The End of Eternity (26 page)

“Noÿs!”

And all at once, so quickly that she was in his arms before he was sure he had seen her at all, she was there with him, and her arms were around him and clutching him and her cheek was against his shoulder and her dark hair was soft against his chin.

“Andrew?” she said, her voice muffled by the pressure of his body. “Where were you? It’s been days and I was getting frightened.”

Harlan held her out at arm’s length, staring at her with a kind of hungry solemnity. “Are you all right?”

“
I’m
all right. I thought something might have happened to you. I thought—” She broke off, terror springing into her eyes and gasped, “Andrew!”

Harlan whirled.

It was only Twissell, panting.

Noÿs must have gained confidence from Harlan’s expression. She said more quietly, “Do you know him, Andrew? Is it all right?”

Harlan said, “It’s all right. This is my superior, Senior Computer Laban Twissell. He knows of you.”

“A Senior Computer?” Noÿs shrank away.

Twissell advanced slowly. “I will help you, my child. I will help you both. The Technician has my promise, if he would only believe it.”

“My apologies, Computer,” said Harlan stiffly, and not yet entirely repentant.

“Forgiven,” said Twissell. He held out his hand, took the girl’s reluctant one. “Tell me, girl, has it been well with you here?”

“I’ve been worried.”

“There’s been no one here, since Harlan last left you.”

“N—no, sir.”

“No one at all? Nothing?”

She shook her head. Her dark eyes sought Harlan’s. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing, girl. A foolish nightmare. Come, we will take you back to the 575th.”

On the kettle back Andrew Harlan sank, by degrees, into a troubled and deepening silence. He did not look up when the 100,000th was passed in the downwhen direction and Twissell had snorted an obvious sigh of relief as though he had half expected to be trapped on the upwhen side.

He scarcely moved when Noÿs’s hand stole into his, and the manner in which he returned the pressure of her fingers was almost mechanical.

Noÿs slept in another room and now Twissell’s restlessness reached a peak of devouring intensity.

“The advertisement, boy! You have your woman. My part of the agreement is done.”

Silently, still abstracted, Harlan turned the pages of the volume on the desk. He found his page.

“It’s simple enough,” he said, “but it’s in English. I’ll read it to you and then translate it.”

It was a small advertisement in the upper left-hand corner of a page numbered 30. Against an irregular line drawing as background were the unadorned words, in block letters:

ALL THE
TALK
OF THE
MARKET

Underneath, in smaller letters, it said; “Investments Newsletter, P. O. Box 14, Denver, Colorado.”

Twissell listened painstakingly to Harlan’s translation and was obviously disappointed. He said, “What is the market? What do they mean by that?”

“The stock market,” said Harlan impatiently. “A system by which private capital was invested in business. But that’s not the point at all. Don’t you see the line drawing against which the advertisement is set?”

“Yes. The mushroom cloud of an A-bomb blast. An attention getter. What about it?”

Harlan exploded. “Great Time, Computer, what’s wrong with you? Look at the date of the magazine issue.”

He pointed to the top heading, just to the left of the page number. It read March 28, 1932.

Harlan said, “That scarcely needs translation. The numbers are about those of Standard Intertemporal and you see it’s the 19.32nd Century. Don’t you know that at that time no human being who had ever lived had seen the mushroom cloud? No one could possibly reproduce it so accurately, except—”

“Now, wait. It’s just a line pattern,” said Twissell, trying to retain his equilibrium. “It might resemble the mushroom cloud only coincidentally.”

“Might it? Will you look at the wording again?” Harlan’s fingers punched out the short lines: “All the—Talk—Of the—Market. The initials spell out ATOM, which is English for atom. Is that coincidence, too? Not a chance.

“Don’t you see, Computer, how this advertisement fits the conditions you yourself set up? It caught my eye instantly.
Cooper knew it would out of sheer anachronism. At the same time, it has no meaning other than its face value, no meaning at all, for any man of the 19.32nd.

“So it must be Cooper. That’s his message. We have the date to the nearest week of a Centicentury. We have his mailing address. It is only necessary to go after him and I’m the only one with enough knowledge of the Primitive to manage that.”

