End of an Era

Countdown: 6

The sun was sliding slowly down the bowl of the sky. My watch still showed modern Alberta time, but it looked to be about 3:30 p.m. My nose was a bit stuffed, perhaps from crying but just as likely from the pollens. Little golden motes and things like dandelion seeds danced in the air all about me. I saw a small tortoise at one point, pushing itself with splayed, wrinkly limbs across my path. It seemed ironic that such a humble creature would survive the coming changes that would kill every last one of the magnificent dinosaurs. Like Aesop’s fable: slow and steady wins the race.

Suddenly the ground dropped away. I was at the lip of a sheer precipice of crumbling reddish-brown earth, a saw-toothed row of various hardwood stumps lining its edge. Without any warning, I’d come across a valley, perhaps a kilometer long and half that in width. It looked like an open-pit mine, gouged out of the Earth, an incongruous landscape wound amidst the unspoiled wilderness.

And it was full of dinosaurs.

It was a paleontologist’s dream, or most other people’s nightmare. Two—no, three Triceratopses. An equal number of small tyrannosaurs, and one monster even bigger than the T. rex Klicks and I had seen yesterday afternoon. A herd of ostrich-like ornithomimids. Four duck-billed hadrosaurs.

Two of the hadrosaurs looked to be the genus Edmontosaurus, the quintessential duckbill, with the keratin sheaths at the fronts on their shovel-like prows looking like black lipstick. The other pair of duckbills had head crests, a rare occurrence this late in the Cretaceous. These crests were unlike any I had seen before: one tubular projection going straight up, another, longer one, parallel to the animal’s back. Three of the four hadrosaurs were walking away from me on splayed feet and mitten-like hands, their thick, flattened tails held stiffly above the ground, great bellies swinging back and forth like pendulums. The fourth, one of the edmontosaurs, had risen on its hind legs and was dully surveying its surroundings.

Dancing around the valley were several dozen troodons. About two-thirds of them were the same bright green as the ones we’d met earlier, but the rest were smaller and more brown in color. Males, probably. A group of them—three males and two females—galloped toward the valley’s far wall, their clawed bird-feet kicking up small clouds of dust. They covered the five hundred meters in a time short enough to make even an Olympic gold medalist seem like a slowpoke. Their goal was a cluster of stationary objects that I hadn’t noticed before: three giant tawny spheres, a trio of those strange breathing Martian spaceships resting on their amorphous slug feet.

Where my wits had been for the last few minutes I didn’t know, but they finally came home to roost. I realized that I was inadvertently spying on an encampment of the Hets. If I was going to do that, I figured I’d better not be seen. I dropped to my belly, the buzz of insects abating for a moment as the confused creatures were left in a cloud around where my head had been.

Christ, my MicroCam! The thing was still off. I fumbled for the switch, then lifted the cheesecloth to wipe sweat from my brow. It was as hot as hell out here. I propped my binoculars in front of my face, resting their weight on my elbows, and twiddled with the knob to bring one of the Het ships into focus. It was indeed the same type of vehicle Klicks and I had ridden in last night: sixty meters across, covered with hexagonal scales, pulsing with respiration.

A plaintive cry split the air, a throaty dirge that seemed to tremble with an equal mixture of pain and sadness. I scanned the valley. A huge, blood-red tyrannosaur was squatting in the sand. A thick yellowish-white sausage dropped from between its legs and I realized that it—she—was laying eggs. No sooner had the soft-shelled package rolled onto the earth than a wiry troodon darted between her massive thighs and scooped it up, running with it up the broad tongue and into the vertical mouth slit of one of the spherical ships.

The hapless tyrannosaur was probably under Het control—I doubted any beast would otherwise lay eggs out in the open like that. But despite the Martian within, it let out another heart-wrenching yell, the cry of a mother who had just lost her child—a stronger display of maternal love than I ever thought I’d see from a Mesozoic carnivore. A few minutes later, with visible effort, it squeezed out another egg. This one was also promptly seized in the opposable digits of a troodon and whisked into the spaceship. I commiserated with the giant reptile. To have something you loved snatched away hurt, I knew, more than any physical injury…

I shook my head, trying to fling the tormenting thoughts out of my skull. The movement startled the insects that had landed on the cheesecloth around my pith helmet into buzzing flight.

