Mammoth (28 page)

He stared into the fire for a while.

“Go on,” she said. “I’m hanging on the edge here. Did you discover the secrets of the universe?”

“Not right then,” he admitted. “On the fourth night they came for me.”

HE
was never entirely sure just who they were.

Oh, he had a general idea. They were Americans. They represented the government…which theoretically represented the people, but the people would never be consulted on anything this group did, nor informed of the results of their actions.

He gathered that the people he came into contact with had been assembled from the myriad of law-enforcement and hush-hush and they-don’t-exist agencies for the sole purpose of investigating this time travel phenomenon…which meant investigating Matt Wright, as he was the only one who seemed to know anything about it.

It began in the middle of the night. He had a vague memory of waking up in a panic, unable to breathe. He’d had dreams like that before, but this time it turned out to be true.
He had a brief glimpse of a face blackened with soot, big white staring eyes and grinning teeth above him in the darkness, a sharp smell, the taste of a rag in his mouth.

Later, he figured it was good old chloroform. The old ways are the best.

When he woke up he might have been a few miles down the road or he might have been in Patagonia. He didn’t know how long he had been out. He was in a sparsely furnished room—cot, steel sink with tin cup and a bar of soap, steel toilet, table with three chairs bolted to the floor, no windows to the outside, a steel door with a six-by-six mesh-reinforced window at eye level, a long mirror set into another wall.

A cell, no getting around it. Larger than most cells, he supposed, never having seen one except in the movies, maybe thirty feet square, room for some serious pacing. Only someone who had never seen a television cop show would fail to realize that the big mirror was partially silvered—the infamous one-way mirror. The ceiling was at least twelve feet high. A small camera was mounted in each of the four corners.

It wasn’t particularly clean. The linoleum floor was cracked and peeling in a few places, scuffed here and there, in need of mopping. Dust kitties had accumulated in the floor corners, and there were cobwebs in the ceiling corners. There were smudges on the walls that looked like they had been made by hands, as high as hands could reach. Overhead an ordinary fluorescent light fixture flickered and clicked maddeningly. Exploring the entire place, seeing absolutely everything there was to be seen, took a total of ten minutes.

He was dressed in the clothes he had worn the day before, jeans and shirt, low-top Nike running shoes, cotton socks—which he had not been wearing in bed, when he was chloroformed and kidnapped. Someone must have dressed him. There was nothing in his pockets but lint.

He took encouragement from what was not there. No car batteries or generators with genital clamps attached. No manacles, ropes, whips, thumbscrews, vats of boiling oil, rubber hoses, or billy clubs. Any of those things could be brought in, of course.

Only one feature of the room worried him, and that was a dark brown stain on the floor near the table. He tried to
convince himself it was spilled food or drink. As the hours went by he kept looking at it, wondering if it was the source of the smell that tickled at his nostrils, over the sourness of the sheets and blanket and the gathering odor of his own fear. Was it blood?

He later estimated they held him there for twenty-four hours before anyone came to question him. He couldn’t be sure. The lights never went off. It could have been as little as twelve hours, or as many as forty-eight, he supposed.

They fed him three times. It was the same each time: the door opened and a man in white coveralls and wearing a white bandanna over the lower part of his face entered with a steel tray and set it on the table.

The first time Matt sat up from his reclining position on the cot.

“I want to speak to a lawyer,” he said.

The man didn’t even glance at him. He slammed the door behind him, and Matt heard a key turning in a lock.

The food was a hamburger steak with gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, bread and butter, a slice of melon, and a cup of coffee. He ate it with the only utensil provided, a plastic spoon. The next two meals were pretty much the same.

THE
second time he woke up it was to find two men in suits sitting at the table.

