"What are you talking about?" Harlan rubbed his forehead to clear his mind.
She said softly, "You live forever. You"re an Eternal."
Was it a question or a statement?
He said, "You"re mad. We grow old and die like anyone else."
She said, "You can tell me." Her voice was low and cajoling. The fifty-millennial language, which he had always thought harsh and unpleasant, seemed euphonious after all. Or was it merely that a full stomach and the scented air had dulled his ears?
She said, "You can see all Times, visit all places. I so wanted to work in Eternity. I waited the longest time for them to let me. I thought maybe they"d make me an Eternal, and then I found there were only men there. Some of them wouldn"t even talk to me because I was a woman. _You_ wouldn"t talk to me."
"We"re all busy," mumbled Harlan, fighting to keep off something that could only be described as a numb content. "I was very busy."
"But why aren"t there more women Eternals?"
Harlan couldn"t trust himself to speak. What could he say? That members of Eternity were chosen with infinite care since two conditions had to be met. First, they must be equipped for the job; second, their withdrawal from Time must have no deleterious effect upon Reality.
Reality! That was the word he must not mention under any circ.u.mstances. He felt the spinning sensation in his head grow stronger and he closed his eyes for a moment to stop it.
How many excellent prospects had been left untouched in Time because their removal into Eternity would have meant the non-birth of children, the non-death of women and men, non-marriage, non-happenings, non-circ.u.mstance that would have twisted Reality in directions the Allwhen Council could not permit.
Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man.
(All the thoughts jumbled together in his head, lost and whirling, joined to one another in a free a.s.sociation that produced odd, almost grotesque, but not entirely unpleasant, results. Noys was closer to him now, smiling.) He heard her voice like a drifting wind. "Oh, you Eternals. You are so secretive. You won"t share at all. Make me an Eternal."
Her voice was a sound now that didn"t coalesce into separate words, just a delicately modulated sound that insinuated itself into his mind.
He wanted, he longed to tell her: There"s no fun in Eternity, lady. We work! We work to plot out all the details of everywhen from the beginning of Eternity to where Earth is empty, and we try to plot out all the infinite possibilities of all the might-have-beens and pick out a might-have-been that is better than what is and decide where in Time we can make a tiny little change to twist the is to the might-be and we have a new is and look for a new might-be, forever, and forever, and that is how it has been since Vikkor Mallansohn discovered the Temporal Field in the 24th, way back in the Primitive 24th and then it was possible to start Eternity in the 27th, the mysterious Mallansohn whom no man knows and who started Eternity, really, and the new might-be, forever and forever and forever and . . .
He shook his head, but the whirligig of thought went on and on in stranger and more jagged breaks and leaps until it jumped into a sudden flash of illumination that persisted for a brilliant second, then died.
That moment steadied him. He grasped for it, but it was gone.
The peppermint drink?
Noys was still closer, her face not quite clear in his gaze. He could feel her hair against his cheek, the warm, light pressure of her breath. He ought to draw away, but--strangely, strangely--he found he did not want to.
"If I were made an Eternal . . ." she breathed, almost in his ear, though the words were scarcely heard above the beating of his heart. Her lips were moist and parted. "Wouldn"t you like to?"
He did not know what she meant, but suddenly he didn"t care. He seemed in flames. He put out his arms clumsily, gropingly. She did not resist, but melted and coalesced with him.
It all happened dreamily, as though it were happening to someone else.
It wasn"t nearly as repulsive as he had always imagined it must be. It came as a shock to him, a revelation, that it wasn"t repulsive at all.
Even afterward, when she leaned against him with her eyes all soft and smiling a little, he found he had to reach out and stroke her damp hair with slow and trembling delight.
She was entirely different in his eyes now. She was not a woman, not an individual at all. She was suddenly an aspect of himself. She was, in a strange and unexpected way, a part of himself.
The spatio-temporal chart said nothing of this, yet Harlan felt no guilt. It was only the thought of Finge that aroused strong emotion in Harlan"s breast. And that wasn"t guilt. Not at all.
It was satisfaction, even triumph!
In bed Harlan could not sleep. The lightheadedness had worn off now, but there was still the unusual fact that for the first time in his adult life a grown woman shared his bed.
He could hear her soft breathing and in the ultra-dim glow to which the internal light of the walls and ceiling had been reduced he could see her body as the merest shadow next to his.
He had only to move his hand to feel the warmth and softness of her flesh, and he dared not do that, lest he wake her out of whatever dreaming she might have. It was as though she were dreaming for the two of them, dreaming herself and himself and all that had happened, and as though her waking would drive it all from existence.
It was a thought that seemed a piece of those other queer, unusual thoughts he had experienced just before . . .
Those had been strange thoughts, coming to him at a moment between sense and nonsense. He tried to recapture them and could not. Yet suddenly it was very important that he recapture them. For although he could not remember the details, he could remember that, for just an instant, he had understood something.
