End of an Era

create life and leave it to evolve on its own. Every once in a while you have to give it a push in the direction you want it to go.”

“So—so you’re saying that someone determined that the timeline had to be altered in order to give rise to us?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“But the time-traveling Brandy wrote that he could hunt dinosaurs, or do anything else, with impunity—that any changes he made wouldn’t matter.”

“I’m sure he believed that—he had to, of course, or he never would have done the things that needed doing. It was crucial that he believe that lie. But he was wrong. There was a mathematical string between the Sternberger in the past and the launch point in the present. The changes he made did indeed work their way up that string, altering the timeline as they did so, rewriting the last sixty-five million years of Earth’s history, making our world possible. By the time the string had been hauled all the way back to 2013, the conditions that had given rise to the Sternberger had been eliminated, and our version of the timeline existed instead.”

I sagged against the padded back of the steno chair. “Wow.”

“Wow, indeed.”

“And the other you who invented the time machine?”

She looked down. “I’m clever, but not that clever. I think it was more likely that its birth was induced.”

“Induced?”

“Made to happen. The technique must have somehow been given to me from the future, perhaps by little clues or experiments that went a seemingly serendipitous way.”

“But why you? Why now?”

“Well, here near the beginning of the twenty-first century we’re probably at the very earliest point in human history at which a time machine could be built, the very earliest that the technology existed to put the parts together, even if we couldn’t really understand the theory behind those parts. In fact, it was necessary that we not fully understand it, that the time-traveling Brandy believe that he’d spin off a new timeline, which he would then abandon, rather than actually change the one and only real timeline.”

“So you don’t know how to make a time machine anymore.”

“No. But there was one. It did exist. The Sternberger did go back into the past, did change the course of prehistory in such a way as to make our present existence possible.”

“But then what happened to that other Brandy? That other you?”

“They existed long enough to make a midstream correction, to steer the timeline in the way it was meant to go.”

“Meant to go? Meant to go by—by the powers that be?”

She nodded. “By what we will become. By God. Call it what you will.”

My head was swimming. “I still don’t get it.”

“Don’t you? The trip by the Sternberger was necessary to adjust things, but it also means that there’s no way another time-travel mission from this present to that part of the past could ever be made to happen again. Once the correction had been made, once the temporal surgery had been performed, the— the incision, shall we call it?—the incision would be sutured up, to prevent any further tampering, lest the correction be undone.” She sounded wistful. “I can’t ever build another time machine, and you can’t ever travel in time again. The universe would conspire to prevent it.”

“Conspire? How?” And then it hit me. “Oh my God. Oh, Ching-Mei, I’m sorry. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”

She looked up, a tightly controlled expression on her face. “So am I.” She shook her head slowly, and we both pretended not to notice the single teardrop that fell onto the desk. “At least Dr. Almi was killed quickly in that earthquake.” We sat in silence for a long, long moment. “I wish,” she said very softly, “that that had been what had happened to me.”

Countdown: 5

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

—Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychoanalyst (1856–1939)

My Radio Shack homing device guided me through the Mesozoic heat back toward the Sternberger, an arrowhead on the unit’s LCD showing the direction from which it was receiving radio beeps. It wasn’t taking me along the same route I’d used going out, meaning, I guess, that I hadn’t ambled in a straight line. No matter. I didn’t mind cutting through the forest, since the shade shielded me from the inferno of the late-afternoon sun.

Klicks and I both carried portable radios, of course, but what I had to discuss with him required a face-to-face meeting. Even then, it would be hard to convince him of the incredible spectacle I’d just witnessed.

And yet, exactly what had I seen? A fight involving animals? They still allow bullfights in Spain, and just the week before we’d left, I’d read about a dog-fighting club in Oakville being charged by the local police. If the Hets had stumbled onto humans involved in those cruel sports, what would they have made of us?

But no. What I’d observed was clearly something more, something on a grander, sicker scale.

War games.

But who could they be fighting? What kind of squat, low foe had those mechanical-tank doorways originally been designed to accommodate? That the beetle-like vehicles weren’t of Martian manufacture I felt sure. Captured war machines, then—spoils of some previous skirmish, now used to train living armored vehicles. The triceratopses were clearly expendable.

Het slimeballs rode within them, jerking the dinosaurs’ strings like dragon marionettes.

Was there another civilization on Earth at this time? Had the Hets come here to invade this planet? My sympathies immediately went to the beleaguered Earth beings, a knee-jerk reaction. But it all seemed so incredible, and so unlikely. In China, in Russia, in Australia, in Italy, in England, in the United States, and in Canada paleontologists had examined rocks from the end of the Mesozoic, painstakingly sifting for even the smallest bone chip. It was inconceivable that the remnants of a large-scale technological civilization could pass unnoticed through such scrutiny. But, then, who were the Hets fighting?

I was having trouble thinking clearly—my head pounded with an ache brought on by the heat. The backs of my hands were tingling and I realized too late that they, the only exposed skin on my body, had been sunburned. The presence of all these deciduous trees seemed clear evidence that seasons were well established by this point in Earth’s history, but we must have arrived in high summer. To make matters worse, somehow an insect had gotten under my cheesecloth face mask and bitten my neck, the puncture swelling and itching.

As I made my way back, I came across a couple of wild hadrosaurs, spatulate bills nipping in and out of clusters of pine needles, the horny sheaths impervious to the sharp jabs. Their up-and-down chewing, so unlike a cow’s, made sounds similar to wood rasps as the batteries of thousands of flat molars ground the foliage and small cones. This was the closest I’d come to any large living dinosaurs outside of the protection of the Jeep. I could hear their stomachs rumbling and was made woozy by the pungent methane wind they gave off.

I also ran into my first mammal, a chocolate-colored furball with long limbs, a naked rat-like tail, and an inquisitive chipmunk face, complete with little triangular ears on top. Mammalian paleontology wasn’t my field, but I fancied that this little beast might even have been Purgatorius, the first primate, known from a lot of Paleocene material from nearby Montana and from one admittedly contested tooth from the very end of the Cretaceous.

We regarded each other for thirty seconds or so, the mammal’s quick black eyes locked with mine. For me, it was a special moment, meeting my great-to-the-nth grandfather, and I kidded myself that the little proto-monkey sensed our kinship, too, for he didn’t scamper away until one of the hadrosaurs let out a multi-toned bleat. I