Mammoth

And that was what it was! Little Fuzzy was stuck in a tar pit!

If you go to California even today, to where the city of Los Angeles is now, you can see these tar pits. They look cool and inviting, just as they did that day long ago, but just beneath the surface the tar is still there. Natural gas, what scientists call methane, still bubbles out of the water, and that is what Fuzzy and Temba smelled. Not only mammoths got stuck in the tar. Just about everything that walked or crawled or flew at that time came to the pond to drink, and a lot of them got stuck, couldn't get out, and died. Scientists are still digging out their bones.

If Fuzzy had been a woolly rhinoceros or a giant elk or a dire wolf, he certainly would have died there in the tar pit. But Fuzzy was a mammoth, even though he was still quite a small mammoth, and mammoths did not abandon members of the herd when they were in trouble.

Temba and Big Mama and the others appeared on the top of the low hill and saw little Fuzzy struggling and heard him calling out. He was only working himself deeper.

They hurried down the slope, slipping and sliding, and it was a miracle that some of them didn't get stuck, too! But they carefully reached around little Fuzzy with their trunks, and they pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and Fuzzy's legs came free.

Poor little Fuzzy was a mess!

There was sticky tar all over his legs, and under his trunk. Temba and Big Mama and the others picked at it, and they got tar all over their trunks, too. It was matted in their hair. It was awful!

For weeks after that the tar dried out on Fuzzy's legs, and Temba continued to pick at it. It came away bit by bit, with clumps of his hair.

Ow! Ow! Ow!

Little Fuzzy had learned his lesson. He would never step into a tar pit again!

2

MATT and Susan never felt a thing.

The lights flickered briefly, almost too quick for the eye to see. Something changed in the atmosphere and it took a moment for Matt to realize it was the faint, distant sound of the emergency generator coming on. Then he heard something he'd never heard in the building before: the trumpeting

of Susan's elephants.

"Why did you push the button?" Susan asked.

Matt held his hands up in a pose of i

"I didn't push anything. That thing just sank into the cube on its own."

They both looked at it, now a perfect cube of small glass spheres. As they watched, the central

sphere rose again. "This is way beyond spooky," Susan said.

"The lights went out, the generator went on."

"Let's go outside and see if Howard felt anything."

"You go. I've got to see what's upsetting my elephants."

Susan headed for the interior door. Matt walked slowly, thoughts of cleaning up pushed aside now. Where did all those other marbles go?

His initial reaction, that they might have been folded through space-time somehow, that they were all somehow still there, packed into a seven by seven by seven volume that looked too small from our three-dimensional perspective but was plenty roomy in, say, five or six dimensions, had quickly paled. He was embarrassed that he'd even mentioned it to Susan. What must she think?

Question: Was there a way to explain the vanished spheres without resorting to extradimensional geometry?

Answer: Ask any magician. Ask any thief. Ask any prankster. Ask the gods of coincidence, chance, error, forgetfulness, and spiteful human nature.

So the box hadn't been opened. So what? The vandals got through the gate. All the data needed to build the structure now in the box was in Matt's computer; maybe he had been hacked.

Howard was pissed at him. Maybe he hired the vandals, arranged all this as a cruel hoax, maybe he liked to toy with men's minds that way. He could afford it.

Matt's mental state, though greatly improved since meeting Susan, was sometimes delicate. Maybe he'd simply replaced the alpha assembly himself while in a fugue state, and forgot.

Maybe he had been kidnapped by flying saucer men from Venus and brainwashed and this whole evening—even the whole last year—was a virtual reality experiment of surpassing cleverness.

Any of those things and many more now seemed more likely than multidimensional gymnastics. Matt felt considerable relief that he had blurted out his first theory to Susan rather than to Howard. It would be a lot easier to live down.

He reached the door, opened it, and saw that Santa Monica was gone.

SUSAN was not as frightened as Matt had feared she would be, at least not at first. The possibility had existed, they had talked about time travel in the abstract, she knew he was working on a time machine. But she had not expected to travel through time. If she did, she might have expected the journey to be more dramatic. They made a circuit of the building. They felt they had to do at least that much, even before the sun came up. In an unknown situation, Matt said, step one is to establish the parameters of your problem. For all he knew, he could turn the corner of the building and find that Santa Monica was still there... or Shangri-La, or an alien spaceship landing on Devil's Tower, or the first steps of the Yellow Brick Road.

"Is that a light over there?" Susan asked. Matt could barely see her hand, pointing toward what he figured must be the Hollywood Hills. He thought he might see the tiniest imaginable orange spark against the blackness.

"Somebody built a fire?" he wondered. "Maybe there's people around here."

Who could tell? But at that moment they got evidence that there was something sharing the night with them. It was a blood-curdling screech, very far away, but so powerfully malign that Matt felt his knees begin to shake. He turned the light back on, and they soon found themselves ru

"Can you get us back home?" Susan asked, breathing hard and afraid to look at him.

"I don't know. I think we'd better put that question aside for a few hours and figure out how long I have to solve that problem. How long we can expect to live."

"What do you mean? You think time traveling is harmful?"

"Not so far as I know. No, I mean how long we can survive."

IT quickly came down to water.

They sat together in the quiet warehouse and batted it around. The first thing that became clear was how utterly dependent people of the twenty-first century had become on the vast, interlinked network of goods and services and transportation that they called civilization. The second thing they recalled was that the Los Angeles Basin was a desert.

The taps were dry, of course. Matt assumed they were cut off abruptly, underground, just like the asphalt and concrete surrounding the building ended about five feet away from the sides.

They did an inventory. It didn't look good. Each of the five elephants had a drinking trough, and they varied from full to half empty. That wouldn't last long and there was no way to refill them. There were four rest rooms, two on each half of the warehouse, with two toilets in the ladies' rooms and one each in the men's. That was a good supply in the six tanks, but it wouldn't last long, either.

"I wish we'd put in one of those water coolers with the ten-gallon jugs," Matt said. "There's always a dozen full ones sitting around."

"Again, I haven't any idea."

The best news was the Coca-Cola machine. It was a big one, with a curved, lighted front.

Looking at it, Matt suddenly felt very thirsty. He searched his pockets and came up empty.

"You have any change?"

"My purse was in the car."

Matt looked around and found the crowbar abandoned by one of the vandals. He set the end of