"Mr. Carnelian! Please, Mr. Carnelian, try to wake up!"

"I am awake," he groaned, but he did not open his eyes. His skin felt pleasantly warm. There was a delicious smell in his nostrils. There was silence.

"Then open your eyes, please, Mr. Carnelian," she demanded. "I need your advice."

He obeyed her. He blinked. "What an extraordinarily deep blue," he said of the sky. "So we are back, after all. I became a trifle pessimistic, I must admit, when the machine seemed to be malfunctioning.

How did we get out?"

"I pulled you out, and it was as well I did." She made a gesture. He looked and saw that the time machine was in even worse condition than when he had landed in the 19th century. Mrs. Underwood was brushing sand from her tattered dress of maroon velvet. "That awful stuff," she said. "Even when it dries it makes everything stiff."

He sat up, smiling. "It will be the work of a moment to supply you with fresh clothes. I still have most of my power rings. I wonder who made this. It is ravishing!"

The scenery stretched for miles, all waving fern-like plants of a variety of sizes, from the small ones carpeting the ground to very large ones as big as poplars; and not far from the beach on which they lay was a lazy sea stretching to the horizon. In the far distance behind them was a line of low, gentle hills.

"It is a remarkable reproduction," she agreed. "Rather better in detail than most of those made by your people."

"You know the original?"

"I studied such things once. My father was of the modern school. He did not reject Darwin out of hand."

"Darwin loved him?" Jherek's thoughts had returned to his favourite subject.

"Darwin was a scientist, Mr. Carnelian," she said impatiently.

"And he made a world like this?"

"No, no. It isn't anything really to do with him. A figure of speech."

"What is a 'figure of speech?' "

"I will explain that later. My point was that this landscape resembles the world at a very early age of its geological development. It is tropical and typical ferns and plants are in evidence. It is probably the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic, possibly the Silurian. If this were a perfect reproduction those seas you observe would team with edible life. There would be clams and so on, but no large beasts.

Everything possible to sustain life, and nothing very much to threaten it!"

"I can't imagine who could have made it," said Jherek. "Unless it was Lady Voiceless. She built a series of early worlds a while ago — the Egyptian was her best."

"Such a world as this would have flourished millions of years before Egypt," said Mrs. Underwood, becoming lyrical. "Millions of years before Man — before the dinosaurs, even. Ah, it is paradise! You see, there are no signs at all of animal life as we know it."

"There hasn't actually been any animal life, as such for a good while," said Jherek. "Only that which we make for ourselves."

"You aren't following me very closely, Mr. Carnelian."

"I am sorry. I will try. I want my moral education to begin as soon as possible. There are all sorts of things you can teach me."

"I regard that," she said, "as my duty. I could not justify being here otherwise." She smiled to herself. "After all, I come from a long line of missionaries."

"A new dress?" he said.

"If you please."

He touched a power ring; the emerald.

Nothing happened.

He touched the diamond and then the amethyst. And nothing at all happened. He was puzzled. "I have never known my power rings to fail me," he said.

Mrs. Underwood cleared her throat. "It is becoming increasingly hot. Suppose we stroll into the shade of those ferns?"

He agreed. As they walked, he tried his power rings again, shaking his head in surprise.

"Strange. Perhaps when the time machine began to go awry…"

"It went wrong, the time machine?"

"Yes. Plainly shifting back and forth in time at random. I had completely despaired of returning here."

"Here?"

"Oh, dear," he said.

"So," she said, seating herself upon a reddish-coloured rock and staring around her at the mile upon mile of Silurian ferns, "we could have travelled backwards, could we, Mr. Carnelian?"

"I would say that we could have, yes."

"So much for your friend Lord Jagged's assurances," she said.

"Yes." He sucked his lower lip. "But he was afraid we had left things too late, if you recall."

"He was correct." Again she cleared her throat.

Jherek cleared his. "If this is the age you think it is, am I to gather there are no people to be found here at all."

"Not one. Not a primate."

"We are at the beginning of Time?"

"For want of a better description, yes." Her lovely fingers drummed rapidly against the rock. She did not seem pleased.

"Oh dear," he said, "we shall never see the Iron Orchid again!"

She brightened a little at this. "We'll have to make the best of it, I suppose, and hope that we are rescued in due course."

"The chances are slight, Mrs. Underwood. Nobody has ever gone this far back. You heard Lord Jagged say that your age was the furthest he could reach into the past."

She straightened her shoulders rather as she had done that time when they stood upon the bank of the river. "We must build a hut, of course — preferably two huts — and we must test which of the life, such as it is, is edible. We must make a fire and keep it lit. We must see what the time machine will give us that is useable. Not much I would assume."

"You are certain that this is the period…?"

"Mr. Carnelian! Your power rings do not work. We have no other evidence. We must assume that we are marooned in the Silurian."

