By Bizarre Hands Read Free

and looked up and out the window opposite him, studied the crisp desert sky.
    And a fish swam by.
    Long and lean and speckled with all the colors of the world, flicking its tail as if in good-bye. Then it was gone.
    The old man sat up. Outside, all about, were the fish—all sizes, colors, and shapes.
    "Hey, boy, wake up!"
    The younger man moaned.
    "Wake up!"
    The young man, who had been resting face down on his arms, rolled over. "What's the matter? Time to go?"
    "The fish."
    "Not again."
    "Look!"
    The young man sat up. His mouth fell open. His eyes bloated. Around and around the car, faster and faster in whirls of dark color, swam all manner of fish.
    "Well, I'll be . . .
How?"
    " I told you, I told you."
    The old man reached for the door handle, but before he could pull it a fish swam lazily through the back window glass, swirled about the car, once, twice, passed through the old man's chest, whipped up and went out through the roof.
    The old man cackled, jerked open the door. He bounced around beside the road. Leaped up to swat his hands through the spectral fish. "Like soap bubbles," he said. "No. Like smoke!"
    The young man, his mouth still agape, opened his door and got out. Even high up he could see the fish. Strange fish, like nothing he'd ever seen pictures of or imagined. They flitted and skirted about like flashes of light.
    As he looked up, he saw, nearing the moon, a big dark cloud. The only cloud in the sky. That cloud tied him to reality suddenly, and he thanked the heavens for it. Normal things still happened. The whole world had not gone insane.
    After a moment the old man quit hopping among the fish and came out to lean on the car and hold his hand to his fluttering chest.
    "Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn't it feel like the beating of your own mother's heart while you float inside the womb?"
    And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea.
    "How?" the young man said. "Why?"
    "The time lock, boy. The locks clicked open and the fish are free. Fish from a time before man was man. Before civilization started weighing us down. I know it's true. The truth's been in me all the time. It's in us all."
    "It's like time travel," the young man said. "From the past to the future, they've come all that way."
    "Yes, yes, that's it . . . Why, if they can come to our world, why can't we go to theirs? Release that spirit inside of us, tune into their time?"
    "Now wait a minute . . ."
    "My God, that's it! They're pure, boy, pure. Clean and free of civilization's trappings. That must be it! They're pure and we're not. We're weighted down with technology. These clothes. That car."
    The old man started removing his clothes.
    "Hey!" the young man said. "You'll freeze."
    "If you're pure, if you're completely pure," the old man mumbled, "that's it . . . yeah, that's the key."
    "You've gone crazy."
    "I won't look at the car," the old man yelled, running across the sand, trailing the last of his clothes behind him. He bounced about the desert like a jack-rabbit. "God, God, nothing is happening, nothing," he moaned. "This isn't my world. I'm of that world. I want to float free-in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and—"
    The young man called the old man's name. The old man did not seem to hear.
    "I want to leave here!" the old man yelled. Suddenly he was springing about again. "The teeth!" he yelled. "It's the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!" He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder.
    Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale pink seal among the fish.
    In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future's air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by.
    The young man began to strip off his