End of an Era

needle agitated for a few beats, then came to rest. “You can’t tell which one is north,” Klicks said.

“Yes I can,” I said. “The end of the needle that dips down is pointing to the closest magnetic pole, following the curving lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. Even with continental drift, the north pole will still be the closest.”

Klicks grunted, impressed. “And which end is tipped down?”

“The unpainted one. The polarity is indeed reversed. So the good news is that we are indeed in 29R, and that that way'—I pointed back toward the flat rear wall—'is true north, toward the Arctic rather than the Antarctic.”

“And the bad news,” said Klicks, “is that it really is nightfall.”

That wasn’t going to dampen my spirits. I continued to peer through the glassteel window. Its central part was facing south. It was hard to make out exactly what we were seeing at first, but slowly our eyes irised open.

We weren’t on flat ground. Rather, we seemed to be perched high up on a mound of dirt. A crater wall. Of course: while we had been in stasis, the Sternberger had plummeted out of the sky and evidently had hit some very soft material—mud or loose soil, perhaps. The shock of the impact had formed a crater with a diameter of thirty meters or so—six times as wide as the timeship itself. But the Sternberger had hit with enough force that it had bounced up out of the bottom of the crater and had plunked down here, high on the east side of the donut-shaped crater wall.

God, this was exciting. The past. The past. I felt light-headed, almost dizzy— practically floating. My heart pounded, an increasingly rapid one-two rhythm like a drummer warming up.

It would be folly to go outside in the dark. Who knew what creatures had been attracted by our explosive arrival? Still, until we actually saw a dinosaur, or some other piece of strictly Mesozoic life, we wouldn’t know for sure that we’d arrived before the great extinction. Klicks and I moved to our right, away from the view of the crater wall.

To the south was a lake, looking like a vast pool of blood under the pink sky, its still surface broken at the perimeter by bulrushes, reeds, water lilies, and duckweeds. Straight ahead, running to the rose-colored western horizon, was a wide expanse of dried mud, cracked into a brown hexagonal mosaic, each piece curling up at the edges like a dead leaf. Dotting this mud plain were the ragged, ropy stumps of bald cypress trees, twisting and writhing toward the sky like tormented souls.

We both moved to the back wall. Klicks looked through the window in door number one, which led to the access ramp and ladder. He could see out the glassteel inlay in the main door. I looked through the window in door number two again. Although it was actually darker than when I’d first peered through here, my eyes had adjusted and I could see out better. Directly north, appearing almost like a wall, was a forest of broad-leaved deciduous trees, their upper branches intertwining about twenty-five meters up to form a thick canopy. Mixed in with these were a lesser number of bald cypresses and some eucalyptus-like evergreens. Some of the cypresses poked through the canopy like leafy flagpoles, stretching up an additional twenty-five meters.

With this backwoods-of-Louisiana setting, it certainly looked like the late Mesozoic, but I still harbored a fear that we’d arrived in the early Cenozoic, missing the dinosaurs altogether. We’d have to make the most of this trip, regardless of when we had landed—but with nothing over twenty kilograms surviving the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the lower Paleocene was just plain boring. Damn the Huang Effect and its half-percent uncertainty!

“Look!” shouted Klicks. He’d moved back to the main curving wall, standing over our mini-lab and looking west. I hurried over to stand next to him and sighted along the khaki sleeve of his outstretched arm, following the cracked mud plain out to where it met the sky. A large object was moving at the horizon, silhouetted against the red glow of twilight.

Nothing over twenty kilos … This was the Mesozoic. It had to be! I dashed back to the equipment lockers and grabbed two pairs of binoculars, hurried back to the window, gave one pair to Klicks, fumbled the leather case for mine open, sent lens caps flipping through the air like tossed poker chips, and brought the eyepieces to my face. A dinosaur. Yes, by God, a dinosaur! Bipedal. A duckbill, perhaps? No. Something much more exciting. A theropod, stomping around on its hind legs like Godzilla pounding through Tokyo.

“A tyrannosaur,” I said reverently, looking over at Klicks.

“Ugly mother, ain’t he?”

I gritted my teeth. “He’s beautiful.”

And he was. In this wan light, he looked dark red, as if he had no skin and we were seeing the blood-soaked musculature directly. He had a giant warty head atop a thick neck; a barrel-shaped torso; tiny, almost delicate forelimbs; a thick, endless tail; corded, muscular legs; and bird-like triple-clawed feet. A perfectly designed killing machine.

We were getting the whole thing on video, of course. Each of us wore a Sony MicroCam, hooked into a digital recording system. The only flaw was that we had no way to play the imagery back until we returned to the future.

Suddenly a second tyrannosaur came into view. This one was slightly larger than the first. My heart skipped a beat. Would they fight? Animals that big, needing that much food, might well be territorial. How I wanted to see such a battle firsthand, instead of having to piece it together from mute bones. What a spectacle it would be! I felt buoyant, light as a feather.

The two hunters faced each other for a moment—an incredible tableau, straight out of a Charles Knight painting, a pair of multi-ton carnivores squaring off for a battle to the death. The smaller of the two opened its massive jaws and even at this distance the thing’s sharp teeth were visible, giving a ragged, torn-paper look to the edge of the mouth.

But they did not fight. As one, both turned away from the twilight. A third tyrannosaur was arriving, this one even larger than the first two. It was followed seconds later by a fourth and a fifth. Each walked with a stooped gait, its body swinging forward from wide hips, the massive head balanced by the long, thick tail.

A pair of dark hills near the tyrant lizards shook and I realized that these were yet two more tyrannosaurs flopped on their bellies. They pushed with their hind legs, their tiny two-fingered forelimbs digging into the dirt, channeling the force of those mighty thighs into lifting their torsos instead of sliding them across the ground. Slowly the beasts rose to standing postures. One threw its head back and let loose a low roar that I felt even this far away through the metal walls of the Sternberger. Seven mighty carnosaurs banding together? It was inconceivable to me that there was any prey powerful enough to require these great hunters to combine forces into a pack.

By now it was getting darker. There were only a couple of dozen dinosaur genera left at the close of the Cretaceous, so identifying the genus, even in this light, was easy: Tyrannosaurus. Given this was Alberta, the species was probably mighty T. rex itself, but these were too small to be full-grown females; most of them were probably juveniles, the different sizes representing different hatching seasons, although the biggest might be an adult male. Amazing—

And then suddenly they began to move.

Toward us.

With purposeful strides, the largest of the seven headed toward our timeship, followed in single file by the others. They marched in unison, seven massive left legs pounding the ground, seven bodies tilting to the south, then seven right feet swinging forward, seven loaf-shaped heads tipping to the north. Left, right, south, north, like soldiers in rank and file. Cycads and ferns were pulped underfoot. Tiny creatures that had been hiding in the foliage—too dark to see precisely what they were—scampered out of the way.

It made no sense, this orderly procession of dragons. Granted, some fossil evidence suggested that certain dinosaurs had complex social hierarchies, but this goose-stepping was bizarre—a nightmare parade.

I thought briefly about the strength of the Sternberger’s walls. When locked in stasis, the ship was indestructible. But just sitting here, it was little more than a tin can. And tyrannosaur jaws could bite through steel.

As the seven hunters made their way closer to us, I saw through the binoculars that their bloody coloring wasn’t just a trick of the twilight. They really were dark reddish brown, their skin a tightly packed matrix of round beads like Indian corn. Beneath each massive mandible a loose sack of skin, perhaps a dewlap, waggled back and forth. Their tiny double-clawed forearms, looking withered and useless, bounced like drumsticks against their