End of an Era (8 page)

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.

Klicks got up off his crash couch and made his way across the semicircular floor of the
Sternberger
’s habitat to door number one. He pulled it open, walked down the short access ramp, and peered out the little glassteel insert in the main hatchway. I followed him down and looked over his shoulder. It was a big drop to the crater wall, but there, standing on it, was a dancing green troodon, hopping like a Mexican jumping bean to keep balanced on the ragged slope.

Klicks opened the outer door and looked down at the thing. "What do you want?"

The reptile was silent for half a minute. At last, it made a series of low roars like corrugated cardboard being ripped apart. Klicks turned to look at me. "I don’t think this one talks."

I scratched my beard. "What’s it doing here, then?"

The cardboard ripping noises were growing softer, less harsh. Finally, English came from the reptile’s mouth. "Nothing, man," it said, except it sounded more like "Nuttin’, mon."

I had to smile. "No wonder he’s a bit slow, Klicks," I said. "This must be the one who learned to speak from you." I faced the troodon. "Hey, man!
Day O!"

The reptile looked at the ground as if thinking. "Daylight come and me want go home," it said at last.

I laughed.

"Your wastes are eliminated?" it said. "Your bodies cleansed?"

"Yes," I said warily.

"Then now we shall talk."

"All right," I said.

"I come in?" said the troodon.

"No," I said. "We’ll come down."

The troodon held up a scaly hand. "Later." In a flash, it was gone, skittering down the crater wall. I stepped to the threshold myself and looked out. It was shortly after noon. The sun, brilliantly bright against a cloudless sky, had begun to slip down toward the western horizon. Overhead I could see a trio of gorgeous copper-colored pterosaurs lazily rising and falling on columns of heated air. I took the giant first step out the door and skidded down the crater wall and onto the mud flat. Klicks, holding an elephant gun, followed behind me.

The three troodons were standing about thirty meters from the crater wall. As soon as we were both down, they moved toward us with surprising speed, long legs eating up distance rapidly. Their curved necks worked back and forth as they walked, just like pigeons, but because the dinosaurs had much longer necks, the effect was elegant instead of comical. Their stiff tails, sticking straight out from lean rumps, bounced up and down as they moved. At once, the troodons came to an instantaneous halt: no slowing down, the last stride no different from any of the previous ones. They simply stopped, cold, about three meters away from us.

The one with the diamond-shaped patch of yellow skin on its muzzle — the one that spoke like me — once again did most of the talking. "We have questions for you," it said.

"What about?" I asked.

"Mars," said Diamond-snout. I looked into its huge yellow eyes with their rippling irises, almost hypnotically beautiful. "I ask you again about Mars of the future."

I shook my head, breaking away from the gaze. "And I tell you again: I’ve never been there."

Diamond-snout seemed unconvinced. "But if you ply time, doubtless you also ply space. And even if you donut" — a one-two blink — "
do not
, you must have magnifying optical devices that allow you to tell much about our home."

I looked at Klicks. He shrugged. "What you say is true, of course," I offered. "But without knowing what Mars is like currently here in the Mesozoic, we can’t very well describe how it differs, if at all, in our time. Surely you can understand that."

"Stop calling me Shirley," said Diamond-snout. It used my voice; it used my jokes. "Doubtless you can give us a thumb-claw sketch of Mars without us wasting time describing its current state. Do so."

"All right, dammit," I said. "You might as well know, anyway." I looked at Klicks once again, giving him a final chance to stop me if he thought I was making a huge mistake. His face was impassive. "I was telling the truth," I said, looking back into Diamond-snout’s golden orbs. "No human being has yet been to Mars — but we’ve sent some robot explorers there. They found a lot of weird chemistry in the soil, but no life." I looked at Diamond-snout. Its head had dipped low, the golden orbs with their vertical, cat-like pupils staring at the cracked mud. It was madness to try to interpret its expressions, to try to apply human emotions to a glob of jelly and its dinosaur marionette, and yet, to me, the thing looked shaken. "I’m terribly sorry," I said.

"Mars dead," said the troodon, looking up again, the reflections of the afternoon sun like little novas in its glistening eyes. "Confirm that that is your meaning."

"I’m afraid it’s true," I said, surprised at the emotion in my own voice. "Mars is indeed dead." The beast’s muscles went limp as the Het within presumably tried to digest this information. My heart went out to the being. And yet, on the other hand, if a time traveler were to arrive in 2013 from 65 million years in the future, I’d fully expect him to say that my kind had passed from the face of the Earth, too. "Look," I said softly. "It’s not so bad. We’re talking about an inconceivably long time from now."

