“I wish we didn’t have to make this decision,” I said quietly.
“But we do,” said Klicks.
My gaze shifted out the window. “Yes,” I said at last. “I suppose we do.”
Countdown: 7
O tempora! O mores!
Oh, what times! Oh, what morals!
Klicks was driving me crazy with his cocksure attitude. Things were always so simple for him. For every political debate, for every moral question, he had a glib, pat answer. Should we legalize devices that directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain? What rights do genetically tinkered apes with the power of speech have? Should female priests be allowed to be surrogate mothers? Ask Klicks. He’ll tell you.
Of course, his opinions on mindbenders are similar to those of the editorial writer for
A deep thinker? Not Klicks. But he’s smooth, oh so smooth. Microsoft mouse. “Miles is so articulate,” Tess had said after the last New Year’s Eve bash we’d given together, the same week that Klicks and I had been named as the crew for this mission. “He could charm the pants right off you.”
And so he did.
I’d known him for years. I was even the one who gave him his nickname. How could he, he of all people, steal Tess from me? We had been friends. Friendship is supposed to mean something.
I found out that Klicks and Tess were together less than a month after I’d moved out of our house. Just when I needed my friends most, my best friend—practically my only friend—was off boffing my ex-wife. A man who would steal another man’s wife doesn’t worry about morality, doesn’t weigh the principles, doesn’t consider the repercussions, doesn’t mull over the larger consequences. Doesn’t give a bloody fuck at all.
And yet here he is, all set to grant a reprieve, to—I will say it again, dammit—to
We’d spent a lot of time in mission planning debating whether Klicks and I should always stay together. But since there was so little time and so much to do, it had been agreed that we’d have separate lists of tasks to perform. Each of us was armed and carried a radio, so the risk in separating seemed acceptable. Klicks had gone off after breakfast in our Jeep to find a good spot to take core samples. Now that we knew the asteroid had hit two centuries before the end of the Cretaceous, he wanted to collect some samples to see if the iridium, shocked quartz, and microdiamonds thought to be associated with the impact were indeed already present in Earth’s rocks.
Klicks had set out toward the east. I headed west, ostensibly to examine some hills in that direction, but really just to put as much distance between him and me as possible.
The sun had reached its highest point in the sky, a hot orb that looked perhaps a tad whiter than it did in the twenty-first century. Insects buzzed around me in tiny black swarms. I wore a pith helmet with a cheesecloth rim that kept them away from my face, but their constant droning was giving me a headache.
The air was tormentingly hot; the vegetation lush, with vines hanging between stands of dawn redwood. I must have walked at least five kilometers from the
My head was still swimming from Klicks’s insistence that we bring the Hets forward. I hated having to make big decisions. If you avoid them long enough, they go away.
Dr. Schroeder’s voice echoed in my head, his Bavarian accent making the words harsher, colder: Failing
Screw Schroeder. Screw Klicks. There’s nothing wrong with not liking to make hasty decisions.
Of course, I always end up buying whatever car the dealer has left on the lot from the previous model year so that I won’t have to make all those choices about color and features. And it’s true that I haven’t voted in years. I’ve never been able to decide between the parties—but hell, who can tell them apart? There’s nothing wrong with any of that, damn it all. One shouldn’t make decisions until one is sure.
Besides, it’s not as simple as Klicks made it out to be. Mars of our time is almost airless. Oh, we’d known for half a century that water had once run freely there, carving great valleys. The planet’s atmosphere had been thicker, too, and had probably contained much oxygen. Perhaps Mars was quite pleasant during the Mesozoic. Indeed, it might—I thought of the emerald star I had seen the first night as I’d scanned along the ecliptic. Could it have been Mars, a younger, vibrant world alive with growing things? A planet of life, green with chlorophyll, blue with oceans? A sister to Earth, fully as glorious as this planet?
Perhaps.
But I was a prophet, able to foretell the future with absolute certainty. Mars was doomed, destined to become a stunted, barren dust bowl, cold and desolate, a realm of alien ghosts, a haunt for the memories of things long dead. Granted, no one had been there yet; the joint U.S.-Russia mission had been canceled when neither of them could come up with its share of the money. So it looked like no human being would make it farther than the moon in—well, in my lifetime, I guess. And more than half of Earth’s population had been born after the last person had set foot there, back in 1972. Still, in a weird way, the moon was more inviting than Mars. Luna was sterile and pristine, but Mars was dead, decaying, an oppressive crypt, with the attenuated screams of chill winds raging across the landscape.
The two visions of Mars—one green, one red—could not be more different, and yet sometime in the next 60- odd million years one would give way to the other, that planet being laid waste. Mars would fall prey to some catastrophe even greater than the one that would wipe out the dinosaurs. Or perhaps it had been the same catastrophe. Maybe a great belch of radiation had been expelled from the sun on the side that happened to be facing Mars. If Earth had been on the opposite side of the sun, it might have felt comparatively minor effects by the time it passed through the dissipating cloud of charged particles six months later.
Still, dramatic though the mechanism of the Hets’ demise might be, it didn’t really matter what it was. The fact remained that Mars of my time was uninhabitable, what free oxygen there had once been now locked up in the rocks and ice. I still knew next to nothing about Het biology, but if they were comfortable on Earth now, they could probably no more live in the open on the Mars of the future than I could.
That meant that they’d have to stay on Earth. I could just see them being interviewed on
But wait a minute. That wouldn’t work, either. The gravity would be more than twice what they are used to, since sometime between this present and that present Earth’s gravity increases to what I consider normal. Would it be enough to flatten out their jelly bodies, pinning them to the ground? Probably. And even if we did bring forward some of their dinosaur vehicles for them, they would be no good either, not having the musculature to hack a full g. What could the Hets use instead? Dogs? No manipulatory appendages. Apes? Watch the simian-rights lobby after it gets wind of that idea!
The kilometers added up as I continued my hike. The sky overhead was blue and cloudless, like that of a Toronto summer. The vegetation, though, was decidedly un-Canadian. It was lusher than anything I’d ever seen north of the thirty-fifth parallel: green shot through with a rainbow of flowers. When the insects relented enough for me to hear anything besides their buzzing, I occasionally detected a rustling among the plants. There were small
