Mammoth (7 page)

“Ask Warburton to find out about that,” Christian said. He was speaking to the small man with glasses who had been introduced to Matt as “Ralph, who will get you absolutely anything you need, and keep it all organized for you.” Ralph reached for his cell phone and spoke quietly into it.

“I’ll need a machinist, and a good computer man, naturally, one who knows where to find the right programs or write them if he has to. An engineer, a metallurgist. They’ll tell you what they’ll need.” Matt turned away at last from the box. He shrugged.

“Howard, the truth is, you don’t really need me at all for this stage of your project. I know very little about engineering, and rebuilding or duplicating this thing is a job for an engineer. A gadget man. All I can do is look over his shoulder. Then, when we maybe get an idea of what it’s supposed to do, and some notion of how it’s supposed to do it, maybe I can be useful uncovering the underlying theory behind the thing. But to make it, and to make it work…”

Christian thought he was seeing an attack of cold feet. He just wasn’t used to dealing with a man like Matt Wright, who told the truth as he saw it most of the time, and always when it came to mathematics.

“I have confidence in you,” he said. “We’ll have all that you asked for in place by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you probably want to get to your hotel suite and clean up. I imagine it’s been a long day.”

Matt looked down at his trout-fishing vest, realized it
had
been a long day, but he didn’t feel tired at all. He knew there were some interesting times ahead, and he knew that could be a problem—did Christian know why Matt had been out in the middle of a lake fishing in the first place?

To tackle this problem, he would have to have some insights
on the order of those of Einstein when writing his theory of relativity, or Heisenberg with his uncertainty principle. He would need a new way of thinking.

Because in the universe he thought he knew, this thing was impossible.

IT
was the following afternoon before Matt felt ready to get started.

Most of what would be needed for analysis was in place, from a complete forensic lab to a mass spectrometer to a fully equipped machine shop. Matt had his engineer, his metallurgist, his computer man, and, most important, his restoration specialist. This was Dr. Marian Carreaux, an intense, fiftyish woman stolen away from the Getty Museum. She was a suspicious woman. The device was being kept in a sealed glove box in a helium atmosphere.

“Is this thing radioactive?” she asked.

It seemed a natural enough thing to ask. So they brought in a Geiger counter and several other instruments. They reported only background radiation.

She cleaned it on the outside. There were scratches all over it, and on the top side three indentations that Marian said had been made by a metal object, not a stone tool. Near the handle, set into the side, were two standard peanut lights, one red and one green.

It was the bottom that was interesting.

When the grime was cleared away they could see a deep puncture that had been sealed up with tar. And someone had scrawled a message on the aluminum surface. Analysis revealed traces of flint in the grooves.

Howard was summoned and they all looked at the writing on a television screen. It had been computer enhanced.

There was another mark, about where the crossbar of a T would have been.

“No regrets?” Howard mused. He looked grim. “I have to
say, I cannot imagine a man from our time going back to the Stone Age and having even a tolerable life, much less a good one. God, it must have been a brutal life.”

“I agree. Looks like he died before he could finish the sentence.”

“He wanted to send a message to someone, if he was ever found.”

Matt shivered, thinking of the man from…somewhen? Writing out what had become his last testament as his fingers grew too numb to hold the flint arrowhead.

“Any chance it will release anything toxic when we open it?” Marian asked.

“I have no idea. What would you recommend?”

She had a lot of suggestions. By the time they were ready to open it, they were equipped to detect dozens of poisonous gases, and to collect any gas or liquid that might come out of the box. Nothing that might provide a clue as to function or origin would be allowed to get away.

Finally the moment came. Matt and Howard stood back and looked on as Marian reached into the glove box and prepared to open the time machine.

She secured it with padded clamps, then opened the first of two ordinary latches that held the top down. It squeaked as it came free, and a brownish fluid began to leak around the rubber seal.

