Mammoth

by John Varley

  They held their fire as the herd reached the prostrate form of Big Mama, but the animals paused only long enough to snuffle at the sleeping mammoth with their trunks. The mammoths could tell from her smell that she was not dead, and they could see the rise and fall of her massive chest, and they might have wondered why she had picked this moment, of all moments, to lie down and snooze, but they didn't linger on the question. What was clear was that something was horribly wrong. The beta female, now the de facto herd leader, made her second command decision, raising her trunk and bellowing, a terrible declaration of frustration and rage that reached right down to the monkey part of the human brain to make every hair on the body stand up. Instantly the whole herd wheeled and charged at the line of police cars stretching across the broad street.

  The cops held their positions, and most held their fire, but they couldn't hold it forever. A shot rang out, then another, and the first burst from an automatic rifle set off a fusillade that stopped the mammoths in their tracks.

  The bullets from the handguns did little more than irritate the beasts, but the rifles did real damage. One cow fell to her knees, then staggered up, her head streaming blood. The firing continued, and the charge was stopped. The herd wheeled and took off rapidly in the opposite direction, west on Wilshire.

  As many police and soldiers have learned when in a firefight, once you have started firing your weapon it can be very hard to stop until it is time to reload. The hail of lead continued as the mammoths ran away from the police line. Now they were being hit from behind.

  In all times and in all things there was one prime instinctive directive all mammoths lived by: The Herd sticks together. But now herd civilization collapsed, just as human civilization did when a hundred people tried to escape a burning building through a single door. The herd ceased to exist, they no longer pressed together as they ran, but each ran blindly in whatever direction looked best to her overloaded senses. The steel and glass canyon of Wilshire Boulevard channeled them, but some were in the middle of the street, some on the sidewalks, and the one who had gone to her knees was stumbling, bewildered, over rows of parked cars, crushing hoods and trunks.

  They went three blocks in a very short time, and found themselves facing another row of police cars, bumper to bumper across the road. This time the order to fire was given quickly, and once more the mammoths came to a halt, not as a group this time, but one by one as the bullets tore into their thick hide. One went down, fell on her side, and though she was breathing, she did not get up. None of the other mammoths came to her, they were far beyond noticing a fallen comrade now. The survivors wheeled once more and headed east. The street was spotted with dark puddles of blood.

  "NO!" Susan shouted. "Stop shooting!" Matt had to grab her and pull her back against the partially destroyed fence surrounding the tar pit, then force her to the ground as bullets whizzed through the air all around them. They huddled on the ground and watched as the herd fell apart, broke against the western line of cops, turned, and came back toward the original killing ground. One was down, and a second seemed to have injured herself badly, tearing a foreleg open on a jagged piece of metal from a Toyota Land Cruiser she had stomped almost flat.

  "Here they come again," Matt said. "Maybe we should get behind the fence here. It won't stop them, but it might channel them away from us."

  Susan could only sob as Matt pulled her to her feet and through the hole in the fence, where they crouched a little down the slight slope and watched the slaughter continue.

  HOWARD watched with increasing horror as the scene unfolded before his satellite-aided eyes. The big green blobs in the infrared cameras charged west, then east, then west again. One, then two of them ceased to move.

  His frustration was growing. Because of the location of the tar pits, even with his situation high in the Resurrection Tower to the south of the unfolding action, he had doubted he would be able to get a look with the telescope in the tower. He could see things happening in the nearby mountains, see into windows on the sides of buildings that faced him, and the roofs of almost any building within fifteen miles, but a two- or three-story building two miles away always blocked his view of the street beyond it. His recollection of the La Brea Tar Pits area was that such buildings stood between him and the disaster unfolding on Wilshire.

  But he called up a map of Los Angeles and was surprised to see he might almost have a clear sightline right down Curson Avenue. He might be able to see the herd as they passed that street, for a few seconds.

  Bringing the telescope on line, he quickly aimed it north, then aligned it with Curson Avenue in time to see the remainder of the herd, now caught in a murderous crossfire from both ends of Wilshire, turn one by one and thunder in his direction, big as life though almost three miles away. He thought he could see the blood streaming off their heads as they ran. He even fancied he could see the terror in their eyes.

  One thing he was sure of. He could see the thin line of police cars, three of them set across Curson, not quite bumper to bumper, with only six officers standing behind them. And not quite a block beyond them, so that Howard was looking over their heads, was a single yellow strip of police tape tied to lampposts, holding back a crowd of several hundred people who had come out of their houses in the residential neighborhood, probably drawn by the sound of gunfire.

  With a flash of heat on his face, Howard realized... This is it. This is my superhero moment.

  Howard had made many important decisions in his life, critical decisions, even momentous decisions. But every once in a while—and it was by no means certain that a particular person would ever find himself in this situation—you might find yourself looking at something that you knew must be decided in the next two or three seconds, and that the lives of people you could see would be affected, not financially, but in the saving or losing of life itself. A situation where a mistake would be expressed in the spilling of innocent blood, and where proper conduct would save that life. Cops and firemen and medical people faced these situations as part of their jobs. Superheroes faced these life-or-death choices two or three times in every issue. And they acted.

