End of an Era

Countdown: 1

My broken nose throbbed with each beat of my heart. It had taken seemingly forever, but at least for the time being it had stopped bleeding.

I lay back in my crash couch, exhausted. But Ching-Mei’s clock was ticking: we had only twenty-seven hours until the Huang Effect switched states. I had to stay within the Sternberger, waiting to see if poor Klicks would regain consciousness, but I wondered whether there was any useful work I could do in the meantime.

My night-sky photograph. At least I could check on that, see if it had turned out all right.

I got up from the couch, every joint in my body aching, found my palmtop computer, and slipped it into one of the baggy pockets on my khaki jacket. It was pure agony climbing up the ladder to the instrumentation dome.

I removed the electronic camera from the little tripod, then plugged it into the USB port on my palmtop. The night-sky photo blossomed on the color liquid-crystal display. At first I thought that the picture had been ruined by stray light: two curving bands of solid white passed across the lower right corner of the photograph, one thick, the other thin. Of course: the paths of Luna and Trick as they strolled across the night.

Except for these, it looked like all other time-lapse sky photos: a series of hairline concentric arcs, the paths drawn by stars as the heavens wheeled about Earth’s axis. Since I’d left the lens open for about four hours, each arc was approximately one-sixth of a circle (we expected the Mesozoic day to be a little shorter, but not much).

Still, something wasn’t quite right about this photo. There were six white dots in a line about halfway between the zenith and the southern horizon. I used the palmtop’s touch pad to point at each of the dots in turn, then zoomed in for a closer look. The dots showed no movement arcs at all. One or even two could have been photographic glitches—dust on the lens, single-bit errors in the processing—but six in a row had to represent something real.

The only thing I could think of that would show no movement as the Earth rotates was a geostationary satellite orbiting above the equator. Well, I suppose it isn’t surprising that the Hets put satellites up around Earth, although the precisely even spacing seemed strange to me. Perhaps they were for weather forecasting or communications, but there appeared to be more of them than were necessary for either of those jobs. A trio of evenly spaced satellites in the Clarke orbit could provide complete coverage of the entire planet; there were six satellites visible in this photo, meaning there might be twenty or thirty evenly spaced ones in total—

A crash came from downstairs. Rather than taking the time to disengage the camera from my palmtop, I tucked them both into the baggy pocket and hurried down the diagonal ladder. Klicks was standing, supporting himself against the lab bench. He had managed to knock some of his geological instruments to the floor as he’d hauled himself to his feet.

“Brandy,” he said, “I’m…” He tried again. “Look, man. I didn’t mean—” That didn’t seem to cut it either. “It’s just—” Finally he simply fell silent and shrugged. I sympathized with his predicament. After all, how do you tell someone you’re sorry you tried to kill him?

I looked Klicks up and down. One of his ears was caked with dried blood. The gash across his forehead was nasty; it could have used stitches, but at least it had stopped bleeding.

I’d held my own quite well, given how much more muscular he is than me. I felt a smug satisfaction. In retrospect, I guess I’d taken a certain secret pleasure in beating the crap out of him with impunity. “That’s okay,” I said quietly. “You weren’t yourself.”

Klicks nodded and, after a time, looked away. He probably felt just as uncomfortable with the protracted moment between us as I did. “What about the Het?” he said at last.

I told him about the antiviral drugs I’d injected into his carotid artery. He winced at the prospect of a kilogram or two of dead alien still being inside his body. It was an unsettling thought.

He noticed the electronic camera, sticking up out of my jacket’s breast pocket. Probably just to get his mind on something—anything—else, he said, “Is that your night-sky photo? How’d it turn out?”

“Here,” I said, pulling out the camera and the palmtop, which was still attached to it by a USB cable. I flipped up the little computer’s screen and handed it and the camera to him. “Have a look.”

He held the computer up to his face. “Can you see the two horizontal bands?” I said.

“Yup.”

“Those are the tracks left by the two moons. But I’m puzzled by the stationary dots above them.” I shrugged. “Maybe they’re geosynchronous satellites put up by the Hets.”

Klicks nodded once as he handed everything back to me. “They’re the gravity-suppressor satellites,” he said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

Klicks reached for the edge of the table, steadying himself. His voice quavered. “How did I know that?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Flatworms,” he said suddenly, but this time it wasn’t one of his little tests. It was a flash of insight. The instant he spoke the word, I knew what he meant. I’d done the Humphries-Jacobsen experiment myself as an undergrad, training a planarian named Karen Black—I called it that because of its cute little cross-eyed face—to contract when exposed to light. The flatworm stored the memory of that training in its RNA. I then chopped K.B. up and fed her to another flatworm, Barbra Streisand. Babs assimilated Karen’s memories and immediately knew how to respond to the light. Klicks had apparently gained some of the dead Het’s memories from the RNA it had left in his head.

