Mammoth

"Warburton!" Howard shouted into his microphone. "Warburton, get up here, you son of a bitch! I need you!"

"SUSAN," Matt said, "I'm going to have to go away for a while."

They had returned to the corner of Curson and Wilshire, walking at first, then ru

It took a while for Matt's statement to penetrate through the fog of horror in Susan's mind. Finally she looked at him and frowned.

"Go away? Where?"

"I don't know. There are some things I have to work out. It may take... a while. I'm not sure how long."

"But how will I—"

"I can't say any more now, there isn't time. I'll try to contact you as soon as possible. Until then... it's very important. I hope you'll just trust me for now."

"I trust you, Matt, but—"

"I'm sorry, Susan, I'm truly sorry. But there's no time. I love you." There was no time, no time at all, and he pulled her close to him and kissed her fiercely, then turned and ran, not daring to look back.

Susan stood there for a moment, watching him vanish into the night. Suddenly the reaction set in, all the horror of the worst night of her life, and she sat down on the twisted remains of the fence that had separated the sidewalk from the tar pits and the audio-animatronic mammoths that had been forlornly waving their trunks at the passing traffic on Wilshire for decades. Emergency workers were ru

But one of them wasn't. Cowering at the side of the female on the bank of the tar pit, between the cow and her calf, was a second baby mammoth, this one entirely covered in thick, reddish black hair. It saw Susan and took a step toward her, then retreated back into the shadows of its new surrogate mother and attempted to nurse.

18

THE lights dimmed slowly under the big top until the audience in the bleachers, just back from the intermission with their hands full of expensive popcorn and chips and fresh paper cups of beer, was left in darkness broken only by the faint radiance seeping through the glass ring of skyboxes above and behind them, where the corporate sponsors and the very rich dined on prime rib and lobster and caviar and sipped champagne. There was a burst of excited noise that gradually fell away. The sound of the electronic music, when it came, hammered out of suspended planar speakers like a living thing, begi

Then came the voice of the ringmaster.

"Ladies and gentlemen... and children of all ages..."

A thousand computer-controlled pencil spotlights blazed in a hundred colors and swept crazily around the arena as the music swooped stereophonically from one end of the big top to the other. Fog belched from hidden ducts, and soon the spotlight beams were slicing through it like crazed laser warfare.

"...Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus..."

The spotlights suddenly merged on a gigantic, flat black curtain at the far end of the arena. The curtain opened slowly to each side to reveal... a second scalloped curtain of red velvet.

"...a Howard Christian Company..."

The velvet curtain began to rise at a tantalizing creep, the sound of a thousand snare drums begi

Jungle sounds began to enter the mix, a polyglot, nonsensical, multicontinental cacophony of wild animals that might have been cribbed from an old Joh

"...takes you back to the last Ice Age, when vast sheets of ice covered the very ground we now stand on..."

Now the collective gasp of the audience could actually be heard over the hugely pumped sound track as the vast, billowing big top disappeared to be replaced by towering clouds in a sky so impossibly blue it hurt the eyes, the clouds forming and dissolving and whipping by in time-lapse madness, and maybe the guy sitting next to you breathed in an awed voice How did they do that? if he wasn't in on the trick, which was that, though the big top looked like a gigantic tent from the outside—it was in fact a gigantic tent, outside—the acres of canvas covered an i

"...and proudly presents..."

And now a wind began to howl, a cold wind thrust from a solid ring of ducts mounted atop the skyboxes, a wind generated from air that had been supercooling for three hours in frosty refrigeration chambers, impelled now into the arena by fans that used to power supersonic wind tu

"...after an absence from planet Earth of over ten... thousand... years!...."

Overhead, night fell rapidly, blazing stars embedded in a sky so dark it shimmered like polished obsidian, a sky presided over by a full yellow moon that had to be five times—no, ten times—wait a minute—twenty times as large as the moon ever appeared from the Earth, even in the Ice Age, the moon was no closer then, was it, daddy? of course it wasn't, it's what they call artistic license, sweetheart, or maybe they call it making it up as they go along, but it's a heck of a show, isn't it, sweetie, so why don't you be quiet for a minute and watch it?

And then, silence. Silence and darkness, all the music and animal sounds and air blowers suddenly quiet and all the lights off, only the murmurings of the crowd filling the dark and almost at once that tapered off, too, as everyone knew something big was about to happen... and then, what was that smell?

Well, it was essence of mammoth, that's what it was, and it was issuing from tiny openings in each and every chair in the joint, angled up at the faces... and essence was the right word, but it was a slightly edited essence, wasn't it, there was the musky smell of mammoth hide, the dusty smell of mammoth feet, even the slightly rotten odor of masticated hay and pulverized fruits and vegetables that made up the brown stuff that accumulated around mammoth teeth... but there was the merest whiff of what was actually the dominant olfactory impression one got if one walked even within a city block of any mammoth habitat and that was, not to put too fine a point to it, mammoth shit. But nobody ever said the circus was about realism, the circus was about superreality, taking real animals and people and putting them on a wonderful stage and hyping them up and watching them do fantastic things. And the overpowering odor of mammoth dung swamping one's nostrils was definitely not on the menu of anybody's concept of entertainment, so the carefully crafted smell had just a whiff, just enough to titillate the noses of the city-bred audience, no worse than strolling through a carefully tended horse barn at the county fair.