“And you’ll go?” Twissell’s face was ablaze with relief and happiness.

“I’ll go—on one condition.”

Twissell frowned in a sudden reversal of emotion. “Again conditions?”

“The same condition. I’m not adding new ones. Noÿs must be safe. She must come with me. I will not leave her behind.”

“You
still
don’t trust me? In what way have I failed you? What can there be that still disturbs you?”

“One thing, Computer,” said Harlan solemnly. “One thing still. There
was
a barrier across the 100,000th. Why? That is what still disturbs me.”

It did not stop disturbing him. It was a matter that grew in mind as the days of preparation sped by. It interposed itself between him and Twissell; then between him and Noÿs. When the day of departure came, he was only distantly aware of the fact.

It was all he could do to rouse a shadow of interest when Twissell returned from a session with the Council subcommittee. He said, “How did it go?”

Twissell said wearily, “It wasn’t exactly the most pleasant conversation I’ve ever had.”

Harlan was almost willing to let it go at that, but he broke his moment’s silence with a muttered “I suppose you said nothing about—”

“No, no,” was the testy response. “I said nothing about the girl or about your part in the misdirection of Cooper. It was an unfortunate error, a mechanical failure. I took full responsibility.”

Harlan’s conscience, burdened as it was, could find room for a twinge. He said, “That won’t affect you well.”

“What can they do? They must wait for the correction to
be made before they can touch me. If we fail, we’re all beyond help or harm. If we succeed, success itself will probably protect me. And if it doesn’t—” The old man shrugged. “I plan to retire from active participation in Eternity’s affairs thereafter anyway.” But he fumbled his cigarette and disposed of it before it was half burned away.

He sighed. “I would rather not have brought them into this at all, but there would have been no way, otherwise, of using the special kettle for further trips past the downwhen terminus.”

Harlan turned away. His thoughts moved around and about the same channels that had been occupied to the increasing exclusion of all else for days. He heard Twissell’s further remark dimly, but it was only at its repetition that he said with a start, “Pardon me?”

“I say, is your woman ready, boy? Does she understand what she’s to do?”

“She’s ready. I’ve told her everything.”

“How did she take it?”

“What? . . . Oh, yes, uh, as I expected her to. She’s not afraid.”

“It’s less than three physiohours now.”

“I know.”

That was all for the moment, and Harlan was left alone with his thoughts and a sickening realization of what he must do.

With the kettle loading done and the controls adjusted Harlan and Noÿs appeared in a final change of costume, approximating that of an unurbanized area of the early 20th.

Noÿs had modified Harlan’s suggestion for her wardrobe, according to some instinctive feeling she claimed women had when it came to matters of clothing and aesthetics. She
chose thoughtfully from pictures in the advertisements of the appropriated volumes of the news magazine and had minutely scrutinized items imported from a dozen different Centuries.

Occasionally she would say to Harlan, “What do you think?”

He would shrug. “If it’s instinctive knowledge, I’ll leave it to you.”

“That’s a bad sign, Andrew,” she said, with a lightness that did not quite ring true. “You’re too pliable. What’s the matter, anyway? You’re just not yourself. You haven’t been for days.”

“I’m all right,” Harlan said in a monotone.

Twissell’s first sight of them in the role of natives of the 20th elicited a feeble attempt at jocularity. “Father Time,” he said, “what ugly costumes in the Primitive, and yet how it fails to hide your beauty, my—my dear.”

Noÿs smiled warmly at him, and Harlan, standing there impassively silent, was forced to admit that Twissell’s rust-choked vein of gallantry had something of truth in it. Noÿs’s clothing encompassed her without accentuating her as clothing should. Her make up was confined to unimaginative dabs of color on lips and cheeks and an ugly rearrangement of the eyebrow line. Her lovely hair (this had been the worst of it) had been cut ruthlessly. Yet she was beautiful.

Harlan himself was already growing accustomed to his own uncomfortable belt, the tightness of fit under armpits and in the crotch and the mousy lack of color about his rough-textured clothing. Wearing strange costumes to suit a Century was an old story to him.