The troodon fixed me with a steady gaze. It reminded me of Klicks’s how-dense-can-you-be look. "As said we before, our history goes back almost double that length of time. For us, it is not inconceivably distant." Again it dipped its long face, looking at the dried mud’s pattern of cracks and curled edges. "You speak of our extinction."

Klicks smiled reassuringly. "All lifeforms die out eventually," he said. "It’s the nature of things. Take the dinosaurs—"

"Klicks…"

"They’ve also been around for over a hundred million years and sometime very soon they’re going to be wiped out."

Diamond-snout’s head snapped up. The golden eyes locked on Klicks. "What?"

It was too late to stop him. "It’s true, I’m afraid," Klicks continued. "Earth’s ecosystem is about to change and the dinosaurs won’t be able to hack it."

"Soon," said Diamond-snout, the single word sounding like a hiss. "You say soon. How soon?"

"Very soon," Klicks said. "I don’t mean any day now, of course." He grinned. "But we were aiming for the point in geologic history at which the last dinosaur fossils were found. Our time-travel technology has a fundamental, unavoidable uncertainty about it. The end of the dinosaurs could be as much as three hundred thousand years in the future. Or it could be much, much sooner."

"What is planet five like?" Diamond-snout asked suddenly.

"Planet five?" I said, lost.

The yellow orbs swung on me. "Yess, yess," the thing hissed. "Fifth planet from sun."

"Oh, Jupiter," I said. "In our time, it’s pretty much the same as we think it always has been: a gas giant, a failed star." I scratched my ear. "It’s got a nice little ring now, though, which might not have existed in this time. Nothing like Saturn’s, of course, but still pretty neat."

"Jupiter … oh, see I do," said the Het. "And between Mars and Jupiter?"

"The asteroid belt, of course."

"Of course," said Diamond-snout quickly. The three troodons looked at each other, then turned, their stiff tails swishing through the air; Klicks and I had to step back to avoid being whipped by them. In unison they began to march away.

"Wait a minute," called Klicks. "Where are you going?"

Diamond-snout swiveled its pointed head back at us for a moment, but the troodons didn’t stop striding away. Giant yellow eyes closed and opened in turns as it rasped, "To attend to our hygiene."

I was born the year
Apollo 11
landed on the moon. I was forty-one when the National Research Council of Canada approached me about a time-travel mission. I’d expected our expedition to be along the lines of that moon shot: no expense spared in putting together cutting-edge technology. But there was no big money for pure science anymore — not even in the States, where most of the remaining technological efforts were concentrated on fighting the growing drought in the Midwest. It turned out that big-bucks science had been a purely mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, starting with the Manhattan Project and ending with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The scientific community hadn’t been prepared for this end of an era. But in rapid succession in the early 1990s, the planned Super-Colliding Super Conductor was scrapped, leaving a big hole in the ground where it was supposed to go. About the same time, SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with radio telescopes — was killed. The International Space Station, originally to be called
Freedom
, was downsized so much that people quipped it would have to be renamed Space Station
Fred
, since there wouldn’t be room for the full name on its side — and then, as the various national partners (including Canada) backed out, pleading empty pockets, the few modules that had been assembled in orbit were shut down. The proposed trip to Mars — originally planned for just six years from now, the fiftieth anniversary of Armstrong’s one small step — was likewise chopped. Beg, borrow, and steal became the order of the day in labs throughout the world; big government grants were a fondly remembered thing of the past.

Oh, some military money had trickled in Ching-Mei’s direction for a while. The hawks had seen time travel as strategic, making possible the ultimate in preemptive strikes. They’d provided sufficient funds for Ching-Mei to build a working Huang Effect generator, along with a good-sized power plant to run it. Why, they’d almost finished building
Gallifrey
— that was the code name for the prototype habitat module that ended up being the
Sternberger
— when the implications of Ching-Mei’s equations became clear. She’d been quite honest, telling the Department of National Defence from the outset that the amount of energy required for time travel depended on how far back you were going. What she didn’t tell them was that it was, in fact,
inversely
proportional to the length of time you wanted to travel.

