End of an Era (4 page)

Really, many paleontologists see two separate issues. One is what caused the interesting geology at the K-T boundary — there’s a clay layer rich in iridium there. The other is what caused the extinctions. The geology may or may not have anything to do with the dyings.

Klicks believed the asteroid had killed off the dinosaurs; I vehemently disagreed. I wasn’t even convinced that Chicxulub was the source of the iridium layer; like Officer and Drake, I think it’s mostly volcanic in origin. Yes, iridium is rare on the surface of the Earth but plentiful in some kinds of meteors. But Earth does have the same iridium content as most rocky bodies in the solar system; ours is just fractionated into the deep mantle. There’s lots of evidence for volcanism at the end of the Cretaceous. The Deccan Traps in India, for instance, represent at least one million cubic kilometers of basalt that date from the K-T boundary. And volcanic material shows the same concentrations of arsenic and antimony found in the boundary-layer clay, concentrations that are three orders of magnitude greater than what’s normally associated with meteorites.

Indeed, the largest known impact craters on Earth, including the huge crater remnant off Nova Scotia, show no evidence of iridium deposition. Comets, sometimes named as an alternative culprit, are even less likely: there’s no direct evidence at all for iridium in cometary material.

Klicks and I had argued these issues many times in person, in print, and once when I was visiting scholar at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, where Klicks worked, on a phone-in show on the local community-access cable-TV channel. Klicks had been adamant during that debate: the impact of an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs. It was clear by the calls we got that those members of the public who didn’t have their own crackpot theories almost exclusively sided with Klicks. They wanted to know what all the fuss was about; hadn’t this issue been settled years ago? Everybody knew an asteroid impact had wiped out the dinosaurs.

Well, we were here.

And we were going to find out, one way or another.

I’ve been keeping this diary for years, and tonight, the most exciting of my life, I’m certainly not going to miss making an entry. Someday perhaps I’ll turn these notes into a book about our voyage (editing out the private stuff, of course), so I think I’ll add a little more background detail than usual.

I typed silently in the dark on my Toshiba palmtop for about an hour, its keyclick shut off and the brightness of its screen turned way down so as not to bother Klicks. When I was done, I swallowed the silver sleeping caplet dry.

Soon morning would be here. Soon we would step out into the Mesozoic.

Klicks always took his vacations in Toronto. Partly it was because his parents, both in their seventies, still lived there. Partly it was because his sister and her two sons, whom Klicks doted on, lived just east of the city in Pickering. And partly, I liked to think anyway, it was because he enjoyed spending time with Tess and me — although he did always turn down our invitations to stay at the house, preferring his sister’s luxury condo overlooking Lake Ontario.

But the main reasons for his frequent trips to the mighty T.O. were the culture and the food, both as good as New York’s. Klicks relished the finer things, and there weren’t a lot of them in Drumheller, Alberta. Tonight we were going to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest musical,
Robinson Crusoe
, touted by the critics as his best since
Phantom of the Opera
. Even the most pathetic road company of a major show like that wouldn’t make it out to a small town in the middle of the Prairies.

It was an 8:00 p.m. curtain. That gave us time for a leisurely dinner at Ed’s Egalitarian, the new hot spot in the heart of the theater district.

"I hate menus like this," I said, my eyes running up and down the three panels of steaks, poultry, seafood, salads, and soups. "Too much selection. I never know what to order."

Tess, seated next to me, sighed that I-married-him-despite-his-faults sigh she was getting so good at as the years went by. "You do this every time we eat out. It’s not like you’re making a lifetime commitment." She gave me a playful poke in the belly. "Just pick something that isn’t too fattening."

That was sound advice. My weight usually started going up around Thanksgiving and continued to rise until the good weather came back in March. I always managed to take it off over the summer, and, if I was doing any fieldwork, I could get reasonably thin by late August, but right now I was up a good seven kilos. I glanced across the table at Klicks, who looked more like an athlete than a scientist, then turned my attention back to Tess. "What are you going to have?"

"The petite filet," she said.

"Hmmm. I just don’t know…"

Klicks looked up from his menu. "Well, while you agonize over what to eat, I’ve got some news."

Tess, always a devourer of any gossip, smiled that radiant smile of hers. "Really? What?"

