Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

I tapped out the command that jumped the cursor to the second error. Type mismatch. What the hell did that mean in this context? Oh, I see. I’d tried to do a mathematical operation on a text variable. Stupid.

The self-harmonizing notes from the trombone-crested parasaurolophus split the air, presumably calling out for the bonehead to charge again.

The cursor jumped to the third error. Reserved word? That meant the name I’d chosen for a variable—FREQUENCY—was one the program didn’t allow, because it used it exclusively for some other function. Okay, let’s try a different name. Call it SAVE_ASS, and hope that it does. I almost cracked the palmtop’s tiny case with the force with which I bashed out the compile command again.

I held my breath until the message flashed in front of my face: “Compilation successful. No errors.”

“Got it!” I said.

“Terrific!” crowed Klicks. “Start transmitting.” I highlighted the program file name and held my finger above the Enter key.

“Hit the damn key!” said Klicks.

“I…”

“What’s wrong?”

“You know what’s going to happen?” I said. “I’m not sure I can…”

“If you don’t want to press it, I will.”

I looked at him, held his gaze. “No,” I said. “Failing to act is a decision in and of itself.” I pressed down on the key. The program started running and the radio began transmitting.

Crrack! The pachycephalosaur skull with its yellow and blue display colors smashed the loosened section of hull inward. A circular piece of metal about a meter and a half across crashed to the floor with an ear-splitting clang. Before we could react, the bonehead was gone and a triceratops face was poking through from outside. Klicks cocked his rifle. This individual had only one eye horn. The other probably had snapped off while it was attacking our ship. In one continuous motion, Klicks flopped to his belly and fired up into the soft tissue on the underside of the beast’s throat. It teetered for a moment, then slumped back, dead. Lucky shot: he must have severed the thing’s spinal cord.

Through the jagged opening in the hull we could see two other ceratopsians shouldering the carcass aside. Klicks fired over and over, but these beasts weren’t about to repeat the same mistake. They kept their heads tipped down, the bony frills shielding them. In short order, the path was cleared and a platoon of troodons danced into view. They waited for Klicks to lower his rile to reload, then charged, a scaly green wave of teeth and claws surging forward—

Klicks tried to rise to his feet, but instead slammed into the deck. My stomach seemed to drop right through my boots. The closest of the troodons slapped onto their bellies, two of them being impaled on the ragged edge of the hole in the Sternberger wall, most of the rest tumbling backward out onto the mud flat. Feeling like I weighed a million kilos, I ran as though in slow motion toward the edges of the impromptu doorway, leaning out over the two troodon corpses. Overhead, the great quetzalcoatlus, gliding in a wide circle, crumpled like a paper toy and began plummeting to the earth. Nearby, the sauropod’s twelve meters of neck came crashing to the ground, hitting with a sound like a thunderclap. The tyrannosaurs staggered for a few moments, then, one by one, fell to their knees, their legbones snapping under their own massive weight. The earth vibrated and shook beneath our feet as gravity surged back to a full, normal g. Suddenly the mud flat began to ripple like the Tacoma Narrows bridge, great clouds of brown dust rising into the darkening sky.

I staggered away from the opening and dropped onto my belly near Klicks. The earthquake continued, the roar deafening, the constant heaving of the ground turning my stomach. Wind whipped through the openings in the Sternberger’s hull. There was much lightning, too, strobing through the glassteel, but the thunder was all but lost against the other noises, including a cacophony of animal screams.

On and on, the ground shaking, heaving…

I suspected fissures must be ripping open all across the Earth, spewing out magma rich in iridium and arsenic and antimony. The molten rock would spark countless forest fires and boil water in the seas. In places, clouds of poisonous gas would belch forth, and great tidal waves must be pounding the shores, sloshing ocean water into freshwater shallows, destroying coastal habitats. And, as the Earth compacted slightly under its newfound weight, quartz grains would be shocked and microdiamonds would form—two of the asteroid fans’ favorite pieces of evidence for what they’d thought had been an impact.

My head pounded. I lifted my neck to look up through the opening torn in our hull. The sky had turned a bilious greenish gray, the clouds whipping along with visible speed. The Sternberger bounced like an egg frying. Each time it slammed back down, my chest was bruised, metal fittings on my jacket digging into my skin. My teeth rattled. I was afraid to open my mouth, lest it be slammed back closed by an impact, biting off my tongue. My nose bled steadily.

Eventually the screams from outside stopped, but the pounding went on and on and on, the ground heaving. Sheets of rain dropped out of the sky, as though buckets inside the clouds had been overturned all at once.

An hour went by, and another, the earthquake unrelenting. For a time, Klicks was knocked completely unconscious, his head smashing into the deck as we bounced again and again. As the Earth’s gravity increased, I imagined Luna must be reeling in its orbit. By the time it stabilized again, it would be showing the part of its face familiar to human beings. I suspected tiny Trick would never fully re-stabilize in its closer orbit, making its eventual disintegration inevitable.

At last the quaking stopped. We stayed put in the Sternberger , anticipating an aftershock. That came about twenty minutes later, and others followed for all the rest of the time we remained in the Mesozoic and perhaps, indeed, for years to come.

During one of the gaps between the quakes, we dared to venture outside. The sky, thick with dust, had cleared enough that we could see the blood-red setting sun.

It was a different world. Klicks and I were the only large creatures still able to walk around. Dinosaurs were everywhere, flopped on their bellies. Some still clung to life. The hearts of others had already given out under the hours of gravity 2.6 times what they were used to. Those that did survive would eventually starve, unable to move around to forage.

We saw several Hets. They had oozed out of their dead and dying dinosaur vehicles, but were flattened like blue pancakes, barely able to move. They seemed to be having trouble holding together in large, intelligent concentrations. In many places, we saw three or four smaller globs next to each other, unable to join up. Klicks set fire to all the ones we found.

Many of the small animals, including some tiny birds, tortoises, and a few shrew-like mammals, appeared to be doing all right in the full gravity, but broken bones, internal injuries, or cardiac arrest seemed to be killing or have killed almost everything else.

Death was everywhere and I took as much of it as I could. Finally, bone-weary, I sat down amongst the ferns next to a hapless duckbill, the creature whimpering slightly as its life slipped away. The beast’s intricate crest had apparently been staved in when its head had slammed into a rock as the gravity surged on. The animal’s dying breaths were escaping with ragged whistling sounds through its smashed nasal passages, and it regarded me, terrified, with an unintelligent eye.

It was the end of an era.

Stroking the dinosaur’s pebbly flank, I let my tears flow freely.