Twissell was saying. “Now what I really wanted to do was to install hand controls inside the kettle, as we discussed, but there isn’t any way, apparently. The engineers simply must have a source of power large enough to handle temporal displacement and that isn’t available outside Eternity. Temporal
tension while occupying the Primitive is all that can be managed. However, we have a return lever.”

He led them into the kettle, picking his way among the piled supplies, and pointed out the obtruding finger of metal that now marred the smooth inner wall of the kettle.

“It amounts to the installation of a simple switch,” he said. “Instead of returning automatically to Eternity, the kettle will remain in the Primitive indefinitely. Once the lever is plunged home, however, you will return. There will then be the matter of the second and, I hope, final trip—”

“A second trip?” asked Noÿs at once.

Harlan said, “I haven’t explained that. Look, this first trip is intended merely to fix the time of Cooper’s arrival precisely. We don’t know how long a Time-lapse exists between his arrival and the placing of the advertisement. We’ll reach him by the post-office box, and learn, if possible, the exact minute of his arrival, or as close as we can, anyway. We can then return to that moment plus fifteen minutes to allow for the kettle to have left Cooper—”

Twissell interposed, “Couldn’t have the kettle in the same place at the same time in two different physiotimes, you know,” and tried to smile.

Noÿs seemed to absorb it. “I see,” she said, not too definitely.

Twissell said to Noÿs, “Picking up Cooper at the time of his arrival will reverse all micro-changes. The A-bomb advertisement will disappear again and Cooper will know only that the kettle, having disappeared as we told him it would, had unexpectedly appeared again. He will not know that he was in the wrong Century and he will not be told. We will tell him that there was some vital instruction we had forgotten to give him (we’ll have to manufacture some) and we can only hope that he will regard the matter as so unimportant that he won’t mention being sent back twice when he writes his memoir.”

Noÿs lifted her plucked eyebrows. “It’s very complicated.”

“Yes. Unfortunately.” He rubbed his hands together and looked at the others as though nursing an inner doubt. Then he straightened, produced a fresh cigarette, and even managed a certain jauntiness as he said, “And now, boy, good luck.” Twissell touched hands briefly with Harlan, nodded to Noÿs, and stepped out of the kettle.

“Are we leaving now?” asked Noÿs of Harlan when they were alone.

“In a few minutes,” said Harlan.

He glanced sideways at Noÿs. She was looking up at him, smiling, unfrightened. Momentarily his own spirits responded to that. But that was emotion, not reason, he counseled himself, instinct, not thought. He looked away.

The trip was nothing, or almost nothing; no different from an ordinary kettle ride. Midway there was a kind of internal jar that might have been the downwhen terminus and might have been purely psychosomatic. It was barely noticeable.

And then they were in the Primitive and they stepped into a craggy, lonely world brightened by the splendor of an afternoon sun. There was a soft wind with a chilly edge to it and, most of all, silence.

The bare rocks were tumbled and mighty, colored into dull rainbows by compounds of iron, copper, and chromium. The grandeur of the manless and all but lifeless surroundings dwarfed and shriveled Harlan. Eternity, which did not belong to the world of matter, had no sun and none but imported air. His memories of his own homewhen were dim. His Observations in the various Centuries had dealt with men and their cities. He had never experienced
this.

Noÿs touched his elbow.

“Andrew! I’m cold.”

He turned to her with a start.

She said, “Hadn’t we better set up the Radiant?”

He said, “Yes. In Cooper’s cavern.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“It’s right here,” he said shortly.

He had no doubt of that. The memoir had located it and first Cooper, now he, had been pinpointed back to it.

He had not doubted precision pinpointing in Time-travel since his Cubhood days. He remembered himself then, facing Educator Yarrow seriously, saying, “But Earth moves about the Sun, and the Sun moves about the Galactic Center and the Galaxy moves too. If you start from some point on Earth, and move downwhen a hundred years, you’ll be in empty space, because it will take a hundred years for Earth to reach that point.” (Those were the days when he still referred to a Century as a “hundred years.”)

And Educator Yarrow had snapped back, “You don’t separate Time from space. Moving through Time, you share Earth’s motions. Or do you believe that a bird flying through the air whiffs out into space because the Earth is hurrying around the Sun at eighteen miles a second and vanishes from under the creature?”