End of an Era

Her voice was wistful. "So was I, Dr. Thackeray. Now, whal can I do for you?"

Well, if she was uncomfortable with the intimacy of first names, I wasn’t going to push it. "I’ve got a manuscript I’d like you to read. It’s — it’s my diary. Except I didn’t write it. I — I don’t know where it came from. I found it in my computer." I swallowed hard, then said it all in one breath. "It describes a journey back to the end of the Mesozoic Era, made possible by a device called a Huang temporal phase-shift habitat module." I saw her eyes widen, just for an instant. "The creator of that device is specifically referred to as Ching-Mei Huang." I pulled a sheaf of papers out of my briefcase. For a moment, I hesitated about handing the printout to her. There was so much in there that was personal to me — things about Tess, about Klicks, about myself. It was my diary, for Christ’s sake! This was the first time I’d ever made a printout of anything from that memory wafer. I placed the papers on the tablecloth, laser-printed sheets in eleven-point Optima, the Royal Ontario Museum’s official correspondence font. "Please keep this confidential."

She began reading. "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—"

"Not out loud, please."

"Sorry." She read in silence for a few minutes, then looked up, her face puzzled. "How did you know I’m an atheist?"

I thought back to what the diary said. I was sure that little reference to God was for the sake of the network cameras. Ching-Mei was an atheist. She only had faith in empirical data, in experimental results.

"I didn’t know it, until I read it there."

She went back to reading, her brow furrowed. I occasionally looked over, reading upside down to see what part she was at. How I wished I had a technical document from — from whatever place this came from — instead of something that, almost incidentally, laid my soul bare.

I got up, crossed the room, and fed a five-dollar coin into a vending machine, which in return dispensed a couple of prepackaged donuts. When I returned, Ching-Mei was still reading, engrossed. At last, when she got to the end of the part about the twilight visit by the goose-stepping tyrannosaurs, she looked up, scanned the cafeteria, and saw that we were now alone in it, all the others having trickled out while she was reading. "I can’t stay here any longer," she said, her voice nervous again.

"What about the diary?"

"I’ll finish reading it tonight."

"Can I come by your house, then?"

"No. Meet me here tomorrow." And, before I knew what was happening, she had scurried out of the cafeteria like a frightened animal.

Countdown: 8

Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!

—Robert Burns, Scottish poet (1759–1796)

The interior of the spherical Het spaceship was dimly lit by what appeared to be strips of bioluminescent dots along the walls. Once Klicks and I were inside the thing, it seemed less like a lifeform. However, it didn’t seem like a spaceship, either. There were no right angles anywhere. Instead, floors gently curved into walls, which in turn melded smoothly into ceilings. Nor were there any corridors. Rather, rooms were honeycombed together, each with passageways to the adjacent ones not just on the same level but also above and below.

Most of the passages were permanently open — I supposed that beings without individuality had no need for privacy. A few chambers did have valve-like coverings; apparently those rooms were used for storage.

We saw dozens of brachiators, some walking, others swinging from stiff hoops that seemed to grow out of the roofs. There were also a couple of troodons on board, and countless Het jelly mounds pulsing about freely. The ship was cooler than anywhere we’d been since we’d arrived in the Mesozoic, and it was filled with a faint odor like wet newsprint.

"It’s tremendous," Klicks said, gesturing about him. "When do we take off?"

The brachiator, its coppery coils of fur looking almost black in the faint light, made a facial gesture. "We did take off a short time ago," it said in its thin voice.

"Incredible," said Klicks. "I didn’t feel a thing."

"Why would you want to feel anything during flight?"

Klicks looked at the creature’s sausage-shaped eyes with their disquieting double pupils. "That’s a very good question," he said with a grin. "Where are the windows?"

"Windows?"

"Portholes. Glassed-in areas. Places where you can see outside."