Eighteen stegosauri seemed to fill the small valley. The male was a giant,
perhaps twenty feet long and round as a barrel, his spiky armor making him
appear much larger than he was. The chunky plates along his backbone were
a dull slaty green, but much of his body armor was a livid orange. He tore
at foliage with his jaws, but perpetually kept his beady eyes alert for
danger.
He had two females with him. They were smaller than he, and more lightly
armored. One in particular was prettily marked, the plates of her spine
being almost the same light yellow as her underbelly.
About the stegosauri frisked their young. Bush and Ann walked among them,
absolutely immune. There were fifteen of them, and obviously not many
weeks hatched. Unencumbered as yet by more than the lightest vestige
of armor, they skipped about their mothers like lambs, often standing
on their tall bind legs, sometimes jumping over their parents' wickedly
spiked tails.
The two humans stood in the middle of the herd, watching the antics of
the young reptiles.
"Maybe that's why these things became extinct," Ann said. "The young ones
all got hooked on jumping their mothers' tails and spiked themselves
to death!"
"It's as good as any other theory to date."
Only then did he notice the intruder, although the old man stegosaur
had been backing about puffily for some while. From a nearby thicket,
another animal was watching the scene. Bush took Ann's arm and directed
her attention to the spot. As he did so, the bushes parted and another
stegosaurus emerged. This was a male, smaller and presumably younger
than the leader of the herd, his tail swishing from side to side.
The females and the young paid only the most cursory attention to the
intruder; the females continued to munch, the youngsters to play. The
leader immediately charged forward to deal with the intruder; he was
being challenged for possession of the herd.
Traveling smartly towards each other, the two males hit, shoulder to
shoulder. To the humans, it was entirely soundless. The great beasts
stood there absorbing the shock, and then slowly pressed forward until
they were side by side, one facing one way, one the other. They began
to heave at each other, using their tails for leverage but never as
weapons. Their mouths opened. They displayed little sharp teeth. Still
the females and their young showed no interest in what was happening.
The males strained and struggled, their legs bowed until their ungainly
bodies almost touched the ground. The older animal was winning by sheer
weight. Suddenly, the intruder was forced to take a step backwards. The
leader nearly fell onto him. They stood apart. For a moment, the intruder
looked back at the females, his mouth hanging open. Then he lumbered
off into the nearby thicket and was not seen again.
After a few snorts of triumph, the leader of the little herd returned
to his females. They looked up, then resumed their placid munching.
"A lot they care what happens to him!" Bush said.
"They've probably learned by now that there's not much to choose between
one male and another."
He looked sharply at her. She was grinning. He softened, and smiled back.
When they climbed out of the far end of the valley, they had a wide panorama
of the plains with a river meandering through them. Great forests started
again a mile or two away. Close at hand, situated on a long outcrop of rock,
was the Borrows' tent, and other signs of human habitation.
"At least we can get a drink," Ann said as they approached the motley
collection of tents.
"You go ahead. I want to stay here for a while and think." Bush still had
his head stuffed full of dinosaurs. They disturbed him. Morally? Two men
disputing over women rarely showed as little vindictiveness as those
great armored vegetarians. Aesthetically? Who could say what beauty was,
except from his own standpoint? In any case, that great spinal column,
rising to its highest point over the pelvis and then dying away in the
spiked tail, had its own unassailable logic. Intellectually? He thought
of Lenny, and then diverted his attention back to the sportive reptilian
young, so full of wit in their movements.
He squatted on the spongy floor, which here corresponded almost exactly
with a boulder, and watched Ann walking away from him. He overcame an
impulse to pluck a nearby leaf and chew it; vegetation here was unpluckable
by any ghostly fingers.
One of the most curious effects of mind-travel was the diminution of light
suffered by anyone out of their proper time. Only a few yards away, Ann
was already in deep shadow, and the Borrows' bar, although white-painted,
was even gloomier. But there were other shades here that added not merely
gloom but horror to the scene. Borrow had chosen what was evidently a
popular site. Future generations of mind-travelers would also congregate
here; it would become a town -- perhaps the first Jurassic town. The
signs of its future success were all round. Spectral figures of future
buildings and people could be seen, drabber and mistier as they were
further in the future.
Bush was sitting close to a building very much superior to the tents
of his own generation. By its degree of slaty shade, so transparent
that he could see the unkempt landscape through it, he judged it to
emanate from a time perhaps a century or more ahead of his own. Those
future beings had solved many of the problems that in these early days
of mind-travel seemed utterly baffling: for instance, the transportation
of heavy materials and the installation of electric plants. The future
had moved in to live in style in the remote past; Bush's present could
do no more than camp like savages here. They would also have solved the
problem of sewage; his generation was leaving its excreta strewn from
the Pleistocene to the Cambrian without the hope or excuse that it would
ever turn into coprolites.
