End of an Era

Countdown: 3

When the Het and I arrived at the mud plain near the Sternberger, Klicks was nowhere to be seen. Judging by the position of the sun it was late afternoon, and I didn’t expect him to return before dinner. I could call him on the radio and tell him to hightail it back here, but there seemed no point in that. I couldn’t talk freely until after the Het left—and it gave no sign of wanting to do so. The troodon hopped from one foot to the other, its long tail held stiffly. After a moment, it tipped its drawn-out head up at the crater wall. Perched high above was our timeship.

“Take me inside,” it said suddenly.

It was bad enough being near the troodon, but to be near it inside a confined space… “I’d rather not,” I said.

The troodon turned its giant eyes on me, fixing me with a steady gaze. “Reciprocate, Brandon/Brandy. We allowed you to come inside our ship. Must now you allow us to come inside yours.”

Fancy that, I thought: my manners being corrected by a dinosaur. “But look at where the Sternberger is located,” I said, pointing up. “See how it juts out over the crater rim? I know you can make it up the crater wall, but that’s a big jump up to our hatchway. I doubt you can do it.”

The troodon was off like a shot, clambering up the crumbling crater wall, using its long, dangling arms to help it climb. “Is no problem for me,” it called once it had reached the top.

From the outside, our main door was painted electric blue, with a bright red trim—the mandrill’s mouth, one of the engineers had dubbed it. I had no doubt that the dinosaur could see that, since all living reptiles and birds have color vision. The loss of the ability to see color by dogs and many other mammals was a recent evolutionary occurrence, a trade-off to provide better sight in the dark. The troodon accomplished the same thing simply by having huge eyes. “In I go,” it called.

There was a vertical gap of a little less than a meter between the crumbling edge of the crater and the bottom of our main doorway, but the troodon had no trouble hopping up high enough to grab hold of the door handle. It then braced its feet against the blue door panel, lifted the latch, and swung inside with the door. Next, it let go, dropping to the deck inside the accessway. It couldn’t turn around in there—there wasn’t enough clearance for its stiff tail—but it swung its neck back to look down at me and waved.

Well, I was damned if I was going to let that thing go inside unsupervised. I climbed up the crater wall myself. Although the dirt was dry now, it had apparently rained briefly last night, and all the tyrannosaur tracks from before had been washed away. The troodon had already gone up the ramp that led to interior door number one and had made its way through into the cramped confines of our semicircular habitat. I hurried after it.

It was slowly circumnavigating the small room, looking at the food refrigerator and storage lockers, peering through the window in door number two at the garage, opening the medicine fridge—and quickly closing it when a blast of cold air hit its face—swinging open door number three to have a look at the tiny washroom, then coming along the curving outer wall past the kidney-shaped worktable, the radio console, and, at last, the mini-lab. Despite its protestation earlier, the troodon’s sickle claws did indeed sound like the ticks of a bomb on the steel floor.

“This controls your time machine?” it hissed, pointing at one of Klicks’s lab instruments.

I wasn’t about to move away from the access ramp to the outside door; I wanted to be able to escape in a hurry if the troodon tried anything funny. “No, that’s just a mineral analyzer. As I said before, all the working parts for time travel are up the timestream some sixty-five million years.”

The troodon stepped in front of the radio console and eyed it suspiciously. “What about this?”

“It’s just a fancy radio.”

“Radio?”

“Umm, electromagnetic telecommunications.”

The troodon tapped the console with a curved claw. It seemed fascinated by the fake plastic woodgrain that ran around the edges of the unit. “Yes, we have such communications. But who can you call? Does your radio operate across time?”

“No, no. It’s just regular radio gear. Our timeship was dumped from a helicopter—a flying vehicle. The radio let us communicate with the copter pilot, and with Ching-Mei—that’s the person who invented the time machine—at the ground base. The base was many kilometers away, at the Tyrrell Field Station. We also use the radio to relay signals from our walkie-talkies—portable transceivers—and for our homing devices to lock onto. Oh, and the radio used satellite signals to determine our exact position at the time of the drop from the helicopter, crucial for the Throwback to work. It can even send signals to search-and-rescue satellites, in case we return at other than our expected location. Highly unlikely, or so we’re told, but it could happen.” I gestured at the gleaming panel. “Anyway, it’s far more sophisticated than what we needed, but the corporate sponsor—Ward-Beck in this case—wanted to showcase this particular piece of equipment. Our actual needs were pretty irrelevant.”

“Very strange culture have you,” said the troodon.

