End of an Era

Countdown: 15

Martians.

I’d had a hard enough time typing the words “time travel.” But tapping out M-A-R-T-I-A-N-S seemed like asking for a trip to the funny farm. I guess there really are more things in heaven and earth, Brandio, than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

It was close to noon, the hot Mesozoic sun beating down from a silvery-blue sky intermittently visible through gaps in the thick foliage above us. Insects buzzed everywhere, and I kept batting my arms to disperse them.

The three troodons were close enough that I could smell the stench of raw meat on their breath. Their pebbly green skin was almost iridescent in the bright sunlight and their giant yellow eyes reflected back so much light they almost seemed to glow.

“Martians,” I said softly—the word came easier to the tongue than it does to the fingertips. “Incredible.”

The lead troodon, Diamond-snout, did its patented one-two blink. “Thank you,” it rasped, speaking for the Martian jelly creature within its skull.

“But what are you doing here?” I asked.

The elongated green head tilted to one side. “Talking to you.”

“No—I mean, what are you doing here, in general? Why did you come to Earth?”

“Come to? Pass out of unconsciousness? No link.”

I shook my head. “What was the purpose of your trip to Earth?”

“Purpose not changed,” said Diamond-snout pointedly. “Still is.”

“Okay, okay. What is the purpose of your trip to Earth?”

“Me first,” said the troodon. “What your purpose?”

I sighed. There seemed to be little point in telling the thing that it was violating Miss Manners’s rules of etiquette. Klicks, standing about a meter away from me, and not taking his eyes off the silent troodon closest to him, answered. “We’re scientists. Does that—link? Scientists. Ones whose profession is the quest for knowledge. We came here to discover what we could about the ancient past. We’re particularly interested in the event at the boundary between—”

“—in studying the lifeforms of this time,” I said, cutting him off, a sudden wave of caution overtaking me. It seemed a good idea not to mention right off that most of the life on this world was about to be destroyed.

“Ah!” crowed Diamond-snout, evidently unperturbed by my having interrupted Klicks. “We are colleges.” It looked down, then did that strange one-two blink again. “No, colleagues. We, too, came to this place because of the life here.”

“One small slither for Martian,” said Klicks, “one giant leap for Martiankind.”

“No link,” said the Martian through the troodon’s mouth.

Klicks looked at the ground. “Me neither,” he said.

“ ‘Martian’ means of or pertaining to Mars?” asked Diamond-snout, turning its attention back to me. When finished speaking, it left its narrow jaws hanging open, showing serrated teeth.

“Yes,” I said.

“There are things of or pertaining to Mars that we do not wish to be lumped together with.” Given the plastic nature of the Martians, I wondered if “lumped together” meant the same thing to them as it did to me.

“What should we call you, then?”

“When we occupy creatures with versatile speaking orifices, the term we use for what we are is Hhhet.” It sounded more like a throat-clearing than an English word.

“Het it is,” I said.

Klicks threw up his hands. “Martian, Het, what difference does it make? Brandy, we have to talk.”

“Talk?” said the Het.

“Confer,” I said.

“What have pine trees to do with this?” said the Het.

“Confer,” I said. “Not conifer.”

“Oh,” the Het said. “A chitchat.”

“Exactly.”

“But is that not what we are now having?” it said. “A tit-to-tit?”

“A tete-a-tete,” I corrected. “Professor Jordan means he’d like to talk to me alone.”

“Alone?”

“In private.”

The troodon blinked. “No link.”

I pointed back the way we’d come. “Our time machine is back that way. May we return to it?”

“Ah,” said Diamond-snout. “Yes, we wish to see it.”

The three troodons stepped slightly away from us, and we started walking south. Klicks bent over to scoop up his elephant rifle. The one troodon that had been doing all the talking tipped its head at the rifle. “A weapon?” it hissed.

“Kind of,” said Klicks.

“Not very efficient.”

“Best we could afford,” he said.

We came out of the forest and onto the mud plain. Ahead of us was the soft dirt crater made by the Sternberger’s impact and, high on the west side of the crater wall, the Sternberger itself, indeed looking like a hamburger or a TV flying saucer. Sticking up from the center of its roof was the small instrumentation dome.

“If this is a time vessel,” rasped Diamond-snout, “then assume do I that it will return to where it came from. Conservative?”

“Conservative?” I said, completely lost.

