The End of Eternity (12 page)

Harlan struggled for words. “You say she sold herself—”

“Why that expression? There is no shame attached to sex in this Century. The only strange thing is that she chose you as partner, and
that
she did for the sake of eternal life. It’s plain.”

And Harlan, arms raised, hands claw-bent, with no rational thought in his mind, or any irrational one other than to choke and throttle Finge, sprang forward.

Finge stepped back hastily. He brought out a blaster with a quick, trembling gesture. “Don’t touch me! Back!”

Harlan had just enough sanity to halt his rush. His hair was matted. His shirt was stained with perspiration. His breath whistled through pinched white nostrils.

Finge said shakily, “I know you very well, you see, and I thought your reaction might be violent. Now I’ll shoot if I have to.”

Harlan said, “Get out.”

“I will. But first you’ll listen. For attacking a Computer, you can be declassified, but we’ll let that go. You will understand, however, that I did not lie. The Noÿs Lambent of the new Reality, whatever else may be or not be, will lack this superstition. The whole purpose of the Change will be to wipe out the superstition. And without it, Harlan”—his voice was almost a snarl—“how could a woman like Noÿs want a man like you?”

The pudgy Computer backed toward the door of Harlan’s personal quarters, blaster still leveled.

He paused to say, with a sort of grim gaiety, “Of course, if you had her now, Harlan, if you had her now, you could enjoy her. You could keep your liaison and make it formal. That is, if you had her now. But the Change will come soon, Harlan, and after that, you will not have her. What a pity, the now does not last, even in Eternity, eh, Harlan?”

Harlan no longer looked at him. Finge had won after all and was leaving in clear and leering possession of the field. Harlan stared unseeingly at his own toes, and when he looked up Finge was gone—whether five seconds earlier or fifteen minutes Harlan could not have said.

Hours had passed nightmarishly and Harlan felt trapped in the prison of his mind. All that Finge had said was so true, so transparently true. Harlan’s Observer mind could look back upon the relationship of himself and Noÿs, that short, unusual relationship, and it took on a different texture.

It wasn’t a case of instant infatuation. How could he have believed it was? Infatuation for a man like himself?

Of course not. Tears stung his eyes and he felt ashamed. How obvious it was that the affair was a case of cool calculation. The girl had certain undeniable physical assets and no ethical principles to keep her from using them. So she used
them and that had nothing to do with Andrew Harlan as a person. He simply represented her distorted view of Eternity and what it meant.

Automatically Harlan’s long fingers caressed the volumes in his small bookshelf. He took one out and, unseeingly, opened it.

The print blurred. The faded colors of the illustrations were ugly, meaningless blotches.

Why had Finge troubled to tell him all this? In the strictest sense he ought not to have. An Observer, or anyone acting as Observer, ought never to know the ends attained by his Observation. It removed him by so much from the ideal position of the objective non-human tool.

It was to crush him, of course; to take a mean and jealous revenge!

Harlan fingered the open page of the magazine. He found himself staring at a duplication, in startling red, of a ground vehicle, similar to vehicles characteristic of the 45th, 182nd, 590th, and 984th Centuries, as well as of late Primitive times. It was a very common sort of affair with an internal-combustion motor. In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractions were the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels. That was true of none of the later Centuries, of course.

Harlan had pointed that out to Cooper. He had made quite a point of it, and now his mind, as though longing to turn away from the unhappy present, drifted back to that moment. Sharp, irrelevant images filled the ache within Harlan.

“These advertisements,” he had said, “tell us more of Primitive times than the so-called news articles in the same magazine. The news articles assume a basic knowledge of the world it deals with. It uses terms it feels no necessity of explaining. What is a ‘golf ball,’ for instance?”

Cooper had professed his ignorance readily.

