Mammoth (43 page)

Later, with all the things to think about concerning fate and free will and time paradoxes and such, he had to wonder at his good luck at finding Charlie so easily. Because after a moment he was pretty sure the guy sitting one stool down from him was the man he was looking for. He took the photo he had printed from the one on file at the Nunavut Department of
Motor Vehicles website out of his pocket and compared it to the face he saw in the bar mirror, and it looked pretty close.

And the man was wearing a watch just like the one on Matt’s wrist.

Matt wasn’t much of a drinking man, but for once in his life he felt he needed a stiff one. He ordered a shot of Canadian Club and choked it down, chased it with the rest of his beer, and turned to the Inuit man and smiled at him.

“I couldn’t help noticing, you’ve got a watch just like mine.”

The man frowned, and just for a moment he looked frightened. Matt could understand the initial hostility—he was Inuit, Matt was a stranger—but why would he be frightened? The man—Matt was sure it was Charlie now—looked around as if he expected someone to come crashing through the door.

“See?” Matt said, turning his wrist and pointing to the timepiece he had worn since his incarceration at the secret government facility. “It’s a Seiko Naval Observatory, accurate to a billionth of a second.”

Charlie relaxed a little, shrugged, and grinned, showing widely spaced, tobacco-stained teeth.

“Not mine,” Charlie said. “Mine don’t work. Never has.”

Not surprising
, Matt thought,
since it’s twelve thousand years old.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Matt said.

“CHARLIE
said he found the watch,” Matt told Susan. “Five years ago. Said he thought it would bring him good luck, and it did for a while, but not so much lately.”

“You’re saying he got the watch off the man beside the frozen mammoth.”

“Yes.”

“And Howard didn’t tell you about it.”

“You know Howard. He hates to lose, and he’s secretive as hell. He didn’t tell me about the watch because Charlie stole it before he got there. He didn’t tell me about the second person frozen with the mammoth because it had nothing to do with building a time machine. I didn’t need to know. Howard and his damn secrets.”

“I’m starting to see where this is going,” she said.

“Yes. Susan…from the very first I considered the possibility that the dead man beside the mammoth was…me. There was one thing that argued
strongly
against it. I simply cannot imagine that I would be able to survive in the Stone Age long enough to be as old as this man was. But I guess anything’s possible. Then, when we went back, I was pretty damn sure it
had
been me. I figured I’d explain it to you later, after we had settled in a bit.”

“Break it to me slowly. Because there was just you and the frozen mammoth. I wasn’t there. Which meant I must have died before you did.”

“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t figure out—”

“It’s okay, Matt. I had enough to adjust to as it was.”

“Okay. Then we came back…and it no longer made sense that the frozen man had been me. Then I found Charlie, and the watch.

“I came to your house to tell you that I was now sure I was not only the ‘inventor’ of the time machine, I was the time traveler. I had figured out that, one way or another, the roller-coaster ride wasn’t over yet, for me, anyway. I was trying to figure out how to say good-bye to you for good. Then Howard dropped his bombshell—accidentally, the bastard—and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’ve been trying to decide which ever since, and how to tell you.

“It seems the dead man was me, the dead woman was you, and the dead mammoth was Fuzzy.”

“The dead mammoth was a hybrid? Fuzzy is a hybrid,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“Oh my god.”

THEY
went into the bedroom, got undressed and into bed, and just held each other for a while as Susan absorbed it.

“What if you just tossed it into the sound?” she said after a while.

“I’ll do it if you want me to.”

“And then what?”

“And then we see, I guess. The reason I’m afraid to is, like
I said, if we don’t go back in time, live out our lives, and die up north…then I don’t see how we will ever meet.”

“But we have met. We’re here. Together. What happens to this, to all that’s happened between us?”

“What happens when we die? I have no answers to those questions. Can we alter reality? If we try, then the universe might simply rearrange itself and make it so that none of this ever happened. You’ll live your life in Florida, in the circus, and I’ll live my life in Oregon. And I have to say, from my perspective in the here and now, whatever that means in this context, it wouldn’t be a life worth living. But then…would I know? I don’t think so.”

