Free Billions & Billions by Carl Sagan Page B

they had urgent appointments elsewhere. Sometimes they would change their colors as they swam from environment to environment. One was pale, almost transparent; another orange, with an embarrassed blush of red.
    In some ways, of course, they were different from us. They had their skeletons on the outside, they could breathe water, and a kind of anus was located disconcertingly near their mouths. (They were fastidious about appearance and cleanliness, though, possessing a pair of specialized claws with brushlike bristles. Occasionally, one would give itself a good scrub.)
    But in other ways they were like us. It was hard to miss. They had brains, hearts, blood, and eyes. That flurry of swimming appendages propelling them through the water betrayed what seemed to be an unmistakable hint of purpose. When they arrived at their destination, they addressed the algal filaments with the precision, delicacy, and industriousness of a dedicated gourmet. Two of them, more venturesome than the rest,prowled this world’s ocean, swimming high above the algae, languidly surveying their domain.
    After a while you get so you can distinguish individuals. A shrimp will molt, shedding its old skeleton to make room for a new one. Afterward, you can see the thing—transparent, shroud-like, hanging rigidly from a branch, its former occupant going about his business in a sleek new carapace. Here’s one missing a leg. Had there been some furious claw-to-claw combat, perhaps over the affections of a devastating nubile beauty?
    From certain angles, the top of the water is a mirror, and a shrimp sees its own reflection. Can it recognize itself? More probably, it just sees the reflection as one more shrimp. At other angles, the thickness of the curved glass magnifies them, and then I can make out what they really look like. I notice, for example, that they have mustaches. Two of them race to the top of the water and, unable to break through the surface tension, bounce off the meniscus. Then, upright—a little startled, I imagine—they gently sink to the bottom. Their arms are crossed casually, it almost seems, as if the exploit were routine, nothing to write home about. They’re cool.
    If I can clearly see a shrimp through the curved crystal, I figure, it must be able to see me, or at least my eye—some great looming black disk, with a corona of brown and green. Indeed, sometimes as I watch one busily fingering the algae, it seems to stiffen and look back at me. We have made eye contact. I wonder what it thinks it sees.
    After a day or two of preoccupation with work, I wake up, take a glance at the crystal world.… They all seem to be gone. I reproach myself. I’m not required to feed them or give them vitamins or change their water or take them to the vet. All I have to do is make sure that they’re not in too much light or toolong in the dark and that they’re always at temperatures between 40° and 85° Fahrenheit. (Above that, I guess, they make a bisque and not an ecosystem.) Through inattention, have I killed them? But then I see one poking an antenna out from behind a branch, and I realize they’re still in good health. They’re only shrimp, but after a while you find yourself worrying about them, rooting for them.
    If you’re in charge of a little world like this, and you conscientiously concern yourself about its temperature and light levels, then—whatever you may have had in mind at the beginning—eventually you care about who’s
in
there. If they’re sick or dying, though, you can’t do much to save them. In certain ways, you’re much more powerful than they, but they do things—like breathing water—that you can’t. You’re limited, painfully limited. You even wonder if it’s cruel to put them in this crystal prison. But you reassure yourself that at least here they are safe from baleen whales and oil slicks and cocktail sauce.
    The ghostly molting shrouds and the rare dead body of an expired shrimp do not linger long.