End of an Era Page 18

  Beep!

  Klicks stroked Tess’s mane, his thick fingers passing gently through the orange strands the way mine used to, the way mine still ached to do each time I ran into her. I thought for a moment that he was going to laugh at what she had told him, but what he did was much, much worse, cutting me like troo-don teeth. "There, there," he said, his too-smooth baritone the perfect complement to her throaty sexiness. "Don’t worry, Lambchop" — Lambchop! — "He’s gone now."

  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 eye
brow. He screamed in pain. Blood welled from the wound and I hoped it would obscure his vision.

  No such luck. A thin layer of phosphorescent blue jelly seeped out of the cut, stanching the flow. I was running out of ideas, not to mention stamina. My heart pounded and I felt my strength flagging.

  Klicks had screamed in pain.

  That was my one hope. I gave his crash couch a healthy twist, setting it spinning around, then jumped as far as I could across the room. Klicks wheeled to face me. We danced for position, him swinging his great arms again the way a bear swipes with its paws. Finally he thought he had me trapped in the corner where the flat rear wall met the curving outer wall. He stood spread-eagle, his legs apart, his arms raised, trying to prevent me slipping past. This was the moment. The one chance, the only hope. I ran straight at him and, with all the force I could muster, brought my knee up into his groin, slamming it as brutally as I could, all my inertia and all my strength concentrating on bashing his testicles back up into his body cavity.

  Klicks doubled from the waist, his fists moving under human instinct instead of Het command to protect his private parts from further assault. In the brief interval while the Het struggled to regain control of its biological vehicle, I made my final move. I grabbed Klicks’s elephant gun from where he’d left it propped up next to the microwave-oven stand and smashed the length of its steel barrel across the back of his neck. He stood as if frozen for several seconds, then slumped to the ground, possibly dead, certainly unconscious. I suspected that if Klicks had survived the blow, and that was indeed in doubt, it would only be a matter of minutes, or even seconds, before the Het would find a way to turn this biological machine back on.

  I hurried to the medicine refrigerator, mounted between doors number two and three. We’d been provided with a complete pharmacopoeia, of course, since no one knew what Mesozoic germs would do to us. I hadn’t spent much time inside the thing before, but thankfully all the drugs were categorized by function. Peering through clouds of my own breath condensing in the cold air from the interior, I scanned the labels. Analgesics, antibiotics, antihistamines. Ah! Antiviral agents. There were several vials in that section, but the one I seized upon was para-22-Ribavirin — better known as Deliverance, the miracle AIDS cure.

  I plunged a syringe through the rubber cap, drawing forth the milky liquid. I knew how to use needles from my work in the comparative-anatomy lab, but — my father’s pain-racked face flashed before me — I’d never injected a human being before. I ran to Klicks, my footfalls echoing in the steel-walled room, and bent over his crumpled form. He was still breathing, but shallowly, slowly, life apparently ebbing from him. I forced the needle through the thick wall of his right carotid artery, pumped the plunger down, and, never taking my eyes off him, slumped back against the door to our garage, the agony from my shattered nose growing, throbbing, multiplying.

  It took a while — I’d lost track of the passage of time — but finally small amounts of blue jelly began to seep from Klicks’s temple. But something was wrong. It wasn’t undulating the way I’d seen the Hets move before, nor was it glowing. I rolled him over so that his bruised face was visible. One of his eyelids was stuck shut by dried blood, but the other fluttered open for a few seconds and he spoke in a rasping whisper. "You animals—"

  I got an orange garbage bag and a spoon and, taking immense care not to touch it, began scraping away what little of the jelly had escaped. No more than two tablespoonfuls. The rest, dead or dying I hoped, seemed destined to remain inside Klicks’s head until his own antibodies and white corpuscles could deal with it as they would any other inert viral material.

  I stuffed the bag into a metal box, went down the ramp to our outside door, and heaved the box as far as I could in the reduced gravity. It sailed out onto the cracked mud plain far below; in the moonlight, I saw it bounce twice when it hit.

  I made it back to the medicine refrigerator, filled another syringe with Deliverance, and injected myself as a precaution. Then I opened the first-aid kit mounted on the refrigerator’s top and found a wad of white gauze. I held it tightly against the center of my face, stumbled back to my crash couch, and lay down on my back, the shift in posture sending daggers of pain through my head. I hoped and prayed with all my might that Klicks would pull through.