Harlan went on in the didactic tone he could scarcely avoid
on occasions such as this. “We could deduce that it was a small pellet of some sort from the nature of the casual mentions it receives. We know that it is used in a game, if only because it is mentioned in an item under the heading ‘Sport.’ We can even make further deductions that it is hit by a long rod of some sort and the object of the game is to drive the ball into a hole in the ground. But why bother with deduction and reasoning? Observe this advertisement! The object of it is only to induce readers to buy the ball, but in so doing we are presented with an excellent close-range portrait of one, with a section cut into it to show its construction.”

Cooper, coming from an era in which advertisement was not as wildly proliferative as it was in the later Centuries of Primitive times, found all this difficult to appreciate. He said, “Isn’t it rather disgusting the way these people blow their own horn? Who would be fool enough to believe a person’s boastings about his own products? Would he admit defects? Is he likely to stop at any exaggeration?”

Harlan, whose homewhen was middling fruitful in advertisement, raised tolerant eyebrows and merely said, “You’ll have to accept that. It’s their way and we never quarrel with the ways of any culture as long as it does not seriously harm mankind as a whole.”

But now Harlan’s mind snapped back to his present situation and he was back in the present, staring at the loudmouthed, brassy advertisements in the news magazine. He asked himself in sudden excitement: Were the thoughts he had just experienced really irrelevant? Or was he tortuously finding a way out of the blackness and back to Noÿs?

Advertisement! A device for forcing the unwilling into line. Did it matter to a ground vehicle manufacturer whether a given individual felt an original or spontaneous desire for his product? If the prospect (that was the word) could be artificially persuaded or cajoled into feeling that desire and acting upon it, would that not be just as well?

Then what did it matter if Noÿs loved him out of passion or out of calculation? Let them but be together long enough and she would grow to love him. He would
make
her love him and, in the end, love and not its motivation was what counted. He wished now he had read some of the novels out of Time that Finge had mentioned scornfully.

Harlan’s fists clenched at a sudden thought. If Noÿs had come to
him
, to
Harlan
, for immortality, it could only mean that she had not yet fulfilled the requirement for that gift. She could have made love to no Eternal previously. That meant that her relationship to Finge had been nothing more than that of secretary and employer. Otherwise what need would she have had for Harlan?

Yet Finge surely must have tried—must have attempted . . . (Harlan could not complete the thought even in the secrecy of his own mind.) Finge could have proved the superstition’s existence on his own person. Surely he could not have missed the thought with Noÿs an ever-present temptation. Then she must have refused him.

He had had to use Harlan and Harlan had succeeded. It was for that reason that Finge had been driven into the jealous revenge of torturing Harlan with the knowledge that Noÿs’s motivation had been a practical one, and that he could never have her.

Yet Noÿs had refused Finge even with eternal life at stake and
had
accepted Harlan. She had that much of a choice and she had made it in Harlan’s favor. So it wasn’t calculation entirely. Emotion played a part.

Harlan’s thoughts were wild and jumbled, and grew more heated with every moment.

He
must
have her, and
now.
Before any Reality Change. What was it Finge had said to him, jeering:
The now does not last, even in Eternity.

Doesn’t it, though? Doesn’t it?

Harlan had known exactly what he must do. Finge’s angry
taunting had goaded him into a frame of mind where he was ready for crime and Finge’s final sneer had, at least, inspired him with the nature of the deed he must commit.

He had not wasted a moment after that. It was with excitement and even joy that he left his quarters, at all but a run, to commit a major crime against Eternity.

No one had questioned him. No one had stopped him.

There was that advantage, anyway, in the social isolation of a Technician. He went via the kettle channels to a door to Time and set its controls. There was the chance, of course, that someone would happen along on a legitimate errand and wonder why the door was in use. He hesitated, and then decided to stamp his seal on the marker. A sealed door would draw little attention. An unsealed door in active use would be a nine-day wonder.

Of course, it might be Finge who stumbled upon the door. He would have to chance that.

Noÿs was still standing as he had left her. Wretched hours (physiohours) had passed since Harlan had left the 482nd for a lonely Eternity, but he returned now to the same Time, within a matter of seconds, that he had left. Not a hair on Noÿs’s head had stirred.

She looked startled. “Did you forget something, Andrew?”

