End of an Era

horns pointing dead ahead, it rammed into the beetle-like tank. The horns pierced the tank’s plating and there was a sound like a pop can opening as pressure equalized.

The triceratops dug in its forelegs, dropped to its rear knees, and arched its powerful neck, tendons distending, muscles bulging. With massive grunts, it lifted the tank impaled on its horns a meter off the ground and then quickly smashed it down. It did this twice more in rapid succession, and the tank’s hull cracked like an eggshell. Through the broken casing I could see the interior. It was made of an iridescent, amber-colored metal.

Meanwhile, the remaining two tanks were pumping off rounds of glassy ammunition, the whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of their report echoing off the valley walls. The vehicles apparently could move in any direction, sliding left and right, forward and backward with ease. The other two ceratopsians danced to avoid the shells.

One triceratops saw an opening as the transparent gun tube that had been trained on it swung away to take a bead on another horned-face. It charged, head low, bringing its eye horns underneath the tank’s lens-shaped body. With a quick movement, it flipped the vehicle onto its back. The tank’s underbelly, made of that same amber metal, was tightly packed with glistening meter-wide ball bearings, explaining its agility.

I glanced at the watching gallery. Even the unoccupied hadrosaurs had become intrigued by the battle, for they had risen on their hind legs, their tails bending stiffly against the ground. The Het-ridden beasts stood quietly, though, nothing giving away the thoughts of the aliens within them.

Evidently one of the triceratopses had let its attention wander from the fight for a second as well, for I swung my binoculars back just in time to see a crystal projectile explode in a flash of green light against its face. The detonation smashed its neck frill, snapping off its nasal and right-eye horns. They flew into the air like white missiles. Slick with blood, half its skull gone, the thing still managed to charge. How could it move with its brain—? Of course. A Het rode within the animal. It must be farther back, perhaps stretched out along the spinal cord to better control the creature’s body. I imagined it would be under a lot of pressure now, having to take over the horned-face’s autonomic functions, which must have been about all the beast’s fist-sized brain had been good for anyway. A lumbering corpse, the injured horned-face slammed into the side of the tank, which spun away under the force of the impact.

The triceratops that had earlier impaled a tank had managed to disentangle its face from the twisted wreckage and it, too, charged the remaining armored vehicle. Rearing up on its hind legs, it made a quick, sheering bite with its parrot-like beak, snipping off the crystal gun tube. The two uninjured triceratopses shouldered against the tank, pushing it toward the far valley wall.

The half-headless beast, apparently blind, had collapsed onto its belly, its forelimbs twisted at an angle that would have been excruciating had the animal still possessed a mind with which to register pain. I zoomed in on its shattered skull and saw a phosphorescent blue lump the size of a beach ball—much larger than any of the Hets I had yet seen—oozing out of the splintered bone onto the blood-saturated soil.

I turned back to the remaining tank. The two triceratopses were still butting it with their shoulders, the lens-shaped body denting slightly each time they hit it. Within minutes the dinosaurs had rammed the beetle-like vehicle against the sheer wall of the valley. I lowered my binoculars and surveyed the scene: one tank smashed, another flipped on its back, and a third taken prisoner. Incredible.

I snapped off rolls of still pictures—I’d left our electronic camera back at the Sternberger—but I knew nonetheless that I’d have a hard time convincing Klicks of what I’d seen.

Triceratops fossils represented three-quarters of all di-nosaurian finds from Alberta and Wyoming during the last million years of the Cretaceous. I tried to imagine what kind of destruction a herd—an assault force—of these great beasts could inflict. That rasping voice of the Martian Het, spoken around bloody spit through the troodon’s mouth, came back to me. “We, too, came to this place because of the life here.”

I’ll say.

Boundary Layer

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

—Abraham Lincoln, 16th American President (1809–1865)

I sat alone in the TRIUMF staff cafeteria for a while, nibbling at one of my stale vending-machine donuts, trying to understand why Dr. Huang had run off. It didn’t make any sense.

I threw out the second donut and made my way out of the room. I had a whole day to kill waiting for Ching- Mei to finish reading the diary, so I decided to take a tour of the research facility. I identified myself to the old man at the front desk as a curator from the Royal Ontario Museum and suddenly found the red carpet being rolled out for “a distinguished visiting scientist.” That was great because it meant that I got to see areas normally closed to the public.

My guide, an enthusiastic young Native Canadian named Dan Pitawanakwat, wanted to be sure I understood everything I saw, but most of it still went over my head. He showed me giant 30,000-kilogram magnets that looked like yellow Pac-Man characters, a room full of bright blue consoles with models of famous movie starships, including the Enterprise-F, Starplex, and the Millennium Falcon hanging by fishing line from the ceiling, and a Positron Emission Tomography scanner, used to take pictures of the insides of people’s brains. But the most interesting thing to me was the Batho Biomedical Facility, where cancer patients received concentrated beams of pions. According to Dan, this method caused less general damage than conventional radiation therapy. I watched, riveted, as a man lay under the pion beam for treatment of a brain tumor. His face was held steady by a transparent mask. The plastic obscured his features and my mind kept superimposing my father’s own craggy visage onto the head. It brought back the suffering and the torture and the loss of human dignity that Dad was going through. When they finally did remove the mask, I saw that the hairless head beneath belonged to a boy perhaps sixteen years old. I had to look away from the effusive Dan to wipe my eyes.

Later on, I said, “Dan, do they do any studies here about the nature of time?”

“Well, the thrust these days is always toward practical applications,” he said. “That’s the only way we can get the grant money to keep coming in.” But then he nodded. “However, we’ve typically got four hundred researchers here at once, so some of them are bound to be doing work in that area. But it was really Ching-Mei’s —Dr. Huang’s—forte. She even wrote a book on it with Dr. Mackenzie.”

“Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics.” I nodded knowingly and was pleased to see that the young man was impressed. “But that was ten years ago. What’s happened since?”

“Well, when I came here in 2005, everybody thought Ching-Mei was going to make some kind of breakthrough. I mean, there was talk of a trip to Stockholm, if you catch my drift.” He winked.

“You mean her work was important enough to win her a Nobel Prize?”

“That’s what some people were saying. ’Course, she probably would have shared it with Almi at the Weizmann Institute in Israel—he was doing similar work. But he was killed in that freak earthquake, and nobody there was able to pick up where he left off.”

“That’s a shame.”

“It’s a friggin’ crime is what it is. Almi was the new Einstein, as far as a lot of us were concerned. We may never recover what he knew.”

“And what happened here? Why did Ching-Mei give up her research? Wasn’t it going anywhere?”

“Oh, it was going places, all right. There was a rumor that she was close to demonstrating a stopped-time condition. But, well, then she…”

“She what?”

“You’re a good friend of hers, aren’t you, sir?”

“I came all the way from Toronto just to see her.”

“So you know about her troubles.”

“Troubles?”