Mammoth (12 page)

Eventually they had a meeting. Python was disappointed, naturally enough, at the old ragbag who had talked so tough. Droopy knew he had to win Python’s respect quickly, so he trotted out some of his best stories of clashes with abortion doctors. Python listened with distaste—he had been the proximate cause of several abortions himself—but remembered the old man’s fervent views on this new evil of cloning, and knew that in a holy fight it was sometimes necessary to do business with people you would scorn in a perfect world. After a while, cautiously, Python added a few stories of his own. Droopy didn’t mention that he’d hunted deer and rabbits all through his childhood to put food on the table. He hadn’t held a gun in fifteen years, but the memories were still fond.

Python resembled that kraut actor, Maximilian Schell, but just missed being handsome. There was a burn scar on the side of his face, and he was missing the pinkie finger from his right hand. A mink had bitten it off while he was freeing her and five hundred of her sisters from a ranch, which he called a
concentration camp. Served him right, Droopy thought. Vicious little monsters, minks.

When Droopy mentioned the name of Howard Christian, Python’s eyes narrowed with interest. So he went heavy on that angle, and soon was sitting in Python’s car on the way to look over the mammoth project warehouse.

Python liked what he saw from the start. The warehouse was in an area of similar warehouses, hardly worth a second glance except for the unarmed guard sitting in a booth beside the door into the building. The whole property was surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire and there was a thirty-foot strip of bare concrete between that and the target. The people who worked inside parked their cars there. They gained access by punching a number into a keypad mounted on a pole, which caused an electric gate to roll back.

Python drove all around the building, then parked his van a hundred feet away and watched the gate for a while. Droopy slumped in the right seat.

“Couldn’t sit here too long without that guard getting interested, if he’s doing his job,” Python pointed out. He looked in the backseat. “That’s why you’ll come in handy, Lamb.” Python, who loved intrigue, had never asked for the names of his companions, and had certainly never given his own. He had code-named them Lamb and Turtle. “You’re out here every day?”

“He is, every day,” said Droopy/Turtle. “I am, too, on the days my back lets me move around a little.”

“By now that guy doesn’t notice you any more than he does a rock or a tree,” Python said. “Let’s do it.”

IT
didn’t take long. Lamb/Martyr stood in his usual spot, calming down gradually when he realized no one noticed him casually lifting a tiny pair of opera glasses to his face whenever someone entered the grounds. The second morning he got the right angle on it. The number was 4-1-5-3-9. He knew, sadly, that they would go in that night.

Python wasn’t a smash-and-grab guy, like Droopy. Hit fast, hit hard, don’t worry about who gets hurt. Droopy wanted to
steal a dump truck and crash right through the gate and the door, knock the guard on the head, and start tossing Molotov cocktails. Then dump a load of cow manure all over the place.

Python liked the cow manure part, but the rest of it sucked. He liked to keep things simple, minimize the violence to bystanders—after all, the guard wasn’t cloning monstrosities in test tubes—and maximize the time to do as much damage as possible. Contrary to every Hollywood movie you ever saw, if you started hitting people over the head, sooner or later somebody would be killed.

“The gate is wired,” Python pointed out, “otherwise a Cyclone fence is a joke. Pair of wire cutters, and you’re through. But if we breach it, an alarm goes off in the guardhouse, and the police are probably called. We get five minutes, tops.”

“It doesn’t take long to throw a firebomb,” Droopy pointed out.

“Yeah, and it’s a metal building, and we’d have to be sure we hit something flammable inside. And don’t forget, there’s half a dozen elephants in there. You want to be the one to clear them out?” Python had already decided that freeing the elephants was out of the question. It was one thing to free a lab full of rats and rabbits or a fur farm full of minks, but he knew even that could go badly wrong. Remembering, he rubbed the stump of his little finger. Who could have known such a little bundle of fur like a mink could be so aggressive, and bite so hard?

“We go tonight, at midnight.”