That fluid was collected, and the various monitors were checked. Nothing dangerous seemed to be coming out, so Marian proceeded to open the second latch and lift the lid, and everyone crowded around for the first look inside.

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

Young Temba got
pregnant
that long-ago summer in what would become Canada. But Canada would not be the young mammoth’s home.

Mammoth mothers carried their children for a long, long time.

Human mothers take nine months to make a baby. Elephants and mammoths take almost two years!

Twenty-two months! Ninety-five weeks! Six hundred and sixty-two days!

Temba moved south with the herd and she never saw Tsehe again. We don’t know what happened to Tsehe, but we can hope he led a long and happy life up there on the green and grassy steppes.

Temba did not miss Tsehe. Mammoths were not like humans, they did not mate for life, and in fact except at mating season adult males and females did not concern themselves with the opposite sex very much.

This would not be a good way for humans to live, but it was fine for mammoths.

The herd drifted south and west as the summer drew to a close and the rains came. That winter the herd got as far south as the place we now call Arizona. But Arizona was not like it is today, which is to say very hot and dry and barren. Much of the American southwest was lush and green and tree-covered.

The grazing was wonderful, and that was a good thing because mammoths needed a lot of food! Each full-grown mammoth could eat as much as three or four hundred pounds of grass and leaves and fruits every day.

Temba, making a baby, needed even more. She spent most of each day and sometimes into the night, eating. Eating and eating and eating. She had never been so hungry!

Summer came again and the herd moved north, but not so far north as they had the year before. They spent most of the summer in what we would later call Colorado and Nebraska.

Then it was time to move again.

Now the weather turned bad. The herd had to forage hard to find the food it needed, and sometimes went a few days without water.

But Big Mama was old and wise. She had seen hard times before. She had been over this ground, and many other places as well. She knew where the pools and wallows were, the places where the herd could bathe and frolic after a hot and hungry day. And if there were no pools, she knew every spot where a mammoth could dig with her massive feet and find water under the surface, enough for all her sisters and daughters and nieces to drink enough to get them to the next watering hole.

All through the bad winter they moved west, and when spring came they found themselves looking out at more water than any of them but Big Mama had ever seen, so much water that you couldn’t see the other side of it.

The water was what we would later call the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t good to drink but it was fun to swim in, and they were in a green and lush valley we would later call the Los Angeles Basin.

The mammoths had come to California.

SUSAN
Morgan opened the door in the side of the big trailer box and stepped inside to a familiar smell. It didn’t surprise her that the hired attendant hadn’t been as scrupulous at cleaning out the traveling stall as he should have been. She’d met the man at the elephant retirement ranch up north and judged him to be one of entirely too many elephant keepers who had no business within a mile of a pachyderm. Elephants frightened him. He relied on a hook to control the beasts, and one day one would squash him like a bug.

Not her problem.

This one was a twenty-five-year-old Indian named Petunia-tu. Most elephants that young would still be working, but Petunia-tu had developed a foot infection a few years back that had left her semicrippled, unable to perform, and a behavior problem when the foot was giving her pain. Little chance of that now; she was doped to the eyebrows with painkillers and tranquilizers for the trip to the big city. The tranks had probably not been necessary. She was a circus veteran, used to traveling to two or three cities a week.

Susan had found her at a game ranch in Simi Valley, run by a humane society, where many circus animals were living out their days on rambling grounds that, in some ways, resembled the African savanna. Not that Petunia-tu would have known that. She was captive-born, in Portland, Oregon, and her ancestors hailed from Sri Lanka. It was an undemanding life up there in the pleasant dry heat, having to do little more than stand around behind a cleverly camouflaged barrier and watch the pickups and SUVs drive by, full of moms and dads and kids pretending to be on safari. But Susan didn’t doubt
Petunia-tu could perform her old routines at the drop of a ringmaster’s whistle. Elephants really did have good memories.

Now she was about to embark on a great adventure, and she would never know it.

