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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,