The End of Eternity (5 page)

There was no point in asking the nature of a Speedy-vac. It might be a suction cleaner, a computing machine, a type of spray painter. Anything. Harlan wasn’t particularly interested.

He said, “Do you know anything about history? Any kind of history?”

“I studied European history.”

“Your particular political unit, I take it.”

“I was born in Europe. Yes. Mostly, of course, they taught us modern history. After the revolutions of ’54; 7554, that is.”

“All right. First thing you do is to forget it. It doesn’t mean anything. The history they try to teach Timers changes with every Reality Change. Not that they realize that. In each Reality, their history is the only history. That’s what’s so different about Primitive history. That’s the beauty of it. No matter what any of us does, it exists precisely as it has always existed. Columbus and Washington, Mussolini and Hereford, they all exist.”

Cooper smiled feebly. He brushed his little finger across his upper lip and for the first time Harlan noticed a trace of bristle there as though the Cub were cultivating a mustache.

Cooper said, “I can’t quite—get used to it, all the time I’ve been here.”

“Get used to what?”

“Being five hundred Centuries away from homewhen.”

“I’m nearly that myself. I’m 95th.”

“That’s another thing. You’re older than I am and yet I’m seventeen Centuries older than you in another way. I can be your great-great-great-and-so-on-grandfather.”

“What’s the difference? Suppose you are?”

“Well, it takes getting used to.” There was a trace of rebellion in the Cub’s voice.

“It does for all of us,” said Harlan callously, and began talking about the Primitives. By the time three hours had passed, he was deep in an explanation concerning the reasons why there were Centuries before the 1st Century.

(“But isn’t the 1st Century
first?
” Cooper had asked plaintively.)

Harlan ended by giving the Cub a book, not a good one, really, but one that would serve as a beginning. “I’ll get you better stuff as we go along,” he said.

By the end of a week Cooper’s mustache had become a pronounced dark bristle that made him look ten years older and accentuated the narrowness of his chin. On the whole, Harlan decided, it would not be an improvement, that mustache.

Cooper said, “I’ve finished your book.”

“What did you think of it?”

“In a way—” There was a long pause. Cooper began over again. “Parts of the later Primitive was something like the 78th. It made me think of home, you know. Twice, I dreamed about my wife.”

Harlan exploded. “Your
wife?
”

“I was married before I came here.”

“Great Time! Did they bring your wife across too?”

Cooper shook his head. “I don’t even know if she’s been Changed in the last year. If she has, I suppose she’s not really my wife now.”

Harlan recovered. Of course, if the Cub were twenty-three years old when he was taken into Eternity, it was quite possible that he might have been married. One thing unprecedented led to another.

What was going on? Once modifications were introduced into the rules, it wouldn’t be a long step to the point where everything would decline into a mass of incoherency. Eternity was too finely balanced an arrangement to endure modification.

It was his anger on behalf of Eternity, perhaps, that put an unintended harshness into Harlan’s next words. “I hope you’re not planning on going back to the 78th to check on her.”

The Cub lifted his head and his eyes were firm and steady. “No.”

Harlan shifted uneasily, “Good. You have no family. Nothing. You’re an Eternal and don’t ever think of anyone you knew in Time.”

Cooper’s lips thinned, and his accent stood out sharply in his quick words. “You’re speaking like a Technician.”

Harlan’s fists clenched along the sides of his desk. He said hoarsely, “What do you imply? I’m a Technician so I make the Changes? So I defend them and demand that you accept them? Look, kid, you haven’t been here a year; you can’t speak Intertemporal; you’re all misgeared on Time and Reality, but you think you know all about Technicians and how to kick them in the teeth.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cooper quickly; “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“No, no, who offends a Technician? You just hear everyone else talking, is that it? They say, ‘Cold as a Technician’s heart,’ don’t they? They say, ‘A trillion personalities changed—just a Technician’s yawn.’ Maybe a few other things. What’s the answer, Mr. Cooper? Does it make you feel sophisticated to join in? It makes you a big man? A big wheel in Eternity?”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“All right. I just want you to know I’ve been a Technician for less than a month and I personally have never induced a Reality Change. Now let’s get on with business.”

