Bush watched as the riders climbed off and set about inflating a tent.
All of them wore the green buckskin which was virtually the uniform
of their kind. One, he saw, had long streaming yellow hair -- a woman
perhaps. Although he could not tell from this distance, his interest
was aroused.
After a while, the riders spotted him sitting on the red gravel and four
of them began to walk towards him. Bush felt self-conscious, but remained
where he was, at first pretending he had not seen them.
They were tall. All wore high peel-down buckskin boots. They carried their
air-leakers carelessly slung round their necks. One had a reptile skull
painted on his helmet. As usual with such groups, they were all between
thirty and forty -- hence their nickname, "tershers" -- since that was
the youngest age group that could afford to hit mind-travel. One of them
was a girl.
Although Bush was nervous to see them marching up, he felt an immediate
attack of lust at the sight of the girl. She was the one with the long
yellow hair. It looked untended and greasy, and her face was utterly
without makeup. Her features were sharp but at the same time indeterminate,
her gaze somewhat unfocused. Her figure was slight. It must be her damned
boots, he jeered at himself, for she was not immediately attractive,
but the feeling persisted.
"What are you doing here, chum?" one of the men asked, staring down
at Bush.
Bush thought it was time he stood up, remaining where he was only because
to stand up might look threatening.
"Resting, till you lot roared up." He looked over the man who had spoken.
A blunt-nosed fellow with two creases under each cheek that nobody would
dare or want to call dimples; nothing to recommend him: scrawny, scruffy,
highly strung.
"You tired or something?"
Bush laughed; the pretence of concern in the tersher's voice was pitched
exactly right. Tension left him and he replied, "You could say that --
cosmically tired, at a standstill. See these armored fish here?" He put
his foot through where the lobe fins appeared to be, gobbling in the
sea wrack. "I've been lying here all day watching them evolve."
The tershers laughed. One of them said, cheekily, "We thought you was
lying there trying to evolve yourself. Look as if you could do with it!"
Evidently he had appointed himself group humorist and was not much
appreciated. The others ignored him and the leader said, "You're mad!
You'll get swept away by the tide, you will!"
"It's been going out for the last million years. Don't you read the
newspapers?" As they laughed at that, he climbed to his feet and dusted
himself down -- purely instinctively, for he had never touched the sand.
They were in contact now. Looking at the leader, Bush said, "Got anything
to eat you'd care to swap for food tablets?"
The girl spoke for the first time. "A pity we can't grab some of your
evolving fish and cook them. I still can't get used to that sort of
thing -- the isolation."
She had sound teeth, though they probably needed as good a scrub as the
rest of her.
"Been here long?" he said.
"Only left 2090 last week."
He nodded. "I've been here two years. At least, I haven't been back to --
the present for two years, two and a half years. Funny to think that by
our time these walking fish will be asleep in the Old Red Sandstone!"
"We're making our way up to the Jurassic," the leader said, elbowing
the girl out of the way. "Been there?"
"Sure. I hear it's getting more like a fair ground every year."
"We'll find ourselves a place if we have to clear one."
"There's forty-six million years of it," Bush said, shrugging.
He walked with them back to the rest of the group, who stood motionless
among the inflated tents.
"I'd like to involve into one of them big Jurassic animals, with big teeth,"
the humorist said. "Tyrannosaurs or whatever they call 'em. I'd be as tough
as you then, Lenny!"
Lenny was the leader with the excoriated dimples. The funny one was called
Pete. The girl's name was Ann; she belonged to Lenny. None of the group used
names much, except Pete. Bush said his name was Bush and left it like that.
There were six men, each with a bike, and four girls who had evidently
blasted into the Devonian on the back of the men's bikes. None of the
girls were attractive, except for Ann. They all settled by the bikes,
lounging or standing; Bush was the only one who sat. He looked cautiously
round for the Dark Woman; she had disappeared; just as well -- remote
though she was, she might sense more clearly than anyone else here the
reason why Bush had tagged along with the gang.
The only other person in the group whom Bush marked out as interesting
was an older man obviously not a tersher at all, although he wore the
buckskin. His hair was a dead black, probably dyed, and under his long
nose his mouth had settled into a wry expression that seemed worth a
moment's curiosity. He said nothing, though his searching glance at Bush
spoke of an alert mind.