I forced a laugh. “That it is.”

Klicks drove back into our camp shortly after sunset, parking the Jeep so that it would be in the morning shade of the crater wall. The troodon and I met him down on the mud flat. I held up my A W can so that Klicks could see the intact pull-tab. He opened his jacket’s breast pocket and pulled out the Twinkies. They were slightly squished—hard to avoid that with Twinkies—but certainly showed no sign of having been deliberately flattened.

The troodon hung around for hours, keeping me from talking candidly to Klicks. The little dinosaur did help us gather bald cypress wood and we built a small fire to cook some steaks. Cow steaks, that is—no more pachycephalosaur for me. The idea of cooked food was new to the Het, and it asked if it could feed some to its vehicle. With one gulp about fifty dollars’ worth of prime sirloin disappeared down the troodon’s throat. It tasted a lot like shrew, according to the Het, insectivores being one of the few mammalian groups well established by this time.

Even with the sun down, it was still warm. As we sat around the campfire, I watched the flames dance in the dinosaur’s giant eyes. The troodon paid no attention to our theatrical yawns, and at last Klicks simply said, “It’s time for us to go to sleep.”

“Oh,” said the Het. Without another word, it stalked away into the darkness. Klicks and I doused the flames and scrambled back up into the Sternberger. As soon as we’d entered the habitat, I turned to him.

“Klicks,” I said, finally able to talk without a Martian eavesdropping, “we can’t bring the Hets forward in time.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re evil.”

Klicks looked at me, his jaw kind of slack, the way you’d look at someone who had just said something completely out of left field.

“I’m serious,” I said. “They’re at war.”

“At war?”

“That’s right. The troodon who came back here with me confirmed it.”

“Who are they fighting?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“What are they fighting about?”

“The Hets want to enslave the other side.”

“Enslave?”

“Crawl in their heads; make them do whatever the Hets want.”

“The Het said this to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why would it tell you that?”

“Why wouldn’t it tell me? Don’t you see, Klicks, they’re a single entity, a hive mind. Those globs of jelly come together and share memories. The idea of one individual deceiving another is foreign to them. About the only good thing you can say about them is that they’re pathological truth-tellers.”

“They seem harmless enough to me.”

“They’re viruses,” I said.

Klicks looked at me blankly.

“Viruses? You mean metaphorically…”

“I mean it literally. They’re viral-based; they consist of nucleic acids, but they can’t grow or breed on their own. They have to infest a living host. Only when they do so are they really alive.”

“Viral,” said Klicks slowly. “Well, I guess that would explain how they percolate through living tissue. Certainly viruses are small enough to do that.”

“But don’t you see? Viruses are evil.”

Klicks gave me a what-are-you-on look. “Viruses are just bits of chemistry,” he said.

“Exactly. Bits of programmed instructions, instructions to take over living matter and convert the cells of that matter to producing more viruses. They are always harmful to their hosts.”

“I suppose.”

“They’re harmful to their hosts by definition. What’s good for the virus is never good for the cells it has invaded.”

“And you’re saying that if the Hets are viral, they must have a psychology based on this?”

“I’m not saying it could only have been that way. But in this particular evolutionary case, yes, that’s the way it turned out: the Hets are conquest-driven. You heard what they said about the rosette of stars we saw. ‘It galls us.’ They hate the fact that there’s some life out there that they can’t reach, can’t subjugate.”

“I don’t know, Brandy. You’re going out on a limb.”

“It’s the truth, damn it. The Het told me so.”

“In exactly those words?”

“No, not exactly.”

“You know, Brandy, you’re picking the wrong guy to tell this to. This viral-nature stuff sounds a lot like you’ve made up your mind that the Hets are inferior, and are trying to use science to justify that belief. That sort of thinking did my people a lot of harm over the years.”

“But, look,” I said, “you’re alive.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean you’re a living creature. So am I. Black people, white people, all people, all animals, all plants. We’re all alive.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But viruses aren’t. They’re not alive, not in the scientific sense. They have to conquer if they are to exist at all. That’s their only purpose. It’s not a question of potentials one way or another. It’s what they do. The one and only thing they can do. To be a virus is to be bent on conquest—by definition.”

“It’s an interesting theory, but—”

“It’s more than a theory. I saw their war games.”

“Whatever you saw, you must be misinterpreting it.”

It was frustrating as hell. I’d recorded the whole thing on my MicroCam, but had no way to play the images back until we returned to the twenty-first century. “I tell you it’s true,” I said. “They’re using dinosaurs as armored vehicles and attack machines.”

