Mammoth (42 page)

Susan laughed. “I hate to say this, but you’re losing me even quicker with this stuff than you did with the physics.”

“That’s exactly how I felt. So I looked around. The older religions, what we look down our noses at and call ‘mythology,’ like the Romans and Norse and Greeks, had a different world-view. Hindus today still see the universe like that. Their gods duke it out from time to time. They are willful, vain, childish, vindictive, quite willing to play dice with human lives.”

“So’s the Christian God, in my opinion.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. But we put all those attributes into one being. Animists and others give different attributes to different gods.” Matt sighed heavily. “What I’m going to tell you is that I’ve begun to get a…a hint of an inkling of an intuition of an enigma. Remember the old fable of the blind men and the elephant? One feels his trunk and says an elephant is like a snake. Another thinks he’s like a tree, from feeling his leg. Another thinks an elephant is like a wall.

“What’s happened to me is like…like I’m blind, deaf, and have no hands, and you gave me one hair off Fuzzy’s back and asked me to deduce a mammoth from that.”

“At last.” Susan laughed. “A metaphor I can understand. How far have you gotten?”

“About as far as you’d expect. How about the railroad metaphor? I thought that one was pretty good.”

“You’re right. I got that one.”

“Then try this. We think time is a long, straight train ride at constant speed. Actually, it can turn into a roller coaster. It’s got big loops in it. It turns upside down now and then, and sometimes it goes forward and then backward. Why? I don’t know. But it could be that during human history we’ve been riding on an abnormally straight stretch of track, that what we think of as universal laws concerning time are really only local. Maybe in the next galaxy down the block time runs backward. Maybe out there in empty space there are
lots
of loops, and we have no way to detect them.

“I was struck by something a lot of American Indian tribes share, the deity usually called Coyote. The trickster. He enjoys playing pranks on humans. If there is a god or gods out there, maybe they’re just having fun with us, putting us on this ride we think is going to be calm and reasonable, and suddenly the bottom drops out and we fall screaming down the first hill and they laugh and laugh and laugh.”

“You’ve given me a lot of maybes.”

“Best I can offer. I’ve got a million more. Maybe these loops in time open up more often than we let ourselves admit. What if the Loch Ness monster is an aquatic dinosaur that fell through a hole in time and swam around long enough to get spotted a few times, create a legend, and then died? What if the Sasquatch and the Yeti were time travelers? What if some—some, mind you, ninety-nine percent of them are swamp gas—some UFOs are lost astronauts from the future?”

“I’ve heard some of this stuff before. There are websites devoted to it.”

“Sure. And until I traveled in time I dismissed them. I have no proof of any of them now, for that matter. As you say, all I’ve got is a lot of maybes.”

Susan took another drink of her beer and thought it over.

“You’re disappointed, aren’t you?” Matt asked.

“A little,” she admitted. “I was hoping you’d found some answers.”

“I’m a long way from that. But I did learn to do a trick, and I did make a discovery. You may like the trick, but I don’t think the discovery is going to be easy for either of us to accept. Watch this.”

Matt reached into his pocket and took out something she immediately recognized as one of the marbles he had tinkered with five years earlier, when he was trying to duplicate the time machine. It looked like ordinary red glass, in a square cage with ridges that could be interlocked with other cages to slide over each other in any direction.

He held it between thumb and forefinger and started twisting it in the air. Left, right, right some more, forward, left again…she soon lost track of the permutations. It was like watching a safecracker twisting the dial, only he turned it through three axes. Then he stopped. Nothing happened.

“Nice trick,” she said.

“It doesn’t work every time. That’s what’s so frustrating. In science as I knew it, repeatability is
everything.
With this stuff…well, like my grandfather used to say, ‘It don’t work unless you hold your mouth right.’”

He went through the motions again, and she was amused to see that he actually had screwed up one side of his mouth in an odd way, though she didn’t think he was aware that he was doing it. Then he set it down on the table between them…and this time the little wire cube with the clear red glass ball in it seemed to be seized by a mysterious energy. It began to spin.

