Mammoth

by John Varley

  He looked over the chaos again, and knew this was the very picture of false economy.

  "The elephants are all okay," Susan was saying. Elephants? God, he'd forgotten all about them. He wondered if Susan had any inkling of just how far onto the back burner he had shoved the cloning project in favor of this incomprehensible mess trying to become a time machine. "Looks like they never got into that part of the building."

  "That's good," Howard said.

  "They came here because they think cloning is evil," Matt said, with a small smile. "What do you figure they made of all this?" Howard didn't reply. Matt sighed. "The damage isn't as bad as it looks. Give me another week, we can probably be right back where we were."

  "Keep at it, then. I'll have all the labor you need out here in the morning to get this cleaned up and sorted out."

  "It won't take much. I've got one unit assembled, that one over there, and it wasn't opened. As for the rest... might as well wait until the first unit fails before we start assembling the beta version." He stooped over and picked up a clear crystalline sphere from the floor. He tossed it to Howard, who caught it in one hand. "As for the rest, it's mostly just sorting."

  Howard's eyes met Matt's for a moment. Both of them knew the incident of the purloined marble would never be mentioned between them again, and that it would affect their relationship forever.

  "Do what you have to do," Howard said, turning away. "Call me when you're ready to switch it on."

  They watched him leave, slamming the door behind him. Susan looked around.

  "All that work...," she said. "I'm so sorry, Matt."

  "It's not a big deal. Lucky those idiots didn't let your herd loose. Imagine the mess that would have made. I'm going over to look at the alpha gadget. Looks like somebody whacked it with something."

  He went to the table where the alpha unit lay, went around it, and regarded it from the front for the first time.

  One of the little lights was on. It was the red one.

  "What does that mean?" Susan asked.

  "That's what I'd like to know."

  He ran his hands carefully over the case, which was cool and smooth to the touch, and now sported three dimples that looked familiar. If he connected the dots with a pen they would form a tall right triangle. As far as he could tell, the three dents were identical to the dents on the original unit recovered with the mammoth and the caveman, now safely stored away in some subterranean vault beneath the Resurrection Tower.

  "Is it working?" Susan asked. She stood close, which was probably the only thing that could have distracted him from the gadget at that moment.

  "There's a little chip inside, but I never programmed it for anything. Now it looks like it's programmed itself, enough to turn on this light, anyway."

  "That's weird."

  "That's way beyond weird and right into the occult. Let's take a look inside."

  He opened the catches and lifted the lid. Inside was a perfect cube, seven marbles on each edge... with one marble sticking out in the dead center of the upper surface. All of the 194 visible marbles were clear as tiny crystal balls. Susan had found a Maglite on the floor where Python had abandoned it as he fled; she turned the beam on the array, just three and a half inches on each side. It sparkled magnificently, and somehow, a little ominously. Something about it didn't look right. Something about it hurt her eyes, like a distorting mirror in a funhouse.

  "Can I have that?" Matt took the flashlight from Susan and ducked down, squinting as he shined the beam between the rows. He tentatively prodded the cube here and there. Nothing moved. It was securely attached to the bottom of the case, and the array of little crystal spheres resisted all his efforts to move them. He avoided, for the moment, the conspicuous single marble sitting on the top. He had the weird idea that it might be some sort of trap, that he was meant to press that marble, and that whoever had first designed and built this puzzle didn't have Matt Wright's best interests at heart.

  "Refraction?" Susan suggested.

  "I don't think the light could be scattered that much in such a short distance. Now, what I had assumed, looking at it, was that there would be... five cubed, one hundred and twenty-five more marbles inside, in orderly rows. That doesn't seem to be the case. So... there are more compact ways of arranging spheres, but if the ones in the center were packed like that, the ones here on the outside would reflect that crystalline structure if they were packed as solidly as they seem to be. I think they are packed in there very tightly indeed. And you know why I think so?"

  "It's way beyond me, Matt. You're the mathematician."

  "Not anymore. Now I'm the student. Because when I locked this box up and went home with you, there were two thousand, four hundred and one marbles in it, arranged in a stack ten high, twelve wide, and twenty long, with one orphan sticking out of the top. I think we can be pretty sure nobody opened the box to play a prank on us.

  "Now we've got a cube seven by seven by seven. That's three hundred forty-three."

  "So where are the..."

  "Two thousand fifty-seven." He looked back at the shining cube.

  "I think they're all still in that cube, in a multidimensional crystal structure. I think we're seeing just one side of an object folded through space."

  HOWARD was walking toward Kraylow with the intent of giving him instructions for the rest of the night, when the man's jaw dropped open in amazement. Howard frowned... and something like a big black snake flashed past him, not a foot from his right shoulder. Kraylow saw it coming and dived to his right. The snake hit the ground and popped and hissed for a moment. Howard realized it was a severed power line, now drooping from a pole directly in front of him. He turned around. The warehouse was gone.

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

  Elephants love to splash around in pools and mud. Mammoths were very much like elephants, and they loved to bathe, too. Fuzzy liked it so much that when he smelled a watering hole he got very excited, and wanted to dive in as soon as he could!

