Mammoth (32 page)

Rudolph Valentino would have ridden all night on his camel and sneaked into her tent and ravished her, even if she resisted at first.

Try as he might, he couldn’t see Matthew Wright, Ph.D., nondescript and awkward and tongue-tied and the very definition of the stumbling, fumble-fingered, malaprop geek from Central Casting, making his way from his lonely bed to that of his lady without slipping on a roller skate, toppling a priceless Ming vase, and inadvertently setting fire to the drapes. In the movies, he knew he would play Jerry Lewis, not Dean Martin. There was very little Casanova in him, almost no Cary Grant.

Nevertheless, the wee hours of the morning found him making his way carefully over the plush carpeting, his heart
throbbing in the back of his throat. What’s the worst she could do? Scream and shout? Throw things? He’d slink back to his room, or even out the front door and into the night, humiliated, but at least aware of where he stood.

The door would be locked, he was sure.

It wasn’t. It turned easily under his hand. Now the alarm will go off, he told himself. But it didn’t. He pushed the door slowly open and a wedge of light gradually widened and fell across the king-sized bed, where the covers had been turned back. Susan was lying there on her side, nude, her back to him. She rolled over and sat up on one elbow, then swung her legs over the side and sat up, facing him.

“Took you long enough,” she said.

“THERE
seems to be so much we need to talk about,” Matt said, later, “and I can’t seem to think of a damn thing to say.”

“I’ve visualized it many times,” Susan said, as she nestled herself a little more snuggly under Matt’s protective arm. “I saw myself screaming and shouting for, oh, hours and hours. Then kicking your miserable ass right out the door. Then crying all night long.”

“Did I say I’m sorry yet?”

“I think you did. Several times. I was a bit too busy there for a while to listen very carefully.”

“In case I didn’t, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be. In a way, it’s a good thing Howard showed up when he did. Just listening to you tell it like you did explained so much. I wondered why you never contacted me but through those damn postcards. I had no idea you’d been arrested.”

“I never was, actually.”

“You know what I mean. Abducted? Kidnapped? Whatever you want the call the atrocity they put you through. I lost a lot of faith in America tonight.”

“You want to know something funny?” Matt said, and laughed quietly. “In a way, it made me feel better about this country.”

Susan sat up and stared down at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Think about it. There are a lot of places where, if the
government thought I knew something they just had to have…well, I’d
still
be in that cell, or a lot worse one, and they’d be torturing me every day. Lots of other places they might not torture me, or at least not much, but they’d never let me loose.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I’ve had five years to put it in perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending it. It was wrong, it was immoral. Unconstitutional—though probably not illegal, if you can follow that reasoning. Bad form, poor sportsmanship, nasty and rotten and not fair, all of that. But I’m alive, and I’m out, and I never thought that would happen. Movies and books and television shows have convinced us of that. What I found out is that
some
people in the government have
some
scruples.”

“If you have a billionaire on your side,” Susan snorted.

“There’s that, that sure helped. I also don’t doubt that even this NNSA has forms to fill out and oversight of some kind, a bureaucracy to answer to. Nobody operates with total impunity, everyone worries about a paper or electronic trail that may one day bring them in front of a congressional committee.”

“Covering their asses.”

“Don’t knock it. There are lots of ways to cover your ass, but the best one is to not do the crime.”

Susan nestled herself back against his chest, nuzzled his neck.

“You’ve changed, Matt.”

“Is that good, or bad?”

“It’s just different. I think I like it. I think you’ve learned a lot.”

“I have learned a lot about myself. That’s a big part of what this whole crazy journey has been about.”

“I’ve changed some, too,” she said, in a different tone.

“I want to hear all about it. Every detail.”

“And I want to tell you,” she said, then whispered in his ear, “but not here, and not now.”

He frowned, then realized what she meant.

