End of an Era

Besides, it’s not as simple as Klicks made it out to be. Mars of our time is almost airless. Oh, we’d known for half a century that water had once run freely there, carving great valleys. The planet’s atmosphere had been thicker, too, and had probably contained much oxygen. Perhaps Mars was quite pleasant during the Mesozoic. Indeed, it might — I thought of the emerald star I had seen the first night as I’d scanned along the ecliptic. Could it have been Mars, a younger, vibrant world alive with growing things? A planet of life, green with chlorophyll, blue with oceans? A sister to Earth, fully as glorious as this planet?

Perhaps.

But I was a prophet, able to foretell the future with absolute certainty. Mars was doomed, destined to become a stunted, barren dust bowl, cold and desolate, a realm of alien ghosts, a haunt for the memories of things long dead. Granted, no one had been there yet; the joint U.S.-Russia mission had been canceled when neither of them could come up with its share of the money. So it looked like no human being would make it farther than the moon in — well, in my lifetime, I guess. And more than half of Earth’s population had been born after the last person had set foot there, back in 1972. Still, in a weird way, the moon was more inviting than Mars. Luna was sterile and pristine, but Mars was dead, decaying, an oppressive crypt, with the attenuated screams of chill winds raging across the landscape.

The two visions of Mars — one green, one red — could not be more different, and yet sometime in the next 60-odd million years one would give way to the other, that planet being laid waste. Mars would fall prey to some catastrophe even greater than the one that would wipe out the dinosaurs. Or perhaps it had been the same catastrophe. Maybe a great belch of radiation had been expelled from the sun on the side that happened to be facing Mars. If Earth had been on the opposite side of the sun, it might have felt comparatively minor effects by the time it passed through the dissipating cloud of charged particles six months later.

Still, dramatic though the mechanism of the Hets’ demise might be, it didn’t really matter what it was. The fact remained that Mars of my time was uninhabitable, what free oxygen there had once been now locked up in the rocks and ice. I still knew next to nothing about Het biology, but if they were comfortable on Earth now, they could probably no more live in the open on the Mars of the future than I could.

That meant that they’d have to stay on Earth. I could just see them being interviewed on Good Morning America and Canada a.m., or being signed up as spokesthings for some headache pill. Does your head feel like you’ve got one of us crawling around in your brain? Take Excedrin Plus and relax!

But wait a minute. That wouldn’t work, either. The gravity would be more than twice what they are used to, since sometime between this present and that present Earth’s gravity increases to what I consider normal. Would it be enough to flatten out their jelly bodies, pinning them to the ground? Probably. And even if we did bring forward some of their dinosaur vehicles for them, they would be no good either, not having the musculature to hack a full g. What could the Hets use instead? Dogs? No manipulatory appendages. Apes? Watch the simian-rights lobby after it gets wind of that idea!

The kilometers added up as I continued my hike. The sky overhead was blue and cloudless, like that of a Toronto summer. The vegetation, though, was decidedly un-Canadian. It was lusher than anything I’d ever seen north of the thirty-fifth parallel: green shot through with a rainbow of flowers. When the insects relented enough for me to hear anything besides their buzzing, I occasionally detected a rustling among the plants. There were small animals about and I saw a great flock of a thousand or more violet pterosaurs at one point, but, as for dinosaurs, no luck.

God, it was hot out. But no, that couldn’t be the problem. I reminded myself that Torontonians are supposed to be impervious to shifts in temperature. We always blame our discomfort on something else. In winter we say, "It’s not the cold, it’s the wind." In summer our lament becomes, "It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity."

Well, whether it was temperature or moisture that was at fault I didn’t know, but I was sweating like the proverbial pig. And, indeed, there was a third potential culprit — exertion. I suddenly realized that the ground tilted up at a sharp angle. I must have gained more than thirty meters in elevation already. Although we’d been able to make only rough guesses about what the landscape would be like here in the late Cretaceous, we’d expected a uniformly flat terrain at this particular site. Certainly there was no trace in the geological record of a steep hill.