End of an Era

In the comparative-anatomy lab at the museum we’ve got chemicals for killing wild animals: painless clear death for the rodents; amber death for the larger mammals; an incongruous peach-colored death for the lizards and snakes. I stare at my father.

"Please, Brandon," he says. He never calls me Brandy. Brandon was the name of his favorite uncle — some guy from England that I’d never met — and nobody had ever called him Brandy. "Please help me."

I stumble out of the ward, somehow find my car. By the time I realize what I am doing, I have driven almost all the way to the house where Tess and I used to live, where Tess still lives. I turn around, go home, and get very drunk, feeling no pain.

Countdown: 19

Professor Cope’s errors will continue to invite correction, but these, like his blunders, are hydra-headed, and life is really too short to spend valuable time in such an ungracious task.

—Othniel Charles Marsh, paleontologist (1831–1899)

I will correct [Marsh’s] errors, and I expect the same treatment. This should not excite any personal feelings in any person normally or properly constituted; which unfortunately Marsh is not. He makes so many errors, and is so deficient that he will always be liable to excitement and tribulation. I suspect a Hospital will yet receive him. *Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist (1840-1897)

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.

Fred loved that cat, and his wife knew he’d be upset when she told him what had happened. But when he got back Sunday evening, he said he already knew the cat was dead — because, according to the version of the story I eventually heard over my back fence, he’d seen his cat up at the cottage, two hundred kilometers away. The tabby had appeared to him one last time to say good-bye.

I always looked at Fred a little differently after I’d heard that. I mean, it was fantastic, and fantastic things don’t happen in normal lives. Certainly they don’t happen to people like me.

Or so I thought.

I’m a paleontologist; a dinosaur guy. Some might think that’s glamorous, I suppose, but it sure doesn’t pay glamorously. Oh, about twice a year, I get my name in the paper or five seconds on CBC Newsworld, commenting on a new exhibition or some new find. But that’s about it for excitement. Or at least it was, until I got involved in this project.

Time travel.

I feel like an idiot typing those two words. I’m afraid anyone who reads them will start looking at me the way I look at poor Fred.

Sure, by now everyone has probably read about the mission in the papers, or seen the preparations on TV. Yeah, it really works. Ching-Mei Huang has demonstrated it enough times. And, yes, it’s incredible, absolutely incredible, that she went from a first discovery of the underlying principle in 2005 to a working time machine by 2013. Don’t ask me how she did it so fast; I don’t have a clue. In fact, sometimes I don’t think Ching-Mei has a clue, either.

But it works.

Or, at least, the first Throwback worked; the automated probe returned with air samples (a little more oxygen than today, no pollution, and, fortunately, no harmful germs), plus about four hours’ worth of pictures, showing lots of foliage and, at one point, a turtle.

But now we’re going to try it with human beings; if this test works, a bigger mission, with everyone from meteorologists to entomologists, will be sent back next year.

But for this attempt, only two people were going back, and one of them was me: Brandon Thackeray, forty-four, a little paunchy, a lot gray, a goddamned civil servant, a museum curator. Yes, I’m also a scientist. Got a Ph.D. — from an American university, to boot — and I suppose it makes sense that it would be a scientist who’d go gallivanting across time. But I’m not an adventurer. I’m just a regular guy, with quite enough to deal with, thank you very much, without something like this. An ailing father, a divorce, a mortgage that I might be able to pay off by the beginning of the next geologic era, hay fever. Regular stuff.

But this was far from regular.

We were hanging by a thread.

Okay, it was really a steel cable, about three centimeters thick, but it didn’t give me any more reassurance.

And I wished that damned swaying would stop.

Our time machine had been lifted up by a Sikorsky Sky Crane, and was now hanging a thousand meters above the stark beauty of the Badlands of Alberta. The pounding of the helicopter’s engines thundered in my ears.

I wished that noise would stop, too.

But most of all, I wished Klicks would stop.