His surprisingly small ears flared out and he lifted his trunk and bellowed. He turned in a half circle, every massive muscle in his body flexing, knocking over a tree and tearing up the ground. He trumpeted again, and charged at them. Within four steps he was up to his knees, unable to move, and rapidly sinking deeper into the tar that lay just beneath the surface of the pool.
Matt and Susan stood, frozen in place, and watched as the creature's struggles mired him ever deeper in the tar. He bellowed, he raged, he thrashed about, and nothing did any good. Soon his legs were completely below the surface.
"They're driving the mammoths into the tar pits," Matt said, in awe. The hunters could end this bull's struggles with arrows, or spears, or whatever weapons they had, or wait until it died, and carefully climb onto its back and cut away the parts they could use. An animal like this could feed a tribe for a year, if they dried the meat.
He was going to tell Susan this when he happened to glance down at the time machine. The red light was on.
"Susan..."
"Matt! Look!"
He looked up, and a herd of mammoths appeared on the other side of the pond. They milled around in agitation, turning back and forth between the fire and the water where the big bull was trapped. One took a tentative step into the water, sank down to her massive ankle, and pulled back out.
Matt thought her because, though they were gigantic, none were as big as the doomed bull. Say, ten feet high, tops. One big cow made her decision, and was heading around the water. The others hesitated, not seeming to want to leave the bull, terrified of the fire, pulled to follow what seemed to be the herd leader. But they soon fell into line behind her. In a few moments they would be right on top of Matt and Susan.
"Susan, there's..." He looked again at the time machine. The green light was on.
"What? What? We've got to get moving, Matt!"
"It's on," he said, simply.
Susan frowned at him, licked her lips, and raised the elephant gun to her shoulder.
"Do what you can," she said.
Matt squatted down and opened the box.
The seven by seven by seven array of clear marbles was glowing with a pearly internal light. It was hypnotic, and strangely soothing. He could almost forget where he was, what was going on....
He touched the cube with his finger. It was warm, and hummed with energy. He felt his eyes going out of focus, felt the rippling patterns of light playing with his mind. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling... but he knew time was running out. Or moving by, or he was moving down time's arrow in a way he couldn't completely understand. What is time? Can it be experienced any other way? There were mathematical systems that said it was possible. He brought those equations to mind, some of them reaching as far back as Albert Einstein, others new and untried.
He thought he was beginning to see a pattern.
"Matt, they're heading this way."
"Quiet. I've got to think."
"Quiet? Damn it, Matt..." But she shut up, and aimed the gun toward the approaching mammoths. He looked up in time to see her elevate the barrel and fire over their heads. The report was deafening, and the mammoths stopped in their tracks. But, possibly more important, it broke Matt's concentration.
I'm going crazy, he thought. I'm twelve thousand years from home, kneeling on the edge of a deadly tar pit, a dozen seven-ton behemoths bearing down on us while the land burns and unseen savage hunters lurk somewhere out there ready to kill us and cook us if the mammoths somehow miss... and I'm worried about a little box of marbles.
But he knew he was right. It was the little box of marbles that had got them here, somehow, and somehow it would get them out. So he concentrated.
Soon he was back into whatever zone he had started to enter. He didn't know how to describe it, but it was a place he had learned to access when he was about six. At first it was arithmetic. He could stare at a page full of numbers and see relationships among them. Adding them up or finding percentages was just the start; the longer he stared, the more he saw. He felt the numbers were speaking to him.
Now this hypercube was speaking to him, not in words, but in patterns that almost made sense. His mind whirled, a few steps behind, then a step behind, then half a step.
Without thinking too hard about it, he picked up the cube and twisted it, just like a Rubik puzzle. The top layer rotated easily, and locked into place. The pattern of chasing lights changed, but nothing else did.
This is crazy. But he ignored the small voice, and twisted again.
The cube became filled with light, and Matt felt his eyes crossing as it collapsed in on itself in a way impossible to describe, and suddenly it was six by six by six.
The cube went through another iteration that twisted Matt's stomach. It happened in a series of quick steps, each one of them seeming logical and inevitable, yet when it was done the cube was five marbles on a side, and there simply wasn't any place the... six cubed minus five cubed equals ninety-one... the ninety-one marbles on the outer surface to have gone. But they were gone, either compressed into the middle of the cube or turned through another dimension to a place his mind couldn't follow.
When Susan fired the gun again, Matt barely heard it. He was committing the events he had just seen to memory, though already he felt them fading, in the manner of a vivid dream losing its grip on reality with the return of consciousness.
"Matt, we've got to run."
"Three more seconds." He wasn't sure where the figure came from, but he knew it was accurate. He hoped it would be enough time.
Twist. Four by four by four. Sixty-four marbles left.
Twist. Twenty-seven left. It had to be getting tight in there.
Twist. Only eight now.
Twist.
He looked up to see a Los Angeles city bus bearing down on him.
16 THE herd of mammoths appeared on the Miracle Mile at 10:18 P.M. on a Thursday night, almost two days after a building belonging to Howard Christian vanished in Santa Monica.
Big Mama was pissed.
First it was the pipsqueak bipeds with their annoying little spears, too small to do much damage to a mammoth but hurtful if one dared get in close enough to jab, carrying the hateful bright hot light, setting the world on fire. Then a long rush through the night, blinded and stumbling and terrified. Then Big Daddy sinking up to his belly in the sticky pit. It was at that point Big Mama began to get angry.
Big Mama wanted to try to help Big Daddy out of the black goo, and would have, even at the risk of getting caught herself... but the world was on fire. So for a few minutes she had dithered, swayed back and forth by conflicting duties and impulses and instincts, until something inside her finally broke and she left Big Daddy to his fate. It was a moment that seldom came to domesticated elephants, but trainers dreaded it like nothing else, because when an elephant's normally placid temper broke, she was capable of doing almost anything.
What Big Mama wanted to do was kill a few of these pesky bipeds. As she rounded the tar pit she could actually feel biped bones crushing under her mighty feet. It was a good feeling.
The explosion of sound startled her and stopped her in her tracks. Another member of the herd, the one with the notch in her left ear, mother of the third child to be born last birthing season, actually collided with her, something that would have been unthinkably rude normally, and would have earned her a big cuff on the head. Big Mama hardly noticed it. She had no idea a slug of lead big and fast enough to have torn through her massive skull had passed a few feet over her head. She only knew she hated that sound. She didn't want to go toward it.