Harlan stared at her hungrily, but made no move to touch her. He remembered Finge’s words, and he dared not risk a repulse. He said stiffly, “You’ve got to do as I say.”

She said, “But is something wrong, then? You just left. You just this minute left.”

“Don’t worry,” said Harlan. It was all he could do to keep from taking her hand, from trying to soothe her. Instead he spoke harshly. It was as though some demon were forcing him to do all the wrong things. Why had he come back at the first available moment? He was only disturbing her by his almost instantaneous return after leaving.

(He knew the answer to that, really. He had a two-day margin of grace allowed by the spatio-temporal chart. The earlier portions of that period of grace were safer and yielded least chance of discovery. It was a natural tendency to crowd it as far downwhen as he could. A foolish risk, too, though. He might easily have miscalculated and entered Time before he had left it physiohours earlier. What then? It was one of the first rules he had learned as an Observer: One person occupying two points in the same Time of the same Reality runs a risk of meeting himself.

Somehow that was something to be avoided. Why? Harlan knew he didn’t want to meet himself. He didn’t want to be staring into the eyes of another and earlier [or later] Harlan. Beyond that it would be a paradox, and what was it Twissell was fond of saying? “There are no paradoxes in Time, but only because Time deliberately avoids paradoxes.”)

All the time Harlan thought dizzily of all this Noÿs stared at him with large, luminous eyes.

Then she came to him and put cool hands on either burning cheek and said softly, “You’re in trouble.”

To Harlan her glance seemed kindly, loving. Yet how could that be? She had what she wanted. What else was there? He seized her wrists and said huskily, “Will you come with me? Now? Without asking any questions? Doing exactly as I say?”

“Must I?” she asked.

“You must, Noÿs. It’s very important.”

“Then I’ll come.” She said it matter-of-factly, as though
such a request came to her each day and was always accepted.

At the lip of the kettle Noÿs hesitated a moment, then stepped in.

Harlan said, “We’re going upwhen, Noÿs.”

“That means the future, doesn’t it?”

The kettle was already faintly humming as she entered it and she was scarcely seated when Harlan unobtrusively moved the contact at his elbow.

She showed no signs of nausea at the beginnings of that indescribable sensation of “motion” through Time. He was afraid she might.

She sat there quietly, so beautiful and so at ease that he ached, looking at her, and gave not the particle of a damn that, by bringing a Timer, unauthorized, into Eternity, he had committed a felony.

She said, “Does that dial show the numbers of the years, Andrew?”

“The Centuries.”

“You mean we’re a thousand years in the future? Already?”

“That’s right.”

“It doesn’t feel like it.”

“I know.”

She looked about. “But how are we moving?”

“I don’t know, Noÿs.”

“You
don’t
?”

“There are many things about Eternity that are hard to understand.”

The numbers on the temporometer
marched.
Faster and faster they moved till they were a blur. With his elbow Harlan had nudged the speed stick to high. The power drain might cause some surprise in the power plants, but he doubted it.
No one had been waiting for him in Eternity when he returned with Noÿs and that was nine-tenths the battle. Now it was only necessary to get her to a safe place.

Again Harlan looked at her. “Eternals don’t know everything.”

“And I’m not an Eternal,” she murmured. “I know so little.”

Harlan’s pulse quickened.
Still
not an Eternal? But Finge said . . .

Leave it at that, he pleaded with himself. Leave it at that. She’s coming with you. She smiles at you. What more do you want?

But he spoke anyway. He said, “You think an Eternal lives forever, don’t you?”

“Well, they call them Eternals, you know, and everyone says they do.” She smiled at him brightly. “But they don’t, do they?”

“You don’t think so, then?”

“After I was in Eternity a while, I didn’t. People didn’t talk as though they lived forever, and there were old men there.”

“Yet you told me I lived forever—that night.”

She moved closer to him along the seat, still smiling. “I thought: who knows?”

He said, without being quite able to keep the strain out of his voice, “How does a Timer go about becoming an Eternal?”