Cryptozoic! Read Free Page B

Stein!"

"I mean, there's the sea where it all started, and here we are. We can't

touch it, of course." Josie was wrestling with concepts too awful and

vague for her mental equipment, judging by the tranced look on her face.

"Funny, I look at this sea and I can't help thinking we're at the end

of the world, not the beginning."

This chimed strangely with something Bush had been meditating on earlier

in the day; the girl had a beautiful idea, and for an instant he debated

switching his attentions to her. The others looked glum; it was their

way of registering profundity. Lenny slung himself onto his bike and

kicked the starter, and the two air columns began to blow at once. It

still looked like a defiance of a physical law that the sand lay under

them undisturbed; and so it was. All round them was the invisible but

unyielding wall of mind-travel. The four other tersher boys climbed

on to their bikes, two of the girls jumping up behind. They snarled

away down the darkening sand. Night was coming, the low bristles of

vegetation stirred with an on-shore breeze; but in the mind dimension,

all was still. Bush was left standing with the older man, Josie, and Ann.

"So much for supper," he commented. "If I'm not wanted, I'll be off.

I have a camp just up in the first series of hills." He gestured towards

the sunset, looking all the while at Ann.

"You mustn't mind Lenny," Ann said. "He's moody." She looked at him.

She really had next to no figure, he told himself, and she was dirty

and scruffy; it did not stop him trembling. The isolation of mind-travel

could bring on complete disassociation of character; once in it, one could

feel nothing, smell nothing, hear nothing, except one's fellow travelers.

This girl -- she was like the prospect of a banquet! And there was more

to it than that -- what he could not yet determine.

"Now that those who do not wish to discuss vital subjects are away,

you can sit and talk with us," said the older man. It could have been

that wry expression, or maybe he was in some way mocking.

"I've overstayed my welcome. I'm off."

To his surprise, the older man came and shook his hand.

"You keep the strangest company," Bush said. He was not interested in

this fellow, whoever he was.

He started back along the beach towards his own lonely camp, the uselessness

of playing about with Lenny's girl uppermost in his mind. The dark thing

out to sea had spread monstrous wings and was in flight for the land.

He suddenly felt the utter senselessness of setting down Man in such a

gigantic universe and then letting him challenge it -- or of giving him

desires he could neither control nor fulfil.

Ann said, "I can't get used to the way we can't touch anything of the

real world. It really bugs me. I -- you know, I don't feel I exist."

She was walking beside him. He could hear the sound of her boots slapping

against her legs.

"I've adapted. It's the smell of the place I miss. The air-leakers don't

give you a whisper of what it smells like."

"Life never gives you enough."

He stopped. "Must you follow me? You're going to get me into trouble.

Beat it back to your lover boy -- you can see I'm not your kind."

"We haven't proved it yet."

Momentarily, they looked desperately at each other, as if some enormous

thing had to be resolved in silence.

They trudged on. Bush had made up his mind now; or rather, he had no mind.

It had gone from him, sunk under the ocean of his bloodstream, in the tides

of which it seemed to him that direction was being born anew. They scrambled

together into the river valley, hurrying upstream along the bank, clasping

each other's hands. Only momentarily was he aware of what he was doing.

"What's got into you?"

"You're crazy!"

"You're crazy!"

They hurried over a bed of large and broken shells. He could have cut his

hand on one. He'd looked them up in the guide book earlier. Phragmoceras.

At first he had thought they were some animal's teeth, not the