Mammoth

There wasn't much he could add that wouldn't get into more specificity than Susan could handle, and she seemed to recognize that. They were silent for a while, until Susan looked toward the door they had left propped open, and realized there was pale gray light coming through it.

They approached the door cautiously. Outside, there were entirely unremarkable trees and shrubs. The analytical side of Matt's mind noted there was no sign of whatever trees and shrubs had occupied the ground the time-traveling building now sat on. Were those trees now growing from Howard Christian's land in Santa Monica? Something to think about later, after they had made a plan.

At the top, they looked out over a primeval Pleistocene landscape, untouched in any way by the hand of man.

To the west, the Pacific was still gray in the morning light. To the north they could see what had to be the Hollywood Hills, surprisingly green and covered with scrub oaks. To the east the sky was orange, the sun about to burst over the horizon... and the mountains over there seemed to be frosted with snow. To the south, just rolling country and, far in the distance, what looked like a herd of horses.

"Maybe horses, maybe camels," Susan said. "I can't tell from this far away."

"Camels?"

"Sure, there were several species. And the horses may have three toes."

"And the tigers have big teeth."

"Not really tigers, Matt, they were a lot more like lions."

"You're the expert. But we'd probably better watch out for them. I'll bet they could hide pretty

well in all this underbrush."

"If we stick with the elephants, we shouldn't be bothered much by saber-toothed cats."

"Right. The elephants. What are we going to do about the elephants?"

"Water them, obviously."

"And how do we do that?"

"I think we leave it to them." They were silent again as the first rays of the sun reached them.

"That is so beautiful," Susan said, with a catch in her voice. "I wish I'd brought my camera."

Matt was thinking about saber-toothed cats and wishing he'd brought a gun... a very large gun.

"So...," Susan said. "Where did you hide your superstring data?"

"It's in my safe-deposit box, in Portland."

They looked at each other, and laughed. "Well, I should have destroyed it," Matt said.

Matt looked into the distance again, and decided to say nothing.

"I guess we'd better get to work," Susan said. "I think we've got an interesting day ahead of us."

ABOUT twelve thousand years in the future, Howard Christian was finally at the end of the most interesting day of his life, and one of the more expensive ones.

He had heard somewhere that the New York City police department used to have an informal code for the offering of bribes, a way to avoid the awkwardness of just coming out and saying "Would you take a bribe?" Instead, you could say, "You look like you could use a new hat." What that meant was: "Would twenty dollars make this problem go away?" Sometimes it took a new suit to do the job: one hundred dollars.

Tomorrow a half dozen Santa Monica patrolmen would be driving around in brand-new Land Rovers. Kraylow, Vasquez, Dawson, and probably a few others at Robinson Security had just earned themselves new homes in Simi Valley.

According to Howard's lawyers, there was nothing illegal, in itself, in making a large metal warehouse vanish from the face of the Earth, and that was all the police officers had witnessed. The money they would receive, very discreetly, was simply for not talking about what they had seen. Howard was confident the matter could be buried easily enough, especially since each of the superior officers in the department would be getting the price of two or three Land Rovers.

The price was steeper for the Robinson people because they were the only ones who knew there had been two people inside the building when it ceased to exist.

Howard's lawyers weren't quite so sure of the ramifications of that one. Unless it could be determined just what had caused the warehouse to evaporate it would be difficult to charge Howard or any of his enterprises with anything that might have befallen Matt and Susan... and who could even prove they had been harmed? Perhaps they were fine... wherever they went. Still, they had been there, and now they were gone, and the Robinson people knew it, and not mentioning it to the police might be seen as negligence, at the very least, and so they had earned the price of a house in Simi Valley, the dream of every Southland cop and ex-cop.

But where did Matt and Susan go?

That was a question Howard was determined should never be asked. Everyone who knew that Matt was working on a time machine had either vanished with the building or was in Howard's employ, so that was under control.

It would have been a lot cheaper for Howard if he could have simply stonewalled: My building disappeared, I don't know why, and I don't know where it went. End of story. But there would never be an end to it, and he knew it. Reporters would be all over the story, and soon the bugs would start crawling out of the baseboards. Roswell flying saucer bugs, crop circle bugs, Area 51 bugs. Alien abductees.

It took all morning, but at last he felt he had it under control. He was exhausted, but willed himself to drive back to the scene of the disaster. He took one of the Robinson Blazers this time, not wishing to draw attention to himself in one of his antique cars.

There was another Robinson vehicle parked outside the gate, ma

No, they would conclude, sensibly, that somehow Howard Christian, the eccentric billionaire, had had the structure demolished overnight, right down to the concrete pad, and replanted in scrubby-looking oak trees.

Howard drove around to the far side where there were no people. He got out, walked to the chain-link fence, and grabbed it with his hands. He scowled at the trees inside, trees that had obviously grown right where they now stood, for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years. He shook the fence in frustration.

Where did you take my building, Matt?

FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

Mammoths did not sleep a lot. Most nights they would sleep only four or five hours, and only for an hour or so at a time. Somebody was always awake, watching for danger.

Sometimes they slept standing up. This wasn't uncomfortable for mammoths, as it would be for us. Many animals sleep standing up. But sometimes they liked to lie down on their sides for a while and sleep that way.

One night a few weeks after Fuzzy got into big trouble at the tar pits, he was sleeping lying down. There were still hard balls of tar clinging to his front legs and he didn't like that. He rubbed his legs against trees and on the ground, trying to get them off. Maybe he dreamed. What would a mammoth dream about? We don't know.

But just after the night was darkest, when the moon had just risen over the hills to the east, Fuzzy was awakened by the urgent touch of Temba's trunk. He opened his eyes to see a strange light.

The herd was all awake, and milling around nervously. Fuzzy got to his feet and huddled close to his mother's side, where he felt warm and safe and secure. Then the quiet of the night was broken by the high, horrible cries he had heard once before. He remembered them well.

They came from the south, waving burning sticks that were so bright they hurt the eyes of the mammoths.