Mammoth (31 page)

“You want to go back to Esalen?”

“No. I want to be let loose. I want to explore new avenues. I want to find new tools. Because the answer, if there is one, will not be found in your lab.”

He tapped the side of his head, and winced.

“It’ll be found up here. If that thug hasn’t damaged it too much.”

THE
fifth face Matt saw in his cell was a woman who might have been a doctor. She wore no credentials and gave no name or title, but she carried the tools of the trade: stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, reflex hammer, one of those little flashlights with a lens for looking into eyes, ears, nose. She did a routine exam, carefully checking his pupils and telling him he didn’t have a concussion. She checked his nose and examined the bruising on his abdomen.

Two things struck him while she worked. One was that it took a relatively short time without them for a prisoner to become almost
astonished
by the very idea of a female. He was acutely aware of the smell of her, the look of her, the feel of her skin when she took his pulse. He fell head over heels in love, though she was not really that attractive, and not even very nice.

The other was not so charitable. What kind of doctor would work in a place like this? Had she had occasion to treat injuries far more debilitating than his? Had there been bodies to dispose of?

She left. Three more meals were delivered. Then Howard returned, possibly twenty-four hours later, with a cardboard box under one arm.

“I’ve got good news,” he said with a big grin.

“For me, or you?”

“Both of us, I hope. You’re outta here.” He dropped the box on the table and Matt joined him.

“They ruined some of your stuff,” Howard said, taking out the wallet which Argyle had torn apart in front of him. “Your computers seem to be intact. I didn’t access anything in them, but I turned them on.”

“You have all the data anyway,” Matt said, and Howard didn’t deny it. “That’s fine with me. If somebody else finds the answers in there, so be it. I’d welcome the chance to stop thinking about it.” He pawed through the remains of his things. “Where’s the marble?”

“Marble? Oh, right. They wanted to keep that. I told them it belonged to you.” Howard smiled, and reached into his pocket. He came up with the marble encased in its little wire cage. He held it out to Matt, and Matt knew that if he hadn’t mentioned it, Howard would have kept it forever. “Keeping it as a souvenir?”

“Sort of,” Matt said, taking it and turning it against the light. It was a superb little agate, red in color, with a swirling imperfection in the center that refracted brilliantly. “It’s all that’s left of the glorious experiment.”

“That, and the time machine,” Howard reminded him, hopefully.

“Yes, wherever it is,” Matt agreed. He looked up at Howard. “So, what’s the catch?”

“Catch?”

“What are the conditions? I can’t believe I’m simply being cut loose. I expect this will be more like parole.”

Howard looked uncomfortable.

“You’re probably right. They haven’t told me anything about that, but I suspect they’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

“So that’s it, right? I just walk out of here? No releases to sign? No bills to pay for the room and board? No mighty oaths of secrecy to swear?”

“How can they ask for a release when you haven’t even been here? As for secrecy, if you start talking about this you will be punished severely; it will make what that monster did to you today seem mild.”

“Killed?”

“I honestly don’t know, and very much do not
want
to know. My opinion? I doubt it. But they could make you sorry you’re alive.”

“I already am.”

MATT
was thirsty, and he didn’t want any more wine. He realized he’d done more talking in the last few hours than he’d done in the last few…months? Years, even? He stopped, and there was a long silence in the room.

“Most of this is new to me,” said Andrea de la Terre.

“I kept meaning to tell you,” Howard said, uneasily. “I never could seem to find the right time.”

Andrea looked at him skeptically.

“Or how to go about it,” she suggested.

“Honey, everything he just said is the truth.”

She thought about that. “Okay. But what he said is that you
told
him you had nothing to do with his kidnapping and imprisonment. I can believe that’s the truth. What I need to hear now is
you
telling
me
that you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Howard looked hurt.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Howard, I don’t know yet, because you have chosen not to tell me anything about it. I want you to tell me now.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Howard said.

Andrea looked at him for a very long moment, then nodded and patted his hand.

“I believe you.” She turned to Matt. “Do you?”

