Mammoth (17 page)

And to make it even more hopeless, the path chosen by the elephants was far from a beeline. Susan seemed to think they were on the scent of water, but if they were, the scent must be coming from several directions, maybe shifting with the wind. They had meandered north for a while, then turned back east, then north again, then east. He hoped they knew what they were doing.

ONE
good thing: though the trail was growing colder as they fell farther behind, there was little danger of it vanishing overnight, or even over the next two or three days. And Susan
said the elephants would surely stop to browse, whether they found water or not. He was wrapped up in thoughts like that when he almost ran into the giant yellow bear.

That was his first thought, anyway. It was a wall of thick fur, and it was so entangled and crusted with bits of twigs and leaves and acorns and clods of dirt as to almost appear a part of the landscape. It had been almost under a tree, and now it stood up…and stood up…

He stopped in his tracks and Susan ran into him.

“What’s the…” Then she got a look at it. It must have been twenty feet tall. Susan whispered something.

“What?” Matt whispered back.

“Sloth. Giant ground sloth.”

“Sloth? Like those things that hang in trees? You gotta be—”

“Related,” she hissed. “Be quiet. I don’t think it sees us.”

The thing was turning, ponderously. Way, way up there was a head—it had to be a head, it was at the end of a neck like a tree trunk—that was comically small for its gargantuan body. But small is a relative thing. Matt figured the tree branch it held in its jaws was about the size of his thigh, and it didn’t look very big there.

About the time he had that thought, the creature bit through the branch like a toothpick, and spit out the remains. It was facing them now, looking down with big, soft brown eyes that held no fear.

“Let’s back away,” Susan suggested, in a whisper.

“Good idea.”

They began a slow retreat, and the sloth watched them. Then it took a step in their direction.

“Should we run?” Matt asked.

“Best not to, unless we have to,” Susan decided. “I figure he could catch us if he wanted to.”

The animal took another step, then another…and Matt realized that it was running toward them. Its huge size made the movements seem slow, but each stride was enormous, and it was suddenly a lot closer to them.

“Run!” Susan hissed. Matt didn’t need any prodding. He took half a dozen quick backward steps, afraid to turn away,
then he did turn, and ran as fast as he had ever run in his life. Behind him he heard the sloth crashing through brush, and the sound of Susan’s footsteps.

Wait a minute.
Guys didn’t run ahead of girls, that just wasn’t done. He half turned as he ran, and Susan nearly ran over him. He was so startled that he tripped over his own feet and hit the ground, hard.

He looked up, fully expecting to see the sloth towering over him. But it was nowhere near. In fact, it had stopped not far from the point where they began their hasty retreat. He heard Susan return to crouch beside him.

“You okay?”

“Skinned my elbow,” he said. “Nothing serious.”

They watched the sloth, who seemed to have completely lost interest in them.

“Just scaring us off, I guess,” Susan said. “It’s so big I’ll bet it doesn’t have any predators, at least not when it’s full-grown.”

“Looks like it could pretty well crush a saber-tooth.”

“No kidding. Did you see the size of the claws on that thing?”

“Three on each hand. Long as my arm.”

“He’s pretty well tearing up that tree.”

They watched, from a good distance, as the giant sloth stripped leaves and bark from a tree.

“Wonder why he came after us?” Matt asked.

“Maybe it’s a female, maybe there’s a cub nearby.”

IN
the next two hours they encountered a lot of wildlife, though none as dramatically. Several times they saw what looked to be ordinary jackrabbits darting in and out of bushes. Once a wolf regarded them for a while from a distance of a hundred yards, then trotted off. Twice they encountered small herds of deer. They looked like ordinary deer to Matt. He supposed a man who had spent a lot of time with deer in the crosshairs of his rifle might have spotted differences in these animals and modern ones.

