It was completely different from all the lifeforms I had ever studied. Of course, its macro structure probably no more reflected its constituent parts than the body of a man resembles the cells he’s made of, or the dunes in a desert reveal the crystalline nature of the quartz grains of which they’re composed. I’d love to get the Het under a microscope, to find out what made it tick.
I placed the box on its side in the back of the Jeep, but left the rear door open so that the creature wouldn’t cook in the heat and so it could get out if it wanted to. Then I went back to my dissection of the pachycephalosaurus. When we returned to our vehicle two hours later, the Het was still there.
As we drove back to the
“It’s not that easy,” I said softly. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that I was getting closer to coming to a conclusion. “I guess I’m leaning toward agreeing with you.”
“You realize the world will have our hides if we don’t bring the Hets forward. Humanity has been waiting decades to meet extraterrestrials. People aren’t going to be happy if we deprive them of the chance to do just that.”
I was silent for several seconds. Then: “Did I ever tell you what my father asked me to do?”
“How is Leon?” asked Klicks. “Responding to the treatments?”
“Not really, no. He’s in a lot of pain.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He wants me to give him some poison so that he can end his life.”
Klicks’s foot eased up on the accelerator. “My God. Really?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head, but more in despair than negation. “It’s a shame. He was such a vital man. Still, they should have euthanasia laws in place shortly.”
“Shortly?” I looked out at the wild landscape. “I suppose that a couple of years is a short length of time— except when every moment you live is torturing you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give him the poison.”
“That one’s easy for you, too, eh?”
“What’s to think about? He’s your father, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes. Yes, he is.”
“Do it, Brandy. I’d do it for my dad.”
“It’s easy to say that now. George is strong as an ox. Hell, he’ll probably outlive you. It’s completely different when it stops being a theoretical question. You can’t answer it truthfully until you really have to answer it.”
Klicks was quiet for a long moment as our Jeep bounced over the uneven ground. “Well,” he said at last, “you really have to answer the question about the Hets in the next—what?—sixty-four hours. Sooner, in fact, because I’m sure they’ll need time to prepare.”
“I know that,” I said, my voice weary.
We drove the rest of the way back to the
Countdown: 9
Monster one minute, food the next.
Paleontology has a long history of famous meals. On New Year’s Eve, 1853, Sir Richard Owen hosted a dinner for twenty fossil experts inside a life-size reconstruction of Iguanodon made under his direction by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.
Almost a century later, Russian paleontologists enjoyed a meal of mammoth steaks and the finest vodka after one of the hairy elephants was found frozen in Siberia.
Klicks and I weren’t to be outdone. Late that afternoon we built a fire near the base of the crater upon which the
While the meat was grilling, I went over to check on our Martian hitchhiker. I found some shady ground and set the stasis box down on its side, and, in case the Het wanted something to drink, I placed a bowl of water next to it. Evidently it wasn’t thirsty, since after pulsing its way over to the bowl to see what it contained, it ignored it.
I normally like my meat medium-rare, but we grilled the steaks for a long time, flipping them repeatedly. We wanted to be sure that any parasites and germs had been killed. When it finally came time to eat the meat, I felt a certain reluctance. For one thing, although all modern bird, reptile, and mammal meat is edible by humans, there was always the small chance that dinosaur flesh would prove poisonous. For another, well, it somehow seemed wrong.
As usual, Klicks had no such misgivings. He immediately sliced a piece off and brought it to his mouth.
“How is it?” I asked.
“Different.”
This from the gourmet of Drumheller. Oh, well. Making sure my cup of water was handy, in case I had to wash down some foul taste, I took a tenuous nibble. I’d never eaten reptile before, but I expected it to resemble chicken. It tasted more like roasted almonds. I don’t think I’d ever want to have it again, but it wasn’t bad—just a bit too stringy to be a comfortable chew.
I didn’t know if the Het needed to eat—really, we didn’t know much about them at all—but I took a plate over to it with both some cooked and uncooked pachycephalosaur and a mound of fronds. It ignored these, too, and seemed content just to throb quietly. I couldn’t understand a lifeform that neither drank water nor ate. Although I wasn’t looking forward to seeing other Hets again, I hoped some would come soon and take our reluctant guest off our hands.
It was getting too dark to do any serious exploring, so we just sat around on some bald cypress trunks, letting the meal digest.
“Hey, Brandy,” Klicks said at last.
“Yeah?”
“How do you define gross ignorance?”
“Beats me.”
“One hundred and forty-four Brits.” He flashed a grin.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, rising to the challenge. “What do sugarcane and unwanted pregnancies have in common?”
“Dunno.”
“They both pop up all over Jamaica.”
He laughed out loud. “Good one. Why does King Charles want to abdicate?”
“Too easy. So he can go on welfare like everybody else in England. What has six legs and goes ‘ho-de-do, ho-de-do, ho-de-do’?”
“What?”
“Three Jamaicans running for the elevator.”
Klicks roared. “Well, fuck me,” he said.
I sipped my coffee. “Not while there are still dogs in the street.”
I sighed contentedly. It was like old times. We’d whiled away many an evening in the twenty-odd years we’d known each other telling jokes, slagging each other’s ancestors, and just shooting the bull. We’d shared a lot in that
