Mammoth

It was a new environment, and he imagined it was full of new and exciting and probably disturbing smells. He had noticed all the elephants were raising their trunks frequently. It stood to reason that with ten feet of nose, they smelled things he couldn't even imagine. What if something scared her?

"You've convinced me," he said.

So they got down, and Matt quickly found the elephants set a pace a lot quicker than he had realized. So high off the ground, it didn't seem so fast.

Susan walked alongside Queenie, guiding the great beast with touches of a wooden broom handle, trying to slow her down. But the other elephants weren't having any of it.

"I was hoping they'd accept her as the herd leader," Susan told him. "She's the oldest. But Queenie has never been dominant. They won't follow her."

"So who's the leader of the pack?" Matt asked, already starting to pant from the pace the

elephants were setting.

"That would be Becky, the one with the notch in her left ear."

"Why not go to Becky, slow her down?"

"Becky doesn't like me. We never hit it off."

She tried to slow Becky, but soon the great gray moving wall of flesh had had enough, and

ignored further commands. She set her own pace, which was too fast for the humans to keep up with.

"They're getting away," Matt observed, bent over trying to catch his breath.

"Probably for the best."

"You think so?"

Susan shrugged, but he could see she was upset. "Matt, they had to go free sooner or later. I can't feed them, I can't water them. They'll have to fend for themselves. Which shouldn't be hard; this land is full of things they can eat, so long as they find water."

She pointed to the retreating tails of her former charges. A fleet of trucks might have just passed, tearing up shrubs, breaking branches off trees, leaving deep indentations in the soil. Tracking a herd of elephants didn't require the services of Tonto.

"I'm pretty sure they're on the scent of it. All we need to do is follow, and hope it's not a three-day trip."

So they set off at a comfortable walking pace. Soon the elephants disappeared over a rise, and when they got to the top of it, the herd was nowhere to be seen.

THEY stopped several hills later and sat down to eat a few bags of peanuts and candy bars and wash it down with cans of warm root beer. Susan kept watch for predators while Matt opened the time machine once again to glare uselessly at the gleaming, frozen i

Susan looked around at the empty landscape. So far they hadn't seen so much as a prehistoric bu

"You know, Matt, I could really use some good news here."

He looked up at her. "The red light flickered a while ago."

"It did? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't know what it means. I'm hoping it's detecting something. Some fluctuation in space-time. If the green light comes on, maybe it will work again."

"How do we make it come on?"

"Trial and error, I guess. That's the best I can say. Keep moving."

Susan glanced at the sun, then to the west. She gazed longingly in that direction, then back to the elephant trail, which still led steadfastly eastward. She looked at Matt helplessly, and shrugged.

"First things first," he agreed. "Find a water supply before we start to get thirsty. It made sense this morning, and it still makes sense."

NEITHER of them had a great picture of Los Angeles in their heads. As new arrivals who had spent most of their time working, they knew the neighborhoods where they had lived and worked, and some other places where people of good income went to shop and dine: Santa Monica, Westwood, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Venice. They had made a few excursions into Valley communities. But except for a trip or two to the airport neither of them had ever driven as far south as Century Boulevard, and in fact had seldom been south of Venice. In the same way, Western Avenue was the eastern limit of their known territory. Neither had ever set foot in downtown Los Angeles, though they knew where it was, had seen its skyscrapers in the distance.

Matt wasn't sure how much good it would have done them, considering that the things an urban dweller would note about his surroundings would be streets and buildings, all of which were now gone... that is, none of which were here yet... but he didn't see how it could have hurt. Twelve thousand years wasn't enough to have changed the large features of the area. No new mountains had been built in that time, and the canyons would be only slightly less eroded now than they had been in the twenty-first century. The Santa Monica Mountains had been then, and were now, visible from anywhere in the basin, and were basically unchanged as to their gross outlines. Yet even there, his memory was not much help. You looked at those mountains, and what you noticed was the Hollywood sign, and thus knew your position roughly. With the sign gone, with all roads and houses gone, the Hollywood Hills were fairly nondescript. He could see several low points. Was that one where Laurel Canyon would be, or was it Coldwater Canyon? Without knowing where such prominent features of the terrain were, how could he hope to venture a guess as to their present position?

And did it really matter?

He knew there was something over to the east called the Los Angeles River, but he seemed to recall it was something of a joke. In the twenty-first century it was a wide, flat, concrete ditch, a favorite of Hollywood film directors for staging car chases, dry most of the year except for a trickle down the middle.

Los Angeles was a desert then, and it looked like a desert now. The shallow arroyos they had crossed were all bone dry. That might be seasonal. In some thousands of years a man named Mulholland would dig a long series of aquaducts and L.A. would bloom with imported palm trees and tropical flowers, but right now the dominant vegetation was sagebrush and scrawny live oaks.

He didn't know how far they had come. He had tried counting steps, and quickly lost count as his mind drifted to other things. Maybe he could estimate the length of their journey by time... but how many miles could a man walk in an hour? He had only a vague idea of their speed.

And to make it even more hopeless, the path chosen by the elephants was far from a beeline. Susan seemed to think they were on the scent of water, but if they were, the scent must be coming from several directions, maybe shifting with the wind. They had meandered north for a while, then turned back east, then north again, then east. He hoped they knew what they were doing. ONE good thing: though the trail was growing colder as they fell farther behind, there was little danger of it vanishing overnight, or even over the next two or three days. And Susan said the elephants would surely stop to browse, whether they found water or not. He was wrapped up in thoughts like that when he almost ran into the giant yellow bear.

He stopped in his tracks and Susan ran into him.

"What's the..." Then she got a look at it. It must have been twenty feet tall. Susan whispered

something.

"What?" Matt whispered back.