He realized he had almost been shouting. He stopped himself, deliberately calmed down. Susan didn't seem disturbed by it, but she did glance at her watch.
"It's feeding time. I'll have to go now."
"Sorry about that." "No, it's not a problem. But really, Queenie'll get cranky if she doesn't get her feed on time. One thing you don't want to deal with is a cranky elephant."
"Thanks for showing me this." She seemed about to say something else, maybe about the chance she knew he was taking by bringing her here, but she thought better of it. She waved, and started for the door.
When she was almost there, she turned.
"I wouldn't mind sharing a sub sandwich with you again one of these days, though. Maybe you can tell me more."
"Sub sandwich," he snorted. "Listen, I'd like to take you out for a real meal. Kentucky fried
chicken."
"I don't know if I could deal with luxury like that. But I'll try."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow."
He waited until he was sure the door was closed behind her, and then did something he seldom
did. He danced.
FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"
Life was not all fun and games for the mammoth herd. There were dangerous things, and not just saber-toothed cats.
One day when Temba was browsing in a big tree, pulling down branches with sweet tender leaves on them and thrusting them into her mouth, Fuzzy wandered off a little ways to another tree.
Baby mammoths, like baby elephants, were born knowing how to stand up, how to walk, how to nurse, and they probably know how to swim, too. But they had to learn to use their trunks, just like baby humans have to learn to use their hands. A mammoth's trunk contained many thousands of muscles and a grown-up mammoth could use it to pick up a single leaf or twig!
The way they learned to use their trunks was the same way people or animals learn to use anything: practice!
Fuzzy picked up a branch with his trunk, like he had seen his mother do. He swung it around, hitting things with it.
He hit the trunk of the tree. He hit a big stone.
And the big pile of straw reared up and screamed at him!
It was big! Bigger than Temba, taller than Big Mama! From the tips of its three curved claws to the top of its little, angry head, it was fifteen feet tall.
It was a giant ground sloth.
There is nothing alive today that is anything like a giant ground sloth. Its only living cousin is small and lives in the trees where it hangs upside down and sleeps almost all day. But the giant ground sloth was huge, and there were many of them in California at the time little Fuzzy was born.
Giant ground sloths were plant eaters, like mammoths, and usually they gave the herd no trouble. But they could be cranky, and they didn't like being rudely awakened any more than most animals do. This one took a swing at Fuzzy with his mighty arms, and sent the poor little mammoth tumbling over the dusty ground.
Fuzzy was very frightened, and he cried out for his mother.
Well! In no time at all not only Temba but all the sisters and cousins and aunts and nieces and the young bulls who had not yet left the herd were thundering toward the ground sloth, trumpeting their rage!
They came between Fuzzy and the giant sloth and stomped and flapped their ears and lifted their trunks. The sloth stood his ground, roaring back, and it could have gotten bloody, but finally the sloth turned around and lumbered away.
The mammoths did not chase him.
Fuzzy cowered in Temba's shadow for a while until everybody was calmed down. He would remember the smell of the giant ground sloth, and he would run away if he ever saw one again!
13
THERE was still much work to do. From the start Matt had decided there were basically two ways to go about this. One: Repair this machine. Two: Build another just like it. On his third day of work he had put the question to Howard Christian. Which approach do you
favor, Howard? "Do 'em both," Howard had replied.
Easier said than done.
NO two of the marbles were alike.
Some of them appeared to be pretty much exactly that: marbles. They were glass, always of a uniform color. Basically silicon, with various impurities. Over a thousand were minerals, almost anything that could be shaped into a sphere and polished to close tolerances. Any geology student in the world would have loved to have these; many were quite beautiful. Among them were precious and semiprecious stones, including a diamond sphere and others of emerald and sapphire. The remainder were metals, sometimes pure and sometimes alloys.
Full analysis of all 2,401 balls took almost a month after the day Matt first invited Susan into his lab. It was quite a job, and nobody could say it was dull.
"Since coming to work for you," said Jim, the metallurgist, "I've run into stuff that sent me running for the textbooks. It's like a final exam, from a sadistic teacher. It's not every day you come across some praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, dysprosium, and ytterbium. Some guys will go a whole career and never deal with some of those."
That's exactly what Matt was coming to feel, too, that the device was not so much a practical, working thing as a one-time assemblage put together just to frustrate him. Something for him to look at, three paper cups for him to study while the real action with the hidden pea was happening somewhere just out of his sight.
Prestidigitation. Misdirection.
Nevertheless, he couldn't proceed on that assumption until he'd ruled out as many other possibilities as possible. What was important here?
"IN a problem like this," he told Susan, "the first thing you do is try to limit the variables. Too many variables, you never get anywhere."
"Like your twenty-four hundred marbles."
"Twenty-four-oh-one."
"Who's counting?"
"Two thousand, four hundred and one is seven to the fourth power."
"Really? Is that important?" "I wish to hell I knew."
About once a minute the baby mammoth squealed what Matt supposed was the mammoth word for "Mommy!" All three pachyderms waved their trunks helplessly.
They were on the grounds of the La Brea Tar Pits, and the mammoths were robots. Within walking distance was a working excavation. A stone's throw in the other direction, six lanes of traffic whizzed by on Wilshire Boulevard.
There were a thousand very good restaurants within an easy drive of the mammoth warehouse, and he took her to two before she admitted she didn't really enjoy eating in restaurants that much. It turned out that what she liked was picnics.
"I can do picnics," Matt had said, and headed for the mall. He'd been intending to buy something from Sears, but halfway there he remembered he was rich, turned around, and found a shop in Beverly Hills that sold him a beautiful basket complete with Waterford glasses and fine china and linen napery and a chill compartment for white wine for a price that only made him a little light-headed.