My responsibility ends at the gangplank, Walton thought, and forced his attention to his food. He ate with such resolute single-mindedness that a second or two elapsed before he realized that the conversation had suddenly and unexpectedly taken a combative turn, that Dews had said something to which Michelle objected; he looked up and saw her regarding Dews piercingly, saw Dews return her look with one of happy belligerence, heard Moen say blandly, "Dews, I don't think our young guest approves of any of this—do you, Miz Kelly?"

"I don't. Call me an eco-maniac, but I don't like the idea of raiding the past to keep the present going. A lot of people don't."

Dews leaned back in his chair and knitted his blunt red fingers over his midsection; Michelle did not flinch from his gaze. "The quantum-mechanics boys," he drawled, "say we haven't traveled into our own Earth's prehistoric past at all. They say there must be duplicate Earths, parallel Earths—each more or less different from our own. So nothing we do here can make any difference in our own timeline."

"It's certainly a convenient theory. But there's nothing here that contradicts anything we already knew for certain about mid-Paleozoic times. We knew about maybe two percent of the whole story from what we found in the fossil record. Now we can at least glimpse the other ninety-eight percent, and it's roughly what we imagined it would be. Even if the physicists're right, even if this isn't our own Earth, it might as well be. What about this planet's future? Even if it's only a duplicate Earth, what if, four hundred million years from now, humans arise but can't invent technological civilization all over again because the resources needed to do so aren't there?"

"There's no guarantee," Dews said, "that humans necessarily arise on Earth-type planets. Maybe humans don't make it here. Maybe the dinosaurs never go extinct, no big meteor crash, and the mammals never get their shot at greatness. Maybe there never are even dinosaurs here, just bugs and shellfish until the sun expands and the planet fries. We can't see into the future of this world and find out if it's a good thing or a bad thing to exploit its resources. Meanwhile, we need the oil."

"What we need is a replacement for the internal-combustion engine."

"You may not believe me, but I agree. I've been waiting all my life for one of those hydrogen-powered buckets. And you, Bud," Dews said to Walton, "how much'd that tub of yours save you if you didn't have to use diesel fuel?"

Walton did not look up from his dinner; he said, without enthusiasm, "A bundle."

"Right!" Dews returned his attention to Michelle. "But the fact of the matter is, we don't have a replacement, and—meanwhile—the internal-combustion engines we do have need the oil!"

Michelle said nothing but shook her head emphatically.

Dews rolled his eyes. "Eco-maniacs give me a highly localized pain. Because people like me know how to take what the earth has to offer, everybody, including you, lives better and longer than any people in history. But people like you don't want us to hurt their precious goddamn salamanders and bugs."

"Time out," Moen interjected, "for a sunset," and everybody relaxed as one and turned as one to watch the sun go down.

Conversation, slow to resume, restricted itself to requests for condiments, then died altogether. After the silence had stretched out across half an eternity Michelle suddenly said, "Well, everybody, how about some music?" and took her chip pack from her shirt pocket.

Simultaneously, Dews said, "What?" and Moen exclaimed, "Excellent idea!"

"I've got Mozart and the three Bees," she said, "plus bop, pop, hop, drop, and truckstop."

"Lady's a poet," said McCampbell, and Bloodworth asked, "You got the Shiners?"

She gave him a regretful look. "Sorry, fresh out. Oh, I know." She did something with the chip pack. "What I'm about to inflict on you is an actual top-ten country-and-western hit back in the twenty-first century," and at the touch a button there came a twangy guitar introduction, and then a woman sang, in a nasal but good-humored voice,

Baby, come on back with me,
let's skinny-dip in the Tethys Sea.
Let's pack a bag and leave today
four hundred million years away,
and marvel at exotic fauna
living in or near Gondwana—
trilobites and placoderms
and seven thousand kinds of worms.

During an instrumental interlude, McCampbell said, "Sure's hell don't write songs like they used to."

"That's for damn sure," Dews said.

Moen laughed. "It's wonderful, boys. A top-ten hit, she says. I bet it's playing at truck stops all over America."

We'll pitch a tent, and through the door
we'll watch those creatures flop ashore
and bet on how well each one waddles—
we'll be excellent role models,
we'll leave our tracks along the shore
and demonstrate what feet are for.
We'll brew some psilophytic tea
and make love by the Tethys Sea.

Moen laughed again as the song ended. "I bet there's not a trucker or a waitress in a hundred who knows what the hell it's even about."

