And yet I felt as if a gate within me had burst open. "I’m so confused," I said into the wind. "I — I’ve tried to live a good life. I really have. I’ve made mistakes, but—"

I paused, embarrassed by this babbling start, then began again. "I can’t fathom why my life is falling apart. My father is dying the kind of death we all hope to be spared. He was a good man. Oh, I know he cheated on his taxes and maybe even on his wife, and he hit her once, but only just that once, but now you’re punishing him in a way that seems cruel."

Insects buzzed; foliage rustled in the breeze.

"I’m suffering right along with him. He wants me to release him from all that, to let him die peacefully, quietly, with a modicum of dignity. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong here. Can’t you take him? Can’t you let him die quickly instead of robbing him of his strength but leaving his mind to feel pain, to suffer? Can’t you — won’t you — relieve me of having to make this decision? And will you forgive me if I can’t find the strength within myself to choose?"

I was suddenly aware that my face was wet, but it felt good, oh so good, to get this off my chest. "And, as if that wasn’t enough to put me through, now you’ve taken Tess from me, too. I love her. She was my life, my whole existence. I can’t seem to find the energy to go on by myself anymore. I want her back so very much. Is Klicks a better son to you than I? He seems so … so shallow, so unthinking. Is that what you want from your children?"

The word "children" triggered a thought in my mind. God’s putative son, Jesus, wouldn’t be born for almost 65 million

years. Did God know how the future would go? Or did the Huang Effect supersede even his omniscience? Should I tell him what would happen to his beloved Jesus? Or was he aware already? Was it inevitable that humans would reject his son? I opened my mouth to speak, but then closed it and said nothing.

A twig cracked and my heart jumped. For one horrible instant I thought that Klicks had followed me, had overheard me, had seen me making a bloody fool of myself. I looked into the forest but couldn’t see anything unusual. Clearing my mind, I quickly rose to my feet, brushed pieces of moss off my bum, and headed forward.

The sun was sliding slowly down the bowl of the sky. My watch still showed modern Alberta time, but it looked to be about 3:30 p.m. My nose was a bit stuffed, perhaps from crying but just as likely from the pollens. Little golden motes and things like dandelion seeds danced in the air all about me. I saw a small tortoise at one point, pushing itself with splayed, wrinkly limbs across my path. It seemed ironic that such a humble creature would survive the coming changes that would kill every last one of the magnificent dinosaurs. Like Aesop’s fable: slow and steady wins the race.

Suddenly the ground dropped away. I was at the lip of a sheer precipice of crumbling reddish-brown earth, a saw-toothed row of various hardwood stumps lining its edge. Without any warning, I’d come across a valley, perhaps a kilometer long and half that in width. It looked like an open-pit mine, gouged out of the Earth, an incongruous landscape wound amidst the unspoiled wilderness.

And it was full of dinosaurs.

It was a paleontologist’s dream, or most other people’s nightmare. Two — no, three Triceratopses. An equal number of small tyrannosaurs, and one monster even bigger than the T. rex Klicks and I had seen yesterday afternoon. A herd of ostrich-like ornithomimids. Four duck-billed hadrosaurs.

Two of the hadrosaurs looked to be the genus Edmontosaurus, the quintessential duckbill, with the keratin sheaths at the fronts on their shovel-like prows looking like black lipstick. The other pair of duckbills had head crests, a rare occurrence this late in the Cretaceous. These crests were unlike any I had seen before: one tubular projection going straight up, another, longer one, parallel to the animal’s back. Three of the four hadrosaurs were walking away from me on splayed feet and mitten-like hands, their thick, flattened tails held stiffly above the ground, great bellies swinging back and forth like pendulums. The fourth, one of the edmontosaurs, had risen on its hind legs and was dully surveying its surroundings.

Dancing around the valley were several dozen troodons. About two-thirds of them were the same bright green as the ones we’d met earlier, but the rest were smaller and more brown in color. Males, probably. A group of them — three males and two females — galloped toward the valley’s far wall, their clawed bird-feet kicking up small clouds of dust. They covered the five hundred meters in a time short enough to make even an Olympic gold medalist seem like a slowpoke. Their goal was a cluster of stationary objects that I hadn’t noticed before: three giant tawny spheres, a trio of those strange breathing Martian spaceships resting on their amorphous slug feet.

Where my wits had been for the last few minutes I didn’t know, but they finally came home to roost. I realized that I was inadvertently spying on an encampment of the Hets. If I was going to do that, I figured I’d better not be seen. I dropped to my belly, the buzz of insects abating for a moment as the confused creatures were left in a cloud around where my head had been.

Christ, my MicroCam! The thing was still off. I fumbled for the switch, then lifted the cheesecloth to wipe sweat from my brow. It was as hot as hell out here. I propped my binoculars in front of my face, resting their weight on my elbows, and twiddled with the knob to bring one of the Het ships into focus. It was indeed the same type of vehicle Klicks and I had ridden in last night: sixty meters across, covered with hexagonal scales, pulsing with respiration.

A plaintive cry split the air, a throaty dirge that seemed to tremble with an equal mixture of pain and sadness. I scanned the valley. A huge, blood-red tyrannosaur was squatting in the sand. A thick yellowish-white sausage dropped from between its legs and I realized that it — she — was laying eggs. No sooner had the soft-shelled package rolled onto the earth than a wiry troodon darted between her massive thighs and scooped it up, running with it up the broad tongue and into the vertical mouth slit of one of the spherical ships.

The hapless tyrannosaur was probably under Het control — I doubted any beast would otherwise lay eggs out in the open like that. But despite the Martian within, it let out another heart-wrenching yell, the cry of a mother who had just lost her child — a stronger display of maternal love than I ever thought I’d see from a Mesozoic carnivore. A few minutes later, with visible effort, it squeezed out another egg. This one was also promptly seized in the opposable digits of a troodon and whisked into the spaceship. I commiserated with the giant reptile. To have something you loved snatched away hurt, I knew, more than any physical injury…

I shook my head, trying to fling the tormenting thoughts out of my skull. The movement startled the insects that had landed on the cheesecloth around my pith helmet into buzzing flight.

I forced my attention onto one of the triceratopses. Charles R. Knight, the father of scientific dinosaur illustration, always painted triceratops so that it resembled a tank. Like many paleontologists, I first became interested in dinosaurs as a child, seeing Knight’s century-old paintings in a book. It was uncanny how much three-horned-face looked like Knight’s renditions of him: quadrupedal, that great bony frill with a fluted rim around the thick neck, two massive white horns sticking straight out above the beady eyes, a third, shorter horn projecting from above the parrot-like beak. But the beast had adornments that had been unknown in Knight’s time, since all he’d had to go by were heavily eroded specimens. Tiny horns pointed downward from the corners of the skull over the jaw hinges, more tiny horns aimed backward from where the eye horns met the bony frill. The perimeter of the frill was lined with squat triangular spikes, giving it a chainsaw edge. The beast measured a good six meters in length from the tips of its eye horns to the end of its stubby tail. But whereas Knight’s triceratopses had plain dun-colored skin, this one’s leather hide was greenish blue dappled with large orange splotches. The design reminded me of — what? Camouflage? Not in that garish color scheme, but the pattern was right.