"Two years you been minding, you say?" Lenny said. "You a millionaire
or something?"
"Painter. Artist. Grouper. I do spatial-kinetic groupages, SKGs, if you
know what they are. And I operate back here for Wenlock Institute. How do
you all afford to get here?"
Lenny scorned to answer the question. He said, challengingly, "You're
lying, mate! You never work for the Institute! Look -- I ain't a fool! --
I know they only send recorders out into the past for eighteen months
at a time at the most. Two and a half years: what are you on about?
You can't kid me!"
"I wouldn't bother to kid you! I
do
work for the Institute. It's true
I came back for an eighteen-month term, but I've -- I've overstayed for
an extra year, that's all."
Lenny glared at him in contempt. "They'll have your guts for garters!"
"They won't! If you must know, I'm one of their star minders. I can get
nearer the present than anyone else on their books."
"You aren't very near now, lounging about in the Devonian! Not that I believe
your story anyway."
"Believe or not, as you please," Bush said. He loathed cross-questioning
and shook with anger as Lenny turned away.
Unmoved by the argument, one of the other tershers said, "We had to work,
get cash, take the CSD shot, come back here. Lot of money. Lot of work!
Still don't believe we're really here."
"We aren't. The universe is, but we aren't. Or rather, the universe may
be and we aren't. They still aren't sure which way it is. There's a lot
about mind-travel that still has to be understood." He was heavy and
patronizing to cover his disturbance.
"Would you paint us?" Ann asked him. It was the only reaction he got to his
announcement that he was a painter.
He looked her in the eye. He thought he understood the glance that passed
involuntarily between them. One gratifying thing about growing older was
that you misinterpreted such looks more rarely.
"If you interested me I would."
"Only we don't want to be painted, see," Lenny said.
"I wasn't volunteering to do it. What sort of work did you do to earn
the cash to get here?"
Bush was not interested in their answer. He was looking at Ann, who had
dropped her gaze. He thought that he could feel her -- nothing could be
touched in the limbo of mind-travel, but she was from his time, so she
would respond to touch.
One of the anonymous tershers answered him. "Except for Ann here, and
Josie, we all ganged on the new Bristol mind-station. We was some of the
first to mind through when it was finished. Know it?"
"I designed the SKG, the groupage in the foyer -- the synchronized-signal
nodal re-entry symbol with the powered interlocking vanes. 'Progression,'
it's called."
"That bloody thing!" As he spoke, Lenny pulled the cigarlet from his mouth
and sent it spinning towards the slow-motion sea. The end lay just above
the waves, glowing, until lack of oxygen extinguished it.
"Me, I liked it," Pete said. "Looked like a couple of record-breaking
watches had run into each other on a dark night and were signaling for
help!" He laughed vacuously.
"You shouldn't laugh at yourself. You just gave us a pretty good
description of all this." Bush swung his hand about to take in the
visible and invisible universe.
"Piss off!" Lenny said, heaving himself off his bike and moving over to Bush.
"You are so smart and boring, Jack! You can just piss off!"
Bush got up. But for the girl, he would have pissed off. He had no
inclination to be beaten up by this mob. "If you don't care for my
conversation, why don't
you
supply some?"
"You talk rubbish, that's why. That business about the Old Red Sandstone
. . ."
"It's true! You may not like it, or care about it, but it's not rubbish."
He pointed at the older man with dark dyed hair, standing slightly apart
from the group. "Ask him! Ask your girl friend. Up in 2090, all that you
see here is compressed into a few feet of rumpled red rock -- shingle,
fish, plants, sunlight, moonlight, the very breeze, all solidified down
into something the geologists hack out of the earth with pickaxes.
If you don't know about that or you aren't moved by the poetry of it,
why bother to blow ten years' savings to come back here?"
"I'm not saying nothing about that, chum. I'm saying you bore me."
"It's entirely mutual." He had gone as far as he was prepared to go,
and it seemed that Lenny had too, for he backed away indifferently when
Ann came in and shouted them both down.
