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  "As you say, let's get some sleep, Professor."

  The sound of voices. Ann stooping to touch his arm. He sat up. No time seemed to have passed since he closed his eyes, yet his head was clear again. Something had been happening in there -- his father had laughed or his mother smiled -- but now he was able to occupy his consciousness again; straightway, he remembered the masterpiece.

  Pressing Ann's hand, he got up and went over to shake Borrow's hand.

  "You've spoken for your time," he said.

  "The Amniote Egg did it -- being tethered there, at the command of all and sundry. I was made to find a means of self-expression."

  "It's more than that. Ver told you it was more than that, I'm sure."

  Borrow showed signs of wanting to change the subject.

  I left Ver holding the fort," he said. "Norman Silverstone has sounded the trumpet for adventure. It'll be new to me. I'm nervous as a kitten."

  He looked entirely calm. As ever, he was neatly dressed, wearing an old-fashioned two-piece, his pack slung nonchalantly over one shoulder. A strange prophet of the new order, Bush thought -- whatever the new order was going to be.

  "We're all nervous, Roger, but at least the Jurassic's safer than the Victorian Buckingham Palace."

  "Don't bet on that," Howes said, breaking in on them. "It's live with agents back at The Amniote Egg. We were certainly recognized, and it is only a matter of time -- short time -- before they get organized and come and sort us out. There's a price on Sllverstone's head."

  "Then I must have something to eat," Bush said. "I'm starving."

  "No time. Professor Silverstone, will you get us moving?"

  The professor had woken as smartly as Bush, and rolled up his light bed. As he came forward, Bush noticed how anxious he looked. He saw also that the Dark Woman was back, standing some distance away, patiently looking on. Stifling an impulse to know her, he reflected that she was as inaccessible as the anima of his mind for which he sometimes took her.

  Silverstone said, "Except for you, Mr. Borrow, we must all have CSD still in our veins. Would you please inject yourself? I'm delighted you could come. Will your wife manage The Amniote Egg without you?"

  "Sure. She has a chucker-out to help her." Borrow was pressing an ampoule into the artery in his left forearm and wasted no time on polite chitchat.

  "You are going to be a sort of amniote egg for the times ahead of us -- you and Mr. Bush, I hope, with your united artistic talents. The human race has to launch away from what was as definitively as the reptiles launched away from the amphibians, and I hope you two will form a part of the vehicle that effects the transformation."

  "Captain Howes told me where we are going."

  "Good." Silverstone turned to Bush. "Then you are the only one who is not informed of my plan. Take Ann's arm -- Ann, you link with Mr. Borrow, and you, Mr. Borrow, with the captain. I'll take your other arm, Bush, and we'll go into the discipline together. We are going to mind to the one place we can all reach where we shall be safe from rude interruption -- beyond the Devonian Era, as far as we can into the Cryptozoic."

  "You know about the air change in the early world?"

  "Indeed. We shall sink until we can only just breathe."

  "Is that really necessary?" Borrow asked. "How about a remote stretch of the Carboniferous? Good place, plenty of cover. The enemy can't comb it all."

  "I'm fully aware of that. But they can comb some of it, and I want no more close escapes such as we experienced in the Victorian days. Captain Howes is a military man; he can bear them, but I cannot. So, the Cryptozoic it is -- and I fancy that if we run into trouble, other powers will provide." He pointed a finger towards the Dark Woman, at the same time nodding politely to her.

  They linked arms, Bush taking care to clutch Ann tightly. He refused to say anything, not only because he saw that Howes still nursed a grudge against him and might make trouble, but because he had the firm belief that he was stranded on a shore from which reality was receding like a tide. Even the suggestion that some sort of artistic commission might come his way had failed to move him.

  All he could think of, as an automatic part of his mind rattled off the relevant sections of the Wenlock discipline, was the idiotic simile his father had once used to explain the ages of Earth to Mrs. Annivale: the dial of the clock image, with the world being prestidigitated at midnight and the wee small hours being filled with the dread volcanoes of creation with hands dragging round the dial to the tune of everlasting rainstorms and the quarters sounding in a bare room as magma seas rolled. Daylight came, the alarm shrilled, stirring some peptic chains to motion under the sleeping clouds. The long dull morning had worn on quite a pace before the first teeth in the first mouths bit into the first flanks, and not until time for elevenses did the sail-bearing pelycosaurs of the Permian drop in for coffee. Only at a few seconds to midday did mankind show a leg -- at which time, according to the imagery, darkness fell and the whole thing began all over again: except that in this particular revolution, five of those leg-showing mammals were going to be fighting their way back towards the dawn.

  He surfaced, and it was almost as dark as it had been in his hallucination. The others were with him, Ann tucked against him. They stood utterly still, breathing heavily into their air-leakers.

  They were standing on the generalized floor with which mind-travel had made them familiar. The ground was some ten feet below their heels, so that they appeared to be suspended in mid-air. It was a long while before any of them could bring themselves to step forward.

  The world sweated and shivered below them, waking into the long fever of being. Great belts of rain were moving across the face of the planet, more like rivers that flowed vertically than ordinary rainstorms. The rain was the color of thin varnish.

