Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity

Item Five: Noÿs.

That was the really important part of the interlude, and all the idyllic part.

In his off-hours, when Cooper was gone, when he might ordinarily have been eating in solitude, reading in solitude, sleeping in solitude, waiting in solitude for the next day—he took to the kettles.

With all his heart he was grateful for the Technician’s position in society. He was thankful, as he had never dreamed he could be, for the manner in which he was avoided.

No one questioned his right to be in a kettle, nor cared whether he aimed it upwhen or down. No curious eyes followed him, no willing hands offered to help him, no chattering mouths discussed it with him.

He could go where and when he pleased.

Noÿs said, “You’ve changed, Andrew. Heavens, you’ve changed.”

He looked at her and smiled. “In what way, Noÿs?”

“You’re smiling, aren’t you? That’s one of the ways. Don’t you ever look in a mirror and see yourself smiling?”

“I’m afraid to. I’d say: ‘I can’t be that happy. I’m sick. I’m delirious. I’m confined in an asylum, living in daydreams, and unaware of it.’”

Noÿs leaned close to pinch him. “Feel anything?”

He drew her head toward him, felt bathed in her soft, black hair.

When they separated, she said breathlessly, “You’ve changed there, too. You’ve become very good at it.”

“I’ve got a good teacher,” began Harlan, and stopped abruptly, fearing that would imply displeasure at the thought of the many who might have had the making of such a good teacher.

But her laugh seemed untroubled by such a thought. They had eaten and she looked silky-smooth and warmly soft in the clothing he had brought her.

She followed his eyes and fingered the skirt gently, lifting it loose from its soft embrace of her thigh. She said, “I wish you wouldn’t, Andrew. I really wish you wouldn’t.”

“There’s no danger,” he said carelessly.

“There is danger. Now don’t be foolish. I can get along with what’s here, until—until you make arrangements.”

“Why shouldn’t you have your own clothes and doodads?”

“Because they’re not worth your going to my house in Time and being caught. And what if they make the Change while you’re there?”

He evaded that uneasily. “It won’t catch me.” Then, brightening, “Besides my wrist generator keeps me in physiotime so that a Change can’t affect me, you see.”

Noÿs sighed. “I don’t see. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it all.”

“There’s nothing to it.” And Harlan explained and explained with great animation and Noÿs listened with sparkling eyes that never quite revealed whether she was entirely interested, or amused, or, perhaps, a little of both.

It was a great addition to Harlan’s life. There was someone to talk to, someone with whom to discuss his life, his deeds, and thoughts. It was as though she were a portion of himself, but a portion sufficiently separate to require speech in communication rather than thought. She was a portion sufficiently separate to be able to answer unpredictably out of independent thought processes. Strange, Harlan thought, how one might Observe a social phenomenon such as matrimony and yet miss so vital a truth about it. Could he have predicted in advance, for instance, that it would be the passionate interludes that he would later least often associate with the idyl?

She snuggled into the crook of his arm and said, “How is your mathematics coming along?”

Harlan said, “Want to look at a piece of it?”

“Don’t tell me you carry it around with you?”

“Why not? The kettle trip takes time. No use wasting it, you know.”

He disengaged himself, took a small viewer from his pocket, inserted the film, and smiled fondly as she put it to her eyes.

She returned the viewer to him with a shake of her head. “I never saw so many squiggles. I wish I could read your Standard Intertemporal.”

“Actually,” said Harlan, “most of the squiggles you mention aren’t Intertemporal really, just mathematical notation.”

“You understand it, though, don’t you?”

Harlan hated to do anything to disillusion the frank admiration in her eyes, but he was forced to say, “Not as much as I’d like to. Still, I have been picking up enough math to get what I want. I don’t have to understand everything to be able to see a hole in a wall big enough to push a freight kettle through.”

He tossed the viewer into the air, caught it with a flick of his hand, and put it on a small end-table.

Noÿs’s eyes followed it hungrily and sudden insight flashed on Harlan.

He said, “Father Time! You can’t read Intertemporal, at that.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then the Section library here is useless to you. I never thought of that. You ought to have your own films from the 482nd.”

She said quickly, “No. I don’t want any.”

He said, “You’ll have them.”

“Honestly, I don’t want them. It’s silly to risk—“

“You’ll have them!” he said.

For the last time he stood at the immaterial boundary separating Eternity from Noÿs’s house in the 482nd. He had intended the time before to be the last time. The Change was nearly upon them now, a fact he had not told Noÿs out of the decent respect he would have had for anyone’s feelings, let alone those of his love.

Yet it wasn’t a difficult decision to make, this one additional trip. Partly it was bravado, to shine before Noÿs, bring her the book-films from out the lion’s mouth; partly it was a hot desire (what was the Primitive phrase?) “to singe the beard of the King of Spain,” if he might refer to the smooth-checked Finge so.

Then, too, he would have the chance once again of savoring the weirdly attractive atmosphere about a doomed house.

He had felt it before, when entering it carefully during the period of grace allowed by the spatio-temporal charts. He had felt it as he wandered through its rooms, collecting clothing, small objets d’art , strange containers, and instruments from Noÿs’s vanity table.

There was the somber silence of a doomed Reality that was past merely the physical absence of noise. There was no way for Harlan to predict its analogue in a new Reality. It might be a small suburban cottage or a tenement in a city street. It might be zero with untamed scrubland replacing the parklike terrain on which it now stood. It might, conceivably, be almost unchanged. And (Harlan touched on this thought gingerly) it might be inhabited by the analogue of Noÿs or, of course, it might not.

To Harlan the house was already a ghost, a premature specter that had begun its hauntings before it had actually died. And because the house, as it was, meant a great deal to him, he found he resented its passing and mourned it.

Once, only, in five trips had there been any sound to break the stillness during his prowlings. He was in the pantry, then, thankful that the technology of that Reality and Century had made servants unfashionable and removed a problem. He had, he recalled, chosen among the cans of prepared foods, and was just deciding that he had enough for one trip, and that Noÿs would be pleased indeed to intersperse the hearty but uncolorful basic diet provided in the empty Section with some of her own dietary. He even laughed aloud to think that not long before he had thought her diet decadent.

It was in the middle of the laugh that he heard a distinct clapping noise. He froze!

The sound had come from somewhere behind him, and in the startled moment during which he had not moved the lesser danger that it was a housebreaker occurred to him first and the greater danger of its being an investigating Eternal occurred second.