End of an Era (2 page)

You pays your money, you takes your chances. We had contingency plans for every possible outcome of the drop: what to do if we landed in water; if we landed upside down; if we couldn’t get the door open; if for some reason we came out of stasis too early and were damaged on impact. But the worst of all, really, was if we landed at night, because for that the contingency plan was simply to wait until morning.

My crash couch was swiveled to face the
Sternberger
’s curving outer wall. A glassteel window was built into it, giving a full 180-degree panorama. Everything outside was dark. Actually it wasn’t quite night: it just took my eyes a minute to adjust. More like twilight, really. Klicks must have been thinking the same thing, because he whistled the DOO-doo-DOO-doo signature from that old Rod Serling TV series.

"It’s almost sunrise," I said, unstrapping myself, the aluminum buckle opening with a clang. I rushed over to stand in front of the radio console and peered out of the center of our window.

"And the glass is half-full," replied Klicks, also getting to his feet.

"Huh?" I hated his little tests — cryptic phrases designed to see just how much on the ball you were.

He came over and stood near me. We both peered into the darkness. "You’re an optimist, Brandy. I think it’s just past sunset."

I pointed to my left. "That part of the window was facing east when the Sikorsky dropped us."

He shook his head. "Makes no difference. We could have corkscrewed as we fell, or bounced on impact."

"There’s one way to tell." I walked back to the straight rear wall of the habitat. I paused for a second to peer through the little window in door number two, the one that led into our Jeep’s garage. The garage door was made out of glassteel panels, so it was completely transparent. I should have been able to see outside past the Jeep, but it seemed pitch-black. Oh, well. I opened the middle of the three equipment lockers and rummaged around until I found a compass. It was pretty beat-up, the veteran of many field expeditions. I brought it over to Klicks.

"No good," he said, not bothering to look at the compass’s dial. "It’ll only show us the north-south line; it won’t tell us which is which."

I was about to say "Huh?" again, but after a second, I realized what Klicks was getting at. The polarity of Earth’s magnetic field reverses periodically. We’d been aiming for about a third of the way down into 29R, a half-million-year-long chron of reversal that straddled the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary during which the magnetic north pole was located near the geographic south pole. If we’d hit our target, the colored end of our compass needles would be facing south. But the Huang Effect’s uncertainty was big enough that we might have landed well into the more recent 29N chron of normal orientation, or maybe just into the top of the more ancient SON. If we’d landed in either of those, the colored end would be facing north instead. Klicks knew there’d be no easy way to tell, except by looking at the sun, which of course would still rise in the east and set in the west. Until we could see if it was getting brighter or darker along the glowing horizon to our right, we wouldn’t know if it was dawn or dusk.

Except — hah!
Got him
. I looked at the compass dial, holding it very steady. The needle agitated for a few beats, then came to rest. "You can’t tell which one is north," Klicks said.

"Yes I can," I said. "The end of the needle that dips down is pointing to the closest magnetic pole, following the curving lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. Even with continental drift, the north pole will still be the closest."

Klicks grunted, impressed. "And which end is tipped down?"

"The unpainted one. The polarity is indeed reversed. So the good news is that we are indeed in 29R, and that
that
way" — I pointed back toward the flat rear wall — "is true north, toward the Arctic rather than the Antarctic."

"And the bad news," said Klicks, "is that it really is nightfall."

That wasn’t going to dampen my spirits. I continued to peer through the glassteel window. Its central part was facing south. It was hard to make out exactly what we were seeing at first, but slowly our eyes irised open.

We weren’t on flat ground. Rather, we seemed to be perched high up on a mound of dirt. A crater wall. Of course: while we had been in stasis, the
Sternberger
had plummeted out of the sky and evidently had hit some very soft material — mud or loose soil, perhaps. The shock of the impact had formed a crater with a diameter of thirty meters or so — six times as wide as the timeship itself. But the
Sternberger
had hit with enough force that it had bounced up out of the bottom of the crater and had plunked down here, high on the east side of the donut-shaped crater wall.

