End of an Era

  Suddenly the middle tank squeezed off a crystalline projectile. It was hard to see, just a glint of light as it arced through the air. As soon as they heard the gun’s report — a reverberating metallic sound like sheet metal being warped — the trio of horned dinosaurs burst into action. They moved with surprising speed for animals of their bulk, musculature rippling under their gaudy hides. Magnificent, energetic beasts! Even this far away, I felt a rumbling in the soil beneath my belly as they ran. One veered to the right, its body snapping to the side like a sprung mousetrap. The second continued its forward charge, but weaving in a complex pattern as it did so, a mad dance to which only it could predict the next step. The third triceratops, much to my surprise, reared on its hind legs, like a horse whinnying, and let out a multi-note roar. It dropped back to all fours and deked left. The projectile hit where this one would have been if it hadn’t changed course, sending up a cloud of dirt.

  The one who’d almost been killed charged even faster, its legs pumping beneath its body. It escaped a second impact by once again rising up on its hind legs, the crystal shell exploding in front of it. Red slice marks appeared on its lean belly as shards carved into the beast’s hide. With its one-ton frilled head lowered and eye horns pointing dead ahead, it rammed into the beetle-like tank. The horns pierced the tank’s plating and there was a sound like a pop can opening as pressure equalized.

  The triceratops dug in its forelegs, dropped to its rear knees, and arched its powerful neck, tendons distending, muscles bulging. With massive grunts, it lifted the tank impaled on its horns a meter off the ground and then quickly smashed it down. It did this twice more in rapid succession, and the tank’s hull cracked like an eggshell. Through the broken casing I could see the interior. It was made of an iridescent, amber-colored metal.

  Meanwhile, the remaining two tanks were pumping off rounds of glassy ammunition, the whoomp-whoomp-whoomp of their report echoing off the valley walls. The vehicles apparently could move in any direction, sliding left and right, forward and backward with ease. The other two ceratopsians danced to avoid the shells.

  One triceratops saw an opening as the transparent gun tube that had been trained on it swung away to take a bead on another horned-face. It charged, head low, bringing its eye horns underneath the tank’s lens-shaped body. With a quick movement, it flipped the vehicle onto its back. The tank’s underbelly, made of that same amber metal, was tightly packed with glistening meter-wide ball bearings, explaining its agility.

  I glanced at the watching gallery. Even the unoccupied hadrosaurs had become intrigued by the battle, for they had risen on their hind legs, their tails bending stiffly against the ground. The Het-ridden beasts stood quietly, though, nothing giving away the thoughts of the aliens within them.

  Evidently one of the triceratopses had let its attention wander from the fight for a second as well, for I swung my binoculars back just in time to see a crystal projectile explode in a flash of green light against its face. The detonation smashed its neck frill, snapping off its nasal and right-eye horns. They flew into the air like white missiles. Slick with blood, half its skull gone, the thing still managed to charge. How could it move with its brain — ? Of course. A Het rode within the animal. It must be farther back, perhaps stretched out along the spinal cord to better control the creature’s body. I imagined it would be under a lot of pressure now, having to take over the horned-face’s autonomic functions, which must have been about all the beast’s fist-sized brain had been good for anyway. A lumbering corpse, the injured horned-face slammed into the side of the tank, which spun away under the force of the impact.

  The triceratops that had earlier impaled a tank had managed to disentangle its face from the twisted wreckage and it, too, charged the remaining armored vehicle. Rearing up on its hind legs, it made a quick, sheering bite with its parrot-like beak, snipping off the crystal gun tube. The two uninjured triceratopses shouldered against the tank, pushing it toward the far valley wall.

  The half-headless beast, apparently blind, had collapsed onto its belly, its forelimbs twisted at an angle that would have been excruciating had the animal still possessed a mind with which to register pain. I zoomed in on its shattered skull and saw a phosphorescent blue lump the size of a beach ball — much larger than any of the Hets I had yet seen — oozing out of the splintered bone onto the blood-saturated soil.

  I turned back to the remaining tank. The two triceratopses were still butting it with their shoulders, the lens-shaped body denting slightly each time they hit it. Within minutes the dinosaurs had rammed the beetle-like vehicle against the sheer wall of the valley. I lowered my binoculars and surveyed the scene: one tank smashed, another flipped on its back, and a third taken prisoner. Incredible.

  I snapped off rolls of still pictures — I’d left our electronic camera back at the Sternberger — but I knew nonetheless that I’d have a hard time convincing Klicks of what I’d seen.

  Triceratops fossils represented three-quarters of all di-nosaurian finds from Alberta and Wyoming during the last million years of the Cretaceous. I tried to imagine what kind of destruction a herd — an assault force — of these great beasts could inflict. That rasping voice of the Martian Het, spoken around bloody spit through the troodon’s mouth, came back to me. "We, too, came to this place because of the life here."

  I’ll say.

  Boundary Layer

  I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

  —Abraham Lincoln, 16th American President (1809–1865)

  I sat alone in the TRIUMF staff cafeteria for a while, nibbling at one of my stale vending-machine donuts, trying to understand why Dr. Huang had run off. It didn’t make any sense.

