Mammoth

Albert came back with a huge stack of paper under one arm. He slapped it down on the table in such a way that Matt could see what was printed on the front of the file: DR. MATTHEW WRIGHT. More psychology, Matt figured. All that paper could obviously have been put onto a computer and Albert could have consulted that. Albert wanted Matt to see the amount of documentation available to him.

Albert flipped through the file and reached the page he wanted.

"Aphasia," he said. "You've suffered from it before."

Matt nodded.

"He's faking," Argyle said.

Matt shook his head.

"I don't think he is," Albert sighed. "I think he really wants to tell us where it is. Don't you,

Matt?"

Matt nodded.

"Then we'll just have to play twenty questions, won't we?" Albert said.

BIG as the dossier with his name on it was, there was still more. They brought in stacks and boxes of paper, spread things around on the table. They made no attempt to hide any of it from him.

Results: zero.

The Esalen Institute had been—was still being—searched. When the government was done they'd have to rebuild the place practically from the ground up. Matt regretted bringing all that trouble on them.

Every police force and fire department and National Guard unit and Boy Scout troop and, probably, the Brownies and Bluebirds, were beating the bushes along his entire route from Los Angeles to Big Sur, looking for a steel attache case. They had been joined by thousands of civilians spurred by a million-dollar reward.

Results: a big pile of garbage. Thus the game of twenty questions.

It can be an effective tool in the hands of a skilled questioner, and Albert was no slouch. But you have to know the right questions to ask, or you never even get on the right track.

First they brought out a map. Did you leave the time machine here? No? Did you leave it here? Here? No, no, and no. All the way down the map, town by town.

Albert thought about it.

Well, did you last see it here? No, no, no, no... yes.

The yes was Los Angeles. Albert brought out another map. Pointed to the tar pits.

Yes.

"OH, man," Susan said. "That was..."

"About a week after our little adventure. I'm not sure precisely, since I didn't have a clock and the drugs screwed up my time sense a bit."

"That was when they sealed off that whole area. A square mile, evacuated and decontaminated

because of that dirty bomb."

"I read about it later," Matt said. "It was a while before I added it up."

"You think... the government set off the bomb?" "If there was a bomb."

"What I meant was, if there was a dirty bomb. A radiological bomb, one that would take a while to decontaminate after it went off. The way I'd do it, I'd put some dynamite in a truck, call in a warning so the immediate area can be evacuated. Then I'd blow it up and release a small amount of some relatively harmless radioactive gas, enough to set off the Geiger counters. The story was the terrorists chose that area because of all the publicity with the mammoths. Then seal off and evacuate a square mile and ban all overflights because of the radiation danger, to give yourself a little privacy, and get to work looking. When I heard about it I figured it was too much for coincidence. What was it, three weeks before they let anyone back in? That's long enough to do quite a search."

"Almost four weeks," came a voice. Susan gasped, turned, and saw Howard Christian standing on her deck, looking through her huge front windows.

23

SUSAN had been raised to offer food and drink to any guest, even if she'd really like to leave him out on the front porch looking in like a pathetic waif. But he was with Andrea de la Terre, and Susan liked Andrea. She had liked her before the woman—amazingly!—fell in love with Howard, first as a fan, later as an acquaintance. She knew a lot of famous people now and had learned that, for the most part, they were no better and sometimes a lot worse than your ordinary citizen.

Andrea was different. She was one of those rare ones that could somehow transcend her celebrity, get close to just about anyone quickly, so that in no time at all you felt you'd known her all your life, and might even think of her as a friend. So she'd shown Andrea where to hang that ridiculous mammoth-fur coat in the front closet, and hurried into the kitchen to see if she had anything suitable to serve to a multibillionaire and the most famous movie star on the planet.

Howard was easy. She knew that a handful of stale beer nuts would satisfy him. What she had was a bag of chips that was only three days past the sell-by date and an unopened bowl of pretty good guacamole dip that didn't smell bad.

So what wine goes with chips and salsa, red or white? She dithered a while over the bottles, hearing the vague buzz of conversation from the living room behind her, wondering what the hell they could be talking about, given the fact that Howard hated Matt. But it wasn't her problem, she decided. Screw Howard. She grabbed a bottle of red and went back to the living room.

Everyone had sat down again, Howard and Andrea side by side and facing Matt across a low glass table, the fire crackling off to one side. Susan set the tray down and opened the bottle in dead silence. Nobody reached for any chips. Oh, well, the important thing was to offer it. She poured wine into four glasses.

"What should we drink to?" Andrea asked. "How about the return of old friends?" Howard suggested, glaring at Matt.

"Disclosure of what?" Andrea said, brightly. She looked from Susan to Matt to Howard, obviously realizing she was way behind everybody else here, but not seeming too concerned about it.

"I'd go for that," Howard said, looking back to Matt.

"You first," Matt said. "Was that your dirty bomb?"

Howard drained his wine and set the glass down on the table, hard.

"You have entirely too high an opinion of me," he said. "Or too low, depending on how you look at it."

"Can somebody catch me up here, please?" Andrea said.

Matt kept staring at Howard, but finally sighed and looked away.

"Might as well, I guess. Let's see, where was I? Oh, yes. After the people who may have been government agents or may have been employed by a certain Mr. Warburton couldn't get anything out of me with drugs..."

CAUSE-and-effect was at the heart of the paradoxes of time travel, and Matt had had occasion to ponder the concept often in his ruminations while trying to construct a time machine for Howard Christian.

A Jew from Germany observes an atom of a heavy metal split into two parts, releasing energy.

Effect: The best minds of a nation are assembled in strict secrecy. A certain rare ore is mined at a fever pitch and trucked to Te

A man sitting at a table in a room points to a particular spot on a map and says, "I last saw it here." In an adjoining room needles on a machine jump and twitch in a way that suggest the man is probably telling the truth.

Effect...

Three days later the operation had been pla