"I’m moving to Toronto for a year. I’m taking my sabbatical at U of T."

It was a good thing that the waiter hadn’t yet brought us our drinks. Otherwise, I might have spluttered gin and tonic all over the fancy lace tablecloth. "You’re doing what?" I said.

"I’m going to be working with Singh in the geology department. He’s gotten a small grant from — what do they call it? Whatever that new, scaled-down thing that replaced NASA is. Anyway, the money’s to study satellite photographs. We’re going to see if a technique can be worked out for identifying fossiliferous locales from space, as a prelude to an eventual Mars excursion."

"If they ever get enough money together to do one," I said. "But, Christ — that might put you in line for the mission. I’d heard they were considering having a paleontologist go with them."

He made a dismissive motion with his hand. "It’s too early to speculate on that. Besides, you know what they say: the

reason Canadians have an inferiority complex is that we’re the only country that routinely has to lay off our astronauts."

I laughed, the better to hide my envy. "Lucky stiff."

Klicks smiled. "Yeah. But now we’ll be able to spend a lot more time together." He turned to my wife. "Tess, see what you can do about dumping Brandy."

"Ha ha," I said.

Our bow-tied waiter returned with our drinks, the aforementioned gin and tonic for me, an imported white wine for Klicks, and mineral water with a twist of lime for Tess. "Are you ready to order?" he asked in the requisite obscure European accent used by all waiters at Ed’s various restaurants.

"You go ahead," I said. "I’ll decide by the time he gets round to me."

"Madame?"

"A small Caesar salad, please, and the petite filet wrapped in bacon, rare."

"Very good. Sir?"

"To start," said Klicks, "the French onion soup — please make sure the cheese is cooked." He looked over at Tess. "And the lamb chop."

My heart skipped a beat. I wondered if he knew that "Lamb-chop" was my pet name for her. I tried never to use it in public, but I suppose I might have slipped from time to time.

"And for you, sir?" the waiter said to me.

"Hmmm."

"Come on, Brandy," said Tess.

"Yeah," I said. "The lamb chop sounds good. I’ll have the same thing as him."

"Good night, Dr. Thackeray."

" ‘Night, Maria. Try not to get soaked." Another strobing flash of lightning sent wild shadows sprinting around the room. Even when it wasn’t storming out, the Paleobiology offices at the Royal Ontario Museum were a wonderfully macabre place — especially in the evening after most of the lights had been turned off. Bones were everywhere. Here, a black
Smilodon
skull with fifteen-centimeter-long saber teeth. There, the curving brown claws of an ornithomimid mounted on a metal stand, poised as if ready to seize fresh prey. Sprawling across a table, the articulated yellow skeleton of a Pliocene crocodile. Scattered about: boxes of shark teeth, sorting trays with thousands of bone chips, a small cluster of fossil dinosaur eggs looking as though they were about to hatch, and plaster jackets containing heaven-only-knows-what brought back from the latest dig.

From outside, the claps of thunder were like dinosaur roars, echoing down the millennia.

This was my favorite time. The phones had stopped ringing and the grad students and volunteer catalogers had gone home. It was the one opportunity in the day for me to relax and get caught up on some of my paperwork.

And, when all that was done, I took my old Toshiba palmtop out of the locked drawer in my desk and wrote my daily entry in this diary. (I normally wouldn’t run a computer during an electrical storm, but my trusty Tosh was battery powered.) I executed a macro that jumped to the bottom of my diary file, inserted the current date — 16 February 2013 — boldfaced it, and typed a colon and two spaces. I was about to begin today’s write-up when my eyes were caught by the tail end of the previous entry.
I let my tears flow freely
, it said.

Huh?

I scrolled back a few pages.

My heart pounded erratically.

What the hell was this?

Where did this entry come from?

Living dinosaurs? A journey back through time? An attack by — ? Was this some kind of joke? If I ever found out who’d been messing with my diary, I’d kill him. I was so pissed off, I barely noticed that the freak lightning storm had stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun.

I jumped to the top of the document. I’d begun a new diary file on January 1, about six weeks ago, but this file started with a date only five days ago. Still, there were pages and pages of unfamiliar material here. I began to read from the beginning.

Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby ran in front of a car right outside my townhouse. Killed instantly.

Those weren’t my words. Where was my diary? How did this get here in its place? What the hell was going on?

And what’s this about Tess and Klicks — ? Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ…

Mesozoic sunlight shone through the glassteel window that ran around the curving rim of the
Sternberger
’s habitat, stinging my eyes and casting harsh shadows on the flat rear wall. I woke up still feeling strangely light-headed and buoyant. I looked around the semicircular chamber, but Klicks was nowhere to be found. The bastard had gone outside without me. I quickly shed my PJs, pulled on the same Tilley pants that I’d worn yesterday, fumbled into my shirt, jacket, and boots, and opened door number one, bounding down the little ramp that led to the outer hatch. Much to my surprise, I hit my head on the low ceiling as I went down the ramp. Rubbing my bruised pate, I opened the blue outer door panel and looked down at the crater wall. In the brown earth, I could clearly see the skid marks made by Klicks’s size twelves. To their right, there were giant triple-clawed tyrannosaur tracks, made by the beasts that had reconnoitered us last night. Also visible: tiny two-pronged marks made by the minuscule tyrannosaur finger-claws.

I took a deep breath and walked forward. The first step, as the saying goes, was a doozy. The hull of the
Sternberger
jutted out from the crater wall, and I fell close to a meter before my boots connected with the crumbly, moist soil. Still, it was a surprisingly gentle fall, and I skidded with ease down to the mud flat, brown clouds of dirt rising behind me. At the base of the crater, I fell back on my bum; a rather ignominious first step into the Cretaceous world.

It was hot, humid, and overgrown. The sun, just clearing the tops of the bald cypresses, was burning brighter than I’d ever experienced. I looked everywhere for a dinosaur, or any vertebrate, but there was none to be seen.

None, that is, except Klicks Jordan. He came bounding around from behind the crater wall, jumping up and down like a madman.

"Check this out, Brandy!" He crouched low, folding his knees to his chest, then sprang, the soles of his work boots clearing the dark soil by a meter. He did it again and again, leaping into the air, a demented rabbit.

"What the hell are you doing?" I said, irritated by his childishness and perhaps a little envious of his prowess. I certainly had never been able to jump that high.

"Try it."

"What?"

"Go ahead. Try it. Jump!"

"What’s gotten into you, Klicks?"

"Just do it, will you?"

The path of least resistance. I crouched down, my legs stiff from just having awoke, and bolted. My body went up, up, higher than I’d ever jumped before, then, more slowly, more gently than I’d ever experienced, it settled back to Earth, landing with a dull thud. "What the — ?"

"It’s the gravity!" said Klicks, triumphantly. "It’s less here — much less." He wiped sweat from his brow. "I estimate I weigh just over a third of what I normally do."

"I’ve felt light-headed since we arrived—"

"Me, too."

"But I thought it was just excitement at being here—"

"It’s more than that, my friend," said Klicks. "It’s the gravity. The actual fucking gravity. Christ, I feel like Superman!" He leapt into the air again, rising even higher than he had before.

I followed suit. He could still outjump me, but not by much. We were laughing like children in a playground. It was exhilarating, and the pumping adrenaline just boosted our abilities.

You can’t avoid building up some decent leg muscles doing fieldwork, but I’d never been particularly strong. I felt like I’d drunk some magic potion — full of energy, full of power. Alive!

Klicks set off leaping around the crater wall. I gave chase. The donut of dark, crumbling earth had been providing some shade, but we came out into the fierce sun as we moved around back. It took us several minutes of mad hopping to circumnavigate the thirty-meter-wide crater, returning to the part of the wall upon which the
Sternberger
was perched.

"That’s amazing," I said, catching my breath, my head swimming. "But what could possibly account for it?"

"Who knows?" Klicks sat down on the dried mud. Even in less than half a g, leaping up and down like an idiot is enough to tire you out. I crouched about ten meters away from him, wiping sweat from my soaked forehead. The heat was stifling. "I’ll tell you one thing
it
accounts for, though," said Klicks. "Giantism in dinosaurs. Matthew of the AMNH asked the question a century ago: if the elephant is the largest size our terrestrial animals can now manage, how could the dinosaur have grown so much larger? Well, we’ve got the answer now: they evolved in a lesser gravity.
Of course
they’re bigger!"