"Course they will," McCampbell said. "It's about having sex in the great outdoors."

Michelle gestured with the chip pack. "Want to hear it in some other style?"

"Once is enough," Dews muttered.

Moen gave Michelle a sidelong look and asked, "What other delights've you got in that little box of yours?"

Walton flushed and frowned, and though he looked at Moen when he spoke, he clearly meant his words for Michelle. "I don't want to be a party-pooper, but I have to get an early start tomorrow. We're—I'm on a tight schedule."

Michelle leaned back in her seat, looked first at Walton, then at Moen. She slipped the chip pack back into her shirt pocket. She looked around the table and said, "It's been nice meeting you fellows."

"Come back any time," McCampbell ventured jocosely, "and bring your girlfriends."

"Listen to you," Michelle said as she stood up. "Wouldn't it be more fun if you had some women geologists here all the time?"

"Yep," McCampbell conceded, "even if they were tree-huggers. Maybe especially if they were tree-huggers."

Michelle gave him a look of politest inquiry.

McCampbell said, "Gal who'll hug a tree'll hug anything," and laughed uproariously. After a moment, Dews followed his lead. Bloodworth joined in, but halfheartedly. Moen smiled thinly.

Walton rose and nodded to Moen, whose smile was suddenly replaced by a disappointed and slightly desperate expression; the geologist almost overturned his own chair as he pushed to his feet. Walton cast a final look around the table, let his gaze rest for a moment on the grinning McCampbell, and murmured, "Gentlemen." As he turned away, he heard Moen utter Michelle's name, but without waiting to see if she would follow he began walking toward the river. He felt embarrassed and angry and vaguely unclean.

He did not look back until he had reboarded the barge, and he had no sooner done so than he saw her emerge from darkness into the light of Karen's lamps, looking as cool and casual as though she had been for a stroll around the block. Moen trailed one or two paces behind her with the air of someone trying to salvage an unexpectedly and rapidly deteriorating situation. She turned at the gangplank and told him gaily, "Thank you for a perfectly lovely evening," and came on board, and as she passed Walton she called out, "Perhaps we'll have time to visit again on the way back downriver."

Moen wilted on the bank. He did not set his foot on the gangplank. "Well," he said. "I guess I should say good night."

"Good night," she said, and Walton seconded her. The geologist smiled wanly and went back to his camp.

"I thought you might be thinking of spending the night ashore," Walton told Michelle in an even tone, without quite looking at her.

"So did he. In fact, I believe he had his whole weekend planned out. Straight-ahead romantic plunge on a boat, followed by hours of grunting and bucking. I guess setting me and Dews on each other was his idea of foreplay." She had plainly meant for him to laugh or at least smile.

Walton did not respond; he still would not look at her. "If you don't mind my asking, what're your plans for when we get back to the base camp? All I do is come upriver and go downriver. Occasionally, I hug the coast to Wegener Point and back, but not anytime soon."

The edge in his voice was matched in hers. "I might try to hitch a ride to someplace else. Or I could just walk."

"Walk? Walk where?"

Her tone became defiant. "Wegener Point's only about a hundred klicks north of the base camp, right? Stinktown's another few hundred."

"But walk?"

She raised a foot and waggled it for a moment. "I may've grown up in car culture, but I know what these things on the end of my legs are for. If hiking through hills and canyons in southern California didn't prepare me—"

"It's mostly evaporite flats between here and Wegener Point. Truly grisly places."

"I'm sure. But there's a great tradition in my family of walking through hostile environments. One of my ancestors walked from Berlin to the south of France to get away from Nazis when he was fifteen."

"Well, then, I must say I am impressed. With you and your ancestor both. But you can't possibly carry enough food to last you till you reached the point."

"I wouldn't have to carry it. I can always find it lying around."

Walton shook his head—admiringly, in spite of himself, for though her cocksure attitude grated, he found himself liking her adventurousness and apparent fearlessness. He suppressed his irritation and said, "Nature girl."

"Why don't you let me make dinner tomorrow and see for yourself?" He looked dubious. "I promise not to poison you. I'd like you to try some of my food."

"Exactly what do you eat?" Walton said warily.

"Whatever there is. My Uncle Ivan was one of the first scientists to study Paleozoic life-forms and ecosystems in the Paleozoic. He told me what I'd be able to eat here and what not to eat. Um, Wicket is invited, of course."

