in trouble.

  Matt found a few long branches and arranged them with one end in the fire and the other sticking out where they could reach them.

  "If we see anything move out there," he said, "grab one of these and throw it toward the movement. Like a torch."

  "Good idea."

  They ate some of their remaining fruit and a candy bar each.

  "Too bad we don't have some—"

  "I wish we had some—"

  "—hot dogs!" they finished together, and laughed longer than the coincidence really warranted. When they were through with their meager dinner they sat close together and stared into the fire. Susan finished her drink and was about to toss the empty can into the fire, then she frowned at it. "Say we leave this back here in the past," she said.

  "Well, what if somebody finds it? Digs it up, back in the future."

  "They'd be mighty puzzled, wouldn't they."

  "I mean... would it cause a paradox, or something?"

  "I've always operated on the assumption that there are no real paradoxes."

  "I don't get your meaning."

  "I mean 'real-world' paradoxes. Sure, they can exist in math, and in logic
. The human mind can

  propose a paradox, but if you examine it you'll find it's either a semantic problem or a hypothetical physical problem that actually doesn't exist in the real world."

  "Help me out here."

  "Okay. Take a silly paradox, the one Gilbert and Sullivan described in Pirates of Penzance. Frederick was apprenticed to the Pirate King until his twenty-first birthday, not his twenty-first year. But he was born in a leap year, on the twenty-ninth of February. Therefore, though he was twenty-one years old, he had only had five birthdays. You see, the paradox only arises because of the way the contract was worded."

  "Got it."

  "Then there's another classic one, the grandfather paradox. You build a time machine, go into the past, and kill your grandfather when he's a young boy. So your father is never born, and you are

  never born..." He waited.

  "So you never built a time machine and never traveled in time and never killed your grandfather."

  "Exactly."

  "But... that is a paradox. Isn't it?"

  "It would be, if time travel was possible. Up to now, I would have sworn it wasn't possible, so I

  didn't spend a lot of time worrying about temporal paradoxes."

  "Sounds like you'd better reorder your priorities."

  "Sounds like."

  They were silent for a long time, listening to the crackling of the fire. Susan tried not to look at it, not wanting to destroy her night vision. Once she thought she saw a movement at the edge of their little clearing and she tossed a flaming brand at it. Nothing happened, and the torch soon burned itself out. "So," Matt said at last. "You know any good ghost stories?"

  "Matt," she said quietly at one point. "We may never get out of here, right?"

  He looked at her a long time, trying to find it in himself to give her a reassuring lie. He knew he couldn't do it, so he just shook his head. She scooted closer to him and rested her head on his shoulder. They hadn't found anything like real bedding in their search of the warehouse. The best they could do were several plastic tarps that had been used for various things. They were sitting on one, and each of them had one to wrap up in. They weren't very thick, and he could feel her warmth against him.