From the future building, people were leaning. So faintly were they drawn
on the air, it was impossible to be sure if they were men or women. He
had that disturbing feeling that their eyes were slightly brighter than
they should be. They could see him no better than be could see them,
but the sensation of being overlooked was uncomfortable. Bush turned
his gaze away towards the plain, only to realize how covered it was with
the misty obstructions of future time. Two faint phantasms of men walked
through him, deep in conversation, not a decibel of which leaked through
the time-entropy barrier to him. He had already noticed that his shadow
woman was near him again; how did she feel about Ann? Ghost though she
was, she would have feelings, there in her stifling future. The whole of
space-time was becoming stuffed with human feelings. Briefly, he thought
again of Monet. The old boy was right to concentrate on water lilies;
they might overgrow their pond, but you never caught them swarming over
the bank and the nearby trees as well.
He recalled Borrow had been a painter, back in their youth. Borrow would
be a good man to talk to. Borrow was hard-hearted, but he could sometimes
make you laugh.
As he got up and strolled towards his friend's establishment, he saw that
Borrow had very much improved the amenities. There were three tents
instead of the pair there had been, and two of them were considerable in
size. One was a sort of general store-cum-trading post, one was a bar,
one was a cafe. Over them all, Borrow and his wife had hoisted a great
sign: THE AMNIOTE EGG.
Behind the tents, before them, amid them, were other collections of
buildings in strange styles of architecture, some of them also called
THE AMNIOTE EGG, all of them in various degrees of shadow, according to
their degrees of futurity. It had been the presence of these shadows,
so clearly omens of success, that had encouraged the Borrows to set up
business in the first place; they were flourishing on the paradox.
"Two amniote eggs and chips," Bush said, as he pushed his way into the cafe.
Ver was behind the counter. Her hair was greyer than Bush remembered
it; she would be about fifty. She smiled her old smile and came out
from behind the counter to shake Bush's hand. He noted that her hand
felt glassy; they had not mind-traveled back from the same year; the
same effect made her face greyer, shadier, than it really was. Even
her voice came muted, drained away by the slight time-barrier. He knew
that the food and drink, when he took it, would have the same "glassy"
quality and digest slowly.
They chaffed each other affectionately, and Bush said the old place was
clearly making Ver's fortune.
"Bet you don't even know what an amniote egg is," Ver said. Her parents
had christened her Verbena, but she preferred the contraction.
"It means big business to you, doesn't it?"
"We're keeping body and soul together. And you, Eddie? Your body looks
all right -- how's the soul doing?"
"Still getting trouble from it." He had known this woman well in the
days when he and Borrow were struggling painters, before mind-travel,
had even slept with her once or twice before Roger had become seriously
interested. It all seemed a long while ago -- about a hundred and
thirty million years ago, or ahead, whichever it was. Sometimes past
and future became confused and seemed to flow in opposite directions
to normal. "Don't seem to get as many signals from it as I used to,
but those that do come through are mainly bad."
"Can't they operate?"
"Doc says it's incurable." It was marvelous how he could talk so trivially
to her about such momentous things. "Talking of incurables, how's Roger?"
"He's okay. You'll find him out back. You doing any grouping nowadays,
Eddie?"
"Well -- I'm just in a sort of transition stage. I'm -- hell, no, Ver,
I'm absolutely lost at the moment." He might as well tell her an
approximation of the truth; she was the only woman who asked about his
work because she actually cared what he did.
"Lost periods are sometimes necessary. You're doing nothing?"
"Did a couple of paintings last time I was in 2090. Just to pass the time.
Structuring time, psychologists call it. There's a theory that man's
biggest problem is structuring time. All wars are merely part-solutions
to the problem."
"The Hundred Years War would rate as quite a success in that case."
"Yep. It puts all art, all music, all literature, into that same category.
All time-passers,
Lear
, 'The St. Matthew Passion,' 'Guernica,'
'Sinning in the City.'"
"The difference is one of degree, presumably."
"It's the degrees I'm up against right now."
They exchanged smiles. He pressed into the back to find Borrow. For the
first time -- or had he felt the same thing before and forgotten it? --
he thought that Ver was more interesting than her husband.
Borrow was pottering about outside in the grey daylight. Like his wife,
he was inclining to stoutness, but he still dressed as immaculately as
ever, with the old hint of the dandy about him. He straightened as Bush
came across to him and held out a hand.
"Haven't seen you in a million years, Eddie. How's life? Do you still
hold the record for low-distance mind-travel?"
"As far as I know, Roger. How're you doing?"
"What's the nearest year to home you ever reached?"
"There were men about." He did not get the drift of, or see the necessity
for, his friend's question.
"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,