Walton shook his head emphatically. "It'd just disturb him." Neither of them spoke for a good part of a minute. Then: "I mean, set something aside for him if you want, and I'll give it to him, but—everything considered, he's done quite well these past few days. He's doing the best he can. He can't do any better than he does."

Presently, from the direction of the camp came the sound of a diesel engine cranking up.

Michelle gazed off into the darkness. "Boys with toys," she said.

That evening, in the cramped cubicle that served as Karen's formal mess area, Michelle set before Walton a serving of what seemed to be snap beans and brown rice. There was also a small mound of what could have been black beans or caviar. He said, "Is it a good idea to ask what this stuff is before I put it in my mouth?"

"Probably not, if you have irrational food prejudices."

He thought of her collecting sortie. "Then don't tell me afterward, either, okay?" He slipped his fork into the black beans or caviar and put three or four of them into his mouth. They were neither black beans nor caviar, but he allowed after chewing them a couple of times that they tasted pretty good. She beamed at him and dug into her own food.

When they had finished eating, he sat back and told her, "Michelle Kelly, I salute you. In you are met all the best of French and Irish."

"German, too. The name's just the legacy of my ethnically bewildered parents. I'm only very attenuated anything."

Walton started to gather up his tableware.

"No," she said, rising, "don't get up, I'll take care of the dishes."

He watched her putter in the tiny galley for a minute. Then he said, seriously, "Tomorrow we go on as far as we can. The last outpost this side of Gondwana. I'll appreciate your staying on the boat then. I can't be sure how he'll take to you being there." He thought, but did not say, I don't want you getting into anything with him the way you almost did with Dews.

Kelly glanced over her shoulder at him. "How who'll take what?"

"How the hermit'll take to you being there. The old man of the mountain, as I call him."

"Who is he, and what's his story?"

"He's part of the paleoclimate survey. Mans the radio station out here."

"What's his story?"

"I don't know. Maybe he doesn't have a story."

"Nobody just becomes a hermit."

"No? Most people know or feel—even if they don't know they know it, or don't know they feel this—for most people, selfhood exists not in isolation from other people but in relationships to other people. But there're always some men who want solitude. In pioneer days, they were the ones who pulled up stakes and moved on because they felt crowded by their closest neighbors, five miles away."

Michelle dried the last dish and put it away. She turned, leaned against the tiny sink, began carefully drying her fingers. Without looking at Walton, she said, "Is that how it is with you?"

"God, no. I'm gregarious as hell."

Now she did look at him. "You know, Mister Walton, I believe there's a good deal more to you than meets the eye. You're not just some old river rat."

"No," he said slowly, "I guess I'm not."

"What's your story? Or don't you have one either?"

"I have a degree from UCLA School of Philosophy. It's true. In another life, another time. On another world. I was the complete philosophy wonk. Even to having a tall, fair, Nordic girlfriend who liked to dress in black. She did look fine in a leotard, too. The stuff of being and meaning was our breakfast conversation and our pillow talk. She was doing her thesis on Kierkegaard, which may explain why she was about as lively in bed as a Norwegian cheese. Well, here's the best part of her story—her name was Joy! So. I had my degree in hand, I was all set to start teaching the next generation of philosophy wonks everything I'd just been taught about ethical formalism and intuitionism and what all, when the news came out about the spacetime anomaly. Time-travel, expeditions to prehistoric times! Then and there, in an instant, my life turned itself inside out. I told myself, told my girlfriend, Dammit, I want to go on one of those expeditions! Of course, as far as the National Science Foundation was concerned, a degree in philosophy wasn't all that relevant to Paleozoic research. So I hooked up with an uncle who plied the Intercoastal Waterway out of Mobile and learned how to handle a boat. Hired out to one of the private companies. Now I'm a private enterprise in my own right, with my own damn government contract. Ferrying supplies and delivering mail. Never regretted it for a second."

"And Wicket?"

"My sister Karen's boy. I became his legal guardian after she died. He's terminally shy, in case you haven't noticed, but he's quite intelligent, never forgets anything, whiz at math. So I made him the company accountant. When they said I couldn't bring him along in my capacity as an equal-opportunity employer helping somebody overcome a handicap, I made him my business partner. And some people went to bat for me. Kevin Barnet, for one." Walton paused, then said carefully, "By the way, do you know Kevo well?"

"Well enough to know he's a character."

"He's hardly what you'd call an unimpeachable character reference."

