The End of Eternity (21 page)

“You follow all this, Cooper, don’t you?”

Cooper said, “Perfectly, Computer Twissell. I have seen the calibration curve without understanding the purpose at the time. It is quite clear now.”

But Harlan was exceedingly interested now. He stared at the measured arc marked off in centuries. The shining arc was porcelain on metal and the fine lines divided it into Centuries, Decicenturies and Centicenturies. Silvery metal gleamed thinly through the porcelain-penetrating lines, marking them clearly. The figures were as finely done and, bending close, Harlan could make out the Centuries from 17 to 27. The hairline was fixed at the 23.17th Century mark.

He had seen similar time-gauges and almost automatically he reached to the pressure-control lever. It did not respond to his grasp. The hairline remained in place.

He nearly jumped when Twissell’s voice suddenly addressed him.

“Technician Harlan!”

He cried, “Yes, Computer,” then remembered that he could not be heard. He stepped to the window and nodded.

Twissell said, almost as though chiming in with Harlan’s thoughts, “The time-gauge is set for a thrust back to the 23.17th. That requires no adjustment. Your only task is to pour energy through at the proper moment in physiotime. There is a chronometer to the right of the gauge. Nod if you see it.”

Harlan nodded.

“It will reach zero-point backward. At the minus-fifteen-second point, align the contact points. It’s simple. You see how?”

Harlan nodded again.

Twissell went on, “Synchronization is not vital. You can
do it at minus fourteen or thirteen or even minus five seconds, but please make every effort to stay this side of minus ten for safety’s sake. Once you’ve closed contact, a synchronized force-gear will do the rest and make certain that the final energy thrust will occur precisely at time zero. Understood?”

Harlan nodded still again. He understood more than Twissell said. If he himself did not align the points by minus ten, it would be taken care of from without.

Harlan thought grimly: There’ll be no need for outsiders.

Twissell said, “We have thirty physiominutes left. Cooper and I will leave to check on the supplies.”

They left. The door closed behind them, and Harlan was left alone with the thrust control, the time (already moving slowly backward toward zero)—and a resolute knowledge of what must be done.

Harlan turned away from the window. He put his hand inside his pocket and half withdrew the neuronic whip it still contained. Through all this he had kept the whip. His hand shook a little.

An earlier thought recurred: a Samson-smash of the temple!

A corner of his mind wondered sickly: How many Eternals have ever heard of Samson? How many know how he died?

There were only twenty-five minutes left. He was not certain how long the operation would take. He was not really certain it would work at all.

But what choice had he? His damp fingers almost dropped the weapon before he succeeded in unhinging the butt.

He worked rapidly and in complete absorption. Of all the aspects of what he planned, the possibility of his own passage
into nonexistence occupied his mind the least and bothered him not at all.

At minus one minute Harlan was standing at the controls.

Detachedly he thought: The last minute of life?

Nothing in the room was visible to him but the backward sweep of the red hairline that marked the passing seconds.

Minus thirty seconds.

He thought: It will not hurt. It is not death.

He tried to think only of Noÿs.

Minus fifteen seconds.

Noÿs!

Harlan’s left hand moved a switch down toward contact. Not hastily!

Minus twelve seconds.

Contact!

The force-gear would take over now. Thrust would come at zero time. And that left Harlan one last manipulation. The Samson-smash!

His right hand moved. He did not look at his right hand.

Minus five seconds.

Noÿs!

His right hand mo—ZERO—ved again, spasmodically. He did not look at it.

Was this nonexistence?

Not yet. Nonexistence not yet.

Harlan stared out the window. He did not move. Time passed and he was unaware of its passage.

The room was empty. Where the giant, enclosed kettle had been was nothing. Metal blocks that had served as its base sat emptily, lifting their huge strength against air.

Twissell, strangely small and dwarfed in the room that had become a waiting cavern, was the only thing that moved as he tramped edgily this way and that.

Harlan’s eyes followed him for a moment and then left him.

Then, without any sound or stir, the kettle was back in the spot it had left. Its passage across the hairline from time past to time present did not as much as disturb a molecule of air.

Twissell was hidden from Harlan’s eyes by the bulk of the kettle, but then he rounded it, came into view. He was running.

