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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 co
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 passed 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 passage 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 i
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 passage 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 circumstances; 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 space-port. He barely looked up when Harlan entered. He barely mumbled something that might have been a greeting.
A change had indeed blasted the space-port. Its shininess was gone; what buildings there stood were not the grand creations they had been. A space-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.