  Mammoth children were just like any other children. Sometimes they didn't think before they ran. And sometimes they ran off when their mother wasn't looking. That was when they could get into big trouble!

  Then he saw it, a big circle of trees with the shimmer of water in the middle! There was also the smell of mud baking in the sun. Fuzzy loved to roll in the mud! He started walking faster.

  About this time Temba noticed that little Fuzzy was nowhere to be seen. She turned in a circle, looking for him. She flapped her ears, listening for him, and lifted her trunk, trying to smell him.

  She caught his scent on the wind, and another scent that she remembered, a bad smell that meant death and suffering. She trumpeted loudly!

  Come back, little Fuzzy! her cries rang out.

  Then she called to the herd. Every ear turned to her at once! She was already moving, walking very fast toward the bad scent.

  Fuzzy had come to the pond. It was peaceful and quiet. Ducks were swimming on the water. Fuzzy stood for a moment at the top of a small muddy hill and looked at it.

  Maybe, just for a moment, he wondered if he should go back to his mother and tell her about the water and the whole herd could bathe in it.

  But the day was hot and many flies were buzzing around his head, and little Fuzzy hated that, like all elephants and mammoths. He wanted a nice cool coating of mud matted into his too-long fur to keep the bugs away. So he started down the slope, and soon he was slipping and sliding, feet out in front of him, down on his knees.

  Wheeeee!

  He hit the water with a splash... and he stuck fast! There was some bad-smelling sticky black stuff beneath the water. He was in it up to his chest. He struggled, he tugged, he pulled, he slapped the water with his trunk and almost got that stuck, too. He was as stuck as Br'er Rabbit with the Tar Baby.

  And that was what it was! Little Fuzzy was stuck in a tar pit!

  If you go to California even today, to where the city of Los Angeles is now
, you can see these tar pits. They look cool and inviting, just as they did that day long ago, but just beneath the surface the tar is still there. Natural gas, what scientists call methane, still bubbles out of the water, and that is what Fuzzy and Temba smelled. Not only mammoths got stuck in the tar. Just about everything that walked or crawled or flew at that time came to the pond to drink, and a lot of them got stuck, couldn't get out, and died. Scientists are still digging out their bones.

  If Fuzzy had been a woolly rhinoceros or a giant elk or a dire wolf, he certainly would have died there in the tar pit. But Fuzzy was a mammoth, even though he was still quite a small mammoth, and mammoths did not abandon members of the herd when they were in trouble.

  Temba and Big Mama and the others appeared on the top of the low hill and saw little Fuzzy struggling and heard him calling out. He was only working himself deeper.

  They hurried down the slope, slipping and sliding, and it was a miracle that some of them didn't get stuck, too! But they carefully reached around little Fuzzy with their trunks, and they pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and Fuzzy's legs came free.

  Poor little Fuzzy was a mess!

  There was sticky tar all over his legs, and under his trunk. Temba and Big Mama and the others picked at it, and they got tar all over their trunks, too. It was matted in their hair. It was awful!

  For weeks after that the tar dried out on Fuzzy's legs, and Temba continued to pick at it. It came away bit by bit, with clumps of his hair.

  Ow! Ow! Ow!

  Little Fuzzy had learned his lesson. He would never step into a tar pit again!

  2

  MATT and Susan never felt a thing.

  The lights flickered briefly, almost too quick for the eye to see. Something changed in the atmosphere and it took a moment for Matt to realize it was the faint, distant sound of the emergency generator coming on. Then he heard something he'd never heard in the building before: the trumpeting

  of Susan's elephants.

  "Why did you push the button?" Susan asked.

  Matt held his hands up in a pose of innocence.

  "I didn't push anything. That thing just sank into the cube on its own."

  They both looked at it, now a perfect cube of small glass spheres. As they watched, the central

  sphere rose again. "This is way beyond spooky," Susan said.

  "The lights went out, the generator went on."

  "Let's go outside and see if Howard felt anything."

  "You go. I've got to see what's upsetting my elephants."

  Susan headed for the interior door. Matt walked slowly, thoughts of cleaning up pushed aside now. Where did all those other marbles go?

  His initial reaction, that they might have been folded through space-time somehow, that they were all somehow still there, packed into a seven by seven by seven volume that looked too small from our three-dimensional perspective but was plenty roomy in, say, five or six dimensions, had quickly paled. He was embarrassed that he'd even mentioned it to Susan. What must she think?

  Question: Was there a way to explain the vanished spheres without resorting to extradimensional geometry?

  Answer: Ask any magician. Ask any thief. Ask any prankster. Ask the gods of coincidence, chance, error, forgetfulness, and spiteful human nature.

  So the box hadn't been opened. So what? The vandals got through the gate. All the data needed to build the structure now in the box was in Matt's computer; maybe he had been hacked.

  Howard was pissed at him. Maybe he hired the vandals, arranged all this as a cruel hoax, maybe he liked to toy with men's minds that way. He could afford it.

