Cryptozoic!, page 5
“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 amniote 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 to 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 slope 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 excuse 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 liberation 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 recognize 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 something egotistic, of course: now I’m 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 felt 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 helping 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 come-uppance: 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 scuttling 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 bulrushes 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 comptosaurus, 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 archaeopteryx 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 the 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 now longed 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 begot 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-coated 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 awaiting for him. No reptiles there. Only parents.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT TAKES MORE THAN DEATH
Mind-travel was easy in some circumstances, once its principles and the Wenlock discipline were learnt. But to return to the present was as full of pain and effort as birth. It was a rebirth. 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 yielding 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, certainly 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, 2nd
April 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 that was real, the present of passing time which man had invented, and with which he was stuck.
Climbing out of his pack, Bush stood up and surveyed himself in the mirror. Amid these sanitary surroundings, he looked scruffy and filthy. He fed his measurements into the clotheomat and dialled for a one-piece. It was delivered in thirty seconds flat; a metal drawer containing it sprang open and caught Bush painfully on the shin. He took the garment out, laid it on the bed, removed his wrist instruments, picked up a clean towel from the heated rail, and padded into the shower. As he roused himself in the warm water — unimaginable luxury — he thought of Ann and her grubby flesh, lost somewhere back in a time that was now transmuted into layers of broken rock, buried underground. From now on, he would have to regard her as just another of his casual lays; there was no reason to suppose he would ever see her again.
In ten minutes, he was fit to leave the cubicle. He rang the bell, and a male attendant came to unlock the door and present him with a bill for room and services. Bush stared at the amount and winced: but the Wenlock Institute would pay that. He would have to report there shortly, prove that he had been doing something in the last two and a half years. First, he would go home and be the dutiful son. Anything to delay the report a little.
Slinging his pack over one shoulder, he walked down the spotless corridor — behind those locked doors so many other escapees foraged through their minds into the dark backward and abysm of time — into the entrance hall. One of his groupages was there, one of the largest, bolted on to the ceiling. Bloody Borrow had superseded it. Forbidding himself to look up at it, he went over towards the heat baffles and stepped into the open.
“Taxshaw, sir?”
“Going-home present, sir? Lovely little dollies!”
“Buy some flowers, mister — daffs fresh picked today.”
“Taxshaw! Take you anywhere!”
“Want a girl, squire? Take your mind off mind-travel?”
“Spare a cent!”
He remembered the cries of despair. This was home; 2090 or 2093, this was the time track he knew. He could make a textbook picture of it, the unfortunates ranged from left to right, like dinosaurs in the other diagram: male beggar first, then female, then taxshawman pulling his carriage, then toy-vendor, clouting away ragged kid, with flower-woman extreme right, under lamp-post; and in the background, the smart mind-station contrasted with the filthy ragged houses and broken roads. Jostling his way through the little knot of mendicants and hawkers, he started to walk, changed his mind, and went over to a taxshawman sitting sullenly in his carriage. Giving his father’s address, he asked how much the ride would cost. The man told him.
“It’s far too much!”
“Prices have gone up while you’ve been flitting round the past.
They always said that. It was always true.
Bush climbed into the vehicle, the man lifted the shafts, and they were off.
The air tasted wonderful! It was a miracle that only this tiny sliver of time, the present, should seem to have the magical stuff in abundance, everywhere, even where there were no people. Clever devices though the air-leakers were, they always made one feel near to suffocation. And it was not only air — there were a thousand sounds here, all striking blessedly on Bush’s ear, even the harsh ones. Also, everything that could be seen had its individual tactile quality; everything that had been turned to rubbery glass in the past here possessed its own miraculous properties of texture.
Although he knew he was thoroughly hooked on mind-travel, and would inevitably plunge back again, he loathed the abdication of the senses it entailed. Here was the world, the real world — rattling, blazing, living: and probably a little too much for him, as it had proved before!
Already, as he filled his lungs, as they rattled through the streets, he could see disturbing signs that 2093 was far from being a paradise, perhaps even farther from being a paradise than 2090. Maybe the adage was right that said you could stay away too long; perhaps already the mindless reptilian past was more familiar than this present. He knew he did not really belong here when he could not understand the slogans scrawled on the brick walls.
At one point, a column of soldiers in double file marched down the road. The taxshawman gave them a wide berth.
“Trouble in town?”
“Not if you keep your nose clean.”
An ambiguous answer, Bush thought.
He took some while to grasp exactly why the road in which his parents lived looked smaller, baser, altogether more drab. It was not just because several windows had been broken and boarded up; that he recalled from before, and the litter in the streets. It was only as he paid off the man and confronted his father’s house that he realized all the trees in the road had been chopped down. In the dentist’s neat little front garden, two ornamental cherries had grown — James Bush had planted them himself when he first took over the practice — they would have been coming into blossom about now. As he walked up the brick path, he saw their brown and decaying stumps sticking out of the ground like advertisements for his father’s profession.
Some things were the same. The brass plate still announced James Bush, LDS, Dental Surgeon. Tucked into a transparent plastic holder, the card still said “Please Ring and Walk In” in his mother’s handwriting. As the practice went downhill, she had been forced for economic reasons to become her husband’s receptionist, thus providing an unwitting example of time’s turning full circle, since it was as his receptionist she had got to know him in the first place. Bush braced himself to hear a flood of examples of how things had gone farther downhill since he left; his mother was always expert at providing tedious and repetitive examples of anything. Grasping the doorknob, he Walked In Without Ringing.