The keeper had given Susan one useful bit of information about his charge beyond the basic medical information concerning the missing part of Petunia-tu’s left front foot. She had a fondness for watermelon, so Susan had had one cut into bite-sized—for an elephant—chunks in a wicker basket. She approached Petunia-tu slowly, always watching her eyes, reading her body language. Susan felt she could always spot anger in an elephant’s eyes, and the animal’s movements spoke volumes to those who could read them. Petunia-tu was radiating calm. She might even have been enjoying her return to the road. It was sure a more interesting life than the game park.

Susan held out a chunk of melon and Petunia-tu took it and eagerly jammed it up into her massive jaws, which began their unique grinding motion. She didn’t spit out the seeds. She didn’t even spit out the rind.

When the watermelon was half gone Susan opened the gate that separated the carrier into two halves. She took the end of the rope looped around Petunia-tu’s neck and tugged her gently, and the living gray mountain lumbered forward, her trunk probing into the wicker basket.

Outside, the keeper had lowered the heavy ramp in front, put there so the cargo didn’t have to back up, which was always chancy with a beast weighing ten thousand pounds and lacking a rearview mirror.

Petunia-tu balked at the top of the ramp, not wanting to put her weight on her weak foot to come down the ramp. The keeper—Susan thought his name was Barry—stepped forward and, sure enough, there was an elephant hook in his hand. Susan scowled at him and waved him away, and coaxed Petunia-tu carefully to the ground. After that it was a piece of cake to lead her into her stall in the cool interior of the big warehouse. She perked up a little and raised her trunk as soon as she smelled the other inmates, and immediately went to the fence of steel girders that separated her quarters from Queenie’s on her left. The cows sniffed each other for a while, and neither
seemed upset. Susan was sure Petunia-tu was instantly aware that Queenie was pregnant, though it would be many more months before she showed.

She stayed a while to be sure no conflicts would erupt. Elephants were social animals and could be temperamental about dominance, which they worked out as nicely as the U.S. Senate, but it was mostly the males who were trouble. Females tended to establish the pecking order peacefully. She expected Petunia-tu to fit into her growing herd easily enough.

Outside, as she was closing the door to the warehouse, the truck was pulling away. As it left it revealed the other, more mysterious half of Howard Christian’s mammoth obsession, that Matthew Wright fellow she hadn’t spoken to more than half a dozen times since his first day at the project when she had given him the short course in artificial insemination. He was sitting at a wrought-iron table Christian had had installed in the parking lot behind the warehouse, next to the ten-foot security fence that hid the whole installation from prying eyes. He was under a big canvas umbrella that seemed a good idea with his pale complexion; the merciless summer sun would no doubt broil him like a lobster in about five minutes. He had spread the wrapper of a huge Subway sandwich on the table and was watching her as he ate it. He gestured toward the closed door with the hand holding the sandwich.

“More godless, cruel, antinature experimentation, I presume,” he said. He gestured to the two enormously determined men who had taken it upon themselves to mount an eternal vigil at the driveway leading to the warehouse—if “eternal” could be taken to mean nine to five, Monday through Friday. Susan didn’t know their names or who they were affiliated with. She called the tall one with the day’s growth of beard and the look of perpetual angelic bliss on his face the Martyr. He stood all day, muttering something over and over which Susan thought might be the Rosary. She had never seen him move, but somehow he migrated during the day within a thirty-yard range on either side of the gate of Cyclone fencing.

The other might have been the Martyr’s father. There was a family resemblance in the withered ruins of this old man who, once or twice a week, took his son’s place, sitting in a lawn
chair of nylon webbing and holding the same sign. He had a case of dowager’s hump so bad he couldn’t lift his head above the level of his shoulders, and his jowls sagged far below the level of his jaws. She called him Droopy.

The sign they carried read,
STOP GODLESS CLONING. NO FRANKENSTEIN ANIMALS. CALL OR WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN
.