Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity

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?

Noÿs 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!

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 Noÿs 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 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 passage through any door might be. Had there been a Timer watching, it would have seemed to him that Harlan had simply disappeared.