The End of Eternity (22 page)

His empty hands moved to his lips and when nothing happened, he looked at the space between finger and thumb blankly.

Harlan thought: He’s not as calm as he’s trying to sound. He can’t be. But why does he talk all this nonsense
now
? With Eternity ending?

Then in agony: But why doesn’t it
end
then? Now!

Twissell said, “When I allowed you to go to Finge just recently, I more than half suspected danger. But Mallansohn’s memoir
said
you were away the last month and no other natural reason for your absence offered itself. Fortunately, Finge underplayed his hand.”

“In what way?” asked Harlan wearily. He didn’t really care, but Twissell talked and talked and it was easier to take part than to try to shut the sound out of his ears.

Twissell said, “Finge labeled his report: ‘
In re
unprofessional conduct of Technician Andrew Harlan.’ He was being the faithful Eternal, you see, being cool, impartial, unexcited. He was leaving it to the Council to rage and throw itself at me. Unfortunately for himself, he did not know of your real importance. He did not realize that any report concerning you would be instantly referred to me, unless its supreme importance were made perfectly clear on the very face of things.”

“You never spoke to me of this?”

“How could I? I was afraid to do anything that would disturb you with the crisis of the project at hand. I gave you every opportunity to bring your problem to me.”

Every opportunity? Harlan’s mouth twisted in disbelief, but then he thought of Twissell’s weary face on the Communiplate asking him if he had nothing to say to him. That was yesterday. Only yesterday.

Harlan shook his head, but turned his face away now.

Twissell said softly, “I realized at once that he had deliberately goaded you into your—rash action.”

Harlan looked up. “You know that?”

“Does that surprise you? I knew Finge was after my neck. I’ve known it for a long time. I am an old man, boy. I know these things. But there are ways in which doubtful Computers can be checked upon. There are some protective devices, culled out of Time, that are not placed in the museums. There are some that are known to the Council alone.”

Harlan thought bitterly of the time-block at the 100,000th.

“From the report and from what I knew independently, it was easy to deduce what must have happened.”

Harlan asked suddenly, “I suppose Finge suspected you of spying?”

“He might have. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Harlan thought back to his first days with Finge when Twissell first showed his abnormal interest in the young Observer. Finge had known nothing of the Mallansohn project, and he had been interested in Twissell’s interference. “Have you ever met Senior Computer Twissell?” he had once asked and, thinking back, Harlan could recall the exact tone of sharp uneasiness in the man’s voice. As early as that Finge must have suspected Harlan of being Twissell’s finger-man. His enmity and hate must have begun that early.

Twissell was speaking, “So if you had come to me—”

“Come to
you
?” cried Harlan. “What of the Council?”

“Of the entire Council, only I know.”

“You never told them?” Harlan tried to be mocking.

“I never did.”

Harlan felt feverish. His clothes were choking him. Was this nightmare to go on forever. Foolish, irrelevant chatter!
For what? Why?

Why didn’t Eternity end? Why didn’t the clean peace of
non-Reality reach out for them?
Great Time, what was wrong?

Twissell said, “Don’t you believe me?”

Harlan shouted, “Why should I? They came to look at me, didn’t they? At that breakfast? Why should they have done that if they didn’t know of the report? They came to look at the queer phenomenon who had broken the laws of Eternity but who couldn’t be touched for one more day. One more day and then the project would be over. They came to gloat for the tomorrow they were expecting.”

“My boy, there was nothing of that. They wanted to see you only because they were human. Councilmen are human too. They could not witness the final kettle drive because the Mallansohn memoir did not place them at the scene. They could not interview Cooper since the memoir made no mention of that either. Yet they wanted something. Father Time, boy, don’t you see they would want something? You were as close as they could get, so they brought you close and stared at you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth.”

Harlan said, “Is it? And while we ate, Councilman Sennor talked of a man meeting himself. He obviously knew about my illegal trips into the 482nd and my nearly meeting myself. It was his way of poking fun at me, enjoying himself cutely at my expense.”