He had never hunted. He might have to learn. Could he figure out how to make a useful bow and arrows? A spear? Could he learn to throw it hard and far enough to bring down a swift,
alert deer? He suspected he could get mighty hungry while acquiring that skill. Maybe traps would be better. How did one make a rabbit trap?

Stop it
, he told himself. Keep a positive attitude. You
will
figure out how the machine works. We
will
get out of here.

THE
sun was still above the horizon when Susan looked around and said this would be a good place to stop. Matt didn’t like it.

“Can’t we keep on for a while more? We’ve still got some light.”

“You’d be surprised how quickly that will go away,” she said. “There’s things we need to do, and it’s best to be familiar with the immediate area before it gets dark. We need every advantage we can get if there are night-hunting predators around.”

Matt still didn’t look convinced, so she added, “Do you really want to gather firewood in the dark with saber-tooths prowling around?”

There was plenty of wood lying around, both dead branches blown down by the wind and a couple trees that had been devastated by large herbivores, probably sloths or mammoths. They worked at it for half an hour, and when they were done it was getting harder to see. They arranged a fire and lit it with the lighter they had found in a desk drawer. Soon it was crackling, and Susan’s spirits soared with the sparks that leaped into the air. She looked at Matt, who was sweaty, soot-streaked, and grinning.

“Fire is the basic unit of civilization,” he said.

“I never thought of it that way…but you may be right.”

“It’s the first thing that really set us off from other animals,” Matt said. “And it still does. Other animals have languages, other animals use tools. We’re still the only animal that manipulates energy.”

Susan had felt something like that before, sitting around a campfire. Out in the woods, just you and your family or some other Girl Scouts…you realized that the bad things feared the light, that as long as you were in the light, you were okay. If the fire went out, if the darkness closed in, that was when you were in trouble.

Matt found a few long branches and arranged them with one end in the fire and the other sticking out where they could reach them.

“If we see anything move out there,” he said, “grab one of these and throw it toward the movement. Like a torch.”

“Good idea.”

They ate some of their remaining fruit and a candy bar each. “Too bad we don’t have some—”

“I wish we had some—”

“—hot dogs!” they finished together, and laughed longer than the coincidence really warranted. When they were through with their meager dinner they sat close together and stared into the fire. Susan finished her drink and was about to toss the empty can into the fire, then she frowned at it.

“Say we leave this back here in the past,” she said.

“Yeah? Go on.”

“Well, what if somebody finds it? Digs it up, back in the future.”

“They’d be mighty puzzled, wouldn’t they.”

“I mean…would it cause a paradox, or something?”

“I’ve always operated on the assumption that there are no real paradoxes.”

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“I mean ‘real-world’ paradoxes. Sure, they can exist in math, and in logic. The human mind can propose a paradox, but if you examine it you’ll find it’s either a semantic problem or a hypothetical physical problem that actually doesn’t exist in the real world.”

“Help me out here.”

“Okay. Take a silly paradox, the one Gilbert and Sullivan described in
Pirates of Penzance.
Frederick was apprenticed to the Pirate King until his twenty-first birthday, not his twenty-first year. But he was born in a leap year, on the twenty-ninth of February. Therefore, though he was twenty-one years old, he had only had five birthdays. You see, the paradox only arises because of the way the contract was worded.”

“Got it.”

“Then there’s another classic one, the grandfather paradox. You build a time machine, go into the past, and kill your
grandfather when he’s a young boy. So your father is never born, and you are never born…” He waited.

“So you never built a time machine and never traveled in time and never killed your grandfather.”

“Exactly.”

“But…that is a paradox. Isn’t it?”

“It would be, if time travel was possible. Up to now, I would have sworn it wasn’t possible, so I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about temporal paradoxes.”

“Sounds like you’d better reorder your priorities.”

“Sounds like.”

They were silent for a long time, listening to the crackling of the fire. Susan tried not to look at it, not wanting to destroy her night vision. Once she thought she saw a movement at the edge of their little clearing and she tossed a flaming brand at it. Nothing happened, and the torch soon burned itself out.

