Mammoth

On the second day he began to get some inkling of a new direction. At first it was no more than an itch at the back of his mind, something he had experienced before when a new idea was struggling to be born. He knew he couldn't force it to come, so he did what he always did at times like that. He went to bed. Maybe his subconscious mind would give him a boost.

But he woke up no wiser, and knew it was time to move on. He was rested, felt up to driving now. So he checked out and drove on up the coast, up US 101, then California Route 1 until he got to Big Sur, where he pulled over and found a place where he could sit and watch the ocean pounding the shore.

After a while he noticed a collection of buildings not too far away from him. There were tents, yurts, a pool, gardens, a large green lawn, odd-shaped buildings with an impromptu, weathered look, all set in the rugged, up and down, rocky and deeply forested surf-battered terrain for which Big Sur was famous. It looked peaceful, secluded, open to the air and the sea. Some sort of resort, maybe. Possibly just the sort of thing he needed to get his thoughts together.

He got back in his car and soon was driving by a sign that said ESALEN INSTITUTE.

IT took a moment to penetrate, then Susan sat forward.

"Esalen?"

"That's right."

"That place where rich people go to get massages and soak in hot tubs?" "Well, they're not all rich, though it's not cheap. And there are hot tubs and massages, but there are classes, too, and discussions of... well, all sorts of things."

"Let me get this straight. While I was... while I... you were soaking in a hot tub in Big Sur?"

Susan felt she was right on the edge. She had loved him, she had worried about him, she had gotten angry at him as years rolled by with nothing but his maddening monthly postcards. She had briefly thought she hated him, and then she had tried her best to forget him. God knows she had enough to deal with, between Howard, Fuzzy, her unwanted fame, and Big Mama, goddamn Big Mama, who had damn near killed her. Now here he was, and the reason he hadn't come back to her was...

Esalen?

In that moment she felt she could hate him again.

"I couldn't just walk right in the door," he was saying. "You have to have reservations. But I got lucky, there was a cancellation. I got in after waiting three days at a motel in Monterey. I enrolled in

'Gestalt and Evolutionary Psychology' and 'An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy.' "

"What, no massage?"

"Well, yes, in the evenings." He glanced up at her, and hurried on.

"I almost quit after the first day. I had no idea what I was doing there, but I had this persistent feeling that I was on the trail of something important. But the courses were stupid. There was no logic to them. Things were posited with no empirical proof, then accepted as true with no further discussion. Or, none from anyone but me, that is. I began to realize that no one there but myself had any training in math or science... or what I think of as science, anyway. It was another culture entirely, couldn't have been more foreign to me if I'd been dropped off in the fourteenth century."

"Which I guess is no longer just a figure of speech."

"What? Oh, sure, I guess we proved it's possible."

"I didn't prove anything, Matt. I was just along for the ride."

"So was I. More than you'll ever know." He sighed heavily, and drank the last of the wine from

his glass. "Anyway, I stuck it out, and by the third day I felt I was begi

"What, that Buddhism is the true faith? Did we travel with a Zen time machine?"

She had thought he would laugh, but he merely looked thoughtful, then slowly shook his head.

"I began to see that there was a tool there... or maybe a set of tools, that could... what I was looking for, you see, was a new perspective. My scientific one, all my mathematical tools, had failed me.

He stared into the fire for a while.

"Go on," she said. "I'm hanging on the edge here. Did you discover the secrets of the universe?"

"Not right then," he admitted. "On the fourth night they came for me."

HE was never entirely sure just who they were.

Oh, he had a general idea. They were Americans. They represented the government... which theoretically represented the people, but the people would never be consulted on anything this group did, nor informed of the results of their actions.

He gathered that the people he came into contact with had been assembled from the myriad of law-enforcement and hush-hush and they-don't-exist agencies for the sole purpose of investigating this time travel phenomenon... which meant investigating Matt Wright, as he was the only one who seemed to know anything about it.

It began in the middle of the night. He had a vague memory of waking up in a panic, unable to breathe. He'd had dreams like that before, but this time it turned out to be true. He had a brief glimpse of a face blackened with soot, big white staring eyes and gri

Later, he figured it was good old chloroform. The old ways are the best.

When he woke up he might have been a few miles down the road or he might have been in Patagonia. He didn't know how long he had been out. He was in a sparsely furnished room—cot, steel sink with tin cup and a bar of soap, steel toilet, table with three chairs bolted to the floor, no windows to the outside, a steel door with a six-by-six mesh-reinforced window at eye level, a long mirror set into another wall.

A cell, no getting around it. Larger than most cells, he supposed, never having seen one except in the movies, maybe thirty feet square, room for some serious pacing. Only someone who had never seen a television cop show would fail to realize that the big mirror was partially silvered—the infamous one-way mirror. The ceiling was at least twelve feet high. A small camera was mounted in each of the four corners. It wasn't particularly clean. The linoleum floor was cracked and peeling in a few places, scuffed here and there, in need of mopping. Dust kitties had accumulated in the floor corners, and there were cobwebs in the ceiling corners. There were smudges on the walls that looked like they had been made by hands, as high as hands could reach. Overhead an ordinary fluorescent light fixture flickered and clicked maddeningly. Exploring the entire place, seeing absolutely everything there was to be seen, took a total of ten minutes.

He took encouragement from what was not there. No car batteries or generators with genital clamps attached. No manacles, ropes, whips, thumbscrews, vats of boiling oil, rubber hoses, or billy clubs. Any of those things could be brought in, of course.

Only one feature of the room worried him, and that was a dark brown stain on the floor near the table. He tried to convince himself it was spilled food or drink. As the hours went by he kept looking at it, wondering if it was the source of the smell that tickled at his nostrils, over the sourness of the sheets and blanket and the gathering odor of his own fear. Was it blood?

He later estimated they held him there for twenty-four hours before anyone came to question him. He couldn't be sure. The lights never went off. It could have been as little as twelve hours, or as many as forty-eight, he supposed.

They fed him three times. It was the same each time: the door opened and a man in white coveralls and wearing a white banda

The first time Matt sat up from his reclining position on the cot.

"I want to speak to a lawyer," he said.

The man didn't even glance at him. He slammed the door behind him, and Matt heard a key turning in a lock.