The End of Eternity (23 page)

Yes, I, Laban Twissell, Senior Computer Twissell.

Three separate times, a point in physiotime came and passed, during which some simple action of my own might have altered her personal Reality. Naturally, I knew that no such personally motivated Change could possibly be authorized by the Council. Still, I began to feel personally responsible for her death. That was part of my motivation later on, you see.

She became pregnant. I took no action, though I should have. I had worked her Life-Plot, modified to include her relationship with me, and I knew pregnancy to be a high-probability consequence. As you may or may not know, Timed women are occasionally made pregnant by Eternals despite precautions. It is not unheard of. Still, since no Eternal may have a child, such pregnancies as do occur are ended painlessly and safely. There are many methods.

My Life-Plotting had indicated she would die before delivery, so I took no precautions. She was happy in her pregnancy and I wanted her to remain so. So I only watched and tried to smile when she told me she could feel life stirring within her.

But then something happened. She gave birth prematurely—

I don’t wonder you look that way. I had a child. A real child of my own. You’ll find no other Eternal, perhaps, who can say that. That was more than a misdemeanor. That was a serious felony, but it was still nothing.

I hadn’t expected it. Birth and its problems were an aspect of life with which I had had little experience.

I went back to the Life-Plot in panic and found the living child, in an alternate solution to a low-probability forklet I had overlooked. A professional Life-Plotter would not have
overlooked it and I had done wrong to trust my own abilities that far.

But what could I do now?

I couldn’t kill the child. The mother had two weeks to live. Let the child live with her till then, I thought. Two weeks of happiness is not an exorbitant gift to ask.

The mother died, as foreseen, and in the manner foreseen. I sat in her room, for all the time permitted by the spatio-temporal chart, aching with a sorrow all the keener for my having waited for death, in full knowledge, for over a year. In my arms, I held my son and hers.

—Yes, I let it live. Why do you cry out so? Are
you
going to condemn me?

You cannot know what it means to hold a little atom of your own life in your arms. I may have a Computaplex for nerves and spatio-temporal charts for a bloodstream, but I do know.

I let it live. I committed that crime, too. I put it in the charge of an appropriate organization and returned when I could (in strict temporal sequence, held even with physiotime) to make necessary payments and to watch the boy grow.

Two years went by that way. Periodically, I checked the boy’s Life-Plot (I was used to breaking that particular rule, by now) and was pleased to find that there were no signs of deleterious effects on the then-current Reality at probability levels over 0.0001. The boy learned to walk and mispronounced a few words. He was not taught to call me “daddy.” Whatever speculations the Timed people of the child care institution might have made concerning me I don’t know. They took their money and said nothing.

Then, when the two years had passed, the necessities of a Change that included the 575th at one wing was brought up before the Allwhen Council. I, having been lately promoted to Assistant Computer, was placed in charge. It was the first Change ever left to my sole supervision.

I was proud, of course, but also apprehensive. My son was an intruder in the Reality. He could scarcely be expected to have analogues. Thought of his passage into nonexistence saddened me.

I worked at the Change and I flatter myself even yet that I did a flawless job. My first one. But I succumbed to a temptation. I succumbed to it all the more easily because it was becoming an old story now for me. I was a hardened criminal, a habitué of crime. I worked out a new Life-Plot for my son under the new Reality, certain of what I would find.

But then for twenty-four hours, without eating or sleeping, I sat in my office, striving with the completed Life-Plot, tearing at it in a despairing effort to find an error.

There was no error.

The next day, holding back my solution to the Change, I worked out a spatio-temporal chart, using rough methods of approximation (after all, the Reality was not to last long) and entered Time at a point more than thirty years upwhen from the birth of my child.

He was thirty-four years old, as old as I myself. I introduced myself as a distant relation, making use of my knowledge of his mother’s family, to do so. He had no knowledge of his father, no memory of my visits to him in his infancy.

