Cryptozoic! Page 5

  "That's pretty good. Could you date it?"

  "It was some time in the Bronze Age." Of course, everyone who minded was fascinated by the idea that, when the discipline was developed further, it might be possible for them to visit historic times. Who knows, the day might even dawn when it would be possible to break through the entropy barrier entirely and mind into the future.

  Borrow slapped him on the back. "Good going! See any artists at work? We had a chap in the bar the other day claimed he had minded up to the Stone Age. I thought that was pretty good, but evidently you still hold the record."

  "Yeah, well they say it needs a disrupted personality to get as far as I got!"

  They looked into each other's eyes. Borrow dropped his gaze almost at once. Perhaps he recalled that Bush hated being touched. The latter, regretting his outburst, made an effort to pull himself together and be pleasant.

  "Nice to see you and Ver again. Looks as if The Amniote Egg is doing well. And -- Roger, you're painting again!" He had noticed what Borrow was stacking. He stooped, and gently lifted one of the plasbord panels into the light.

  There were nine panels. Bush looked through them all in growing amazement.

  "You've taken up your old hobby again," he said thickly.

  "Poaching a bit on your territory, I'm afraid, Eddie." But these were not SKGs. These panels seemed to look back, in one sense, to Gabo and Pevsner, but using the new materials, here etiolated, here compounded; the effect was startlingly new, not sculpture, not groupage, not machine.

  All nine panels were variations on a theme, encrusted, as Bush saw, with perspex and glass, and with rotating fragments of metal held in place by electro-magnets. They were so formed that they carried suggestions of great distances, with relationships that varied according to the point from which they were viewed. Some were in continual movement, powered by pill-thrust from microminiaturized nuclear drives set in the panel bases, so that the static element had been eliminated.

  It was immediately clear to Bush what the groupages represented: abstractions of the time strata folded so ominously about The Amniote Egg. They had been created with absolute clarity and command -- command of vision and material, coalescing to produce masterworks. Hard after Bush's awe came his jealousy, burning through him like a flood.

  "Very cute," he said, expressionlessly.

  "I thought you might understand them," Borrow said, staring hard into his friend's face.

  "I came here after a girl I know. I want a drink!"

  "Have one on the house. Your girl may be in the bar."

  He led the way and Bush followed, too angry to speak. The panels were astonishing -- cool, yet with a Dionysiac quality -- revolutionary, selective, individual . . . they gave Bush that prickle between his shoulder blades which he recognized as his private signal when something had genius; or if not genius, a quality he might imitate and perhaps transmute into genius, whatever the hell genius was -- a stronger prickle, a greater surge of electricity through the cells of the body. And old Borrow had it, Borrow , who had stopped being any sort of artist years ago and turned himself into a shopkeeper and his pretty wife into an assistant for the sake of cash, Borrow , fussy about his shirt cuffs, Borrow had got the message and delivered it back!

  What hurt was that Borrow knew he had done it. That was why he had tried to cushion Bush from the shock by reminding him that he held the record for low-distance mind-travel. Bush might be washed up as an artist, ah, but he held the record for low-distance mind-travel! So Borrow had known Bush would recognize the merits of the panels and had pitied him because he, Bush, could produce nothing similar.

  How much were those panels fetching in 2090, for God's sake? No wonder The Amniote Egg was flourishing; there was capital to back it now. The shopkeeper-artist was on a good thing, turning his inspiration into hamburgers and tonic water!

  Bush hated his thoughts. They kept coming, though he called himself a bastard. Those panels . . . of course Gabo . . . Pevsner . . . in two dimensions -- no, they had their predecessors, but these were originals. Not a new language, but a bridge from the old. A bridge he himself might have found; now he would find another, have to find another! But old Borrow . . . a man who'd once dared to laugh at Turner's masterpieces!

  "Double whisky," Bush said. He couldn't pull himself together to say thank you as Borrow sat down on a stool companionably beside him.

  "Is your girl here? What's she like? Blonde?"

  "She's dirty. God knows what color her hair is. Picked her up in the Devonian. She's no good -- I'm only too glad to lose her." It was not true; in his shame, he could not think what he was saying. Already, he wanted to look at the panels again, but was unable to ask.

  Borrow sat in silence for a moment, as if digesting how much of Bush's statement he should believe. Then he said, "You still work for the Wenlock Institute, Eddie?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "Guy in here yesterday called Stein -- must still be around. He used to work for Wenlock too."

  "Don't know him." That Stein connected with the Institute? Never!

  "Need a room for the night, Eddie? Ver and I can fix you up."

  "I've got my own tent. Anyhow, I may not be staying."

  "Come on, you must have a meal with Ver and me, tonight after we've closed. There's no hurry -- there's all the world in the time, as they say."

  "Can't." He made an awful effort to pull himself together and stop being a bastard. "What the hell is an aniniote egg anyway? A new dish?"