“Gravity suppression,” I said. “Fascinating. So the reduced gravity is caused by the Hets—”

“So they can comfortably move around here, yes. They’ve scaled Earth’s gravity down to the same level as Mars’s, cutting it to one Martian g—thirty-eight percent of what we consider normal.”

I shook my head. “Damn, we were stupid. We never felt any movement when we flew in that Het spaceship—nor any weightlessness while we were in orbit, for that matter. They seem to be able to do all kinds of tricks with gravity. Ching-Mei would love these guys: their physics must be extraordinary.”

Klicks frowned. “I don’t think they’re that much ahead of us,” he said. “Yes, they have a better grasp on gravity, but they obviously don’t have time travel. They want the Sternberger something fierce.”

I scratched my beard. “Tell me more about the Hets.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

“Well, let’s try a specific question. Tell me if there’s free-running water on Mars right now.”

He blinked. “Oh, yes. A complete water cycle, with rains and snow.”

“And what else lives on Mars besides the Hets?”

“Nothing lives except us. All other things exist for our subjugation.”

Talk about Manifest Destiny. “You’re going to be in for one hell of a debriefing when we get back, my friend. Tell me: how do the Hets communicate?”

Klicks closed his eyes. “The individual viral units produce impulses like synapses that can travel short distances. All the units in one of those lumps we’ve encountered are acting together, like the cells of one brain. The bigger the conglomeration, the smarter it is.”

“And what about the dinosaurs?”

Klicks’s eyes were still closed, as though he were listening to an internal voice. “Well, without the low gravity caused by the Hets, dinosaurian giantism wouldn’t have occurred. But, beyond that, the Hets have done some direct genetic tinkering recently, fine-tuning existing dinosaurs to be better suited for war. For instance, natural ceratopsians, like Chasmosaurus, had neck frills that were only for bluffing displays. They were just outlined in bone, with skin stretched across. That wasn’t suitable for real battle, so the Hets tweaked them into the genus Triceratops, filling in the open spaces to produce a solid shield of bone.”

“Okay, time for Final Jeopardy: who are the Hets fighting?”

“Good Christ! It is the natives of Tess.” Klicks looked away. “I—I mean of the belt planet.”

“Really? And what’s this garbage about the Martian civilization being a hundred and thirty million years old?”

Klicks looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then his eyes opened wide in astonishment. “The civilization of the viral Martians did arise that long ago, back in what we’d call the early Jurassic. Ten thousand years later—nothing on the scale we’re talking about—they put up the gravity suppressor satellites around Earth. Since the satellites can control gravity, their orbits never decay, and they’re solar-powered, so they never run out of energy. They have indeed been in stationary orbit around Earth for one hundred and thirty million years now.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. The Het technology is clearly more advanced than ours is, but it’s centuries, maybe even tens of centuries, ahead of us, not a hundred-odd million years. I mean, the rosette-makers, whoever they are, they might have a million-plus-year-old civilization, given that they can move stars around, but the Hets aren’t anywhere near that advanced.”

“That’s right,” said Klicks, and then his face clouded. “Oh, shit, of course they left the dinosaurs alone until very recently. The Hets, the Hets died out, almost completely. It’s—” Klicks was shaking slightly. “It’s horrible. God, the destruction.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then staggered toward his crash couch and held onto it for support. “Brandy, you were right. The Martians are inherently violent. They seethe with the need to conquer.”

His breathing was growing ragged; his eyes were haunted, darting. “The original viral globs lived as parasites within different types of Martian animals. But eventually the viruses developed intelligence. They wanted to enslave creatures that had manipulatory appendages. In the Martian seas, there was a creature that looked kind of like a hand—five tubular extensions coming out of one side of a central disk. At the ends of each of their five finger-like tubes, the creatures had circles of extruded iron filaments controlled by sphincter muscles. They’d evolved these appendages to pop open a type of Martian shellfish, but the ancestral Hets enslaved the Hands and used the iron filaments as general manipulators.”

Klicks’s head was shaking back and forth, but he seemed unaware that he was doing it. “Eventually the Hands built spaceships for the Hets, ships that moved by polarizing gravity. The Hets visited Earth and the belt planet. On both, they found animal life that might indeed develop intelligence someday. The belt world was small enough for the Hets and their Hands to move around comfortably, but Earth was much too massive. A project was begun to—to marsiform Earth, to make it Mars-like and habitable. The first step was the installation of the gravity-suppressor satellites; as I said, they went into orbit a hundred and thirty million years ago.

“These early Hets saw, hanging there in their southern sky, the rosette, the cluster of arranged suns—yes, it’s that old. They knew there were other creatures out there, somewhere. And they hated that fact—hated that there were minds that they couldn’t reach, couldn’t enslave. The Hets assumed that any intelligence would be as violent as their own, so they forced the Hands to build war machines, ready to meet the rosette-makers whom they felt were bound to come and try to conquer them.”

