The End of Eternity (15 page)

“There’s no danger,” he said carelessly.

“There
is
danger. Now don’t be foolish. I can get along with what’s here, until—until you make arrangements.”

“Why shouldn’t you have your own clothes and doodads?”

“Because they’re not worth your going to my house in Time and being caught. And what if they make the Change while you’re there?”

He evaded that uneasily. “It won’t catch me.” Then, brightening, “Besides my wrist generator keeps me in physiotime so that a Change can’t affect me, you see.”

Noÿs sighed. “I don’t see. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it all.”

“There’s nothing to it.” And Harlan explained and explained with great animation and Noÿs listened with sparkling eyes that never quite revealed whether she was entirely interested, or amused, or, perhaps, a little of both.

It was a great addition to Harlan’s life. There was someone to talk to, someone with whom to discuss his life, his deeds, and thoughts. It was as though she were a portion of himself, but a portion sufficiently separate to require speech in communication rather than thought. She was a portion sufficiently separate to be able to answer unpredictably out
of independent thought processes. Strange, Harlan thought, how one might Observe a social phenomenon such as matrimony and yet miss so vital a truth about it. Could he have predicted in advance, for instance, that it would be the passionate interludes that he would later least often associate with the idyl?

She snuggled into the crook of his arm and said, “How is your mathematics coming along?”

Harlan said, “Want to look at a piece of it?”

“Don’t tell me you carry it around with you?”

“Why not? The kettle trip takes time. No use wasting it, you know.”

He disengaged himself, took a small viewer from his pocket, inserted the film, and smiled fondly as she put it to her eyes.

She returned the viewer to him with a shake of her head. “I never saw so many squiggles. I wish I could read your Standard Intertemporal.”

“Actually,” said Harlan, “most of the squiggles you mention aren’t Intertemporal really, just mathematical notation.”

“You understand it, though, don’t you?”

Harlan hated to do anything to disillusion the frank admiration in her eyes, but he was forced to say, “Not as much as I’d like to. Still, I have been picking up enough math to get what I want. I don’t have to understand everything to be able to see a hole in a wall big enough to push a freight kettle through.”

He tossed the viewer into the air, caught it with a flick of his hand, and put it on a small end table.

Noÿs’s eyes followed it hungrily and sudden insight flashed on Harlan.

He said, “Father Time! You can’t read Intertemporal at that.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then the Section library here is useless to you. I never
thought of that. You ought to have your own films from the 482nd.”

She said quickly, “No. I don’t want any.”

He said, “You’ll have them.”

“Honestly, I don’t want them. It’s silly to risk—”

“You’ll have them!” he said.

For the last time he stood at the immaterial boundary separating Eternity from Noÿs’s house in the 482nd. He had intended the time before to be the last time. The Change was nearly upon them now, a fact he had not told Noÿs out of the decent respect he would have had for anyone’s feelings, let alone those of his love.

Yet it wasn’t a difficult decision to make, this one additional trip. Partly it was bravado, to shine before Noÿs, bring her the book-films from out of the lion’s mouth; partly it was a hot desire (what was the Primitive phrase?) “to singe the beard of the King of Spain,” if he might refer to the smooth-cheeked Finge so.

Then, too, he would have the chance once again of savoring the weirdly attractive atmosphere about a doomed house.

He had felt it before, when entering it carefully during the period of grace allowed by the spatio-temporal charts. He had felt it as he wandered through its rooms, collecting clothing, small
objets d’art
, strange containers, and instruments from Noÿs’s vanity table.

There was the somber silence of a doomed Reality that was past merely the physical absence of noise. There was no way for Harlan to predict its analogue in a new Reality. It might be a small suburban cottage or a tenement in a city street. It might be zero with untamed scrubland replacing the park-like terrain on which it now stood. It might, conceivably, be almost unchanged. And (Harlan touched on this
thought gingerly) it might be inhabited by the analogue of Noÿs or, of course, it might not.