"The Morphail Effect is supposed to send us into the future," he said, "not the past."

"This is certainly no future we might expect from 1896, Mr. Carnelian."

"No." A thought came to him. "I was discussing the possibility of the cyclic nature of Time with Brannart Morphail and Lord Jagged quite recently. Could we have plunged so far into the future that we are, as it were, at the start again?"

"Such theories cannot mean a great deal to us," she told him "in our present circumstances."

"I agree. But it would explain why we are in them, Mrs. Underwood."

She plucked a frond from over her head and began to fan herself, deliberately ignoring him.

He drew a deep breath of the rich Silurian (or possibly Ordivician) air. He stretched himself out luxuriously upon the ground. "You yourself described this world as Paradise, Mrs. Underwood. In what better place could two lovers find themselves?"

"Another abstract idea, Mr. Carnelian? You surely do not refer to yourself and myself?"

"Oh, but I do!" he said dreamily. "We could begin the human race all over again! A whole new cycle. This time we shall flourish before the dinosaurs. This is Paradise and we are Adolf and Eva! Or do I mean Alan and Edna?"

"I think you refer to Adam and Eve, Mr. Carnelian. If you do, then you blaspheme and I wish to hear no more!"

"Blas-what?"

"Pheme."

"Is that also to do with Morality?"

"I suppose it is, yes."

"Could you explain, perhaps, a little further," he asked enticingly.

"You offend against the Deity. It is a profanity to identify yourself with Adam in that way."

"What about Eve?"

"Eve, too."

"I am sorry."

"You weren't to know." She continued to fan herself with the frond. "I suppose we had best start looking for food. Aren't you hungry?"

"I am hungry for your kisses," he said romantically, and he stood up.

"Mr. Carnelian!"

"Well," he said, "we can 'marry' now, can't we? Mr. Underwood said as much."

"We are not divorced. Besides, even if I were divorced from Mr. Underwood, there is no reason to assume that I should wish to give myself in marriage to you. Moreover, Mr. Carnelian, there is nobody in the Silurian Age to marry us." She seemed to think she had produced the final argument, but he had not really understood her.

"If we were to complete my moral education," he said, "would you marry me then?"

"Perhaps — if everything else was properly settled — which seems unlikely now."

He walked slowly back to the beach again and stared out over the sluggish sea, deep in thought. At his feet a small mollusc began to crawl through the sand. He watched it for a while and then, hearing a movement behind him, turned. She was standing there. She had made herself a hat of sorts from fern-leaves. She looked extremely pretty.

"I am sorry if I upset you, Mr. Carnelian," she said kindly. "You are rather more direct than I have been used to, you see. I know that your manner is not deliberately offensive, that you are, in some ways, more innocent than I. But you have a way of saying the wrong thing — or sometimes the right thing in the wrong way."

He shrugged. "That is why I am so desperate for my moral education to begin. I love you, Mrs.

Amelia Underwood. Perhaps it was Lord Jagged who encouraged me to affect the emotion in the first place, but since then it has taken hold of me. I am its slave. I can console myself, of course, but I cannot stop loving you."

"I am flattered."

"And you have said that you loved me, but now you try to deny it."

"I am still Mrs. Underwood," she pointed out gently.

The small mollusc began, tentatively, to crawl onto his foot. "And I am still Jherek Carnelian," he replied.

She noticed the mollusc. "Aha! Perhaps this one is edible."

As she reached down to inspect it, he stopped her with his hand on her shoulder. "No," he said.

"Let it go."

She straightened up, smiling gently at him. "We cannot afford to be sentimental, Mr. Carnelian."

His hand remained for an instant on her shoulder. The worn, stiffened velvet was beginning to grow soft again. "We cannot afford not to be, I think."

Her grey eyes were serious; then she laughed. "Oh, very well. Let us wait, then, until we are extremely hungry." Gaily, with her black buttoned boots kicking at the fine sand of that primordial shore, she began to stride along beside the thick and salty sea.

"All things bright and beautiful," she sang, "all creatures great and small./ All things wise and wonderful:/ The Lord God made them all!"

There was a certain defiance in her manner, a certain spirited challenge to the inevitable, which made Jherek gasp with devotion.

"Self-denial, after all," she called back over her shoulder, "is good for the soul!'

"Ah!" He began to run after her and then slowed before he had caught up. He stared around him at the calm, Silurian world, struck suddenly by the freshness of it all, by the growing understanding that they really were the only two mammals on this whole planet. He looked up at the huge, golden sun and he blinked in its benign glare. He was full of wonder.

A little later, panting, sweating, laughing, he fell in beside her. He noticed that her expression was almost tender as she turned to look at him.

He offered her his arm.

After a second's hesitation, she took it.

They strolled together through the hot, Silurian afternoon.

"Now, Mrs. Underwood," he said contentedly, "what is 'self-denial'?"