Robert Sawyer: End of an Era

A time machine.

An actual time machine.

I just wish I knew exactly where it was going to take me.

“ Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven .”

The Huang Effect was accurate to one-half of one percentage point—a minuscule imprecision. But given that we were casting back from a.d. 2013 to 65.0 million years ago, a half-point error could plop us as much as 330,000 years into the Cenozoic, much too late to determine just what had caused the worldwide extinctions at the end of the previous era, the Mesozoic.

“ Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two .”

My analyst says I’m going to excessive lengths to prove I’m right and Klicks is wrong. Thank God for socialized medicine—there’s no way I could afford to stubbornly disbelieve Dr. Schroeder month after month if the government health plan weren’t picking up the bills for my therapy. Besides, it’s more than just me versus Klicks. If we don’t miss our target, this trip might clear up an enduring scientific mystery, something that he and I and hundreds of others had argued for years through the pages of Nature and Science and The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology .

“ Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen .”

The government of Alberta had wanted us to launch from Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. But the fossils found there were from a time 10 million years before the end of the age of dinosaurs. We’d gone upstream along the Red Deer River to a formation from the latest late Maastrichtian—right at the end of the Cretaceous. But to make the government happy, Ching-Mei had established her control center at the Tyrrell Field Station inside Dinosaur Provincial Park.

“ Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven .”

The distance between the center of the Earth and ground level here in the Red Deer valley might have changed by several hundred meters in the last 65 million years. Unfortunately, the geomorphologists working on this project couldn’t agree on whether the landforms would have shifted up or down during that timespan. To avoid the possibility of our ship arriving underground—killing us, of course, not to mention causing one hell of an explosion as matter tried to force itself inside of other matter—the Sternberger had been hauled a kilometer above the Badlands by the Sikorsky. Just before Ching-Mei threw the switch to activate the Huang Effect, we would be cut loose. The interior of the Sternberger would lock into stasis—a stopped-time condition, the first creation of which had won Ching-Mei a Nobel Prize in 2007—until ten minutes after we arrived in the Mesozoic. Plenty of time, supposedly, for us to come crashing to the ground and for the mountain of debris we would kick up on impact to rain out of the sky.

That’s the theory, anyway.

“ Seven. Six. Five .”

I thought of something funny in those last few seconds. If I did die, my will still named Tess as my beneficiary. Not that I owned much of value—just a beat-up Ford and the townhouse in Mississauga—but it seemed strange that my ex-wife would get it all. I guess that would be all right if both Klicks and I died, but I didn’t like to think of just me buying it. After all, since Tess had taken up with Klicks—just how long had they been seeing each other, anyway?—my estate would in essence go to him, too. That’s the last thing I wanted.

“ TWO. ONE. ZERO! ”

My stomach lurched as the cable was released—

You pays your money, you takes your chances. We had contingency plans for every possible outcome of the drop: what to do if we landed in water; if we landed upside down; if we couldn’t get the door open; if for some reason we came out of stasis too early and were damaged on impact. But the worst of all, really, was if we landed at night, because for that the contingency plan was simply to wait until morning.

My crash couch was swiveled to face the Sternberger ’s curving outer wall. A glassteel window was built into it, giving a full 180-degree panorama. Everything outside was dark. Actually it wasn’t quite night: it just took my eyes a minute to adjust. More like twilight, really. Klicks must have been thinking the same thing, because he whistled the DOO-doo-DOO-doo signature from that old Rod Serling TV series.

“It’s almost sunrise,” I said, unstrapping myself, the aluminum buckle opening with a clang. I rushed over to stand in front of the radio console and peered out of the center of our window.

“And the glass is half-full,” replied Klicks, also getting to his feet.

“Huh?” I hated his little tests—cryptic phrases designed to see just how much on the ball you were.

He came over and stood near me. We both peered into the darkness. “You’re an optimist, Brandy. I think it’s just past sunset.”

I pointed to my left. “That part of the window was facing east when the Sikorsky dropped us.”

He shook his head. “Makes no difference. We could have corkscrewed as we fell, or bounced on impact.”

“There’s one way to tell.” I walked back to the straight rear wall of the habitat. I paused for a second to peer through the little window in door number two, the one that led into our Jeep’s garage. The garage door was made out of glassteel panels, so it was completely transparent. I should have been able to see outside past the Jeep, but it seemed pitch-black. Oh, well. I opened the middle of the three equipment lockers and rummaged around until I found a compass. It was pretty beat-up, the veteran of many field expeditions. I brought it over to Klicks.

“No good,” he said, not bothering to look at the compass’s dial. “It’ll only show us the north-south line; it won’t tell us which is which.”

I was about to say “Huh?” again, but after a second, I realized what Klicks was getting at. The polarity of Earth’s magnetic field reverses periodically. We’d been aiming for about a third of the way down into 29R, a half-million-year-long chron of reversal that straddled the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary during which the magnetic north pole was located near the geographic south pole. If we’d hit our target, the colored end of our compass needles would be facing south. But the Huang Effect’s uncertainty was big enough that we might have landed well into the more recent 29N chron of normal orientation, or maybe just into the top of the more ancient SON. If we’d landed in either of those, the colored end would be facing north instead. Klicks knew there’d be no easy way to tell, except by looking at the sun, which of course would still rise in the east and set in the west. Until we could see if it was getting brighter or darker along the glowing horizon to our right, we wouldn’t know if it was dawn or dusk.

Except—hah! Got him . I looked at the compass dial, holding it very steady. The 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.”