Mammoth

Most animals don't like fire, and mammoths were no different. They ran away!

But the two-legs were determined, they kept coming. The mammoths would stop for breath, and once again the two-legs would be almost on them.

And now they were touching their flaming sticks to the ground, and the yellow grass itself began to burn. It raced toward the herd, and the two-legs were close behind.

On and on the mammoth herd ran, into the night, trying to stay one step ahead of the inferno on the ground. Little Fuzzy began to get very tired.

Then he smelled something that made his young heart beat even faster. It was a smell he would never forget, the smell of that awful day when he was almost swallowed up in the thick black goo that lurked just beneath the surface of that quiet, inviting pool.

It was the smell of tar!

Fuzzy wanted to turn back. He looked back at the fire. It was impossible to go that way. Temba and Big Mama and the rest of the herd kept going, onward toward the tar pits.

Then they were joined by other mammoths. These were big bulls, the biggest mammoths Fuzzy had ever seen! They were panicked, too, rushing forward as fast as they could go.

And then a very, very strange thing happened....

3

SUSAN was a list maker. While Matt made a last attempt to make the time machine work again, she sat down at her laptop and listed their assets:

2 laptops

1 tera-mainframe computer

1 generator (diesel fuel for 4 days of operation)

WATER: about 500 gallons in elephant tanks about 40 gallons in toilet tanks 97 soft drinks (Coke, 7-Up, root beer)

CLOTHING: what we're wearing

SHELTER: 1 large warehouse

WEAPONS: 2 fire axes 8 fire extinguishers 1 tranquilizer gun 1 elephant gun

TOOLS: 2 butane lighters

3 boxes mechanic's tools

1 box woodworking tools

1 electron microscope

1 mass spectrometer

She supposed the laptops might be useful for something other than the list she was currently making, but she couldn't at the moment figure what that might be. As for the state-of-the-art computer Howard Christian had provided to Matt for analyzing the possible permutations of the time machine... Matt had told her it would take even that monster millions of years to make a dent in the problem. And, when the generator stopped working, the big computer would become nothing more than a very complex piece of junk. So would the generator itself, and everything inside the warehouse that ran on electricity... which was almost everything.

The food and water situation could have been better, and it could have been worse. It was too bad there wasn't a commissary of some kind, or a lunch wagon parked on the grounds when the wormhole opened and swallowed them, but there wasn't. On the other hand, the snack and pop machines had only been there a few weeks, and Susan had no idea why they had been installed. She'd never seen anyone buy anything from them, and she'd bet the coin boxes were empty or nearly so. It would stretch for some weeks, with care, though they'd surely get very tired of Pop-Tarts and tiny bags of potato chips.

Every few minutes Susan had to stop herself from asking Matt how long he thought it would take to put the machine into reverse and step on the gas, floor the son of a bitch full-speed into the twenty-first century. If he had any idea, she knew he would have told her, and simply to ask the question was to invite the impossible answer, the answer she didn't think she could bear to hear: How long? It will be thousands of years before we, or our bones, reach the twenty-first century.

Clothing could be a problem. They didn't know what time of year it was now. Who could even tell if summer would be hot or winter cold? The climate had changed a lot in thousands of years. Both of them were lightly dressed in what they had thrown on when Matt got the call. It seemed pleasant enough for now, but it had been chilly last night, Susan remembered. What if this was summer? What if the Los Angeles Basin got a lot of snow in December? What about tonight, for that matter? They must find water soon, and that meant that if the elephants didn't find some close by, they would likely be spending the night in the open, on the ground, and they didn't have so much as a blanket.

More frightening than the idea of getting cold, though, was the idea of getting eaten. Susan had spent some time years ago camping out, but Matt had hardly ever slept outside of a building. Neither of them knew much survival lore. And there were sure to be things out there happy to make a meal of them. She looked at the big elephant gun lying there on the table, and almost wanted to laugh.

Five years ago, an ill-treated elephant had run amok in Los Angeles. It killed three police officers and soaked up a ton of LAPD lead before a weapon powerful enough to kill it had been brought to the scene. The city council enacted a law requiring anyone keeping elephants to have such a weapon handy at all times. Susan had scoffed at the time, but dutifully took the thing—she had no idea of the maker or the caliber, except that it fired bullets that seemed almost as big as beer cans—to an indoor range and fired it... twice. The first time knocked her down and badly bruised her shoulder. The second shot was to prove to herself she could master it. She had, and never intended to fire it again.

"How are you doing over there?" she called to Matt.

He glanced up, and shrugged.

"I've got a good program roughed out for the computer to run. But I'm flying blind. Give me another few minutes."

She went back to her list.

The ax would be handy for cutting firewood, if they needed heat. As far as building a shelter, she thought staying in the warehouse would be the best idea, unless water was too far away.

There had not been a vehicle within range of whatever force had taken them through time. She thought a mid-sized SUV would be able to handle most of the primeval terrain of Los Angeles. Hell, with the machines Howard had installed in Matt's lab, he could probably build an SUV, given time. She hoped they wouldn't have that much time.

She looked across the room to the door to the giant refrigerator. She wondered if she should add that to her list: FOOD: TEN TONS OF MAMMOTH MEAT. In a few days it would be thawed and rotting.

She couldn't stand it anymore, so she got up and stood behind Matt. He had the case open, and was carefully pushing the hypercube here and there, in different combinations. Nothing was happening, nothing at all. She got the impression he could keep at it for hours, maybe days.

"What do you say we get moving?" she said.

He looked up at her, and closed the case. "You're right. Let's go."

LEARNING to get on the back of an elephant wasn't as easy as Susan had hinted. He had stepped on Queenie's trunk, as instructed, and then felt she was going to toss him right over her back, the ride upward was so swift, his weight so negligible to the giant animal. He ended up sprawled across the elephant's head, which couldn't have been too comfortable for her, but she displayed endless patience as Susan grabbed his arm and helped him get seated behind her. Then, off they went, at the head of a row of pregnant pachyderms that would have made P. T. Barnum proud. The view was spectacular, and the ride wasn't too uncomfortable. He already preferred it to his one ride on a horse.

"This is no good," Susan said, giving Queenie the touch command that made her stop. "We're going to have to walk."

"And I was having such a good time. Why not ride?"

"Too many reasons. These are all former circus elephants, but I didn't train them, and they're all rusty. Queenie is responding to most of my commands, but she's slow, I think she's forgotten some. And she's edgy."