THE
first part went smoothly, if slowly. Droopy insisted on going along. He saw it as his swan song, and he wouldn’t be denied. Python seethed, slouched down in the anonymous rental van where they had been sitting for almost five hours.

The guard made a slow circuit of the warehouse every half hour, inserting a plastic card in a time clock halfway around to register that he had actually made the trip. It took him about five minutes. That should be just enough time.

So when the guard put down his book and left the small booth at midnight, Python told his troops to get ready. In a few moments the uniformed figure turned the corner and vanished into the darkness.

Python got out of the van and no interior lights came on. He carried a big Maglite flashlight and a crowbar, the all-purpose tool of the serious vandal. He wore a black backpack bulging with cans of paint wrapped in towels. Paint was needed to write slogans on the walls, and could do an amazing amount of damage when sprayed into the delicate innards of scientific equipment. That could be done before getting down to the soul-satisfying work of smashing everything in sight that was smashable. In a biology lab, that was going to be a lot of stuff.

He hurried to the gate and punched in the number Lamb had obtained. The gate immediately began to roll back, not silent, but not very noisy, either. He turned around, itching to go…

And they’re off!
he thought. Lamb and Turtle were almost halfway to the gate, Lamb with his Bible in one hand and his rosary and a crowbar in the other, Turtle jerking his walker ahead one step at a time as fast as he could move it. It was a toss-up which was moving slower, the hot-blooded old man or the reluctant monk.

Python had decided that getting inside in one step would be cutting it too close. His watch read 12:04 when they reached the group of Dumpsters against the warehouse wall. He shoved one out and hurried his accomplices behind it, then pulled it back exactly as it had been.

They heard the guard’s footsteps go by, not ten feet away from them, and continue on. They heard him settle down on a squeaky swivel chair. Python edged one eye carefully around the Dumpster and saw the man pick up his paperback book and start reading again.

It didn’t smell very good back there. He identified elephant dung, rotting vegetables, and a sour whiff mixed with Old Spice, which he knew was coming from Turtle, as he had smelled it for the last five hours in the van. He heard a sound, like dry sticks cracking. He sighed. If the popping of Turtle’s cervical vertebrae didn’t bring the guard, they’d be okay, he figured.

The guard left again precisely at 12:30. As soon as he rounded the corner Python’s ragtag commandos hurried over to the warehouse door as fast as they were able. They punched
in the number and the door opened. Python glanced at the guard’s paperback as they passed. It was
Why Me?
by Donald E. Westlake.

There were a few lights on, high overhead. As soon as he turned on his flashlight, he knew a mistake had been made.

Many of his colleagues had never set foot in a laboratory except to destroy it, but Python knew his way around from college classes. He knew the sort of equipment a cloning facility should have, and as he swept the room with his flashlight he saw none of it. The machines he did see were more suited for the practice of metallurgy or physics. There were complicated lathes and drills, a furnace, a mass spectrometer. What was just as important was what he did not see. He didn’t see any glassware. He didn’t see a gene sequencer.

He didn’t see any elephants. Hard to miss elephants, if they were present.

Out in the middle of the half-empty, cavernous room were some ordinary folding cafeteria tables. They were covered with some sort of assemblies, built into aluminum cases.
What the hell?
Python swept his flashlight beam over the array. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so puzzling: marbles in every color of the rainbow.

He turned, examining the other item of interest and frustration, a huge rack of hundreds and hundreds of cubbies, or caches, each containing marbles of the same type. At the bottom of each cubby was a number, but looking closer, he could see the numbers had been painted over what looked like Chinese characters.
Chinese?
The whole thing looked like it might be intended to assemble models of molecules, the kind you could see in a high school biochem lab.

Putting aside what he didn’t understand, Python swept his light around the room again, and it came to him. Not enough. Not nearly enough space in here.

“Where did they bring the elephants in?” he whispered to Lamb. “Which side of the building?”

But Lamb didn’t really hear the question. He was in a state of Rapture.

