Mammoth (10 page)

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”

Life was not all fun and games for the mammoth herd. There were dangerous things, and not just saber-toothed cats.

One day when Temba was browsing in a big tree, pulling down branches with sweet tender leaves on them and thrusting them into her mouth, Fuzzy wandered off a little ways to another tree.

Baby mammoths, like baby elephants, were born knowing how to stand up, how to walk, how to nurse, and they probably know how to swim, too. But they had to learn to use their trunks, just like baby humans have to learn to use their hands. A mammoth’s trunk contained many thousands of muscles and a grown-up mammoth could use it to pick up a single leaf or twig!

The way they learned to use their trunks was the same way people or animals learn to use anything: practice!

Fuzzy picked up a branch with his trunk, like he had seen his mother do. He swung it around, hitting things with it.

He hit the trunk of the tree.

He hit a big stone.

He hit a big pile of yellow straw that smelled funny…

And the big pile of straw reared up and screamed at him!

It was big! Bigger than Temba, taller than Big Mama! From the tips of its three curved claws to the top of its little, angry head, it was fifteen feet tall.

It was a
giant ground sloth
.

There is nothing alive today that is anything like a giant ground sloth. Its only
living cousin
is small and lives in the trees where it hangs upside down and sleeps almost all day. But the
giant ground sloth was huge, and there were many of them in California at the time little Fuzzy was born.

Giant ground sloths were plant eaters, like mammoths, and usually they gave the herd no trouble. But they could be cranky, and they didn’t like being rudely awakened any more than most animals do. This one took a swing at Fuzzy with his mighty arms, and sent the poor little mammoth tumbling over the dusty ground.

Fuzzy was very frightened, and he cried out for his mother.

Well! In no time at all not only Temba but all the sisters and cousins and aunts and nieces and the young bulls who had not yet left the herd were thundering toward the ground sloth, trumpeting their rage!

They came between Fuzzy and the giant sloth and stomped and flapped their ears and lifted their trunks. The sloth stood his ground, roaring back, and it could have gotten bloody, but finally the sloth turned around and lumbered away.

The mammoths did not chase him.

Fuzzy cowered in Temba’s shadow for a while until everybody was calmed down. He would remember the smell of the giant ground sloth, and he would run away if he ever saw one again!

THERE
was still much work to do.

From the start Matt had decided there were basically two ways to go about this.

One: Repair this machine.

Two: Build another just like it.

On his third day of work he had put the question to Howard Christian.
Which approach do you favor, Howard?

“Do ’em both,” Howard had replied.

Okay…

Easier said than done.

NO
two of the marbles were alike.

Some of them appeared to be pretty much exactly that: marbles. They were glass, always of a uniform color. Basically silicon, with various impurities. Over a thousand were minerals, almost anything that could be shaped into a sphere and polished to close tolerances. Any geology student in the world would have loved to have these; many were quite beautiful. Among them were precious and semiprecious stones, including a diamond sphere and others of emerald and sapphire. The remainder were metals, sometimes pure and sometimes alloys.

Full analysis of all 2,401 balls took almost a month after the day Matt first invited Susan into his lab. It was quite a job, and nobody could say it was dull.

“Since coming to work for you,” said Jim, the metallurgist, “I’ve run into stuff that sent me running for the textbooks. It’s like a final exam, from a sadistic teacher. It’s not every day
you come across some praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, dysprosium,
and
ytterbium. Some guys will go a whole career and never deal with some of those.”

That’s exactly what Matt was coming to feel, too, that the device was not so much a practical, working
thing
as a one-time assemblage put together just to frustrate him. Something for him to look at, three paper cups for him to study while the real action with the hidden pea was happening somewhere just out of his sight.

Prestidigitation. Misdirection.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t proceed on that assumption until he’d ruled out as many other possibilities as possible. What was important here?

“
IN
a problem like this,” he told Susan, “the first thing you do is try to limit the variables. Too many variables, you never get anywhere.”

“Like your twenty-four hundred marbles.”

“Twenty-four-oh-one.”

“Who’s counting?”

“Two thousand, four hundred and one is seven to the fourth power.”

“Really? Is that important?”

“I wish to hell I knew.”

They were sitting on a bench not far from a heart-wrenching scene. Near the edge of a small pond a mammoth bull stood with his child. The baby had his trunk extended toward a full-grown female mammoth with tusks that must have been twenty feet long, submerged to the hindquarters in the water. But the placid surface of the pond was deceiving, Matt knew. Bubbling constantly from the depths was methane—swamp gas—that you could smell when the wind was right. Just beneath the surface lay a nearly bottomless pit of asphalt that was more than adequate to humble even such a mighty beast. The mammoth cow was a goner.

About once a minute the baby mammoth squealed what Matt supposed was the mammoth word for “Mommy!” All three pachyderms waved their trunks helplessly.

They were on the grounds of the La Brea Tar Pits, and the mammoths were robots. Within walking distance was a working excavation. A stone’s throw in the other direction, six lanes of traffic whizzed by on Wilshire Boulevard.

There were a thousand very good restaurants within an easy drive of the mammoth warehouse, and he took her to two before she admitted she didn’t really enjoy eating in restaurants that much. It turned out that what she liked was picnics.

“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.

“We didn’t want to damage the originals too much,” Matt said to Susan, after showing her the setup. “We couldn’t drill them for samples. No matter how fine the drill bit is, it would inflict more damage than I’m willing to risk at this point.”

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—”

“I understand isotopes. Go on, Matt. If you get beyond me, I’ll let you know.”

“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.

“This way leads to madness. The permutations are damn near infinite. There’s a little circuit board in there, identical to the one in the original machine. I went out and bought them at Radio Shack, off the rack. It has a small IC chip, a processor, this and that, none of which seems to be connected in a very logical way. I’ll experiment with that. It has two batteries and two lights. What it doesn’t have is an on/off switch that I can see, any way of setting your destination in time or space, or a user’s manual.”

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.