Senior Computer Twissell called Andrew Harlan to his office the next day.

He said, “How would you like to go on an M.N.C., boy?”

It was almost too apposite. All that morning Harlan had been regretting his cowardly disclaimer of personal involvement in the Technician’s work; his childish cry of: I haven’t done anything wrong yet, so don’t blame me.

It amounted to an admission that there
was
something wrong about a Technician’s work, and that he himself was blameless only because he was too new at the game to have had time to be a criminal.

He welcomed the chance to kill that excuse now. It would be almost a penance. He could say to Cooper: Yes, because of something I have done, this many millions of people are new personalities, but it was necessary and I am proud to have been the cause.

So Harlan said joyfully, “I’m ready, sir.”

“Good. Good. You’ll be glad to know, boy,” (a puff, and the cigarette tip glowed brilliantly) “that every one of your analyses checked out with high-order accuracy.”

“Thank you, sir.” (They were analyses now, thought Harlan, not guesses.)

“You’ve got a talent. Quite a touch, boy. I look for great things. And we can begin with this one, 223rd. Your statement that a jammed vehicle clutch would supply the necessary fork without undesirable side effects is perfectly correct. Will you jam it?”

“Yes, sir.”

That was Harlan’s true initiation into Technicianhood.
After that he was more than just a man with a rose-red badge. He had handled Reality. He had tampered with a mechanism during a quick few minutes taken out of the 223rd and, as a result, a young man did not reach a lecture on mechanics he had meant to attend. He never went in for solar engineering, consequently, and a perfectly simple device was delayed in its development a crucial ten years. A war in the 224th, amazingly enough, was moved out of Reality as a result.

Wasn’t
that
good? What if personalities were changed? The new personalities were as human as the old and as deserving of life. If some lives were shortened, more were lengthened and made happier. A great work of literature, a monument of Man’s intellect and feeling, was never written in the new Reality, but several copies were preserved in Eternity’s libraries, were they not? And new creative works had come into existence, had they not?

Yet that night Harlan spent hours in a hot agony of wakefulness, and when he finally drowsed groggily, he did something he hadn’t done in years.

He dreamed of his mother.

Despite the weakness of such a beginning a physioyear was sufficient to make Harlan known throughout Eternity as “Twissell’s Technician,” and with more than a trace of ill-humor as “The Wonder Boy” and “The Never-Wrong.”

His contact with Cooper became almost comfortable. They never grew completely friendly. (If Cooper could have brought himself to make advances, Harlan might not have known how to respond.) Nevertheless they worked well together, and Cooper’s interest in Primitive history grew to the point where it nearly rivaled Harlan’s.

One day Harlan said to Cooper, “Look, Cooper, would you mind coming in tomorrow instead? I’ve got to get up to
the 3000’s sometime this week to check on an Observation and the man I want to see is free this afternoon.”

Cooper’s eyes lit up hungrily. “Why can’t I come?”

“Do you want to?”

“Sure. I’ve never been in a kettle except when they brought me here from the 78th and I didn’t know what was happening at the time.”

Harlan was accustomed to using the kettle in Shaft C, which was, by unwritten custom, reserved for Technicians along its entire immeasurable length through the Centuries. Cooper showed no embarrassment at being led there. He stepped into the kettle without hesitation and took his seat on the curved molding that completely circled it.

When Harlan, however, had activated the Field, and kicked the kettle into upwhen motion, Cooper’s face screwed into an almost comic expression of surprise.

“I don’t feel a thing,” he said. “Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. You’re not feeling anything because you’re not really moving. You’re being kicked along the temporal extension of the kettle. In fact,” Harlan said, growing didactic, “at the moment, you and I aren’t matter, really, in spite of appearances. A hundred men could be using this same kettle, moving (if you can call it that) at various velocities in either Time-direction, passing through one another and so on. The laws of the ordinary universe just don’t apply to the kettle shafts!”

Cooper’s mouth quirked a bit and Harlan thought uneasily: The kid’s taking temporal engineering and knows more about this than I do. Why don’t I shut up and stop making a fool of myself?