“Yes. I still do.” He was going to add that it didn’t really matter, it was a long time ago, let bygones be bygones, but decided she didn’t need to hear any doubt in his voice. He could give Howard that much help. Watching the expression of
relief on Howard’s face, Matt realized the man really was deeply in love with his movie star girlfriend, just like the tabloid headlines said. For a moment he thought Howard was going to kiss her, but he turned instead to Matt.

“So, Matt, you’re back at last. I guess you know what my next question is.”

“Should I speak real loud for the NNSA mikes?” Matt asked.

“Doesn’t matter much. They’re watching me, too. They’ll find out what you say.”

“All right, then, Albert, or Mister Argyle Socks, or whoever else has this place bugged, I’m sorry to bring bad news…but I haven’t learned anything.”

Howard looked at Matt blankly. The words didn’t seem to have any meaning for him. He said what people often do when a statement is unacceptable to them:

“What do you mean, you haven’t learned anything?”

“I. Haven’t. Learned. Anything. You want me to say it again?”

Howard couldn’t seem to come up with a response.

“Howard…it was always an iffy thing. I told you I had a…a notion. A hint. A glimmering of something, if you will. I thought it might lead somewhere. It didn’t. I’m at a dead end. It was either a fluke, an act of God, a cosmic joke, or something that is just beyond the capacity of my poor, abused brain. I’m through. I give up. I quit.”

Matt looked theatrically around the room, and held his arms out, wrists together.

“You hear that, Mr. President? Come on, arrest me again, run me through the wringer.
Fuck you all!”

Matt found himself shaking with rage. He knew he had suppressed it for a long time. Maybe it was being near Susan again, the bitterness of the five years without her that had been lost, gone and impossible to get back, and the very strong possibility that he would never get her back at all, and who could blame her?

He got himself back under control again quickly, sat back and glanced at Susan, who was smiling strangely at him, then at Howard.

Howard was standing, and his face was red and twisted with fury.

“Well, that’s just not good enough, goddamnit. I know you’re lying.”

Matt couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

“Howard,” Andrea said, gently, “if he hasn’t found the answer, it will have to be good enough.”

“No, goddamn it! You lost my warehouse, all my pregnant elephants, the original time machine and all the duplicates, my frozen mammoth, my caveman and my cavewoman, my—”

“Cavewoman?” Matt asked. “You never mentioned any cavewoman.”

Howard seemed to realize he had said more than he intended. He really
had
been shaken up.

“It was none of your business. After we got the mammoth sperm there wasn’t any pressure to deal with the rest of it. The woman had no metal objects on her. So I deferred to Rostov, my mammoth expert, who wanted to do the recovery properly. Very, very slowly. Then Rostov came down with pneumonia from working in the cold, and the work was shut down for a while. Then he died, and I was looking for a new mammoth expert when…well, when the whole project vanished.”

“A woman,” Matt said.

“Probably a woman.”

“You should have told me about that.”

“I didn’t see it was relevant to your work.”

“You should have told me.”

Never defend yourself. Attack.
“Screw that. I’m telling you I think you’re lying, and I’m going—”

“Howard, you owe him an explanation.”

He took a moment to calm himself. Andrea was trying to teach him a more forgiving outlook on things and he was trying to learn. He took a deep breath.

“I didn’t tell
anybody
, because Indian tribes have been raising such an uproar over the remains of what they claim were their ancestors. They have been burying priceless anthropological specimens, bodies we could learn a lot from, and…well, you get in the habit of secrecy.”

“It might have had a bearing on my research.”

“How?”

“You just don’t hamstring a researcher that way. You tell me everything, and you let me decide what’s important.”

“Okay. I was wrong, I admit it. But now…we both know you’re lying. And I won’t let you quit—you know something and I mean to find out what it is.”

“I don’t work for you anymore, Howard,” Matt pointed out. “And I don’t particularly like being called a liar.”

