The End of Eternity

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 pla

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 thi

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 out 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 begi

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 up 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 a 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."