They crossed the international boundary and pulled up at the Canadian Customs shack. Standing beside the road a little way ahead of them in the area where Customs could pull you over for a thorough search, they could see Jack Elk, the man who called himself Python, and two men with briefcases.
Matt rolled down his window and looked at the smiling officer. "Anything to declare?" he said.
1
THE time traveler pulled the fur robe tighter around himself and tried to nestle a little closer to the dead mammoth as the snow drifted higher around him, and wondered why he bothered. He was hours from death, maybe minutes, and he knew it, he welcomed it. He could no longer feel his feet. The fingers of his left hand weren't moving very well. Only his right arm had any warmth in it, still wrapped around his wife's body where he had jammed it after he killed the mammoth, waited for it to bleed to death, and tucked her tenderly as far as he could under the great hairy body.
He had killed her three days before and she was quite frozen, but somehow she still felt warm to his touch.
Oh, lord, how he missed her, the woman who had redeemed him, who had made his life worth living. He was looking forward to joining her wherever she had gone, heaven or hell or sweet nothingness.
He had the preparation of cyanide in his medicine bag. He could go quickly if he chose. His wife had certainly gone quickly enough, and though it had not been completely painless, she had thanked him as she swallowed the fatal dose.
He would take the poison... but there was a nagging feeling of something left undone. He couldn't imagine what it might be, but he knew he wouldn't let go until it came to him.
A dying man's life is supposed to pass before his eyes and he had been having many, many memories, but hardly any from before what they came to call Day One of Year One. It all seemed like a past life now. Cities. Helicopters. Computers, satellites, nuclear bombs, cell phones—any sort of telephone. He could easily believe he had dreamed it all.
But not a dream, in retrospect. A nightmare. A nightmare he had once thought had begun on Day One, Year One... but now realized had ended on that horrible day.
THERE they were, floating in Puget Sound in a magnificent eight-million-dollar yacht, and the world went away.
Everything he valued in the world, anyway, except for Andrea. There they were, at the entrance to one of the great metropolitan estuaries on Earth, and all he could see for miles and miles was water, rocks, trees, and a sky without airplanes. Here they were, worth thirty-nine billion dollars, on paper (thirty-nine and a half billion, counting Andrea's money), and unable to buy anything. The real meaning of that phrase, "on paper," had never come home to him until that moment.
They spent most of the first day motoring around the sound, looking for signs of human life, Howard raging, Andrea despairing. Was it 1804, were Lewis and Clark somewhere south on the Columbia? Was it 100,000 B.C.? Was it A.D. 100,000, and all the works of mankind crumbled to dust?
But neither of them were quitters.
They inventoried the Bertram, from the scuppers to the fo'c'sle, or whatever they called it, and found they had quite a lot of stuff. Like Howard himself, the friend he had borrowed the boat from had enjoyed gadgets, and liked to have the best. There was plenty of food. There were tools. There was fishing gear sturdy enough to land a killer whale (Howard had never even baited a hook), and rifles and shotguns and pistols and ammunition and tools. There were several computers, including one Howard had brought himself, pocket-sized and able to run on solar energy.
They got out the manuals and learned to run the ship. They turned off the generator on the second day, to save fuel, sat quietly in the dark at night, grudging even a single candle they could never replace, talking over the possibilities. During the day they learned to fish. The waters were teeming with fish. They landed salmon the size of atomic submarines.
And day by day a conviction grew in Howard. He could not explain it and he could not prove it, but he knew what the date was. It was shortly before that horrible, horrible man, Matt Wright, and that thieving bitch, Susan Morgan, had gone into the past with his time machine and come back with a herd of mammoths and no time machine.
Nothing could sway him from this, and Andrea didn't even try. She herself didn't much care where she was if there was no place to shop, but if she had to be somewhere, southern California was what she knew, and though she realized that Rodeo Drive wouldn't be built for ten thousand years or so, a sea voyage would be better than sitting around here in the damp, cloudy, moldy, rainy, chilly, fungus-ridden, depressing Pacific Northwest.
And who knew? Maybe Howard's obsession was right. Maybe she could get back to where her credit cards worked. Andrea was an environmentalist, but no outdoorswoman. The woods were full of chiggers and mosquitoes and spiders and things.
So Howard made his calculations, found they could just get there on the three thousand gallons of fuel remaining, and they made their way down the coast on just one of the big twin diesels at the most economical rpm setting as determined by the boat's computer.
They had good luck. When a big storm hit they were able to shelter in San Francisco Bay. How very, very odd to sail through it with no bridge overhead. There was nothing on Alcatraz Island, nothing on Yerba Buena, no '49ers boomtown. Nothing.
Several times they saw, and were seen by, native peoples. Some were on shore, some in canoes, but none tried to catch the big Bertram. So it wasn't the age of dinosaurs... but Howard had known that, the coastline pretty much agreed with the ship's maps—though of course all the fancy GPS stuff was useless with no satellites overhead—and the continent had been very different when T. rex stalked the Earth.
Howard had hoped to find his missing warehouse on the way, but found no sign of it. It proved nothing, though he scanned the area from the top of every rise. He hadn't realized how easy it would be to hide a single structure in wilderness like this. It could be in the next shallow ravine, or he could be miles away from it.
Or, maybe it hadn't arrived yet.
They found the tar pits. Again, nothing. They spent the night, sleepless from all the unfamiliar and frightening animal sounds, and hiked back to the ship the next day.
On the shore, a hundred people awaited them.
IT was snowing harder now. Howard kept brushing it away from his face, again wondering why he was bothering.
He remembered something he hadn't thought of for a long time: His first sight of the "caveman" nestled up against the frozen mammoth. He remembered his disgust. Soon, probably before the day was over, something would make a meal of his face. Hell, of most of his head. Not a bear, a bear would certainly drag him away and eat a lot more. Probably not a wolf. Most likely some of the little snow foxes he had seen on his way north. They would gnaw at him a while, then the snow would cover him. He found the prospect held no emotion for him, one way or the other. Though if they came while he was still alive he'd fight them off. Howard Christian was not a quitter.
He looked at his watch... and smiled again. At Matt's watch. Even after all these years he still did it from time to time. His people felt the watch held very powerful medicine, because the chief looked at it so often, and they had been sorry to see him leave with it, but of course too polite to say so.
And it did have heap powerful juju, or voodoo, or power of some sort, though not of a type any of them would ever understand. Nor, he admitted to himself, did he have more than the faintest, quasispiritual sense of the watch's power. Hell, it didn't even tell time anymore, hadn't since the radio signal from the Naval Observatory had suddenly winked off on Day One, Year One. Years ago.