Mammoth (16 page)

And then a very, very strange thing happened….

SUSAN
was a list maker. While Matt made a last attempt to make the time machine work again, she sat down at her laptop and listed their assets:

She supposed the laptops might be useful for something other than the list she was currently making, but she couldn’t at the moment figure what that might be. As for the state-of-the-art computer Howard Christian had provided to Matt for analyzing the possible permutations of the time machine…Matt had told her it would take even that monster millions of years to make a dent in the problem. And, when the generator stopped working, the big computer would become nothing more than a very complex piece of junk. So would the generator itself, and everything inside the warehouse that ran on electricity…which was almost
everything.

The food and water situation could have been better, and it could have been worse. It was too bad there wasn’t a commissary of some kind, or a lunch wagon parked on the grounds when the wormhole opened and swallowed them, but there wasn’t. On the other hand, the snack and pop machines had only been there a few weeks, and Susan had no idea why they had been installed. She’d never seen anyone buy anything from them, and she’d bet the coin boxes were empty or nearly so. It would stretch for some weeks, with care, though they’d surely get very tired of Pop-Tarts and tiny bags of potato chips.

Every few minutes Susan had to stop herself from asking Matt how long he thought it would take to put the machine into reverse and step on the gas, floor the son of a bitch full-speed into the twenty-first century. If he had any idea, she knew he would have told her, and simply to ask the question was to invite the impossible answer, the answer she didn’t think she
could bear to hear:
How long? It will be thousands of years before we, or our bones, reach the twenty-first century.

Clothing could be a problem. They didn’t know what time of year it was now. Who could even tell if summer would be hot or winter cold? The climate had changed a lot in thousands of years. Both of them were lightly dressed in what they had thrown on when Matt got the call. It seemed pleasant enough for now, but it had been chilly last night, Susan remembered. What if this was summer? What if the Los Angeles Basin got a lot of snow in December? What about tonight, for that matter? They must find water soon, and that meant that if the elephants didn’t find some close by, they would likely be spending the night in the open, on the ground, and they didn’t have so much as a blanket.

More frightening than the idea of getting cold, though, was the idea of getting eaten. Susan had spent some time years ago camping out, but Matt had hardly ever slept outside of a building. Neither of them knew much survival lore. And there were sure to be things out there happy to make a meal of them. She looked at the big elephant gun lying there on the table, and almost wanted to laugh.

Five years ago, an ill-treated elephant had run amok in Los Angeles. It killed three police officers and soaked up a ton of LAPD lead before a weapon powerful enough to kill it had been brought to the scene. The city council enacted a law requiring anyone keeping elephants to have such a weapon handy at all times. Susan had scoffed at the time, but dutifully took the thing—she had no idea of the maker or the caliber, except that it fired bullets that seemed almost as big as beer cans—to an indoor range and fired it…twice. The first time knocked her down and badly bruised her shoulder. The second shot was to prove to herself she could master it. She had, and never intended to fire it again.

Now she was glad they had it. If it would knock down an elephant, it ought to deal with a saber-toothed cat easily enough…if she could hit it. The tranquilizer gun was also required by law, but it was more problematic. She figured a big cat could chew off a pretty big chunk before the drugs took hold.

“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.

He got to enjoy it for almost a mile.

“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.”

“What about our 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.”

So they continued down the path the elephants had beaten for them.

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 H
OLLYWOOD
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 Cold-water 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.