They were fairly unremarkable, with more of the bureaucrat than the cop or the torturer in their appearance and demeanor, perfect FBI types. One was blond, midthirties, tall and clean-cut, the only thing out of place about him being the argyle socks Matt could see above his black wingtips. The other was sixtyish, short and rather portly, with a rim of feathery white hair around a shiny pink dome of baldness, thick glasses, and a look of perpetual puzzlement on his smooth baby face. Matt felt somehow that he should know him. Later, when the questioning began, it was clear he was conversant with the higher mathematics needed to ask intelligent questions about time travel, so it was entirely possible Matt
did
know him; it was a small world. But he could never place the face with a name, and he finally put it down to a slight resemblance to Albert Einstein.

Neither introduced himself and Matt never learned their names, so he quickly started thinking of them as Albert and Argyle. They sat in two bolted-down chairs on one side of the table, and Albert gestured for Matt to sit in the chair across from them.

Argyle went first.

He started by emptying a box he had brought with him. It contained the things that had been in Matt’s possession when he was abducted. He spread out the change, took every card and scrap of paper and dollar bill from the wallet, then opened the Swiss Army knife and meticulously opened all the seams of the wallet, searching for things that might be concealed there—a small display of arrogance and power that was not lost on Matt. He dumped the banded stacks of money from the canvas bag, riffled idly through them, and tossed them aside. He set out the three computers and turned them on.

The last item to emerge from the box was an ordinary glass marble, red in color, in a tiny square cage. He held it up to the flickering overhead light and squinted at it, turning it this way and that. At last he put it down and pushed it toward Matt with his index finger, and for the first time looked Matt in the eye.

“What is this?” he said.

“It’s a marble in a steel cage,” Matt said.

Neither Albert nor Argyle said anything for almost a minute, both of them looking down at the object on the table. Then Argyle looked up again.

“What is this?” he said.

Matt sighed. It was looking like it would be a long day. He had done nothing wrong, but he knew somehow that that would not matter to these people. He didn’t really have a lot to hide, either.

Just one small thing. But, of course, that was what they were after.

“It is a component of a device I was hired to re-create for Howard Christian. He believed it would make it possible to travel backward in time. So to speak.”

Albert jumped in.

“Explain that last sentence.”

“It’s hard to. I mean, the phrase ‘travel backward in time’ is an attempt to put into language a concept that the language
is not equipped to describe. ‘Travel’ is almost certainly not the correct verb, ‘backward’ may or may not be a useful modifier to the concept of traveling, and ‘time’ is a concept that I’ve come to realize is far from adequately defined.”

“But you did go somewhere.”

“I can’t say that for certain. I could say I went ‘some
when
,’ but I’m not even sure of that. It is possible that I stayed right where I was and everything else went somewhere or somewhen. Though that requires us to define a space-time locus ‘where or when I
was’
and set it in opposition to ‘where or when I
went
,’ or ‘where or when everything else went…or didn’t go,’ and I’m afraid I can’t make that reconcile, relativistically speaking.”

Albert was nodding. Argyle was gazing fixedly at Matt, mouth slightly open, apparently about as sentient as a cow. Argyle took over again.

“Where is the time machine?”

“I don’t know.” Truth.

There was another pause.

“Where is the time machine?”

“It went somewhere I can’t follow.” Truth.

“Or somewhen?” Albert asked.

“Possibly.”

Another long silence. Matt had never been interrogated before. But no literate human in America could be totally unaware of a few interrogation techniques. He supposed he was meant to feel a kinship to Albert, who at least seemed to know a little math and was conversant with some of the quantum dichotomies present in the idea of time traveling, and it was plain as could be that Argyle intended to be menacing with his silent contempt and simple, repeated questions.

Matt found he was indeed frightened of Argyle, very frightened. The man stank of suppressed violence and Matt felt sure that, if orders came from his superiors, Argyle would do absolutely anything to obtain the location of the missing time machine.

If he was supposed to like Albert, though, the man wasn’t doing his job.

Albert spoke again.

“Matthew, are you aware that it is no longer necessary to
hook a man up to a lot of wires and clamps and springs to run a polygraph test on him?”

