“How long am I going to be gone?”
“Elapsed time will be virtually nil. We’ll throw the switch, off you’ll go, you’ll do your jaunt, we’ll grab you back, and it’ll seem like no time at all, perhaps a thousandth of a second. We aren’t going to believe that you went anywhere at all, until you start telling us about it.”
McCulloch sensed that Bleier was being deliberately evasive, not for the first time since McCulloch had been selected as the time-traveler. “It’ll seem like no time at all to the people watching in the lab,” he said. “But what about for me?”
“Well, of course for you it’ll be a little different, because you’ll have had a subjective experience in another time-frame.”
“That’s what I’m getting at. How long are you planning to leave me in the future? An hour? A week?”
“That’s really hard to determine, Jim.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know, we’ve sent only rabbits and stuff. They’ve come back okay, beyond much doubt—”
“Sure. They still munch on lettuce when they’re hungry, and they don’t tie their ears together in knots before they hop. So I suppose they’re none the worse for wear.”
“Obviously we can’t get much of a report from a rabbit.”
“Obviously.”
“You’re sounding awfully goddamned hostile today, Jim. Are you sure you don’t want us to scrub the mission and start training another volunteer?” Bleier asked.
“I’m just trying to elicit a little hard info,” McCulloch said. “I’m not trying to back out. And if I sound hostile, it’s only because you’re dancing all around my questions, which is becoming a considerable pain in the ass.”
Bleier looked squarely at him and glowered. “All right. I’ll tell you anything you want to know that I’m capable of answering. Which is what I think I’ve been doing all along. When the rabbits come back, we test them and we observe no physiological changes, no trace of ill effects as a result of having separated the psyche from the body for the duration of a time-jaunt. Christ, we can’t even tell the rabbits have been on a time-jaunt, except that our instruments indicate the right sort of thermodynamic drain and entropic reversal, and for all we know we’re kidding ourselves about that, which is why we’re risking our reputations and your neck to send a human being who can tell us what the heck happens when we throw the switch. But you’ve seen the rabbits jaunting. You know as well as I do that they come back okay.”
Patiently McCulloch said, “Yes. As okay as a rabbit ever is, I guess. But what I’m trying to find out from you, and what you seem unwilling to tell me, is how long I’m going to be up there in subjective time.”
“We don’t know, Jim,” Bleier said.
“You don’t know? What if it’s ten years? What if it’s a thousand? What if I’m going to live out an entire life-span, or whatever is considered a life-span a hundred years from now, and grow old and wise and wither away and die and then wake up a thousandth of a second later on your lab table?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we have to send a human subject.”
“There’s no way to measure subjective jaunt-time?”
“Our instruments are here. They aren’t there. You’re the only instrument we’ll have there. For all we know, we’re sending you off for a million years, and when you come back here you’ll have turned into something out of H. G. Wells. Is that straightforward enough for you, Jim? But I don’t think it’s going to happen that way, and Mortenson doesn’t think so either, or Ybarra for that matter. What we think is that you’ll spend something between a day and a couple of months in the future, with the outside possibility of a year. And when we give you the hook, you’ll be back here with virtually nil elapsed time. But to answer your first question again, there’s no way you can instruct us to yank you back. You’ll just have to sweat it out, however long it may be. I thought you knew that. The hook, when it comes, will be virtually automatic, a function of the thermodynamic homeostasis, like the recoil of a gun. An equal and opposite reaction: or maybe more like the snapping back of a rubber band. Pick whatever metaphor you want. But if you don’t like the way any of this sounds, it’s not too late for you to back out, and nobody will say a word against you. It’s never too late to back out. Remember that, Jim.”
McCulloch shrugged. “Thanks for leveling with me. I appreciate that. And no, I don’t want to drop out. The only thing I wonder about is whether my stay in the future is going to seem too long or too goddamned short. But I won’t know that until I get there, will I? And then the time I have to wait before coming home is going to be entirely out of my hands. And out of yours too, is how it seems. But that’s all right. I’ll take my chances. I just wondered what I’d do if I got there and found that I didn’t much like it there.”
“My bet is that you’ll have the opposite problem,” said Bleier. “You’ll like it so much you won’t want to come back.”
Again and again, while the pilgrims traveled onward, McCulloch detected bright flares of intelligence gleaming like brilliant pinpoints of light in the darkness of the sea. Each creature seemed to have a characteristic emanation, a glow of neural energy. The simple ones—worms, urchins, starfish, sponges—emitted dim gentle signals; but there were others as dazzling as beacons. The lobster-folk were not the only sentient life-forms down here.
