Mammoth (45 page)

“I guess we’ll never know that. But remember what he wrote on the box.” She shivered. “I’m just thinking about Howard up there in Canada, getting off the helicopter, going to look at his mammoth…and seeing his own dead body.”

Nobody had a comment to make about that. Susan looked at Warburton and sighed. “Okay, when do we start back?” Warburton shook his head.

“You think I care about that? My boss is gone, and I’m retiring. You saved my life, and I pay my debts. I’ll call the search off, I’ll tell them I’m on my way back to Oregon with the animal, and that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned.”

He got up and walked out into the night.

THE
rain let up before sunrise, and the ferry pulled into its slip shortly after that. Half a dozen other vehicles had parked before the gate went up and they all drove aboard. It was the same size as the first ferry they had been on.

The crossing to Friday Harbor was smooth, the day overcast. Quite a few more cars got on, and then they were off to Point Roberts. Susan stayed in the trailer with Fuzzy, who was feeling as close to grumpy as he ever got. Matt stood at the bow of the ship and watched some dolphins rolling in front of them, thinking about many things, rearranging his life. It looked like there was another jail cell in the offing, though Susan thought they wouldn’t be in custody for long. He could tolerate it if they turned the lights out at night. He didn’t think any Canadian jailers would be punching him in the nose.

Howard, why did you do it?
There at the end, when he was dying, Howard could have done something, some small thing, to twist events around so that he never would have gone back into the past to live what must have been a very, very hard life. Why didn’t he? Before that, he could have refused to go north.

Had a good life.
That was the only explanation Matt was likely to get.

The ferry docked and Susan joined him in the cab for the short drive to the crossing, having given Fuzzy another tranquilizer and laid him down in the back. The next few days were going to be stressful.

They crossed the international boundary and pulled up at the Canadian Customs shack. Standing beside the road a little way ahead of them in the area where Customs could pull you over for a thorough search, they could see Jack Elk, the man who called himself Python, and two men with briefcases.

Matt rolled down his window and looked at the smiling officer.

“Anything to declare?” he said.

Matt and Susan looked at each other, and burst out laughing.

THE
time traveler pulled the fur robe tighter around himself and tried to nestle a little closer to the dead mammoth as the snow drifted higher around him, and wondered why he bothered. He was hours from death, maybe minutes, and he knew it, he welcomed it. He could no longer feel his feet. The fingers of his left hand weren’t moving very well. Only his right arm had any warmth in it, still wrapped around his wife’s body where he had jammed it after he killed the mammoth, waited for it to bleed to death, and tucked her tenderly as far as he could under the great hairy body.

He had killed her three days before and she was quite frozen, but somehow she still felt warm to his touch.

Oh, lord, how he missed her, the woman who had redeemed him, who had made his life worth living. He was looking forward to joining her wherever she had gone, heaven or hell or sweet nothingness.

He had the preparation of cyanide in his medicine bag. He could go quickly if he chose. His wife had certainly gone quickly enough, and though it had not been completely painless, she had thanked him as she swallowed the fatal dose.

He would take the poison…but there was a nagging feeling of something left undone. He couldn’t imagine what it might be, but he knew he wouldn’t let go until it came to him.

A dying man’s life is supposed to pass before his eyes and he had been having many, many memories, but hardly any from before what they came to call Day One of Year One. It all seemed like a past life now. Cities. Helicopters. Computers, satellites, nuclear bombs, cell phones—
any
sort of telephone. He could easily believe he had dreamed it all.

But not a dream, in retrospect. A nightmare. A nightmare he had once thought had
begun
on Day One, Year One…but now realized had
ended
on that horrible day.

THERE
they were, floating in Puget Sound in a magnificent eight-million-dollar yacht, and the world went away.