God, this was exciting. The past.
The past
. I felt light-headed, almost dizzy — practically floating. My heart pounded, an increasingly rapid one-two rhythm like a drummer warming up.

It would be folly to go outside in the dark. Who knew what creatures had been attracted by our explosive arrival? Still, until we actually saw a dinosaur, or some other piece of strictly Mesozoic life, we wouldn’t know for sure that we’d arrived before the great extinction. Klicks and I moved to our right, away from the view of the crater wall.

To the south was a lake, looking like a vast pool of blood under the pink sky, its still surface broken at the perimeter by bulrushes, reeds, water lilies, and duckweeds. Straight ahead, running to the rose-colored western horizon, was a wide expanse of dried mud, cracked into a brown hexagonal mosaic, each piece curling up at the edges like a dead leaf. Dotting this mud plain were the ragged, ropy stumps of bald cypress trees, twisting and writhing toward the sky like tormented souls.

We both moved to the back wall. Klicks looked through the window in door number one, which led to the access ramp and ladder. He could see out the glassteel inlay in the main door. I looked through the window in door number two again. Although it was actually darker than when I’d first peered through here, my eyes had adjusted and I could see out better. Directly north, appearing almost like a wall, was a forest of broad-leaved deciduous trees, their upper branches intertwining about twenty-five meters up to form a thick canopy. Mixed in with these were a lesser number of bald cypresses and some eucalyptus-like evergreens. Some of the cypresses poked through the canopy like leafy flagpoles, stretching up an additional twenty-five meters.

With this backwoods-of-Louisiana setting, it certainly looked like the late Mesozoic, but I still harbored a fear that we’d arrived in the early Cenozoic, missing the dinosaurs altogether. We’d have to make the most of this trip, regardless of when we had landed — but with nothing over twenty kilograms surviving the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the lower Paleocene was just plain boring.
Damn the Huang Effect and its half-percent uncertainty!

"Look!" shouted Klicks. He’d moved back to the main curving wall, standing over our mini-lab and looking west. I hurried over to stand next to him and sighted along the khaki sleeve of his outstretched arm, following the cracked mud plain out to where it met the sky. A large object was moving at the horizon, silhouetted against the red glow of twilight.

Nothing over twenty kilos … This
was
the Mesozoic. It had to be! I dashed back to the equipment lockers and grabbed two pairs of binoculars, hurried back to the window, gave one pair to Klicks, fumbled the leather case for mine open, sent lens caps flipping through the air like tossed poker chips, and brought the eyepieces to my face. A dinosaur. Yes, by God, a dinosaur! Bipedal. A duckbill, perhaps? No. Something much more exciting. A theropod, stomping around on its hind legs like Godzilla pounding through Tokyo.

"A tyrannosaur," I said reverently, looking over at Klicks.

"Ugly mother, ain’t he?"

I gritted my teeth. "He’s beautiful."

And he was. In this wan light, he looked dark red, as if he had no skin and we were seeing the blood-soaked musculature directly. He had a giant warty head atop a thick neck; a barrel-shaped torso; tiny, almost delicate forelimbs; a thick, endless tail; corded, muscular legs; and bird-like triple-clawed feet. A perfectly designed killing machine.

We were getting the whole thing on video, of course. Each of us wore a Sony MicroCam, hooked into a digital recording system. The only flaw was that we had no way to play the imagery back until we returned to the future.

Suddenly a second tyrannosaur came into view. This one was slightly larger than the first. My heart skipped a beat. Would they fight? Animals that big, needing that much food, might well be territorial. How I wanted to see such a battle firsthand, instead of having to piece it together from mute bones. What a spectacle it would be! I felt buoyant, light as a feather.

The two hunters faced each other for a moment — an incredible tableau, straight out of a Charles Knight painting, a pair of multi-ton carnivores squaring off for a battle to the death. The smaller of the two opened its massive jaws and even at this distance the thing’s sharp teeth were visible, giving a ragged, torn-paper look to the edge of the mouth.