  "You could say that in a way." Borrow explained the amniote egg as the great invention of the Mesozoic Era, the one thing that brought about the dominance of the great reptiles over hundreds of millions of years. An amnion was the membrane within a reptilian egg that allowed the embryo reptile to go through the "tadpole" stage inside the egg, to emerge into the world as a fully formed creature. It enabled the reptiles to lay their eggs on land, and thus conquer the continents. For the amphibians from which they had developed laid only soft and gelatinous eggs that had to hatch in a fluid medium, which kept them pegged to rivers and lakes.

  "The reptiles broke the old amphibian tie with the water as surely as mankind broke the old mammal tie with space-time time. It was their big clever trick, and it stood them in good stead for I-don't-know-how-long."

  "The way your store and bar is going to do for you."

  "What's upset you, Eddie, boy? You're not yourself. You ought to go back to the present."

  Bush drained his glass, stood up, and looked at his friend. With a great effort, he conquered himself. "I may be back, Roger. I thought -- your constructions were okay." As he hurried out of the bar, he saw there was one of the constructions hanging as decoration on the canvas wall.

  All the clocks of his mind were hammering furiously. You ought to be glad someone did it. Christ, you ought to be glad your friend did it. But I've suffered. . . . Maybe he suffered -- maybe he suffers all the time like me -- you never can tell. He hasn't done anything. Those were just flashy tourist gimmicks. I'm so despicable. You've no control over yourself. All this self-recrimination is itself just a cover-up. And beneath that and beneath that -- go on peeling the layers away and you'll see they always come alternate, self-love and self-hate, right down to the rotten core. It's my parents' fault . . . incest motif again. God, I'm so sick of myself! Let me out!

  He saw how he had wasted himself. Five years before, he had been doing good work. Now he was just a spineless mind-travel addict.

  One of the ways of escape from himself was at hand. A man and a girl were walking in front of him, so unshadowed that Bush knew they had come back from the same year as he. He hardly glanced at the man. The girl was terrific, with beautiful legs and a sort of high-stepping walk that suited her trim ankles. Her bottom was good and did not slop too much. Her hair was short. Bush could see nothing of her face, but to look at it immediately became his obsession.

  It was a gambler's urge of which he had long been victim -- and now he no longer had the ex
cuse that he needed a model. The odds were stacked high against any girl being a beauty. A thousand girls had pretty posteriors -- one in a thousand had a tolerable face. The fever died in him directly he found one that did not match up to his standards. He was a face fetishist. Even as he fell into pursuit, Bush realized -- it was an aside -- Ann had a pretty face.

  He followed the couple carefully, moving from side to side behind the girl, so that by this libration he could see the maximum amount of her profile. There were tents pitched here, and ragged individuals standing about, wondering what the devil to do with the past now they had it. Bush avoided them.

  His quarry disappeared round the corner of a tent. Quickening his pace, Bush followed. He saw the girl was standing alone just ahead. She had turned to look at him. She was a cow. Almost at the same moment, Bush scented danger. He whirled about, but the blow was already descending. The girl's escort had jumped out of the tent doorway, and was bringing a cosh down over his shoulder, hard.

  The moment stretched into a whole season, as if the panic in Bush's mind had flushed it of the man-made idea of passing time. He had more than enough leisure to read the fear and madness -- as hateful as the dreaded blow itself -- in the man's face, and to perform a whole series of connected observations: I should have looked at the man, or at least have spared him a glance: I recognized him: he was that odd fellow with Lenny and Ann, blast her: dyed hair: his name was . . . but Roger mentioned the name too . . . why didn't I take it in? why am I always so involved in something else? always sometimes egotistic, of course . . . now I'm in for trouble . . . Stone -- no, Stein, Stein, Stein!

  The cosh landed, clumsily but hard, half across his face and half across his neck. He went down. Anger came to him too late (again because he was too self-involved to react quickly to the external situation?) and as he fell he grappled for Stein's legs. His fingers clutched trousers. Stein kicked him in the chest and pulled away. Sprawling on the soggy generalized floor, Bush saw the man run away, past the girl, not bothering about her.

  The whole incident had not raised even one grain of Jurassic dust. It remained alien, unstirrable.

  Two men came over and helped Bush up. They said something about getting him over to The Amniote Egg. That was the last thing he wanted. Still in a daze, he snatched himself away from them and staggered off, moving out of the tented area, clutching his neck, all his emotions jarring and churning inside him. He remembered the girl's face as she turned to watch him collect his comeuppance: with her heavy brows and silly little nose, she had not been even near to pretty.

  Where the crude tents of his own day finished, the shadowy structures belonging to future invaders of the past continued. Bush lurched through them, through the shadows that inhabited them, finally got beyond them and pushed through a green thicket of gymnosperms. A little coelurosaur, no bigger than a hen, and scuffling on its hind legs, ran out from under his feet. It startled him, although he had not caused its fright.

  Emerging from the thicket, he found himself on the bank of a wide and slow-moving river, the one he and Ann had seen before she left him. He sat by it with a hand over his throbbing neck. There was jungle close at hand, the heavy, almost flowerless jungle of mid-Jurassic times, while on the opposite side of the river, where an ox-bow was forming, it was marshy and bullrushes and barrel-bodied cycadeoids flourished.