He retreated into silence, and stared somberly at Cooper. The younger man’s mustache had been full grown for months. It drooped, framing his mouth in what Eternals called Mallansohn hairline, because the only photograph known to be authentic of the Temporal Field inventor (and
that a poor one and out of focus) showed him with just such a mustache. For that reason it maintained a certain popularity among Eternals even though it did few of them justice.

Cooper’s eyes were fixed on the shifting numbers that marked the passing of the Centuries with respect to themselves. He said, “How far upwhen does the kettle shaft go?”

“Haven’t they taught you that?”

“They’ve hardly mentioned the kettles.”

Harlan shrugged. “There’s no end to Eternity. The shaft goes on forever.”

“How far upwhen have you gone?”

“This will be the uppest. Dr. Twissell has been up to the 50,000’s.”

“Great Time!” whispered Cooper.

“That’s still nothing. Some Eternals have been up past the 150,000th Century.”

“What’s
that
like?”

“Like nothing at all,” said Harlan morosely. “Lots of life but none of it human. Man is gone.”

“Dead? Wiped out?”

“I don’t know that anyone exactly knows.”

“Can’t something be done to change that?”

“Well, from the 70,000’s on—” began Harlan, then ended abruptly. “Oh, to Time with it. Change the subject.”

If there was one subject about which Eternals were almost superstitious, it was the “Hidden Centuries,” the time between the 70,000th and the 150,000th. It was a subject that was rarely mentioned. It was only Harlan’s close association with Twissell that accounted for his own small knowledge of the era. What it amounted to was that Eternals couldn’t pass into Time in all those thousands of Centuries.

The doors between Eternity and Time were impenetrable. Why? No one knew.

Harlan imagined, from some casual remarks of Twissell’s,
that attempts had been made to Change the Reality in the Centuries just downwhen from the 70,000th, but without adequate Observation beyond the 70,000th not much could be done.

Twissell had laughed a bit one time and said, “We’ll get through someday. Meanwhile, 70,000 Centuries is quite enough to take care of.”

It did not sound wholly convincing.

“What happens to Eternity after the 150,000th?” asked Cooper.

Harlan sighed. The subject, apparently, was not to be changed. “Nothing,” he said. “The Sections are there but there are no Eternals in it anywhere after the 70,000th. The Sections keep on going for millions of Centuries till all life is gone and past that, too, till the sun becomes a nova, and past that, too. There isn’t any end to Eternity. That’s why it’s called Eternity.”

“The sun
does
become a nova, then?”

“It certainly does. Eternity couldn’t exist if that weren’t so. Nova Sol is our power supply. Listen, do you know how much power is required to set up a Temporal Field? Mallansohn’s first Field was two seconds from extreme downwhen to extreme upwhen and big enough to hold not more than a match head and that took a nuclear power plant’s complete output for one day. It took nearly a hundred years to set up a hair-thin Temporal Field far enough upwhen to be able to tap the radiant power of the nova so that a field could be built big enough to hold a man.”

Cooper sighed. “I wish they would get to the point where they stopped making me learn equations and field mechanics and start telling me some of the interesting stuff. Now if I had lived in Mallansohn’s time—”

“You would have learned nothing. He lived in the 24th, but Eternity didn’t start till late in the 27th. Inventing the
Field isn’t the same as constructing Eternity, you know, and the rest of the 24th didn’t have the slightest inkling of what Mallansohn’s invention signified.”

“He was ahead of his generation, then?”

“Very much so. He not only invented the Temporal Field, but he described the basic relationships that made Eternity possible and predicted almost every aspect of it except for the Reality Change. Quite closely, too—but I think we’re pulling to a halt, Cooper. After you.”

They stepped out.

Harlan had never seen Senior Computer Laban Twissell angry before. People always said that he was incapable of any emotion, that he was an unsouled fixture of Eternity to the point where he had forgotten the exact number of his homewhen Century. People said that at an early age his heart had atrophied and that a hand computer similar to the model he carried always in his trouser pocket had taken its place.

Twissell did nothing to deny these rumors. In fact most people guessed that he believed them himself.