End of an Era

Countdown: 13

I was born the year Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I was forty-one when the National Research Council of Canada approached me about a time-travel mission. I’d expected our expedition to be along the lines of that moon shot: no expense spared in putting together cutting-edge technology. But there was no big money for pure science anymore—not even in the States, where most of the remaining technological efforts were concentrated on fighting the growing drought in the Midwest. It turned out that big-bucks science had been a purely mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, starting with the Manhattan Project and ending with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The scientific community hadn’t been prepared for this end of an era. But in rapid succession in the early 1990s, the planned Super-Colliding Super Conductor was scrapped, leaving a big hole in the ground where it was supposed to go. About the same time, SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with radio telescopes—was killed. The International Space Station, originally to be called Freedom, was downsized so much that people quipped it would have to be renamed Space Station Fred, since there wouldn’t be room for the full name on its side—and then, as the various national partners (including Canada) backed out, pleading empty pockets, the few modules that had been assembled in orbit were shut down. The proposed trip to Mars—originally planned for just six years from now, the fiftieth anniversary of Armstrong’s one small step—was likewise chopped. Beg, borrow, and steal became the order of the day in labs throughout the world; big government grants were a fondly remembered thing of the past.

Oh, some military money had trickled in Ching-Mei’s direction for a while. The hawks had seen time travel as strategic, making possible the ultimate in preemptive strikes. They’d provided sufficient funds for Ching-Mei to build a working Huang Effect generator, along with a good-sized power plant to run it. Why, they’d almost finished building Gallifrey—that was the code name for the prototype habitat module that ended up being the Sternberger—when the implications of Ching-Mei’s equations became clear. She’d been quite honest, telling the Department of National Defence from the outset that the amount of energy required for time travel depended on how far back you were going. What she didn’t tell them was that it was, in fact, inversely proportional to the length of time you wanted to travel.

To go back 104 million years, which seemed to be the maximum that the Huang Effect allowed (one of the equations produced a negative number after that point) required virtually no energy at all. To go back 103 million years required a little energy, 102 a little more, and so on. To cast back 67 million years, as we had done, took a huge amount of power. Any attempt to travel back into historical times, a thousand years or so, would take the entire energy output of the Earth for the better part of a century, and to venture back into the last few decades would require the harnessed energy of a small nova.

Time travel, it turned out, was of little good to anyone except paleontologists.

Unfortunately, paleontology has never been a big-money affair. A dig, not a moon shot, became the model for what we were doing. We scraped together what equipment we could, struck sponsorship deals with the private sector, and, slashing expenses as much as possible, came up with just enough to get the two-person test mission going.

Even so, we had to watch every dollar. That’s why we did the Throwback in February, a month in which no sane person would normally visit the Red Deer River valley. Since the air temperature was already thirty degrees below zero Celsius, we saved a bundle cooling the superconducting batteries that were a key part of the Huang Effect generator.

Now that Klicks and I were ready to leave the vicinity of the Sternberger, I would have loved to have some high-tech vehicle with giant springy wheels and dish antennas and nuclear engines. Instead, we had a plain ordinary Jeep, donated because the chairperson of Chrysler Canada had fond memories of his boyhood membership in the ROM’s Saturday Morning Club. There was nothing special about this vehicle; it was just the latest 2013 model from Detroit. It even came with the optional AM/FM stereo and rear-window defogger, both of which had seemed pointless to me.

Getting the Jeep out of its tiny garage was going to be tricky. With the Sternberger high on the crater wall, the vehicle would have to be brought down a very steep incline. We were fortunate that the garage door had ended up facing northwest, pretty much over the outer edge of the crater wall, instead of back toward the bowl of the crater. The Jeep never would have been able to climb out of there, but at least we had a chance of getting it down to ground level in one piece this way.

From inside the Sternberger’s habitat, I swung open the middle of the three doors along the five-meter-long rear wall. Four steps led down to the tiny garage’s floor, and I squeezed past the left side of the Jeep and slipped into its cab.

Strapping myself in, I looked at the dashboard. I felt like Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel: I check the instruments. They are all there. I’d been practicing in this Jeep for weeks before the Throwback, but it really was true that if you learned to drive with automatic transmission, it was hard to become comfortable with manual later on. I hit the button mounted on the dash, and the garage-door opener—a standard model from Sears—slid the articulate strips of glassteel up.

From my vantage point in the cab, I couldn’t see any ground in front of me. The crater wall fell away so steeply that the Jeep’s hood blocked it from my vision. Instead, I saw the mud plain up ahead and far below. Maybe we could just walk while we’re here…

I turned the ignition key. In this heat, the engine caught immediately. If I moved slowly forward, the front wheels would roll off the edge of the hull and end up spinning freely. That would mean the rear wheels would have to scrape the chassis over the edge. The whole thing might tip forward on its nose and drop facedown onto the crater wall.

I looked up and saw the tiny figure of Klicks standing far out on the dried mud. He was holding up his walkie-talkie. I picked mine off the passenger seat and thumbed it on.

“It looks like you’re going to have to gun it,” he said.

Unfortunately, that’s what it looked like to me, too. I took off the parking brake, revved the engine, and popped the clutch.

“A breathtaking sight” is how Klicks, who recorded the whole thing in slow motion, later described it. Certainly it took my breath away while I was doing it. The low gravity helped no doubt in carrying me further under my initial acceleration, but the ground came rushing up far too soon anyway, and when I hit the crater wall and began bouncing down I felt like a basketball being dribbled. My heart was racing almost as fast as the car’s engine as I rushed toward the mud flat.

The moment I was off the slope of the crater wall, I hit the brakes. Too soon! I began to skid. The Jeep’s rear end fishtailed and I saw Klicks running his ass off to get out of the way. I pulled hard on the wheel and the vehicle swung around, heading for the lake. I slammed the brakes once more, and the Jeep spun again, coming to a rest with its rear wheels in the water. I drove it fully onto the mud plain and Klicks came jogging up to me. I rolled down the window. “Going my way?” I said with a grin.

Klicks stood there, shaking his head, hands on hips. “I think I better do the driving,” he said.

Well, that was fine by me: this is one trip for which I wanted the luxury of looking at the scenery. I clambered over to the passenger’s seat, he got in, and we headed off into the Mesozoic.