a good five minutes to register and digest this information, but still he did not reply. I grew uneasy. Perhaps the enormous span of time separating the physicist and me had affected the transcordions. If it made for a small time lag between sending and receiving, well, that would entail inconvenience, certainly, but not catastrophe. Astronauts, after all, have to cope with this phenomenon. Why not a chrononaut, then?
Walking a few steps along the shore, I keyed this in: “The past FEELS different, Dr. Kaprow. At least to me. It’s not a matter of misaligned geographies or molecules twisted sideways, really. It’s even different from my perception of the Early Pleistocene in my spirit-traveling episodes. Let me see if I can explain.”
After clearing the transcordion’s display area, I tried to explain: “When I was small, probably about ten or so, I was thumbing through a science book when I came across a strange photograph. It showed a canary submerged on its perch in an aquarium. The bird was actually in the water, it was wet, and there were guppies and goldfish swimming around it. How neat, I thought, how neat and how weird. It reminded me of my own terrible out-of-placeness in my dreams.”
My display area was nearly full. I cleared it again, knowing that Kaprow’s unit was connected to a printout terminal that would preserve my messages on long sheets of computer paper. For portability’s sake, of course, my transcordion had no such attachment, and Kaprow was therefore limited to messages of exactly ten lines at sixty-five characters a line. So far, though, he had not said, “Boo.”
I typed: “You see, that canary was inside a cubic foot of water sheathed by an oxygen-permeable membrane of laminated silicon. The canary was wet, but it could breathe. It was existing in an alien physical medium. It looked bewildered, but it was existing, Dr. Kaprow, and that’s more or less the way I’m experiencing the past. The past feels different, but it’s not impossible to breathe and think here . . . Does that give you any idea what the past feels like?”
This time I waited. Surely, by now, Kaprow would have had time to receive and to respond to at least the first of my messages. I wanted his or Blair’s advice about the absence of wildlife. Maybe I had leapt into the wrong past, and maybe our only viable course was to abort the mission.
“That canary was surrounded by FISH,” I typed, surveying my creatureless paradise. “I, on the other hand, am totally alone. And I miss the fish. I miss them because I want the whole Pleistocene, the complete experience of it. I’ve waited my entire life for this, Dr. Kaprow, and I’m willing to wait a great deal longer to make those insidious, beautiful dreams of mine come true. Do you read me?”
No, I was not going to abort the mission. We had talked about the possibility of failing to establish or losing transcordion contact, but always with the tacit understanding that neither of these dreadful eventualities would befall us. The latter had occupied a bit more of our discussion time—after all, I could drop the transcordion on a rock or lose it in a stream bed or forfeit it to an envious and overbearing baboon—but because the transcordion was an instrument capable of withstanding a great deal of physical abuse, and because I fully understood its value, we had entertained the possibility of this danger only as a dutiful intellectual exercise.
“DAMN IT, KAPROW! ANSWER ME, PLEASE!”
Our contingency plan was simple. In the event the transcordions failed, I was to assess my situation and either abort or continue the mission according to my intuitive assessment. If I opted to go ahead, I was to return the Backstep Scaffold to the interior of the omnibus (in order not to leave an anomalous hole in the prehistoric atmosphere) and come back to this lakeshore site at least once a day. At regular intervals Kaprow or one of his technicians would lower the scaffold so that I could either reject the invitation or clamber aboard for a trip back to the twentieth century. The appointed times for these rendezvous were dawn, noon, and sunset. Kaprow did not want to leave the scaffold out at night for fear of retracting into the omnibus’s sensitive interior some rambunctious representative of a Pleistocene primate species. At all costs, it was necessary to avoid monkey fur in the works. Finally, Kaprow had dictated that