Mammoth

But still no cause for alarm. And, oh, yeah, we're evacuating six blocks in every direction now.

No more "official" reports were really necessary after that. The only problem was to keep Angelenos from voluntarily evacuating the whole metropolitan area. Once again, someone had seriously underestimated the fear the public had of radiation, and of government reassurances.

For twenty-four hours the traffic on the freeways was a complete nightmare. Seven people died from natural causes, just sitting there, ambulances unable to get to them. Airplanes arrived at LAX virtually empty and left full. The next day traffic was better than it had been since 1947, at the opening of the Pasadena Freeway. Every hotel room from San Francisco to Reno to Las Vegas to Phoenix to San Diego was taken, some of them double-booked. For a mile in every direction from the point where Matt's finger had touched the map, there was hardly a human soul in residence. There was a cordon around the whole area.

Now there was room to work. The trouble was... work on what?

The results of Matt's interrogation had been very frustrating to those in power. The spectrum of drugs known collectively as "truth serum" were very sophisticated these days. Something could be mixed up that would force anyone to spill everything they knew in only a few hours. Thus the interrogators were used to getting the information they needed, pronto, and being able to deny later that any coercive methods had been used. Matt's hysterical aphasia was a new one to the interrogators, and one that drove them to distraction.

There were older, more distasteful ways of getting information, and back in Washington there were those who began to advocate them. What the heck? This guy holds the secret to something that makes the hydrogen bomb seem like a flint arrowhead, we must have it, and if a little blood gets spilled, it will be in a good cause. Always bearing in mind, of course, the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg. Because it is well known, it is axiomatic among students of this kind of thing, that everybody talks under torture. The only question is how soon, and the answer is that with most people you only have to lay the instruments of torture out there on the table. The tougher cases will sell out mothers, mates, and children after less than an hour of pain. Just give the word, Mr. President, and we will know everything this man knows by this afternoon.

The president was not one to enter into such an enterprise lightly, however, and the decision was not entirely up to him, anyway, and so the searchers were sent back to the transcripts to pore over them for a clue as to the location of the device.

The transcripts were maddening.

Q: When did you last see the device? A:A: (Analysis: He's telling the truth. Probability 90%.)

Q: Where did you last see the device? A: The question has very little meaning. I showed you on the map where I was the last time I saw it. (Analysis: True, 90%)

Q: Where did you put it? A: As I said, the question has no meaning. (Analysis: True, 55%)

He was waffling, he was concealing something, but not once in his interrogation did he make a statement that could be demonstrated to be false.

And so the search went on.

It was known that he had not had a great deal of time to conceal the device, so most of the analysts figured the device had to be somewhere on the grounds of the park that contained the tar pits and the museum. And so the park was taken apart.

Magnetometers found many, many things buried on the grounds, from water and electric lines to loose change. The walls of the museum were torn out, the plumbing was torn out, the floors torn up, even the mammoth skeletons on display were disassembled and x-rayed, under the theory that the device had been made of many small parts, and they might no longer be hidden as a single unit. Nothing was found.

But all that was easy. The nasty part was draining the tar pits themselves.

The pits went down a long way, but were not bottomless. The problem was that, anything with any weight that was tossed into the pits sank into the goo, just like a trapped mammoth. People had been tossing old wagons and cars and horseshoes and coins and cans and nails and just endless junk into the pits for over a hundred years, so a magnetic scan was useless. The only way to search the tar was to bring it out, bucket by bucket, and go through it by hand. They dug down one hundred feet, and found no time machine. Then they had to put it all back.

At the same time the National Guard was searching house to house in a one-mile radius. It was impossible to keep a search like that a secret, of course, with so many soldiers involved. The object of the search quickly leaked out, television stations were soon showing the pictures that had been handed to the searchers, so the public's help was enlisted, with the cover story that the metal briefcase being so urgently sought was thought to contain three pounds of weapons-grade plutonium smuggled by the same terrorists who had set off the dirty bomb.

"If you find this briefcase do not touch it! Do not attempt to open it! Call 911 immediately and get out of the area!"

MATT knew none of this at the time. He only knew that Albert and Argyle stopped showing up for the twice-daily interrogations. They put in an appearance now and then, at no predictable intervals, and asked some new questions, few of which made much sense to Matt, but never stayed longer than an hour.

Time crawled by, with no way to measure it. It might have been two weeks or it might have been six weeks. Meals arrived, sometimes when he was hungry, sometimes when he was not. After an hour they were taken away, whether he had eaten them or not. He had all the water he needed, and much more light than he desired, as the overhead fixture was never turned off. There was nothing to read, no television to watch, absolutely nothing to do but lie on the bunk or exercise. He jogged around the room, did push-ups and sit-ups, and soon was in the best shape of his life.

He slept a lot at first, and then hardly at all, to the point where he was surprised to wake up lying in the bunk.

Before long he came to actually look forward to the visits from A&A, something he would have sworn would never happen. He realized it meant they were wearing him down, and knew there was not much he could do about it. In spite of himself, he found himself asking them questions. Stupid, desperate questions.

How is the weather today?

Where are you from?

Is Susan okay?

Do you have more than one pair of argyle socks, or do you wash those every night?

Matt had always been a loner, but he found to his surprise that he did not seem to actually be hermit material. He found himself hungering for the barest hint of contact, and even though he was aware that Albert was probably doling out these hints with complete calculation, with the goal in mind of making Matt emotionally dependent on him, he soaked up the tiny bits of data like a sponge.

It's warm and su

I'm from Oregon. Yes, I know you are, too.

Susan is fine. Would you like to write her another postcard, tell her you're okay? Argyle never answered about the socks. Argyle never answered anything. And of course that was calculated, too.

But about halfway through his ordeal (as he estimated later), he began to adjust. He spent more and more time simply sitting. Sometimes he cleared his mind, went into a state of meditation, inventing for himself the basics of yoga. Other times his mind was very busy indeed, thinking over what had become the central problem of his life: time travel, and how to accomplish it.

It was during these times of meditation that he decided on his future course.