He approached a female, knowing precisely which one was the appropriate one, and sang to her, and she acknowledged his song with a song of her own, and raised her third pair of legs to him, and let him plant his gametes beside her oviducts. There was no apparent pleasure in it, as he remembered pleasure from his days as a human. Yet it brought him a subtle but unmistakable sense of fulfillment, of the completion of biological destiny, that had a kind of orgasmic finality about it, and left him calm and anchored at the absolute dead center of his souclass="underline" yes, truly the still point of the turning world, he thought.
His mate moved away to begin her new Growing and the awaiting of her motherhood. And McCulloch, unbidden, began to ascend the slope that led to the land.
The bottom was fine sand here, soft, elegant. He barely touched it with his legs as he raced shoreward. Before him lay a world of light, radiant, heavenly, a bright irresistible beacon. He went on until the water, pearly-pink and transparent, was only a foot or two deep, and the domed upper curve of his back was reaching into the air. He felt no fear. There was no danger in this. Serenely he went forward— the leader, now, of the trek—and climbed out into the hot sunlight.
It was an island, low and sandy, so small that he imagined he could cross it in a day. The sky was intensely blue and the sun, hanging close to a noon position, looked swollen and fiery. A little grove of palm trees clustered a few hundred yards inland, but he saw nothing else, no birds, no insects, no animal life of any sort. Walking was difficult here—his breath was short, his shell seemed to be too tight, his stalked eyes were stinging in the air—but he pulled himself forward, almost to the trees. Other male lobsters, hundreds of them, thousands of them, were following. He felt himself linked to each of them: his people, his nation, his community, his brothers.
Now, at that moment of completion and communion, came one more call from the past.
There was no turbulence in it this time. No one was yanking at his wrist, no surf boiled and heaved in his mind and threatened to dash him on the reefs of the soul. The call was simple and clear: This is the moment of coming back, Jim.
Was it? Had he no choice? He belonged here. These were his people. This was where his loyalties lay.
And yet, and yet: he knew that he had been sent on a mission unique in human history, that he had been granted a vision beyond all dreams, that it was his duty to return and report on it. There was no ambiguity about that. He owed it to Bleier and Maggie and Ybarra and the rest to return, to tell them everything.
How clear it all was! He belonged here, and he belonged there, and an unbreakable net of loyalties and responsibilities held him to both places. It was a perfect equilibrium; and therefore he was tranquil and at ease. The pull was on him; he resisted nothing, for he was at last beyond all resistance to anything. The immense sun was a drumbeat in the heavens; the fiery warmth was a benediction; he had never known such peace.
“I must make my homefaring now,” he said, and released himself, and let himself drift upward, light as a bubble, toward the sun.
Strange figures surrounded him, tall and narrow-bodied, with odd fleshy faces and huge moist mouths and bulging staring eyes, and their kind of speech was a crude hubbub of sound-waves that bashed and battered against his sensibilities with painful intensity. “We were afraid the signal wasn’t reaching you, Jim,” they said. “We tried again and again, but there was no contact, nothing. And then just as we were giving up, suddenly your eyes were opening, you were stirring, you stretched your arms—”
He felt air pouring into his body, and dryness all around him. It was a struggle to understand the speech of these creatures who were bending over him, and he hated the reek that came from their flesh and the booming vibrations that they made with their mouths. But gradually he found himself returning to himself, like one who has been lost in a dream so profound that it eclipses reality for the first few moments of wakefulness.
“How long was I gone?” he asked.
“Four minutes and eighteen seconds,” Ybarra said.
McCulloch shook his head. “Four minutes? Eighteen seconds? It was more like forty months, to me. Longer. I don’t know how long.”
“Where did you go, Jim? What was it like?”
“Wait,” someone else said. “He’s not ready for debriefing yet. Can’t you see, he’s about to collapse?”
McCulloch shrugged. “You sent me too far.”
“How far? Five hundred years?” Maggie asked.
“Millions,” he said.
Someone gasped.
“He’s dazed,” a voice said at his left ear.
“Millions of years,” McCulloch said in a slow, steady, determinedly articulate voice. “Millions. The whole earth was covered by the sea, except for one little island. The people are lobsters. They have a society, a culture. They worship a giant octopus.”
Maggie was crying. “Jim, oh, Jim—”
“No. It’s true. I went on migration with them. Intelligent lobsters is what they are. And I wanted to stay with them forever. I felt you pulling at me, but I—didn’t—want— to—go—”
“Give him a sedative, Doc,” Bleier said.
“You think I’m crazy? You think I’m deranged? They were lobsters, fellows. Lobsters.”
After he had slept and showered and changed his clothes they came to see him again, and by that time he realized that he must have been behaving like a lunatic in the first moments of his return, blurting out his words, weeping, carrying on, crying out what surely had sounded like gibberish to them. Now he was rested, he was calm, he was at home in his own body once again.
He told them all that had befallen him, and from their faces he saw at first that they still thought he had gone around the bend: but as he kept speaking, quietly, straightforwardly, in rich detail, they began to acknowledge his report in subtle little ways, asking questions about the geography, about the ecological balance in a manner that showed him they were not simply humoring him. And after that, as it sank in upon them that he really had dwelled for a period of many months at the far end of time, beyond the span of the present world, they came to look upon him—it was unmistakable—as someone who was now wholly unlike them. In particular he saw the cold glassy stare in Maggie Caldwell’s eyes.
Then they left him, for he was tiring again; and later Maggie came to see him alone, and took his hand and held it between hers, which were cold.
She said, “What do you want to do now, Jim?”
“To go back there.”
“I thought you did.”
“It’s impossible, isn’t it?” he said.
“We could try. But it couldn’t ever work. We don’t know what we’re doing, yet, with that machine. We don’t know where we’d send you. We might miss by a million years. By a billion.”
“That’s what I figured too.”
“But you want to go back?”
He nodded. “I can’t explain it. It was like being a member of some Buddhist monastery, do you see? Feeling absolutely sure that this is where you belong, that everything fits together perfectly, that you’re an integral part of it. I’ve never felt anything like that before. I never will again.”
“I’ll talk to Bleier, Jim, about sending you back.”
“No. Don’t. I can’t possibly get there. And I don’t want to land anywhere else. Let Ybarra take the next trip. I’ll stay here.”
“Will you be happy?”
He smiled. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
When the others understood what the problem was, they saw to it that he went into re-entry therapy—Bleier had already foreseen something like that, and made preparations for it—and after a while the pain went from him, that sense of having undergone a violent separation, of having been ripped untimely from the womb. He resumed his work in the group and gradually recovered his mental balance and took an active part in the second transmission, which sent a young anthropologist named Ludwig off for two minutes and eight seconds. Ludwig did not see lobsters, to McCulloch’s intense disappointment. He went sixty years in the future and came back glowing with wondrous tales of atomic fusion plants.