John Varley - Mammoth

And the man was wearing a watch just like the one on Matt's wrist.

Matt wasn't much of a drinking man, but for once in his life he felt he needed a stiff one. He ordered a shot of Canadian Club and choked it down, chased it with the rest of his beer, and turned to the Inuit man and smiled at him.

"I couldn't help noticing, you've got a watch just like mine."

The man frowned, and just for a moment he looked frightened. Matt could understand the initial hostility—he was Inuit, Matt was a stranger—but why would he be frightened? The man—Matt was sure it was Charlie now—looked around as if he expected someone to come crashing through the door.

Charlie relaxed a little, shrugged, and grinned, showing widely spaced, tobacco-stained teeth.

"Not mine," Charlie said. "Mine don't work. Never has."

Not surprising, Matt thought, since it's twelve thousand years old.

"Let me buy you a drink," Matt said.

"CHARLIE said he found the watch," Matt told Susan. "Five years ago. Said he thought it would bring him good luck, and it did for a while, but not so much lately."

"You're saying he got the watch off the man beside the frozen mammoth."

"Yes."

"And Howard didn't tell you about it."

"You know Howard. He hates to lose, and he's secretive as hell. He didn't tell me about the watch because Charlie stole it before he got there. He didn't tell me about the second person frozen with the mammoth because it had nothing to do with building a time machine. I didn't need to know. Howard and his damn secrets."

"I'm starting to see where this is going," she said.

"Yes. Susan... from the very first I considered the possibility that the dead man beside the mammoth was... me. There was one thing that argued strongly against it. I simply cannot imagine that I would be able to survive in the Stone Age long enough to be as old as this man was. But I guess anything's possible. Then, when we went back, I was pretty damn sure it had been me. I figured I'd explain it to you later, after we had settled in a bit."

"Break it to me slowly. Because there was just you and the frozen mammoth. I wasn't there. Which meant I must have died before you did."

"I'm sorry. I just couldn't figure out—"

"It's okay, Matt. I had enough to adjust to as it was."

"Okay. Then we came back... and it no longer made sense that the frozen man had been me. Then I found Charlie, and the watch. "I came to your house to tell you that I was now sure I was not only the 'inventor' of the time machine, I was the time traveler. I had figured out that, one way or another, the roller-coaster ride wasn't over yet, for me, anyway. I was trying to figure out how to say good-bye to you for good. Then Howard dropped his bombshell—accidentally, the bastard—and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I've been trying to decide which ever since, and how to tell you.

"The dead mammoth was a hybrid? Fuzzy is a hybrid," Susan said.

"Yes."

"Oh my god."

THEY went into the bedroom, got undressed and into bed, and just held each other for a while as Susan absorbed it.

"What if you just tossed it into the sound?" she said after a while.

"I'll do it if you want me to."

"And then what?"

"And then we see, I guess. The reason I'm afraid to is, like I said, if we don't go back in time, live out our lives, and die up north... then I don't see how we will ever meet."

"But we have met. We're here. Together. What happens to this, to all that's happened between us?"

"What happens when we die? I have no answers to those questions. Can we alter reality? If we try, then the universe might simply rearrange itself and make it so that none of this ever happened. You'll live your life in Florida, in the circus, and I'll live my life in Oregon. And I have to say, from my perspective in the here and now, whatever that means in this context, it wouldn't be a life worth living. But then... would I know? I don't think so."

She kissed him.

"I feel the same way. I guess we don't dare mess with it." She drew her head back and looked at him. "But you must have a theory. About what would happen if we tried to get rid of the time machine."

Matt sighed. "I think one of two things would happen. If I threw it over the side right here, this RV, the ferry dock, and maybe all of Port Townsend would be hurled backward into the Stone Age. Remember, the warehouse and all the elephants went back with us the first time."

"And the other thing?" "I think a big fish would swallow it, get netted, cut up, the time machine would get thrown in the trash, fall off the trunk on the way to the landfill, get picked up by a scavenger, sold to an antique shop, and one day we'd walk into that antique shop with Fuzzy on a leash..."

He laughed and kissed her nose. "I hadn't thought of that. Let's make a vow. When we buy furniture for our home together, we buy strictly new stuff."

"Our home together?"

"I hope so."

"Me, too." She sighed, and snuggled closer. "I don't much fancy a cave as a first home, though. The Stone Age... life wasn't easy back then, Matt. I wasn't even a very good Girl Scout. I don't know how I'll be at picking roots and berries."

"I couldn't catch a trout, the one time I tried. I guess we'd better start studying survival manuals, that sort of thing. How are your teeth?"

"Good. Oh, lord, no medical and dental benefits where we're going."

"Not even any Novocain. But we'll have each other, and we'll have a tame mammoth. Fuzzy will be back in his world."

"I guess that's something. No, I mean, that's everything, being with you—"

"I know what you meant."

"I had no idea, when I took Fuzzy, just how far we'd be taking him." She was silent for a while. Matt felt himself begin to stir, wondered if she still felt like sleeping. He touched her, and she proved she wasn't sleepy at all. But first she drew back one more time and looked at him.

"So when does this happen, do you think?"

"When it's time."

NIGHT fell, and the satellites opened their infrared eyes.

Howard paid for time on every high-resolution commercial orbiter as they came over the horizon until they sank below it. He stayed on the plane with Andrea, parked at the Executive Terminal, monitoring his bank of screens and listening to incoming reports from units in the field—all negative so far—while Warburton and his team watched similar displays in the war room of the security company only about half a mile away. Warburton was sure they would try to sneak over somewhere in the wilderness, so he concentrated on the eyes scanning the border, from Blaine to western Montana. They set the system to look for trailers of the right size, and for large animals. The heat-sensitive cameras could pick out a single rabbit but the computers were good at sorting through that. They quickly discarded the garbage and sent the larger hits to the screens for a human to decide if it was worth checking out.

There was a herd of cattle. Warburton watched as the computer examined several areas that turned out to be nothing but clumps of cows that made an unusually large heat signature. More cows. A group of people hiking along a mountain trail. He could see their arms and legs moving, and the beams of their flashlights. Kind of late to be moving around in the woods. Here was a group of five deer. More deer. More people. Deer, deer, deer, man alone, deer, deer... what was that? Bear. Now there was a car, a tent, a campfire, and two people... my, that's an interesting position.

It was the last interesting thing Warburton saw for several hours.

THE clock swung past midnight, eased into the wee hours. Warburton had to stop and rest his eyes every fifteen minutes or so. He hadn't had any idea there were so many deer in the whole country, and this was just a narrow strip of Washington and the tip of Idaho. Not to mention RVs. Those were fairly easy. A mammoth in an RV or a truck would shine like a beacon. They had found hundreds of garage-type fifth wheels, some with a heat source at the back where Fuzzy would be standing, but a quick look always showed it to be the still-warm engines of off-roaders like the one Susan had probably abandoned on the roadside somewhere.