Mammoth

Matt said nothing. She took his hand.

"I liked you a lot when we were working together. I liked making love to you, it made me less afraid of what was happening to us. But I was always a little afraid of you."

Matt was genuinely shocked.

"How could you be afraid of me? I didn't think you were afraid of anything."

"Oh, there's plenty of things that scare me. I just try not to show it. You were just so... so damn smart. You were so much smarter than me I just couldn't keep up with you. When you started talking about quantum physics and like that, I felt like such a dope."

"Last time I checked, they weren't graduating any dopes from veterinary school. Seems to me you need the same skills as somebody who becomes a doctor, only your patients can't even tell you what's bothering them."

"Wrong word, maybe. I know I'm smart, but it's... relative, like Dr. Einstein said. I felt like a dope." She smiled briefly. "I'd never met a supergenius."

Matt grimaced. "I've had that trouble all my life. I try not to talk shop, explain what it is I'm researching, but with you, we were both working, and you wanted to know. I probably shouldn't have, but as a conversationalist, I am a dope."

"I'm not blaming you, Matt. I wanted to know what you were doing. And you're a good explainer. But you'd lose me."

"Like you say, it's all relative. I happen to have a mind that's quick with numbers. And you know what? There are people with an IQ of 60, people who can't even tie their shoes, who can do anything with numbers I can do." "Is what you've got to tell me more about the time machine? More quantum theory and chaos theory and stuff like that?"

"I began to realize that my point of view was entirely too provincial to explain the universe as I had encountered it."

THE media circus that his life had become gradually abated, though it never entirely folded its tent. There was a flurry of activity at the one-year a

Matt deliberately tried to lead as boring a life as possible, in part to discourage the hordes of the curious. In other words, he sometimes realized wryly, he tried to return to the kind of life he led before Howard Christian barged into it. He thought about returning to a university somewhere to continue his researches, plenty of places would have jumped at the chance of having the guy they thought of as "the man who invented time travel" on the faculty, no questions asked, no pressure applied, here's your lab, Matt, and do whatever you want in it... but he realized that didn't appeal to him anymore. His quest was taking him in other directions.

He entered a monastery in New Mexico for a while. Partly it was so he could look out the window and see the forlorn press pool, only a handful at that point, forced to stake out the building in the blistering heat. But he really was in need of a quiet, cloistered lifestyle.

This was sort of a Club Med monastery, nondenominational, catering to people with emotional problems to resolve or deep doubts about existence to work out. Matt put himself in the latter category. The quarters were Spartan, the food was plain, the brothers wore robes, and you chanted and sang at appointed hours, but nobody demanded that you believe in God. Sort of religion lite.

Things eased up greatly when the biggest male box office star in the world was arrested for murdering his wife and two children. He claimed to be i

Not lost. They found him again easily enough. And during the brief period when there had been no reporters aware of his whereabouts, Matt noticed that two men he had thought were reporters were still dogging him. One was a very large man with very little fat on him, maybe an ex-marine. The other was wiry, moved smoothly as a lizard, and had eyes like stones. He called them Jarhead and Snake. He decided they were probably Howard's agents, and knew they would never give up, but they never interfered with him so he ignored them.

"He was easy. Some of the ones before him were tougher." He gri

"OH, Matt, that's awful."

"Scared me a little, I admit it. He told me they'd 'taken down' three men who were trying to do me harm, and foiled one kidnap attempt. Said they'd heard rumors that one foreign government was thinking about trying to get their hands on me."

"What did you do?"

Matt shrugged. "What could I do? I felt claustrophobic enough with the press corps following me around. I didn't like Jarhead and Snake following me, for that matter, but I never complained after that. I didn't want to lock myself away behind walls. I enjoyed the monastery for a month, but I wouldn't have wanted to stay longer. I decided to take my chances.

"Anyway, it was just about two years before I thought things had cooled off enough that I could move around freely. It wasn't wasted time; I was reading and thinking. I read everything I could find about time travel theories. I read every science fiction story I could get my hands on, from H. G. Wells to some ridiculous thing about taking people off of airplanes that were about to crash. But there were places I wanted to go, people I wanted to talk to, and I needed to travel...."

MATT became a globetrotter. For almost three years he sought out people who might have insights that had been denied him in his education, which had been the best possible in the sciences but quite deficient in everything else.

He wandered India, speaking to the holy men of that country's thousand religions. He bathed in the Ganges. He went to Tibet, to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Mecca. He climbed Mount Fujiyama, sought out eremites in Ethiopia and Egypt. He sat in a sweat lodge in Arizona and chewed peyote and tried LSD.

Since the days of Einstein, scientists had been searching for a "Theory of Everything," a paradigm that would tie together all the known forces in the universe. Much progress had been made, but every time humanity seemed on the verge of being able to write it all down in an equation as elegant as E=mc2, something else came along that made the results more complicated rather than less, requiring more theories to explain the new data.

Matt had begun to wonder if everybody was looking in the wrong direction. "YOU'RE not going religious on me, are you, Matt?" Susan smiled at him.

"Listen, I know you don't want to hear more about string theory, but bear with me a minute. You'll be relieved when I get through it, I promise you.

"What we call a 'string' is a sort of loop of pure energy. They would be very small. Imagine the sun, one million miles across. Now imagine a proton in the center of the sun. Expand that proton until it is the size of the Solar System, out to the orbit of Pluto. A string within that proton would be the size of the proton before we expanded it."

"Pretty damn small."

"The technical term for it is 'teeny weeny weeny weeny weeny weeny.' Now, the thing is, string theory has been around a long time now... but no one has come up with any experiment that could prove or disprove it. No one has thought of a way to detect a string, to shine a light on it. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that there is no way for us to detect them. We keep fiddling with the theory because the math is intriguing, it works out elegantly... but we have no way to know if it co