Klicks grinned. “He means ‘right’ I think.”

The troodon’s head bobbed. “Right. You will return to origin, right?”

“That’s right,” said Klicks. “The time-displacement effect will hold us back here for"—he consulted his watch—"almost exactly three more days, then, like reeling in a fish, we’ll be hauled back to our launch point.”

“It happens aut-o-mat-ic-al-ly?” asked the troodon.

“Yes,” I said. “The actual Huang Effect apparatus is located in the future. There aren’t any moving parts or controls within our timeship related to time travel, except for the stasis-field unit. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Enough,” said the troodon, but exactly how I was supposed to take that, I couldn’t say. “And where is launch point?”

“Oh, it’s right here,” Klicks said. “We call this area the Red Deer River valley in our time. It’s pretty rough territory.”

“And all your time-travel missions are launched from there?”

“Actually,” Klicks said, “time travel is quite new to us. Ours is the first crewed mission back to here.”

“Is Earth muchly different in your time?” asked the troodon.

“It is,” Klicks said. “Mammals, not reptiles, dominate. The climate is cooler, the continents are more dispersed, the land is drier, and the seasons are more pronounced. And, perhaps most interesting of all, the gravity is maybe two and half times what it is now.”

The troodon’s neck weaved in an odd swooping motion. “What did you say?”

“Crazy, isn’t it?” I said. “The gravity on Earth seems to double or triple over the next sixty-five million years.”

“That is most peculiar, Dr. Brandon Thackeray whose friends call him Brandy.”

“It is indeed. We can’t account for it.”

There was no way to read the troodon’s expressionless face. Indeed, it seemed to go limp, its muscles relaxing as if the Het within was distracted, lost in its own thoughts. “Higher gravity, say you. Intriguing. Tell me: what is Mars like in your time?”

Klicks was about to answer the creature’s question, but I jumped in quickly: “I’ve never been there.”

We’d reached the crumbling crater wall. I noted with astonishment that tiny green shoots had already appeared in the freshly turned soil. Another irrelevant thought hit me. I felt like I was out on a date and that we’d arrived back at the woman’s home. It was that awkward moment where you find out if you’re going to get invited in. Except that the Sternberger was my home, and the Hets were the too-tenacious escorts who didn’t seem to be getting the hint that it was time for them to say their good-byes.

Finally the Het said, quite bluntly, “Show us the inside.”

Klicks was about to roll out the goddamned red carpet for them, but I cut him off. “Certainly. And we’d like to see inside your spaceships. But not just now, please. Professor Jordan and I have some matters of personal hygiene to attend to, and humans require privacy to do that.”

“Privacy,” it said again. “Being … alone?”

“That’s right.”

“A strange concept.”

I shrugged. “It’s important to us.”

Diamond-snout looked at me, its head tilted in that gesture I associated with puzzlement. “Oh,” it said at last—or maybe it was just a reptilian throat-clearing. “Well, we will speak again.” A pause. “Soon.” The three dinosaurs strode away, back into the forest.

Klicks and I scrambled up the crater wall. It had been a heck of a lot easier getting down than it was going back up, even in the lighter gravity. I practically filled my boots with soft dirt in the process.

Once we were alone inside the cramped confines of the Sternberger’s semicircular habitat, Klicks sprawled out on his crash couch, fingers interlaced behind his head, and said, “Well, what do you make of that?”

I hated the man’s infinite calmness. He had to be as excited as I was. Why didn’t he show it? Why did I have to show it so transparently? “This is incredible,” I said, and instantly regretted my hyperbole.

“Incredible,” said Klicks, savoring the word, or, more precisely, savoring my use of it. “Yes, that it is. This changes everything, of course.”

“How do you mean?”

He gave me one of those looks, the ones he saved for times when he thought the person he was talking to was a little on the slow side. “I mean about our mission. The discovery of the Hets is more important than any paleontological research we were going to do.”

I felt anger growing within me. Nothing was more important than dinosaurs, as far as I was concerned. “We’ve got a job to do,” I said, as evenly as I could.

“Oh, yes indeed,” said Klicks, unlacing his fingers. “We have to bring the Hets forward in time, of course.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Think about it, man. By our time, Mars is dead. Completely abiologic. Every probe since Viking has confirmed that.”

“So?”