“You think they might—”

“Shh. It’s best to assume they might be listening.” Raising her voice, she said, “Looks like the sun’s coming up. It’s been
a long night, but would you believe it, I don’t feel tired at all. How about we go for a walk?”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, hoping he sounded casual.

THERE
was a dirt trail leading down the hill where Susan’s house sat, that soon reached a small stream that bubbled over rocks and snags.

Matt followed Susan, who seemed familiar with the place. He noticed her slight limp more here than he had in the house. She seemed to pick her way over the stones a bit more carefully than he would have.

Last night in the dimness of her bedroom he had felt the puckered scar on her thigh where the bone had been shattered and poked through the skin. Her hand had immediately grasped his and tried to move it away, but he had resisted, and eventually she had let him explore the length of it. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but eventually he got out of her that there had been three operations to put her leg back together, that there was a titanium rod where most of her femur used to be.

She wouldn’t let him look at it with the light on.

Gradually they lost the magnificent view of Mount Hood and the pine forest closed around them. She stopped, and kissed him fiercely. Then she broke away and gestured toward a fallen log. “Let’s sit here for a minute, Matt. There are some things I have to tell you.”

He waited.

“Matt, you said you have changed. You’re not the only one. When I went into this, all I wanted to do was be a part of a great experiment. I don’t care about getting my name in the history books. Howard could have that, him and the gene-pushers that fertilized the eggs.”

It took Matt a moment to realize that she was talking about the original project, the production of a mammoth/elephant hybrid, the job she had been hired to do. So much, so very much had happened since then; that project was ancient history, supplanted with the arrival of two live mammoths and a supply of fresh egg cells and sperm from the rest of the herd and from Big Daddy.

“I grew up in the circus. I love elephants, I loved training them, I felt I was doing some good keeping the species alive. There aren’t many left alive in the wild and I felt—still do feel—that zoos and circuses were doing valuable work breeding, preserving the gene pool. I know a lot of people disagree, but that’s what I felt.”

“But you’ve changed your mind.”

“Partly. Things happen.” She was rubbing her thigh, not seeming to be aware she was doing it, and he wondered if it was just because it was sore from the hike.

“Go on.”

She smiled wryly at him, and shrugged.

“I guess there’s really no way to do this but to just come out and say it. I’m going to steal Fuzzy. I’m going to do it tonight. Do you want to help?”

There were so many things Matt might have said.

You’re going to steal the most famous and valuable animal on the planet.

The animal belongs to a billionaire, one of the most powerful men on the planet, and one who is not always too fussy about his methods.

Fuzzy is rather…large. Why not steal the Golden Gate Bridge while you’re at it?

There were just about as many questions he could have asked:

How will you hide him?

Where are you going to take him?

What will you do with him?

Are you crazy?

And simply,
Why?

But what he said was, “Yes.”

IT
was far and away the most amazing show Matt had ever seen.

He was familiar with the magic that could be done with computer-generated imagery. But he had never been to a major theme park, or a big stage show in Las Vegas or Broadway. He was not prepared for the hyperreality that could be created by live performers, clever lighting, smoke, mirrors, and thundering sound. When the giant mammoths strode over his head on the giant screens above him, he felt like an ant. He almost dropped his popcorn.

He had what he figured was one of the best seats in the house. In a football stadium he would be sitting on about the forty-yard line, five rows up from the field. Some would say the skyboxes were better but Matt couldn’t believe it. They were way up there at the top of the stadium, right above the cheapest seats. That position would distort the perspective of the overhead screens, like sitting in the front row of a movie theater, and it was as far as you could get from the action on the floor. He supposed it was a status thing, sitting on a comfortable sofa with servants catering to you, surrounded by your rich and beautiful friends, eating fancy food.

But why would you come here to eat French five-star cuisine? It was the
circus
, for crying out loud! A digitized, computer-controlled, steroid-pumped, and amphetamine-boosted version of the circus, but a circus all the same.