  Howard acted.

  The narrower street had funneled the individual mammoths back into something resembling a herd. They were no more than fifty feet from the first fleeing onlookers. Beyond that there was nothing to stop them all the way to San Vicente Boulevard, where traffic was still flowing normally. If they weren't stopped now, they might rampage for a long time through residential neighborhoods before the LAPD could corner them and bring them to their inevitable end.

  That they were doomed seemed beyond argument. So, with a sick feeling in his stomach, Howard Christian brought the crosshairs to bear on the bloodied head of the lead mammoth, and squeezed the trigger.

  Down in the bottommost basement of the Resurrection Tower, behind a vault door monitored by a retinal scanner that would recognize and admit only three people in the world, sat the Beam of Death. It wasn't as big as you'd expect it to be, no larger than a standard outdoor garbage can, though the other devices needed to charge it and operate it filled a fair-sized room. Massive cables attached it to the fusion power plant located on the level just above, and when Howard squeezed the trigger electricity flowed through these cables and pumped energy into the laser. For an instant, all the lights of the Resurrection Tower, shining opulently through the southern California night as they always did, dimmed. The energy that had been accumulating leaped forth, straight up through a vacuum pipe running through the center of the building, hit a moveable mirror just behind the eye of the Eagle of Vigilance, and burst forward into the air. The beam spread only slightly in the nanosecond it took to travel from the tower to Curson Avenue, losing no more than 2 percent of its power. Another 1 percent was lost to resistance of the molecules in the air, and for a second there was a corridor of charged particles and steam that might have been visible in the daytime, but which quickly dispersed. Someone below might have heard a faint hiss o
f the beam's passage, but in most places traffic noise was much louder. Other than that, the Beam of Death was virtually undetectable. There was no blazing streak of red or green or violet light, no Hollywood sizzle or zap or rolling thunder of special-effect sound. Just that little hiss and a momentary tunnel of fog. The effect when the beam hit the first mammoth was spectacular enough to make up for all that.

  As the searchlight beam from the helicopter played over the street in front of the tar pits, officers began to emerge from behind their vehicles, shaken but still very much pumped. Many of them waved to the helicopter pilot, directing him to the street where the mammoths had turned. The blinding pool of light swung down Curson, and the men and women in blue followed, at a run.

  WHEN the shooting stopped, Matt and Susan clambered up the slope from the edge of the tar pool and saw the police heading down Curson, right in front of them.

  "Come on!" Susan shouted, and started running down the street.

  "What are we going to do?" Matt asked when he caught up with her.

  "Stop them," she said.

  "Stop..." He supposed asking her how was not the sort of thing a supportive soul mate should do, but he couldn't help wondering. He wasn't sure Susan meant to stop the mammoths or the police, or both, and wasn't sure which would be the easier task, but he had to admire her flat-out, no-questions-asked, no-prisoners-taken commitment.

  And looking ahead, he began to wonder if stopping the police would even be a good idea, assuming they could do it, because just beyond them the battered and bloodied herd had just swept aside the thin wall of police cars on the narrow side street and were within a few feet of the half-dozen spectators too slow, stunned, or stupid to move out of the way. He saw a young mother holding a crying child, rooted to the spot, and an old man clinging to his aluminum walker. It looked to Matt like there was nothing to stop or even slow down the thundering herd.

  That was when the first mammoth exploded. There was no big bang and no flames. The massive head simply came apart in a shower of blood and meat and bone, and the ten-ton pachyderm hurtling along at fifteen or twenty miles per hour stopped dead and was shoved backward ten feet as if by a giant hand, tumbling onto its back and into the mammoth following it. A stream of blood fountained from the corpse like a high-pressure hose into the face of the second mammoth, which fell over the body, bellowing in terror. Matt thought he could hear a bone snap in the animal's foreleg, but it was struggling to its feet when it, too, blew up. This time Matt heard a sound he later described as a giant hammer hitting a slab of meat on a butcher's block, and huge chunks of the mammoth's body were flying through the air. The air was thick with the smell of burning meat. The animal was almost cut in half, dead before it hit the ground. The cops had stopped running and simply stood there, weapons pointing at the ground, almost as stunned as the mammoths. Matt and Susan came to a stop a few yards behind the police, breathing hard.

  "I have no idea." Then he looked down the street, past the traffic at the end, beyond the low buildings, and saw the bright pinnacle of the Resurrection Tower looming through the night. The eyes of the gigantic eagle were looking right at him, and they glowed with bright menace.

  Things began sliding into place in Matt's mind, like little marbles sliding around in their metal racks.

  HOWARD fired a third time, then a fourth, and now there was only one mammoth left standing. The animal didn't even try to move. All the fight, even all the fear seemed to have gone out of her. Too overloaded with impossible sights and sounds, standing in the middle of the carnage that had been her herd, the only home she had ever known, she simply gave up. Blood seeped from dozens of bullet wounds.

  The young woman with her child had finally managed to get moving and was nowhere to be seen. There was no one left within fifty feet of the lone surviving mammoth, in fact, but the old man standing with his walker, looking at least as stunned as the mammoth. He could almost have reached out and touched her.

