Mammoth

Nobody seemed to care. It was enough to see Fuzzy. Matt figured the crowd would go wild if he just stood there and ate hay. When one of the youngsters lifted his tail and unceremoniously dropped a steaming load of dung near the center of the ring, the audience, and especially the children, went wild with delight. They liked it even more when a troop of incompetent clowns scurried out and made a hilarious botch of cleaning up the mess. There must be something universal about toilet humor, Matt decided, because he was laughing, too.

When Fuzzy and his entourage finally left the arena the show was essentially over, but nobody moved. The final attraction was about to unfold, the nightly Super Lottery, and Matt realized, with a bit of a shock, that this was the part of the show he was really here for.

Compared to the Super Lottery, a private papal audience was no big deal.

There were certainly a few people sitting around Matt who would be indifferent to the chance to enter Fuzzy's private quarters, get the chance to stroke his big furry flanks, maybe feed him a handful of his specially formulated mammoth treats. But even they wouldn't miss the opportunity to brag to their friends about how they got to hobnob for thirty minutes with the world's most famous animal celebrity.

Obviously the whole throng couldn't pet the animal, all those reaching hands would eventually wear him down like a pencil eraser. Howard had wanted Fuzzy installed in a glass environment so that the entire departing crowd could at least file by and see him on their way out, but Susan had vetoed that. To Matt's considerable surprise, Susan had vetoed a lot of Howard's more intrusive ideas, and he still wasn't sure how she got away with that. But she had given in to the idea of letting a small group—families with children only, she had insisted—spend a short time with Fuzzy after the shows. She had suggested a lottery and the show's producers had eagerly agreed, as just one more way to heighten the excitement.

So now the ringmaster a

The ticket wasn't a little stub of cardboard, but a souvenir in itself. It was plastic, three by four inches. There was a screen that showed a picture of Fuzzy striding across a grassy plain, and some buttons beneath the screen. After the lottery it became a handheld game, but right now it was a magic talisman. Searchlights began crisscrossing the crowd at random as the music built once again.

Even before the names were a

Three more families were a

Matt knew something nobody else in the audience knew, though some suspected, which was that the lottery could be fixed.

It was openly a

No, the cheating was only applied in favor of guests of organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, kids with terminal diseases or terrible injuries. This had been Andrea de la Terre's idea, and it had been noticed, but who was going to complain? There had never been an outraged editorial or expose, and there never would be.

But the fact that the lottery could be fixed meant that it could be fixed for anyone. It was all up to whoever controlled the lottery computer.

"And the last family of the night..."

It seemed the air pressure dropped a bit from all the people inhaling at once.

"...is Jerry and Melissa Myers, and their children, Brittney and Dwight!"

To Matt's right the Myers family was bathed in light and Brittney was proving, incredibly, that she had hardly begun to demonstrate the power of her lungs earlier in the show. Matt was showered with Karamel Kettle Korn as she threw her half-eaten jumbo box into the air. He glanced at his ticket, which was flashing red, too, then he slipped it back into his pocket and joined in the thunderous applause. Then in an instant he was engulfed in the biggest human traffic jam he had ever seen, as all the people who had not dared to leave while they still had a chance were suddenly seized by visions of gridlock in the parking lots, long lines for trains, and the tantrums of cross and exhausted children. He sat and waited for a bit as his feet were stepped on by the shuffling mass, then when his aisle was clear he got up and followed the directions Susan had given him. EVENTUALLY he reached a point where the wide exit corridors branched beneath a sign that read:

The crowd went one way and he went another. At last he had some elbow room. Fifty feet down a hall lined with a plastic jungle filled with capering mechanical monkeys and the standard whoops, caws, roars, and yelps of a 1930s jungle epic he came to a velvet rope barrier ma

Around one last bend and there was the i

Susan stood beside Fuzzy on the other side of the heavy fence. Between the two fences was the male assistant handler, an old friend of Susan's, who guarded a gate through which he would let groups of two or three children to a caged enclosure where they could actually reach out and stroke Fuzzy's fur. Most of the children did this in absolute, awed silence, so delicately and tentatively that it was as if they feared their tiny hands could somehow hurt the giant beast. Matt noticed that one of the kids, a girl of about seven, was careful to keep her left side turned away from the people she was with. He glimpsed a hideous burn, and a nose that was in the process of being reconstructed. The look of sheer delight on the undamaged side of the girl's face made the back of Matt's throat burn, and he had to turn away.

What am I doing here? Is this a good idea?

But it was too late for that.

Susan caught his eye, and unobtrusively turned her head and gestured toward a door off to Matt's left. He nodded, trying not to glance too obviously at the cameras set high in the walls of the enclosure. Once inside, he switched on the lights.

This was Susan's office, and it was much like any office anywhere, dominated by various data systems. There were a few old-fashioned filing cabinets, a coffeemaker, and a microwave. He noticed there were fluorescent lights in the ceiling but they hadn't come on. Instead, a series of attractive lamps at each work area gave the room a warmth unusual for a place like this.