"Thirty-four. Thirty-three. Thirty-two."

Mounted against the central wall in the gaps between the doorways were a small stand with an old microwave oven on it, a large food refrigerator, a bank of three equipment lockers swiped from some high school demolition sale, and a small medical refrigerator with a first-aid kit on top. Bolted to the floor were the swivel bases for our two crash couches.

A time machine.

An actual time machine.

I just wish I knew exactly where it was going to take me.

"Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven."

The Huang Effect was accurate to one-half of one percentage point — a minuscule imprecision. But given that we were casting back from a.d. 2013 to 65.0 million years ago, a half-point error could plop us as much as 330,000 years into the Cenozoic, much too late to determine just what had caused the worldwide extinctions at the end of the previous era, the Mesozoic.

"Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two."

My analyst says I’m going to excessive lengths to prove I’m right and Klicks is wrong. Thank God for socialized medicine — there’s no way I could afford to stubbornly disbelieve Dr. Schroeder month after month if the government health plan weren’t picking up the bills for my therapy. Besides, it’s more than just me versus Klicks. If we don’t miss our target, this trip might clear up an enduring scientific mystery, something that he and I and hundreds of others had argued for years through the pages of Nature and Science and The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

"Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen."

The government of Alberta had wanted us to launch from Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. But the fossils found there were from a time 10 million years before the end of the age of dinosaurs. We’d gone upstream along the Red Deer River to a formation from the latest late Maastrichtian — right at the end of the Cretaceous. But to make the government happy, Ching-Mei had established her control center at the Tyrrell Field Station inside Dinosaur Provincial Park.