He had heard somewhere that the New York City police department used to have an informal code for the offering of bribes, a way to avoid the awkwardness of just coming out and saying "Would you take a bribe?" Instead, you could say, "You look like you could use a new hat." What that meant was: "Would twenty dollars make this problem go away?" Sometimes it took a new suit to do the job: one hundred dollars.
Tomorrow a half dozen Santa Monica patrolmen would be driving around in brand-new Land Rovers. Kraylow, Vasquez, Dawson, and probably a few others at Robinson Security had just earned themselves new homes in Simi Valley.
According to Howard's lawyers, there was nothing illegal, in itself, in making a large metal warehouse vanish from the face of the Earth, and that was all the police officers had witnessed. The money they would receive, very discreetly, was simply for not talking about what they had seen. Howard was confident the matter could be buried easily enough, especially since each of the superior officers in the department would be getting the price of two or three Land Rovers.
The price was steeper for the Robinson people because they were the only ones who knew there had been two people inside the building when it ceased to exist.
Howard's lawyers weren't quite so sure of the ramifications of that one. Unless it could be determined just what had caused the warehouse to evaporate it would be difficult to charge Howard or any of his enterprises with anything that might have befallen Matt and Susan... and who could even prove they had been harmed? Perhaps they were fine... wherever they went. Still, they had been there, and now they were gone, and the Robinson people knew it, and not mentioning it to the police might be seen as negligence, at the very least, and so they had earned the price of a house in Simi Valley, the dream of every Southland cop and ex-cop.
But where did Matt and Susan go?
That was a question Howard was determined should never be asked. Everyone who knew that Matt was working on a time machine had either vanished with the building or was in Howard's employ, so that was under control.
It would have been a lot cheaper for Howard if he could have simply stonewalled: My building disappeared, I don't know why, and I don't know where it went. End of story. But there would never be an end to it, and he knew it. Reporters would be all over the story, and soon the bugs would start crawling out of the baseboards. Roswell flying saucer bugs, crop circle bugs, Area 51 bugs. Alien abductees.
It took all morning, but at last he felt he had it under control. He was exhausted, but willed himself to drive back to the scene of the disaster. He took one of the Robinson Blazers this time, not wishing to draw attention to himself in one of his antique cars.
There was another Robinson vehicle parked outside the gate, manned by Kraylow, who nodded at Howard but did not get out. There was a small group of people, mostly men who worked in the area, standing around with puzzled looks on their faces. Luckily, there were not many of them. No explanation would be offered to them, and what were they going to think, anyway? That the building had fallen into a temporal wormhole?
No, they would conclude, sensibly, that somehow Howard Christian, the eccentric billionaire, had had the structure demolished overnight, right down to the concrete pad, and replanted in scrubby-looking oak trees.
Howard drove around to the far side where there were no people. He got out, walked to the chain-link fence, and grabbed it with his hands. He scowled at the trees inside, trees that had obviously grown right where they now stood, for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years. He shook the fence in frustration.
Where did you take my building, Matt?
FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"
Mammoths did not sleep a lot. Most nights they would sleep only four or five hours, and only for an hour or so at a time. Somebody was always awake, watching for danger.
Sometimes they slept standing up. This wasn't uncomfortable for mammoths, as it would be for us. Many animals sleep standing up. But sometimes they liked to lie down on their sides for a while and sleep that way.
One night a few weeks after Fuzzy got into big trouble at the tar pits, he was sleeping lying down. There were still hard balls of tar clinging to his front legs and he didn't like that. He rubbed his legs against trees and on the ground, trying to get them off. Maybe he dreamed. What would a mammoth dream about? We don't know.
But just after the night was darkest, when the moon had just risen over the hills to the east, Fuzzy was awakened by the urgent touch of Temba's trunk. He opened his eyes to see a strange light.
The herd was all awake, and milling around nervously. Fuzzy got to his feet and huddled close to his mother's side, where he felt warm and safe and secure. Then the quiet of the night was broken by the high, horrible cries he had heard once before. He remembered them well.
They came from the south, waving burning sticks that were so bright they hurt the eyes of the mammoths.
Most animals don't like fire, and mammoths were no different. They ran away!
But the two-legs were determined, they kept coming. The mammoths would stop for breath, and once again the two-legs would be almost on them.
And now they were touching their flaming sticks to the ground, and the yellow grass itself began to burn. It raced toward the herd, and the two-legs were close behind.
On and on the mammoth herd ran, into the night, trying to stay one step ahead of the inferno on the ground. Little Fuzzy began to get very tired.
Then he smelled something that made his young heart beat even faster. It was a smell he would never forget, the smell of that awful day when he was almost swallowed up in the thick black goo that lurked just beneath the surface of that quiet, inviting pool.
It was the smell of tar!
Fuzzy wanted to turn back. He looked back at the fire. It was impossible to go that way. Temba and Big Mama and the rest of the herd kept going, onward toward the tar pits.
Then they were joined by other mammoths. These were big bulls, the biggest mammoths Fuzzy had ever seen! They were panicked, too, rushing forward as fast as they could go.
And then a very, very strange thing happened....
3
SUSAN was a list maker. While Matt made a last attempt to make the time machine work again, she sat down at her laptop and listed their assets:
2 laptops
1 tera-mainframe computer
1 generator (diesel fuel for 4 days of operation)
WATER: about 500 gallons in elephant tanks about 40 gallons in toilet tanks 97 soft drinks (Coke, 7-Up, root beer)
CLOTHING: what we're wearing
SHELTER: 1 large warehouse
WEAPONS: 2 fire axes 8 fire extinguishers 1 tranquilizer gun 1 elephant gun
TOOLS: 2 butane lighters
3 boxes mechanic's tools
1 box woodworking tools
1 electron microscope
1 mass spectrometer
She supposed the laptops might be useful for something other than the list she was currently making, but she couldn't at the moment figure what that might be. As for the state-of-the-art computer Howard Christian had provided to Matt for analyzing the possible permutations of the time machine... Matt had told her it would take even that monster millions of years to make a dent in the problem. And, when the generator stopped working, the big computer would become nothing more than a very complex piece of junk. So would the generator itself, and everything inside the warehouse that ran on electricity... which was almost everything.
The food and water situation could have been better, and it could have been worse. It was too bad there wasn't a commissary of some kind, or a lunch wagon parked on the grounds when the wormhole opened and swallowed them, but there wasn't. On the other hand, the snack and pop machines had only been there a few weeks, and Susan had no idea why they had been installed. She'd never seen anyone buy anything from them, and she'd bet the coin boxes were empty or nearly so. It would stretch for some weeks, with care, though they'd surely get very tired of Pop-Tarts and tiny bags of potato chips.