End of an Era

Countdown: 10

I jumped back, the thought of touching one of those alien slimeballs again being enough to send my heart racing. The blue jelly had finished exiting the pachycephalosaur and sat there, a pulsing mound, on its hip.

“What do we do with it?” asked Klicks, standing about five meters from the dinosaur corpse.

Set fire to it was my first thought. What I said was, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we can’t just leave it here,” he said. “You’ve carved up its vehicle.”

“Serves it right. It almost wrecked our Jeep.”

Klicks shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Huh?”

“Well, you saw the way the pachycephalosaur behaved. A territorial challenge, a ritual head-butting. I think the Het was a passenger within it, not a pilot. It was observing the way the dinosaur behaved, rather than controlling its actions.”

I thought about that, then looked at the butchered mounds of flesh in front of me. External observation followed by dissection seemed inadequate study tools compared with climbing inside the animal’s skin, living its life, feeling its sensations. Klicks was probably right; the pachycephalosaur had been behaving of its own volition, not under Het control. And it had attacked the Jeep with considerable justification, after all.

I nodded. “Okay, then. What do we do?”

“We could take it back to the Sternberger with us. I’m sure our Het friends will be visiting us again there.”

It seemed a sensible course of action, except for one thing. “But, Klicks, if this one’s been up here in the mountains for the last few days, it may not know about us. As far as it’s concerned, we’re strange creatures it’s never seen before.”

“Good point.” Klicks cleared his throat and spoke to the blue mound. “Hello,” he said. “Do you understand me? Do you understand English?”

The thing pulsed more quickly. It was obviously reacting to the sound of Klicks’s voice, but whether with an attempt to respond or with sheer terror I couldn’t say.

“I’m sure it can’t talk without a vehicle with vocal cords,” I said.

“Maybe not,” said Klicks. “But it should be able to listen.”

“It has no ears,” I pointed out.

“But it surely can feel the air vibrating as I speak.” He turned to the creature again. “We come in peace,” he said. Funny, I thought, that our language should already have a cliche for greeting aliens. The jelly’s rapid pulsing continued; evidently those words hadn’t calmed the creature. Klicks pointed at the Het, then straight up, apparently trying to convey that he knew that the creature came from the sky. He hoped, I guess, that if the Het realized that we understood that, it would assume that we’d already made friends with others of its kind. There was no response at first, so he tried the gesture three more times. Perhaps the Het finally did catch his meaning, for it soon seemed less agitated.

“Well, I don’t know if I got through to the thing or not,” said Klicks with a shrug. Then an evil smile overtook his features. “Hey, man, perhaps you could lie down next to it and let it crawl into your head. That would be a good sign of friendship.”

“The hell I will! Why don’t you do that?”

“You’re the one whose English they seemed to like best.”

“No, thank you. Once was more than enough.”

“Well, then, what are we going to do?”

“Let’s leave it up to the Het.” I walked back to the Jeep and got a stasis box out of the rear compartment. I put it on its side near the grapefruit-sized mound of jelly. The Het was still for a while, then began to flow toward it, undulating its way along the pachycephalosaur’s haunch. It hesitated at the lip of the box, then pulsed its way into the dark interior. I went to close the lid.

“Don’t!”

I looked at Klicks. “Why not?”

“Once you close the lid, the stasis field will turn on. We can’t shut the field off without a Huang Invertor, and the nearest one of those is sixty-five million years in the future.”

“Oh, hell, right. Okay.” I picked up the box by its handles and looked inside. This was the first chance I’d had to examine a Het with any detachment. I felt a wave of revulsion as I looked at the thing, quivering and blue. It wasn’t uniformly transparent. Rather, there were cloudier parts within, representing places where the jelly was thicker or perhaps of a different constitution. And the faint phosphorescence I’d observed earlier came from thousands of tiny pinpoints of light. They swirled within the plasma, like fireflies moving through molasses. The pulsing of the body wasn’t a contraction and expansion, like a lung. Rather it was an arching motion, the Het pushing itself up from beneath, alternately forming then destroying a concave hollow under its body.

It was completely different from all the lifeforms I had ever studied. Of course, its macro structure probably no more reflected its constituent parts than the body of a man resembles the cells he’s made of, or the dunes in a desert reveal the crystalline nature of the quartz grains of which they’re composed. I’d love to get the Het under a microscope, to find out what made it tick.

I placed the box on its side in the back of the Jeep, but left the rear door open so that the creature wouldn’t cook in the heat and so it could get out if it wanted to. Then I went back to my dissection of the pachycephalosaurus. When we returned to our vehicle two hours later, the Het was still there.

As we drove back to the Sternberger, Klicks had evidently decided that the Het in the back either really didn’t understand English or, if it did, couldn’t hear us talking over the roar of the Jeep’s engine. “Made any progress on the great moral decision?” he said, his voice edged with just enough sarcasm to make clear that he thought I was weak for not having his knack for decisive action.

“It’s not that easy,” I said softly. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that I was getting closer to coming to a conclusion. “I guess I’m leaning toward agreeing with you.”

“You realize the world will have our hides if we don’t bring the Hets forward. Humanity has been waiting decades to meet extraterrestrials. People aren’t going to be happy if we deprive them of the chance to do just that.”

I was silent for several seconds. Then: “Did I ever tell you what my father asked me to do?”

“How is Leon?” asked Klicks. “Responding to the treatments?”

“Not really, no. He’s in a lot of pain.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He wants me to give him some poison so that he can end his life.”

Klicks’s foot eased up on the accelerator. “My God. Really?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head, but more in despair than negation. “It’s a shame. He was such a vital man. Still, they should have euthanasia laws in place shortly.”

“Shortly?” I looked out at the wild landscape. “I suppose that a couple of years is a short length of time—except when every moment you live is torturing you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give him the poison.”

“That one’s easy for you, too, eh?”

“What’s to think about? He’s your father, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

“Do it, Brandy. I’d do it for my dad.”

“It’s easy to say that now. George is strong as an ox. Hell, he’ll probably outlive you. It’s completely different when it stops being a theoretical question. You can’t answer it truthfully until you really have to answer it.”

Klicks was quiet for a long moment as our Jeep bounced over the uneven ground. “Well,” he said at last, “you really have to answer the question about the Hets in the next—what?—sixty-four hours. Sooner, in fact, because I’m sure they’ll need time to prepare.”

“I know that,” I said, my voice weary.

We drove the rest of the way back to the Sternberger in silence.