End of an Era

by Robert J. Sawyer

  "Dinosaur tanks?"

  "Think about it: biological tanks are self-repairing, self-replicating, and the slimeballs can operate them by direct mind control." I swung my crash couch around and sat on it sideways. "You’ve studied dinosaurian physiology: you know they’d make perfect killing machines. They’re incredibly strong — theropod jaws can cut through steel pipe — and their nervous systems are simplistic enough that they wouldn’t even know they’d been mortally wounded until after they’d taken down a few dozen of their opponents. These creatures were bred to kill, born to fight."

  Klicks shook his head. "Who could they possibly be at war with?"

  "I don’t know. I don’t think it’s here on Earth. I saw them loading up dinosaur eggs into their spaceships. I think they transfer the eggs to wherever the battle is raging. Somewhere — somewhere with orange and blue vegetation, I think."

  "What?"

  "The ceratopsians I saw were patterned in those colors. Camouflage, I suspect."

  Klicks shook his head in wonderment. "But you don’t know who they’re fighting?"

  That this was a good question irritated me. "There are lots of possibilities," I said too quickly, my tone betraying that I didn’t have a real answer. "Maybe a different type of Martian. Or maybe some lifeform on one of the moons of Jupiter."

  "That seems unlikely, Brandy. None of those moons has an environment even remotely like Earth’s, and I find it hard to envision a platoon of tyrannosaurs in giant space suits."

  "Hmm. Hadn’t thought of that."

  We were both silent for a few seconds.

  "There is one other possibility," said Klicks slowly, a hint of gentle teasing in his tone.

  "Eh?"

  "Well, there could be an Earth-like planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. You know — where the asteroids are in our time. As long as it had a mild greenhouse effect, it could be quite temperate." He filled an Envirofoam cup with water and placed it in our microwave.

  "There’s not enough rubble in the asteroid belt to have ever made up a decent-sized planet," I said.

  "Hey, man, I’m just trying to get into the spirit of your delusion." His fingers drummed on the microwave’s membrane keyboard, and it beeped in response. "See, in the final battle, the Hets will use a total-conversion weapon, turning three-quarters of the enemy planet’s mass into energy. Or maybe they just pounded the planet until it shattered and the bulk of it fell into Jupiter or the sun, or spiraled out to become Pluto." His one eyebrow arched in the center. "In fact, now that I mention it, that explains something that’s been bugging me. We’ve always assumed that the water-erosion features on Mars are incredibly ancient, created at a time billions of years before the era we’re in now. But, really, the only indication of the age of those features is the heavy cratering that overlays them. We made some assumptions about the rate of cratering, and then extrapolated that the water features underneath must be a couple of billion years old. Well, Mars would have been scoured by asteroid impacts after the planet in the belt was pulverized, giving the water-erosion landforms the appearance of being a lot older than they really are. That would explain how Mars could indeed be covered with free-flowing water right now."

  Klicks was smiling, but it made sense to me. "Right!" I said. "The bloody Martian asked us about the fifth planet, then seemed surprised when I told it about Jupiter. In this time, Jupiter’s the sixth planet." My head was spinning. "Good Christ. And that explains why they’re here on Earth."

  The microwave beeped. "You’ve lost me, Sherlock," said Klicks.

  "Earth would be strategic in such a war," I said. "When Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from the — the belt planet, but Earth is on the same side as it, Earth could be a great platform for launching attacks."

  "The ‘belt planet’, eh?" Klicks laughed. "It needs a better name than that."

  "Okay. How about—"

  "Not so fast. You got to name Earth’s second moon. It’s my turn."

  He had a point there. "Okay."

  Klicks scratched his head. "How about…"

  "How about what?"

  His grin had slipped away. "Nothing," he said, making a show of sifting decaf coffee crystals into his steaming cup. "I — I want to sleep on it."

  He wished to name it Tess, of course. That was fine with me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Klicks continued: "That would be one hell of a war, Brandy. Mars laid waste. The other side’s home world reduced to rubble."