"I think this was in the way of one character recommending another. I distinctly heard him call you colorful."

"You should take everything that man says with a five-pound block of salt. He's a drunken old bum and a lecher. I really don't care much for the man. But I owe him on Wicket's account. Anyway, I believe Wicket's happy here. He likes being on the boat, likes his work. He doesn't have to deal with anyone but me and the occasional lower life-form."

"Such as me."

"You know perfectly well what I mean."

"I don't even see the mountain."

"It's a metaphorical mountain. And he's a metaphorical old man." He tugged on the whistle cord, and Karen let out a piercing shriek. "That'll let him know to expect us. I don't want to scare him into the underbrush by just showing up. Metaphorical underbrush, you understand."

They rounded the bend, and Walton brought the barge in close to the bank. The radio station consisted of a shed fashioned of corrugated metal sheets, dominated by a dish antennae. A smaller shed with one open side housed the generator. The three people on the water waited. Nothing moved on the land.

"What do we do," Michelle said, "just toss everything onto the shore like before and leave?"

Walton shook his head. "I always like to see him. They always ask me when I get back, 'How'd he look?' And I have to tell 'em. He'll show himself. He knows I won't leave until he does."

"How does he look, usually?"

"Like a Neanderthal who's down on his luck."

Wicket ran out the gangplank, took up a gigantic armload of cartons, and went ashore. Walton followed, carrying a carton under each arm. After a moment's hesitation, Michelle picked up a carton and followed as well.

Walton glared back at her, "Asked you to stay on the barge."

"I think your hermit's off hiding someplace."

Wicket deposited his armload of cartons by the door to the shed and immediately turned back toward the barge. The door was ajar. Michelle set the carton on the ground, then, overcome with curiosity and helpless to do otherwise, stepped to the doorway and peered within. Her nose was crinkled in anticipation of squalor served up, perhaps, with the thick, sickening smell of dirty socks and foodstuffs gone bad; instead she found only an inconsistent sort of untidiness—a cluttered table, a disheveled cot, and radio equipment that looked well-maintained and clean. A rude shelf mounted at eye level on the near wall contained not tapes or chips but old-fashioned books. She was not certain what she would have expected to find in the cabin of a hermit—Robinson Crusoe, perhaps, or Heart of Darkness—but it disappointed her that the only titles she could read were those of electronics maintenance manuals.

She suddenly sensed someone behind her and turned.

The old man of the mountain wore cutoff jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap—all frayed and rather dirty—and a pair of sandals that appeared to have been repaired with insulated electrical wire. His long, matted hair covered his head like the hood of a parka, and his beard grew up his face almost to the lower eyelids, yet the face in the midst of this unkempt hyperpilosity was that of a man in his mid-thirties. His eyes, clear blue, alert, nervous, never quite met hers. He gave the impression of an animal that found itself cut off from its burrow.

Walton hove into view behind and to one side of the man and said, "Hello." The hermit shot him a startled glance, and Michelle took the opportunity to step aside, out of the doorway. She made an apologetic sound as the man pushed by, trailing a sour smell. He stopped just inside the door, turned, stood there blinking and fidgeting as Walton continued speaking. "You remember Wicket, don't you?" he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the big man standing stock still on the path. "Of course you do. This"—indicating Michelle—"is our new friend, Miz Kelly. Say hello."

"Hello," said Michelle.

The man looked as though he were about to speak but settled for nodding.

"We've put everything here by the door for you," Walton said.

"Good. Good. That's good." The man spoke as though it amazed him to discover that he still possessed a voice, and he seemed to repeat words as though to make certain they sounded right when he spoke them. "Thank you. That's good. Good."

"We'll be going now. Till next time. Michelle."

Michelle hurried to rejoin Walton, and then the hermit practically herded them back to the boat and watched until Walton had backed the barge away from the bank, brought it about, pointed its blunt bow downriver. Then he disappeared into his shed and did not show himself again. She imagined a couple of times that she glimpsed his face at the window, but could not be certain of it. The boat followed the bend of the river, and the radio station passed from view.

After dinner, they sat looking up at the dark purple sky. Walton stretched, crossed his arms tightly across his chest, and made a contented sound. She looked around at him and said, "How'd he get past screening? The old man of the mountain."

Walton shrugged. "I guess he was well enough to get through screening. Living in the Paleozoic brought out the craziness in him. It's some kind of progressive disorder."