  Then at the bottom of his screen Howard saw two bulky men in black clothing and helmets running north on Curson, their backs to him. They were the first of the special weapons teams to arrive, in full combat gear and bringing something heavy enough that they had to carry it between them. They took a position a hundred feet away and set the weapon down on a tripod. One of the men squatted behind it.

  The old man had gotten maybe ten feet away from the mammoth when she began to follow him. She had never been the alpha, beta, or even gamma cow in the herd, she had been following all her life and now, in her extremity, her instinct took over.

  There was a flash of light, and Howard realized the special weapons team had fired a warning shot over the cow's head.

  "No, don't shoot," Howard muttered through clenched teeth.

  But they did. Howard saw fingers of orange light streak from the barrel of the machine gun—

  —AND Matt saw a line of big holes stitch themselves across the last mammoth's side and, incredibly, punch out the other. The noise of the gun was stunning. Susan's fingers tightened on his biceps and her fingernails dug in hard enough to draw blood, but he hardly felt it. The mammoth must have been dead before her knees even touched the pavement. She tottered like that for a moment, then fell onto her side.

  He liked animals; he would never have bought the circus if he hadn't.

  Plus, the value of a herd of mammoths was almost beyond calculation.

  Plus... imagine the liability problems if this incident could somehow be traced back to him.

  But that last one, that poor stunned animal could have been stopped, could have been contained, captured, caged, possibly even patched up and trained. If it was permanently maddened from this trauma, it would be a gold mine even in a zoo setting. But trained, performing...

  In his mind's eye he saw the lights dim in the big top, heard the drum roll, heard the dramatic voice of the ringmaster, his voice echoing over the public address:

  "And now, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages... Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus... a Howard Christian Company... the Greatest Show On Earth for over a century... proudly presents... after an absence from planet Earth of over ten... thousand... years!... The Columbian Mammoth!" It was an announcement he had been dreaming of for over a decade, and now not only did he not have living mammoths from the past, all his most promising hybrids had vanished to wherever his building, his host-mother elephants, and two of his employees had gone. Howard didn't know where that was, but it was starting to look like it was the Pleistocene Era.

  God damn them, trigger-happy cops.

  He took a last look at the scene of slaughter, the remains of what could have been the biggest circus attraction the world had ever seen, now just heaps of steaming meat with a baffled old man sitting on his ass on the asphalt beside his walker right in the middle of it, and reached for his phone to dial Warburton. Howard sensed there was going to be a lot of coverage of this incident, inquiries, commissions, press snooping around, private "advocates" of one stripe or another, most of them looking for somebody to sue for damages, and he needed to alert his senior fixer to get cracking on containment, at whatever cost. Then he spotted Matthew Wright standing there on the street behind the line of police.

  Matt Wright, Doctor Matthew Wright, with his 1600 SATs, his IQ off the end of the charts, Matt Wright who was able to do without apparent effort things that Howard Christian had worked his ass off all his life to achieve. Matt goddamn Wright who had the temerity, the gall to accuse Howard of...

  He zoomed in on Matt's face. It was a much more battered face than it had been the last time Howard saw it. Blood and dirt were smeared across it in about equal measure. His clothes were tattered, his hair was filthy. Howard nudged the controls of the telescopic sight and now, in addition to dirt and a smear of blood, crosshairs appeared on Dr. Wright's forehead. Howard felt his trigger finger twitch.

  For a moment, Matt was looking right into Howard's eyes, as if daring him to shoot. He could almost feel the gigawatts o
f power gathered in the basement, coiled like a snake, ready to lash out at the speed of light with the application of only a few ounces of pressure from Howard's finger.

  He took a deep breath, and removed his hand from the trigger. At almost the same moment, Matt turned and, pulling on Susan's hand, hurried away down Curson Avenue, directly away from Howard, almost as if he sensed the danger.

  "Warburton!" Howard shouted into his microphone. "Warburton, get up here, you son of a bitch! I need you!"

  "SUSAN," Matt said, "I'm going to have to go away for a while."

  They had returned to the corner of Curson and Wilshire, walking at first, then running, Matt having to drag Susan. When they reached the sidewalk in front of the tar pit Matt stopped and looked around. It was amazing, the amount of damage done. All the trees in the median strip had been knocked down. Cars had been trampled. Shattered glass glittered in the remaining streetlights. There was the smell of spilled gasoline and gun smoke.

  It took a while for Matt's statement to penetrate through the fog of horror in Susan's mind. Finally she looked at him and frowned.

  "Go away? Where?"

  "I don't know. There are some things I have to work out. It may take... a while. I'm not sure how long."

  "But how will I—"

  "I can't say any more now, there isn't time. I'll try to contact you as soon as possible. Until then... it's very important. I hope you'll just trust me for now."

  "I trust you, Matt, but—"

  "I'm sorry, Susan, I'm truly sorry. But there's no time. I love you." There was no time, no time at all, and he pulled her close to him and kissed her fiercely, then turned and ran, not daring to look back.