“An Omen, certainly,” said several of the lobsters at once. “A herald, beyond doubt.”
McCulloch continued, “It was our hope to discover something of the worlds that are to come after ours. And therefore I was sent forward—”
“A herald—certainly a herald!”
“—to come to you, to go among you, to learn to know you, and then to return to my own people, the air-people, the human people, and bring the word of what is to come. But I think that I am not the herald you expect. I carry no message for you. We could not have known that you were here. Out of the former world I bring you the blessing of those that have gone before, however, and when I go back to that world I will bear tidings of your life, of your thought, of your ways—”
“Then our kind is unknown to your world?”
McCulloch hesitated. “Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one.”
“You have no discourse with them, then?” one of the lobsters asked.
“Very little,” he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile. McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, “We eat them!” and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts—and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.
The spasm passed. The lobsters had not stirred. They continued to regard him with patience: impassive, unmov-ing, remote. McCulloch wondered if all that had passed through his mind just then had been transmitted to his host. Very likely; the host earlier had seemed to have access to all of his thoughts, though McCulloch did not have the same entree to the host’s. And if the host knew, did all the others? What then, what then?
Perhaps they did not even care. Lobsters, he recalled, were said to be callous cannibals, who might attack one another in the very tanks where they were awaiting their turns in the chef’s pot. It was hard to view these detached and aloof beings, these dons, these monks, as having that sort of ferocity: but yet he had seen them go to work on that swimming mouth-creature without any show of embarrassment, and perhaps some atavistic echo of their ancestors’ appetites lingered in them, so that they would think it only natural that McCullochs and other humans had fed on such things as lobsters. Why should they be shocked? Perhaps they thought that humans fed on humans, too. It was all in the former world, was it not? And in any event it was foolish to fear that they would exact some revenge on him for Lobster Thermidor, no matter how appalled they might be. He wasn’t here. He was nothing more than a figment, a revenant, a wanderer, a set of intrusive neural networks within their companion’s brain. The worst they could do to him, he supposed, was to exorcise him, and send him back to the former world.
Even so, he could not entirely shake the guilt and the shame. Or the fear.
Bleier said, “Of course, you aren’t the only one who’s going to be in jeopardy when we throw the switch. There’s your host to consider. One entire human ego slamming into his mind out of nowhere like a brick falling off a building—what’s it going to do to him?”
“Flip him out, is my guess,” said Jake Ybarra. “You’ll land on him and he’ll announce he’s Napoleon, or Joan of Arc, and they’ll hustle him off to the nearest asylum. Are you prepared for the possibility, Jim, that you’re going to spend your entire time in the future sitting in a loony-bin undergoing therapy?”
“Or exorcism,” Mortenson suggested. “If there’s been some kind of reversion to barbarism. Christ, you might even get your host burned at the stake!”
“I don’t think so,” McCulloch said quietly. “I’m a lot more optimistic than you guys. I don’t expect to land in a world of witch-doctors and mumbo-jumbo, and I don’t expect to find myself in a place that locks people up in Bedlam because they suddenly start acting a little strange. The chances are that I am going to unsettle my host when I enter him, but that he’ll simply get two sanity-stabilizer pills from his medicine chest and take them with a glass of water and feel better in five minutes. And then I’ll explain what’s happening to him.”
“More than likely no explanations will be necessary,” said Maggie Caldwell. “By the time you arrive, time travel will have been a going proposition for three or four generations, after all. Having a traveler from the past turn up in your head will be old stuff to them. Your host will probably know exactly what’s going on from the moment you hit him.”
“Let’s hope so,” Bleier said. He looked across the laboratory to Rodrigues. “What’s the count, Bob?”
“T minus eighteen minutes.”
“I’m not worried about a thing,” McCulloch said.
Caldwell took his hand in hers. “Neither am I, Jim.”
“Then why is your hand so cold?” he asked.
“So I’m a little worried,” she said.
McCulloch grinned. “So am I. A little. Only a little.”
“You’re human, Jim. No one’s ever done this before.”
“It’ll be a can of corn!” Ybarra said.
Bleier looked at him blankly. “What the hell does that mean, Jake?”
Ybarra said, “Archaic twentieth-century slang. It means it’s going to be a lot easier than we think.”
“I told you,” said McCulloch, “I’m not worried.”
“I’m still worried about the impact on the host,” said Bleier.
“All those Napoleons and Joans of Arc that have been cluttering the asylums for the last few hundred years,”
Maggie Caldwell said, “Could it be that they’re really hosts for time-travelers going backward in time?”
“You can’t go backward,” said Mortenson. “You know that. The round trip has to begin with a forward leap.”
“Under present theory,” Caldwell said. “But present theory’s only five years old. It may turn out to be incomplete. We may have had all sorts of travelers out of the future jumping through history, and never even knew it. All the nuts, lunatics, inexplicable geniuses, idiot-savants—”
“Save it, Maggie,” Bleier said. “Let’s stick to what we understand right now.”
“Oh? Do we understand anything?” McCulloch asked.
Bleier gave him a sour look. “I thought you said you weren’t worried.”
“I’m not. Not much. But I’d be a fool if I thought we really had a firm handle on what we’re doing. We’re shooting in the dark, and let’s never kid ourselves about it.”
“T minus fifteen,” Rodrigues called.
“Try to make the landing easy on your host, Jim,” Bleier said.
“I’ve got no reason not to want to,” said McCulloch.
He realized that he had been wandering. Bleier, Maggie, Mortenson, Ybarra—for a moment they had been more real to him than the congregation of lobsters: he had heard their voices, he had seen their faces, Bleier plump and perspiring and serious, Ybarra dark and lean, Maggie with her crown of short upswept red hair blazing in the laboratory light—and yet they were all dead, a hundred million years dead, two hundred million, back there with the triceratops and the trilobite in the drowned former world, and here he was among the lobster-people. How futile all those discussions of what the world of the early twenty-second century was going to be like! Those speculations on population density, religious belief, attitudes toward science, level of technological achievement, all those late-night sessions in the final months of the project, designed to prepare him for any eventuality he might encounter while he was visiting the future—what a waste, what a needless exercise. As was all that fretting about upsetting the mental stability of the person who would receive his transtemporalized consciousness. Such qualms, such moral delicacy—all unnecessary, McCulloch knew now.