A flick of his hand was enough to activate the mechanism that opened the door of the control room. He hurtled inside, shouting with an almost lyrical excitement. “It’s done. It’s done. We’ve closed the circle.” He had breath to say no more.

Harlan made no answer.

Twissell stared out the window, his hands flat against the glass. Harlan noted the blotches of age upon them and the way in which they trembled. It was as though his mind no longer had the ability or the strength to filter the important from the inconsequential, but were selecting observational material in a purely random manner.

Wearily he thought: What does it matter? What does anything matter now?

Twissell said (Harlan heard him dimly), “I’ll tell you now that I’ve been more anxious than I cared to admit. Sennor used to say once that this whole thing was impossible. He insisted something must happen to stop it—What’s the matter?”

He had turned at Harlan’s odd grunt.

Harlan shook his head, managed a choked “Nothing.”

Twissell left it at that and turned away. It was doubtful whether he spoke to Harlan or to the air. It was as though
he were allowing years of pent-up anxieties to escape in words.

“Sennor,” he said, “was the doubter. We reasoned with him and argued. We used mathematics and presented the results of generations of research that had preceded us in the physiotime of Eternity. He put it all to one side and presented his case by quoting the man-meets-himself paradox. You heard him talk about it. It’s his favorite.

“We knew our own future, Sennor said. I, Twissell, knew, for instance, that I would survive, despite the fact that I would be quite old, until Cooper made his trip past the downwhen terminus. I knew other details of my future, the things I would do.

“Impossible, he would say. Reality must change to correct your knowledge, even if it meant the circle would never close and Eternity never established.

“Why he argued so, I don’t know. Perhaps he honestly believed it, perhaps it was an intellectual game with him, perhaps it was just the desire to shock the rest of us with an unpopular viewpoint. In any case, the project proceeded and some of the memoir began to be fulfilled. We located Cooper, for instance, in the Century and Reality that the memoir gave us. Sennor’s case was exploded by that alone, but it didn’t bother him. By that time, he had grown interested in something else.

“And yet, and yet”—he laughed gently, with more than a trace of embarrassment, and let his cigarette, unnoticed, burn down nearly to his fingers—“you know I was never quite easy in my mind. Something
might
happen. The Reality in which Eternity was established
might
change in some way in order to prevent what Sennor called a paradox. It would have to change to one in which Eternity would not exist. Sometimes, in the dark of a sleeping period, when I couldn’t sleep, I could almost persuade myself that that was indeed so—and now it’s all over and I laugh at myself as a senile fool.”

Harlan said in a low voice, “Computer Sennor was right.”

Twissell whirled. “What?”

“The project failed.” Harlan’s mind was coming out of the shadows (why, and into what, he was not sure). “The circle is not complete.”

“What are you talking about?” Twissell’s old hands fell on Harlan’s shoulders with surprising strength. “You’re ill, boy. The strain.”

“Not ill. Sick of everything. You. Me. Not ill. The gauge. See for yourself.”

“The gauge?” The hairline on the gauge stood at the 27th Century, hard against the right-hand extreme. “What happened?” The joy was gone from his face. Horror replaced it.

Harlan grew matter-of-fact. “I melted the locking mechanism, freed the thrust control.”

“How could you—”

“I had a neuronic whip, I broke it open and used its micropile energy source in one flash, like a torch. There’s what’s left of it.” He kicked at a small heap of metal fragments in one corner.

Twissell wasn’t taking it in. “In the 27th? You mean Cooper’s in the 27th—”

“I don’t know where he is,” said Harlan dully. “I shifted the thrust control downwhen, further down than the 24th. I don’t know where. I didn’t look. Then I brought it back. I still didn’t look.”

Twissell stared at him, his face a pale, unhealthy yellowish color, his lower lip trembling.

“I don’t know where he is now,” said Harlan. “He’s lost in the Primitive. The circle is broken. I thought everything would end when I made the stroke. At zero time. That’s silly. We’ve got to wait. There’ll be a moment in physiotime when Cooper will realize he’s in the wrong Century, when he’ll do something against the memoir, when he—” He broke off, then broke into a forced and creaky laughter. “What’s the difference? It’s only a delay till Cooper makes the final break in
the circle. There’s no way of stopping it. Minutes, hours, days. What’s the difference? When the delay is done, there will be no more Eternity. Do you hear me? It will be the end of Eternity.”