“How do I know you haven’t been lying right from the start? We all knew you were hiding something but we could never figure out what it was. I’ve wondered for a long time if those government people were a bit too heavily invested in their lie detection technology. I’ve been wondering if you just happen to be so good a liar that the machines can’t catch you. I’ve had it researched, it
is
possible to fool them.”

“My understanding is that psychotics are best at it,” Matt said.

Howard was about to reply to that when Susan stood up.

“That’s the third time you’ve called Matt a liar. Get out of my house.”

“Your
house? This house belongs to me, and you know—”

“It may belong to you, but it’s my legal residence, and as long as it is I determine who is welcome in it. Matt is my friend, and I won’t have him insulted in my house. If he says he’s telling you the truth, he’s telling you the truth. Now, please leave.”

Howard stood there, stunned. In his youth he had been all too familiar with being ordered around, but it had been quite a long time since anyone had done so, and even longer since someone had told him he couldn’t have something once he had set his sights on it. He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Matt watched him, interested but not particularly afraid of what he would say next, while one phrase went around in his mind: Matt is my friend.
Friend?
Just what did she mean by that?

Andrea stood up and took Howard’s hand.

“Howard, let’s go,” she said quietly. Matt thought she looked a little confused and conflicted. There had been a lot for her to absorb in the last hour, much more than for any of
the rest of them. She needed time to think it all over. In the meantime she was shrewd enough to know nothing good could be accomplished here tonight by dragging out an unpleasant scene.

Howard seemed to realize that too, finally, and his posture gradually softened and he looked away from Matt and allowed himself to be led toward the door. But he couldn’t resist a parting shot.

“You haven’t heard the last of this,” he said.

Matt stayed silent until they had gone. Then he stood and turned to Susan.

“Have I cost you your job here?” he asked.

“Hah!
Doesn’t he wish?” She saw his uncomprehending look, and shook her head wearily. “I haven’t filled you in on
my
wonderful life yet, have I? No, don’t worry, I’m not angry, I was a lot more interested in hearing your story than telling mine. But I’m going to fall asleep right here on the carpet if I have to talk or listen any more tonight. We’ll have to save the rest for tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.”

She looked away from him.

“There’s a guest room at the end of the hall upstairs. Nobody’s used it since I moved in—I don’t have much of a life, outside of the park—so there are no sheets on the bed. I’ll go up and—”

“It’s not a problem, Susan. I’ve slept on much worse, believe me.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about it tomorrow.” She suppressed a yawn. “Well, are you okay for tonight, then?”

Other than having a broken heart?
“I’m fine,” he said.

She moved to him a bit awkwardly and gave him a sisterly kiss on the cheek, which hurt more than a punch in the nose. But she lingered for a moment and whispered in his ear.

“You were lying to Howard, weren’t you?”

He kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Yes.”

MATT
stood for almost an hour by the luminous dial of the watch he had worn religiously since the first day of his release
from the prison cell in New Jersey, something he had not done in his earlier life. The moment he hit the street he had been seized by a powerful desire to know what time it was, to
always
know what time it was. Eight weeks in a cell where the lights were never turned off could do that to you. It was a Seiko solar-powered radio chronometer with a stainless steel case and embedded electronics; you could drop it from the Resurrection Tower and run over it with a tank and it would still keep perfect time from the Naval Observatory atomic clock.

He spent the time doing what he often did when confronted by a situation he felt inadequate to deal with. He asked himself what the hero of a romantic comedy would do. He remembered Clark Gable erecting a sheet—the walls of Jericho, he called it—in a motel room, and assuring Claudette Colbert that the wall would not be breached, correctly following the mores of the 1930s. But it was Susan who had put up the sheet, hadn’t she? And this wasn’t the twentieth century.

What would a modern hero do? Probably never have gone meekly to the guest bedroom in the first place, Matt guessed. But if he did he sure wouldn’t have slept there. He would have strode confidently down the hallway at some romantic hour of the night to his lover’s room, opened the door, and she would either have been eagerly waiting for him or he would have slipped into her bed and she would have been pretending to be asleep, and then pretend to be overpowered. Both of them would have bright, witty, sexy things to say to each other.