“Dinosaur tanks?”

“Think about it: biological tanks are self-repairing, self-replicating, and the slimeballs can operate them by direct mind control.” I swung my crash couch around and sat on it sideways. “You’ve studied dinosaurian physiology: you know they’d make perfect killing machines. They’re incredibly strong—theropod jaws can cut through steel pipe—and their nervous systems are simplistic enough that they wouldn’t even know they’d been mortally wounded until after they’d taken down a few dozen of their opponents. These creatures were bred to kill, born to fight.”

Klicks shook his head. “Who could they possibly be at war with?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s here on Earth. I saw them loading up dinosaur eggs into their spaceships. I think they transfer the eggs to wherever the battle is raging. Somewhere—somewhere with orange and blue vegetation, I think.”

“What?”

“The ceratopsians I saw were patterned in those colors. Camouflage, I suspect.”

Klicks shook his head in wonderment. “But you don’t know who they’re fighting?”

That this was a good question irritated me. “There are lots of possibilities,” I said too quickly, my tone betraying that I didn’t have a real answer. “Maybe a different type of Martian. Or maybe some lifeform on one of the moons of Jupiter.”

“That seems unlikely, Brandy. None of those moons has an environment even remotely like Earth’s, and I find it hard to envision a platoon of tyrannosaurs in giant space suits.”

“Hmm. Hadn’t thought of that.”

We were both silent for a few seconds.

“There is one other possibility,” said Klicks slowly, a hint of gentle teasing in his tone.

“Eh?”

“Well, there could be an Earth-like planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. You know—where the asteroids are in our time. As long as it had a mild greenhouse effect, it could be quite temperate.” He filled an Envirofoam cup with water and placed it in our microwave.

“There’s not enough rubble in the asteroid belt to have ever made up a decent-sized planet,” I said.

“Hey, man, I’m just trying to get into the spirit of your delusion.” His fingers drummed on the microwave’s membrane keyboard, and it beeped in response. “See, in the final battle, the Hets will use a total-conversion weapon, turning three-quarters of the enemy planet’s mass into energy. Or maybe they just pounded the planet until it shattered and the bulk of it fell into Jupiter or the sun, or spiraled out to become Pluto.” His one eyebrow arched in the center. “In fact, now that I mention it, that explains something that’s been bugging me. We’ve always assumed that the water-erosion features on Mars are incredibly ancient, created at a time billions of years before the era we’re in now. But, really, the only indication of the age of those features is the heavy cratering that overlays them. We made some assumptions about the rate of cratering, and then extrapolated that the water features underneath must be a couple of billion years old. Well, Mars would have been scoured by asteroid impacts after the planet in the belt was pulverized, giving the water-erosion landforms the appearance of being a lot older than they really are. That would explain how Mars could indeed be covered with free-flowing water right now.”

Klicks was smiling, but it made sense to me. “Right!” I said. “The bloody Martian asked us about the fifth planet, then seemed surprised when I told it about Jupiter. In this time, Jupiter’s the sixth planet.” My head was spinning. “Good Christ. And that explains why they’re here on Earth.”

The microwave beeped. “You’ve lost me, Sherlock,” said Klicks.

“Earth would be strategic in such a war,” I said. “When Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from the—the belt planet, but Earth is on the same side as it, Earth could be a great platform for launching attacks.”

“The ‘belt planet’, eh?” Klicks laughed. “It needs a better name than that.”

“Okay. How about—”

“Not so fast. You got to name Earth’s second moon. It’s my turn.”

He had a point there. “Okay.”

Klicks scratched his head. “How about…”

“How about what?”

His grin had slipped away. “Nothing,” he said, making a show of sifting decaf coffee crystals into his steaming cup. “I—I want to sleep on it.”

He wished to name it Tess, of course. That was fine with me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Klicks continued: “That would be one hell of a war, Brandy. Mars laid waste. The other side’s home world reduced to rubble.”

“So you can see that we can’t bring the Hets forward.”

Klicks shook his head. “I’m not sure about that. I’m still not convinced by your virus theory—”

“It’s not my theory, dammit. It’s what the Het told me.”

“And, besides, if fighting wars was enough to disqualify a species from being otherwise decent, you’d have to kiss humanity good-bye, too. Plus, they’ve voluntarily left our bodies twice now.”