To go back 104 million years, which seemed to be the maximum that the Huang Effect allowed (one of the equations produced a negative number after that point) required virtually no energy at all. To go back 103 million years required a little energy, 102 a little more, and so on. To cast back 67 million years, as we had done, took a huge amount of power. Any attempt to travel back into historical times, a thousand years or so, would take the entire energy output of the Earth for the better part of a century, and to venture back into the last few decades would require the harnessed energy of a small nova.

Time travel, it turned out, was of little good to anyone
except
paleontologists.

Unfortunately, paleontology has never been a big-money affair. A dig, not a moon shot, became the model for what we were doing. We scraped together what equipment we could, struck sponsorship deals with the private sector, and, slashing expenses as much as possible, came up with just enough to get the two-person test mission going.

Even so, we had to watch every dollar. That’s why we did the Throwback in February, a month in which no sane person would normally visit the Red Deer River valley. Since the air temperature was already thirty degrees below zero Celsius, we saved a bundle cooling the superconducting batteries that were a key part of the Huang Effect generator.

Now that Klicks and I were ready to leave the vicinity of the
Sternberger
, I would have loved to have some high-tech vehicle with giant springy wheels and dish antennas and nuclear engines. Instead, we had a plain ordinary Jeep, donated because the chairperson of Chrysler Canada had fond memories of his boyhood membership in the ROM’s Saturday Morning Club. There was nothing special about this vehicle; it was just the latest 2013 model from Detroit. It even came with the optional AM/FM stereo and rear-window defogger, both of which had seemed pointless to me.

Getting the Jeep out of its tiny garage was going to be tricky. With the
Sternberger
high on the crater wall, the vehicle would have to be brought down a very steep incline. We were fortunate that the garage door had ended up facing northwest, pretty much over the outer edge of the crater wall, instead of back toward the bowl of the crater. The Jeep never would have been able to climb out of there, but at least we had a chance of getting it down to ground level in one piece this way.

From inside the
Sternberger
’s habitat, I swung open the middle of the three doors along the five-meter-long rear wall. Four steps led down to the tiny garage’s floor, and I squeezed past the left side of the Jeep and slipped into its cab.

Strapping myself in, I looked at the dashboard. I felt like Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel:
I check the instruments. They are all there
. I’d been practicing in this Jeep for weeks before the Throwback, but it really was true that if you learned to drive with automatic transmission, it was hard to become comfortable with manual later on. I hit the button mounted on the dash, and the garage-door opener — a standard model from Sears — slid the articulate strips of glassteel up.

From my vantage point in the cab, I couldn’t see any ground in front of me. The crater wall fell away so steeply that the Jeep’s hood blocked it from my vision. Instead, I saw the mud plain up ahead and far below. Maybe we could just walk while we’re here…

I turned the ignition key. In this heat, the engine caught immediately. If I moved slowly forward, the front wheels would roll off the edge of the hull and end up spinning freely. That would mean the rear wheels would have to scrape the chassis over the edge. The whole thing might tip forward on its nose and drop facedown onto the crater wall.

I looked up and saw the tiny figure of Klicks standing far out on the dried mud. He was holding up his walkie-talkie. I picked mine off the passenger seat and thumbed it on.

"It looks like you’re going to have to gun it," he said.

Unfortunately, that’s what it looked like to me, too. I took off the parking brake, revved the engine, and popped the clutch.

"A breathtaking sight" is how Klicks, who recorded the whole thing in slow motion, later described it. Certainly it took my breath away while I was doing it. The low gravity helped no doubt in carrying me further under my initial acceleration, but the ground came rushing up far too soon anyway, and when I hit the crater wall and began bouncing down I felt like a basketball being dribbled. My heart was racing almost as fast as the car’s engine as I rushed toward the mud flat.

The moment I was off the slope of the crater wall, I hit the brakes. Too soon! I began to skid. The Jeep’s rear end fishtailed and I saw Klicks running his ass off to get out of the way. I pulled hard on the wheel and the vehicle swung around, heading for the lake. I slammed the brakes once more, and the Jeep spun again, coming to a rest with its rear wheels in the water. I drove it fully onto the mud plain and Klicks came jogging up to me. I rolled down the window. "Going my way?" I said with a grin.

Klicks stood there, shaking his head, hands on hips. "I think I better do the driving," he said.

Well, that was fine by me: this is one trip for which I wanted the luxury of looking at the scenery. I clambered over to the passenger’s seat, he got in, and we headed off into the Mesozoic.