To Harlan the house was already a ghost, a premature specter that had begun its hauntings before it had actually died. And because the house, as it was, meant a great deal to him, he found he resented its passing and mourned it.

Once, only, in five trips had there been any sound to break the stillness during his prowlings. He was in the pantry, then, thankful that the technology of that Reality and Century had made servants unfashionable and removed a problem. He had, he recalled, chosen among the cans of prepared foods, and was just deciding that he had enough for one trip, and that Noÿs would be pleased indeed to intersperse the hearty but uncolorful basic diet provided in the empty Section with some of her own dietary. He even laughed aloud to think that not long before he had thought her diet decadent.

It was in the middle of the laugh that he heard a distinct clapping noise. He froze!

The sound had come from somewhere behind him, and in the startled moment during which he had not moved the lesser danger that it was a housebreaker occurred to him first and the greater danger of its being an investigating Eternal occurred second.

It
couldn’t
be a housebreaker. The entire period of the spatio-temporal chart, grace period and all, had been painstakingly cleared and chosen out of other similar periods of Time because of the lack of complicating factors. On the other hand, he had introduced a micro-change (perhaps not so micro at that) by abstracting Noÿs.

Heart pounding, he forced himself to turn. It seemed to him that the door behind him had just closed, moving the last millimeter required to bring it flush with the wall.

He repressed the impulse to open that door, to search the
house. With Noÿs’s delicacies in tow he returned to Eternity and waited two full days for repercussions before venturing into the far upwhen. There were none and eventually he forgot the incident.

But now, as he adjusted the controls to enter Time this one last time, he thought of it again. Or perhaps it was the thought of the Change, nearly upon him now, that preyed on him. Looking back on the moment later, he felt that it was one or the other that caused him to misadjust the controls. He could think of no other excuse.

The misadjustment was not immediately apparent. It pinpointed the proper room and Harlan stepped directly into Noÿs’s library.

He had become enough of a decadent himself, now, to be not altogether repelled by the workmanship that went into the design of the film cases. The lettering of the titles blended in with the intricate filigree until they were attractive but nearly unreadable. It was a triumph of aesthetics over utility.

Harlan took a few from the shelves at random and was surprised. The title of one was
Social and Economic History of our Times.

Somehow it was a side of Noÿs to which he had given little thought. She was certainly not stupid and yet it never occurred to him that she might be interested in weighty things. He had the impulse to scan a bit of the
Social and Economic History
, but fought it down. He would find it in the Section library of the 482nd, if he ever wanted it. Finge had undoubtedly rifled the libraries of this Reality for Eternity’s records months earlier.

He put that film to one side, ran through the rest, selected the fiction and some of what seemed light non-fiction. Those and two pocket viewers. He stowed them carefully into a knapsack.

It was at that point that, once more, he heard a sound in the house. There was no mistake this time. It was not a short sound of indeterminate origin. It was a laugh, a man’s laugh. He was
not
alone in the house.

He was unaware that he had dropped the knapsack. For one dizzy second he could think only that he was trapped!

All at once it had seemed inevitable. It was the rawest dramatic irony. He had entered Time one last time, tweaked Finge’s nose one last time, brought the pitcher to the well one last time. It had to be then that he was caught.

Was it Finge who laughed?

Who else would track him down, lie in wait, stay a room away, and burst into mirth?

Well, then, was all lost? And because in that sickening moment he was sure all was lost it did not occur to him to run again or to attempt flight into Eternity once more. He would face Finge.

He would kill him, if necessary.

Harlan stepped to the door from behind which the laugh had sounded, stepped to it with the soft, firm step of the premeditated murderer. He flicked loose the automatic door signal and opened it by hand. Two inches. Three. It moved without sound.

The man in the next room had his back turned. The figure seemed too tall to be Finge and that fact penetrated Harlan’s simmering mind and kept him from advancing further.

Then, as though the paralysis that seemed to hold both
men in rigor was slowly lifting, the other turned, inch by inch.

