Cryptozoic! Read Online Free PDF Page A

mind-travel, and that we might not really be here

at all, or something like that? He said there was something sinister about

the undermind, and nobody understood it yet, despite all the claims of the

Wenlock Institute."

"Well, it's all new as yet. The undermind was only first developed as a

concept in 2073, and the first mind-travel wasn't till two years later,

so there may be more to discover, although it's difficult to see what

it might be. What does Stein know about it, anyway?"

"Maybe he was just sounding off, trying to impress me."

"Did you let him -- I mean, did he lie with you?"

"Jealous?" She grinned challengingly.

"What do you want me to say?" They stared at each other. Through the dirty

pane of her face, he saw life shine. He reached forward and kissed her.

She lifted the boiling beef essence off his tiny stove and said, "I think

I've about had the Devonian Period. How about moving on to the Jurassic

with me?"

"Aren't Lenny and Co. going there?"

"So what? There's forty-six million years of it . . ."

"Touché. What do you want to do there? See the carnivores mate?"

She gave him a sly look. "We could watch 'em together." Instantly,

he was excited. He slid a hand across her buckskin thigh.

"I'll come with you." As they drank their essence, he was jeering at himself

for getting mixed up with the girl; she was confused and could only upset

his mental balance. It was true she was not unintelligent and a good lay,

but he had never been satisfied to accept anyone else by compartments;

her whole self did not seem accessible. And perhaps he was not the right

person to help her render all of her personality accessible.

She snuggled against him. "I need someone to mind-travel with. I'd be

frightened to let go on my own. My mother wouldn't mind-travel to save her

life! People of that generation will never take to it, I suppose. Wow,

I wish we could mind back just a little way -- you know, one generation

-- because I'd so like to see my old man courting my mother and making

love to her. I bet they made a proper muck-up of it, just as they did

of anything else!"

When he said nothing, she nudged him. "Well, go on, say something!

Wouldn't you like to see your parents at it? You aren't as stuffy as

you make out, Bush, are you? You'd love it!"

"Ann, you just don't realize the horror of what you are saying!"

"Come on, you'd like it too!"

Bush shook his head. "I have enough data on my parents without the need for

that sort of thing! But I suppose yours is the majority view. Dr. Wenlock

ran a questionnaire at the Institute about a decade ago -- I mean in 2080

-- which showed how strong incest-motivation is in mind-travelers. It's the

force behind the predisposition to look back. The findings coincide with

the old psychoanalytical view of human nature.

"Current theory suggests that man first became Homo sapiens when he put

a ban on -- well, let's call it endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage

outside the familial group. Exogamy was man's very first painful step

forward. No other animal puts a ban on endogamy."

"Was it worth it!" Ann exclaimed.

"Well, since then man has become all the things we know he has become,

conqueror of his environment and all that, but his severance with nature

has seemed to grow wider and wider -- I mean with his true nature.

"The way the Wenlockians see it, the undermind is, as it were, our old

natural mind. The overmind is a later, Homo sap accretion, a high-powered

dynamo whose main function is to structure time and conceal all the sad

animal thoughts in the undermind. The extremists claim that passing time

is an invention of the overmind."

Perhaps she was not listening. She said, "You know why I followed you

yesterday? I had the strongest feeling directly you appeared that you

and I had -- known each other terribly well at some past time."

"I'd have remembered you!"

"It must have been my undermind playing up! Anyhow, what you were saying

was very