ELEVEN
We dined that evening at a very special restaurant in Chicago, a place whose distinction is that it serves meats almost impossible to obtain elsewhere: buffalo steak, filet of bear, moose, elk, such birds as pheasant, partridge, grouse. Vornan had heard about it somehow and wanted to sample its mysterious delights. It was the first time we had gone to a public restaurant with him, a point that troubled us; already an ominous tendency was developing for uncontrollable crowds to gather about him everywhere, and we feared what might happen in a restaurant. Kralick had asked the restaurant management to serve its specialties at our hotel, and the restaurant was willing — for a price. But Vornan would have none of that. He wished to dine out, and dine out we did.
Our escort of Government people took precautions. They were learning fast how to cope with Vornan’s unpredictable ways. It turned out that the restaurant had both a side entrance and a private dining room upstairs, so we were able to sweep our guest into the place and past the regular diners without problems. Vornan seemed displeased to find himself in an isolated room, but we pretended that in our society it was the acme of luxury to eat away from the vulgar throng, and Vornan took the story for what it was worth.
Some of us did not know the nature of the restaurant. Heyman thumbed the menu cube, peered at it for a long moment, and delivered a thick Teutonic hiss. He was sizzling in wrath over the bill of fare. “Buffalo!” he cried. “Moose! These are rare animals! We are to eat valuable scientific specimens? Mr. Kralick, I protest! This is an outrage!”
Kralick had suffered much on this jaunt, and Heyman’s testiness had been nearly as much of a bother to him as Vornan’s flamboyance. He said, “I beg your pardon, Professor Heyman. Everything on the menu is approved by the Department of the Interior. You know, even the herds of rare animals need to be thinned occasionally, for the good of the species. And—”
“They could be sent to other conservation preserves,” Heyman rumbled, “not slaughtered for their meat! My God, what will history say of us? We who live in the last century when wild animals are found on the earth, killing and eating the priceless few survivors of a time when—”
“You want the verdict of history?” Kolff asked. “There sits history, Heyman! Ask its opinion!” He waved a beefy hand at Vornan-19, in whose authenticity he was not a believer, and guffawed until the table shook.
Serenely Vornan said, “I find it quite delightful that you should be eating these animals. I await my chance to share in the pleasure of doing so.”
“But it isn’t right!” Heyman spluttered. “These creatures — do any of them exist in your time? Or are they all gone — all eaten?”
“I am not certain. The names are unfamiliar. This buffalo, for example: What is it?”
“A large bovine mammal covered with shaggy brown fur,” said Aster Mikkelsen. “Related to the cow. Formerly found in herds of many thousands on the western prairies.”
“Extinct,” said Vornan. “We have some cows, but no relatives of cows. And moose?”
“A large-horned animal of the northern forests. That’s a moose head mounted on the wall, the one with the huge antlers and the long, drooping snout,” said Aster.
“Absolutely extinct. Bear? Grouse? Partridge?”
Aster described each. Vornan replied gleefully that no such animals were known to exist in his era. Heyman’s face turned a mottled purple. I had not known he harbored conservationist leanings. He delivered a choppy sermon on the extinction of wildlife as a symbol of a decadent civilization, pointing out that it is not barbarians who eliminate species but rather the fastidious and cultured, who seek the amusements of the hunt and of the table, or who thrust the outposts of civilization into the nesting grounds of strange and obscure creatures. He spoke with passion and even some wisdom; it was the first time I had heard the obstreperous historian say anything of the faintest value to an intelligent person. Vornan watched him with keen interest as he spoke. Gradually a look of pleasure spread across our visitor’s face, and I thought I knew why: Heyman was arguing that extinction of species comes with the spread of civilization, and Vornan, who privately regarded us as little more than savages, doubtless thought that line of reasoning extremely funny.
When Heyman finished, we were eyeing one another and our menu cubes in shamefaced fashion, but Vornan broke the spell. “Surely,” he said, “you will not deny me the pleasure of cooperating in the great extinction that makes my own time so barren of wildlife? After all, the animals we are about to eat tonight are already dead, are they not? Let me take back to my era the sensation of having dined on buffalo and grouse and moose, please.”
Of course there was no question of dining somewhere else that night. We would eat here feeling guilty or we would eat here without guilt. As Kralick had observed, the restaurant used only licensed meat obtained through Government channels, and so was not directly causing the disappearance of any endangered species. The meat it served came from rare animals, and the prices showed it, but it was idle to blame a place like this for the hardships of twentieth-century wildlife. Still, Heyman had a point: the animals were going. I had seen somewhere a prediction that in another century there would be no wild animals at all except those in protected preserves. If we could credit Vornan as a genuine ambassador from posterity, that prediction had come to pass.
We ordered. Heyman chose roast chicken; the rest of us dipped into the rarities. Vornan requested and succeeded in getting a kind of smorgasbord of house specialties: a miniature filet of buffalo, a strip of moose steak, breast of pheasant, and one or two of the other unusual items.
Kolff said, “What animals do you have in your — ah — epoch?”
“Dogs. Cats. Cows. Mice.” Vornan hesitated. “And several others.”
“Nothing but domestic creatures?” asked Heyman, aghast.
“No,” said Vornan, and propelled a juicy slab of meat to his mouth. He smiled pleasantly. “Delicious! What a loss we have suffered!”
“You see?” Heyman cried. “If only people had—”
“Of course,” said Vornan sweetly, “we have many interesting foods of our own. I must admit there’s a pleasure in putting a bit of meat from a living creature into one’s mouth, but it’s a pleasure that only the very few might enjoy. Most of us are rather fastidious. It takes a strong stomach to be a time traveler.”
“Because we are filthy, depraved, hideous barbarians?” Heyman asked loudly. “Is that your opinion of us?”
Not at all discomfited, Vornan replied, “Your way of life is quite different from my own. Obviously. Why else would I have taken the trouble to come here?”
“Yet one way of life is not inherently superior or inferior to the other,” Helen McIlwain put in, looking up fiercely from a huge slab of what I recall as elk steak. “Life may be more comfortable in one era than in another, it may be healthier, it may be more tranquil, but we may not use the terms superior or inferior. From the viewpoint of cultural relativism—”
“Do you know,” said Vornan, “that in my time such a thing as a restaurant is unknown? To eat food in public, among strangers — we find it inelegant. In the Centrality, you know, one comes in contact with strangers quite often. This is not true in the outlying regions. One is never hostile to a stranger, but one would not eat in his presence, unless one is planning to establish sexual intimacy. Customarily we reserve eating for intimate companions alone.” He chuckled. “It’s quite wicked of me to want to visit a restaurant. I regard you all as intimate companions, you must realize—” His hand swept the whole table, as though he would be willing to go to bed even with Lloyd Kolff if Kolff were available. “But I hope that you will grant me the pleasure of dining in public one of these days. Perhaps you were trying to spare my sensibilities by arranging for us to eat in this private room. But I ask you to let me indulge my shamelessness a bit the next time.”