He was an aeronautical engineer. The 575th was expert in half a dozen varieties of air travel (as it still is in the current Reality), and my son was a happy and successful member of his society. He was married to an ardently enamored girl, but would have no children. Nor would the girl have married at all in the Reality in which my son had not existed. I had known that from the beginning. I had known there would be no deleterious affect on Reality. Otherwise, I might not have found it in my heart to let the boy live. I am not
completely
abandoned.

I spent the day with my son. I spoke to him formally,
smiled politely, took my leave coolly when the spatio-temporal chart dictated. But underneath all that, I watched and absorbed every action, filling myself with him, and trying to live one day at least out of a Reality that the next day (by physiotime) would no longer have existed.

How I longed to visit my wife one last time, too, during that portion of Time in which she lived, but I had used every second that had been available to me. I dared not even enter Time to see her, unseen.

I returned to Eternity and spent one last horrible night wrestling futilely against what must be. The next morning I handed in my computations together with my recommendations for Change.

Twissell’s voice had lowered to a whisper and now it stopped. He sat there with his shoulders bent, his eyes fixed on the floor between his knees, and his fingers twisting slowly into and out of a knotted clasp.

Harlan, waiting vainly for another sentence out of the old man, cleared his throat. He found himself pitying the man, pitying him despite the many crimes he had committed. He said, “And that’s all?”

Twissell whispered, “No, the worst—the worst—An analogue of my son did exist. In the new Reality, he existed—as a paraplegic from the age of four. Forty-two years in bed, under circumstances that barred me from arranging to have the nerve-regenerating techniques of the 900’s applied to his case, or even for arranging to have his life ended painlessly.

“That new Reality still exists. My son is still out there in the appropriate portion of the Century.
I
did that to him. It was my mind and my Computaplex that discovered this new life for him, and my word that ordered the Change. I had committed a number of crimes for his sake and for his mother’s, but that one last deed, though strictly in accordance with my
oath as an Eternal, has always seemed to me to be my great crime,
the
crime.”

There was nothing to say, and Harlan said nothing.

Twissell said, “But you see now why I understand your case, why I will be willing to let you have your girl. It would not harm Eternity and, in a way, it would be expiation for my crime.”

And Harlan believed. All in one change of mind, he believed!

Harlan sank to his knees and lifted his clenched fists to his temples. He bent his head and rocked slowly as savage despair beat through him.

He had thrown Eternity away, and lost Noÿs—when, except for his Samson-smash, he might have saved one and kept the other.

Twissell was shaking Harlan’s shoulders. The old man’s voice urgently called his name.

“Harlan! Harlan! For Time’s sake, man.”

Harlan emerged only slowly from the slough. “What are we to do?”

“Certainly not
this.
Not despair. To begin with, listen to me. Forget your Technician’s view of Eternity and look at it through a Computer’s eyes. The view is more sophisticated. When you alter something in Time and create a Reality Change, the Change may take place at once. Why should that be?”

Harlan said shakily, “Because your alteration has made the Change inevitable?”

“Has it? You could go back and reverse your alteration, couldn’t you?”

“I suppose so. I never did, though. Or anyone that I heard of.”

“Right. There is no intention of reversing an alteration, so it goes through as planned. But here we have something else. An unintentional alteration. You sent Cooper into the
wrong Century and now I firmly intend to reverse that alteration and bring Cooper back here.”

“For Time’s sake, how?”

“I’m not sure yet, but there
must
be a way. If there were no way, the alteration would be irreversible; Change would come at once. But Change has not come. We are still in the Reality of the Mallansohn memoir. That means the alteration is reversible and
will
be reversed.”

“What?” Harlan’s nightmare was expanding and swirling, growing murkier and more engulfing.

“There must be some way of knitting the circle in Time together again and our ability to find the way to do it must be a high-probability affair. As long as our Reality exists, we can be certain that the solution remains high-probability. If at any moment, you or I make the wrong decision, if the probability of healing the circle falls below some crucial magnitude, Eternity disappears. Do you understand?”

