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There was a fishy salt tang in the air, all right. And a shushing sound that might not be the wind. I said, "Once we get up on the dunes, we'll get a better view." Down in the hollows, all you could see was the white-ice peaks of the Ring wall.

God. Giving names to everything.

There was a sudden, booming howl, not so far away, like a mournful giant playing his tuba. The chimps jerked, looking around, panicky, bug-eyed, jabbering and gesturing, edging closer to us.

Millikan looked at me, more nervous than the chimps, and said, "What'd you say those trumpet-monsters were called?"

"Parasauralophus."

As we'd moved downslope, it quickly became obvious the life forms of the ages were arranged in rings, going backward in time as you descended toward the mist. Without a machine technology, we won't get far. The oxygen content of the air has to be different down there. And down in the mist, down in the Archaean ...

We'd hardly gotten down to the Pleistocene border, seen our first few mammoths and crap, before the dinosaurs started turning up. Seventy-six million years ago, the world had been full of big, fast migratory animals. And nothing here to stop them from walking uphill.

What the hell's it going to be like, when the mixing's at full boil?

And what the hell happens to me if I get fucking killed in here?

For some reason, the Gods didn't say.

Millikan was looking down at his spear. "This thing's not going to be much good against a Tyrannosaur."

"No shit."

Jonas crested the dune and suddenly threw himself flat. "Jesus!"

I slithered up beside him, pulling Maryanne along by the hand, stopping when I could peer over the dune.

Ocean. Fat, flat ocean, stretching out and out until it became unreal. Something big out there. Something big like a whale.

Maryanne said, "Oh, my God! Look!" Pointing down at a broad white beach like a thousand Waikikis stuck together.

One of the little hairy things looked up from its forage, standing upright with a clam in one hand, a flat rock in the other. It pried the shell open and ate what was inside. Then it casually nudged the next one with its toe, nodding up at the dune. The kneeling one, a female from its hanging, hairy breasts, turned and looked up at us. Froze.

Maryanne said, "Those are habilis, aren't they?"

I nodded, wishing for just a second that Paulie was here, so I could say they were tor-o-don.

Crouching beside me, Ben Millikan grinned through his beard, and said, "God damn, this is the coolest thing that ever happened to me!"

Out beyond the rolling surf, something leapt from the sea, curving like a dolphin, disappearing again. Not a fish, too small to be an ichthyosaur. It appeared again, standing on its tail looking straight at us, I thought, and screamed, a familiar word-like parrot squawk.

Maryanne whispered, "Like it knows we're here, and it's glad."

Millikan laughed. "Maybe it's fucking Flipper!"

Closer now, the parasauralophus moaned and, when I looked, the nearest chimp, a big male, was only a few yards away, eyes big and desperate. I gave a tight-lipped smile, remembering all that I'd read, and motioned for him to come on up.

When we camped out that night, six moons appeared in the sky all at once.

Rebirth.

I can't even call it a second chance, for the first one was rigged against me, even before I squirted, inter anem et urinam, into the false old world.

From the lowest passes through the Ringwall, the Earth Bubble looks unreal, even more like an Impressionist canvas than the Grand Canyon, or the view southward from Kilimanjaro. From any mountain peak, you can see the world below tip away from you, tilting ever steeper as it gets farther away. From the south rim of the Grand Canyon, you can see the clouds over the North Rim angling impossibly upward.

Not here.

Here was a bowl of mist, a bowl of unknowable size, filled with a painted-on, cloud-hazy landscape, a patchy ring of green and gold and blue surrounding an abyss of dense, yellow-white fog. Down there,