I forced my attention onto one of the triceratopses. Charles R. Knight, the father of scientific dinosaur illustration, always painted triceratops so that it resembled a tank. Like many paleontologists, I first became interested in dinosaurs as a child, seeing Knight’s century-old paintings in a book. It was uncanny how much three-horned-face looked like Knight’s renditions of him: quadrupedal, that great bony frill with a fluted rim around the thick neck, two massive white horns sticking straight out above the beady eyes, a third, shorter horn projecting from above the parrot-like beak. But the beast had adornments that had been unknown in Knight’s time, since all he’d had to go by were heavily eroded specimens. Tiny horns pointed downward from the corners of the skull over the jaw hinges, more tiny horns aimed backward from where the eye horns met the bony frill. The perimeter of the frill was lined with squat triangular spikes, giving it a chainsaw edge. The beast measured a good six meters in length from the tips of its eye horns to the end of its stubby tail. But whereas Knight’s triceratopses had plain dun-colored skin, this one’s leather hide was greenish blue dappled with large orange splotches. The design reminded me of—what? Camouflage? Not in that garish color scheme, but the pattern was right.

Suddenly the triceratops I was looking at moved out of my binoculars’ field of vision. By the time I had refocused on it, it had turned around so that it was facing the other way, its left side to me instead of its right. I put the binoculars down and saw that the two other horned-faces were falling in beside this one, their array of facial armament pointing forward like jousters’ lances. One of the beasts was pawing the ground with its stubby foreleg, looking for all the world like a bull about to charge.

I glanced toward the far end of the valley and my jaw dropped. Three mechanical tanks, each one just a tad smaller than the horned dinosaurs, had appeared near the Het ships. Flat, beetle-shaped, they were painted in a cool aquamarine shot through with veins of red, a color scheme very close to that worn by the triceratopses. On a tank, this surely was camouflage, meaning—meaning what?

Each tank sported a tapering crystal tube, presumably a gun, mounted on a hemispherical turret. The tanks must have come from within the ships, for all three of the pulsing spheres now had their thick-lipped mouths open and their gray access tongues stretched out to the ground.

These tanks were the first machines I’d seen with the Hets, and they seemed incongruous with the living spaceships and dinosaur vehicles, almost as if they belonged to some other alien technology. That impression was reinforced as I noticed that one of the tanks had an open door on its curving side. Although the door measured about two meters by one, the right proportions to comfortably allow a Het riding inside its trusty troodon or brachiator to enter, it was oriented the wrong way, with the long axis parallel to the ground. There was another door just inside the first, forming an airlock-like chamber.

The triceratopses now stood one hundred meters from the tanks, as if waiting for some signal. Many of the other dinosaurs had walked to the near end of the valley, except for poor old mother tyrannosaur. She was flopped on her belly near the spaceships, apparently too tired to move.

It soon became apparent which of the beasts were currently Het-ridden. The trio of small tyrannosaurs stood in rapt attention, as did the giant female T. rex. Perhaps these great theropods were too dangerous to ever let run free. By contrast, the placid hadrosaurs seemed to be unoccupied. One was defecating. Another had ambled off and was using its shovel-like bill to sift through the dirt of the valley floor, apparently looking for roots. About half of the ornithomimids, looking like plucked ostriches, were likely hosting Hets, for they were looking intently at the tableau of tanks and triceratopses. The other half were busy grooming themselves or each other. As for the troodons, most had their bright eyes riveted to the scene in front of them.

Everyone was clearly waiting for somebody to make the first move. The anticipation—of what, I still did not know—was palpable, and I found myself holding my breath. Seconds passed, the buzz of insects in my ears like the drone of an electric motor.

Suddenly the middle tank squeezed off a crystalline projectile. It was hard to see, just a glint of light as it arced through the air. As soon as they heard the gun’s report—a reverberating metallic sound like sheet metal being warped—the trio of horned dinosaurs burst into action. They moved with surprising speed for animals of their bulk, musculature rippling under their gaudy hides. Magnificent, energetic beasts! Even this far away, I felt a rumbling in the soil beneath my belly as they ran. One veered to the right, its body snapping to the side like a sprung mousetrap. The second continued its forward charge, but weaving in a complex pattern as it did so, a mad dance to which only it could predict the next step. The third triceratops, much to my surprise, reared on its hind legs, like a horse whinnying, and let out a multi-note roar. It dropped back to all fours and deked left. The projectile hit where this one would have been if it hadn’t changed course, sending up a cloud of dirt.

