Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (31 page)

It wasn’t our fault.

It wasn’t.

And thirty days to save the world, and our own butts, wasn’t much time.

~~~

RORY STEVES is just an old has-been who never was.

Capturing mammoths was all in a day’s work for Deke Atwood. A saber-tooth tiger, on the other hand, was a problem that would require a solution bigger than an elephant gun…

INVOICE H10901: 3
WOOLY MAMMOTHS

by
Robert J. Sullivan

Every now and then it’s a good idea to review your career choices. Sitting in a Model T Ford at midnight guarding a baby wooly mammoth from a saber-tooth tiger is a better time than most.

I’m Deke Atwood and I run the Inter-World Trading Company in Manhattan. That’s on Delta Earth. Here, it’s 1921, and in some respects it’s only a little different from the one in your history books. President Cox is in office and Roosevelt is his vice president. Two weeks ago I saw Babe Ruth hit two home runs against the Washington Senators and I’ve got tickets to see Dempsey fight Charpentier in Jersey City in a few weeks, if I live that long. The work isn’t hard, I set my own hours, I meet interesting people, and there are always new challenges.
Like collecting wooly mammoths.
From other worlds.

My boss called me a week ago and asked if I’d like to pick up a few extra bucks. He had a client who wanted three wooly mammoths and would I mind a side trip to one of the worlds where they’re still alive, pick them out, pack them up, and send them to him? I agreed.

There was a circus playing at Madison Square Garden. I headed that way, asked a few questions and recruited some cowboys who had been wrangling elephants, figuring that was as close to an expert as I was likely to find. With Steve Bremmer’s help, I bought camping supplies, cages, chains, rope, guns, food and transportation. We made the transfer and there we were.

“There” was Zeta Earth. Jumping between parallel worlds is more like time travel since the worlds don’t run at the same speed. On Zeta Earth, for instance, there are no people – at least I never saw any — and critters that died out after the Ice Age on Earth Prime are still running around.

Like wooly mammoths.

And the beasts that eat them.

There was a noise in the darkness. There had been noises in the dark for three hours since I started keeping watch. I took one hand off the .600 Nitro Express
rifle
I was holding and wiped it on my shirt, then did the other hand. Anything I hit with this was going down. But I’d never shot anything live in my life.

What you do with an object depends on your training, background and inclination, with a factor for emergencies. Hand a pen to Bill Shakespeare and you get a sonnet or play. With Mozart, you get music to inspire. James Bond might stab you with it.

Whoever developed the technology to move between universes must have thought, “Wow! There must be a way to make a ton of money with this!” Their answer was trade, moving stuff from where it was cheap and selling it where it was expensive. When the business grows enough so the only thing holding you back from making more money is not enough manpower, you recruit people to run offices on both worlds.

I’m one of the recruits. I don’t think there’s anything special about me; I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and it’s worked out great. I deal mostly in luxury items with a high markup: second-hand junk in 1921 — pistols, swords, books, magazines, scrimshaw and the like — become antiques when shifted 80 or 90 years in the future. I can see myself doing this for a long time.

Except for the part about sitting around waiting for a saber-tooth tiger to show up.

The rest of the camp was quiet. There were eight of us: me and the two truck drivers, two animal handlers, and three cowboys I hired from the circus. They were doing a show at the Garden when I talked them into this expedition as a way to make some extra money. Parked next to me sat one of the trucks, and on the other side was the campfire, burning low now but still giving enough light to see fifty feet in front of the car to the cage with the baby mammoth. His parents were staked down beyond the other truck. The elephant handler told me the ropes would hold a small ocean liner.

Another noise sounded in the night, this time behind me. I turned to look, saw nothing but darkness until I started to imagine things. I turned back — and the tiger stood between me and the cage. There hadn’t been a sound from him. Sweat poured down my sides.

The saber-tooth was wildly over-muscled, like a bodybuilder who’d scored a tanker truck of steroids and had spent
years
bingeing. He reached out and batted at the cage, and the baby mammoth started bawling, wanting mama to come and get him. There was an answering trumpet from his parents and the tiger snarled like a chainsaw slicing through a trash can.

I was in an awkward position to shoot. I hunched forward and raised the rifle to my shoulder, hoping not to be seen. The barrel smacked into the steering wheel and the animal’s head snapped in my direction.

All hell let out for recess.

The saber-tooth screamed and started for me, going from zero to oh-my-god in one bound. I jerked the gun to my shoulder and let off both barrels. It felt like I’d been on the catching end of a Bruce Lee side kick. The world narrowed to a tunnel with the tiger in the center heading straight for me. The animal
leaped,
all snarling maw and claws and I decided I didn’t want to be there when he landed. In one spasmodic jerk, I went over the door and slammed into the ground with the grace of a bag of cement. The car sat high off the ground and I rolled under it. The car bounced on its springs and banged into me as it got a new occupant. I kept rolling, came up on all fours and sprinted for the cage, trying to suck air into my lungs.

By the time I was on the other side of the cage, everybody was in motion. Steve Bremmer, one of the cowboys, ran up in long johns, boots,
hat
and lever-action rifle, closely followed by Lathan Kohler wearing just boots, hat and pistol. Someone threw a bundle of sticks on the fire and we had light. The truckers came on the trot.

“Horses,” Bremmer said. The horses were adding to the racket, whinnying in panic.

“Got it,” said Kohler, the one without the long johns, and he was gone.

The mammoths’ trumpeting escalated the noise level several decibels. Bremmer yelled to the elephant wrangler. “Byrne, see to your animals!”