Twissell said, “Sennor? You worried about Sennor? Do you know the pathetic figure he is? His homewhen is the 803rd, one of the few cultures in which the human body is deliberately disfigured to meet the aesthetic requirements of the time. It is rendered hairless at adolescence.

“Do you know what that means in the continuity of man? Surely you do. A disfigurement sets men apart from their ancestors and descendants. Men of the 803rd are poor risks as Eternals; they are too different from the rest of us. Few are
chosen. Sennor is the only one of his Century ever to sit on the Council.

“Don’t you see how that affects him? Surely you understand what insecurity means. Did it ever occur to you that a Councilman could be insecure? Sennor has to listen to discussions involving the eradication of his Reality for the very characteristic that makes him so conspicuous among us. And eradicating it would leave him one of a very few in all the generation to be disfigured as he is. Someday it will happen.

“He finds refuge in philosophy. He overcompensates by taking the lead in conversation, by deliberately airing unpopular or unaccepted viewpoints. His man-meeting-himself paradox is a case in point. I told you that he used it to predict disaster for the project and it was we, the Councilmen, that he was attempting to annoy, not you. It had nothing to do with you. Nothing!”

Twissell had grown heated. In the long emotion of his words he seemed to forget where he was and the crisis that faced them, for he slipped back into the quick-gestured, uneasily motioned gnome that Harlan knew so well. He even slipped a cigarette from his sleeve pouch and had all but frictioned it into combustion.

But then he stopped, wheeled, and looked at Harlan again, reaching back through all his own words to what Harlan had last said, as though until that moment, he had not heard them properly.

He said. “What do you mean, you almost met yourself?”

Harlan told him briefly and went on, “You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

There were a few moments of silence that were as welcome to the feverish Harlan as water would have been.

Twissell said, “Is that it? What if you
had
met yourself?”

“I didn’t.”

Twissell ignored that. “There is always room for random variation. With an infinite number of Realities there can be no such thing as determinism. Suppose that in the Mallansohn Reality, in the previous turn of the cycle—”

“The circle goes on forever?” asked Harlan with what wonder he could still find in himself.

“Do you think only twice? Do you think two is a magic number? It’s a matter of infinite turns of the circle in finite physiotime. Just as you can draw a pencil round and round the circumference of a circle infinitely yet enclose a finite area. In previous turns of the cycle, you had not met yourself. This one time, the statistical uncertainty of things made it possible for you to meet yourself. Reality had to change to prevent the meeting and in the new Reality, you did not send Cooper back to the 24th but—”

Harlan cried, “What’s all this talk about? What are you getting at? It’s all done. Everything. Let me alone now!
Let me alone!
”

“I want you to know you’ve done wrong. I want you to realize you did the wrong thing.”

“I didn’t. And even if I did,
it’s done.
”

“But it is
not
done. Listen just a little while longer.” Twissell was wheedling, almost crooning with an agonized gentleness. “You will have your girl. I promised that. I still promise it. She will not be harmed. You will not be harmed. I promise you this. It is my personal guarantee.”

Harlan stared at him wide-eyed. “But it’s too late. What’s the use?”

“It is
not
too late. Things are
not
irreparable. With your help, we can succeed yet. I must have your help. You must realize that you did wrong. I am trying to explain this to you. You must want to undo what you have done.”

Harlan licked his dry lips with a dry tongue and thought: he
is
mad. His mind can’t accept the truth—or, does the Council know more?

Did it? Did it? Could it reverse the verdict of the Changes?

Could they halt Time or reverse it?

He said, “You locked me in the control room, kept me helpless, you thought, till it was all over.”

“You said you were afraid something might go wrong with you; that you might not be able to carry on with your part.”

“That was meant to be a threat.”

“I took it literally. Forgive me. I must have your help.”

It came to that. Harlan’s help must be had. Was he mad? Was Harlan mad? Did madness have meaning? Or anything at all, for that matter?

The Council needed his help. For that help they would promise him anything. Noÿs. Computership. What would they not promise him? And when his help was done with, what would he get? He would not be fooled a second time.

“No!” he said.

“You’ll have Noÿs.”