  "So you can see that we can’t bring the Hets forward."

  Klicks shook his head. "I’m not sure about that. I’m still not convinced by your virus theory—"

  "It’s not my theory, dammit. It’s what the Het told me."

  "And, besides, if fighting wars was enough to disqualify a species from being otherwise decent, you’d have to kiss humanity good-bye, too. Plus, they’ve voluntarily left our bodies twice now."

  "They have to do that," I said. "They get claustrophobic if they inhabit the same body for too long; they need to constantly conquer new creatures." Klicks rolled his eyes. "It’s true," I said. "The Het told me. Look, they knew it would be over three full days until we headed back; sticking around inside our bodies that long would be the viral equivalent of waiting endlessly at the airport. Of course they exited us; they knew they could always reenter just by having a swarm of troodons overpower us, if no other way worked out."

  "You’re putting the worst possible spin on everything," said Klicks.

  My turn to roll eyes. "Look, these creatures can dissociate into components small enough that you’d need an electron microscope to see them. Once they’re loose on Earth in the twenty-first century, there would be no putting the genie back in the bottle. Bringing them forward in time would be an irrevocable decision, a real-life Pandora’s box."

  "You’re mixing your metaphors," said Klicks. "Besides, leaving them back here would be an irreversible decision, too. We’re the one opportunity the Hets have to be saved."

  "We can’t risk that." I set my jaw. "I’m convinced — convinced — that they’re, well, evil."

  Klicks sipped his coffee. "Well," he said at last, "we all know how reliable your conclusions are."

  I felt a knotting in my stomach. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

  He took another sip. "Nothing."

  My voice had taken on a little shakiness at the edges. "I want to know what you meant by that crack."

  "It’s nothing, really." He forced a smile. "Forget about it."

  "Tell me."

  He sighed, then spread his hands. "Well, look — all this nonsense about me and Tess." He met my eyes briefly, then looked away. "You stand there all high-and-mighty, both judge and jury, condemning me for something I didn’t do." His voice had gotten small. "I just don’t like it, that’s all."

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. "Something you didn’t do?" I sneered the words. "Are you denying you’re having an affair with her?"

  His eyes swung back to mine, and this time they held their lock. "Get this through your thick head, Thackeray. Tess is single. Divorced. And so am I." He paused. "Two single people together does not constitute an affair."

  I waved my hand. "Semantics. Besides, you were fooling around with her even before Tess and my marriage was over."

  Klicks’s voice was ripe with indignation. "I never touched her — not even once — until you and she were as extinct as your bloody dinosaurs."

  "Bull." I put my hand down on the lab table — really, I’d just intended to gently place it there, but all the instruments clacked together. "Tess got her divorce on July third, 2011. You were boffing her long before that."

  "That date was just a formality, and you know it," Klicks said. "Your marriage had been over for months by then."

  "Its end hastened no doubt by your constant flirting with her."

  "Flirting?" There was now a hint of derision in his lilting tones. "I’m not sixteen, for God’s sake."

  "Oh, yeah? What did
you say to her that night the three of us went out to see the new Star Wars film?"

  "How the hell should I remember what I said?" — but the slight change in his vocal tone told me that he did indeed remember very well.

  "She’d just gotten new glasses that day," I said. "The ones with the purply-pink wire frames. You looked right at her and said, ‘You certainly have a lovely pair, Tess.’" I could see that Klicks was fighting not to smile, and that made me even more furious. "That’s a hell of a thing to say to another man’s wife."

  He drained his remaining coffee in a single gulp. "Come on, Bran. It was a joke. Tess and I are old friends; we kid around. It didn’t mean anything."

  "You stole her right out from under me."

  He absently broke a piece of Envirofoam off the cup’s rim. "Maybe if she had been under you a little more often, it never would have happened."

  "Fuck you."

  "Why not?" he said, lifting his eyes. "You certainly weren’t fucking her."

  I was quaking with anger. "You son of a bitch. We did it once a week."