But they did not fight. As one, both turned away from the twilight. A third tyrannosaur was arriving, this one even larger than the first two. It was followed seconds later by a fourth and a fifth. Each walked with a stooped gait, its body swinging forward from wide hips, the massive head balanced by the long, thick tail.

A pair of dark hills near the tyrant lizards shook and I realized that these were yet two more tyrannosaurs flopped on their bellies. They pushed with their hind legs, their tiny two-fingered forelimbs digging into the dirt, channeling the force of those mighty thighs into lifting their torsos instead of sliding them across the ground. Slowly the beasts rose to standing postures. One threw its head back and let loose a low roar that I felt even this far away through the metal walls of the
Sternberger
. Seven mighty carnosaurs banding together? It was inconceivable to me that there was any prey powerful enough to require these great hunters to combine forces into a pack.

By now it was getting darker. There were only a couple of dozen dinosaur genera left at the close of the Cretaceous, so identifying the genus, even in this light, was easy:
Tyrannosaurus
. Given this was Alberta, the species was probably mighty
T. rex
itself, but these were too small to be full-grown females; most of them were probably juveniles, the different sizes representing different hatching seasons, although the biggest might be an adult male. Amazing -

And then suddenly they began to move.

Toward us.

With purposeful strides, the largest of the seven headed toward our timeship, followed in single file by the others. They marched in unison, seven massive left legs pounding the ground, seven bodies tilting to the south, then seven right feet swinging forward, seven loaf-shaped heads tipping to the north. Left, right, south, north, like soldiers in rank and file. Cycads and ferns were pulped underfoot. Tiny creatures that had been hiding in the foliage — too dark to see precisely what they were — scampered out of the way.

It made no sense, this orderly procession of dragons. Granted, some fossil evidence suggested that certain dinosaurs had complex social hierarchies, but this goose-stepping was bizarre — a nightmare parade.

I thought briefly about the strength of the
Sternberger
’s walls. When locked in stasis, the ship was indestructible. But just sitting here, it was little more than a tin can. And tyrannosaur jaws could bite through steel.

As the seven hunters made their way closer to us, I saw through the binoculars that their bloody coloring wasn’t just a trick of the twilight. They really were dark reddish brown, their skin a tightly packed matrix of round beads like Indian corn. Beneath each massive mandible a loose sack of skin, perhaps a dewlap, waggled back and forth. Their tiny double-clawed forearms, looking withered and useless, bounced like drumsticks against their massive guts.

When the reptiles got within thirty meters of us, they broke formation. The lead tyrannosaur headed to our right. The next went to our left, and so on, alternating, except for the last of the procession, who just stopped where it was, the tip of its tail swishing back and forth.

The beasts who had been near the front of the caravan tried to continue around back, but they seemed flummoxed by the crater wall upon which we were perched. One of them attempted scaling the steep sides, but its tiny forearms were useless for gaining purchase. The tyrannosaurs, now simply black shadows moving against the night, regarded us. They were apparently trying to make sense out of the squat metal disk that had invaded their stomping ground.

After a few minutes, the one who had tried to climb the wall backed off about twenty-five meters. It growled, a low, resonant thrumming, then ran forward, its legs pumping up and down like pistons. The creature’s momentum, two tons of angry inertia, carried it up the crater wall toward us. The mass of blood-colored flesh hit hard, right in front of my face, the impact causing the
Sternberger
to teeter backward. The glassteel of the window deformed where the creature had hit, losing some of its transparency. The massive warty head, jaws snapping like castanets, tried to lock onto our hull. Serrated teeth, many of them fifteen centimeters long, scraped the glassteel with a sound like a dentist’s drill. Several, presumably the ones that had been ready to shed anyway, popped from their sockets and went flying. Finally, unable to find anything to hold onto, the tyrannosaur slipped backward, stumbling down the crumbling crater wall to join its kin.

Then, just as they had come, they left, marching in single file back into the night, the pounding of their footfalls continuing long after they had faded from view. Overhead, in a sky clearer and blacker than any known to Earth after the Industrial Revolution, the Milky Way shone like a river of diamonds.