Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

“It is,” Klicks said. “Mammals, not reptiles, dominate. The climate is cooler, the continents are more dispersed, the land is drier, and the seasons are more pronounced. And, perhaps most interesting of all, the gravity is maybe two and half times what it is now.”

The troodon’s neck weaved in an odd swooping motion. “What did you say?”

“Crazy, isn’t it?” I said. “The gravity on Earth seems to double or triple over the next sixty-five million years.”

“That is most peculiar, Dr. Brandon Thackeray whose friends call him Brandy.”

“It is indeed. We can’t account for it.”

There was no way to read the troodon’s expressionless face. Indeed, it seemed to go limp, its muscles relaxing as if the Het within was distracted, lost in its own thoughts. “Higher gravity, say you. Intriguing. Tell me: what is Mars like in your time?”

Klicks was about to answer the creature’s question, but I jumped in quickly: “I’ve never been there.”

We’d reached the crumbling crater wall. I noted with astonishment that tiny green shoots had already appeared in the freshly turned soil. Another irrelevant thought hit me. I felt like I was out on a date and that we’d arrived back at the woman’s home. It was that awkward moment where you find out if you’re going to get invited in. Except that the Sternberger was my home, and the Hets were the too-tenacious escorts who didn’t seem to be getting the hint that it was time for them to say their good-byes.

Finally the Het said, quite bluntly, “Show us the inside.”

Klicks was about to roll out the goddamned red carpet for them, but I cut him off. “Certainly. And we’d like to see inside your spaceships. But not just now, please. Professor Jordan and I have some matters of personal hygiene to attend to, and humans require privacy to do that.”

“Privacy,” it said again. “Being … alone?”

“That’s right.”

“A strange concept.”

I shrugged. “It’s important to us.”

Diamond-snout looked at me, its head tilted in that gesture I associated with puzzlement. “Oh,” it said at last—or maybe it was just a reptilian throat-clearing. “Well, we will speak again.” A pause. “Soon.” The three dinosaurs strode away, back into the forest.

Klicks and I scrambled up the crater wall. It had been a heck of a lot easier getting down than it was going back up, even in the lighter gravity. I practically filled my boots with soft dirt in the process.

Once we were alone inside the cramped confines of the Sternberger ’s semicircular habitat, Klicks sprawled out on his crash couch, fingers interlaced behind his head, and said, “Well, what do you make of that?”

I hated the man’s infinite calmness. He had to be as excited as I was. Why didn’t he show it? Why did I have to show it so transparently? “This is incredible,” I said, and instantly regretted my hyperbole.

“Incredible,” said Klicks, savoring the word, or, more precisely, savoring my use of it. “Yes, that it is. This changes everything, of course.”

“How do you mean?”

He gave me one of those looks, the ones he saved for times when he thought the person he was talking to was a little on the slow side. “I mean about our mission. The discovery of the Hets is more important than any paleontological research we were going to do.”

I felt anger growing within me. Nothing was more important than dinosaurs, as far as I was concerned. “We’ve got a job to do,” I said, as evenly as I could.

“Oh, yes indeed,” said Klicks, unlacing his fingers. “We have to bring the Hets forward in time, of course.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “ What?”

“Think about it, man. By our time, Mars is dead. Completely abiologic. Every probe since Viking has confirmed that.”

“So?”

“So something wipes out the Hets between now and then. We’ve got the opportunity to jump the ones that are here forward, past whatever event kills them. We can repopulate Mars.”

“We can’t do that,” I said. My head was pounding.

“Sure we can. You saw how small those Het slimeballs are. We could take back hundreds of them. It’s just a question of balance. Once we empty our water tank, we’ll have plenty of room and a big mass deficit that we’ll have to fill with something before the Huang Effect switches states. It might as well be the Hets.”

“We were going to bring forward some biological specimens. Maybe even a small dinosaur. They’ve got a habitat all set at the Calgary Zoo—”

“We can do that, too. They’re not mutually exclusive propositions.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, trying to buy time to think. This was all happening much too quickly. “Maybe it’s not our place to do something like that. I mean, we’d be playing God—”

Klicks rolled his eyes as though I’d said something incalculably stupid. “Jesus, man, what do you think bringing home a baby Ornithomimus would be? After all, they’re extinct, too.”

“But this is intelligent life. It just seems—”

“Seems that we should ignore it? Brandy, how would you feel if the shoe was on the other—the other pseudopod? Some natural disaster wipes out all of good old H. sap . Wouldn’t you want some guy to play Noah for us? We can prevent the extinction of a—what’s that word the science-fiction writers use?—a sentient lifeform.”

He mispronounced it, saying it as three distinct syllables. “That’s sen-shent ,” I said. “It rhymes with quotient .”

“What the hell difference does that make? I’m talking about a bold, sweeping move and you’re going all picayune on me.”

“Details matter. Besides, we don’t have to decide this thing ourselves; we’re just the test mission. When they send the big multinational mission next year, they can haul the Hets forward, if it seems the right thing to do.”

“Point-five-oh,” said Klicks.

This time I failed his little test. I looked at him blankly. “What?”

“The Huang Effect has a 50 percent uncertainty, thanks to the parts of the Throwback calculations that are quantum mechanical. The chances of the big timeship hitting even this same century are minuscule.” Klicks shook his head. “No, my friend. No one else can make the decision. This is it, the one and only opportunity to save the Hets from extinction.”

My throat felt dry. “But doubtless eventually another mission will hit this particular time. Maybe not one from the twenty-first century, or even the twenty-second. But eventually.”

Klicks scowled, his one continuous eyebrow bunching like a knotted shoelace. “Haven’t you been reading the papers? Ever since Derzhavin was assassinated by those resurgent hardliners, things have gotten a lot worse between the Americans and the Russians. And even if they do work their differences out, if the global warming trend continues, we’re not going to have enough food to feed ourselves. I wouldn’t count on there being anyone left by the twenty-second century.”

“Oh, things aren’t that bad,” I said weakly.

“Perhaps not. But it’s unfair to the Hets for us to assume that humanity will eventually get around to dealing with their plight sometime in the distant future. We’ve got to help them right now, while we’re sure we can.”

“It’s a moral decision,” I said, shaking my head.

Klicks frowned. “And you hate making moral decisions.”

“ ‘Hate’ is a strong word—”

“You don’t have a stand on abortion or capital punishment. Hell, you haven’t voted in, what, twenty years?”

I despised the sound of his voice. I’d never had any trouble refuting Klicks’s claims in print, taking hours to mold letters of response for the journals, but face-to-face he could always run circles around me. “But this isn’t a decision we’re competent to make.”