End of an Era Read online

  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…

  Countdown: 16

  To really understand a man, you have to get inside his head.

  —Rudolph L. Schroeder, Canadian clinical psychologist (1941– )

  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!"

  I saw in an instant that he was right. "It also explains the extensive vascularization in dinosaur bones," I said. Dinosaur bone is remarkably porous, which is part of the reason it fossilizes so we
ll through permineralization. "They wouldn’t need as much bone mass to support their weight in a lower gravity."

  "I thought that vascularization was because they might be warm-blooded," said Klicks, sounding genuinely curious. He was, after all, a geologist, not a biologist. "Haversian canals for calcium interchange, and all that."

  "Oh, there’s probably a correlation there, too. But I’ve never bought the idea of warm-blooded brontosaurs, and even they have bones that look like Swiss cheese in cross section. I’m sure you’ve seen the studies that say they’d break their own legs if they tried to walk faster than three kilometers an hour. That figure assumed normal gravity, of course. And, say, speaking of odd bone structure — it never quite seemed possible to me that Archaeopteryx and the pterosaurs could really fly. Their skeletons are weak for normal gravity, but they should be more than adequate in this."

  "Hmmm," said Klicks. "It does explain a lot, doesn’t it? We’ll have to have a good look at dinosaurian heat production while we’re here. I seem to remember that another argument in favor of warm-blooded dinosaurs was that their fossils have been found inside the Cretaceous Arctic Circle, where the nights would be months long."

  "That’s right," I said. "The idea was that dinosaurs must be warm-blooded because they couldn’t have possibly migrated far enough to avoid the long nights."

  "Hell," said Klicks, taking off his boot and shaking it upside down to get rid of a pebble that had found its way inside, "I could walk to here from the Arctic Circle in this gravity."

  "Yeah," I said. "But I’d still like to know why the gravity is less. I guess the gravitational constant could have increased in value over time."

  "That would mean it’s not much of a constant, then, wouldn’t it?"

  "Well, I don’t know a lot of physics," I said, ignoring his smart-ass comment, "but didn’t Einstein more or less pull the value for G out of the air to get his equations to balance? We’ve only been measuring its value for a century, and measuring it precisely for only a few decades. A general tendency for it to increase over time might not have shown up yet."

  "I suppose, although I’d expect to find—" Suddenly he fell silent, his head swinging around. "What was that?" he said.

  "What?"

  "Shhsh!"

  He pointed to the deciduous forest, the sun now well above the trees. There was a rustling as something man-sized pushed aside fronds. I caught a flash of emerald in my peripheral vision. My heart began pounding and my mouth went dry. Could it be a dinosaur?

  We didn’t have much of an armament. Hell, we didn’t have much of a budget. Someone had suggested we bring modern automatic assault weapons to protect ourselves, but no corporate donor came through with any of those — bad PR to be associated with killing animals, after all. All we had were a couple of old elephant guns, each holding two bullets at a time.

  Klicks had brought his elephant gun with him when he’d come out this morning. It was propped up against the crater wall, about a dozen meters away. He sauntered over to it, casually picked it up, and motioned for me to follow. It took about forty seconds for us to reach the dense wall of trees. Pushing foliage aside with his hands, Klicks made his way into the forest. I was right behind him.

  We heard the rustling again. Breath held tight, I strained to listen, scanning the dense growth for any sign of an animal. Nothing. Branches and leaves stood still, as if they, too, were frozen in anticipation. Seconds ticked by, heartbeats added up. Whatever it was must be nearby, either to my left or in front of me.

  Suddenly in a flurry of motion the thick vegetation parted and a green bipedal dinosaur leapt into view, the top of its head coming to no more than the height of my shoulder.

  It was a slender theropod, using a stiff, whip-thin tail held parallel to the ground to balance a horizontally carried torso. At the end of its darting neck was a head about the size and shape of a borzoi dog’s, drawn out and pointed. Two huge eyes, like yellow glass billiard balls, stared forward, their fields of vision overlapping, providing the kind of depth perception a predator needed. The creature opened its mouth, revealing small, tightly packed teeth, serrated like steak knives along their rear edges. Long, thin arms dangled in front of its body, the three-fingered hands ending in sickle claws. The animal flexed them in anticipation and I saw that the third finger was opposable to the other two digits. Bobbing and weaving its head, it cut loose a sticky sound like a person trying to kick up phlegm.

  I recognized this creature in an instant: Troodon, long hailed as the most intelligent dinosaur, a carnivore armed not only with slashing claws and razor dentition but also with a hunter’s keen senses and — perhaps — with cunning. Although the best troodon skeletons were known from a time 5 million or more years before the end of the age of dinosaurs, fossil troodon teeth were found in beds right up to the close of the Cretaceous. These specimens were on the large side for troodon, but the shape of the skull was unmistakable.