  I threw out the second donut and made my way out of the room. I had a whole day to kill waiting for Ching-Mei to finish reading the diary, so I decided to take a tour of the research facility. I identified myself to the old man at the front desk as a curator from the Royal Ontario Museum and suddenly found the red carpet being rolled out for "a distinguished visiting scientist." That was great because it meant that I got to see areas normally closed to the public.

  My guide, an enthusiastic young Native Canadian named Dan Pitawanakwat, wanted to be sure I understood everything I saw, but most of it still went over my head. He showed me giant 30,000-kilogram magnets that looked like yellow Pac-Man characters, a room full of bright blue consoles with models of famous movie starships, including the Enterprise-F, Starplex, and the Millennium Falcon hanging by fishing line from the ceiling, and a Positron Emission Tomography scanner, used to take pictures of the insides of people’s brains. But the most interesting thing to me was the Batho Biomedical Facility, where cancer patients received concentrated beams of pions. According to Dan, this method caused less general damage than conventional radiation therapy. I watched, riveted, as a man lay under the pion beam for treatment of a brain tumor. His face was held steady by a transparent mask. The plastic obscured his features and my mind kept superimposing my father’s own craggy visage onto the head. It brought back the suffering and the torture and the loss of human dignity that Dad was going through. When they finally did remove the mask, I saw that the hairless head beneath belonged to a boy perhaps sixteen years old. I had to look away from the effusive Dan to wipe my eyes.

  Later on, I said, "Dan, do they do any studies here about the nature of time?"

  "Well, the thrust these days is always toward practical applications," he said. "That’s the only way we can get the grant money to keep coming in." But then he nodded. "However, we’ve typically got four hundred researchers here at once, so some of them are bound to be doing work in that area. But it was really Ching-Mei’s — Dr. Huang’s — forte. She even wrote a book on it with Dr. Mackenzie."

  "Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics." I nodded knowingly and was pleased to see that the young man was impressed. "But that was ten years ago. What’s happened since?"

  "Well, when I cam
e here in 2005, everybody thought Ching-Mei was going to make some kind of breakthrough. I mean, there was talk of a trip to Stockholm, if you catch my drift." He winked.

  "You mean her work was important enough to win her a Nobel Prize?"

  "That’s what some people were saying. ‘Course, she probably would have shared it with Almi at the Weizmann Institute in Israel — he was doing similar work. But he was killed in that freak earthquake, and nobody there was able to pick up where he left off."

  "That’s a shame."

  "It’s a friggin’ crime is what it is. Almi was the new Einstein, as far as a lot of us were concerned. We may never recover what he knew."

  "And what happened here? Why did Ching-Mei give up her research? Wasn’t it going anywhere?"

  "Oh, it was going places, all right. There was a rumor that she was close to demonstrating a stopped-time condition. But, well, then she…"

  "She what?"

  "You’re a good friend of hers, aren’t you, sir?"

  "I came all the way from Toronto just to see her."

  "So you know about her troubles."

  "Troubles?"

  Dan looked uncomfortable, as if he’d put his foot in something distasteful. I held him in my gaze.

  "Well," he said at last, "don’t tell anybody, because I’ll get into a lot of trouble if you do, but, well, something bad happened to Ching-Mei about five years ago." Dan looked over his shoulder to see if anybody was listening. "I mean, she never talked about it to me, but the gossip got around." He shook his head. "She was attacked, Dr. Thackeray. Raped. Absolutely brutalized. She was in the hospital for a week afterward, and away on — you know what they call it — on ‘rest leave’ for the better part of a year. They say he attacked her for three hours solid and, well, he used a knife. She was all torn up, you know, down there. She’s lucky to be alive." He paused for a long moment. "Except, she doesn’t really seem to think that."

  I winced. "Where did it happen?"

  "In her house." Dan sounded sad. "She’s never been the same since. Frankly, she doesn’t do much of anything anymore. Her job is mostly scheduling other people’s access to the cyclotron, instead of doing any original work of her own. They keep her on here, hoping that one day the old Ching-Mei will come back, but it’s been five years now." He shook his head again. "It’s tragic. Who knows what she would have come up with if that hadn’t happened?"

  I shook my head, too, trying to clear the mental picture of that defenseless woman being violated. "Who knows, indeed?" I said at last.

  I went to TRIUMF again first thing the next morning. This time, strangely, Dr. Huang did invite me into her little office. There were awards and diplomas on the walls, but none with recent dates. Books and papers were piled everywhere. As soon as I’d entered, we realized there was a problem: the office only had one chair in it.

  "I’m sorry, Dr. Thackeray. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visitor here." She disappeared out the door and returned a few minutes later wheeling a stenographer’s chair in front of her. "I hope this will do."

  I sat down and looked at her expectantly.

  "I’m sorry about you and your wife," she said abruptly.

  "We’re still together."

  "Oh. I’m glad. You obviously love her immensely."

  "That I do." There was silence for a time. "You’ve read the entire diary?"

  "I have," she said. "Twice."

  "And?"