"What happens to him if everybody else here just folds up and goes home?"

"Well, that's not very likely to happen, is it? Listen, he's not the only one. There're several more just like him, living off in the badlands with just a radio set and some crates of canned goods and a case of whiskey. That one we visited today, he told me once that man is the ape that lives like a cockroach."

"I guess he's the living proof of that."

"He meant that we tend to pack ourselves together in confined spaces and live in our own dirt, and we eat anything and breed like crazy."

"That man needs professional help."

Walton shrugged again. "Nobody can help him."

"Not here they can't."

"Not back in the twenty-first century, either. Where could he go there, what could he do, to find the kind of isolation and seclusion he wants? Here, at least, he's happy, or content, or whatever the hell he is. You can't get much more secluded and isolated than four hundred million years in the past and way off in the hinterlands."

"He looked at me like I was—like I was I don't know what."

"Like you were just another member of the whole damned human race he came here to get away from. It's nothing personal. There's nothing personal about any of it. I'm not sure he really thinks of himself as a member of our species any more. Somebody who needs isolation that bad must've been born without the ape gene for gregariousness. I'm not sure what he thinks at all, to tell the truth. We may be just symbionts to him. We bring him food and whiskey, he transmits data to us. It's about the same kind of relationship you have with the bacteria in your guts."

"It sounds sociopathic."

"Maybe. It's antisocial at the very least. But maybe sociopaths are really mutants adapted for life off by themselves. Preadapted for life in the unknown places. It's always the loners who're the trailblazers, the first ones to go out into the unknown. Probably wherever the human race goes, out in space to other worlds, back in time, there'll always be some seriously unsocialized character way out ahead on the edge of everything. Maybe men like that are our ace in the hole. Maybe they guarantee the survival of our species."

"Not if they are all men and don't take along girlfriends."

"There're women hermits, too."

"Out here?"

Walton shrugged. "Who knows?"

They said no more for several minutes. Then Michelle made an amused sound. "What do you suppose courtship between a male and a female hermit is like?"

"Maybe like scorpions mating. Hell, I don't know. Maybe hermits aren't our ace in the hole. It's just a hypothesis."

"Well, I've had it up to here with hypotheses. Can a person buy something to drink on this beamy scow?"

"If it's Scotch, and if a person doesn't call this beautiful and versatile craft of mine a beamy scow." He glanced at her sharply. "And I should probably ask to see some identification."

"I turned twenty-five in November."

"Moen was right. You are older than you look."

Walton fetched a bottle and two glasses, and he and Michelle settled into a comfortable silence. After a minute or two, however, he realized that he was unaccountably quite happy, and then after a moment more that he was perhaps not quite so happy after all, that he wanted to say to her and, moreover, that he probably would never dare to say to her, I think I shall miss you terribly when you've gone. He was grateful when Wicket, who had been sitting on a stack of palettes at the bow, reading a book, suddenly got up and came and stood about six feet from Walton and Michelle. Walton looked at him in frank astonishment and murmured, "Well, well." Wicket looked from Walton to a point in space near Michelle and then back at Walton, who told Michelle, "Looks like you've finally been sort of kind of accepted."

She made a visible effort not to look directly at the big man. "I thought he was never going to make up his mind about me."

"Moen distracted him for a bit. He's not crazy about Moen."

"Imagine that."

Walton gave Wicket an expectant look and said, "Will you please read from your book now?"

The big man softly cleared his throat and began to read aloud. He had a surprisingly sweet voice; he read with passable enunciation and made a respectable attempt at inflection. "Fanny had the pleasure of seeing Edmund continue at the window with her, in spite of the expected glee, and of having his eyes soon turned like hers toward the scene without, where all that was solemn and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the deep shade of the woods. 'Here's harmony!' said she. 'Here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry can only attempt to describe. Here's what may tranquilize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.' "

Michelle laughed her good laugh and said, "Whoa!"

Walton regarded him with wonder. "What are you reading from?" Wicket shyly held the book out to him. "Mansfield Park. Jane Austen. Jesus Christ. You are such a romantic."

"Looks like they've been cutting doughnuts."

"What else is there for them to do for fun around here?"

"Maybe they've been celebrating. Maybe they've found what they were looking for. Are we going ashore now?"

Walton shook his head. "Not unless you want to."

"I don't want to."

"Then not till we have to."

Special thanks to Jessica Reisman and her pals.