Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

Beep!

Suddenly my disembodied being coalesced into physical form. I smashed my right hand through the window pane, the glass shredding my knuckles like mozzarella cheese. I was going to kill him—

Beep!

“Huh?” Groggy, I reached down and pressed buttons on my wristwatch until I found the one that shut off the alarm. “Klicks?” There was no answer. I guess the alarm hadn’t awoke him. Perhaps he was still doped up by a sleeping pill. I must have been, too, for I imagined just for a second that yellow billiard-ball eyes were peering at me from out of the darkness. I rolled off my crash couch, felt my way along the back wall until I found door number one, and fumbled up the ladder into the instrumentation dome. I clipped the lens cap back onto the camera and removed the rubber band to release the shutter. Noises echoed in a funny way inside that tiny dome and it sounded like the main timeship door downstairs was swinging shut and the latch clicking closed.

I stumbled back down the ladder and reentered the habitat.

“Brandy?”

My heart jumped. “Klicks?”

“Yeah.”

“Did my alarm wake you?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t sleep.”

I thought about it for a moment. I probably could fall back to sleep easily enough—that medication was powerful stuff, but… “Want some coffee?” I said at last.

“Decaf? Sure.”

“Mind if I turn on the lights?”

“No.”

I fumbled for the switch and the overheads sputtered into activity. The brightness was stinging. I shielded my eyes and looked over at Klicks. He was alternating between having his left eye closed and his right, squinting.

“What about the Hets?” he said. “They’re going to ask us tomorrow if we will take them back to the future. What do we tell them?”

I filled two cups with water and put them in the microwave. “I still say we have to tell them no.”

“You’re wrong,” Klicks said slowly, most of the Jamaican lilt gone from his voice, a brief pause between each of the words. “We must help them get past whatever natural catastrophe caused their extinction.”

“Look,” I said, trying to summon my strength of will, “the Royal Ontario Museum is in for much more funding for this mission than is the Tyrrell. That makes me de facto mission leader, and, if necessary, I’ll invoke that right. We leave the Hets behind.”

“But we must take them forward.”

“No.” I turned my back on Klicks, furious.

“Well,” said Klicks, his voice growing closer, “if you feel that strongly about it…”

“Thank you, Miles.” I breathed a sigh of relief, and then, just in time to save me, refilled my lungs. “I appreciate—”

Thick fingers closed around my neck from behind. I tried to cry out, but couldn’t force enough air through my constricted windpipe to generate anything beyond a faint grunt. I brought my hands up to pry Klicks’s fingers free, but he was too strong, much too strong, his arms like a robot’s, crushing the life out of my body. My vision was blurring and my lungs felt like they were going to burst.

I twisted and bent frantically from my waist. In a mad, desperate moment, I tried throwing Klicks—something I knew I’d never be able to do—but damned if he didn’t flip right over my shoulder, me tossing his ninety kilos as if they were less than half that amount. Of course—the reduced gravity!

I gulped air, my vision slowly clearing. Adrenaline pumped within me, fighting off the effects of the sleeping pill. Klicks picked himself up and we squared off, hands on knees, facing each other. He swung, a great sweeping movement of his right arm, like a grizzly scooping fish from a stream. I jumped back as far as I could in the tight confines of the habitat. From bear to tiger in an instant, he crouched and leapt, his body colliding with mine, knocking me to the cold steel floor next to his crash couch, a great thundering bang from the partially empty water tank beneath our feet echoing throughout the chamber. Then he smashed me across the face, the stone in a ring Tess had given him slicing open my cheek.

What the hell had gotten into Klicks? A Martian, that’s what. Of course. The yellow eyes in the dark. If my wrist alarm hadn’t woke me while the aliens were inside the Sternberger , they would have taken me over, too, then used our timeship to bring themselves forward, neatly cutting us out of the decision-making process. It was only thirty-one hours until the Huang Effect reversed states; I guess the Hets felt they could comfortably remain in our bodies for that long. These creatures played for keeps, that was for damn sure. My only chance of preventing them from seizing the Sternberger , it seemed, was to kill Miles Jordan.

That was easier said than done, though. As much as I sometimes disliked the man, as much I had fantasized about splitting his skull with the trusty cold chisel I had used for years to open slabs of rock, I had strong moral compunctions about physically hurting another human being. Even in self-defense, I found it hard to fight. My natural reaction was that a reasonable person would respond better to words than to fisticuffs. But Klicks, or at least the Het riding within him, had none of those same misgivings—as the bit of white froth at the corner of his mouth made clear.

He smashed me again in the face, hard. Although I’d never experienced the sensation before, I was sure that was what a breaking nose felt like. Blood soaked my mustache.

Still, I realized, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He could have done that just by shooting me in the back with his elephant gun. Vast suspicions would be aroused if both of us didn’t return from the Mesozoic. Hell, Tess had joked that she’d expected only one of us to come back alive, given how poorly we’d been getting on of late. Of course, nobody on the project knew what I wrote in this diary, or what I said to Schroeder, and the idea of psychological testing, mainstay of the moon shots (back when the world could afford moon shots), was completely foreign to those putting together paleontological digs. Hell, paleontologists routinely go off into the field for weeks on end without anyone taking steps to see if those particular people could get along.

Whether the Hets knew or understood any of that, I couldn’t say. But they obviously wanted me incapacitated so that I could be entered by one of their kind. For that experience, twice had been more than enough. Fear and revulsion at the idea renewed my strength. I reached behind my head for the footrest of Klicks’s crash couch and with all my energy spun the chair on its swivel base, slamming its arm into the side of his head. The armrest was padded, but Klicks, in his lackadaisical way, had left his shoulder strap hanging across it. The aluminum buckle split the skin across the top of his ear where it hit. The blow put him off balance long enough for me to knock him over. I scrambled to my feet, putting the bulk of the crash couch between him and me.

He tried to feint left and right but, as he did so, I noticed his movements were awkward, his torso turning by repositioning his legs instead of pivoting from the waist. It was as if the Het within him hadn’t yet worked out the finer points of controlling a human body.

We circled the small room several times, me rotating the chair to always keep its long dimension between us. I didn’t know whether my fear was valid, but I worried that if he chased me much longer in a counterclockwise direction the damned thing would unscrew from its base.

As we swung by the lab bench, I grabbed our mineralogical scale and threw it at his forehead. If he had been operating under his own volition, Klicks would have easily avoided the impact, but the Het seemed to hesitate about which muscles to move. By the time it pulled Klicks’s head aside, it was too late: the heavy base hit just above Klicks’s one continuous eyebrow. He screamed in pain. Blood welled from the wound and I hoped it would obscure his vision.