One of Matt’s earliest memories was of a visit to the circus. He must have been three or four. In retrospect it had been a shabby little thing: a musty tent with rips in the canvas, a lion tamer with three raggedy big cats that had to be coaxed to stand up and roar, aging aerialists who did tricks a good ten-year-old gymnastic student could top. But it was all magic to
him, and the highlight was the elephants. Four of them, lumbering ponderously around and around the single ring to the crack of the ringmaster’s whip. He still remembered the exciting, animal smell of them, the insistent beat of the marches by John Philip Sousa and Karl King, and the taste of cotton candy and Cracker Jack.

This circus was everything he remembered, to the tenth power, with the sole exception of the cotton candy. They didn’t sell it. Probably too hard to clean up the mess from the deeply padded, rocking seats. He crunched down on another mouthful of something called Karamel Kettle Korn that was too sweet but close enough for rock and roll, and made a mental note to speak to Susan about the criminal lack of Kotton Kandy.

Then he remembered this would be her last day here, one way or the other. And he didn’t figure they’d be serving a lot of circus snacks in jail.

Now cut that out
, he told himself.
Think positive.

His seat was one of the perks of Susan’s job. She had a block of five seats for every performance. She said the practice was called “ice,” and it was a long showbiz tradition which she had known from her earlier circus days, though she had never qualified for it. The headliners all demanded a certain amount of ice, and the number of seats you got was a measure of your importance, so they fought for it fiercely, like movie stars measuring the length of each other’s Winnebagos. Up to twelve hours before a show she could give or sell them to anyone she chose. After that they went back into the lottery pool and she got the money, which was a nice piece of cash every night since she hardly ever had anyone she wanted to give them to.

Susan’s other four seats had gone to a young couple who obviously could hardly believe their luck, not only winning the daily seating lottery but getting some of the best seats in the house. They had a boy named Dwight who was five or six, and a girl, Brittney, around nine years old. Matt couldn’t help noting their reactions. They liked the movie on the tent ceiling but it was obvious they had seen things like that before. The children shivered and giggled when the cold air came blasting
in. They liked the meteor shower and gasped when the arena shook in the simulated earthquake.

Then came the elephants, and Big Mama. Matt noticed the huge pachyderm’s front legs were chained together and she tended to just stand there until prodded by metal-tipped sticks carried by her handlers. This stick, called an ankus, was a traditional tool of mahouts in Asia. Susan said it could cause damage by an unskilled trainer, but was an absolute necessity with even the gentlest, most socialized captive elephant to remind her who was the boss. The key was to apply it sparingly, lightly, and judiciously, and never, never,
never
think that it would protect you if the elephant really decided to do you damage.

Dwight was beside himself with delight when Big Mama appeared, and seemed awed by the girls in their gaudy costumes. Brittney smiled and watched it all with interest, but it was clear what she was waiting for. She was wearing a Fuzzy T-shirt and a Fuzzy hat with a fuzzy trunk sticking out in front and little woolly mammoth ears flapping at the sides, and waving a Fuzzy pennant.

And now here it came…no, not quite yet. First there were the baby mammoths.

There were a dozen of them now, all full-blooded Columbians, all the product of Big Daddy’s semen and the egg cells harvested from the bodies of the slaughtered herd of cows, born to Indian elephant host mothers. The oldest of them were three years old now, “toddlers” tipping the scales at twenty-five hundred pounds. These came out first, followed in order by smaller and smaller and smaller youngsters, until the final pair, year-old infant twins weighing no more than nine hundred.

“It’s Me-tu and U-tu!” Dwight shouted, and Matt realized that superstar Fuzzy had at least some competition in the hearts of the world’s children. He knew that many if not most of the kids here could name all twelve of these animals.

Matt found himself on the edge of his seat, almost as agog as the children all around him, as the moment arrived for Fuzzy’s appearance. The music swelled and quickened and reached a volume that was almost stunning, but was not loud
enough to drown out the shriek from Brittney that almost broke Matt’s eardrum.