End of an Era

It was slowly circumnavigating the small room, looking at the food refrigerator and storage lockers, peering through the window in door number two at the garage, opening the medicine fridge — and quickly closing it when a blast of cold air hit its face — swinging open door number three to have a look at the tiny washroom, then coming along the curving outer wall past the kidney-shaped worktable, the radio console, and, at last, the mini-lab. Despite its protestation earlier, the troodon’s sickle claws did indeed sound like the ticks of a bomb on the steel floor.

"This controls your time machine?" it hissed, pointing at one of Klicks’s lab instruments.

I wasn’t about to move away from the access ramp to the outside door; I wanted to be able to escape in a hurry if the troodon tried anything funny. "No, that’s just a mineral analyzer. As I said before, all the working parts for time travel are up the timestream some sixty-five million years."

The troodon stepped in front of the radio console and eyed it suspiciously. "What about this?"

"It’s just a fancy radio."

"Radio?"

"Umm, electromagnetic telecommunications."

The troodon tapped the console with a curved claw. It seemed fascinated by the fake plastic woodgrain that ran around the edges of the unit. "Yes, we have such communications. But who can you call? Does your radio operate across time?"

"No, no. It’s just regular radio gear. Our timeship was dumped from a helicopter — a flying vehicle. The radio let us communicate with the copter pilot, and with Ching-Mei — that’s the person who invented the time machine — at the ground base. The base was many kilometers away, at the Tyrrell Field Station. We also use the radio to relay signals from our walkie-talkies — portable transceivers — and for our homing devices to lock onto. Oh, and the radio used satellite signals to determine our exact position at the time of the drop from the helicopter, crucial for the Throwback to work. It can even send signals to search-and-rescue satellites, in case we return at other than our expected location. Highly unlikely, or so we’re told, but it could happen." I gestured at the gleaming panel. "Anyway, it’s far more sophisticated than what we needed, but the corporate sponsor — Ward-Beck in this case — wanted to showcase this particular piece of equipment. Our actual needs were pretty irrelevant."

"Very strange culture have you," said the troodon.

I forced a laugh. "That it is."

Klicks drove back into our camp shortly after sunset, parking the Jeep so that it would be in the morning shade of the crater wall. The troodon and I met him down on the mud flat. I held up my A W can so that Klicks could see the intact pull-tab. He opened his jacket’s breast pocket and pulled out the Twinkies. They were slightly squished — hard to avoid that with Twinkies — but certainly showed no sign of having been deliberately flattened.

The troodon hung around for hours, keeping me from talking candidly to Klicks. The little dinosaur did help us gather bald cypress wood and we built a small fire to cook some steaks. Cow steaks, that is — no more pachycephalosaur for me. The idea of cooked food was new to the Het, and it asked if it could feed some to its vehicle. With one gulp about fifty dollars’ worth of prime sirloin disappeared down the troodon’s throat. It tasted a lot like shrew, according to the Het, insectivores being one of the few mammalian groups well established by this time.

Even with the sun down, it was still warm. As we sat around the campfire, I watched the flames dance in the dinosaur’s giant eyes. The troodon paid no attention to our theatrical yawns, and at last Klicks simply said, "It’s time for us to go to sleep."

"Oh," said the Het. Without another word, it stalked away into the darkness. Klicks and I doused the flames and scrambled back up into the Sternberger. As soon as we’d entered the habitat, I turned to him.

"Klicks," I said, finally able to talk without a Martian eavesdropping, "we can’t bring the Hets forward in time."

"Why not?"

"Because they’re evil."

Klicks looked at me, his jaw kind of slack, the way you’d look at someone who had just said something completely out of left field.

"I’m serious," I said. "They’re at war."

"At war?"

"That’s right. The troodon who came back here with me confirmed it."

"Who are they fighting?"

"I don’t know. He didn’t say."

"What are they fighting about?"

"The Hets want to enslave the other side."

"Enslave?"

"Crawl in their heads; make them do whatever the Hets want."

"The Het said this to you?"

"Yes."

"Why would it tell you that?"

"Why wouldn’t it tell me? Don’t you see, Klicks, they’re a single entity, a hive mind. Those globs of jelly come together and share memories. The idea of one individual deceiving another is foreign to them. About the only good thing you can say about them is that they’re pathological truth-tellers."

"They seem harmless enough to me."

"They’re viruses," I said.

Klicks looked at me blankly.

"Viruses? You mean metaphorically…"