End of an Era

You pays your money, you takes your chances. We had contingency plans for every possible outcome of the drop: what to do if we landed in water; if we landed upside down; if we couldn’t get the door open; if for some reason we came out of stasis too early and were damaged on impact. But the worst of all, really, was if we landed at night, because for that the contingency plan was simply to wait until morning.

My crash couch was swiveled to face the Sternberger’s curving outer wall. A glassteel window was built into it, giving a full 180-degree panorama. Everything outside was dark. Actually it wasn’t quite night: it just took my eyes a minute to adjust. More like twilight, really. Klicks must have been thinking the same thing, because he whistled the DOO-doo-DOO-doo signature from that old Rod Serling TV series.

"It’s almost sunrise," I said, unstrapping myself, the aluminum buckle opening with a clang. I rushed over to stand in front of the radio console and peered out of the center of our window.

"And the glass is half-full," replied Klicks, also getting to his feet.

"Huh?" I hated his little tests — cryptic phrases designed to see just how much on the ball you were.

He came over and stood near me. We both peered into the darkness. "You’re an optimist, Brandy. I think it’s just past sunset."

I pointed to my left. "That part of the window was facing east when the Sikorsky dropped us."

He shook his head. "Makes no difference. We could have corkscrewed as we fell, or bounced on impact."

"There’s one way to tell." I walked back to the straight rear wall of the habitat. I paused for a second to peer through the little window in door number two, the one that led into our Jeep’s garage. The garage door was made out of glassteel panels, so it was completely transparent. I should have been able to see outside past the Jeep, but it seemed pitch-black. Oh, well. I opened the middle of the three equipment lockers and rummaged around until I found a compass. It was pretty beat-up, the veteran of many field expeditions. I brought it over to Klicks.

"No good," he said, not bothering to look at the compass’s dial. "It’ll only show us the north-south line; it won’t tell us which is which."

I was about to say "Huh?" again, but after a second, I realized what Klicks was getting at. The polarity of Earth’s magnetic field reverses periodically. We’d been aiming for about a third of the way down into 29R, a half-million-year-long chron of reversal that straddled the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary during which the magnetic north pole was located near the geographic south pole. If we’d hit our target, the colored end of our compass needles would be facing south. But the Huang Effect’s uncertainty was big enough that we might have landed well into the more recent 29N chron of normal orientation, or maybe just into the top of the more ancient SON. If we’d landed in either of those, the colored end would be facing north instead. Klicks knew there’d be no easy way to tell, except by looking at the sun, which of course would still rise in the east and set in the west. Until we could see if it was getting brighter or darker along the glowing horizon to our right, we wouldn’t know if it was dawn or dusk.

Except — hah! Got him. I looked at the compass dial, holding it very steady. The needle agitated for a few beats, then came to rest. "You can’t tell which one is north," Klicks said.

"Yes I can," I said. "The end of the needle that dips down is pointing to the closest magnetic pole, following the curving lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. Even with continental drift, the north pole will still be the closest."

Klicks grunted, impressed. "And which end is tipped down?"

"The unpainted one. The polarity is indeed reversed. So the good news is that we are indeed in 29R, and that that way" — I pointed back toward the flat rear wall — "is true north, toward the Arctic rather than the Antarctic."

"And the bad news," said Klicks, "is that it really is nightfall."

That wasn’t going to dampen my spirits. I continued to peer through the glassteel window. Its central part was facing south. It was hard to make out exactly what we were seeing at first, but slowly our eyes irised open.

We weren’t on flat ground. Rather, we seemed to be perched high up on a mound of dirt. A crater wall. Of course: while we had been in stasis, the Sternberger had plummeted out of the sky and evidently had hit some very soft material — mud or loose soil, perhaps. The shock of the impact had formed a crater with a diameter of thirty meters or so — six times as wide as the timeship itself. But the Sternberger had hit with enough force that it had bounced up out of the bottom of the crater and had plunked down here, high on the east side of the donut-shaped crater wall.

God, this was exciting. The past. The past. I felt light-headed, almost dizzy — practically floating. My heart pounded, an increasingly rapid one-two rhythm like a drummer warming up.