I saw in an instant that he was right. "It also explains the extensive vascularization in dinosaur bones," I said. Dinosaur bone is remarkably porous, which is part of the reason it fossilizes so well through permineralization. "They wouldn’t need as much bone mass to support their weight in a lower gravity."

"I thought that vascularization was because they might be warm-blooded," said Klicks, sounding genuinely curious. He was, after all, a geologist, not a biologist. "Haversian canals for calcium interchange, and all that."

"Oh, there’s probably a correlation there, too. But I’ve never bought the idea of warm-blooded brontosaurs, and even they have bones that look like Swiss cheese in cross section. I’m sure you’ve seen the studies that say they’d break their own legs if they tried to walk faster than three kilometers an hour. That figure assumed normal gravity, of course. And, say, speaking of odd bone structure — it never quite seemed possible to me that Archaeopteryx and the pterosaurs could really fly. Their skeletons are weak for normal gravity, but they should be more than adequate in this."

"Hmmm," said Klicks. "It does explain a lot, doesn’t it? We’ll have to have a good look at dinosaurian heat production while we’re here. I seem to remember that another argument in favor of warm-blooded dinosaurs was that their fossils have been found inside the Cretaceous Arctic Circle, where the nights would be months long."

"That’s right," I said. "The idea was that dinosaurs must be warm-blooded because they couldn’t have possibly migrated far enough to avoid the long nights."

"Hell," said Klicks, taking off his boot and shaking it upside down to get rid of a pebble that had found its way inside, "I could walk to here from the Arctic Circle in this gravity."

"Yeah," I said. "But I’d still like to know why the gravity is less. I guess the gravitational constant could have increased in value over time."

"That would mean it’s not much of a constant, then, wouldn’t it?"

"Well, I don’t know a lot of physics," I said, ignoring his smart-ass comment, "but didn’t Einstein more or less pull the value for G out of the air to get his equations to balance? We’ve only been measuring its value for a century, and measuring it precisely for only a few decades. A general tendency for it to increase over time might not have shown up yet."

"I suppose, although I’d expect to find—" Suddenly he fell silent, his head swinging around. "What was that?" he said.

"What?"

"Shhsh!"

He pointed to the deciduous forest, the sun now well above the trees. There was a rustling as something man-sized pushed aside fronds. I caught a flash of emerald in my peripheral vision. My heart began pounding and my mouth went dry. Could it be a dinosaur?

We didn’t have much of an armament. Hell, we didn’t have much of a budget. Someone had suggested we bring modern automatic assault weapons to protect ourselves, but no corporate donor came through with any of those — bad PR to be associated with killing animals, after all. All we had were a couple of old elephant guns, each holding two bullets at a time.

Klicks had brought his elephant gun with him when he’d come out this morning. It was propped up against the crater wall, about a dozen meters away. He sauntered over to it, casually picked it up, and motioned for me to follow. It took about forty seconds for us to reach the dense wall of trees. Pushing foliage aside with his hands, Klicks made his way into the forest. I was right behind him.

We heard the rustling again. Breath held tight, I strained to listen, scanning the dense growth for any sign of an animal. Nothing. Branches and leaves stood still, as if they, too, were frozen in anticipation. Seconds ticked by, heartbeats added up. Whatever it was must be nearby, either to my left or in front of me.

Suddenly in a flurry of motion the thick vegetation parted and a green bipedal dinosaur leapt into view, the top of its head coming to no more than the height of my shoulder.

It was a slender theropod, using a stiff, whip-thin tail held parallel to the ground to balance a horizontally carried torso. At the end of its darting neck was a head about the size and shape of a borzoi dog’s, drawn out and pointed. Two huge eyes, like yellow glass billiard balls, stared forward, their fields of vision overlapping, providing the kind of depth perception a predator needed. The creature opened its mouth, revealing small, tightly packed teeth, serrated like steak knives along their rear edges. Long, thin arms dangled in front of its body, the three-fingered hands ending in sickle claws. The animal flexed them in anticipation and I saw that the third finger was opposable to the other two digits. Bobbing and weaving its head, it cut loose a sticky sound like a person trying to kick up phlegm.

