Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

“Very good. Sir?”

“To start,” said Klicks, “the French onion soup—please make sure the cheese is cooked.” He looked over at Tess. “And the lamb chop.”

My heart skipped a beat. I wondered if he knew that “Lamb-chop” was my pet name for her. I tried never to use it in public, but I suppose I might have slipped from time to time.

“And for you, sir?” the waiter said to me.

“Hmmm.”

“Come on, Brandy,” said Tess.

“Yeah,” I said. “The lamb chop sounds good. I’ll have the same thing as him.”

“Good night, Dr. Thackeray.”

“ ’Night, Maria. Try not to get soaked.” Another strobing flash of lightning sent wild shadows sprinting around the room. Even when it wasn’t storming out, the Paleobiology offices at the Royal Ontario Museum were a wonderfully macabre place—especially in the evening after most of the lights had been turned off. Bones were everywhere. Here, a black Smilodon skull with fifteen-centimeter-long saber teeth. There, the curving brown claws of an ornithomimid mounted on a metal stand, poised as if ready to seize fresh prey. Sprawling across a table, the articulated yellow skeleton of a Pliocene crocodile. Scattered about: boxes of shark teeth, sorting trays with thousands of bone chips, a small cluster of fossil dinosaur eggs looking as though they were about to hatch, and plaster jackets containing heaven-only-knows-what brought back from the latest dig.

From outside, the claps of thunder were like dinosaur roars, echoing down the millennia.

This was my favorite time. The phones had stopped ringing and the grad students and volunteer catalogers had gone home. It was the one opportunity in the day for me to relax and get caught up on some of my paperwork.

And, when all that was done, I took my old Toshiba palmtop out of the locked drawer in my desk and wrote my daily entry in this diary. (I normally wouldn’t run a computer during an electrical storm, but my trusty Tosh was battery powered.) I executed a macro that jumped to the bottom of my diary file, inserted the current date—16 February 2013—boldfaced it, and typed a colon and two spaces. I was about to begin today’s write-up when my eyes were caught by the tail end of the previous entry. I let my tears flow freely , it said.

Huh?

I scrolled back a few pages.

My heart pounded erratically.

What the hell was this?

Where did this entry come from?

Living dinosaurs? A journey back through time? An attack by—? Was this some kind of joke? If I ever found out who’d been messing with my diary, I’d kill him. I was so pissed off, I barely noticed that the freak lightning storm had stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun.

I jumped to the top of the document. I’d begun a new diary file on January 1, about six weeks ago, but this file started with a date only five days ago. Still, there were pages and pages of unfamiliar material here. I began to read from the beginning.

Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby ran in front of a car right outside my townhouse. Killed instantly.

Those weren’t my words. Where was my diary? How did this get here in its place? What the hell was going on?

And what’s this about Tess and Klicks—? Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ…

Mesozoic sunlight shone through the glassteel window that ran around the curving rim of the Sternberger ’s habitat, stinging my eyes and casting harsh shadows on the flat rear wall. I woke up still feeling strangely light-headed and buoyant. I looked around the semicircular chamber, but Klicks was nowhere to be found. The bastard had gone outside without me. I quickly shed my PJs, pulled on the same Tilley pants that I’d worn yesterday, fumbled into my shirt, jacket, and boots, and opened door number one, bounding down the little ramp that led to the outer hatch. Much to my surprise, I hit my head on the low ceiling as I went down the ramp. Rubbing my bruised pate, I opened the blue outer door panel and looked down at the crater wall. In the brown earth, I could clearly see the skid marks made by Klicks’s size twelves. To their right, there were giant triple-clawed tyrannosaur tracks, made by the beasts that had reconnoitered us last night. Also visible: tiny two-pronged marks made by the minuscule tyrannosaur finger-claws.

I took a deep breath and walked forward. The first step, as the saying goes, was a doozy. The hull of the Sternberger jutted out from the crater wall, and I fell close to a meter before my boots connected with the crumbly, moist soil. Still, it was a surprisingly gentle fall, and I skidded with ease down to the mud flat, brown clouds of dirt rising behind me. At the base of the crater, I fell back on my bum; a rather ignominious first step into the Cretaceous world.

It was hot, humid, and overgrown. The sun, just clearing the tops of the bald cypresses, was burning brighter than I’d ever experienced. I looked everywhere for a dinosaur, or any vertebrate, but there was none to be seen.

None, that is, except Klicks Jordan. He came bounding around from behind the crater wall, jumping up and down like a madman.

“Check this out, Brandy!” He crouched low, folding his knees to his chest, then sprang, the soles of his work boots clearing the dark soil by a meter. He did it again and again, leaping into the air, a demented rabbit.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said, irritated by his childishness and perhaps a little envious of his prowess. I certainly had never been able to jump that high.

“Try it.”

“What?”

“Go ahead. Try it. Jump!”

“What’s gotten into you, Klicks?”

“Just do it, will you?”

The path of least resistance. I crouched down, my legs stiff from just having awoke, and bolted. My body went up, up, higher than I’d ever jumped before, then, more slowly, more gently than I’d ever experienced, it settled back to Earth, landing with a dull thud. “What the—?”

“It’s the gravity!” said Klicks, triumphantly. “It’s less here—much less.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “I estimate I weigh just over a third of what I normally do.”

“I’ve felt light-headed since we arrived—”

“Me, too.”

“But I thought it was just excitement at being here—”

“It’s more than that, my friend,” said Klicks. “It’s the gravity. The actual fucking gravity. Christ, I feel like Superman!” He leapt into the air again, rising even higher than he had before.

I followed suit. He could still outjump me, but not by much. We were laughing like children in a playground. It was exhilarating, and the pumping adrenaline just boosted our abilities.

You can’t avoid building up some decent leg muscles doing fieldwork, but I’d never been particularly strong. I felt like I’d drunk some magic potion—full of energy, full of power. Alive!

Klicks set off leaping around the crater wall. I gave chase. The donut of dark, crumbling earth had been providing some shade, but we came out into the fierce sun as we moved around back. It took us several minutes of mad hopping to circumnavigate the thirty-meter-wide crater, returning to the part of the wall upon which the Sternberger was perched.

“That’s amazing,” I said, catching my breath, my head swimming. “But what could possibly account for it?”

“Who knows?” Klicks sat down on the dried mud. Even in less than half a g, leaping up and down like an idiot is enough to tire you out. I crouched about ten meters away from him, wiping sweat from my soaked forehead. The heat was stifling. “I’ll tell you one thing it accounts for, though,” said Klicks. “Giantism in dinosaurs. Matthew of the AMNH asked the question a century ago: if the elephant is the largest size our terrestrial animals can now manage, how could the dinosaur have grown so much larger? Well, we’ve got the answer now: they evolved in a lesser gravity. Of course they’re bigger!”