Mammoth

Python wasn't a smash-and-grab guy, like Droopy. Hit fast, hit hard, don't worry about who gets hurt. Droopy wanted to steal a dump truck and crash right through the gate and the door, knock the guard on the head, and start tossing Molotov cocktails. Then dump a load of cow manure all over the place.

Python liked the cow manure part, but the rest of it sucked. He liked to keep things simple, minimize the violence to bystanders—after all, the guard wasn't cloning monstrosities in test tubes—and maximize the time to do as much damage as possible. Contrary to every Hollywood movie you ever saw, if you started hitting people over the head, sooner or later somebody would be killed.

"The gate is wired," Python pointed out, "otherwise a Cyclone fence is a joke. Pair of wire cutters, and you're through. But if we breach it, an alarm goes off in the guardhouse, and the police are probably called. We get five minutes, tops."

"It doesn't take long to throw a firebomb," Droopy pointed out.

"Yeah, and it's a metal building, and we'd have to be sure we hit something flammable inside. And don't forget, there's half a dozen elephants in there. You want to be the one to clear them out?" Python had already decided that freeing the elephants was out of the question. It was one thing to free a lab full of rats and rabbits or a fur farm full of minks, but he knew even that could go badly wrong. Remembering, he rubbed the stump of his little finger. Who could have known such a little bundle of fur like a mink could be so aggressive, and bite so hard?

"We go tonight, at midnight."

THE first part went smoothly, if slowly. Droopy insisted on going along. He saw it as his swan song, and he wouldn't be denied. Python seethed, slouched down in the anonymous rental van where they had been sitting for almost five hours. The guard made a slow circuit of the warehouse every half hour, inserting a plastic card in a time clock halfway around to register that he had actually made the trip. It took him about five minutes. That should be just enough time.

Python got out of the van and no interior lights came on. He carried a big Maglite flashlight and a crowbar, the all-purpose tool of the serious vandal. He wore a black backpack bulging with cans of paint wrapped in towels. Paint was needed to write slogans on the walls, and could do an amazing amount of damage when sprayed into the delicate i

He hurried to the gate and punched in the number Lamb had obtained. The gate immediately began to roll back, not silent, but not very noisy, either. He turned around, itching to go...

And they're off! he thought. Lamb and Turtle were almost halfway to the gate, Lamb with his Bible in one hand and his rosary and a crowbar in the other, Turtle jerking his walker ahead one step at a time as fast as he could move it. It was a toss-up which was moving slower, the hot-blooded old man or the reluctant monk.

Python had decided that getting inside in one step would be cutting it too close. His watch read

12:04 when they reached the group of Dumpsters against the warehouse wall. He shoved one out and hurried his accomplices behind it, then pulled it back exactly as it had been. They heard the guard's footsteps go by, not ten feet away from them, and continue on. They heard him settle down on a squeaky swivel chair. Python edged one eye carefully around the Dumpster and saw the man pick up his paperback book and start reading again.

It didn't smell very good back there. He identified elephant dung, rotting vegetables, and a sour whiff mixed with Old Spice, which he knew was coming from Turtle, as he had smelled it for the last five hours in the van. He heard a sound, like dry sticks cracking. He sighed. If the popping of Turtle's cervical vertebrae didn't bring the guard, they'd be okay, he figured.

The guard left again precisely at 12:30. As soon as he rounded the corner Python's ragtag commandos hurried over to the warehouse door as fast as they were able. They punched in the number and the door opened. Python glanced at the guard's paperback as they passed. It was Why Me? by Donald E. Westlake.

There were a few lights on, high overhead. As soon as he turned on his flashlight, he knew a mistake had been made.

Many of his colleagues had never set foot in a laboratory except to destroy it, but Python knew his way around from college classes. He knew the sort of equipment a cloning facility should have, and as he swept the room with his flashlight he saw none of it. The machines he did see were more suited for the practice of metallurgy or physics. There were complicated lathes and drills, a furnace, a mass spectrometer. What was just as important was what he did not see. He didn't see any glassware. He didn't see a gene sequencer.

Out in the middle of the half-empty, cavernous room were some ordinary folding cafeteria tables. They were covered with some sort of assemblies, built into aluminum cases. What the hell? Python swept his flashlight beam over the array. It would have been beautiful if it hadn't been so puzzling: marbles in every color of the rainbow.

He turned, examining the other item of interest and frustration, a huge rack of hundreds and hundreds of cubbies, or caches, each containing marbles of the same type. At the bottom of each cubby was a number, but looking closer, he could see the numbers had been painted over what looked like Chinese characters. Chinese? The whole thing looked like it might be intended to assemble models of molecules, the kind you could see in a high school biochem lab.

Putting aside what he didn't understand, Python swept his light around the room again, and it came to him. Not enough. Not nearly enough space in here.

"Where did they bring the elephants in?" he whispered to Lamb. "Which side of the building?"

But Lamb didn't really hear the question. He was in a state of Rapture.

The concept of Rapture was not, strictly speaking, a Catholic idea, but Lamb/Martyr was not a strict Catholic. He gravitated to a more recent fusion of the traditional Church with more evangelical elements. In the services of this new sect, it was not uncommon for healing to take place, for shouted testimonials and the speaking of strange tongues to be heard.

It was the tension of the break-in and the sensory overload of the thousands and thousands of colorful balls that set him off. His understanding of molecules being extremely limited, he imagined the marbles to be genes themselves, and these tables the very places where the obscenity of cloning was being carried out.

Well, we'd see about that.

"Tools of evil!" he shrieked, and grabbed the Chinese compositor's board by one corner. It was heavy and well braced, but his strength was as the strength of ten because he had become the living, breathing Sword of the Lord. The board tilted and the marbles began to clatter on the floor even before Lamb swung it over to crash on the floor.

The racket was incredible. Python had been on his way to the door co

"Guide my hand, O Lord!" Lamb cried, and then looked down at the tables. He overturned one, creating a fresh wave of sound. Lamb turned to another table and began flailing with his crowbar, smashing glass bowls with more marbles in them, sweeping everything in his reach onto the floor.