She kissed him.

“I feel the same way. I guess we don’t dare mess with it.” She drew her head back and looked at him. “But you must have a theory. About what would happen if we tried to get rid of the time machine.”

Matt sighed. “I think one of two things would happen. If I threw it over the side right here, this RV, the ferry dock, and maybe all of Port Townsend would be hurled backward into the Stone Age. Remember, the warehouse and all the elephants went back with us the first time.”

“And the other thing?”

“I think a big fish would swallow it, get netted, cut up, the time machine would get thrown in the trash, fall off the trunk on the way to the landfill, get picked up by a scavenger, sold to an antique shop, and one day we’d walk into that antique shop with Fuzzy on a leash…”

“So, if we avoid antique shops we can at least delay the trip a while. That’s good—Fuzzy has never been interested in antiques.”

He laughed and kissed her nose. “I hadn’t thought of that. Let’s make a vow. When we buy furniture for our home together, we buy strictly new stuff.”

“Our home together?”

“I hope so.”

“Me, too.” She sighed, and snuggled closer. “I don’t much fancy a cave as a first home, though. The Stone Age…life wasn’t easy back then, Matt. I wasn’t even a very good Girl Scout. I don’t know how I’ll be at picking roots and berries.”

“I couldn’t catch a trout, the one time I tried. I guess we’d better start studying survival manuals, that sort of thing. How are your teeth?”

“Good. Oh, lord, no medical and dental benefits where we’re going.”

“Not even any Novocain. But we’ll have each other, and we’ll have a tame mammoth. Fuzzy will be back in his world.”

“I guess that’s something. No, I mean, that’s
everything
, being with you—”

“I know what you meant.”

“I had no idea, when I took Fuzzy, just how far we’d be taking him.” She was silent for a while. Matt felt himself begin to stir, wondered if she still felt like sleeping. He touched her, and she proved she wasn’t sleepy at all. But first she drew back one more time and looked at him.

“So when does this happen, do you think?”

“When it’s time.”

NIGHT
fell, and the satellites opened their infrared eyes.

Howard paid for time on every high-resolution commercial orbiter as they came over the horizon until they sank below it. He stayed on the plane with Andrea, parked at the Executive Terminal, monitoring his bank of screens and listening to incoming reports from units in the field—all negative so far—while Warburton and his team watched similar displays in the war room of the security company only about half a mile away.

Warburton was sure they would try to sneak over somewhere in the wilderness, so he concentrated on the eyes scanning the border, from Blaine to western Montana. They set the system to look for trailers of the right size, and for large animals. The heat-sensitive cameras could pick out a single rabbit but the computers were good at sorting through that. They quickly discarded the garbage and sent the larger hits to the screens for a human to decide if it was worth checking out.

It got boring very quickly.

There was a herd of cattle. Warburton watched as the computer examined several areas that turned out to be nothing but clumps of cows that made an unusually large heat signature. More cows. A group of people hiking along a mountain trail. He could see their arms and legs moving, and the beams of their flashlights. Kind of late to be moving around in the woods. Here was a group of five deer. More deer. More people. Deer, deer, deer, man alone, deer, deer…what was that? Bear. Now there was a car, a tent, a campfire, and two people…my, that’s an interesting position.

It was the last interesting thing Warburton saw for several hours.

*    *    *

THE
clock swung past midnight, eased into the wee hours. Warburton had to stop and rest his eyes every fifteen minutes or so. He hadn’t had any idea there were so many deer in the whole country, and this was just a narrow strip of Washington and the tip of Idaho. Not to mention RVs. Those were fairly easy. A mammoth in an RV or a truck would shine like a beacon. They had found hundreds of garage-type fifth wheels, some with a heat source at the back where Fuzzy would be standing, but a quick look always showed it to be the stillwarm engines of off-roaders like the one Susan had probably abandoned on the roadside somewhere.

He wasn’t discouraged yet, they could be undercover somewhere waiting for the occasional border patrol vehicle to go by, but they had to go across sometime, and he was sure they would be detected. But he had thought to have them by now, he had to admit that. Time to go back over it, question his assumptions. Was he missing something?

