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."
31
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.
He wasn't discouraged yet, they could be undercover somewhere waiting for the occasional border patrol vehicle to go by, but they had to go across sometime, and he was sure they would be detected. But he had thought to have them by now, he had to admit that. Time to go back over it, question his assumptions. Was he missing something?
He called up an area map and looked at it, tried to make it tell him something. After a few minutes he frowned.
"What's this?" he asked Crowder, pointing to the tip of a little peninsula about ten miles west of Blaine. It was an almost perfect square, two miles on a side. He hadn't noticed it before, but it was a different color from the land above it.
"That's the nipple on the hind teat of Canada," Crowder said, with a chuckle.
Warburton waited.
"It's called Point Roberts. Back when somebody was drawing that straight-line border that starts back in Minnesota, that line nicked that little peninsula. 'Fifty-four, forty, or fight,' or some shit like that. It's part of the U.S. Hardly anybody goes there but Canucks crossing to get bargains on stuff that's more expensive up there."
"So there's a border crossing?" "Sure."
Crowder typed a moment, and the map which had been told to display only ferries that went from the United States to Canada now showed the whole maze of Washington State ferries. Sure enough, a couple lines went to Point Roberts.
"Another boondoggle, you ask me," Crowder said. "Just north of the border is the great big
B.C. ferry slip at Tsawwassen. Who needs another ferry?" Sawasen? Warburton hated the stupid names up here. Humptulips, Mukilteo, Puyallup... why couldn't they speak English?
"The ferries that go there. Where do they come from?"
"Let's see... here's one from Anacortes, one from Bellingham, and one from Friday Harbor."
"The first two are covered. Where's Friday Harbor?"
"San Juan Islands." Crowder pointed to a maze of islands, all highly irregular in shape. It looked as if there were three or four big ones and dozens of small ones. "One of the ferries from Anacortes to Sidney, in B.C., stops a couple places in the San Juans, including Friday Harbor."
"But we've got that covered."
"Yeah." Crowder frowned at the map. "But there's one that stops at Friday Harbor before going on to Point Roberts."
"Where does it start?"
"Right here. Port Townsend. Over on the Olympic Peninsula."
All they had over there was one team, at Port Angeles, covering the ferry that went to Victoria. Plus, once they decided Susan was going to Canada, they hadn't been checking the main highway over there, US 101, or much of anything, for that matter. Warburton had thought the only way to Canada via the Olympic Peninsula was through Port Angeles, since he had asked only for international ferries.
It was a serious lapse on Crowder's part—he should have thought of the border crossing at Point Roberts—but Warburton wasn't going to take him to task for it. Not right now, anyway. He addressed Crowder and Blackstone.
"I don't want you to mention this to anybody. Not even Howard, yet. You know we've been picking up chatter, there's been some leaks from some of our employees, naturally, and some notice of what's going on along the border. The news and the police are just starting to get wind that somebody's looking for something the size of an elephant. But I may still have a chance to wrap this up quietly. I'm going out to take a look for myself. If there's a newsman waiting when I get there, I'll know how he found out, understand?" "Don't worry," Blackstone said. Warburton nodded, and went outside to his helicopter, thinking he would retire after this one was over, and never set foot in another helicopter again. He was getting too old for this shit.