Mammoth

it against the door of the Coke machine and started to pull. The door popped open and he took out a cold can of Coke. "You want something?"

"Is there any Mountain Dew?"

"All we have here that's clear is Sprite."

"That'll do."

They popped the tops and drank, then were silent for a moment. They had worked for several hours on the inventory, not having to talk about the central fact of their dilemma, but Matt knew it was unavoidable.

"Look...," he said, and had to stop. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry about this. I'm so sorry about it."

"About what?"

"About... well, about getting you thrown down a temporal wormhole to what might very well be the year 13,000 B.C."

"Is that what happened? A temporal wormhole?"

"You know what I mean."

"Sure. The part I don't see is why any of this was your fault."

"I thought it was sort of... obvious."

"Not to me." She sighed. "Okay, you were trying to build a time machine."

"Trying to duplicate something that was found that might be a time machine."

"Don't get technical. You built it, some ignorant yahoos came in and did something to it—" "We scientists call that 'whacking the shit out of it.' "

"I keep elephants. I keep them in strong, secure stockades, and I keep people away from them. But what if those yahoos got in there, opened the gates and the outside doors, and threw a bunch of firecrackers into the paddocks? And the elephants stampeded down Wilshire and hurt a lot of

people? Is that my fault?"

"Well..."

"Don't think about it too long." There was a tiny edge to her voice.

"No, of course not. Not if you took reasonable precautions. But did I?"

"I don't think anybody could tell what 'reasonable' was, before this happened."

"Maybe. Maybe not. I keep thinking I could have done more."

"Howard sure could have. He could have splurged on two or three guards, around the clock. I

think we ought to take that up with him... when we get back."

He noticed it was when, not if, and was grateful for her confidence... or was she just whistling past the graveyard?

"I think I will. But there's a larger question. What was I doing fooling around with something as

dangerous as time travel in the first place?"

"Satisfying your scientific curiosity. I don't see anything wrong with that."

"That's exactly what Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi and a few dozen other physicists

were doing in the early 1940s."

"So does that make the atomic bomb their fault?"

"People will probably debate that forever. One thing I'm sure of, if they hadn't researched those

questions, if they had opted out from fear of the consequences... somebody else would have found the same answers."

"No question. It's the same with cloning research. We can try to keep it in control, but the answers will come."

"Yes. I know it's foolish to worry too much about the effects of what you might discover. We'd stop discovering anything at all. Still..." He leaned back in his chair and sighed, wondering if he needed to get into this. But there wasn't much they could do until the sun came up, which could be hours yet. He went on. "When I was very young, I discovered science. I couldn't get enough of it. I read everything. I figured I'd continue doing that until I knew everything about everything. Chemistry, biology, physics, math, astronomy, you name it, it was all the same to me. In fact, I didn't see any distinction."

"That's true. In many ways, there isn't any difference. You can't do biology without chemistry, you can't do astronomy without physics... and you can't do any of them without math. That's what I kept coming back to, after I realized there was too much knowledge for any one person to learn in a hundred lifetimes. So when I reached the point where I had to specialize, I asked people what I seemed to be the best at, and they all said math. Which was good, because that's what I thought, too.

"And I'd given some thought to the responsibility of the researcher. Astronomy seemed fairly safe... until you started thinking about the power inherent in stars, in neutron stars, black holes, quasars. Same with physics. Biology gets into the realm of really hairy moral questions, like biological or genetic war, which in some ways is scarier than nuclear bombs. I'll tell you, it got to the point, if I'd been any good with the harmonica, I'd have dropped out of school and started a blues band. Unfortunately, I have no talent for music, or sports, or business, or sales, or fishing... no talents at all, really, except for memory and logical thinking. So I concentrated on math. Math seemed safe."

"You were how old?"

"Twelve."

Susan smiled. "Prodigies. When I was twelve I was learning how not to fall off when an elephant was lifting me on her trunk."

"I wish I knew how to do that."

"I'll teach you. But go on."

Matt wasn't sure he wanted to, but he'd started down the road.

"Well... I got my Ph.D. in mathematics. Even in math you're expected to specialize, but I tried to stay as broadly based as possible. One month I'd be working on the most theoretical things I could find, another I'd get interested in what we call 'real-world' problems. About a year ago I was noodling around some equations concerning superstrings. Do you know what that is?"

"Sure. It's that goop you squirt out of a can at parties. Sticks to stuff."

"Right. But the other sense of the word concerns what quarks are made of."

"Quarks being the particles that make up protons and neutrons and such."

"Yes. So far there is no real evidence of their existence, just some interesting mathematical theories. If they do exist, they are very small. Anyway, superstrings seemed as remote in one direction as quasars are in the other. I didn't think it was likely anything I discovered would have a lot of real-world applications." "You should have remembered that, in 1939, protons and neutrons seemed incredibly tiny."

"I gather it didn't work out that way."

"At first, it was fine. Lovely speculation. Good response to the papers I was publishing, interesting feedback from the three or four people around the world looking into the same thing.

"Then I stopped publishing. I didn't even realize I had done it at the time. I thought I was just organizing my thoughts, I'd put them down and send them in later.

"A year went by, and I started sleeping badly. I was getting an inkling of something that was... frightening me. I'm still not sure why. It got to be hard to do the math; sort of like writer's block, I guess.

"Then one day I stopped talking." Matt swallowed hard, and suited action to his words. After a minute had gone by, Susan spoke, cautiously.

"That must have been awful."

Matt laughed.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Actually, it wasn't so bad, at first. The weird thing was to discover I could get through the day pretty easily without speaking at all. I never had a lot of human contact at work, math is a lonely game sometimes. Casual contact could be handled with a nod or a smile. Hell, it's not like I was the office clown before that; people didn't expect a lot of words out of me. But gradually it became clear that I wasn't choosing not to speak, but that I couldn't speak. I'd open my mouth to say something, and nothing would come out. I wrote notes, memos, and emails to cover myself in most things... then I realized I was having trouble writing, too. I knew it was time to get help.

"And that's sort of where I was when Howard found me. I'd spent a month in a very nice, quiet facility in the country, mildly sedated, and after a while I could talk to a therapist. I was advised to take a few months off to think things over. I didn't need a lot of time to decide one thing: I wouldn't publish my results on the superstring research. There was too much potential danger. In fact, I knew I had to destroy the equations."