The Model T was a dim bulk in the shadow of the truck, its top bulging and the chassis creaking and swaying. Pieces of leather, canvas and foam rubber flew in the air and landed around us as the saber-tooth tore at the car, snarling all the while. Then he bounded free, tearing off the canvas top, and landed twenty feet away, still wrapped in black canvas. He shook his head and poked it out one side, like the world’s ugliest grandmother in a shawl.

I realized that my rifle and I had parted company a while back.

I looked into the face of this primeval killer, with his fierce daggered incisors, and was struck by his expression; this thing was dumb as a bag of hammers. That figured. He was a shark on land, an appetite strapped in muscle. Brains would have been as unnecessary as frosting on a filet mignon.

Bremmer raised his rifle and fired just as the tiger sprang. Bremmer went left and I went right. I kept going until I was on the far side of the car, got my feet tangled and went down, slid, and ended up on top of my rifle. I scrambled back to my feet and remembered the rifle was empty. I groped for the spare rounds in my pocket, broke the weapon open, dumped the empties and closed it on two live rounds.

The tiger crouched on top of the cage, batting at the bars and trying to get in. I was lining up a shot when the mammoths showed up.

It had been amazingly easy to capture the mammoths, despite their size. The male stood 14 feet tall at the shoulder with great curved tusks and small round ears. The female was 12 feet tall. Both were covered with russet-brown hair. They’d been alone on the plain with their calf when we’d driven up in our caravan of cars, trucks and horses and had shown neither surprise nor dismay. Byrne had walked up to the six-foot-tall baby, slipped a rope around its neck and led it away. Mama and Daddy had followed. We fed them bales of hay and they seemed happy to go along. At night, they let our elephant handler put hawsers around their necks and stake them to the ground. The calf ran among us while we traveled, weaving between the vehicles and the horses. It took an effort not to hit him. At night, we put him in a metal cage.

Bremmer had spotted the saber-tooth around noon, pacing us and watching, too far away to shoot. The animal was the same tan as the grass and if he wasn’t in motion, he was invisible.

Byrne had told me the hawsers and stakes would moor a small ocean liner. He was wrong. The male mammoth padded into the clearing surrounding the cage still trailing the rope. He reached out with his trunk, grabbed the saber-tooth by a back leg and slammed him on the ground like he was swatting a fly. A great puff of dust billowed out. The tiger was game and tried to get at the mammoth. The bull picked him up again, swung him in an arc over his head and slammed him into the ground a second time. He got into a rhythm, wham on one side, wham on the other, and repeat. Clouds of dust rose into the air and started drifting away on the gentle breeze. After the first dozen body slams, the saber-tooth lost coordination and started hitting the ground hard. After a few more, he looked like a rag doll.

Byrne ran up, holding a pair of jeans and his boots. He started dressing. “They were already loose when I got there,” he said.

The female mammoth walked up to the cage and the calf squealed in greeting. We backed off to give her some room. She put a foot on the corner of the steel cage and it turned from a cube to a trapezoid to a pile of junk. Mama and baby wrapped their trunks together.

The bull was just about done with the saber-tooth. The tiger was still alive but all his zip was gone. The mammoth dragged him toward the edge of the camp, flailing him from side to side to build some momentum, then took a couple of steps on the backswing and smacked the tiger into the bole of a tree.

If a field goal is getting the ball between the uprights, the mammoth performed an inverse field goal on the tiger: the saber-tooth got the upright between the balls. The predator curled over himself and made a high keening sound. The bull let him go and shuffled closer. He wrapped his trunk around one of the oversized canines and dragged the tiger across to the trunk of a tree lying beside the camp. He slammed the saber-tooth’s giant incisors against the trunk, put a foot on the back of his head and, by a combination of tapping and pushing, drove the teeth several inches into the wood.

Dad, mama and junior held a brief conversation of trumpets and grunts. Then, with some prodding and pushing from mama, junior ran to our woodpile, selected a branch and trotted over to the saber-tooth. Baby gave him a shot. The big cat grunted. It must have been like taking a baseball bat shot from Ted Williams. After a few more whacks with the stick, the calf dropped it, stepped on the predator’s back and peed on him. Then he ran back to mama.

The
adults
conferred while pulling off each other’s halters and removing the baby’s. As they started away, junior picked up his leash, waving it like a blue ribbon he’d won at the county fair.

Dad stopped to look at us, shook his head and followed his family into the darkness. Apparently we weren’t the kind of playmates he wanted for his son. Then they were gone.

The saber-tooth lay limp on the ground. I raised the rifle and drew a bead on him. Bremmer put his hand on the barrel and pushed it down.

“Wouldn’t be sporting,” he said. “Let’s see how he takes it.”

The animal worked his head from side to side, pushing on the log with his front paws, occasionally stopping to rest. Finally he tore his fangs loose and laid his head on the log, breathing hard. After a minute, he rolled in the dirt, probably to get rid of the piss smell, got up and began a very slow, knock-kneed shuffle out of the camp. Before he passed out of the light, he turned and gave us a heads-up stare. I swear he wanted our agreement never to speak of this moment again. Then he was gone. I think I heard him fall down again before he was out of earshot.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “He had a tough enough
day
without somebody shooting him. Come on.” I moved my shoulder and poked at it with a finger. I made a noise.

“Rifle butt catch you wrong?” asked Bremmer.

“Yeah.”

“You’re gonna stiffen up before morning and I ain’t wiping your butt. I got some liniment that might help, though.”

We walked over to one of the trucks and he pulled a brown bottle out of his saddlebags. “Rub this on it. Stings like crazy and smells like crap, but you’ll be able to move in the morning. Right now, I’m going to bed. Looks like I gotta catch another mammoth tomorrow.
‘Night.”
He climbed into the truck and stretched out on a blanket with his head on his saddle.

“Good night.” I started away. His voice came after me.

“You sure are one crummy shot, that’s for sure.”