The one who’d almost been killed charged even faster, its legs pumping beneath its body. It escaped a second impact by once again rising up on its hind legs, the crystal shell exploding in front of it. Red slice marks appeared on its lean belly as shards carved into the beast’s hide. With its one-ton frilled head lowered and eye horns pointing dead ahead, it rammed into the beetle-like tank. The horns pierced the tank’s plating and there was a sound like a pop can opening as pressure equalized.

The triceratops dug in its forelegs, dropped to its rear knees, and arched its powerful neck, tendons distending, muscles bulging. With massive grunts, it lifted the tank impaled on its horns a meter off the ground and then quickly smashed it down. It did this twice more in rapid succession, and the tank’s hull cracked like an eggshell. Through the broken casing I could see the interior. It was made of an iridescent, amber-colored metal.

Meanwhile, the remaining two tanks were pumping off rounds of glassy ammunition, the whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of their report echoing off the valley walls. The vehicles apparently could move in any direction, sliding left and right, forward and backward with ease. The other two ceratopsians danced to avoid the shells.

One triceratops saw an opening as the transparent gun tube that had been trained on it swung away to take a bead on another horned-face. It charged, head low, bringing its eye horns underneath the tank’s lens-shaped body. With a quick movement, it flipped the vehicle onto its back. The tank’s underbelly, made of that same amber metal, was tightly packed with glistening meter-wide ball bearings, explaining its agility.

I glanced at the watching gallery. Even the unoccupied hadrosaurs had become intrigued by the battle, for they had risen on their hind legs, their tails bending stiffly against the ground. The Het-ridden beasts stood quietly, though, nothing giving away the thoughts of the aliens within them.

Evidently one of the triceratopses had let its attention wander from the fight for a second as well, for I swung my binoculars back just in time to see a crystal projectile explode in a flash of green light against its face. The detonation smashed its neck frill, snapping off its nasal and right-eye horns. They flew into the air like white missiles. Slick with blood, half its skull gone, the thing still managed to charge. How could it move with its brain—? Of course. A Het rode within the animal. It must be farther back, perhaps stretched out along the spinal cord to better control the creature’s body. I imagined it would be under a lot of pressure now, having to take over the horned-face’s autonomic functions, which must have been about all the beast’s fist-sized brain had been good for anyway. A lumbering corpse, the injured horned-face slammed into the side of the tank, which spun away under the force of the impact.

The triceratops that had earlier impaled a tank had managed to disentangle its face from the twisted wreckage and it, too, charged the remaining armored vehicle. Rearing up on its hind legs, it made a quick, sheering bite with its parrot-like beak, snipping off the crystal gun tube. The two uninjured triceratopses shouldered against the tank, pushing it toward the far valley wall.

The half-headless beast, apparently blind, had collapsed onto its belly, its forelimbs twisted at an angle that would have been excruciating had the animal still possessed a mind with which to register pain. I zoomed in on its shattered skull and saw a phosphorescent blue lump the size of a beach ball—much larger than any of the Hets I had yet seen—oozing out of the splintered bone onto the blood-saturated soil.

I turned back to the remaining tank. The two triceratopses were still butting it with their shoulders, the lens-shaped body denting slightly each time they hit it. Within minutes the dinosaurs had rammed the beetle-like vehicle against the sheer wall of the valley. I lowered my binoculars and surveyed the scene: one tank smashed, another flipped on its back, and a third taken prisoner. Incredible.

I snapped off rolls of still pictures—I’d left our electronic camera back at the Sternberger—but I knew nonetheless that I’d have a hard time convincing Klicks of what I’d seen.

Triceratops fossils represented three-quarters of all di-nosaurian finds from Alberta and Wyoming during the last million years of the Cretaceous. I tried to imagine what kind of destruction a herd—an assault force—of these great beasts could inflict. That rasping voice of the Martian Het, spoken around bloody spit through the troodon’s mouth, came back to me. “We, too, came to this place because of the life here.”

I’ll say.