  Boundary Layer

  A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

  —George Moore, Irish writer (1852–1933)

  Tess gave me a big hug and a kiss when I got back to Toronto from Vancouver. I squeezed her, but my mind was elsewhere. We’d had a good marriage, as far as I could tell. We’d enjoyed each other’s company. Both of our careers had prospered. And the lack of children? Well, she had always said that it didn’t bother her, that she, too, felt they’d be an inconvenience, at odds with our lifestyle. And yet, in that other, original iteration of the timeline, she had left me for Miles Jordan. Klicks had always wanted kids. Was that part of the reason?

  I wished to God that I’d never found that alternative diary. Ignorance really can be bliss. To think that my personal life was as tenuous and unstable as Ching-Mei said the universe itself was — it was enough to drive me crazy.

  Ching-Mei had tried to explain how that other diary had come to be in my possession, how the memory wafer in my palmtop could have somehow swapped contents with the one the time-traveling Brandy had taken to the past with him. She spoke about shunting and Huang-Effect reversals and chaos theory, but she was guessing, really. It didn’t matter. The damage was done.

  "How was the flight?" asked Tess, removing her arms from me.

  "Typical Air Canada." My tone was cold, dry.

  Tess’s eyes flicked across my face, looking, I guess, for the emotion underlying the weariness in my voice. "Sorry to hear that," she said at last.

  I hung my coat in the hall closet and we made our way up to the living room. We sat together on the L-shaped couch, beneath a framed landscape painting done by Tess’s uncle, a not-bad artist who lived in Michigan. "Anything exciting happen while I was away?"

  "Not really," she said. "Wednesday, I went to see that new James Bond film — I must say Macaulay Culkin makes a surprisingly good 007. And last night I had Miles over for dinner."

  Klicks here? While I was away? "Oh."

  "By the way, I balanced our bank account while you were gone. Why’d you charge your plane tickets on your MasterCard? Shouldn’t the museum have paid for those?"

  Oh, crap. "Uh, well, the research was personal."

  Tess blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

  "I mean, it’s not important."

  She looked up at me, searching. "Is everything all right?"

  "Everything’s fine. Just fine."

  Silence for a time, and then, softly: "I think I’m entitled to a better answer than that."

  "Look," I said, and instantly regretted it, "I’m not giving you the third degree about what you did while I was away."

  Tess smiled with her mouth, but I could see by the corners of her eyes that the smile was forced. "Sorry, honey," she said, false sun in her voice. "It’s just that I worry about you." Her eyes flicked over my face again. "I wouldn’t want you to have a midlife crisis and go running off with somebody else."

  "I’m not the one who’s likely to do that, am I?"

  She went stiff. "What do you mean by that?"

  Christ, I was saying things that I shouldn’t. But if what we had wasn’t as special to her as it was to me, I had to know. I had to. "How was Klicks?" I said.

  She was bristling. "He was fine, thank you very much. Pleasant. Nonargumentative. A damn sight nicer than you’ve been of late."

  "I see. Well, if you prefer his company—"

  "I didn’t say that." She slapped the arm of the couch, air forcing its way out of the plush armrest with a soft whoompf. "Jesus, you’re a frustrating man sometimes. You run off on some junket clear to the other side of the country. You’ve accused me twice now of, of infidelit
y. What in God’s name is wrong with you?"

  "There’s nothing wrong with me." The same weary tone I’d used to describe the flight from Vancouver.

  "The hell there isn’t." She looked up at me again and this time her eyes locked on mine. Those lovely green eyes, the same two haunting orbs that had fueled my fantasies before I’d worked up the courage to ask her out; the same two compassionate orbs that had helped me through the death of my mother, through the loss of that job in Ottawa, through so many tragedies; the same two intelligent orbs that had danced as we had held real discussions about things that had seemed oh so very important in our youth — war and peace and love and international relations and great moral controversies, she always quick with a point of view, me ponderously weighing the evidence, trying to decide what was right and what was wrong. Physically the eyes had changed only slightly over the years: their color was bluer now and there were fine wrinkles at their corners. But where once they had been great expansive windows for me, and me alone, to peer into her very soul, they now seemed silvered over, mirrored, reflecting back my own doubts and fears and insecurities, while revealing nothing of the mind that dwelt behind them.

  "Do you still love me?" she said at last, a slight quaver to the words.

  The question hit me with unexpected force. We didn’t speak of love, not openly, not anymore. That was a topic for those who were still young. We lived a peaceful coexistence: old friends who didn’t have to say much to each other; old shoes that grew more comfortable each time you put them on. Did I still love her? Had I ever loved her — the real her, the actual Tess — or had I only loved an image of someone else, someone I’d created in my mind, sculpted in my dreams? I realized, fast enough, fortunately, that this was one of those moments of truth, one of those significant butterflies, one of those decisions that could bend the timeline so severely that I’d never be able to correct its course.