End of an Era

" ‘Martian’ means of or pertaining to Mars?" asked Diamond-snout, turning its attention back to me. When finished speaking, it left its narrow jaws hanging open, showing serrated teeth.

"Yes," I said.

"There are things of or pertaining to Mars that we do not wish to be lumped together with." Given the plastic nature of the Martians, I wondered if "lumped together" meant the same thing to them as it did to me.

"What should we call you, then?"

"When we occupy creatures with versatile speaking orifices, the term we use for what we are is Hhhet." It sounded more like a throat-clearing than an English word.

"Het it is," I said.

Klicks threw up his hands. "Martian, Het, what difference does it make? Brandy, we have to talk."

"Talk?" said the Het.

"Confer," I said.

"What have pine trees to do with this?" said the Het.

"Confer," I said. "Not conifer."

"Oh," the Het said. "A chitchat."

"Exactly."

"But is that not what we are now having?" it said. "A tit-to-tit?"

"A tete-a-tete," I corrected. "Professor Jordan means he’d like to talk to me alone."

"Alone?"

"In private."

The troodon blinked. "No link."

I pointed back the way we’d come. "Our time machine is back that way. May we return to it?"

"Ah," said Diamond-snout. "Yes, we wish to see it."

The three troodons stepped slightly away from us, and we started walking south. Klicks bent over to scoop up his elephant rifle. The one troodon that had been doing all the talking tipped its head at the rifle. "A weapon?" it hissed.

"Kind of," said Klicks.

"Not very efficient."

"Best we could afford," he said.

We came out of the forest and onto the mud plain. Ahead of us was the soft dirt crater made by the Sternberger’s impact and, high on the west side of the crater wall, the Sternberger itself, indeed looking like a hamburger or a TV flying saucer. Sticking up from the center of its roof was the small instrumentation dome.

"If this is a time vessel," rasped Diamond-snout, "then assume do I that it will return to where it came from. Conservative?"

"Conservative?" I said, completely lost.

Klicks grinned. "He means ‘right’ I think."

The troodon’s head bobbed. "Right. You will return to origin, right?"

"That’s right," said Klicks. "The time-displacement effect will hold us back here for" — he consulted his watch — "almost exactly three more days, then, like reeling in a fish, we’ll be hauled back to our launch point."

"It happens aut-o-mat-ic-al-ly?" asked the troodon.

"Yes," I said. "The actual Huang Effect apparatus is located in the future. There aren’t any moving parts or controls within our timeship related to time travel, except for the stasis-field unit. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Enough," said the troodon, but exactly how I was supposed to take that, I couldn’t say. "And where is launch point?"

"Oh, it’s right here," Klicks said. "We call this area the Red Deer River valley in our time. It’s pretty rough territory."

"And all your time-travel missions are launched from there?"

"Actually," Klicks said, "time travel is quite new to us. Ours is the first crewed mission back to here."

"Is Earth muchly different in your time?" asked the troodon.

"It is," Klicks said. "Mammals, not reptiles, dominate. The climate is cooler, the continents are more dispersed, the land is drier, and the seasons are more pronounced. And, perhaps most interesting of all, the gravity is maybe two and half times what it is now."

The troodon’s neck weaved in an odd swooping motion. "What did you say?"

"Crazy, isn’t it?" I said. "The gravity on Earth seems to double or triple over the next sixty-five million years."

"That is most peculiar, Dr. Brandon Thackeray whose friends call him Brandy."

"It is indeed. We can’t account for it."

There was no way to read the troodon’s expressionless face. Indeed, it seemed to go limp, its muscles relaxing as if the Het within was distracted, lost in its own thoughts. "Higher gravity, say you. Intriguing. Tell me: what is Mars like in your time?"

Klicks was about to answer the creature’s question, but I jumped in quickly: "I’ve never been there."

We’d reached the crumbling crater wall. I noted with astonishment that tiny green shoots had already appeared in the freshly turned soil. Another irrelevant thought hit me. I felt like I was out on a date and that we’d arrived back at the woman’s home. It was that awkward moment where you find out if you’re going to get invited in. Except that the Sternberger was my home, and the Hets were the too-tenacious escorts who didn’t seem to be getting the hint that it was time for them to say their good-byes.

Finally the Het said, quite bluntly, "Show us the inside."

Klicks was about to roll out the goddamned red carpet for them, but I cut him off. "Certainly. And we’d like to see inside your spaceships. But not just now, please. Professor Jordan and I have some matters of personal hygiene to attend to, and humans require privacy to do that."

"Privacy," it said again. "Being … alone?"

"That’s right."

"A strange concept."