Then it began to grow.

It…unfolded itself. Watching it, incredulous, Susan thought each move was as logical as unfolding a paper airplane or taking a flattened box and turning it into an assembled one…but neither of those operations hurt her eyes. This was an evolution that she felt instinctively that human eyes were not equipped to witness. Now there was a larger cube, three marbles on a side, now four, now five…and in a few eye-popping seconds there was the whole array, and the box that contained it, laid out like an opened suitcase in front of her.

She got up and hurried to the bathroom.

*    *    *

“FEELING
better?” Matt asked when she got back.

“I didn’t actually lose the beer,” she said. “But for a minute there I felt sick as a dog.”

“I told you it was a roller-coaster ride.”

“Matt…what did you just
do
?”

“The only thing I’ve learned to do. That night, the night that began with the mammoths about to stomp us, and ended up back in Los Angeles…I watched this thing do its stuff. I ended up with that one little glass ball, and then I got hit by a city bus. I knew I had seen something and I thought I could remember it, and I knew I had to get out of there. It wasn’t until later that I found the ball in my pocket. I don’t remember putting it there. We were sort of busy, if you recall. Later, I figured out that the ball was still somehow attached to the rest of the machine. I did computer simulations on the model I had stored in my computer, and eventually came up with an algorithm that…that sort of pries up the lid on the place where the rest of the machine is.”

“So you’ve had it all the time.”

“That’s right. All through the interrogation. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t.”

“Why not just give it to Howard?”

Matt sighed. “I would love to do that. I don’t want this thing. It’s like…it’s like you own a gun and you know how to fire it, but you haven’t figured out how to aim it yet, and it can shoot in any direction, totally at random. How often are you going to shoot that gun? It’s even worse, though, because sometimes it just goes off by itself, when it wants to, when the conditions are right, when God or Coyote wills it…I don’t know.”

“All the more reason to get rid of it. Give it to Howard.”

“Susan, Howard is a collector. That’s what he wanted a time machine for in the first place. He wanted me to get him a mammoth, or the means to get one. We did, accidentally. He was fixated on mammoths at the time…but you think he’d be satisfied with that? Why not dinosaurs? He could build a real Jurassic Park.”

“Well…why not? I wouldn’t mind getting more mammoths. Fuzzy ought to have more of his own kind.”

“Believe me, if I thought it was that simple I’d go back
with a big-game trapper and bring some more mammoths forward in time. But…”

“But what?”

“But I think it might be very dangerous.”

Susan chewed it over for a time.

“You’re talking about changing the past, right?”

“Yes. I don’t know if it’s possible. Maybe we could change the past and make a better world. Maybe we could make a worse one. Or maybe the way things have happened, are happening, and will happen is written in stone, and can’t be changed. I lean toward that last possibility.”

“Predestination.”

“If you want to call it that. It could be that free choice is illusion. I don’t think I have the right to test it.”

“I see what you mean. But there’s one question I’ve been meaning to ask you, ever since, ever since you made that…that
thing
appear. Who made it?”

“I made it.”

“No, no, I know you made that one. Who made the original one?”

“There is only one. I made it. You watched me.”

“But that’s…that’s crazy! The only way you knew how to make it was you took it apart and found
out
how to make it.”

“Yeah. It’s a puzzler, isn’t it? Time travel is full of stuff like that.”

“But…where did it come from? Why is it here? What’s the
point
of it?”

Matt smiled.

“That’s the big question, isn’t it?
Why?
All my life I’ve been much more concerned with
what
and
how.
Science in the main doesn’t attempt to tackle the meaning of things. I hardly even know how to phrase the questions I need to ask. I’m still learning my ABCs, and I’ve got a sneaking feeling that nobody,
nobody
has even gotten as far as Z yet, much less learned to read. That’s been a comfort to me, trying to understand this, that just about everyone else is almost as ignorant as me.

