Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity

Noÿs looked uneasily at the temporometer. “Where are we? I can’t even see the numbers.”

“ When are we?” Harlan corrected her automatically. He slowed the velocity and the Centuries came into view.

Her beautiful eyes widened and the lashes stood out against the whiteness of her skin. “Is that right? ”

Harlan looked at the indicator casually. It was in the 72,000’s. “I’m sure it is.”

“But where are we going?”

“To when are we going. To the far upwhen,” he said, grimly. “Good and far. Where they won’t find you.”

And in silence they watched the numbers mount. In silence Harlan told himself over and over that the girl was innocent of Finge’s charge. She had owned up frankly to its partial truth and she had admitted, just as frankly, the presence of a more personal attraction.

He looked up, then, as Noÿs shifted position. She had moved to his side of the kettle and, with a resolute gesture, brought the kettle to a halt at a most uncomfortable temporal deceleration.

Harlan gulped and closed his eyes to let the nausea pass. He said, “What’s the matter?”

She looked ashen and for a moment made no reply. Then she said, “I don’t want to go any further. The numbers are so high.”

The temporometer read: 111,394.

He said, “Far enough.”

Then he held out his hand gravely, “Come, Noÿs. This will be your home for a while.”

They wandered through the corridors like children, hand in hand. The lights along the mainways were on, and the darkened rooms blazed at the touch of a contact. The air was fresh and had a liveliness about it which, without sensible draft, yet indicated the presence of ventilation.

Noÿs whispered, “Is there no one here?”

“No one,” said Harlan. He tried to say it firmly and loudly. He wanted to break the spell of being in a “Hidden Century,” but he said it in only a whisper after all.

He did not even know how to refer to anything so far upwhen. To call it the one-one-one-three-ninety-fourth was ridiculous. One would have to say simply and indefinitely, “The hundred thousands.”

It was a foolish problem to be concerned with, but now that the exaltation of actual flight was done with, he found himself alone in a region of Eternity where no human footsteps had wandered and he did not like it. He was ashamed, doubly ashamed since Noÿs was witness, at the fact that the faint chill within him was the faint chill of a faint fear.

Noÿs said, “It’s so clean. There’s no dust.”

“Self-cleaning,” said Harlan. With an effort that seemed to tear at his vocal cords he raised his voice to near-normal level. “But no one’s here, upwhen or downwhen for thousands and thousands of Centuries.”

Noÿs seemed to accept that. “And everything is fixed up so? We passed food stores and a viewing-film library. Did you see that?”

“I saw that. Oh, it’s fully equipped. They’re all fully equipped. Every Section.”

“But why, if no one ever comes here?”

“It’s logical,” said Harlan. Talking about it took away some of the eeriness. Saying out loud what he already knew in the abstract would pin-point the matter, bring it down to the level of the prosaic. He said, “Early in the history of Eternity, one of the Centuries in the 300’s came up with a mass duplicator. Do you know what I mean? By setting up a resonating field, energy could be converted to matter with subatomic particles taking up precisely the same pattern of positions, within the uncertainty requirements, as those in the model being used. The result is an exact copy.

“We in Eternity commandeered the instrument for our own purposes. At that time, there were only about six or seven hundred Sections built up. We had plans for expansion, of course. ‘Ten new Sections a physioyear’ was one of the slogans of the time. The mass duplicator made that all unnecessary. We built one new Section complete with food, power supply, water supply, all the best automatic features; set up the machine and duplicated the Section once each Century all along Eternity. I don’t know how long they kept it going—millions of Centuries, probably.”

“All like this, Andrew?”

“All exactly like this. And as Eternity expands, we just fill in, adapting the construction to whatever fashion turns out to be current in the Century. The only troubles come when we hit an energy-centered Century. We—we haven’t reached this Section yet.” (No use telling her that the Eternals couldn’t penetrate into Time here in the Hidden Centuries. What difference did that make?)

He glanced at her and she seemed troubled. He said hastily, “There’s no waste involved in building the Sections. It took energy, nothing more, and with the nova to draw on—“

She interrupted. “No. I just don’t remember.”

“Remember what?”

“You said the duplicator was invented in the 300’s. We don’t have it in the 482nd. I don’t remember viewing anything about it in history.”

Harlan grew thoughtful. Although she was within two inches of being as tall as himself, he suddenly felt giant-size by comparison. She was a child, an infant, and he was a demigod of Eternity who must teach her and lead her carefully to the truth.

He said, “Noÿs, dear, let’s find a place to sit down and—and I’ll have to explain something.”

The concept of a variable Reality, a Reality that was not fixed and eternal and immutable was not one that could be faced casually by anyone.

In the dead of the sleep period, sometimes, Harlan would remember the early days of his Cubhood and recall the wrenching attempts to divorce himself from his Century and from Time.

It took six months for the average Cub to learn all the truth, to discover that he could never go home again in a very literal way. It wasn’t Eternity’s law, alone, that stopped him, but the frigid fact that home as he knew it might very well no longer exist, might, in a sense, never have existed.

It affected Cubs differently. Harlan remembered Bonky Latourette’s face turning white and gaunt the day Instructor Yarrow had finally made it unmistakably clear about Reality.

None of the Cubs ate that night. They huddled together in search of a kind of psychic warmth, all except Latourette, who had disappeared. There was a lot of false laughter and miserably poor joking.

Someone said with a voice that was tremulous and uncertain, “I suppose I never had a mother. If I go back into the 95th, they’d say: ‘Who are you? We don’t know you. We don’t have any records of you. You don’t exist.’”

They smiled weakly and nodded their heads, lonely boys with nothing left but Eternity.

They found Latourette at bedtime, sleeping deeply and breathing shallowly. There was the slight reddening of a spray injection in the hollow of his left elbow and fortunately that was noted too.

Yarrow was called and for a while it looked as though one Cub would be out of the course, but he was brought around eventually. A week later he was back in his seat. Yet the mark of that evil night was on his personality for as long as Harlan knew him thereafter.

And now Harlan had to explain Reality to Noÿs Lambent, a girl not much older than those Cubs, and explain it at once and in full. He had to. There was no choice about that. She must learn exactly what faced them and exactly what she would have to do.

He told her. They ate canned meats, chilled fruits, and milk at a long conference table designed to hold twelve, and there he told her.

He did it as gently as possible, but he scarcely found need for gentleness. She snapped quickly at every concept and before he was half through it was borne in upon him, to his great amazement, that she wasn’t reacting badly. She wasn’t afraid. She showed no sense of loss. She only seemed angry.