  "The Cryptozoic -- but we picked a showery day!" Silverstone said, grinning uneasily.

  The wilderness of rock below them fermented liquid. Everywhere, its black and tremendous teeth were lashed by a frenzy of water seeking a place to run to. The water did not foam or froth, though it was lashed by the water falling from above.

  In all this horrid place, only one feature stood out. This was a wide fissure that split in two a prominence of rock, cutting across the dome of it like an axe wound in a skull. From the fissure, more water poured -- erupted rather, gushing forth in fury, steaming slightly, smearing the landscape with its bilious vents.

  Yellow water gargled into brown amid black basalts. In the sky, the same dun flags waved as the cloud-race passed perpetually overhead. Of the sun, no sign existed. There was only a series of lighter or darker patches where the suspended moisture fell or failed to fall.

  The mind-travelers could not tell whether they hung above land or above the makings of a sea bed; neither concept had meaning here. Their height above ground level spoke of how the earth in its delirium was heaved up and heaved down.

  "We can't stay here!" Ann said.

  It was generally agreed, without discussion. They minded.

  They minded five times, each time sinking deeper into the terrible eons, always moving towards the period when Earth became an alien planet, its atmosphere a stormy mixture of methane and ammonia, death to human lungs. They were mere grains of pollen in a great sea.

  Bush found that the others were chanting the Wenlock discipline aloud, as if it were a prayer. In all of them was the terror of the unknown, the unknowable: the Cryptozoic contained in its raging kingdom five-sixths of geological time. Each of their mindings covered perhaps ten million years; the five mindings put together carried them only into the early fringes of the period.

  In their surfacings, the height of the land rose and fell -- once they were encased entirely in rock -- but always the rain dropped down from the air, lambasting itself into mist on the exposed slopes. Bush thought of Turner's "Rain, Steam and Speed"; the old man had created that after rushing through Maidenhead in a steam train! Here they dwindled into a three-dimensional Turner that protracted its
elf through pre-phanerozoic time.

  On the fifth surfacing, the minders came upon a period of drought, when the gloomy layers of cloud no longer drained their juices onto the landscape. Whether this was the truce of a day or an age, they could not tell; indeed, they had passed that metempirical point at which the old human connotations of time, formed in the overmind, had meaning or relevance.

  They could only stand numbly and stare at the inscrutable georama about them.

  None of them doubted that the silence encasing them here was a true representation of the world beyond the time-entropy barrier. It was a panorama dedicated to silence; they stood hushed in it, swathed in its vastness, like five ants cooped inside the ruins of a cathedral.

  As their ears were baffled, so were their eyes. They stood amid a morphic enigma in which the rules of perspective were as powerless as the laws of acoustics or the whims of time.

  The clayey rocks about them were each the size of a small mountain, with nothing less than a slab of Stonehenge. They lay heaped about meaninglessly -- and yet with a terrible meaning that hinted of the force that had flung them here. They were grey, without strata, their edges crumbled by the energies of water. Everywhere about, they made a confusion of angles, while underneath them lay snares of shadow. They seemed, under the bare yellow net of cloud, to be something between the inorganic and the organic, to belong neither to the mineral nor the animal kingdom. It was as if they lay here on the decrepit margins of time embodying all the amazing forms the world was to carry, as if the raw turbulent Earth itself were having a nightmare of stone about the progeny that would swarm on it. These copromorphic things had the suggested forms of elephants, seals, walruses, skulls, diploduci, strange squamata and sauropods, hippos, beetles, finny turtles, snails, eggs, ducks, bats, killer sharks, octopoidal fragments, trachodonts, penguins, shovel-tusked mastodons, woodlice, foetuses and faeces, living and dying; and there were reminders of the human physique too: torsos appearing, thighs, groins lightly hollowed, backbones, breasts, suggestions of hands and fingers, knees, massive shoulders, phallic shapes; all distinct and yet merged with the stranger anatomies about them in some unfathomable splanchnic agony of nature -- and all molded mindlessly out of a grey putty, without thought turned out, without thought to be disintegrated. They stretched as far as the eye could see, piled on top of each other, seeming in their multitudinousness to imply that they covered the globe.

  The minders stared about them in a terror approaching joy, as if emotions too ran in a vortex, in a circle with the clock. Wisely, they could not speak. For these uncreated promises in clay there were no words.

  Bush saw that the Dark Woman once more stood among them. He felt that there was an element in the air that made the eyes prickle and caught in the throat. It made no difference. They had to gulp down, to digest somehow, these cryptadia round them before they could pursue their own preoccupations.

  But he was the first one to speak, to gasp out anything.

  "So this is how the world began!"

  "No, this is how it ended," Silverstone said. He stared at them with the look of self-deprecation on his face. "We are in the Cryptozoic all right, but it stands at the end of Earth's history, not at the beginning as you have believed."

  And he started to tell them.