He was not certain what that something was, but there had been the unearthly clarity of the half-asleep, when more than mortal eye and mind seems suddenly to come to life.
His anxiety grew. Why couldn"t he remember? So much had been in his grasp.
For the moment even the sleeping girl beside him receded into the hinterland of his thoughts.
He thought: If I follow the thread . . . I was thinking of Reality and Eternity . . . yes, and Mallansohn and the Cub!
He stopped there. Why the Cub? Why Cooper? He _hadn"t_ thought of him.
But if he hadn"t, then why should he think of Brinsley Sheridan Cooper now?
He frowned! What was the truth that connected all this? What was it he was trying to find? What made him so sure there was something to find?
Harlan felt chilled, for with these questions a distant glow of that earlier illumination seemed to break upon the horizons of his mind and he almost knew.
He held his breath, did not press for it. Let it come.
Let it come.
And in the quiet of that night, a night already so uniquely significant in his life, an explanation and interpretation of events came to him that at any saner, more normal time he would not have entertained for a moment.
He let the thought bud and flower, let it grow until he could see it explain a hundred odd points that otherwise simply remained--odd.
He would have to investigate this, check this, back in Eternity, but in his heart he was already convinced that he knew a terrible secret he was not meant to know.
A secret that embraced all Eternity!
6 Life-Plotter
A month of physiotime had pa.s.sed since that night in the 482nd, when he grew acquainted with many things. Now, if one calculated by ordinary time, he was nearly 2000 Centuries in Noys Lambent"s future, attempting by a mixture of bribery and cajolery to learn what lay in store for her in a new Reality.
It was worse than unethical, but he was past caring. In the physiomonth just gone he had, in his own eyes, become a criminal. There was no way of glossing over that fact. He would be no more a criminal by compounding his crime and he had a great deal to gain by doing so.
Now, as part of his felonious maneuvering (he made no effort to choose a milder phrase) he stood at the barrier before the 2456th. Entry into Time was much more complicated than mere pa.s.sage between Eternity and the kettle shafts. In order to enter Time the coordinates fixing the desired region on Earth"s surface had painstakingly to be adjusted and the desired moment of Time pin-pointed within the Century. Yet despite inner tension Harlan handled the controls with the ease and quick confidence of a man with much experience and a great talent.
Harlan found himself in the engine room he had seen first on the viewing screen within Eternity. At this physiomoment Sociologist Voy would be sitting safely before that screen watching for the Technician"s Touch that was to come.
Harlan felt no hurry. The room would remain empty for the next 156 minutes. To be sure, the spatio-temporal chart allowed him only 110 minutes, leaving the remaining 46 as the customary 40 per cent "margin." Margin was there in case of necessity, but a Technician was not expected to have to use it. A "margin-eater" did not remain a Specialist long.
Harlan, however, expected to use no more than 2 minutes of the iio. Wearing his wrist-borne field generator so that he was surrounded by an aura of physiotime (an effluvium, so to speak, of Eternity) and therefore protected from any of the effects of Reality Change, he took one step toward the wall, lifted a small container from its position on a shelf, and placed it in a carefully adjusted spot on the shelf below.
Having done that, he re-entered Eternity in a way that seemed as prosaic to himself as pa.s.sage through any door might be. Had there been a Timer watching, it would have seemed to him that Harlan had simply disappeared.
The small container stayed where he put it. It played no immediate role in world history. A man"s hand, hours later, reached for it but did not find it. A search revealed it half an hour later still, but in the interim a force-field had blanked out and a man"s temper had been lost. A decision which would have remained unmade in the previous Reality was now made in anger. A meeting did not take place; a man who would have died lived a year longer, under other circ.u.mstances; another who would have lived died somewhat sooner.
The ripples spread wider, reaching their maxium in the 2481st, which was twenty-five Centuries upwhen from the Touch. The intensity of the Reality Change declined thereafter. Theorists pointed out that nowhere to the infinite upwhen could the Change ever become zero, but by fifty Centuries upwhen from the Touch the Change had become too small to detect by the finest Computing, and that was the practical limit.
Of course no human being in Time could ever possibly be aware of any Reality Change having taken place. Mind changed as well as matter and only Eternals could stand outside it all and see the change.
Sociologist Voy was staring at the bluish scene in the 2481st, where earlier there had been all the activity of a busy s.p.a.ce-port. He barely looked up when Harlan entered. He barely mumbled something that might have been a greeting.
A change had indeed blasted the s.p.a.ce-port. Its shininess was gone; what buildings there stood were not the grand creations they had been. A s.p.a.ce-ship rusted. There were no people. There was no motion.