"He
talks
like an artist, doesn't he?" the plump little Josie said,
mainly addressing the older man. "I think there's something in what he says.
We aren't getting the best out of it here, really, I mean. It is a bit
marvelous here, isn't it, long before there were any men or women on
the globe?"
"The capacity for wonder is available to everyone. But most people are
afraid of it." The older man had spoken.
Lenny gave a bark of contempt. "Don't you start in, Stein!"
"I mean, there's the sea where it all started, and here we are. We can't
touch it, of course." Josie was wrestling with concepts too awful and
vague for her mental equipment, judging by the tranced look on her face.
"Funny, I look at this sea and I can't help thinking we're at the end
of the world, not the beginning."
This chimed strangely with something Bush had been meditating on earlier
in the day; the girl had a beautiful idea, and for an instant he debated
switching his attentions to her. The others looked glum; it was their
way of registering profundity. Lenny slung himself onto his bike and
kicked the starter, and the two air columns began to blow at once. It
still looked like a defiance of a physical law that the sand lay under
them undisturbed; and so it was. All round them was the invisible but
unyielding wall of mind-travel. The four other tersher boys climbed
on to their bikes, two of the girls jumping up behind. They snarled
away down the darkening sand. Night was coming, the low bristles of
vegetation stirred with an on-shore breeze; but in the mind dimension,
all was still. Bush was left standing with the older man, Josie, and Ann.
"So much for supper," he commented. "If I'm not wanted, I'll be off.
I have a camp just up in the first series of hills." He gestured towards
the sunset, looking all the while at Ann.
"You mustn't mind Lenny," Ann said. "He's moody." She looked at him.
She really had next to no figure, he told himself, and she was dirty
and scruffy; it did not stop him trembling. The isolation of mind-travel
could bring on complete disassociation of character; once in it, one could
feel nothing, smell nothing, hear nothing, except one's fellow travelers.
This girl -- she was like the prospect of a banquet! And there was more
to it than that -- what he could not yet determine.
"Now that those who do not wish to discuss vital subjects are away,
you can sit and talk with us," said the older man. It could have been
that wry expression, or maybe he was in some way mocking.
"I've overstayed my welcome. I'm off."
To his surprise, the older man came and shook his hand.
"You keep the strangest company," Bush said. He was not interested in
this fellow, whoever he was.
He started back along the beach towards his own lonely camp, the uselessness
of playing about with Lenny's girl uppermost in his mind. The dark thing
out to sea had spread monstrous wings and was in flight for the land.
He suddenly felt the utter senselessness of setting down Man in such a
gigantic universe and then letting him challenge it -- or of giving him
desires he could neither control nor fulfil.
Ann said, "I can't get used to the way we can't touch anything of the
real world. It really bugs me. I -- you know, I don't feel I exist."
She was walking beside him. He could hear the sound of her boots slapping
against her legs.
"I've adapted. It's the smell of the place I miss. The air-leakers don't
give you a whisper of what it smells like."
"Life never gives you enough."
He stopped. "Must you follow me? You're going to get me into trouble.
Beat it back to your lover boy -- you can see I'm not your kind."
"We haven't proved it yet."
Momentarily, they looked desperately at each other, as if some enormous
thing had to be resolved in silence.
They trudged on. Bush had made up his mind now; or rather, he had no mind.
It had gone from him, sunk under the ocean of his bloodstream, in the tides
of which it seemed to him that direction was being born anew. They scrambled
together into the river valley, hurrying upstream along the bank, clasping
each other's hands. Only momentarily was he aware of what he was doing.
"What's got into you?"
"You're crazy!"
"You're crazy!"
They hurried over a bed of large and broken shells. He could have cut his
hand on one. He'd looked them up in the guide book earlier. Phragmoceras.
At first he had thought they were some animal's teeth, not the deserted
home of an early cephalopod. Silurian, maybe, sharpened by the sea to
draw his Quaternary blood, had not mind-travel built that impenetrable
barrier between what-had-been and what-was. The shells did not even
crunch as he and the girl climbed over them. Glancing down in his fever,
he saw their feet were under the level of the shells, treading on the
spongy floor that belonged to their dimension rather than the Devonian
period -- a sort of lowest common denominator of floors.