  Chapter 6

  THE HIMALAYAN GENERATION

  "I have to tell you of a revolution in thinking so great," Silverstone said, "that it is hardly likely that any of us standing here will ever be capable of adjusting to it fully in our lifetimes. The generation contemporary with Einstein was unable to grasp the revolution he ushered in; with all humility, we are now faced with something much greater.

  "You notice I say 'revolution in thinking,' and it will be helpful if you never forget that that is what it is. It is not a turning upside-down of all natural laws, although it often seems like it. The error that has deluded us until now has been in man's minds, not in the external world.

  "Although what I have to tell you is confusing, you will find it less so if you reflect first on the simple but neglected fact that we know only of the external world -- the universe, our back gardens, or our fingernails -- through our senses. We know, in other words, only external world-plus-observer, universe-plus-observer, back garden-plus-observer, fingernails-plus-observer. This remains true even when we interpose instruments between the observed object and our senses. But what mankind has never taken into account until now is the extent to which the observer has managed to distort the external object and to found a great mountain of science and civilization on the distortion.

  "So much by way of preface. Now I will tell you as concisely and simply as I can what this revolution in thinking is. Working with Anthony Wenlock -- and later, I fear, working against him -- I and my associates have discovered the true nature of the undermind. The undermind, as you will know, is the ancient core, historically speaking, of the brain; its counterpart existed before man became sapiens and exists in the higher mammals. The overmind is a much later development, an amazing structure that was unique in its ratiocinative powers until it fathered the computer; but we have cause to believe that its reason for existence has been to distort and conceal the real nature of time from mankind. We now have absolute proof -- indeed, absolute proof has always existed, but has never been recognized as such -- that what we regard as the flow of time in fact moves in the opposite direction to its apparent one.

  "You know that Wenlock shook up our old views of time. He refuted the old unidirectional idea and with it the spatialization of time. I have no new time theory to replace his; all I am fundamentally qualified to speak about is the human mind. But I have to tell you that our findings on the mind indicate clearly that time is flowing in the direction you would call backwards.

  "Wenlock and I started with more or less the same thought on the matter -- an old thought. Even the great Sigmund Freud of the nineteenth century had a glimpse of it. He says somewhere that unconscious mental processes are timeless -- his 'unconscious' was a sort of parody of our undermind; elsewhere he says something to the effect that 'we have made far too little use in our theory of the fact that repressed feelings remain unaltered by the passage of time.' It was the nearest Freud came to saying that repressions, seated in the ancient part of the brain, are immune to the sort of time invented by the overmind.

  "The next century -- the twentieth -- was completely time-obsessed, multitudes of people suffering from schizophrenia, as the division between overmind and undermind became more apparent. As so often happens, artists were first to reveal the time-obsession, or to speak of it in revealed terms: painters such as Duchamps and Degas and Picasso, and writers such as Thomas Mann, Olaf Stapledon, Proust, Wells, Joyce, and Woolf. Then the scientists followed, uncovering smaller units of time, the millisecond, the nanosecond, and the attosecond, establishing them all as viable units with their own scale of events. At the beginning of our own century, we have seen inflated time come into common currency -- we talk happily of megaseconds and gigaseconds, and find it convenient to think of the Solar System as entering into existence some 150,000 teraseconds ago. The greatest novelist of our age, Marston Orston, created in Fullbright a deliberately unfinished novel of over four million words that solely concerns the actions of a young girl rising to open her bedroom window. The groupages of our time-dwelling friend Borrow will, I feel sure, prove equally momentous.

  "All these things are symptoms of the overmind's increasingly desperate efforts, swinging one way and another, to maintain its lying command over the undermind. My findings completely finish its dominance. I happen to come along as an instrument of its downfall; I am merely the culmination of a process that, with hindsight, we can see has been going on a long time. The fourth-century St. Augustine has a famous passage in his Confessions, 'In te, anime meus, tempora metior -- It is in you, my mind, that I measure time. I do not measure the things themselves whose passage produced the impress; it is the impress that I measure when I measure time. Th
us either that is what time is, or I am not measuring time at all.' Augustine almost hit on the truth, and genius always most closely in contact with its undermind has often seemed to suspect the truth.

  "But you see I tell you all this in the old terms, in the way in which we have been accustomed all our lives. Now I'm going to paraphrase it in its true terms, according to our proper time concept, as our children will learn it.

  "'After Wenlock and Silverstone's day, the true nature of time was lost, and it was believed to run backwards. Because the truth as yet lay only just under the surface, this was a time of great unrest, with the scientists occupying their thought with inflated time scales, while a novelist of the period, Marston Orston, filled a four-million-word novel with an account of a girl getting up to open her bedroom window. Earlier novelists, too, such as Proust and Mann, and painters like Picasso, manifested the time-distortion that was being digested by society. Many members of that society, unable to agree that time flowed backwards, became mentally ill, often with schizophrenia.

  "'Society coped with the problem by slowing down its pace and abandoning fast modes of transport such as the airplane and automobile. At the beginning of a more leisurely age stands the psychoanalyst Freud, who clearly grasped much of the temporal disturbance, although he never fathomed its cause. After him, the idea of the undermind becomes hazy indeed.