The concept of Rapture was not, strictly speaking, a Catholic idea, but Lamb/Martyr was not a strict Catholic. He gravitated to a more recent fusion of the traditional Church
with more evangelical elements. In the services of this new sect, it was not uncommon for healing to take place, for shouted testimonials and the speaking of strange tongues to be heard.

It was the tension of the break-in and the sensory overload of the thousands and thousands of colorful balls that set him off. His understanding of molecules being extremely limited, he imagined the marbles to be genes themselves, and these tables the very places where the obscenity of cloning was being carried out.

Well, we’d see about that.

“Tools of evil!” he shrieked, and grabbed the Chinese compositor’s board by one corner. It was heavy and well braced, but his strength was as the strength of ten because he had become the living, breathing Sword of the Lord. The board tilted and the marbles began to clatter on the floor even before Lamb swung it over to crash on the floor.

The racket was incredible. Python had been on his way to the door connecting what he now knew to be two laboratories when the clattering, clanging, clanking wall of sound rolled over him and made a shiver race up his spine. He turned and watched, frozen, as thousands of marbles rolled noisily all around him. It was like a truckload of cymbals rolling down a slope of broken glass.

“Guide my hand, O Lord!” Lamb cried, and then looked down at the tables. He overturned one, creating a fresh wave of sound. Lamb turned to another table and began flailing with his crowbar, smashing glass bowls with more marbles in them, sweeping everything in his reach onto the floor.

No surprise, Python beat Turtle to the door. He flattened himself against the wall so the door would hide him when the guard swung it open…as he did, two seconds after Python got there. The guard swept his flashlight over the room and saw incredible chaos. A wild-eyed man in a baggy trench coat was swinging a crowbar over his head and smashing it down on what remained on the tables; and another fellow, old as anyone the guard had ever seen, was fleeing directly toward him…with an aluminum walker. He took a few steps into the building, not quite able to add up the different parts of the scene into anything that made sense. Behind him, Python
slipped around the door and gave him a shove. The guard fell forward, dropping the flashlight. He heard the rapidly retreating footsteps of Python behind him.

Lamb had cleared the table of just about everything but one last aluminum briefcase. This one was latched and locked. Lamb was seized with the desire to see what was inside this infernal device. He raised his crowbar and brought it down. There was a dent on the dull silver surface. He hit it twice more…and a red light came on.

The resolve left him as quickly as it had come. Suddenly he was sure it was a bomb. The only question in his mind was,
How long do I have?

Take me in Thy arms, Sweet Jesus.

Sweat broke out on his face. The crowbar clattered to the cement floor. As he had in so many times of stress in the past, he took refuge in his rosary beads, looking at the ceiling as he waited for the Lord to take him.

“Move, you asshole!” Turtle shouted, looking back over his shoulder, pumping his walker forward for all he was worth. It was a bad idea in a room covered in marbles. Turtle stepped on a few and his foot flew out from under him. He bobbled, his hands slipped on the walker, and he came down hard with his left leg bent under him. His knee popped. The good news was he had long since lost most sensation from the thighs down. The bad news was, looking at the unnatural angle of his lower leg, he knew he had surely just taken his last step on Earth. Wheelchairs from now on.

He strained to raise his head high enough to see the door where Python had fled. He saw two more uniformed men enter, these carrying shotguns.

“Well, fuck me,” he sighed, and lay down on his back.

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

Younger Sister got very sick.

She stopped eating, and stumbled after the herd for three days. Always, on a ridge a safe distance away, Big Mama could see the two-legs. At night they built fires, which Big Mama hated, but as long as they kept away from the herd she didn’t do anything about it.

Once another group of two-legs came wandering by and they stared at the wounded mammoth. The first group of two-legs came charging down the hill, chattering and throwing things. The two groups fought some, but mostly they screamed at each other, and after a while one group went away.

Which group was the winner, the first or the second? Big Mama didn’t know and didn’t care. She was concerned about Younger Sister, but had no idea what to do about her. Really, there was nothing she could do. Younger Sister would get better, or she would die. That was the harsh rule of nature. The herd would live on.