“They have to do that,” I said. “They get claustrophobic if they inhabit the same body for too long; they need to constantly conquer new creatures.” Klicks rolled his eyes. “It’s true,” I said. “The Het told me. Look, they knew it would be over three full days until we headed back; sticking around inside our bodies that long would be the viral equivalent of waiting endlessly at the airport. Of course they exited us; they knew they could always reenter just by having a swarm of troodons overpower us, if no other way worked out.”

“You’re putting the worst possible spin on everything,” said Klicks.

My turn to roll eyes. “Look, these creatures can dissociate into components small enough that you’d need an electron microscope to see them. Once they’re loose on Earth in the twenty-first century, there would be no putting the genie back in the bottle. Bringing them forward in time would be an irrevocable decision, a real-life Pandora’s box.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors,” said Klicks. “Besides, leaving them back here would be an irreversible decision, too. We’re the one opportunity the Hets have to be saved.”

“We can’t risk that.” I set my jaw. “I’m convinced—convinced—that they’re, well, evil.”

Klicks sipped his coffee. “Well,” he said at last, “we all know how reliable your conclusions are.”

I felt a knotting in my stomach. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He took another sip. “Nothing.”

My voice had taken on a little shakiness at the edges. “I want to know what you meant by that crack.”

“It’s nothing, really.” He forced a smile. “Forget about it.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed, then spread his hands. “Well, look—all this nonsense about me and Tess.” He met my eyes briefly, then looked away. “You stand there all high-and-mighty, both judge and jury, condemning me for something I didn’t do.” His voice had gotten small. “I just don’t like it, that’s all.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Something you didn’t do?” I sneered the words. “Are you denying you’re having an affair with her?”

His eyes swung back to mine, and this time they held their lock. “Get this through your thick head, Thackeray. Tess is single. Divorced. And so am I.” He paused. “Two single people together does not constitute an affair.”

I waved my hand. “Semantics. Besides, you were fooling around with her even before Tess and my marriage was over.”

Klicks’s voice was ripe with indignation. “I never touched her—not even once—until you and she were as extinct as your bloody dinosaurs.”

“Bull.” I put my hand down on the lab table—really, I’d just intended to gently place it there, but all the instruments clacked together. “Tess got her divorce on July third, 2011. You were boffing her long before that.”

“That date was just a formality, and you know it,” Klicks said. “Your marriage had been over for months by then.”

“Its end hastened no doubt by your constant flirting with her.”

“Flirting?” There was now a hint of derision in his lilting tones. “I’m not sixteen, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, yeah? What did you say to her that night the three of us went out to see the new Star Wars film?”

“How the hell should I remember what I said?"—but the slight change in his vocal tone told me that he did indeed remember very well.

“She’d just gotten new glasses that day,” I said. “The ones with the purply-pink wire frames. You looked right at her and said, ‘You certainly have a lovely pair, Tess.’” I could see that Klicks was fighting not to smile, and that made me even more furious. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to another man’s wife.”

He drained his remaining coffee in a single gulp. “Come on, Bran. It was a joke. Tess and I are old friends; we kid around. It didn’t mean anything.”

“You stole her right out from under me.”

He absently broke a piece of Envirofoam off the cup’s rim. “Maybe if she had been under you a little more often, it never would have happened.”

“Fuck you.”

“Why not?” he said, lifting his eyes. “You certainly weren’t fucking her.”

I was quaking with anger. “You son of a bitch. We did it once a week.”

Klicks nodded knowingly. “Sunday mornings, like clockwork. Right after This Week with Peter Jennings. Pretty poor excuse for foreplay.”

“She told you that?”

“We talk a lot, sure. And about more than just the latest find reported in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Face it, Brandy. You were a lousy husband. You lost her all on your own. You can’t blame me for recognizing a good thing when I saw it. Tess deserved better than you.”

I tasted bile in my throat. I wanted to lunge at the man, to make him take back every one of those cruel lies. My hands, sitting on the lab table, clenched into fists. Klicks must have noticed that. “Just try it,” he said, ever so softly.

“But you didn’t even give us a chance to work things out,” I said, forcing a semblance of calm back into my voice.

“There wasn’t any hope of that.”

“But if Tess had only said something to me … This—this is the first I’ve heard of any of this.”

Klicks sighed, a long, weary exhalation, then shook his head again. “Tess had been screaming it at you for months—with every glance she made, with the look on her face, with body language that everyone but you could read.” He spread his arms. “Christ, she couldn’t have been much more obvious about her unhappiness if she’d had the words ‘I am miserable’ tattooed on her forehead.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know. I didn’t see any of that.”

The long sigh again. “That was apparent.”

