Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity

It would involve the aristocracy, the well-to-do, the upper classes, the beneficiaries of the system.

What bothered him was that it would most certainly involve Noÿs.

He got through the remaining three days called for in his chart in a gathering cloud that dampened even his joy in Noÿs’s company.

She said to him, “What happened? For a while, you seemed all different from the way you were in Eter—in that place. You weren’t stiff at all. Now, you seem concerned. Is it because you have to go back?”

Harlan said, “Partly.”

“Do you have to?”

“I have to.”

“Well, who would care if you were late?”

Harlan almost smiled at that. “They wouldn’t like me to be late,” he said, yet thought longingly just the same of the two-day margin allowed for in his chart.

She adjusted the controls of a musical instrument that played soft and complicated strains out of its own creative bowels by striking notes and chords in a random manner; the randomness weighted in favor of pleasant combinations by intricate mathematical formulae. The music could no more repeat itself than could snowflakes, and could no more fail of beauty.

Through the hypnosis of sound Harlan gazed at Noÿs and his thoughts wound tightly about her. What would she be in the new dispensation? A fishwife, a factory girl, the mother of six, fat, ugly, diseased? Whatever she was, she would not remember Harlan. He would have been no part of her life in a new Reality. And whatever she would be then, she would not be Noÿs.

He did not simply love a girl . (Strangely, he used the word “love” in his own thoughts for the first time and did not even pause long enough to stare at the strange thing and wonder at it.) He loved a complex of factors; her choice of clothes, her walk, her manner of speech, her tricks of expression. A quarter century of life and experience in a given Reality had gone into the manufacture of all that. She had not been his Noÿs in the previous Reality of a physioyear earlier. She would not be his Noÿs in the next Reality.

The new Noÿs might, conceivably, be better in some ways, but he knew one thing very definitely. He wanted this Noÿs here, the one he saw at this moment, the one of this Reality. If she had faults, he wanted those faults, too.

What could he do?

Several things occurred to him, all illegal. One of them was to learn the nature of the Change and find out definitely how it would affect Noÿs. One could not, after all, be certain that . . .

A dead silence wrenched Harlan out of his reverie. He was in the Life-Plotter’s office once more. Sociologist Voy was watching him out of the corner of his eye. Feruque’s death’s-head was lowering at him.

And the silence was piercing.

It took a moment for the significance to penetrate. Just a moment. The Summator had ceased its inner clucking.

Harlan jumped up. “You have the answer, Life-Plotter.”

Feruque looked down at the flimsies in his hand. “Yeah. Sure. Sort of funny.”

“May I have it?” Harlan held out his hand. It was trembling visibly.

“There’s nothing to see. That’s what’s funny.”

“What do you mean—nothing?” Harlan stared at Feruque with eyes that suddenly smarted till there was only a tall, thin blur where Feruque stood.

The Life-Plotter’s matter-of-fact voice sounded thin. “The dame doesn’t exist in the new Reality. No personality shift. She’s just out, that’s all. Gone. I ran the alternatives down to Probability 0.0001. She doesn’t make it anywhere. In fact”—and he reached up to rub his cheek with long, spare fingers—“with the combination of factors you handed me I don’t quite see how she fit in the old Reality.”

Harlan hardly heard “But—but the Change was such a small one.”

“I know. A funny combination of factors. Here, you want the flimsies?”

Harlan’s hand closed over them, unfeeling. Noÿs gone? Noÿs nonexistent? How could that be?

He felt a hand on his shoulder and Voy’s voice clashed on his ear. “Are you ill, Technician?” The hand drew away as though it already regretted its careless contact with a Technician’s body.

Harlan swallowed and with an effort composed his features. “I’m quite well. Would you take me to the kettle?”

He must not show his feelings. He must act as though this were what he represented it to be, a mere academic investigation. He must disguise the fact that with Noÿs’s nonexistence in the new Reality he was almost physically overwhelmed by a flood of pure elation, unbearable joy.

Harlan stepped into the kettle at the 2456th and looked backward to make certain that the barrier that separated the shaft from Eternity was truly flawless; that Sociologist Voy was not watching. In these last weeks it had grown to be a habit with him, an automatic twitch; there was always the quick backward glance across the shoulder to make sure no one was behind him in the kettle shafts.

And then, though already in the 2456th, it was for upwhen that Harlan set the kettle controls. He watched the numbers on the temporometer rise. Though they moved with blurry quickness, there would be considerable time for thought.

How the Life-Plotter’s finding changed matters! How the very nature of his crime had changed!

And it had all hinged on Finge. The phrase caught at him with its ridiculous rhyme and its heavy beat circled dizzyingly inside his skull: It hinged on Finge. It hinged on Finge . . .

Harlan had avoided any personal contact with Finge on his return to Eternity after those days with Noÿs in the 482nd. As Eternity closed in about him, so did guilt. A broken oath of office, which seemed nothing in the 482nd, was enormous in Eternity.

He had sent in his report by impersonal air-chute and took himself off to personal quarters. He needed to think this out, gain time to consider and grow accustomed to the new orientation within himself.

Finge did not permit it. He was in communication with Harlan less than an hour after the report had been coded for proper direction and inserted into the chute.

The Computer’s image stared out of the vision plate. His voice said, “I expected you to be in your office.”

Harlan said, “I delivered the report, sir. It doesn’t matter where I wait for a new assignment.”

“Yes?” Finge scanned the roll of foil he held in his hands, holding it up, squint-eyed, and peering at its perforation pattern.

“It is scarcely complete,” he went on. “May I visit your rooms?”

Harlan hesitated a moment. The man was his superior and to refuse the self-invitation at this moment would have a flavor of insubordination. It would advertise his guilt, it seemed, and his raw, painful conscience dared not permit that.

“You will be welcome, Computer,” he said stiffly.

Finge’s sleek softness introduced a jarring element of epicureanism into Harlan’s angular quarters. The 95th, Harlan’s homewhen, tended toward the Spartan in house furnishings and Harlan had never completely lost his taste for the style. The tubular metal chairs had been surfaced with a dull veneer that had been artificially grained into the appearance of wood (though not very successfully). In one corner of the room was a small piece of furniture that represented an even wider departure from the customs of the times.

It caught Finge’s eye almost at once.

The Computer put a pudgy finger on it, as though to test its texture. “What is this material?”

“Wood, sir,” said Harlan.

“The real thing? Actual wood? Amazing! You use wood in your homewhen, I believe?”