“No, I wasn’t, but I’m not surprised. Everything’s high-tech these days, isn’t it? I don’t guess you need rubber hoses or thumbscrews or anything so primitive to torture a man today, either, do you?”

Albert looked elaborately around the room, as if searching for instruments of torture.

“Have you been threatened in any way?”

Matt laughed.

“I don’t know what else you’d call it when you’re kidnapped and held incommunicado and you don’t even know where you are. By the way, I’m asking again to talk to a lawyer.”

“You don’t need a lawyer. You haven’t been accused of anything. It’s all perfectly legal. Haven’t you heard of the Patriot Act? We just want you to answer some questions.”

“I have. You have more questions?”

“Yes, but there’s no point going on with them right now. Your responses have not been entirely forthcoming.”

“You mean you think I’m lying?”

“No. You’re telling the truth, but not all of it. You’re hiding something.” He gave Matt a small smile. “I’m afraid I need to regroup a little, too. It’s just possible I’m not getting the right answers because I don’t know how to ask the right questions.”

“Join the club,” Matt said.

The inquisitors put everything back into the cardboard box and left.

MATT
was not surprised when they drugged him. It was the logical next step.

There was nothing to prevent them from simply tying him down and jabbing a needle into him, but they elected to put it into his food, or his water. And what could he do? He had to eat and drink, so he ate and drank, and then felt the strange feeling of euphoria overcome him.

He laughed.

They let him laugh for an hour, Albert and Argyle, and
then came back in again. All they brought this time was his computers.

“Good morning, Matt,” Albert said. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling great,”
Matt said…and then realized he hadn’t said anything at all. He had opened his mouth, he had taken a breath, he had sent the signals to his lips and tongue that should have produced words, but something had short-circuited and no words had come out.

He laughed again. It was very funny.

“You know you have to answer these questions, don’t you?” Albert said.

“Yes, I know,”
Matt didn’t say, and laughed again. What was so funny was, he
wanted
to answer the questions. Oh, there was a part of him, a part that seemed to have been deeply suppressed by the drugs—and what
was
this stuff? It was very good!—that wanted to keep his secret, that still felt it was important, but most of him was eager to spill everything. He knew it would make him feel very good to tell these fellows everything he knew. But, on the other hand,
not
telling them, not
being able
to tell them, didn’t make him feel
bad
…so he laughed.

Albert and Argyle didn’t laugh.

“Where is the time machine?” Argyle asked.

Matt tried to tell them. Without success.

Albert drummed his fingers on the table, then abruptly got up and left the room.

Matt and Argyle sat there for ten minutes, staring at each other. Argyle had absolutely no expression on his face, and no nervous mannerisms. Somehow, Matt found this scarier than if he had shown overt hatred, hostility, menace, even frustration. He felt Argyle could rip out his guts with absolute indifference.

But he was not capable of worrying about such things at the moment. Thoughts, observations, conclusions entered his mind and were filed away impartially, with no emotional component. If Argyle had told him he intended to cut off Matt’s arms and legs he would have filed that way, too, with no fear. Maybe Argyle knew that, and was saving his venom for a time Matt could appreciate it.

Albert came back with a huge stack of paper under one
arm. He slapped it down on the table in such a way that Matt could see what was printed on the front of the file:
DR. MATTHEW WRIGHT
. More psychology, Matt figured. All that paper could obviously have been put onto a computer and Albert could have consulted that. Albert wanted Matt to see the amount of documentation available to him.

Albert flipped through the file and reached the page he wanted.

“Aphasia,” he said. “You’ve suffered from it before.”

Matt nodded.

“He’s faking,” Argyle said.

Matt shook his head.

“I don’t think he is,” Albert sighed. “I think he really wants to tell us where it is. Don’t you, Matt?”

Matt nodded.

“Then we’ll just have to play twenty questions, won’t we?” Albert said.

BIG
as the dossier with his name on it was, there was still more.