  "And," she said slowly, "based on dozens of little details that you couldn’t have possibly known, I believe it is genuine. I believe it really does describe what my studies would have made possible."

  I sat up straight. "Then you could go back to your research! You could make stasis and then time travel possible. Hell, Ching-Mei, you could win your Nobel Prize!"

  "No." Her face had lost all color. "That’s over. Dead."

  I looked at her, still not comprehending. She seemed so delicate, so fragile. Finally, softly, I said, "Why?"

  She looked away and I could see that she was rallying some inner strength. I waited as patiently as I could and, after

  a minute, she went on. "Physicists and paleontologists," she said. "In a way, we’re both time travelers. We both hunt backward for the very beginnings."

  I nodded.

  "As a physicist, I try to understand how the universe came into being. As a paleontologist, you’re interested in how life began." She spread her arms. "But the fact is, both fields of endeavor come up short when you go right back. The origin of matter has never been satisfactorily explained. Oh, we talk vaguely about random quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a vacuum somehow spontaneously having given rise to the first matter, but we really don’t know."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And," she continued, "you can read the fossil record back to almost the beginning of life, but as to how life actually arose, again, no one is really sure. We speak nebulously about self-replicating macromolecules supposedly arising spontaneously through some random series of events."

  "What are you talking about?" I said, baffled by where all this was going.

  "I’m talking about time travel, Dr. Thackeray. I’m talking about why time travel is inevitable."

  She’d lost me completely. "Inevitable?"

  "It had to come into existence. The future must be able, with hindsight, to rewrite the past." She leaned forward slightly in her chair. "Someday we’ll be able to create life in the laboratory. But we will only be able to do it by reverse-engineering existing life. Something as complex as the universe, as complex as life, has to be reverse-engineered. It has to be built from a known model."

  "Not the first time, obviously."

  "Yes," she said, "especially the first time. That’s the whole point. Without time travel, life is impossible."

  "You mean someone from the future went back into the past and created life?"

  "Yes."

  "And he knew how to do it because he had the lifeforms from his time as models to study?"

  "Yes."

  I shook my head. "That doesn’t make sense."

  "Yes, it does. For years, physicists have bandied about something called the strong anthropic principle. It says the universe must — must — be constructed in such a way so as to give rise to intelligent life. The purpose of the anthropic principle was to explain the existence of our unlikely universe, which has a number of remarkable coincidences about it, all of which were required for us to be possible."

  "For instance?"

  Ching-Mei waved her hand. "Oh, just as one of a great many examples, if the strong nuclear force were even five percent weaker than it is in this universe, protons and neutrons couldn’t bind together and the stars wouldn’t shine. On the other hand, if the strong force were just a little more powerful than it is in this universe, then it could overcome the electrical repulsion between protons, allowing them to bind directly together. That would make the kind of slow hydrogen burning that stars do impossible; instead, hydrogen clouds would explode long before they could coalesce into stars."

  "I think I’m getting a headache."

  She smiled ever so slightly. "That goes with the territory."

  "You’re saying someone from the future went back in time four billion years and created the first life on Earth."

  "That’s right."

  "But I thought the Huang Effect could only go back — what did the diary say? — a hundred and four million years."

  "The Huang Effect was a first-generation time machine, created for a very specific purpose. It might not be the only or the best solution to the problem of time travel."

  "Hmm. Okay. But it’s not just the creation of life you’re talking about."

  "No."

  "You’re also saying that someone from the future — the very far future, I’d guess — went right back to the beginning, back some fifteen billion years, and created matter."

  "That’s right."

  "Created it, with exactly the properties needed to give rise to us, hav
ing learned how to do so by studying the matter from his or her own time."

  "Yes."

  I felt slightly dazed. "That’s mind-boggling. It’s like — like…"

  "It’s like we’re our own God," said Dr. Huang. "We created ourselves in our own image."

  "Then what about the Sternberger?"

  "You’ve read the diary. You know what that other version of you does in the end."

  "Yes, but—"

  "Don’t you see?" she said. "The Sternberger mission was only one of many instances in which time travel was used to set things right. The flow of events requires periodic adjustment. That’s chaos theory for you: you can’t accurately predict the development of any complex system. Therefore, you can’t just create life and leave it to evolve on its own. Every once in a while you have to give it a push in the direction you want it to go."

  "So — so you’re saying that someone determined that the timeline had to be altered in order to give rise to us?"

  "That’s right," she said.

  "But the time-traveling Brandy wrote that he could hunt dinosaurs, or do anything else, with impunity — that any changes he made wouldn’t matter."

  "I’m sure he believed that — he had to, of course, or he never would have done the things that needed doing. It was crucial that he believe that lie. But he was wrong. There was a mathematical string between the Sternberger in the past and the launch point in the present. The changes he made did indeed work their way up that string, altering the timeline as they did so, rewriting the last sixty-five million years of Earth’s history, making our world possible. By the time the string had been hauled all the way back to 2013, the conditions that had given rise to the Sternberger had been eliminated, and our version of the timeline existed instead."

  I sagged against the padded back of the steno chair. "Wow."

  "Wow, indeed."

  "And the other you who invented the time machine?"