I recognized this creature in an instant:
Troodon
, long hailed as the most intelligent dinosaur, a carnivore armed not only with slashing claws and razor dentition but also with a hunter’s keen senses and — perhaps — with cunning. Although the best troodon skeletons were known from a time 5 million or more years before the end of the age of dinosaurs, fossil troodon teeth were found in beds right up to the close of the Cretaceous. These specimens were on the large side for troodon, but the shape of the skull was unmistakable.

Klicks had already brought up his elephant gun, its wooden butt resting against his shoulder. I don’t think he intended to fire unless the animal attacked, but he was aiming along the gun’s shaft, finger on the trigger. Suddenly he pitched forward. The gun went off, missing the troodon, the thunderclap of its report startling a flock of golden birds and a smaller number of white-furred pterosaurs into flight. A second troodon had kicked Klicks in the small of his back, its slender claws shredding the khaki material of his long-sleeved shirt. Two more troodons appeared from the brush. Each was hopping rapidly from foot to foot for balance, like shoeless boys on hot pavement. Klicks rolled over, trying madly to reach his gun. A three-clawed foot slammed into his chest, pinning him. The dinosaur let loose a sticky hiss, showering him with reptilian spit.

I ran toward Klicks and, approaching from the left side, brought my steel-toed boot up and under the creature, kicking it in the center of its yellow gut. I made no dent in the lean, muscular belly, but, much to my surprise, my kick lifted the thing clear off the ground. It must have massed less than thirty kilos and the reduced gravity magnified my strength. Freed, Klicks scrabbled for the gun again, his fingers clawing dirt.

The recipient of my kick turned on me, moving with surprising agility. I held my arms in front of my body, trying to grab its scrawny throat. Hands shooting forward in a green blur of motion, it seized my wrists with sickle digits. My spine arched back like a limbo dancer’s, trying to avoid the jaws at the end of that dexterous neck. The creature wasn’t built for fighting something more than twice its mass with muscles, such as they were, accustomed to more than double the gravity. I held my own for a good fifteen seconds.

Still gripping my arms, the troodon crouched low, folding its powerful hind legs beneath it, and kicked off the rich soil. The force of its leap knocked me backward and I hit the ground hard, rocks biting into my spine. Straddling my body, the crazed reptile arched its neck, opened its lipless mouth wide, exposing yellow knife-like teeth, and -

Kaboom!

Klicks had found his elephant gun and squeezed off a shot. He’d hit my attacker in the shoulder, sending the beast’s neck and head pinwheeling into the sky. Twin geysers of steaming blood shot from the torso’s severed carotid arteries. No longer balanced, the body tipped forward and the cavity of the open chest, sticky and wet, slammed into my face. Revolted, I rolled away, dirt clinging to the dinosaur blood that covered my face.

Klicks was taking a bead on another dancing troodon when the remaining two descended on him from opposite sides. One, balancing on its left leg, slashed out with its clawed right foot. The curving digits grasped the gun’s barrel. Using the leverage provided by its long, stiff tail, the dinosaur twisted the rifle free from Klicks’s hands and, with a deliberate movement, tossed it into the brush. In unison, it and its partner jumped on Klicks, pinning him to the ground again.

The remaining troodon, five meters away from me, crouched low, its slender legs folded at an acute angle. I had made it to my knees when it leapt, knocking the wind out of me with its impact. The creature stood over me, its long arms bent like less-than and greater-than signs. They reached forward, the crescent claws grabbing the sides of my head. If I’d made the slightest movement, those strong hands would have shredded my face, tearing my eyes from their sockets. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was going to die. Panic gripped me like a shrinking sweater, binding my chest, constricting my breathing. The drying blood on my cheeks cracked as my face contorted to scream my final scream.

But death did not come.

Something was happening to the troodon. Its face convulsed, the tip of its muzzle twitched, and, much to my amazement, sky-blue jelly, faintly phosphorescent, began to ooze from the dinosaur’s close-together nostrils. I watched in horror, unable to move, thinking that the creature must be allergic to my strange twenty-first-century biochemistry. I expected the monster to sneeze, its clawed hands convulsing shut on my face as its body racked.