He called up an area map and looked at it, tried to make it tell him something. After a few minutes he frowned.

“What’s this?” he asked Crowder, pointing to the tip of a little peninsula about ten miles west of Blaine. It was an almost perfect square, two miles on a side. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it was a different color from the land above it.

“That’s the nipple on the hind teat of Canada,” Crowder said, with a chuckle.

Warburton waited.

“It’s called Point Roberts. Back when somebody was drawing that straight-line border that starts back in Minnesota, that line nicked that little peninsula. ‘Fifty-four, forty, or fight,’ or some shit like that. It’s part of the U.S. Hardly anybody goes there but Canucks crossing to get bargains on stuff that’s more expensive up there.”

“So there’s a border crossing?”

“Sure.”

“Is there a ferry?”

Crowder typed a moment, and the map which had been told to display only ferries that went from the United States to
Canada now showed the whole maze of Washington State ferries. Sure enough, a couple lines went to Point Roberts.

“Another boondoggle, you ask me,” Crowder said. “Just north of the border is the great big B.C. ferry slip at Tsawwassen. Who needs another ferry?”

Sawasen?
Warburton hated the stupid names up here. Humptulips, Mukilteo, Puyallup…why couldn’t they speak English?

“The ferries that go there. Where do they come from?”

“Let’s see…here’s one from Anacortes, one from Bellingham, and one from Friday Harbor.”

“The first two are covered. Where’s Friday Harbor?”

“San Juan Islands.” Crowder pointed to a maze of islands, all highly irregular in shape. It looked as if there were three or four big ones and dozens of small ones. “One of the ferries from Anacortes to Sidney, in B.C., stops a couple places in the San Juans, including Friday Harbor.”

“But we’ve got that covered.”

“Yeah.” Crowder frowned at the map. “But there’s one that stops at Friday Harbor before going on to Point Roberts.”

“Where does it start?”

“Right here. Port Townsend. Over on the Olympic Peninsula.”

All they had over there was one team, at Port Angeles, covering the ferry that went to Victoria. Plus, once they decided Susan was going to Canada, they hadn’t been checking the main highway over there, US 101, or much of anything, for that matter. Warburton had thought the only way to Canada via the Olympic Peninsula was through Port Angeles, since he had asked only for international ferries.

It was a serious lapse on Crowder’s part—he should have thought of the border crossing at Point Roberts—but Warburton wasn’t going to take him to task for it. Not right now, anyway. He addressed Crowder and Blackstone.

“I don’t want you to mention this to anybody. Not even Howard, yet. You know we’ve been picking up chatter, there’s been some leaks from some of our employees, naturally, and some notice of what’s going on along the border. The news and the police are just starting to get wind that somebody’s
looking for something the size of an elephant. But I may still have a chance to wrap this up quietly. I’m going out to take a look for myself. If there’s a newsman waiting when I get there, I’ll know how he found out, understand?”

“Don’t worry,” Blackstone said. Warburton nodded, and went outside to his helicopter, thinking he would retire after this one was over, and never set foot in another helicopter again. He was getting too old for this shit.

IT
didn’t take long to get over to Port Townsend. Warburton had the pilot keep it high up. With the optics he had there was no need to move in close and make a lot of noise. He examined two RV parks before he found the likely trailer and truck, the engine glowing brightly through the trees, the water heater plainly visible, what looked like two people in the bedroom, and a large heat source in the back. He told the pilot to set it down on the opposite side of town.

There was a motorcycle in the backseat of the chopper. Warburton wrestled it out, pulled on a warm black leather coat and helmet, and headed out. It had a good muffler on it, making no more than a powerful purr as he moved down the deserted streets. Halfway there it started to rain again, the low-pressure system he had been watching and worrying about all night moving in from the Pacific just now arriving here in the western part of the state. He flipped down his visor.

He arrived at the park, killed the engine, and coasted down a slight slope, going by the office, and laid the bike down in shadows. He walked down the rows of sleeping juggernauts and almost missed the one he was looking for. The red stripe was gone, and the long dimple in the side had been painted over.