Harlan was not sure that he did. He wasn’t trying very hard. Slowly he got to his feet and stumbled his way into a chair.

“You mean we can get Cooper back—”

“And send him to the right place, yes. Catch him at the moment he leaves the kettle and he may end up in his proper place in the 24th no more than a few physiohours older; physiodays, at the most. It would be an alteration, of course, but undoubtedly not enough of one. Reality would be rocked, boy, but not upset.”

“But how do we get him?”

“We know there’s a way, or Eternity wouldn’t be existing this moment. As to what that way is, that is why I need you, why I’ve fought to get you back on my side. You’re the expert on the Primitive. Tell me.”

“I can’t,” groaned Harlan.

“You can,” insisted Twissell.

There was suddenly no trace of age or weariness in the old man’s voice. His eyes were ablaze with the light of combat and he wielded his cigarette like a lance. Even to Harlan’s regret-drugged senses the man seemed to be enjoying himself, actually enjoying himself, now that battle had been joined.

“We can reconstruct the event,” said Twissell. “Here is the thrust control. You’re standing at it, waiting for the signal. It comes. You make contact and at the same time squeeze the power thrust in the downwhen direction. How far?”

“I don’t know, I tell you. I don’t know.”

“
You
don’t know, but your muscles do. Stand there and take the control in your hand. Get hold of yourself. Take them, boy. You’re waiting for the signal. You’re hating me. You’re hating the Council. You’re hating Eternity. You’re wearying your heart out for Noÿs. Put yourself back at that moment. Feel what you felt then. Now I’ll set the clock in motion again. I’ll give you one minute, boy, to remember your emotions and force them back into your thalamus. Then, at the approach of zero, let your right hand jerk the control as it had done before. Then take your hand away! Don’t move it back again. Are you ready?”

“I don’t think I can do it.”

“You don’t think—Father Time, you have no choice. Is there another way you can get back your girl?”

There wasn’t. Harlan forced himself back to the controls, and as he did so emotion flooded back. He did not have to call on it. Repeating the physical movements brought them back. The red hairline on the clock started moving.

Detachedly he thought: The last minute of life?

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.

Minus twelve seconds.

Contact!

His right hand moved.

Minus five seconds.

Noÿs!

His right hand mo—ZERO—ved spasmodically.

He jumped away, panting.

Twissell came forward, peering at the dial. “Twentieth Century,” he said. “Nineteen point three eight, to be exact.”

Harlan choked out, “I don’t know. I tried to feel the same, but it was different. I knew what I was doing and that made it different.”

Twissell said, “I know, I know. Maybe it’s all wrong. Call it a first approximation.” He paused a moment in mental calculation, took a pocket computer half out of its container and thrust it back without consulting it. “To Time with the decimal points. Say the probablity is 0.99 that you sent him back to the second quarter of the 20th. Somewhere between 19.25 and 19.50. All right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, now, look. If I make a firm decision to concentrate on that part of the Primitive to the exclusion of all else and if I am wrong, the chances are that I will have lost my chance to keep the circle in time closed and Eternity will disappear. The decision itself will be the crucial point, the Minimum Necessary Change, the M.N.C., to bring about the Change. I now make the decision. I decide, definitely—”

Harlan looked about cautiously, as though Reality had grown so fragile that a sudden head movement might shatter it.

Harlan said, “I’m thoroughly conscious of Eternity.” (Twissell’s normality had infected him to the point where his voice sounded firm in his own ears.)

“Then Eternity still exists,” said Twissell in a blunt,
matter-of-fact manner, “and we have made the right decision. Now there’s nothing more to do here for the while. Let’s get to my office and we can let the subcommittee of the Council swarm over this place, if that will make them any happier. As far as they are concerned, the project has ended successfully. If it doesn’t, they’ll never know. Nor we.”