  Klicks had already brought up his elephant gun, its wooden butt resting against his shoulder. I don’t think he intended to fire unless the animal attacked, but he was aiming along the gun’s shaft, finger on the trigger. Suddenly he pitched forward. The gun went off, missing the troodon, the thunderclap of its report startling a flock of golden birds and a smaller number of white-furred pterosaurs into flight. A second troodon had kicked Klicks in the small of his back, its slender claws shredding the khaki material of his long-sleeved shirt. Two more troodons appeared from the brush. Each was hopping rapidly from foot to foot for balance, like shoeless boys on hot pavement. Klicks rolled over, trying madly to reach his gun. A three-clawed foot slammed into his chest, pinning him. The dinosaur let loose a sticky hiss, showering him with reptilian spit.

  I ran toward Klicks and, approaching from the left side, brought my steel-toed boot up and under the creature, kicking it in the center of its yellow gut. I made no dent in the lean, muscular belly, but, much to my surprise, my kick lifted the thing clear off the ground. It must have massed less than thirty kilos and the reduced gravity magnified my strength. Freed, Klicks scrabbled for the gun again, his fingers clawing dirt.

  The recipient of my kick turned on me, moving with surprising agility. I held my arms in front of my body, trying to grab its scrawny throat. Hands shooting forward in a green blur of motion, it seized my wrists with sickle digits. My spine arched back like a limbo dancer’s, trying to avoid the jaws at the end of that dexterous neck. The creature wasn’t built for fighting something more than twice its mass with muscles, such as they were, accustomed to more than double the gravity. I held my own for a good fifteen seconds.

  Still gripping my arms, the troodon crouched low, folding its powerful hind legs beneath it, and kicked off the rich soil. The force of its leap knocked me backward and I hit the ground hard, rocks biting into my spine. Straddling my body, the crazed reptile arched its neck, opened its lipless mouth wide, exposing yellow knife-like teeth, and -

  Kaboom!

  Klicks had found his elephant gun and squeezed off a shot. He’d hit my attacker in the shoulder, sending the beast’s neck and head pinwheeling into the sky. Twin geysers of steaming blood shot from the torso’s severed carotid arteries. No longer balanced, the body tipped forward and the cavity of the open chest, sticky and wet, slammed into my face. Revolted, I rolled away, dirt clinging to the dinosaur blood that covered my face.

  Klicks was taking a bead on another dancing troodon when the remaining two descended on him from opposite sides. One, balancing on its left leg, slashed out with its clawed right foot. The curving digits grasped the gun’s barrel. Using the leverage provided by its long, stiff tail, the dinosaur twisted the rifle free from Klicks’s hands and, with a deliberate movement, tossed it into the brush. In unison, it and its partner jumped on Klicks, pinning him to the ground again.

  The remaining troodon, five meters away from me, crouched low, its slender legs folded at an acute angle. I had made it to my knees when it leapt, knocking the wind out of me with its
impact. The creature stood over me, its long arms bent like less-than and greater-than signs. They reached forward, the crescent claws grabbing the sides of my head. If I’d made the slightest movement, those strong hands would have shredded my face, tearing my eyes from their sockets. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was going to die. Panic gripped me like a shrinking sweater, binding my chest, constricting my breathing. The drying blood on my cheeks cracked as my face contorted to scream my final scream.

  But death did not come.

  Something was happening to the troodon. Its face convulsed, the tip of its muzzle twitched, and, much to my amazement, sky-blue jelly, faintly phosphorescent, began to ooze from the dinosaur’s close-together nostrils. I watched in horror, unable to move, thinking that the creature must be allergic to my strange twenty-first-century biochemistry. I expected the monster to sneeze, its clawed hands convulsing shut on my face as its body racked.

  Instead, more of the jelly began to ooze from around its bulging eyes, rolling slowly along the contours of its face. The thick slime also began to bead up on the skin halfway down the reptile’s long snout, over the top of its preorbital fenestrae, those large openings in the sides of dinosaurian skulls. The thing was looking down at me, so all the jelly flowed toward the tip of its snout. It slowly ran together, joining into one viscous lump.

  The mass continued to grow, seeping out of the creature’s head, until a glob the size of a baseball had collected at the end of its long face. It hung lower and lower, taking on a teardrop shape, until finally, horribly, the glistening, trembling lump dropped off the creature’s nose, hitting my face with a soft, warm, moist splat.

  I had slammed my eyes shut just before the glob of jelly hit, but I could feel it on me, oozing like worms through the whiskers of my beard, pressing down on my cheeks, heavy on my eyelids. The mass was pulsing and rippling, almost as if probing my features. Suddenly it started to flow up my nostrils and then, a moment later, through the cartilage of my nose. I felt completely stuffed up, as though I had an awful cold. The mass within my nasal passages undulated back into my head. I felt pressure on my temples and, painfully, through the curving channels of my ears. The sounds of the forest muffled and finally faded away as the jelly pressed against my eardrums. All I could hear now was my own heartbeat, booming at a rapid pace.