Free Mammoth by John Varley Page B

approached him as he examinedthe X-56. He glanced at him, then put down the robot and picked up a Pez dispenser in a clear baggie. It was the 1960’s “Psychedelic Eye,” one of the more valuable ones. Naturally it was in mint condition, and Radicon wanted $1,500 for it.
    “Wright invited Susan Morgan into the gadget lab about an hour ago,” Warburton said, following Howard as he moved from Radicon’s table to the adjoining one, which held many boxes of comic books. He began leafing through some in the one-to-two-hundred-dollar range.
    “Why do you figure he’d do that?”
    “Beats me. He knows the penalties.”
    The “gadget” was what they were calling the presumed time machine, for security purposes. They got it from the Manhattan Project.
    Howard pulled out a Justice League comic and examined it critically through the clear plastic sleeve. He got out his digital assistant and punched in the volume and issue numbers. A picture of the comic appeared on the screen, with the notation that it was an issue he had in medium to fine condition. The one in his hand was marked very fine to mint, and cost $150.
    “I don’t see this as mint,” Howard told the dealer. “There’s a chip right here on the fold. See? And isn’t that a repaired crease in the corner?” To Warburton he said, “Do we have it on tape?”
    “That hardly qualifies as a chip.”
    “Of course, we tape everything. There’s a camera right over the door.”
    “A chip’s a chip. I’ll give you a hundred for it. File the tape away. If we ever need to take him to court, it could be valuable.”
    “I already ordered it.”
    “One hundred twenty-five.”
    Howard took a roll from the light trench coat he always wore to sales like this and peeled off a hundred and a twenty, laid them on the table. The man scowled, but scooped them up.
    “And you pay the tax,” Howard said, strolling back to Radicon’s table. He put the comic into one of the coat’s big pockets. The Pez dispenser had vanished. He took anotherlong look at the X-56 in the sealed box, then shook his head and walked away.
    Warburton hurried over.
    “Must have slipped his mind,” he said. “He’s very busy.”
    “Sure,” said Radicon, solemnly, crossing his arms. They’d played this game before, and would probably play it again.
    “How much was that dingus, now…?”
    “Twenty-five hundred,” Radicon said, with a look that dared Warburton to haggle. He needn’t have bothered; Warburton would have gone twice that without a peep. But he couldn’t help thinking,
Fifteen hundred for a lousy little plastic pillbox with a hand holding an eyeball on top.
If he worked for men like Howard Christian all the rest of his life—and he knew he probably would—he would never understand them.
    Then he hurried to catch up with his sticky-fingered boss.

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”
    At first little Fuzzy stayed close to his mother, like all mammoth babies.
    He was the smallest member of the herd…but that didn’t mean he was small! He got his long reddish-black hair from his father’s side of the family, but his size he got from his mother.
    Like most little mammal children, Fuzzy loved to play. Two calves had been born the summer before, a male and a female, and they had been slightly smaller than Fuzzy when they were born, but now weighed almost a thousand pounds! Fuzzy played with these two calves, and when another calf was born a few weeks after his birthday, he played with her, too.
    Mammoths were great swimmers. They loved to romp and splash in the water. It was Fuzzy’s favorite thing, and whenever the herd went to a watering hole he and the other calves joyously slid down the muddy banks and down into the muddy water, where he would churn around with only the tip of his little trunk showing.
    Other creatures came to the watering holes. It was there that Fuzzy first saw the great saber-toothed cats that lived in California at that time. These cats had