“But you—you were supposed to be my friend. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I tried, Brandy. What do you think I was getting at that night in that bar on Keele Street? I said you were working too hard on the new galleries, that it was crazy not to get home till ten o’clock each night when you’ve got a lovely wife waiting for you. You told me that Tess understood.” He frowned and shook his head. “Well, she didn’t. Not at all.”

“So you decided to make your move.”

“I’ve got news for you, Brandy. I didn’t go after Tess. She came after me.”

“What?” I felt my world crumbling around me.

“Ask her, if you don’t believe me. You think I’d go after my best friend’s wife? Christ, Brandy, I turned her down three times. Do you think that was easy for me? The Tyrrell Museum is in a pissant all-white Prairie town, for God’s sake. I’m middle-aged and have permanent dirt under my fingernails from years of fieldwork. How many of the women in Drumheller do you think wanted to get down with me? Jesus, man. Tess is gorgeous and I pushed her aside three fucking times for you. I told her to work it out with you, to return to her husband, to not flush nine good years down the toilet. She kept coming back. Can you blame me for finally saying yes?”

I looked away, my eyelids locked shut to prevent tears from escaping. The moment between us stretched to a minute, then two. I didn’t know what to say, what to do, what to think. I wiped my eyes, blew my nose, and turned to face Klicks. He held my gaze for only a second, but in that second I saw that he’d been telling the truth and, worst of all, I saw that he pitied me. He got up and put his coffee cup in the trash.

Thirty-eight more hours, I thought. Thirty-eight more hours until we return. I didn’t know if I could take it, being here with him, being here with my memories of her—

It was night. Time to go to bed. I’d have to take sleeping medication again, or else I’d toss and turn until dawn, tormented by what Klicks had said.

I began to gather my pajamas.

“You’ve got a job to do,” said Klicks.

I looked at him, but didn’t trust myself to speak.

“The night-sky photo.”

Oh, right. I would have done it last night, except it was clouded over. I went through door number one, but instead of going down the ramp to the outer hatch, I went up the little ladder, angled at forty-five degrees, into the instrumentation dome on the roof. In training, I’d always found climbing that ladder hurt my palms, given that my full weight was on them, but in this lower gravity, it wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

The instrumentation dome was about two meters across and made of glassteel. Several cameras were set up to shoot through its transparent walls, and a vertical slit, very much like that in an observatory dome, let the warm Mesozoic night air flow into the sensors within. The slit closed automatically when rain was detected.

Several automated cameras were taking sky photographs, and one tracked the sun during the days. But there was one astronomical photograph the staff of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory had asked us to take that couldn’t be easily automated, and that was a traditional time-lapse night-sky photo. See, all our automatic cameras were off-the-shelf models, and they had automatic exposure timers, but none of them went past sixty seconds. The photo the DAO wanted required an exposure of four hours, and that demanded manual intervention.

I’d originally volunteered to bring along my Pentax to take this photo, but when I’d asked that jerk from my insurance company if my personal belongings would be covered if I took them 65 million years into the past, he didn’t miss a beat: “Sorry, Mr. Thackeray, that would mean that any loss or damage took place before the effective coverage date of your policy.” Oh, well. In the end, we’d borrowed a fancy electronic camera from the McLuhan Institute at U of T. It, too, only had a short-term exposure timer, but it also had a manual shutter and so I did what generations of sky photographers had done before me: I set up the camera in the dark, slipped a rubber band around its case to hold the shutter button down, then gingerly removed the lens cap.

The result would be a time-exposure photo—an electronic one, since this was a filmless camera—with arcs representing the paths of stars through the night sky. The common center of all these arcs would indicate Earth’s true north pole. Also, such a photo would show the tiny streaks of meteors. A count of those would give some indication of how much debris was floating around local space, and, given we knew how long the exposure had been for, a precise measurement of how many degrees the arcs encompassed would tell us the exact length of a Cretaceous day.

I fiddled with the tiny studs on my wristwatch—I always found the thing frustrating to operate—and set the alarm for four hours from now, which would be at something like 3:00 a.m. local time, so that I would get up and put the lens cap back on the camera.

I headed down the ladder, back through door number one, and into the habitat. Klicks walked over to me. “Here,” he said gently, proffering a cup of water and a silver sleeping caplet. I accepted them silently.

There was a long moment between us, a moment when we both thought over the words we had exchanged. “She did love you,” Klicks said at last. “For many years, she loved you deeply.”

I looked away, nodded, and swallowed the bitter pill.