The End of Eternity (27 page)

Arguing from analogy is risky, but Harlan obtained more rigorous proof in later days and, now, after a scarcely precedented trip into the Primitive, he could turn confidently and feel no surprise at finding the opening precisely where he had been told it would be.

He moved the camouflage of loose rubble and rock to one side and entered.

He probed the darkness within, using the white beam of his flash almost like a scalpel. He scoured the walls, ceiling, floor, every inch.

Noÿs, remaining close behind him, whispered, “What are you looking for?”

He said, “Something. Anything.”

He found his something, anything, at the very rear of the cave in the shape of a flattish stone covering greenish sheets like a paperweight.

Harlan threw the stone aside and flipped the sheets past one thumb.

“What are they?” asked Noÿs.

“Bank notes. Medium of exchange. Money.”

“Did you know they were there?”

“I knew nothing. I just hoped.”

It was only a matter of using Twissell’s reverse logic, of calculating cause from effect. Eternity existed, so Cooper must be making correct decisions too. In assuming the advertisement would pull Harlan into the correct Time, the cave was an obvious additional means of communication.

Yet this was almost better than he had dared hope. More than once during the preparations for his trip into the Primitive, Harlan had thought that making his way into a town with nothing but bullion in his possession would result in suspicion and delay.

Cooper had managed, to be sure, but Cooper had had time. Harlan hefted the sheaf of bills. And he must have used time to accumulate this much. He had done well, the youngster, marvelously well.

And the circle was closing!

The supplies had been moved into the cave, in the increasingly ruddy glow of the westering sun. The kettle had been covered by a diffuse reflecting film which would hide it from any but the closest of prying eyes, and Harlan had a blaster to take care of those, if need be. The Radiant was set up in the cave and the flash was wedged into a crevice, so that they had heat and light.

Outside it was a chill March night.

Noÿs stared thoughtfully into the smooth paraboloid
interior of the Radiant as it slowly rotated. She said, “Andrew, what are your plans?”

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “I’ll leave for the nearest town. I know where it is—or should be.” (He changed it back to “is” in his mind. There would be no trouble. Twissell’s logic again.)

“I’ll come with you, won’t I?”

He shook his head. “You can’t speak the language, for one thing, and the trip will be difficult enough for one to negotiate.”

Noÿs looked strangely archaic in her short hair and the sudden anger in her eyes made Harlan look away uneasily.

She said, “I’m no fool, Andrew. You scarcely speak to me. You don’t look at me. What is it? Is your homewhen morality taking hold? Do you feel you have betrayed Eternity and are you blaming me for that? Do you feel I have corrupted you? What is it?”

He said, “You don’t know what I feel.”

She said, “Then describe it. You might as well. You’ll never have a chance as good as this one. Do you feel love? For me? You couldn’t or you wouldn’t be using me as a scapegoat. Why did you bring me here? Tell me. Why not have left me in Eternity since you have no use for me here and since it seems you can hardly bear the sight of me?”

Harlan muttered, “There’s danger.”

“Oh, come now.”

“It’s more than danger. It’s a nightmare. Computer Twissell’s nightmare,” said Harlan. “It was during our last panicky flash upwhen into the Hidden Centuries that he told me of thoughts he had had concerning those Centuries. He speculated on the possibility of evolved varieties of man, new species, supermen perhaps, hiding in the far upwhen, cutting themselves off from our interference, plotting to end our tamperings with Reality. He thought it was they who
built the barrier across the 100,000th. Then we found you, and Computer Twissell abandoned his nightmare. He decided there had never been a barrier. He returned to the more immediate problem of salvaging Eternity.

“But I, you see, had been infected by his nightmare. I had experienced the barrier, so I knew it existed. No Eternal had built it, for Twissell said such a thing was theoretically impossible. Maybe Eternity’s theories didn’t go far enough. The barrier was there. Someone had built it. Or something.