  Bush stared at the scene for some moments, wondering what he was thinking about it, until he realized it reminded him of a picture in a textbook, long ago, when he was at school, before the days of mind-travel but when -- curiously, as it now seemed -- a general preoccupation with the remote past was evident. That would be about 2056, when his father opened his new dentist's surgery. People had gone Victoriana-mad during that period -- his father had even installed a plastic mahogany rinse-bowl for people to spit into. It was the Victorians who had first revealed the world of prehistory, with its monsters so like the moving things in the depths of the mind, and presumably one thing had led to another. Presumably Wenlock had been influenced by the same currents of the period. But Wenlock had turned out to be the first mind of his age, not a beaten-up failed artist.

  The picture in the textbook, long ago, had had the same arrangement of river, marsh, various plants of exotic kinds, and distant forest which now stretched before Bush. Only the picture had also exhibited a selection of prime reptiles: one allosaurus large on the left of the picture, picking in a refined way at an overturned stegosaurus; next, a camptosaurus, walking like a man with its little front paws raised almost as if it were about to pray for the soul of the stegosaurus; its devotions were interrupted by two pterodactyls swooping about in the middle of the picture; then came a little fleet-foot ornitholestes, grabbing an archaeoptery out of a fern; and lastly, on the right of the picture, a brontosaurus obligingly thrust its long neck and head out of the river, weed hanging neatly out of its mouth to indicate its vegetarian habit.

  How simple the world of the textbook, how like and unlike reality! This creaking old green world was never as crowded as the textbooks claimed; nor could the animals, any more than man, exist in such single blessedness. Nor, for that matter, had Bush ever seen a pterodactyl. Perhaps they were scarce. Perhaps they inhabited another part of the globe. Or perhaps it was just that some imaginative nineteenth-century paleontologist had fitted the fossil bones of some crawling creature together wrongly. The pterodactyl could be purely a Victorian invention, one with Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Dracula.

  It was hot and cloudy -- that at least squared with the picture, for none of the animals there had cast shadows -- much like the day his mother had said she did not love him and proved her point by shutting him out in the garden all day. He longed now for a good old friendly brontosaurus head to come champ-champ-champing out of the river; it might have done him some good on that other day, too; but no brontosaurus appeared. The truth was, the Age of Reptiles was never quite so overcrowded with reptiles as the Age of Man with men.

  As the pain within him died and his pulse rate slowed to normal, Bush made some attempt to ratiocinate. Guilt kept slipping into his reasoning, but he got some things clear.

  Stein, for whatever cause, had clearly believed Bush was following him rather than the girl, If Stein was about here, it was likely that Lenny and his buckskin-booted chums would also be around. Their presence might account for the disappearance of Ann; Lenny could have caught her and be holding her against her will. No, be your age, she had seen him and run to him with thankfulness, only too glad to exchange his dirty feet and dim mind for Bush's pretentious chatter. Well, good riddance to her! Though by God, that first evening, across the uncrunching phragmoceras shells, in that little valley, her gesture in raising one crooked leg, the exquisite planes of her thighs, and their sweet creaming excitement . . .

  "Don't get all worked up!" he exclaimed aloud. Another thing was clear. He did not want anything from anyone here, not from Roger and Ver, not from Lenny and his tershers, not from Stein. But it was possible that one or more of them might follow him and beat him up. As for Ann . . . he had no claims on her. He had done nothing good for her.

  Bush looked anxiously about. Even the Dark Woman had left him. It was time for him to mind home, to face the trouble at the Institute. The Jurassic, as ever, was a flop, it and its amniote eggs.

  He opened his pack and pulled out an ampoule of CSD. His old, ancient, long-ago present was waiting for him. No reptiles there. Only parents.

  Chapter 4

  IT TAKES MORE THAN DEATH

  Mind-travel was easy in some circumstances, once its principles and the Wenlock discipline were learned. But to return to the present was as full of pain and effort as birth. It was a re-birth. Blackness hemmed one, claustrophobia threatened, the danger of suffocation was immediate. Bush kicked and struggled and cried with his mind, "There, that place!" directing himself forward with the peristaltic movements of some unknown part of his brain.

  Light returned to his universe. He sprawled on a yie
lding couch, and luxury pervaded his being; he was back. Slowly, he opened his eyes. He was back in the Southall mind-station from which he had come. His neck still hurt, but he was home.

  He lay in a sort of cocoon in a cubicle that would have remained unopened since he left, one winter's day in 2090. Above his head was the small plant keeping alive some of his tissue and a quarter-pint of his blood. They were almost his only possessions in this age, certainty his most vital ones, for on them, by some awesome osmotic process, he had been able to home like a homing pigeon. Now their usefulness was over.

  Bush sat up, tore away the fine plastic skin that cocooned the bed -- it was reminiscent of a dinosaur rolling out of its damned amniote egg, wasn't it? -- and surveyed his cubicle. A calendar-clock on the wall gave him the dry fact of the date: Tuesday, March 31, 2093. He had not meant to be away so long; there was always a sensation of being robbed of life when you returned and found how time had been ticking on without you. For the past was not the real world; it was just a dream, like the future; it was the present only that was real, the present of passing time which man had invented, and with which he was stuck.