Everything he valued in the world, anyway, except for Andrea. There they were, at the entrance to one of the great metropolitan estuaries on Earth, and all he could see for miles and miles was water, rocks, trees, and a sky without airplanes. Here they were, worth thirty-nine billion dollars, on paper (thirty-nine and a half billion, counting Andrea’s money), and unable to buy anything. The real meaning of that phrase, “on paper,” had never come home to him until that moment.

They spent most of the first day motoring around the sound, looking for signs of human life, Howard raging, Andrea despairing. Was it 1804, were Lewis and Clark somewhere south on the Columbia? Was it 100,000
B.C.
? Was it
A.D.
100,000, and all the works of mankind crumbled to dust?

At some point Howard had realized that, whatever the date was, he was unlikely to find a filling station. When his tanks were dry, that was
it.
So he anchored and raged some more, and Andrea despaired some more.

But neither of them were quitters.

They inventoried the Bertram, from the scuppers to the fo’c’sle, or whatever they called it, and found they had quite a lot of stuff. Like Howard himself, the friend he had borrowed the boat from had enjoyed gadgets, and liked to have the best. There was plenty of food. There were tools. There was fishing gear sturdy enough to land a killer whale (Howard had never even baited a hook), and rifles and shotguns and pistols and ammunition and tools. There were several computers, including one Howard had brought himself, pocket-sized and able to run on solar energy.

They got out the manuals and learned to run the ship. They turned off the generator on the second day, to save fuel, sat quietly in the dark at night, grudging even a single candle they
could never replace, talking over the possibilities. During the day they learned to fish. The waters were
teeming
with fish. They landed salmon the size of atomic submarines.

And day by day a conviction grew in Howard. He could not explain it and he could not prove it, but he knew what the date was. It was shortly before that horrible,
horrible
man, Matt Wright, and that thieving
bitch
, Susan Morgan, had gone into the past with
his
time machine and come back with a herd of mammoths and
no
time machine.

Nothing could sway him from this, and Andrea didn’t even try. She herself didn’t much care where she was if there was no place to shop, but if she had to be somewhere, southern California was what she knew, and though she realized that Rodeo Drive wouldn’t be built for ten thousand years or so, a sea voyage would be better than sitting around here in the damp, cloudy, moldy, rainy, chilly, fungus-ridden,
depressing
Pacific Northwest.

And who knew? Maybe Howard’s obsession was right. Maybe she could get back to where her credit cards worked. Andrea was an environmentalist, but no outdoorswoman. The woods were full of chiggers and mosquitoes and spiders and things.

So Howard made his calculations, found they could just get there on the three thousand gallons of fuel remaining, and they made their way down the coast on just one of the big twin diesels at the most economical rpm setting as determined by the boat’s computer.

They had good luck. When a big storm hit they were able to shelter in San Francisco Bay. How very, very odd to sail through it with no bridge overhead. There was nothing on Alcatraz Island, nothing on Yerba Buena, no ’49ers boomtown.
Nothing.

Several times they saw, and were seen by, native peoples. Some were on shore, some in canoes, but none tried to catch the big Bertram. So it wasn’t the age of dinosaurs…but Howard had known that, the coastline pretty much agreed with the ship’s maps—though of course all the fancy GPS stuff was useless with no satellites overhead—and the continent had been very different when
T. rex
stalked the Earth.

They anchored near what Howard figured to be the future
site of Santa Monica. Pulling away from the boat, they noticed for the first time that it had a name painted on the transom (they had learned a lot of boating terms on the way down). She was the
Twist of Fate.
They laughed, for the first time in a long time. They loaded their weapons and shouldered their backpacks and set out for the La Brea tar pits.

Howard had hoped to find his missing warehouse on the way, but found no sign of it. It proved nothing, though he scanned the area from the top of every rise. He hadn’t realized how easy it would be to hide a single structure in wilderness like this. It could be in the next shallow ravine, or he could be miles away from it.

Or, maybe it hadn’t arrived yet.

They found the tar pits. Again, nothing. They spent the night, sleepless from all the unfamiliar and frightening animal sounds, and hiked back to the ship the next day.