“Of course,” he went on thoughtfully, “Twissell was wrong in some ways. He felt that man
must
evolve, but that’s not so. Paleontology is not one of the sciences that interest Eternals, but it interested the late Primitives, so I picked up a bit of it myself. I know this much: species evolve only to meet the pressures of new environments. In a stable environment, a species may remain unchanged for millions of Centuries. Primitive man evolved rapidly because his environment was a harsh and changing one. Once, however, mankind learned to create his own environment, he created a pleasant and stable one, so he just naturally stopped evolving.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Noÿs, sounding not the least mollified, “and you’re not saying anything about us, which is what I want to talk about.”

Harlan managed to remain outwardly unmoved. He said, “Now why the barrier at the 100,000th? What purpose did it serve? You weren’t harmed. What other meaning could it have? I asked myself: What happened because of its presence that would not have happened had it been absent?”

He paused, looking at his clumsy and heavy boots of natural leather. It occurred to him that he could add to his comfort by removing them for the night, but not now, not now . . .

He said, “There was only one answer to that question. The existence of that barrier sent me raving back downwhen to get a neuronic whip, to assault Finge. It fired me to the
thought of risking Eternity to get you back and smashing Eternity when I thought I had failed. Do you see?”

Noÿs stared at him with a mixture of horror and disbelief. “Do you mean the people in the upwhen wanted you to do all that? They planned it?”

“
Yes.
Don’t look at me like that.
Yes!
And don’t you see how it makes everything different? As long as I acted on my own, for reasons of my own, I’ll take all the consequences, material and spiritual. But to be
fooled
into it, to be
tricked
into it, by people handling and manipulating my emotions as though I were a Computaplex on which it was only necessary to insert the properly perforated foils—”

Harlan realized suddenly that he was shouting and stopped abruptly. He let a few moments pass, then said, “That is impossible to take. I’ve got to undo what I was marionetted into doing. And when I undo it, I will be able to rest again.”

And he would—perhaps. He could feel the coming of an impersonal triumph, dissociated from the personal tragedy which lay behind and ahead. The circle was closing!

Noÿs’s hand reached out uncertainly as though to take his own rigid, unyielding one.

Harlan drew away, avoided her sympathy. He said, “It had all been arranged. My meeting with you. Everything. My emotional make-up had been analyzed. Obviously. Action and response. Push this button and the man will do that. Push that button and he will do this.”

Harlan was speaking with difficulty, out of the depths of shame. He shook his head, trying to shake the horror of it away as a dog would water, then went on. “One thing I didn’t understand at first. How did I come to guess that Cooper was to be sent back into the Primitive? It was a most unlikely thing to guess. I had no basis. Twissell didn’t understand it. More than once he wondered how I could have done it with so little understanding of mathematics.

“Yet I had. The first time was that—that night. You were
asleep, but I wasn’t. I had the feeling then that there was something I must remember; some remark, some thought,
something
that I had caught sight of in the excitement and exhilaration of the evening. When I thought long, the whole significance of Cooper sprang into my mind, and along with it the thought entered my mind that I was in a position to destroy Eternity. Later I checked through histories of mathematics, but it was unnecessary really. I already knew. I was certain of it. How? How?”

Noÿs stared at him intently. She didn’t try to touch him now. “Do you mean the men of the Hidden Centuries arranged that, too? They put it all in your mind, then maneuvered you properly?”

“Yes. Yes. Nor are they done. There is still work for them to do. The circle may be closing, but it is not yet closed.”

“How can they do anything now? They’re not here with us.”

“No?” He said the word in so hollow a voice that Noÿs paled.

“Invisible superthings?” she whispered.

“Not superthings. Not invisible. I told you man would not evolve while he controlled his own environment. The people of the Hidden Centuries are Homo sapiens. Ordinary people.”

“Then they’re certainly not here.”

Harlan said sadly, “You’re here, Noÿs.”

“Yes. And you. And no one else.”

“You and I,” agreed Harlan. “No one else. A woman of the Hidden Centuries and I . . . Don’t act any more, Noÿs. Please.”

She stared at him with horror. “What are you saying, Andrew?”

“What I must say. What were
you
saying that evening, when you gave me the peppermint drink? You were talking
to me. Your soft voice—soft words . . . I heard nothing, not consciously, but I remember your delicate voice whispering. About what? The downwhen journey of Cooper; the Samson-smash of Eternity. Am I right?”

