End of an Era

meantime.

My night-sky photograph. At least I could check on that, see if it had turned out all right.

I got up from the couch, every joint in my body aching, found my palmtop computer, and slipped it into one of the baggy pockets on my khaki jacket. It was pure agony climbing up the ladder to the instrumentation dome.

I removed the electronic camera from the little tripod, then plugged it into the USB port on my palmtop. The night-sky photo blossomed on the color liquid-crystal display. At first I thought that the picture had been ruined by stray light: two curving bands of solid white passed across the lower right corner of the photograph, one thick, the other thin. Of course: the paths of Luna and Trick as they strolled across the night.

Except for these, it looked like all other time-lapse sky photos: a series of hairline concentric arcs, the paths drawn by stars as the heavens wheeled about Earth’s axis. Since I’d left the lens open for about four hours, each arc was approximately one-sixth of a circle (we expected the Mesozoic day to be a little shorter, but not much).

Still, something wasn’t quite right about this photo. There were six white dots in a line about halfway between the zenith and the southern horizon. I used the palmtop’s touch pad to point at each of the dots in turn, then zoomed in for a closer look. The dots showed no movement arcs at all. One or even two could have been photographic glitches—dust on the lens, single-bit errors in the processing—but six in a row had to represent something real.

The only thing I could think of that would show no movement as the Earth rotates was a geostationary satellite orbiting above the equator. Well, I suppose it isn’t surprising that the Hets put satellites up around Earth, although the precisely even spacing seemed strange to me. Perhaps they were for weather forecasting or communications, but there appeared to be more of them than were necessary for either of those jobs. A trio of evenly spaced satellites in the Clarke orbit could provide complete coverage of the entire planet; there were six satellites visible in this photo, meaning there might be twenty or thirty evenly spaced ones in total—

A crash came from downstairs. Rather than taking the time to disengage the camera from my palmtop, I tucked them both into the baggy pocket and hurried down the diagonal ladder. Klicks was standing, supporting himself against the lab bench. He had managed to knock some of his geological instruments to the floor as he’d hauled himself to his feet.

“Brandy,” he said, “I’m…” He tried again. “Look, man. I didn’t mean—” That didn’t seem to cut it either. “It’s just—” Finally he simply fell silent and shrugged. I sympathized with his predicament. After all, how do you tell someone you’re sorry you tried to kill him?

I looked Klicks up and down. One of his ears was caked with dried blood. The gash across his forehead was nasty; it could have used stitches, but at least it had stopped bleeding.

I’d held my own quite well, given how much more muscular he is than me. I felt a smug satisfaction. In retrospect, I guess I’d taken a certain secret pleasure in beating the crap out of him with impunity. “That’s okay,” I said quietly. “You weren’t yourself.”

Klicks nodded and, after a time, looked away. He probably felt just as uncomfortable with the protracted moment between us as I did. “What about the Het?” he said at last.

I told him about the antiviral drugs I’d injected into his carotid artery. He winced at the prospect of a kilogram or two of dead alien still being inside his body. It was an unsettling thought.

He noticed the electronic camera, sticking up out of my jacket’s breast pocket. Probably just to get his mind on something—anything—else, he said, “Is that your night-sky photo? How’d it turn out?”

“Here,” I said, pulling out the camera and the palmtop, which was still attached to it by a USB cable. I flipped up the little computer’s screen and handed it and the camera to him. “Have a look.”

He held the computer up to his face. “Can you see the two horizontal bands?” I said.

“Yup.”

“Those are the tracks left by the two moons. But I’m puzzled by the stationary dots above them.” I shrugged. “Maybe they’re geosynchronous satellites put up by the Hets.”

Klicks nodded once as he handed everything back to me. “They’re the gravity-suppressor satellites,” he said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

Klicks reached for the edge of the table, steadying himself. His voice quavered. “How did I know that?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Flatworms,” he said suddenly, but this time it wasn’t one of his little tests. It was a flash of insight. The instant he spoke the word, I knew what he meant. I’d done the Humphries-Jacobsen experiment myself as an undergrad, training a planarian named Karen Black—I called it that because of its cute little cross-eyed face—to contract when exposed to light. The flatworm stored the memory of that training in its RNA. I then chopped K.B. up and fed her to another flatworm, Barbra Streisand. Babs assimilated Karen’s memories and immediately knew how to respond to the light. Klicks had apparently gained some of the dead Het’s memories from the RNA it had left in his head.

“Gravity suppression,” I said. “Fascinating. So the reduced gravity is caused by the Hets—”

“So they can comfortably move around here, yes. They’ve scaled Earth’s gravity down to the same level as Mars’s, cutting it to one Martian g—thirty-eight percent of what we consider normal.”

I shook my head. “Damn, we were stupid. We never felt any movement when we flew in that Het spaceship—nor any weightlessness while we were in orbit, for that matter. They seem to be able to do all kinds of tricks with gravity. Ching-Mei would love these guys: their physics must be extraordinary.”

Klicks frowned. “I don’t think they’re that much ahead of us,” he said. “Yes, they have a better grasp on gravity, but they obviously don’t have time travel. They want the Sternberger something fierce.”

I scratched my beard. “Tell me more about the Hets.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

“Well, let’s try a specific question. Tell me if there’s free-running water on Mars right now.”

He blinked. “Oh, yes. A complete water cycle, with rains and snow.”

“And what else lives on Mars besides the Hets?”

“Nothing lives except us. All other things exist for our subjugation.”

Talk about Manifest Destiny. “You’re going to be in for one hell of a debriefing when we get back, my friend. Tell me: how do the Hets communicate?”

Klicks closed his eyes. “The individual viral units produce impulses like synapses that can travel short distances. All the units in one of those lumps we’ve encountered are acting together, like the cells of one brain. The bigger the conglomeration, the smarter it is.”

“And what about the dinosaurs?”

Klicks’s eyes were still closed, as though he were listening to an internal voice. “Well, without the low gravity caused by the Hets, dinosaurian giantism wouldn’t have occurred. But, beyond that, the Hets have done some direct genetic tinkering recently, fine-tuning existing dinosaurs to be better suited for war. For instance, natural ceratopsians, like Chasmosaurus, had neck frills that were only for bluffing displays. They were just outlined in bone, with skin stretched across. That wasn’t suitable for real battle, so the Hets tweaked them into the genus Triceratops, filling in the open spaces to produce a solid shield of bone.”

“Okay, time for Final Jeopardy: who are the Hets fighting?”

“Good Christ! It is the natives of Tess.” Klicks looked away. “I—I mean of the belt planet.”

“Really? And what’s this garbage about the Martian civilization being a hundred and thirty million years old?”

Klicks looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then his eyes opened wide in astonishment. “The civilization of the viral Martians did arise that long ago, back in what we’d call the early Jurassic. Ten thousand years later— nothing on the scale we’re talking about—they put up the gravity suppressor satellites around Earth. Since the satellites can control gravity, their orbits never decay, and they’re solar-powered, so they never run out of energy. They have indeed been in stationary orbit around Earth for one hundred and thirty million years now.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. The Het technology is clearly more advanced than ours is, but it’s centuries, maybe even tens of centuries, ahead of us, not a hundred-odd million years. I mean, the rosette-