  Klicks nodded knowingly. "Sunday mornings, like clockwork. Right after This Week with Peter Jennings. Pretty poor excuse for foreplay."

  "She told you that?"

  "We talk a lot, sure. And about more than just the latest find reported in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Face it, Brandy. You were a lousy husband. You lost her all on your own. You can’t blame me for recognizing a good thing when I saw it. Tess deserved better than you."

  I tasted bile in my throat. I wanted to lunge at the man, to make him take back every one of those cruel lies. My hands, sitting on the lab table, clenched into fists. Klicks must have noticed that. "Just try it," he said, ever so softly.

  "But you didn’t even give us a chance to work things out," I said, forcing a semblance of calm back into my voice.

  "There wasn’t any hope of that."

  "But if Tess had only said something to me … This — this is the first I’ve heard of any of this."

  Klicks sighed, a long, weary exhalation, then shook his head again. "Tess had been screaming it at you for months — with every glance she made, with the look on her face, with body language that everyone but you could read." He spread his arms. "Christ, she couldn’t have been much more obvious about her unhappiness if she’d had the words ‘I am miserable’ tattooed on her forehead."

  I shook my head. "I didn’t know. I didn’t see any of that."

  The long sigh again. "That was apparent."

  "But you — you were supposed to be my friend. Why didn’t you tell me about this?"

  "I tried, Brandy. What do you think I was getting at that night in that bar on Keele Street? I said you were working too hard on the new galleries, that it was crazy not to get home till ten o’clock each night when you’ve got a lovely wife waiting for you. You told me that Tess understood." He frowned and shook his head. "Well, she didn’t. Not at all."

  "So you decided to make your move."

  "I’ve got news for you, Brandy. I didn’t go after Tess. She came after me."

  "What?" I felt my world crumbling around me.

  "Ask her, if you don’t believe me. You think I’d go after my best friend’s wife? Christ, Brandy, I turned her down three times. Do you think that was easy for me? The Tyrrell Museum is in a pissant all-white Prairie town, for God’s sake. I’m middle-aged and have permanent dirt under my fingernails from years of fieldwork. How many of the women in Drumheller do you think wanted to get down with me? Jesus, man. Tess is gorgeous and I pushed her aside three fucking times for you. I told her to work it out with you, to return to her husband, to not flush nine good years down the toilet. She kept coming back. Can you blame me for finally saying yes?"

  I looked away, my eyelids locked shut to prevent tears from escaping. The moment between us stretched to a minute, then two. I didn’t know what to say, what to do, what to think. I wiped my eyes, blew my nose, and turned to face Klicks. He held my gaze for only a second, but in that second I saw that he’d been telling the truth and, worst of all, I saw that he pitied me. He got up and put his coffee cup in the trash.

  Thirty-eight more hours, I thought. Thirty-eight more hours until we return. I didn’t know if I could take it, being here with him, being here with my memories of her -

  It was night. Time to go to bed. I’d have to take sleeping medication again, or else I’d toss and turn until dawn, tormented by what Klicks had said.

  I began to gather my pajamas.

  "You’ve got a job to do," said Klicks.

  I looked at him, but didn’t trust myself to speak.

  "The night-sky photo."

  Oh, right. I would have done it last night, except it was clouded over. I went through door number one, but instead of going down the ramp to the outer hatch, I went up the little ladder, angled at forty-five degrees, into the instrumentation dome on the roof. In training, I’d always found climbing that ladder hurt my palms, given that my full weight was on them, but in this lower gravity, it wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

  The instrumentation dome was about two meters across and made of glassteel. Several cameras were set up to shoot through its transparent walls, and a vertical slit, very much like that in an observatory dome, let the warm Mesozoic night air flow into the sensors within. The slit closed automatically when rain was detected.

  Several automated cameras were taking sky photographs, and one tracked the sun during the days. But there was one astronomical photograph the staff of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory had asked us to take that couldn’t be easily automated, and that was a traditional time-lapse night-sky photo. See, all our automatic cameras were off-the-shelf models, and they had automatic exposure timers, but none of them went past sixty seconds. The photo the DAO wanted required an exposure of four hours, and that demanded manual intervention.

