“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 into the future and came back glowing with wondrous tales of atomic fusion plants.
That was too bad, McCulloch thought. But soon he decided that it was just as well, that he preferred being the only one who had encountered the world beyond this world, probably the only human being who ever would.
He thought of that world with love, wondering about his mate and her millions of larvae, about the journey of his friends back across the great abyss, about the legends that were being spun about his visit in that unimaginably distant epoch. Sometimes the pain of separation returned, and Maggie found him crying in the night, and held him until he was whole again. And eventually the pain did not return. But still he did not forget, and in some part of his soul he longed to make his homefaring back to his true kind, and he rarely passed a day when he did not think he could hear the inaudible sound of delicate claws, scurrying over the sands of silent seas.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five: The Palace at Midnight Page 57