Klicks’s arms were trembling as he spoke. His voice had gone hoarse; sweat appeared on his brow.

“The Hands were small creatures, far too puny to accommodate enough viral material to constitute a very astute slaver mind. And the Hand children were far too small to contain any meaningful concentration of Het viruses and therefore couldn’t be controlled at all. At last, the Hand children turned the war machines their parents had been forced to build against the entire planet. The holocaust was incredible. It wiped out almost all life, including every last one of the Hands and most of the proto-Hets. Both Hand child and Hand adult preferred death to a life of enslavement.”

Klicks’s fists were clenching and unclenching like beating hearts. I went to the tap and got him a Dixie cup full of water. He downed it in one gulp. “Mars was left almost completely barren after that uprising,” he said. “Without animal vehicles, the viruses were scattered and lost their capacity for intelligence, although the memories of all this were still stored in their RNA. Earth was left unattended, the gravity-suppressor satellites still running.

“On Mars, something like forty million years—correction: eighty million Earth years—passed before the viral life re-evolved into intelligent creatures, the current Hets. But the Hands had done their job well: the only animal life left on Mars was microscopic.” He shuddered, his shoulders rising and falling with his ragged breath. “The Hets,” he continued, “developed a remarkable bioengineering technology. Viruses, of course, have the innate ability to substitute their genetic material for the native DNA in a cell. Well, the Hets took that a step further. They can selectively substitute nucleotide strings, manufacturing replacement genetic instructions and snipping and splicing at will. They used this ability to directly modify animal DNA. Still, it took them almost fifty million Earth years to evolve new hosts large enough to use as vehicles. But this time out, the Hets resolved to use only biological devices that had to be controlled mentally; never again would they use machines that might be seized by their slaves and used against them.

“At last, intelligence did develop in the natives of Tess.” He was so lost in the story that he wasn’t censoring himself anymore. “The Hets set out to enslave those creatures, too. They returned to Tess in their living spaceships and began a terrible war against the natives, a war that still rages on.”

Klicks was shaking from head to toe, like a man on an adrenaline high, rage coursing through his system. “God, Brandy, I feel like killing—something. Anything. Everything. It’s such a strong urge, such a primal impulse with them. It’s—” He bolted across the room, grabbed a red metal tool chest off the worktable, and heaved it through the air. It smashed against the curving bulkhead, pliers and screwdrivers and wrenches clanging to the floor. Klicks breathed in and out deeply, his eyes closed.

“Miles?”

He looked at me, a hint of calm returning to his face. “God, that felt good.” A pause. “I’m in control now, I think. Do me a favor: don’t ask me any more questions about the Hets. Even the memory of their hatred for life is enough to drive you out of your skull.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve—”

Something funny about the light levels from outside—

I started to turn—

Wham!

The Sternberger shook under a tremendous impact, the hull reverberating, the sound of water in the partially empty tank beneath our feet slapping in a giant wave against one side of the timeship. I staggered, trying to keep my balance. Through the glassteel over the radio console, I could see something dark and gray, like a flying wall, pulling back, farther and farther, bits of sky now visible above it, the brown of the mud plain starting to peek out below it, the gray wall retracting more and more…

A tail. A dinosaur tail. The part that had connected with the timeship was almost twice as high as a man. The tail was flattened from side to side, a giant tapering structure covered with wrinkled gray leather. It was still pulling back and back, until finally the creature it belonged to was fully visible.

A sauropod, a member of that giant quadrupedal group typified by what most people still called Brontosaurus, standing out there on the mud plain, perpendicular to the crater wall, its elongated tail balanced by a similarly long neck rising up and up into the sky, ending in a tiny block-shaped head. In between neck and tail, a vast gray torso like the Goodyear blimp supported by massive column-like legs…

Sauropods were rare in the Upper Cretaceous, and none had ever been found in Alberta—too wet for them, according to one school of thought. Still, at this time there was Alamosaurus in New Mexico, Antarctosaurus, Argyrosaurus, Laplatasaurus, Neuquensaurus, and Titanosaurus in Argentina, and a handful of others in China, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. I supposed that if the Hets needed a living crane, flying one in presented no problem for them. Although they’d been nicknamed thunder lizards, sauropods had massively padded feet. This one, despite its size, had obviously had no trouble sneaking up on us.

The tail had finished pulling back and now was reversing its course, slicing through the air toward us, zooming in to dominate the view out the window—

The first impact clearly had been just a warm-up. Klicks and I went flying when the tail connected with full force. He landed in a heap by his crash couch; I ended up smashing into the washroom door panel. I tried to rise to my feet and looked over at Klicks, who was bracing himself against the fake wood-grain molding around the edges of the radio console. His eyes were closed as he listened to that inner voice once more. “They’re going to take our timeship one way or another,” he said.