“You mean the Council will be willing to break the laws of Eternity once the danger is safely gone? I don’t believe it.” How could the danger safely be passed, a sane scrap of his mind demanded. What was this all about?

“The Council will never know.”

“Would
you
be willing to break the laws? You’re the ideal Eternal. With the danger gone, you would obey the law. You couldn’t act otherwise.”

Twissell reddened blotchily, high on each cheekbone. From the old face all shrewdness and strength drained away. There was left only a strange sorrow.

“I will keep my word to you and break the law,” said Twissell, “for a reason you don’t imagine. I don’t know how much time is left us before Eternity disappears. It could be hours; it could be months. But I have spent so much time in the hope of bringing you to reason that I will spend a little more. Will you listen to me? Please?”

Harlan hesitated. Then, out of a conviction of the uselessness of all things as much as out of anything else, said wearily, “Go on.”

I have heard (began Twissell) that I was born old, that I cut my teeth on a Micro-Computaplex, that I keep my hand computer in a special pocket of my pajamas when I sleep, that my brain is made up of little force-relays in endless parallel hookups and that each corpuscle of my blood is a microscopic spatio-temporal chart floating in computer oil.

All these stories come to me eventually, and I think I must be a little proud of them. Maybe I go around believing them a bit. It’s a foolish thing for an old man to do, but it makes life a little easier.

Does that surprise you? That I must find a way to make life easier? I, Senior Computer Twissell, senior member of the Allwhen Council?

Maybe that’s why I smoke. Ever think of that? I have to have a reason, you know. Eternity is essentially a nonsmoking society, and most of Time is, too. I’ve thought of that often. I sometimes think it’s a rebellion against Eternity. Something to take the place of a greater rebellion that failed . . .

No, it’s all right. A tear or two won’t hurt me, and it isn’t pretense, believe me. It’s just that I haven’t thought about this for a long time. It isn’t pleasant.

It involved a woman, of course, as your affair did. That’s not coincidence. It’s almost inevitable, if you stop to think of it. An Eternal, who must sell the normal satisfactions of family life for a handful of perforations on foil, is ripe for infection. That’s one of the reasons Eternity must take the precautions it does. And, apparently, that’s also why Eternals are so ingenious in evading the precautions once in a while.

I remember my woman. It’s foolish of me to do so, perhaps. I can’t remember anything else about that physiotime.
My old colleagues are only names in the record books; the Changes I supervised—all but one—are only items in the Computaplex memory pools. I remember her, though, very well. Perhaps you can understand that.

I had had a long-standing request for liaison in the books; and after I achieved status as a Junior Computer, she was assigned to me. She was a girl of this very Century, the 575th. I didn’t see her until after the assignment, of course. She was intelligent and kind. Not beautiful or even pretty, but then, even when young (yes, I was young, never mind the myths) I was not noted for my own looks. We were well suited to one another by temperament, she and I, and if I were a Timed man, I would have been proud to have her as my wife. I told her that many times. I believe it pleased her. I know it was the truth. Not all Eternals, who must take their women as and how Computing permits, are that fortunate.

In that particular Reality, she was to die young, of course, and none of her analogues was available for liaison. At first, I took that philosophically. After all, it was her short lifetime which made it possible for her to live with me without deleteriously affecting Reality.

I am ashamed of that now, of the fact that I was glad she had a short time to live. Just at first, that is. Just at first.

I visited her as often as spatio-temporal charting allowed. I squeezed every minute out of it, giving up meals and sleep when necessary, shifting my labor load shamelessly whenever I could. Her amiability passed the heights of my expectations, and I was in love. I put it bluntly. My experience of love is very small, and understanding it through Observation in Time is a shaky matter. As far as my understanding went, however, I was in love.

What began as the satisfaction of an emotional and physical need became a great deal more. Her imminent death stopped being a convenience and became a calamity. I Life-Plotted her. I didn’t go to the Life-Plotting departments,
either. I did it myself. That surprises you, I imagine. It was a misdemeanor, but it was nothing compared to the crimes I committed later.