  Matt's mental state, though greatly improved since meeting Susan, was sometimes delicate. Maybe he'd simply replaced the alpha assembly himself while in a fugue state, and forgot.

  Maybe he had been kidnapped by flying saucer men from Venus and brainwashed and this whole evening—even the whole last year—was a virtual reality experiment of surpassing cleverness.

  Any of those things and many more now seemed more likely than multidimensional gymnastics. Matt felt considerable relief that he had blurted out his first theory to Susan rather than to Howard. It would be a lot easier to live down.

  He reached the door, opened it, and saw that Santa Monica was gone.

  SUSAN was not as frightened as Matt had feared she would be, at least not at first. The possibility had existed, they had talked about time travel in the abstract, she knew he was working on a time machine. But she had not expected to travel through time. If she did, she might have expected the journey to be more dramatic. They made a circuit of the building. They felt they had to do at least that much, even before the sun came up. In an unknown situation, Matt said, step one is to establish the parameters of your problem. For all he knew, he could turn the corner of the building and find that Santa Monica was still there... or Shangri-La, or an alien spaceship landing on Devil's Tower, or the first steps of the Yellow Brick Road.

  "Is that a light over there?" Susan asked. Matt could barely see her hand, pointing toward what he figured must be the Hollywood Hills. He thought he might see the tiniest imaginable orange spark against the blackness.

  "Somebody built a fire?" he wondered. "Maybe there's people around here."

  Who could tell? But at that moment they got evidence that there was something sharing the night with them. It was a blood-curdling screech, very far away, but so powerfully malign that Matt felt his knees begin to shake. He turned the light back on, and they soon found themselves running around the last corner and into the pale but warm square of light, the door leading back inside the steel building.

  "Can you get us back home?" Susan asked, breathing hard and afraid to look at him.

  "I don't know. I think we'd better put that question aside for a few hours and figure out how long I have to solve that problem. How long we can expect to live."

  "What do you mean? You think time traveling is harmful?"

  "Not so far as I know. No, I mean how long we can survive."

  IT quickly came down to water.

  They sat together in the quiet warehouse and batted it around. The first thing that became clear was how utterly dependent people of the twenty-first century had become on the vast, interlinked network of goods and services and transportation that they called civilization. The second thing they recalled was that the Los Angeles Basin was a desert.

  The taps were dry, of course. Matt assumed they were cut off abruptly, underground, just like the asphalt and concrete surrounding the building ended about five feet away from the sides.

  They did an inventory. It didn't look good. Each of the five elephants had a drinking trough, and they varied from full to half empty. That wouldn't last long and there was no way to refill them. There were four rest rooms, two on each half of the warehouse, with two toilets in the ladies' rooms and one each in the men's. That was a good supply in the six tanks, but it wouldn't last long, either.

  "I wish we'd put in one of those water coolers with the ten-gallon jugs," Matt said. "There's always a dozen full ones sitting around."

  "Again, I haven't any idea."

  The best news was the Coca-Cola machine. It was a big one, with a curved, lighted front.

  Looking at it, Matt suddenly felt very thirsty. He searched his pockets and came up empty.

  "You have any change?"

  "My purse was in the car."

  Matt looked around and found the crowbar abandoned by one of the vandals. He set the end of

  it against the door of the Coke machine and started to pull. The door popped open and he took out a cold can of Coke. "You want something?"

  "Is there any Mountain Dew?"

  "All we have here that's clear is Sprite."

  "That'll do."

  They popped the tops and drank, then were silent for a moment. They had worked for several hours on the inventory, not having to talk about the central fact of their dilemma, but Matt knew it was unavoidable.

  "Look...," he said
, and had to stop. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry about this. I'm so sorry about it."

  "About what?"

  "About... well, about getting you thrown down a temporal wormhole to what might very well be the year 13,000 B.C."

  "Is that what happened? A temporal wormhole?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "Sure. The part I don't see is why any of this was your fault."

  "I thought it was sort of... obvious."

  "Not to me." She sighed. "Okay, you were trying to build a time machine."

  "Trying to duplicate something that was found that might be a time machine."

  "Don't get technical. You built it, some ignorant yahoos came in and did something to it—" "We scientists call that 'whacking the shit out of it.' "

  "I keep elephants. I keep them in strong, secure stockades, and I keep people away from them. But what if those yahoos got in there, opened the gates and the outside doors, and threw a bunch of firecrackers into the paddocks? And the elephants stampeded down Wilshire and hurt a lot of

  people? Is that my fault?"

  "Well..."

  "Don't think about it too long." There was a tiny edge to her voice.

  "No, of course not. Not if you took reasonable precautions. But did I?"

  "I don't think anybody could tell what 'reasonable' was, before this happened."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. I keep thinking I could have done more."

  "Howard sure could have. He could have splurged on two or three guards, around the clock. I

  think we ought to take that up with him... when we get back."

  He noticed it was when, not if, and was grateful for her confidence... or was she just whistling past the graveyard?

  "I think I will. But there's a larger question. What was I doing fooling around with something as