“Why? Why?”

Twissell looked helplessly from the gauge to the Technician, his eyes mirroring the puzzled frustration in his voice.

Harlan lifted his head. He had only one word to say. “Noÿs!”

Twissell said, “The woman you took into Eternity?”

Harlan smiled bitterly, said nothing.

Twissell said, “What has she to do with this? Great Time, I don’t understand, boy.”

“What is there to understand?” Harlan burned with sorrow. “Why do you pretend ignorance? I had a woman. I was happy and so was she. We harmed no one. She did not exist in the new Reality. What difference would it have made to anyone?”

Twissell tried vainly to interrupt.

Harlan shouted. “But there are rules in Eternity, aren’t there? I know them all. Liaisons require permission; liaisons require computations; liaisons require status; liaisons are tricky things. What were you planning for Noÿs when all this was over? A seat in a crashing rocket? Or a more comfortable position as community mistress for worthy Computers? You won’t make any plans
now
, I think.”

He ended in a kind of despair and Twissell moved quickly to the Communiplate. Its function as a transmitter had obviously been restored.

The Computer shouted into it till he aroused an answer. Then he said, “This is Twissell. No one is to be allowed in here. No one. No one. Do you understand? . . . Then see to it. It goes for members of the Allwhen Council. It goes for them particularly.”

He turned back to Harlan, saying abstractedly, “They’ll do it because I’m old and senior member of the Council and because they think I’m cranky and queer. They give in to me because I’m cranky and queer.” For a moment he fell into a ruminative silence. Then he said, “Do you think I’m queer?” and his face turned swiftly up to Harlan’s like that of a seamed monkey.

Harlan thought: Great Time, the man’s mad. The shock has driven him mad.

He took a step backward, automatically aghast at being trapped with a madman. Then he steadied. The man, be he ever so mad was feeble, and even madness would end soon.

Soon? Why not at once? What delayed the end of Eternity?

Twissell said (he had no cigarette in his fingers; his hand made no move to take one) in a quiet insinuating voice, “You haven’t answered me.
Do
you think I’m queer? I suppose you do. Too queer to talk to. If you had thought of me as a friend instead of as a crotchety old man, whimsical and unpredictable, you would have spoken openly to me of your doubts. You would have taken no such action as you did.”

Harlan frowned. The man thought
Harlan
was mad. That was it!

He said angrily, “My action was the right one. I’m quite sane.”

Twissell said, “I told you the girl was in no danger, you know.”

“I was a fool to believe that even for a while. I was a fool to believe the Council would be just to a Technician.”

“Who told you the Council knew of any of this?”

“Finge knew of it and sent in a report concerning it to the Council.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I got it out of Finge at the point of a neuronic whip. The business end of a whip abolishes comparative status.”

“The same whip that did this?” Twissell pointed to the gauge with its blob of molten metal perched wryly above the face of the dial.

“Yes.”

“A busy whip.” Then, sharply, “Do you know why Finge took it to the Council instead of handling the matter himself?”

“Because he hated me and wanted to make certain I lost all status. He wanted Noÿs.”

Twissell said, “You’re naïve! If he had wanted the girl, he could easily have arranged liaison. A Technician would not have been in the way. The man hated
me
, boy.” (Still no cigarette. He looked odd without one and the stained finger he laid on his chest as he spoke the last pronoun looked almost indecently bare.)

“You?”

“There’s such a thing, boy, as Council politics. Not every Computer is appointed to the Council. Finge wanted an appointment. Finge is ambitious and wanted it badly. I blocked it because I thought him emotionally unstable. Time, I never fully appreciated how right I was. . . . Look, boy. He knew you were a protégé of mine. He had seen me take you out of a job as an Observer and make you a master Technician. He saw you working for me steadily. How better could he get back at me and destroy my influence? If he could prove my pet Technician guilty of a terrible crime against Eternity, it
would reflect on me. It might force my resignation from the Allwhen Council, and who do you suppose would then be a logical successor?”