Harlan allowed himself a small smile that flickered for a moment, then vanished. It was M.D.R. all right. Maximum Desired Response. And it had happened at once. The Change did not necessarily take place at the precise moment of the Technician"s Touch. If the calculations that went into the Touch were sloppy, hours or days might elapse before the Change actually took place (counting, of course, by physiotime). It was only when all degrees of freedom vanished that the Change took place. While there was even a mathematical chance for alternate actions, the Change did _not_ take place.
It was Harlan"s pride that when _he_ calculated an M.N.C., when it was _his_ hand that contrived the Touch, the degrees of freedom vanished at once, and the Change took place instantly.
Voy said softly, "It had been very beautiful."
The phrase grated Harlan"s ears, seeming to detract from the beauty of his own performance. "I wouldn"t regret," he said, "having s.p.a.cetravel bred out of Reality altogether."
"No?" said Voy.
"What good is it? It never lasts more than a millennium or two. People get tired. They come back home and the colonies die out. Then after another four or five millennia, or forty or fifty, they try again and it fails again. It is a waste of human ingenuity and effort."
Voy said dryly, "You"re quite a philosopher."
Harlan flushed. He thought: What"s the use in talking to any of them? He said, angrily, with a sharp change of subject, "What about the Life-Plotter?"
"What about him?"
"Would you check with the man? He ought to have made some progress by now."
The Sociologist let a look of disapproval drift across his face, as though to say: You"re the impatient one, aren"t you? Aloud he said, "Come with me and let"s see."
The name plate on the office door said Neron Feruque, which struck Harlan"s eye and mind because of its faint similarity to a pair of rulers in the Mediterranean area during Primitive times. (His weekly discourses with Cooper had sharpened his own preoccupation with the Primitive almost feverishly.) The man, however, resembled neither ruler, as Harlan recalled it. He was almost cadaverously lean, with skin stretched tightly over a high-bridged nose. His fingers were long and his wrists k.n.o.bby. As he caressed his small Summator, he looked like Death weighing a soul in the balance.
Harlan found himself staring at the Summator hungrily. It was the heart and blood of Life-Plotting, the skin and bones, sinew, muscle and all else. Feed into it the required data of a personal history, and the equations of the Reality Change; do that and it would chuckle away in obscene merriment for any length of time from a minute to a day, and then spit out the possible companion lives for the person involved (under the new Reality), each neatly ticketed with a probability value.
Sociologist Voy introduced Harlan. Feruque, having stared in open annoyance at the Technician"s insigne, nodded his head and let the matter go.
Harlan said, "Is the young lady"s Life-Plot complete yet?"
"It is not. I"ll let you know when it is." He was one of those who carried contempt for the Technician to the point of open rudeness.
Voy said, "Take it easy, Life-Plotter."
Feruque had eyebrows which were light almost to invisibility. It heightened the resemblance of his face to a skull. His eyes rolled in what should have been empty sockets as he said, "Killed the s.p.a.ceships?"
Voy nodded. "Cut it down a Century."
Feruque"s lips twisted softly and formed a word.
Harlan folded his arms and stared at the Life-Plotter, who looked away in eventual discomfiture.
Harlan thought: He _knows_ it"s his guilt too.
Feruque said to Voy, "Listen, as long as you"re here, what in Time am I going to do about the anti-cancer serum requests? We"re not the only Century with anti-cancer. Why do we get all the applications?"
"All the other Centuries are just as crowded. You know that."
"Then they"ve got to stop sending in applications altogether."
"How do we go about making them?"
"Easy. Let the Allwhen Council stop receiving them."
"I have no pull with the Allwhen Council."
"You have pull with the old man."
Harlan listened to the conversation dully, without real interest. At least it served to keep his mind on inconsequentials and away from the chuckling Summator. The "old man," he knew, would be the Computer in charge of the Section.
"I"ve talked to the old man," said the Sociologist, "and he"s talked to the Council."
"Nuts. He"s just sent through a routine tape-strip. He has to fight for this. It"s a matter of basic policy."
"The Allwhen Council isn"t in the mood these days to consider changes in basic policy. You know the rumors going round."
"Oh, sure. They"re busy on a big deal. Whenever there"s dodging to do, the word gets round that Council"s busy on some big deal."
(If Harlan could have found the heart for it, he would have smiled at that point.) Feruque brooded a few moments, and then burst out, "What most people don"t understand is that anti-cancer serum isn"t a matter of tree seedlings or field motors. I know that every sprig of spruce has to be watched for adverse effects on Reality, but anti-cancer always involves a human life and that"s a hundred times as complicated.
"Consider! Think how many people a year die of cancer in each Century that doesn"t have anti-cancer serums of one sort or another. You can imagine how many of the patients want to die. So the Timer governments in every Century are forever forwarding applications to Eternity to "please, pretty please ship them seventy-five thousand ampules of serum on behalf of the men critically stricken who are absolutely vital to the cultures, enclosed see biographical data.""