End of an Era

A grapefruit-sized mound of phosphorescent blue jelly was throbbing on the shin of Klicks’s khaki pants. It must have come from the troodon I’d killed earlier, the one slumped by the equipment lockers next to where the fridge had been. Klicks frantically undid his belt and pulled the trousers off, flinging them across the accessway. They hit the wall with a wet splat and stuck. But the Het had been having no trouble percolating through the cotton weave and some of it was still on his skin. Klicks was near panic. I grabbed a scalpel from my dissection kit and scraped the dull edge of its blade across his shank, gathering up pieces of Martian. After each stroke, I flicked the knife, sending dabs of blue jelly flying into the dissection-kit box. A minute later I looked up. "I think I got it," I said.

"All of it?" Klicks sounded desperate.

"Well … most of it, anyway. Let’s hope there’s enough Deliverance left in your system to prevent what did get in from interacting with your cells."

"What about that?" he said, pointing at his pants.

I got a pickax and used it to knock the trousers off the wall into a stasis box, then tossed in the dissection kit as well and slammed the silver lid shut. We went up the ramp and back into the main habitat.

Suddenly the ship rocked again as a pair of white triceratops horns burst through the side of the hull. The Hets must have learned from their brief mind-melds with us that the Sternberger was like a yo-yo, attached by a mathematical string to the Huang Effect generator 65 million years in the future. Even partially smashed, the timeship would still dutifully return to its launch point in midair between the Sikorsky Sky Crane and the ground. It didn’t have to be intact, but they did have to be inside its walls.

The ship buffeted once more, its hull deforming where a second triceratops rammed against it. Moments later there was another impact, and another pair of horns pierced the wall, this time less than a half-meter from my head.

The parasaurolophus’s call split the air again. Outside the window, the giant tyrannosaurs, looking like blood clots the size of boxcars, growled in response.

"We’ve got to do something," I said.

"Good thinking, genius," said Klicks. "What should we do?"

"I don’t know. But we can’t let them have access to the future. Christ, they’d take over the whole planet." The ship rocked again, another triceratops smashing into it. "Dammit!" I slammed my fist against the wall. "If only we had some weapon, or … or, hell, I don’t know, maybe some way to turn off the gravity-suppressor satellites."

"A coded signal in binary," said Klicks at once. "1010011010, repeated three times."

"Christ, man, are you sure?"

Klicks tapped the side of his head. "The Martian may be dead, but his memory lingers on."

I was over to our Ward-Beck radio unit in two bounds and flipped the master switch on the black and silver console. "Do you think we can get a signal to the gravity satellites?" I asked.

Klicks squinted at the controls. "The satellites are obviously still in good working order," he said. "And the Hets do use radio in very much the same way we do."

"What about the satellites below the horizon?"

"The off signal will be relayed by those satellites that do receive it," said Klicks. "We only have to connect with one. That makes sense, of course; otherwise, there’d be no way to operate them all from a single ground station."

"Won’t we need a password to access the satellite computers?" I asked, peering at the console, trying to remind myself of what all the buttons did.

"You said it yourself, Brandy. The Hets are a hive mind. The concept of ‘passwords’ is meaningless to them."

I reached for a large calibrated dial. "What frequency should the signal go out at?"

Klicks closed his eyes and tilted his head slightly, listening intently. "Let’s see … three-to-the-thirteenth-power cycles per…"

"Cycles per second?"

"No. Shit! Cycles per unit of Martian time-keeping."

"And how long is one of those?"

"It’s… uh, well, it’s not long."

"Great." The Sternberger shook under another impact. Triceratopses seemed to be using their horns to perforate a hole in one side of the ship. They were making damn good progress, too.

"Well, can’t you program the radio to try a range of frequencies?" asked Klicks.

I looked at the controls. "Not directly. But I might be able to hook the radio up to my palmtop." There was a small patchcord bus running vertically along one side of the radio console. "I’d need the right cable, though."

Klicks picked up the electronic camera. "What about this one?" he said, unplugging the fiber-optic serial cable I’d used to connect it to my palmtop earlier.

"Well, that’s the right type of cable, yes, but it’s the wrong gender. The radio expects a female plug; that one has male connectors at both ends."