In all times and in all things there was one prime instinctive directive all mammoths lived by: The Herd sticks together. But now herd civilization collapsed, just as human civilization did when a hundred people tried to escape a burning building through a single door. The herd ceased to exist, they no longer pressed together as they ran, but each ran blindly in whatever direction looked best to her overloaded senses. The steel and glass canyon of Wilshire Boulevard channeled them, but some were in the middle of the street, some on the sidewalks, and the one who had gone to her knees was stumbling, bewildered, over rows of parked cars, crushing hoods and trunks.

They went three blocks in a very short time, and found themselves facing another row of police cars, bumper to bumper across the road. This time the order to fire was given quickly, and once more the mammoths came to a halt, not as a group this time, but one by one as the bullets tore into their thick hide. One went down, fell on her side, and though she was breathing, she did not get up. None of the other mammoths came to her, they were far beyond noticing a fallen comrade now. The survivors wheeled once more and headed east. The street was spotted with dark puddles of blood.

"NO!" Susan shouted. "Stop shooting!" Matt had to grab her and pull her back against the partially destroyed fence surrounding the tar pit, then force her to the ground as bullets whizzed through the air all around them. They huddled on the ground and watched as the herd fell apart, broke against the western line of cops, turned, and came back toward the original killing ground. One was down, and a second seemed to have injured herself badly, tearing a foreleg open on a jagged piece of metal from a Toyota Land Cruiser she had stomped almost flat.

"Here they come again," Matt said. "Maybe we should get behind the fence here. It won't stop them, but it might channel them away from us."

Susan could only sob as Matt pulled her to her feet and through the hole in the fence, where they crouched a little down the slight slope and watched the slaughter continue.

HOWARD watched with increasing horror as the scene unfolded before his satellite-aided eyes. The big green blobs in the infrared cameras charged west, then east, then west again. One, then two of them ceased to move.

His frustration was growing. Because of the location of the tar pits, even with his situation high in the Resurrection Tower to the south of the unfolding action, he had doubted he would be able to get a look with the telescope in the tower. He could see things happening in the nearby mountains, see into windows on the sides of buildings that faced him, and the roofs of almost any building within fifteen miles, but a two- or three-story building two miles away always blocked his view of the street beyond it. His recollection of the La Brea Tar Pits area was that such buildings stood between him and the disaster unfolding on Wilshire.

But he called up a map of Los Angeles and was surprised to see he might almost have a clear sightline right down Curson Avenue. He might be able to see the herd as they passed that street, for a few seconds.

Bringing the telescope on line, he quickly aimed it north, then aligned it with Curson Avenue in time to see the remainder of the herd, now caught in a murderous crossfire from both ends of Wilshire, turn one by one and thunder in his direction, big as life though almost three miles away. He thought he could see the blood streaming off their heads as they ran. He even fancied he could see the terror in their eyes.

One thing he was sure of. He could see the thin line of police cars, three of them set across Curson, not quite bumper to bumper, with only six officers standing behind them. And not quite a block beyond them, so that Howard was looking over their heads, was a single yellow strip of police tape tied to lampposts, holding back a crowd of several hundred people who had come out of their houses in the residential neighborhood, probably drawn by the sound of gunfire.

With a flash of heat on his face, Howard realized... This is it. This is my superhero moment.

Howard had made many important decisions in his life, critical decisions, even momentous decisions. But every once in a while—and it was by no means certain that a particular person would ever find himself in this situation—you might find yourself looking at something that you knew must be decided in the next two or three seconds, and that the lives of people you could see would be affected, not financially, but in the saving or losing of life itself. A situation where a mistake would be expressed in the spilling of innocent blood, and where proper conduct would save that life. Cops and firemen and medical people faced these situations as part of their jobs. Superheroes faced these life-or-death choices two or three times in every issue. And they acted.

Howard acted.

The narrower street had funneled the individual mammoths back into something resembling a herd. They were no more than fifty feet from the first fleeing onlookers. Beyond that there was nothing to stop them all the way to San Vicente Boulevard, where traffic was still flowing normally. If they weren't stopped now, they might rampage for a long time through residential neighborhoods before the LAPD could corner them and bring them to their inevitable end.

That they were doomed seemed beyond argument. So, with a sick feeling in his stomach, Howard Christian brought the crosshairs to bear on the bloodied head of the lead mammoth, and squeezed the trigger.

Down in the bottommost basement of the Resurrection Tower, behind a vault door monitored by a retinal scanner that would recognize and admit only three people in the world, sat the Beam of Death. It wasn't as big as you'd expect it to be, no larger than a standard outdoor garbage can, though the other devices needed to charge it and operate it filled a fair-sized room. Massive cables attached it to the fusion power plant located on the level just above, and when Howard squeezed the trigger electricity flowed through these cables and pumped energy into the laser. For an instant, all the lights of the Resurrection Tower, shining opulently through the southern California night as they always did, dimmed. The energy that had been accumulating leaped forth, straight up through a vacuum pipe running through the center of the building, hit a moveable mirror just behind the eye of the Eagle of Vigilance, and burst forward into the air. The beam spread only slightly in the nanosecond it took to travel from the tower to Curson Avenue, losing no more than 2 percent of its power. Another 1 percent was lost to resistance of the molecules in the air, and for a second there was a corridor of charged particles and steam that might have been visible in the daytime, but which quickly dispersed. Someone below might have heard a faint hiss of the beam's passage, but in most places traffic noise was much louder. Other than that, the Beam of Death was virtually undetectable. There was no blazing streak of red or green or violet light, no Hollywood sizzle or zap or rolling thunder of special-effect sound. Just that little hiss and a momentary tunnel of fog. The effect when the beam hit the first mammoth was spectacular enough to make up for all that.

As the searchlight beam from the helicopter played over the street in front of the tar pits, officers began to emerge from behind their vehicles, shaken but still very much pumped. Many of them waved to the helicopter pilot, directing him to the street where the mammoths had turned. The blinding pool of light swung down Curson, and the men and women in blue followed, at a run.

WHEN the shooting stopped, Matt and Susan clambered up the slope from the edge of the tar pool and saw the police heading down Curson, right in front of them.