“So something wipes out the Hets between now and then. We’ve got the opportunity to jump the ones that are here forward, past whatever event kills them. We can repopulate Mars.”

“We can’t do that,” I said. My head was pounding.

“Sure we can. You saw how small those Het slimeballs are. We could take back hundreds of them. It’s just a question of balance. Once we empty our water tank, we’ll have plenty of room and a big mass deficit that we’ll have to fill with something before the Huang Effect switches states. It might as well be the Hets.”

“We were going to bring forward some biological specimens. Maybe even a small dinosaur. They’ve got a habitat all set at the Calgary Zoo—”

“We can do that, too. They’re not mutually exclusive propositions.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, trying to buy time to think. This was all happening much too quickly. “Maybe it’s not our place to do something like that. I mean, we’d be playing God—”

Klicks rolled his eyes as though I’d said something incalculably stupid. “Jesus, man, what do you think bringing home a baby Ornithomimus would be? After all, they’re extinct, too.”

“But this is intelligent life. It just seems—”

“Seems that we should ignore it? Brandy, how would you feel if the shoe was on the other—the other pseudopod? Some natural disaster wipes out all of good old H. sap. Wouldn’t you want some guy to play Noah for us? We can prevent the extinction of a—what’s that word the science-fiction writers use?—a sentient lifeform.”

He mispronounced it, saying it as three distinct syllables. “That’s sen-shent,” I said. “It rhymes with quotient.”

“What the hell difference does that make? I’m talking about a bold, sweeping move and you’re going all picayune on me.”

“Details matter. Besides, we don’t have to decide this thing ourselves; we’re just the test mission. When they send the big multinational mission next year, they can haul the Hets forward, if it seems the right thing to do.”

“Point-five-oh,” said Klicks.

This time I failed his little test. I looked at him blankly. “What?”

“The Huang Effect has a 50 percent uncertainty, thanks to the parts of the Throwback calculations that are quantum mechanical. The chances of the big timeship hitting even this same century are minuscule.” Klicks shook his head. “No, my friend. No one else can make the decision. This is it, the one and only opportunity to save the Hets from extinction.”

My throat felt dry. “But doubtless eventually another mission will hit this particular time. Maybe not one from the twenty-first century, or even the twenty-second. But eventually.”

Klicks scowled, his one continuous eyebrow bunching like a knotted shoelace. “Haven’t you been reading the papers? Ever since Derzhavin was assassinated by those resurgent hardliners, things have gotten a lot worse between the Americans and the Russians. And even if they do work their differences out, if the global warming trend continues, we’re not going to have enough food to feed ourselves. I wouldn’t count on there being anyone left by the twenty-second century.”

“Oh, things aren’t that bad,” I said weakly.

“Perhaps not. But it’s unfair to the Hets for us to assume that humanity will eventually get around to dealing with their plight sometime in the distant future. We’ve got to help them right now, while we’re sure we can.”

“It’s a moral decision,” I said, shaking my head.

Klicks frowned. “And you hate making moral decisions.”

“ ‘Hate’ is a strong word—”

“You don’t have a stand on abortion or capital punishment. Hell, you haven’t voted in, what, twenty years?”

I despised the sound of his voice. I’d never had any trouble refuting Klicks’s claims in print, taking hours to mold letters of response for the journals, but face-to-face he could always run circles around me. “But this isn’t a decision we’re competent to make.”

“I feel up to it.” Klicks grinned broadly, but it quickly slipped into a patronizing smile. “Brandy, failing to act is a decision in and of itself.”

He’s been reading my diary, I thought briefly, but immediately rejected the idea. It was password-protected on my palmtop, and I’m twenty times the programmer Klicks is. Although he’s doubtless seen me tapping away at the keyboard, there’s no way he could have accessed the file. Still, those words, those cruel words—

Failing to act is a decision in and of itself.

Dr. Schroeder had said that to me when I talked to him about my father.

Failing to act…

“It’s not a decision I’m comfortable making,” I said at last, my head swimming.

Klicks shrugged, then settled back into the contours of his crash couch. “Life isn’t always comfortable.” He looked me straight in the eye. “I’m sorry, Brandy, but the great moral decision is up to you and me.”

“But—”

“No buts, my friend. It’s up to us.”

I was about to object again, when suddenly, 65 million years before the invention of Jehovah’s Witnesses, of Avon Ladies, of nosy neighbors, there was a knock at the door.