Occasionally he saw, as he had in the early muddled moments of the jaunt, isolated colonies of the giant sea anemones: great flowery-looking things, rising on thick pedestals. From them came a soft alluring lustful purr, a siren crooning calculated to bring unwary animals within reach of their swaying tentacles and the eager mouths hidden within the fleshy petals. Cemented to the floor on their swaying stalks, they seemed like somber philosophers, lost in the intervals between meals in deep reflections on the purpose of the cosmos. McCulloch longed to pause and try to speak with them, for their powerful emanation appeared plainly to indicate that they possessed a strong intelligence, but the lobsters moved past the anemones without halting.
The squid-like beings that frequently passed in flotillas overhead seemed even keener of mind: large animals, sleek and arrogant of motion, with long turquoise bodies that terminated in hawser-like arms, and enormous bulging eyes of a startling scarlet color. He found them ugly and repugnant, and did not quite know why. Perhaps it was some attitude of his host’s that carried over subliminally to him; for there was an unmistakable chill among the lobsters whenever the squids appeared, and the chanting of the marchers grew more vehement, as though betokening a warning.
That some kind of frosty detente existed between the two kinds of life-forms was apparent from the regard they showed one another and from the distances they maintained. Never did the squids descend into the ocean-floor zone that was the chief domain of the lobsters, but for long spans of time they would soar above, in a kind of patient aerial surveillance, while the lobsters, striving ostentatiously to ignore them, betrayed discomfort by quickened movements of their antennae.
Still other kinds of high-order intelligence manifested themselves as the pilgrimage proceeded. In a zone of hard and rocky terrain McCulloch felt a new and distinctive mental pulsation, coming from some creature that he must not have encountered before. But he saw nothing unusual: merely a rough grayish landscape pockmarked by dense clumps of oysters and barnacles, some shaggy out-croppings of sponges and yellow seaweeds, a couple of torpid anemones. Yet out of the midst of all that unremarkable clutter came clear strong signals, produced by minds of considerable force. Whose? Not the oysters and barnacles, surely. The mystery intensified as the lobsters, without pausing in their march, interrupted their chant to utter words of greeting, and had greetings in return, drifting toward them from that tangle of marine underbrush.
“Why do you march?” the unseen speakers asked, in a voice that rose in the water like a deep slow groaning.
“We have had an Omen,” answered the lobsters.
“Ah, is it the Time?”
“The Time will surely be here,” the lobsters replied.
“Where is the herald, then?”
“The herald is within me,” said McCulloch’s host, breaking its long silence at last.
—To whom do you speak? McCulloch asked.
—Can you not see? There. Before us.
McCulloch saw only algae, barnacles, sponges, oysters.
—Where?
—In a moment you will see, said the host.
The column of pilgrims had continued all the while to move forward, until now it was within the thick groves of seaweed. And now McCulloch saw who the other speakers were. Huge crabs were crouched at the bases of many of the larger rock formations, creatures far greater in size than the largest of the lobsters; but they were camouflaged so well that they were virtually invisible except at the closest range. On their broad arching backs whole gardens grew: brilliantly colored sponges, algae in somber reds and browns, fluffy many-branched crimson things, odd complex feathery growths, even a small anemone or two, all jammed together in such profusion that nothing of the underlying crab showed except beady long-stalked eyes and glinting claws. Why beings that signalled their presence with potent telepathic outputs should choose to cloak themselves in such elaborate concealments, McCulloch could not guess: perhaps it was to deceive a prey so simple that it was unable to detect the emanations of these crabs’ minds.
As the lobsters approached, the crabs heaved themselves up a little way from the rocky bottom, and shifted themselves ponderously from side to side, causing the intricate streamers and filaments and branches of the creatures growing on them to stir and wave about. It was like a forest agitated by a sudden hard gust of wind from the north.
“Why do you march, why do you march?” called the crabs. “Surely it is not yet the Time. Surely!”
“Surely it is,” the lobsters replied. “So we all agree. Will you march with us?”
“Show us your herald!” the crabs cried. “Let us see the Omen!”
—Speak to them, said McCulloch’s host.
—But what am I to say?
—The truth. What else can you say?
—I know nothing. Everything here is a mystery to me.
—I will explain all things afterward. Speak to them now.
—Without understanding?