Noÿs said, “I don’t even know what Samson-smash means.”

“You can guess very accurately, Noÿs. Tell me, when did you enter the 482nd? Whom did you replace? Or did you just—squeeze in? I had your Life-Plot worked out by an expert in the 2456th. In the new Reality, you had no existence at all. No analogue. Strange for such a small Change, but not impossible. And then the Life-Plotter said one thing which I heard with my ears but not with my mind. Strange that I should remember it. Perhaps even then, something clanged in my mind, but I was too full of—you to listen. He said:
‘with the combination of factors you handed me, I don’t quite see how she fit in the old Reality.’

“He was right. You didn’t fit in. You were an invader from the far upwhen, manipulating me and Finge, too, to suit yourself.”

Noÿs said urgently, “Andrew—”

“It all fit in, if I had the eyes to look. A book-film in your house entitled
Social and Economic History.
It surprised me when first I saw it. You needed it, didn’t you, to teach you how best to be a woman of the Century. Another item. Our first trip into the Hidden Centuries, remember?
You
stopped the kettle at the 111,394th. You stopped it with finesse, without fumbling. Where did you learn to control a kettle? If you were what you seemed to be, that would have been your first trip in a kettle. Why the 111,394th, anyway? Was it your homewhen?”

She said softly, “Why did you bring me to the Primitive, Andrew?”

He shouted suddenly, “To protect Eternity. I could not tell
what damage you might do there. Here, you are helpless, because I know you. Admit that all I say is true! Admit it!”

He rose in a paroxysm of wrath, arm upraised. She did not flinch. She was utterly calm. She might have been modeled out of warm, beautiful wax. Harlan did not complete his motion.

He said, “Admit it!”

She said, “Are you so uncertain, after all your deductions? What will it matter to you whether I admit it or not?”

Harlan felt the wildness mount. “Admit it, anyway, so that I need feel no pain at all. None at all.”

“Pain?”

“Because I have a blaster, Noÿs, and it is my intention to kill you.”

There was a crawling uncertainty inside Harlan, an irresolution that was consuming him. He had the blaster in his hand. It was aimed at Noÿs.

But why did she say nothing? Why did she persist in this impassive attitude?

How could he kill her?

How could he not kill her?

He said hoarsely, “Well?”

She moved, but it was only to clasp her hands loosely in her lap, to look more relaxed, more aloof. When she spoke her voice seemed scarcely that of a human being. Facing the muzzle of a blaster, it yet gained assurance and took on an almost mystic quality of impersonal strength.

She said, “You cannot wish to kill me only in order to protect Eternity. If that were your desire, you could stun me, tie me firmly, pin me within this cave and then take to your travels in the dawn. Or you might have asked Computer Twissell to keep me in solitary confinement during your absence in the Primitive. Or you might take me with you at dawn, lose me in the wastes. If it is only killing that will satisfy you, it is only because you think that I have betrayed you, that I have
tricked you into love first in order that I might trick you into treason later. This is murder out of wounded pride and not at all the just retribution you tell yourself it is.”

Harlan squirmed. “Are you from the Hidden Centuries? Tell me.”

Noÿs said, “I am. Will you now blast?”

Harlan’s finger trembled on the blaster’s contact point. Yet he hesitated. Something irrational within him could still plead her case and point up the remnants of his own futile love and longing. Was she desperate at his rejection of her? Was she deliberately courting death by lying? Was she indulging in foolish heroics born of despair at his doubts of her?

No!

The book-films of the sickly-sweet literary tradition of the 289th might have it so, but not a girl like Noÿs. She was not one to meet her death at the hands of a false lover with the joyful masochism of a broken, bleeding lily.

Then was she scornfully denying his ability to kill her for any reason whatever? Was she confidently relying on the attraction she knew she had for him even now, certain that it would immobilize him, freeze him in weakness and shame.

That hit too closely. His finger clamped a bit harder on the contact.

Noÿs spoke again. “You’re waiting. Does that mean you expect me to enter a brief for the defense?”