End of an Era

Our upper deck was divided into two halves, each semicircular in shape. One half contained the habitat. Along its curving outer wall was a kidney-shaped worktable, our radio console, and a compact laboratory unit crammed with geological and biological instruments. The straight back wall, marking the ship’s diameter line, had three doors built into it. Door number one — does anybody remember Monty Hall? — led to a little ladder that angled up into the rooftop instrumentation dome and to a ramp that went down the meter and a half to the outer entrance door. Door number two led to the Jeep’s garage, which took up the height of both decks. Door number three gave access to the washroom stall.

"Thirty-four. Thirty-three. Thirty-two."

Mounted against the central wall in the gaps between the doorways were a small stand with an old microwave oven on it, a large food refrigerator, a bank of three equipment lockers swiped from some high school demolition sale, and a small medical refrigerator with a first-aid kit on top. Bolted to the floor were the swivel bases for our two crash couches.

A time machine.

An actual time machine.

I just wish I knew exactly where it was going to take me.

"Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven."

The Huang Effect was accurate to one-half of one percentage point — a minuscule imprecision. But given that we were casting back from a.d. 2013 to 65.0 million years ago, a half-point error could plop us as much as 330,000 years into the Cenozoic, much too late to determine just what had caused the worldwide extinctions at the end of the previous era, the Mesozoic.

"Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two."

My analyst says I’m going to excessive lengths to prove I’m right and Klicks is wrong. Thank God for socialized medicine — there’s no way I could afford to stubbornly disbelieve Dr. Schroeder month after month if the government health plan weren’t picking up the bills for my therapy. Besides, it’s more than just me versus Klicks. If we don’t miss our target, this trip might clear up an enduring scientific mystery, something that he and I and hundreds of others had argued for years through the pages of Nature and Science and The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

"Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen."

The government of Alberta had wanted us to launch from Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. But the fossils found there were from a time 10 million years before the end of the age of dinosaurs. We’d gone upstream along the Red Deer River to a formation from the latest late Maastrichtian — right at the end of the Cretaceous. But to make the government happy, Ching-Mei had established her control center at the Tyrrell Field Station inside Dinosaur Provincial Park.

"Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven."

The distance between the center of the Earth and ground level here in the Red Deer valley might have changed by several hundred meters in the last 65 million years. Unfortunately, the geomorphologists working on this project couldn’t agree on whether the landforms would have shifted up or down during that timespan. To avoid the possibility of our ship arriving underground — killing us, of course, not to mention causing one hell of an explosion as matter tried to force itself inside of other matter — the Sternberger had been hauled a kilometer above the Badlands by the Sikorsky. Just before Ching-Mei threw the switch to activate the Huang Effect, we would be cut loose. The interior of the Sternberger would lock into stasis — a stopped-time condition, the first creation of which had won Ching-Mei a Nobel Prize in 2007 — until ten minutes after we arrived in the Mesozoic. Plenty of time, supposedly, for us to come crashing to the ground and for the mountain of debris we would kick up on impact to rain out of the sky.

That’s the theory, anyway.

"Seven. Six. Five."

I thought of something funny in those last few seconds. If I did die, my will still named Tess as my beneficiary. Not that I owned much of value — just a beat-up Ford and the townhouse in Mississauga — but it seemed strange that my ex-wife would get it all. I guess that would be all right if both Klicks and I died, but I didn’t like to think of just me buying it. After all, since Tess had taken up with Klicks — just how long had they been seeing each other, anyway? — my estate would in essence go to him, too. That’s the last thing I wanted.

"TWO. ONE. ZERO!"

My stomach lurched as the cable was released -

Countdown: 18

Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.

—Margaret Laurence, Canadian novelist (1926–1987)