End of an Era

“Take me inside,” it said suddenly.

It was bad enough being near the troodon, but to be near it inside a confined space… “I’d rather not,” I said.

The troodon turned its giant eyes on me, fixing me with a steady gaze. “Reciprocate, Brandon/Brandy. We allowed you to come inside our ship. Must now you allow us to come inside yours.”

Fancy that, I thought: my manners being corrected by a dinosaur. “But look at where the Sternberger is located,” I said, pointing up. “See how it juts out over the crater rim? I know you can make it up the crater wall, but that’s a big jump up to our hatchway. I doubt you can do it.”

The troodon was off like a shot, clambering up the crumbling crater wall, using its long, dangling arms to help it climb. “Is no problem for me,” it called once it had reached the top.

From the outside, our main door was painted electric blue, with a bright red trim—the mandrill’s mouth, one of the engineers had dubbed it. I had no doubt that the dinosaur could see that, since all living reptiles and birds have color vision. The loss of the ability to see color by dogs and many other mammals was a recent evolutionary occurrence, a trade-off to provide better sight in the dark. The troodon accomplished the same thing simply by having huge eyes. “In I go,” it called.

There was a vertical gap of a little less than a meter between the crumbling edge of the crater and the bottom of our main doorway, but the troodon had no trouble hopping up high enough to grab hold of the door handle. It then braced its feet against the blue door panel, lifted the latch, and swung inside with the door. Next, it let go, dropping to the deck inside the accessway. It couldn’t turn around in there—there wasn’t enough clearance for its stiff tail—but it swung its neck back to look down at me and waved.

Well, I was damned if I was going to let that thing go inside unsupervised. I climbed up the crater wall myself. Although the dirt was dry now, it had apparently rained briefly last night, and all the tyrannosaur tracks from before had been washed away. The troodon had already gone up the ramp that led to interior door number one and had made its way through into the cramped confines of our semicircular habitat. I hurried after it.

It was slowly circumnavigating the small room, looking at the food refrigerator and storage lockers, peering through the window in door number two at the garage, opening the medicine fridge—and quickly closing it when a blast of cold air hit its face—swinging open door number three to have a look at the tiny washroom, then coming along the curving outer wall past the kidney-shaped worktable, the radio console, and, at last, the mini-lab. Despite its protestation earlier, the troodon’s sickle claws did indeed sound like the ticks of a bomb on the steel floor.

“This controls your time machine?” it hissed, pointing at one of Klicks’s lab instruments.

I wasn’t about to move away from the access ramp to the outside door; I wanted to be able to escape in a hurry if the troodon tried anything funny. “No, that’s just a mineral analyzer. As I said before, all the working parts for time travel are up the timestream some sixty-five million years.”

The troodon stepped in front of the radio console and eyed it suspiciously. “What about this?”

“It’s just a fancy radio.”

“Radio?”

“Umm, electromagnetic telecommunications.”

The troodon tapped the console with a curved claw. It seemed fascinated by the fake plastic woodgrain that ran around the edges of the unit. “Yes, we have such communications. But who can you call? Does your radio operate across time?”

“No, no. It’s just regular radio gear. Our timeship was dumped from a helicopter—a flying vehicle. The radio let us communicate with the copter pilot, and with Ching-Mei—that’s the person who invented the time machine—at the ground base. The base was many kilometers away, at the Tyrrell Field Station. We also use the radio to relay signals from our walkie-talkies—portable transceivers—and for our homing devices to lock onto. Oh, and the radio used satellite signals to determine our exact position at the time of the drop from the helicopter, crucial for the Throwback to work. It can even send signals to search-and-rescue satellites, in case we return at other than our expected location. Highly unlikely, or so we’re told, but it could happen.” I gestured at the gleaming panel. “Anyway, it’s far more sophisticated than what we needed, but the corporate sponsor—Ward-Beck in this case—wanted to showcase this particular piece of equipment. Our actual needs were pretty irrelevant.”

“Very strange culture have you,” said the troodon.

I forced a laugh. “That it is.”

Klicks drove back into our camp shortly after sunset, parking the Jeep so that it would be in the morning shade of the crater wall. The troodon and I met him down on the mud flat. I held up my A W can so that Klicks could see the intact pull-tab. He opened his jacket’s breast pocket and pulled out the Twinkies. They were slightly squished—hard to avoid that with Twinkies—but certainly showed no sign of having been deliberately flattened.

The troodon hung around for hours, keeping me from talking candidly to Klicks. The little dinosaur did help us gather bald cypress wood and we built a small fire to cook some steaks. Cow steaks, that is—no more pachycephalosaur for me. The idea of cooked food was new to the Het, and it asked if it could feed some to its vehicle. With one gulp about fifty dollars’ worth of prime sirloin disappeared down the troodon’s throat. It tasted a lot like shrew, according to the Het, insectivores being one of the few mammalian groups well established by this time.

Even with the sun down, it was still warm. As we sat around the campfire, I watched the flames dance in the dinosaur’s giant eyes. The troodon paid no attention to our theatrical yawns, and at last Klicks simply said, “It’s time for us to go to sleep.”

“Oh,” said the Het. Without another word, it stalked away into the darkness. Klicks and I doused the flames and scrambled back up into the Sternberger. As soon as we’d entered the habitat, I turned to him.

“Klicks,” I said, finally able to talk without a Martian eavesdropping, “we can’t bring the Hets forward in time.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re evil.”

Klicks looked at me, his jaw kind of slack, the way you’d look at someone who had just said something completely out of left field.

“I’m serious,” I said. “They’re at war.”

“At war?”

“That’s right. The troodon who came back here with me confirmed it.”

“Who are they fighting?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“What are they fighting about?”

“The Hets want to enslave the other side.”

“Enslave?”

“Crawl in their heads; make them do whatever the Hets want.”

“The Het said this to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why would it tell you that?”

“Why wouldn’t it tell me? Don’t you see, Klicks, they’re a single entity, a hive mind. Those globs of jelly come together and share memories. The idea of one individual deceiving another is foreign to them. About the only good thing you can say about them is that they’re pathological truth-tellers.”

“They seem harmless enough to me.”

“They’re viruses,” I said.

Klicks looked at me blankly.

“Viruses? You mean metaphorically…”

“I mean it literally. They’re viral-based; they consist of nucleic acids, but they can’t grow or breed on their own. They have to infest a living host. Only when they do so are they really alive.”

“Viral,” said Klicks slowly. “Well, I guess that would explain how they percolate through living tissue. Certainly viruses are small enough to do that.”

“But don’t you see? Viruses are evil.”

Klicks gave me a what-are-you-on look. “Viruses are just bits of chemistry,” he