Mammoth

Now this hypercube was speaking to him, not in words, but in patterns that almost made sense. His mind whirled, a few steps behind, then a step behind, then half a step.

Without thinking too hard about it, he picked up the cube and twisted it, just like a Rubik puzzle. The top layer rotated easily, and locked into place. The pattern of chasing lights changed, but nothing else did.

This is crazy. But he ignored the small voice, and twisted again.

The cube became filled with light, and Matt felt his eyes crossing as it collapsed in on itself in a way impossible to describe, and suddenly it was six by six by six.

The cube went through another iteration that twisted Matt's stomach. It happened in a series of quick steps, each one of them seeming logical and inevitable, yet when it was done the cube was five marbles on a side, and there simply wasn't any place the... six cubed minus five cubed equals ninety-one... the ninety-one marbles on the outer surface to have gone. But they were gone, either compressed into the middle of the cube or turned through another dimension to a place his mind couldn't follow.

When Susan fired the gun again, Matt barely heard it. He was committing the events he had just seen to memory, though already he felt them fading, in the ma

"Matt, we've got to run."

"Three more seconds." He wasn't sure where the figure came from, but he knew it was accurate. He hoped it would be enough time.

Twist. Four by four by four. Sixty-four marbles left.

Twist. Twenty-seven left. It had to be getting tight in there.

Twist. Only eight now.

Twist.

He looked up to see a Los Angeles city bus bearing down on him.

16 THE herd of mammoths appeared on the Miracle Mile at 10:18 P.M. on a Thursday night, almost two days after a building belonging to Howard Christian vanished in Santa Monica.

Big Mama was pissed.

First it was the pipsqueak bipeds with their a

Big Mama wanted to try to help Big Daddy out of the black goo, and would have, even at the risk of getting caught herself... but the world was on fire. So for a few minutes she had dithered, swayed back and forth by conflicting duties and impulses and instincts, until something inside her finally broke and she left Big Daddy to his fate. It was a moment that seldom came to domesticated elephants, but trainers dreaded it like nothing else, because when an elephant's normally placid temper broke, she was capable of doing almost anything.

What Big Mama wanted to do was kill a few of these pesky bipeds. As she rounded the tar pit she could actually feel biped bones crushing under her mighty feet. It was a good feeling.

The explosion of sound startled her and stopped her in her tracks. Another member of the herd, the one with the notch in her left ear, mother of the third child to be born last birthing season, actually collided with her, something that would have been unthinkably rude normally, and would have earned her a big cuff on the head. Big Mama hardly noticed it. She had no idea a slug of lead big and fast enough to have torn through her massive skull had passed a few feet over her head. She only knew she hated that sound. She didn't want to go toward it.

But what was she to do? Behind her the land still burned, and she could smell the approaching hunters even over the stench of smoke. After another few moments she lowered her tusks, aimed at the two bipeds, and charged.

Before she had taken three steps, everything changed.

SUSAN was between Matt and the bus, with her back to it, her whole concentration on the herd of mammoths bearing down on them. As the brakes of the bus began to shriek, Matt got up and dived at her, his arms extended, and lifted her right off her feet, thrusting her out of the path of the bus. Then there was no time to do more than put out his hands as his feet got tangled under him. He was falling backward when the bus struck him, the bike rack on the front missing him by an inch. The back of his head hit the pavement and his vision was filled with bright points of light for a moment... then he looked up to see the bottom of the front bumper of the bus just above his face and, inches from his head, a massive gray foot smelling of urine and tar and elephant shit. Just above that, he had an astonishing worm's-eye view of a full-grown Columbian mammoth as she thrust forward with all the strength in her body. Glittering cubes of safety glass showered down all over him as he closed his eyes, hard, and hoped for the best. SIGHT is the fastest sense, and the first thing that assaulted Big Mama was a scene in which she recognized nothing. A human could not have been more baffled if she had been instantly transported to the bottom of the sea.

Scent information was the last to arrive in her brain with her first massive inhalation, but it was the most important to her, and the most awful of all, because there were literally thousands of smells in the night air that were perfectly alien to her. In her normal surroundings just one strange scent made for an exciting day, and she might linger over it for many minutes, fixing it in her comprehensive library of smells, far more vast than a human mind could comprehend.

There was a crumpled McDonald's cup lying in the gutter, which had held a strawberry shake; she smelled that, had a pretty good idea where it was, no idea what it was, though she knew it was edible as it was related to her mental folders labeled milk and berries. On the other side of the street a woman was walking a German shepherd on a leash and Big Mama smelled that, too. It was something like the dire wolves she had always ignored in her world, puny little animals, but also wildly different, and mixed with a hundred other smells she could separate but not identify: shampoo, his mistress's perfume, dog food containing the cooked flesh of several different animals plus carrots, grains, charcoal, and the metallic smell of the tin the food had come in.

There were dozens of restaurants a short whiff away, each emanating a thousand smells, very few of them pleasant. There were a thousand people on the street each with an odor as distinctive as a face, each wearing clothing made of alien substances, laundered in harsh detergents, and shoes made from canvas and rubber and leather.

There were smells of creosote from phone poles, paint and plaster and brick from the buildings, a monstrous panoply of chemicals used in processing paper and plastic and cloth and electronic devices and metals and ceramics, a phantasmagoric stench that could be summed up in a word no puny Pleistocene biped had yet used in Big Mama's world: civilization.

Over it all, a vast enveloping presence, was the apocalyptic smell she classified as burning tar, the petrochemical miasma humans constantly swam through, as oblivious to it as a fish to water. The burned tar products belched from the tailpipes of the bright, low, shiny animals that darted past her on all sides, sweated off the oil-coated sides of their roaring guts, oozed off the hard asphalt surface she stood on. It was a smell antithetical to everything her heart knew as wholesome, and she hated it. Hated it.

Now here came another animal, an animal actually larger than Big Mama, a unique and affronting experience in itself and one she normally would have run from, being at her center a peaceful and cautious beast. But her capacity for caution was gone and there was nothing left but a red and blinding rage. She turned, faced the creature, and lunged at it. Her tusks went right through its eyes, which were hard and brittle and no match for ten feet of ivory. Inside the beast she could see other creatures, more of the damned bipeds, screaming and fleeing toward the back of the thing's bright alien belly. This made no sense, but she was far beyond any concept of sense. She roared again, and tried to flip the creature onto its back. It was too heavy, so she put one huge foot into the broken eye socket and stomped down on it.