Mammoth

Fuzzy hurried to Temba's side and cowered there, barely daring to peek around his mother's thick, tree-trunk leg. Some of his aunts herded all the younger mammoths around Fuzzy and Temba and then made a wall of mammoth flesh around them. They bellowed at the chattering two-legs!

Meanwhile, Big Mama and four or five others charged at the two-legs, who quickly turned and scattered and ran away. Big Mama could not chase them all, but she caught one with one of her huge tusks and threw him into the air! When the two-leg fell to the ground again he didn't move. Big Mama trod him into the dirt. The other two-legs retreated to a nearby hilltop and stayed there. They watched the herd.

When things had calmed down the others went to help Younger Sister, who was still struggling in the pit. It was a very nasty thing. It was not very deep, but the Clovis hunters had sharpened tree limbs and set them into the ground at the bottom of it.

Younger Sister had fallen on several of the sharp points. She was struggling, and crying out in pain, and Fuzzy was frightened to see it and hear it. After a while Younger Sister struggled out of the pit. She had several deep wounds on her legs and her belly, and one sharp branch had broken off in her side.

On the hilltop, the two-legs settled in to wait.

14 THE man Susan knew as the Martyr was not what you'd call a man of action.

The leader of the duet of pickets at Howard Christian's warehouse of sin was the man in the aluminum lawn chair, the one Susan knew as Droopy. Though these days he looked about as peripatetic as the average barnacle, in his younger days Droopy had been a pistol. He had spent part of his youth in the merchant marine, and part in the pen. He drank a lot and fought a lot, and on his fortieth birthday he found God and devoted himself to God's work with the same energy he formerly brought to a fistfight. In fact, God's work in those days often did involve a fistfight. Many a depraved abortionist had spent a lot of money at the dentist's office after a run-in with Droopy... and Droopy spent many more nights in jail as a result.

But now the bones of his spine had turned into something as light and hole-ridden as pumice, with the tensile strength of a stick of chalk. His chin practically sat on his chest, and when he turned his head he could hear sounds that more properly should come from a mill making stone-ground wheat than from a human body. All he was good for now was to sit day after day in his lawn chair, the base of a big picket sign jammed between his legs, and hold the sign where passersby could read it.

But Droopy, though a God-fearing man, wasn't big on Hail Marys. As he sat there, and as he had sat over the last five years at many another site of Satan's work, he pla

To make any of his plans work, he had to have an accomplice, as his physical condition limited the amount of mayhem he could work against Satan's tools. The Martyr was useless, nothing but a pious pissant, in Droopy's estimation. But every time he had tried to enlist others into his schemes they had turned him down. That was probably because they were pretty stupid plans, on the order of kidnapping the children of abortion butchers and keeping them until the "doctor" swore never to kill an unborn child again.

But sitting outside Mr. Multibillionaire Tool-of-Satan Howard Christian's house of ungodly horrors day after day, he had decided he had to do something. This gene-tampering business was almost as bad as abortion. It had to be stopped.

And this time he had a plan—and an ally, known only as Python. He was a member of the Action Wing of the Soldiers of the Animal Kingdom. SAK was antifur, antimeat, and antivivisection. They specialized in actions like the liberation of lab animals, arson attacks on the property of circuses and rodeos, and even the bombing of butcher shops. They went so far as to oppose horseback riding and the keeping of pets—which they called slaves—of any kind.

Their common ground was cloning, which Python and SAK saw as just one more way to abuse our animal brothers. And their meeting ground was the Internet.

While the Martyr had learned only enough computer skills to access the rich lode of Bible discussions to be found online, Droopy had taken to cyberspace instantly. On the Net, he was a strong, young, active man again. In person it was easy to discount the views of a tired old fart who could no longer raise his voice above a hoarse rattle. In antiabortion chat rooms and newsgroups, he was Swordofthelord, a powerful and well-respected voice in the movement. He met Python on an anticloning message board, they corresponded for a time, and Droopy got the impression of a young man who wasn't too worried someone might get hurt. Droopy had always felt that way. If you didn't hurt them, why would they pay attention to you?

Eventually they had a meeting. Python was disappointed, naturally enough, at the old ragbag who had talked so tough. Droopy knew he had to win Python's respect quickly, so he trotted out some of his best stories of clashes with abortion doctors. Python listened with distaste—he had been the proximate cause of several abortions himself—but remembered the old man's fervent views on this new evil of cloning, and knew that in a holy fight it was sometimes necessary to do business with people you would scorn in a perfect world. After a while, cautiously, Python added a few stories of his own. Droopy didn't mention that he'd hunted deer and rabbits all through his childhood to put food on the table. He hadn't held a gun in fifteen years, but the memories were still fond.

Python resembled that kraut actor, Maximilian Schell, but just missed being handsome. There was a burn scar on the side of his face, and he was missing the pinkie finger from his right hand. A mink had bitten it off while he was freeing her and five hundred of her sisters from a ranch, which he called a concentration camp. Served him right, Droopy thought. Vicious little monsters, minks.

When Droopy mentioned the name of Howard Christian, Python's eyes narrowed with interest. So he went heavy on that angle, and soon was sitting in Python's car on the way to look over the mammoth project warehouse.

Python liked what he saw from the start. The warehouse was in an area of similar warehouses, hardly worth a second glance except for the unarmed guard sitting in a booth beside the door into the building. The whole property was surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire and there was a thirty-foot strip of bare concrete between that and the target. The people who worked inside parked their cars there. They gained access by punching a number into a keypad mounted on a pole, which caused an electric gate to roll back.

Python drove all around the building, then parked his van a hundred feet away and watched the gate for a while. Droopy slumped in the right seat.

"Couldn't sit here too long without that guard getting interested, if he's doing his job," Python pointed out. He looked in the backseat. "That's why you'll come in handy, Lamb." Python, who loved intrigue, had never asked for the names of his companions, and had certainly never given his own. He had code-named them Lamb and Turtle. "You're out here every day?"

"By now that guy doesn't notice you any more than he does a rock or a tree," Python said. "Let's do it."

IT didn't take long. Lamb/Martyr stood in his usual spot, calming down gradually when he realized no one noticed him casually lifting a tiny pair of opera glasses to his face whenever someone entered the grounds. The second morning he got the right angle on it. The number was 4-1-5-3-9. He knew, sadly, that they would go in that night.