Life is good, Howard thought. Life is very good.
THERE had been some dodgy days there at first, five years ago, when Fuzzy and Big Mama and the herd had appeared like magic on Wilshire Boulevard.
The first twenty-four, forty-eight hours had been critical, as he had known they would be right from the moment he shut down the big laser. His claims to ownership of the mammoths were tenuous at best, but that was what lawyers were for. By noon of the second day, with the media maelstrom swirling undiminished, Howard's legal team had filed no fewer than seventeen lawsuits in five separate jurisdictions outlining why the prehistoric creatures belonged to Howard Christian and no one else, under no fewer than three legal theories, each of them contradictory to the other two. His public relations team was hard at work selling the proposition that not only was Howard entitled to the spoils, it would be a travesty of justice, a blight on the free enterprise system, an insidious undermining of the basic principles that made this country the greatest democracy in the world if ownership of these poor defenseless creatures was awarded to anyone other than the man who was responsible for their arrival in the twenty-first century, i.e., the aforesaid Howard Christian.
Unfortunately, that ultimately entailed the revelation of the means whereby they had arrived in the twenty-first century, something Howard would very much have liked to have kept close to his vest, but that was the cost of doing business. You never got everything you wanted, so you concentrated on the main attraction and gave a little here and there.
It was a lot sexier story than cloning, and that would have been sexy enough. That was the angle his PR teams took: Howard the time travel pioneer, Howard the techno-wizard, Howard the man who was going to revolutionize the world once again. And that was fine, too. Wasn't a man entitled to the fruits of his labors?
There was also the matter of actual physical possession. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, or something like that. That was how his father had put it, anyway, and Howard could remember the exact circumstances when he'd first heard it, as Dad stuffed a boombox into a gaffed shopping bag and sauntered casually out of a Wal-Mart, "avoiding the unconstitutional state sales tax," as he had put it.
Six months later he had legal possession as well, over the protests of the Sierra Club, the Fund for Animals, the State of California and County of Los Angeles, and many others. On the day the appeals court issued its ruling Howard gave the go-ahead to his planning team, which had already been working on tentative proposals for the circus that was to display Fuzzy and Big Mama: Full steam ahead, boys!
Yes, life was indeed sweet, or as sweet as it ever gets. There's always a little lemon peel in the lemonade, and there are three things you can do about that: minimize it, add more sugar, and/or learn to like a little bitterness. Howard did all three things, at various times.
There was the question of the slaughter of the fleeing mammoths.
There was no way simply to make that ugly event just go away; billions of people had seen it on live television. Not that anyone wanted to arrest anybody over it, the animals were clearly out of control, and if somebody had killed them that was more or less all right... but how? Exactly what had happened out there that bloody night?
Best answer, five years later: Nobody knew. Leading theory: It was some side effect of the time traveling itself. Some invisible force seemed to have seized them when they got a certain distance from the point of "temporal translation," as one of Howard's experts put it. It worked like this:
Forces are accumulating as a person travels through the temporal continuum. Those forces are strongly localized to what the expert called a "six-dimensional synclastic infundibular space-time nexus" (i.e., the site of the temporal breakthrough), and increased as the cube of the distance from this nexus to the location of the time traveler, decreasing only as the square of the interval between temporal translation and "present" time X, measured in seconds. If not enough time is allowed between temporal translation and movement away from the space-time nexus, this expert testified to five separate investigation boards and a committee of Congress (with a degree of chutzpah that had serious mathematicians chuckling in admiration even five years later), the accumulated forces discharged, with the awful results everyone had seen repeated endlessly on videotape.
Or some such bullshit.
Howard, who was no math slouch, could not follow all the man's equations, but that was what he was being paid for. Obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, intended to make the ordinary viewer, simple congressperson, or even educated layman drop his jaw and say... duuuuuh, okay, if you say so.
Knowing the public would never be completely comfortable with an explanation like that, Howard's PR firm suggested how the whole bucket of lemons could be sweetened a bit, and so a second expert was hired. This one was a well-known populizer of science with the stature and stage presence of the late, great Isaac Asimov but without Asimov's scruples. That worthy came up with the following analogy:
Ouch!
Well, yeah... but why didn't the same thing happen when Big Mama and Fuzzy and the corpse of Big Daddy were removed? Easy. What happens if you don't reach for that doorknob? What if you wait a minute or two before trying to open the door? Why, the static charge bleeds off into the air.
Viola!
This was all said with such conviction, reasonableness, and aplomb that even Howard almost found himself ready to believe it. And the public and the investigatory boards, knowing that there was a solid basis of mathematical gobbledygook underlying this rampant flummery, accepted it, too.
The biggest reason everyone, scientist and layman alike, pretty much had to accept Howard's version of events was that there was absolutely no proof that it was wrong. Other than to reveal that time travel had been accomplished, that a time machine existed, Howard had revealed a sum total of... nothing.
He knew there were those who viewed his exploding mammoth hypothesis as the sheer claptrap that it was. There were alternative explanations, of course, some of them wacky enough to make amusing reading, most just stupid. The Internet was rife with websites claiming to have the straight dope on that fateful night, from UFOs to communists to vast conspiracies of animal-hating capitalists to the Wrath of God Himself. There were even a few that got it right, but who was listening? They all faded into that vast babble of nuts that everyone was so used to by now, the online riffraff, the crazies with an ax to grind who drowned each other out in their relentless paranoia.
Then there were the handful of people capable of following the highest of higher mathematics, who knew that a few decimal points had been dropped, a few numbers divided by zero, a few Riemannian terms sneaked into the Lobachevskian continuum presented with such gusto. But how were they going to explain that to those who couldn't even spell continuum, much less understand what it meant?
Better yet, even many of those who could spot the bad shuffle simply assumed it was deliberate disinformation given out not to cover up anything Howard had done, but to conceal what he knew. So what if somebody had his thumb on the scales of the equations submitted publicly? The incontrovertible fact was that time travel had happened, that human beings had gone back in time and returned to the present day with living—and dead—proof that they had been there.
How they had done it was proprietary, far too closely held even to risk applying for a patent. Howard was assumed to be protecting his interests until he had everything sewed up, until he had figured out how to squeeze every dollar out of this revolutionary new technology, until every conceivable piece of it and application for it was wholly owned by Mr. Howard Christian. In short, he was doing exactly what they would have done if they had discovered time travel. And nobody could do a damn thing about it.