Mammoth

In Vegas, all the stations would be ma

He glanced at his two companions for the night, seated at consoles directly in front of him and just below. To work this shift they didn't exactly have to be the two sharpest pencils in the cup, and they weren't. Security work tended to attract two types: retired cops, and guys who liked to wear police-style uniforms and hoped to one day get a job that would let them carry a gun.

Ed Crane was a perfect example of the first type, a veteran patrolman from the Beaverton force, sixtyish, thick around the middle, more than happy to find a job that let him sit in a soft chair all night and exercise his remarkable ability to sleep soundly with his eyes wide open. Darryl Mosely was the wa

"Got a camera glitch here, chief!"

Jack looked up slowly—It's no big deal, it's just a little problem; we get one every night, don't act strange!—and saw that one of Darryl's twenty-four screens was black.

"Ah... try keying it in again." What the hell was going on?

Darryl did as instructed, and for good measure, flicked the screen a few times with his fingernail on the well-established principle that giving a balky machine a whack or two was apt to fix it. But it didn't.

"Camera's in Fuzzy's compound," Darryl said. "Other two in there look okay, though. Critter's eatin' his way through another bale of hay."

Jack could see that on his own screens.

"How about I go down there and take a look?"

"No!" Jack said, a little too loudly. "Uh... you know we aren't supposed to disturb the big boy unless it's an emergency. He's got his night keeper watching him." He realized he was explaining too much. "Let me see if I can do anything from here."

Do something, do something.

Following a corollary of the same principle Darryl had used earlier, Jack pressed his thumb against each of the nine cards he had replaced... and felt a click on number 9.

"Oops! There we are, back on line," Darryl said.

Jack let his breath out very slowly. He hadn't realized he had been holding it.

"TELL me about this Jack guy," Matt said. "Why's he doing this?"

"Isn't the better question why am I doing this?"

"I've got a feeling that's a much longer story. I just asked because when my mouth is moving my

teeth can't chatter." "I know what you mean." Susan was at a desk, opening and shutting drawers. She found what she needed—one of the ubiquitous plastic cards that a few years ago would have been a CD and a few years before that a floppy disk, and a cobbled-together thing that looked as if it had started out as a remote control for a model airplane—and they went back to the first Fuzzy. Excuse me, Fuxxy. Fuxxy Mark Two, according to Susan.

"Never entered my mind." It hadn't. Matt had wondered, from time to time, if Susan had had any male companionship during his long absence. It would only have been reasonable and natural, and he really didn't care and didn't want to know unless she wanted to tell him. He had only cared if she would take him back, and she had. No, he knew she hadn't gone to bed with Jack because she had said she had only met him once, and it wasn't in her nature to use people that way, to get something from a guy with sex. If she had screwed Jack, it would have been because she liked him, not to enlist him.

"Jack Elk is a lurker around the edges of the animal rights movement. He's a member of the Audubon Society and several other middle-of-the-road animal and conservation groups... pretty much like me. When he was young he went to a few protest marches and such, he was offered the chance to help 'liberate' some minks from a fur farm and declined—which was a good decision, because most of them got arrested and one had a finger bitten off. He's not a joiner and not an activist, at heart."

She lifted the amazingly realistic flap of one of Fuxxy Mark Two's ears and found a slot there to insert the card. When it was in you couldn't even see the slot.

"He is anticircus and antifur and antizoo and a vegetarian, but he's never done much about it, and we were very lucky to find him, because if he'd joined any of the more radical groups he'd never have got past the security checks here. Now hang on a minute here, I only saw this demonstrated once, and I don't want us to get trampled by a mechanical mammoth."

She concentrated on the controller. A green light came on. She punched a few buttons... and Fuxxy Mark Two began to breathe.

I swear it, if it wasn't too late already I'd run to my car and not stop driving until I got to the Nevada state line.

But it was far too late. On screen 1 he could see Susan and Matt and that goddamn contraption coming down the hall. He had to stick it out. Half an hour, just half an hour, that's how long she said it would take.

He got up from his chair, idly walked along the back gallery, stretched his arms and cracked his neck as he did a dozen times every shift... and casually glanced down at Ed Crane's console where, if things were not working, two people and a mechanical mammoth would come around a corner in about five seconds. Not that Ed was likely to notice it, staring glassy-eyed into space. But Darryl certainly would, and soon. Nothing happened on the screen, and he went and sat back down. On his own screen he could see Susan and Matt and Fuxxy. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the Unknown Hacker. Piece of cake, my ass.

All his life—or since the age of eighteen, anyway, when he had been horrified by the pictures and stories he had seen at a booth at a career fair at his high school—he had hated the exploitation of animals. It had been like a born-again moment for a Baptist; from that day his outlook on life had changed.

His outlook... but not his actions. He was basically lazy, didn't interact well with people, and had found the perfect niche for himself in a job that allowed him to sit down all day and spy on people he didn't have to talk to. He figured in another ten years his ass would be a yard wide and he'd have a hard time walking from the car to the front door, but he didn't particularly care. It was the life that suited him.

But he spent his spare time—where else?—sitting at his home computer co

Then one day the word had gone out that an operational group—what the straight media would call "terrorists"—was looking for someone with skills that could have been culled perfectly from a reading of his resume. From some dark well of guilt in his soul, carefully kept covered for the last decade since that almost-debacle with the minks, he felt the sudden urge to stand up and be counted, to put his ass on the line, to do something about the terrible evils he read about every day. Cautiously, he sent out a feeler, and, cautiously, an approach was made. One thing led to another...