Mammoth

22

SUSAN had been contrite about the blow. It was inexcusable for one person to hit another except in self-defense, she said, and he told her he figured if anybody ever had good reason to strike another, she was it. She didn't have anything to say to that, but after a long pause during which he felt like a specimen under a microscope, and not a very appetizing one, she unlocked the front door and invited him in.

And then it was... awkward.

He had a million things he wanted to tell her and another million things he wanted to ask her, but he had been far from sure he'd even be invited in the door, and, once in, his tongue seemed tied in knots. So... what have you been up to? He knew most of that; Susan's life had been well documented from the time Fuzzy came into her life. She was famous, had been on the television many times in the early years. Hell, she was a character on a Saturday morning animated television show, she had been played by Andrea de la Terre in the movie version of Little Fuzzy.

There was only one question worth asking, and he couldn't just come right out and ask it, certainly not with the cold look in her eye as she sat stiffly on a big cane chair opposite him, one leg curled up under her and the other one, the bad one, carefully extended. No, you'd have to work up to that one, if you ever had the guts to ask it at all, and she sure wasn't giving anything away.

What little conversation there was soon died away, and she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands and neither did he, so finally she asked, in a tone of voice that sounded to him a little like one you might use if your least favorite uncle had plopped himself down in your living room and just wouldn't go away, if he wanted something to eat. And he wasn't proud, no sir, he'd use any excuse to stretch his time with her until what he was begi

So he showered, and hacked away at his unruly and scraggly beard until it was almost presentable, dressed in the only change of clothes he had, and descended the stairs again to find her in the kitchen just pouring spaghetti into a colander.

"You know I'm not a cook," she said, wiping the condensed steam from her forehead with the back of her hand in a gesture that made him almost weep with longing. "But there's nobody around here that delivers except a so-so pizza shop, and I did make this sauce—spaghetti sauce is one of the five things I know how to make. Anyway, it's from the freezer, and so is the bread, and there's no salad because I'm hardly ever here and I just can't keep the refrigerator stocked with fresh things." She shrugged, and set the bowl of noodles and the bowl of bubbling red sauce on the simple pine table. "Anyway, here it is. Do you want some wine?"

He did, and she selected a red from a walk-in cellar with rack space for hundreds of bottles, only a dozen of them occupied.

He was hungry, he hadn't had anything since an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, having spent the whole day pacing or sitting on her front deck, and the food was good, when he could bring his attention to it, but most of the time it tasted like nothing in his mouth, just something to choke down until they could move on to the next stage, which was finding out if she was at all interested in listening to his story or if she'd shake his hand on the way out the door.

It was the tensest meal he ever ate, consumed in absolute silence.

Then they retired to the vast living room with glasses of wine and she invited him to sit on a plush couch with some sort of Indian art pattern, facing the fire ring, which was an artful arrangement of native stones, no mortar, set on glistening white beach sand in the center of the room. A copper fu

I am well, but ca

Will explain later.

I love you.

Matt

His face flushed as he flipped rapidly through them. Had anything ever sounded so lame? But he didn't know how else to say it.

He looked up, and saw her drain her glass of wine. He realized it was her third glass, and the bottle sitting beside her was almost empty. She gave him a twisted smile, then tossed her empty glass at the stones, where it shattered.

She laced her fingers around her good knee and leaned back.

"So, Matt. What have you been doing with yourself?"

And the words began to spill out of him.

MATT fled the scene of slaughter that night with only one thought in his mind: He had to find a quiet place to gather his thoughts, order the events of the last hour, write it all down. His grasp on what he had seen in the depths of the time machine was so tenuous it made the waking residual images of a dream seem as solid as a slap in the face. He needed to retreat from the storm he could see coming. He was standing beside a brand-new pickup truck whose door was wide open, the owner fled who-knew-where. He saw the key was in the ignition.

Ten minutes later he was on the San Diego Freeway, heading north.

He didn't sleep, he didn't dare, he knew it would all go up in smoke and blow away if he slept; the only way he could keep it all in his head was to invent mathematical mnemonics to trick himself into remembering, so he sat there in the parking lot of a McDonald's, the first restaurant he had seen, and when it opened he bought six cups of coffee and drove carefully down the street to a Bank of America and waited for it to open. When it did, he went inside and, not without some difficulty, withdrew a hundred thousand dollars from his account, worrying every minute that Howard or some federal agency would be looking for him, putting a flag on his account or his credit cards. But he walked out with the cash in a canvas bag and, gulping coffee, found a large consumer electronics store and purchased three personal computers for six hundred dollars. Then he drove around town looking for a used car lot, abandoned the stolen pickup after wiping the steering wheel and door handles and everything else he might have touched. He knew he must have left DNA traces inside, but hoped that for a routine stolen car the police would only dust for fingerprints. He walked to the car lot and paid four thousand in cash for an anonymous gray sedan that looked reliable enough, then drove it to Ventura, where he checked into a Motel 6 at noon under the name of Kevin Moore, paying an extra hundred-dollar bill for the privilege of not showing his driver's license.

At first it was dense with mathematical symbols, as he tried to document and somehow rationalize the things he had seen in that little metal box on that fateful night twelve thousand years ago... or was it really fifteen thousand years ago? Was that too linear a way of thinking? It made it sound as if the Pleistocene was in some... direction, a place you could point to, or a vector whose length and orientation was the sole possible result of a specific equation.

He knew he had seen something that a human eye is not really equipped to see... and yet how could that be? It was a contradiction in terms, but so was everything else from the moment they went into the past. It could not happen, yet it had happened. Which meant that he, Matt Wright, mathematical genius, was missing something.