“So,” Matt said at last. “You know any good ghost stories?”

MATT
sat up for a while, fiddling with the time machine with Susan watching over his shoulder. He didn’t learn anything he didn’t know already.

“Matt,” she said quietly at one point. “We may never get out of here, right?”

He looked at her a long time, trying to find it in himself to give her a reassuring lie. He knew he couldn’t do it, so he just shook his head. She scooted closer to him and rested her head on his shoulder. They hadn’t found anything like real bedding in their search of the warehouse. The best they could do were several plastic tarps that had been used for various things. They were sitting on one, and each of them had one to wrap up in. They weren’t very thick, and he could feel her warmth against him.

“Maybe we should change our names to Adam and Eve,” she said.

He looked at her, and for once in his life he didn’t even think about it, he just leaned over and kissed her. She responded for a moment, then pushed him gently away.

“I want you to hold me,” she said. “Let’s get together under both these tarps, we’ll be warmer.”

“Good idea,” he said, breathing hard. They struggled to get it all arranged, and then lay down side by side and he took her in his arms. She hugged him tightly.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

“So am I.”

“I want you to make love to me,” she said. “But I guess it would be too dangerous. There’s things out there, hunting. We need to stay alert.”

“You’re right,” he said. She let go of him and started squirming around, and he asked, “What are you doing?”

“Getting out of my pants. Wishing, for the first time in a long time, that I’d worn a skirt, so if we have to run for it I wouldn’t have to run half-naked.”

“Maybe I should get out of my pants, too. So you won’t be the only one running away half-naked.”

“That’s very considerate of you,” she said. She raised her knees under the tarp and got her jeans off, then faced him and slipped her hand into the waist of his pants, and squeezed his erection. “Yes, I do think you should take off your pants.”

She helped him, then took his hand and pressed it to her belly. He moved it over her hip, down her thigh, and then into curly hair and wetness. She kissed him, and he moved over her.

“I wanted to tell you…I’ve been trying for weeks to tell you that I love you.”

She smiled at him. “You don’t have to say that. I’m going to fuck you anyway.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I know,” she said. But Matt noticed she didn’t say she returned the love. She asked, “When?”

“When did I fall in love with you?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to pinpoint a moment?”

“Sure. Can’t you?”

“I’m tempted to say it happened over time, as I got to know you. But I think it really happened the first time I saw you.”

She looked at him, and grinned. “Really? Love at first sight?”

“I’ll have to admit it wasn’t the first time it’s happened to me. I used to fall in love at first sight several times a week. This was just the first time I’ve been able to do anything about it.”

She laughed. “When did it first happen?”

“My first day of college. But she was an older woman. She was, oh, I’d guess around twenty. And I was twelve.”

“You’re something else, Matt. My first supergenius.”

It was only later that he even thought about that, of other men she might have made love to, or been in love with. She might still be in love with another man, she had never talked about it. So maybe it was despair, surrendering to the idea that they would never go back to the world they knew. Maybe it was fear of the darkness out there and the things hiding in it. Maybe it was the need for human warmth and knowing he was the only one who could provide it. He didn’t care. Just then he lived entirely in the moment, in his body and not in his head. Just then she became his entire world.

THEY
never did get to sleep that night. The creatures in the dark made themselves known with rustlings, twitterings, and the occasional terrifying roar. Once they saw eyes reflecting the firelight. They threw a torch in that direction and the eyes vanished. They talked about taking watches, but decided against it. They made love again, this time more carefully, if such a thing can be done, Matt kneeling with his back against the tree they sheltered under, Susan on her hands and knees, aware of each other and aware of their surroundings, too.

When dawn came they started walking again. Within a few hours they came to a low hill overlooking a small stream. The Los Angeles River? There was no way of knowing, but they did know it was quite a few miles from the warehouse. And they weren’t the first ones there. From the hilltop they could see, half a mile away, a herd of mammoths drinking and splashing.