Harlan never witnessed the completion of that turn. The other’s profile had not yet come into view when Harlan, holding back a sudden gust of terror with a last fragment of moral strength, flung himself back out the door. Its mechanism, not Harlan, closed it soundlessly.

Harlan fell back blindly. He could breathe only by struggling violently with the atmosphere, fighting air in and pushing it out, while his heart beat madly as though in an effort to escape his body.

Finge, Twissell, all the Council together could not have disconcerted him so much. It was the fear of nothing physical that had unmanned him. Rather it was an almost instinctive loathing for the nature of the accident that had befallen him.

He gathered the stack of book-films to himself in a formless lump and managed, after two futile tries, to re-establish the door to Eternity. He stepped through, his legs operating mechanically. Somehow he made his way to the 575th, and then to his personal quarters. His Technicianhood, newly valued, newly appreciated, saved him once again. The few Eternals he met turned automatically to one side and looked steadfastly over his head as they did so.

That was fortunate, for he lacked any ability to smooth his face out of the death’s-head grimace he felt he was wearing, or any power to put the blood back into it. But they didn’t look, and he thanked Time and Eternity and whatever blind thing wove Destiny for that.

He had not truly recognized the other man in Noÿs’s house by his appearance, yet he knew his identity with a dreadful certainty.

The first time Harlan had heard a noise in the house he, Harlan, had been laughing and the sound that interrupted his laugh was of something weighty dropping in the next room.
The second time someone had laughed in the next room and he, Harlan, had dropped a knapsack of book-films. The first time he, Harlan, had turned and caught sight of a door closing. The second time he, Harlan, closed a door as a stranger turned.

He had met himself!

In the same Time and nearly in the same place he and his earlier self by several physiodays had nearly stood face-to-face. He had misadjusted the controls, set it for an instant in Time which he had already used and he, Harlan, had seen him, Harlan.

He had gone about his work with the shadow of horror upon him for days thereafter. He cursed himself for a coward, but that did not help.

Indeed from that moment matters took a downward trend. He could put his finger on the Great Divide. The key moment was the instant in which he had adjusted the door controls for his entry into the 482nd for one last time and somehow had adjusted it wrongly. Since then things went badly, badly.

The Reality Change in the 482nd went through during that period of despondency and accentuated it. In the past two weeks he had picked up three proposed Reality Changes which contained minor flaws, and now he chose among them, yet could do nothing to move himself to action.

He chose Reality Change 2456-2781, V-5 for a number of reasons. Of the three, it was farthest upwhen, the most distant. The error was minute, but was significant in terms of human life. It needed, then, only a quick trip to the 2456th to find out the nature of Noÿs’s analogue in the new Reality, by use of a little blackmailing pressure.

But the unmanning of his recent experience betrayed him.
It seemed to him no longer a simple thing, this gentle application of threatened exposure. And once he found the nature of Noÿs’s analogue, what then? Put Noÿs in her place as charwoman, seamstress, laborer, or whatever. Certainly. But what, then, was to be done with the analogue herself? With any husband the analogue might have? Family? Children?

He had thought of none of this earlier. He had avoided the thought. “Sufficient unto the day . . .”

But now he could think of nothing else.

So he lay skulking in his room, hating himself, when Twissell called him, his tired voice questioning and a little puzzled.

“Harlan, are you ill? Cooper tells me you’ve skipped several discussion periods.”

Harlan tried to smooth the trouble out of his face. “No, Computer Twissell. I’m a little tired.”

“Well, that’s forgivable, at any rate, boy.” And then the smile on his face came about as close as it ever did to vanishing entirely. “Have you heard that the 482nd has been Changed?”

“Yes,” said Harlan shortly.

“Finge called me,” said Twissell, “and asked that you be told that the Change was entirely successful.”

Harlan shrugged, then grew aware of Twissell’s eyes staring out of the Communiplate and hard upon him. He grew uneasy and said, “Yes, Computer?”