  I’d originally volunteered to bring along my Pentax to take this photo, but when I’d asked that jerk from my insurance company if my personal belongings would be covered if I took them 65 million years into the past, he didn’t miss a beat: "Sorry, Mr. Thackeray, that would mean that any loss or damage took place before the effective coverage date of your policy." Oh, well. In the end, we’d borrowed a fancy electronic camera from the McLuhan Institute at U of T. It, too, only had a short-term exposure timer, but it also had a manual shutter and so I did what generations of sky photographers had done before me: I set up the camera in the dark, slipped a rubber band around its case to hold the shutter button down, then gingerly removed the lens cap.

  The result would be a time-exposure photo — an electronic one, since this was a filmless camera — with arcs representing the paths of stars through the night sky. The common center of all these arcs would indicate Earth’s true north pole. Also, such a photo would show the tiny streaks of meteors. A count of those would give some indication of how much debris was floating around local space, and, given we knew how long the exposure had been for, a precise measurement of how many degrees the arcs encompassed would tell us the exact length of a Cretaceous day.

  I fiddled with the tiny studs on my wristwatch — I always found the thing frustrating to operate — and set the alarm for four hours from now, which would be at something like 3:00 a.m. local time, so that I would get up and put the lens cap back on the camera.

  I headed down the ladder, back through door number one, and into the habitat. Klicks walked over to me. "Here," he said gently, proffering a cup of water and a silver sleeping caplet. I accepted them silently.

  There was a long moment between us, a moment when we both thought over the words we had exchanged. "She did love you," Klicks said at last. "For many years, she loved you deeply."

  I looked away, nodded, and swallowed the bitter pill.

  Countdown: 2

  Things are in the saddle,

  And ride mankind.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer (1803–1882)

  Like most people, I guess, I only remember
my dreams when I wake during them. I was dreaming about Tess, her wild mane of red hair; her intelligent green eyes; her slim, almost girlish figure. It wasn’t Tess Thackeray, my wife, though. No, this was the reborn Tess Lund, a name that had been retired years ago but was now pressed back into active service by the liberation of divorce.

  Tess was lying naked in bed, the twin light of two moons playing across her heart-shaped face, lofty Luna still accompanied by tiny Trick. Someone was in bed with her, but it wasn’t me. Nor was it a stranger, which probably would have been a less disquieting sight. No, the powerful brown arms wrapped around her pale waist belonged to Professor Miles Jordan, bon vivant, respected academic, my friend. My best friend in the world.

  I was observing them, a disembodied camera, through a window in her bedroom. It had changed since the days when I had shared that room with Tess: the furnishings were richer, more refined. Our old queen-sized bed had been replaced with an elegant Victorian four-poster. Its canopy, a tapestry of pension and benefit contracts, was raised high over their heads by thick brown poles carved from mahogany trunks.

  Tess was talking to Klicks in that sexy, deep voice that always seemed so incongruous coming out of her tiny body. She was telling him about me, sharing with him all my deepest, darkest secrets — an endless succession of humiliations, defeats, and shames. She told him about my fascination with my cousin Heather and the horrible public scene Heather had made when I’d drunkenly tried to act on those emotions at her brother Dougal’s wedding. She told him about the time I was caught shoplifting at age thirty-four, walking out of a Lichtman’s with a stupid porno magazine that I was too embarrassed to take up to the cash counter. And she told him about the night a mugger beat the crap out of me in Philosopher’s Walk behind the museum, and, finding that picture of my mother in my wallet, had, cruelly, oh so cruelly, forced me to eat it.

  Klicks listened raptly to everything Tess revealed about me, things so hidden, so private, so personal that Doc Schroeder would have given his eyeteeth to hear me divulge them on that sticky vinyl couch of his. Klicks heard secrets that should have been mine alone to carry to my grave. He knew my very soul. The thought of him living and knowing such things, having such power over me, was unbearable -