On the shore, a hundred people awaited them.

IT
was snowing harder now. Howard kept brushing it away from his face, again wondering why he was bothering.

He remembered something he hadn’t thought of for a long time: His first sight of the “caveman” nestled up against the frozen mammoth. He remembered his disgust. Soon, probably before the day was over, something would make a meal of his face. Hell, of most of his head. Not a bear, a bear would certainly drag him away and eat a lot more. Probably not a wolf. Most likely some of the little snow foxes he had seen on his way north. They would gnaw at him a while, then the snow would cover him. He found the prospect held no emotion for him, one way or the other. Though if they came while he was still alive he’d fight them off. Howard Christian was not a quitter.

He looked at his watch…and smiled again. At
Matt’s
watch. Even after all these years he still did it from time to time. His people felt the watch held very powerful medicine, because the chief looked at it so often, and they had been sorry to see him leave with it, but of course too polite to say so.

And it did have heap powerful juju, or voodoo, or power of
some
sort, though not of a type any of them would ever understand. Nor, he admitted to himself, did
he
have more than the
faintest, quasispiritual sense of the watch’s power. Hell, it didn’t even tell time anymore, hadn’t since the radio signal from the Naval Observatory had suddenly winked off on Day One, Year One. Years ago.

Years ago.

How many? He could probably work it out, if it mattered. He had a good memory. There was Year One. There was the Year of Building. There was the year of Many Fish. There was the Year of the First-Born Child. There was the Year of the First Mammoth Kill. There was…

He had forgotten the sequence. At some point it had ceased to matter. It was probably around the Year Howard Realized Matt Was Not Coming. At some point he had moved from being a middle-aged man to being an old man, and then a very old man. Probably somewhere between seventy-five and eighty.

Damn it, what else was he forgetting?

A
few brave souls had actually been aboard the
Twist of Fate
, but they hadn’t ventured inside, and they had done very little damage. One had put a steel fishhook through his hand, but didn’t seem angry about it. He seemed to treasure the bright, shiny new thing hanging there.

Howard kept his finger on the trigger, and he and Andrea both smiled a lot, and nodded, and showed open palms, and got into their Zodiac and—startling everyone when they started the engine—motored back out to the
Twist.

Establishing themselves as White Gods didn’t take long. They had a practically unlimited supply of miracles to offer. Soon everyone was friendly and eager to see new things. When Howard and Andrea went back to the tar pits and set up a tent, part of the tribe went with them to protect them, and the rest moved their village three miles north to guard the
Twist
and to fish, which was their main livelihood.

Howard waited.

To pass the time, he read. His computer memories held much of the future worlds’ libraries, most of it absolutely useless but some incredibly valuable to them, from the Boy Scout Handbook to paleontology and anthropology texts. Year One
passed, meticulously marked off by the internal clock in Howard’s computer.

They never called the next one Year Two. When it came to an end, it was the Year of Building. Things just…happened.

Howard wasn’t capable of just sitting and waiting, and neither was Andrea. They got involved in the affairs of the tribe. He was never going to be able to give them automobiles or rifles, hell, he would never even be able to smelt iron. But he could teach them things. Andrea picked up the language like a sponge, and he learned it almost in spite of himself.

And he began to change things. At first, it was for his own comfort. The food in the
Twist
ran out, and he was sick to death of fish. Howard longed for beef. The People trapped and hunted small game and picked wild fruit and vegetables. They lived in huts made of sticks and the bones of mammoths that had died a natural death. Southern California was a lot cooler now than it would be in Howard’s time; the wind blew right through the flimsy things, and his tent had big rips in it and was miserable in the rain.

He taught them to build better shelter.

Andrea had a baby, and they named him Adam.

Howard found out how elephants had been hunted and killed before gunpowder, and taught them to do that.

Andrea had another baby, and they named her Eve. Eve died two months later of some disease, and it almost broke their hearts.