“I don’t even think this ‘time machine’ is necessary. I think a crystal ball might do it, or tarot cards. A man from the last century might actually use a vehicle like the one in
The Time
Machine.
Cavemen might time-travel just by looking into a campfire and thinking the right thoughts.”

“The right thoughts? You mean…”

“I think it was my mind that sent us back, and brought us home. But it doesn’t work all the time. You have to be in the right place, too. We appear to be on an unscheduled loop on the roller coaster of time.

“But one of the few things I know for sure is…that if that loop hadn’t happened, we never would have met. That’s the most important thing in the world to me.”

Susan wondered if she was going to cry. She held it in, because there were still more questions she had to ask. She was starting to be disturbed.

“What else are you sure of? You said you had a trick, which you showed me, and that’s good enough, please don’t turn it on. And you made a discovery. And…I thought the roller-coaster ride through time was over.”

Matt looked down at the table, then met Susan’s eyes again.

“Not quite. To make the discovery, I had to go back to the beginning. I had to go to northern Canada, to Nunavut.”

THE
place was called Kangiqiniq, formerly Rankin Inlet, and it was located about three-quarters of the way up the western shore of Hudson Bay, which put it in the balmy, sun-kissed southern regions of Nunavut.

Matt had never felt so cold.

It began as soon as he stepped off the small plane from Winnipeg, which had been cold enough. It got worse as he moved around the streets of town. Kangiqiniq was a bustling metropolis, for Nunavut. Population almost five thousand, very few of whom seemed to spend any time on the streets. It made sense. The wind howled down the arrow-straight streets between the mostly modular buildings, direct from the North Pole—which was actually the northernmost point in the territory.

There were a lot of parked snowmobiles. Most of the town was not fancy, but in addition to traditional native ways of making a living there was a thriving tourist industry catering to hunters, fishermen, and eco-touring. People who could afford to indulge in things like that usually didn’t like to stay in tarpaper shacks, so there were half a dozen fancy resorts built from imported stone and timber, pretending to be Swiss ski lodges or Colorado vacation mansions. They all had indoor pools and gyms, plush rooms, good restaurants. There was actually a golf course, possibly the northernmost one in the world.

It had taken Matt a lot of effort to track down the members of the old recovery team from the Mammoth Seven site. Rostov was dead. There were only four others and they were all Inuit, and scattered all over the territory—which meant they were really scattered, as Nunavut covered two million square kilometers. That was the bad news. The good news was there
were only thirty-five thousand citizens. If it came to it, Matt could question most of them, and there was a complex web of blood relationships that meant he should come across an aunt or uncle or third cousin of any of them sooner or later.

He started down his list alphabetically, with a guy named Charlie Charttinirpaaq.

Charlie had an address in Kangiqiniq. Matt took a taxi there and knocked on the door of a modular home with a lot of junk scattered around it. It looked like Charlie was something of a packrat. There was a Mercedes SUV that had been very fancy when new, about five years ago, sitting on four flat tires, and three snowmobiles parked in the yard amid all the clutter.

There was no answer at the door, so Matt went to a neighbor and was greeted by a short, brown woman with narrow eyes and very little expression on her face. Her yard was very clean, and the room behind her was spotless. She wasn’t eager to give out information to this red-nosed, sniffling white man, but Matt said he had some money for Charlie—which was true, he was prepared to pay for his story—and a possible job. The woman looked dubious, but told Matt he could probably find Charlie in a bar called the Blind Walrus.

The Walrus wasn’t located in any of the fancy hotels. Matt was the only white face when he came through the door. Everybody looked up and gave him the once-over, but he didn’t sense any hostility. There were two guys playing pool, half a dozen sitting around watching a hockey match on an old television, and two men at the bar. The only thing of interest in the room was a stuffed polar bear, rearing almost up to the ceiling. Matt went to the bar and ordered a beer. He considered his approach. Just ask the bartender and patrons if any of them were Charlie Charttinirpaaq? The neighbor lady had showed a trace of a smile when he said the name so he was fairly sure he was mangling the pronunciation.