BEYOND THE SEA

Mother blinked and regarded him gravely, Melissa's slightly protrubant eyes became more so, and Father stared incredulously. When at last he did manage to speak he said, "You're giving up your studies, your instrument, for this, this fantasy?"

Zack shook his head. "That's not what I said. I'll still be studying music and playing. But I want to concentrate on geology."

"Geology! Geology! And if that wasn't nonsense enough --"

"Please try to understand."

"I am trying very hard to understand! I have been trying for years, in fact, to understand why anyone would prefer grubbing in rocks to performing music. And this other business, what's this, this business about time-travel expeditions?"

"It's true. They've found a -- I don't know what exactly. A flaw in time, a rip or crack. It's something like that. I don't understand the first thing about the physics of it. Someone in the science department --"

Father laughed harshly. "Perhaps those physicists across the quad are having their little joke."

"It's no joke. The Association for the Advancement of Science made the announcement." Father's expression suggested that that organization meant no more to him that the Kiwanas, the Boy Scouts, the Justice League of America. Zack persevered. "People have already gone through and come back. It's real, this whatever it is, and they really can use it to travel back into distant prehistoric times. Back to the age of trilobites, four hundred million years ago."

"Pah! Not even to visit Mozart, Bach, Beethoven!"

"No," Zack said, smiling, "and just as well. My German stinks." His father did not return the smile. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, I'm talking about time-travel! Doctor Weiss said scientists are going to be going in droves, by the hundreds. After all, she says, it's easier and cheaper to get there than it is to go into space, never mind the moon or Mars. Everyone who can write a grant proposal is bound to get to go. There are already hundreds of people who're dying to go. Thousands, probably. Every institution in the world is going to want to send a team."

Now Mother spoke up. "Melissa," she said brightly, "would you please go make us all a cup of tea?" Something between a pout and a glower established itself on Melissa's face, and Zack resisted an irrational, resurgent urge, dormant since early adolescence, to tell her to pull her lip in because pouting made her look as though she had no chin. She got up suddenly and left almost at a run. Mother returned her attention to Zack. "If every Ph.D. and post-doc who ever found a bone is going --" she made a vague gesture "-- back there, then why do you need to go?"

"Doctor Weiss evidently thinks I have the makings of a good geologist."

"Doctor Weiss, Doctor Weiss," Father said. "I think this Doctor Weiss should mind his own business."

"This is her business." Zack felt his temper suddenly trying to get away from him. Calmly, he told himself. He said, as calmly as he could manage, "Maybe I think I could be a better geologist than I am a clarinetist," and imagined that he saw lightning flash through his father's clouding expression. "It's not like I wouldn't keep up my playing in the meantime. I've never missed one of our gigs yet."

"And what about later, if you actually got to go? Would you practice when you're --" his mother gestured again, as vaguely as before "-- back there?"

"Well, then I would have to give up playing for a while. It's hot and humid in the Paleozoic era. The climate'd ruin a clarinet. I probably wouldn't even get through my scales before the cork lining rotted. The pads would fall right out. I wouldn't be able to use a reed more than once or twice, and replacements would be difficult if not impossible to get."

"Just how long a while are you talking about?"

"I don't know. They're trying to figure a way to establish permanent camps. Where scientists could live and work for a year at a time, maybe more."

Now, definitely, lightning crackled across Father's face. "A year! You can't just put down the clarinet and expect to pick up it a year later! Unless you practice every day, you'll soon find yourself playing as badly as -- as a child with a penny whistle! You'll lose your embouchure. Your fingers'll become stiff." Father held up both claw-like hands; the rebuke was unmistakable: Unlike you, I had no say in the matter. "What then?"

"You couldn't make your own reeds back in, back there?"

Zack answered his mother's question first. "There aren't, I mean, there weren't five ounces of good woody tissue in the whole Silurian period." Then he said to his father, "I can always take up whistling. Or learn to play spoons and Jew's harp. Maybe I'll just burst into song whenever the mood hits. The hills are alive, or I am the very model of a modern major general."

Father exhaled a consonant sound of exasperation, nnn! To Mother he said, "His head has turned to rock, I cannot communicate with someone whose brain has turned to rock. Talk some sense to him if you can. I am going out back to burst a blood vessel." He kicked out his chair out of his way and stormed out of the room.

Mother said nothing, merely looked expectantly at Zack. He made an effort not to appear abashed; the effort felt as obvious as his embarrassment. He said, "I know it means completely rethinking everything. But I have been rethinking everything. I was just going to take the earth-sciences course my sophomore year to keep my hand in. Keep up with my hobby. But it's not a hobby any more, not since this time-travel thing. It's not too late for me to switch majors." He paused to see what she would say; when she said nothing, he said, "Do you think you can get him to come around?"

Mother made a sound that could have been either a laugh or a sob. "What makes you think I'm going to come around? Just because I haven't blown my top or fainted dead away, don't suppose I'm any less astonished and dismayed by all this than your father is. All those years of music lessons, all those hours of practice, wasted."

"I said I'd keep my hand in."

"Keep your hand in! Your father was a good musician. When he could no longer play, he thought he could at least count on becoming the patriarch of a musical family."

"And he got Melissa and me instead. Semi-skilled musical laborers."

"That's a rather harsh judgement."

"Still, it's true, isn't it? I'm not going to presume to say what goes through Melissa's so-called mind when she's sawing away, but --"

"Don't be nasty. Melissa wants more than anything to please your father. Unlike you, she has no hobbies, no pastimes except the viola. She always plays at the absolute limit of her ability, which is adequate, and of course your father always insists that if she'd only push herself a bit more, she'd be brilliant. They break each other's hearts."

To avoid meeting her gaze, Zack put the metal cap on the clarinet's mouthpiece, removed the mouthpiece and the bell, broke the instrument down into its constituent sections, placed them in the instrument case. He regarded them thoughtfully. He loved the clarinet, and had ever since hearing -- oh, what had it been? Oh, what did it matter? Learning to play had been for him a test of character; he had almost given up -- for what seemed the longest time he could make the infuriatingly uncooperative black tube produce nothing but anguished squeaks.

And when had he first been drawn to the mysteries of the earth? Before I could tell the difference, he answered himself, between Mozart and mopop. He had been born and raised in Nashville and its environs, amid Ordovician strata thousands of feet thick, and introduced early to the joys, to say nothing of the sheer hard labor, of fossil-hunting by his maternal grandfather, a geologist for the State of Tennessee. He could remember vividly, for instance, the time and effort the two of them had once put into prying a big fossil arthropod out of the stone. All the while they had whistled and hummed and sung to each other, for his rockhound grandfather also loved music. His life had seemed always to embrace, encompass, serenely and easily, both interests, and he more than anyone had set the lexicons of science and music whirling in Zack's brain like worlds orbiting each other, separate, yet inseparable.

Until now.