End of Eternity, The - Isaac Asimov

VIP免费

2024-12-01 0 0 510.65KB 131 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isaac Asimov is regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction writers of our time, as well

as a valued contributor to the world of science. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from

Columbia University (1948) and, though he no longer lives in the Boston area, is an

Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University. He has received numerous

awards for his inspiring scientific articles covering a wide range of subjects.

In this novel Dr. Asimov’s probing imagination has created fascinating adventures set in

the not-too-distant future--adventures that could change from fiction to fact any day now.

isaac asimov

THE END

OF ETERNITY

To Horace L. Gold

1. Technician

ANDREW HARLAN stepped into the kettle. Its sides were perfectly round and it

fit snugly inside a vertical shaft composed of widely spaced rods that shimmered into an

unseeable haze six feet above Harlan’s head. Harlan set the controls and moved the

smoothly working starting lever.

The kettle did not move.

Harlan did not expect it to. He expected no movement; neither up nor down, left

nor right, forth nor back. Yet the spaces between the rods had melted into a gray

blankness which was solid to the touch, though nonetheless immaterial for all that. And

there was the little stir in his stomach, the faint (psychosomatic?) touch of dizziness, that

told him that all the kettle contained, including himself, was rushing up when through

Eternity.

He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of operations assigned

him two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been the farthest up when he had ever

traveled. Now he was moving up when to the 2456th Century.

Under ordinary circumstances he might have felt a little lost at the prospect. His

native Century was in the far downwhen, the 95th Century, to be exact. The 95th was a

Century stiffly restrictive of atomic power, faintly rustic, fond of natural wood as a

structural material, exporters of certain types of distilled potables to nearly everywhen

and importers of clover seed. Although Harlan had not been in the 95th since he entered

special training and became a Cub at the age of fifteen, there was always that feeling of

loss when one moved outwhen from “home.” At the 2456th he would be nearly two

hundred forty millennia from his birthwhen and that is a sizable distance even for a

hardened Eternal.

Under ordinary circumstances all this would be so. But right now Harlan was in

poor mood to think of anything but the fact that his documents were heavy in his pocket

and tense, a little confused.

It was his hands acting by themselves that brought the kettle to the proper halt at

the proper Century.

Strange that a Technician should feel tense or nervous about anything. What was

it that Educator Yarrow had once said:

“Above all, a Technician must be dispassionate. The Reality Change he initiates

may affect the lives of as many as fifty billion people. A million or more of these may be

so drastically affected as to be considered new individuals. Under these conditions, an

emotional make-up is a distinct handicap.”

Harlan put the memory of his teacher’s dry voice out of his mind with an almost

savage shake of his head. In those days he had never imagined that he himself would

have the peculiar talent for that very position. But emotion had come upon him after all.

Not for fifty billion people. What in Time did he care for fifty billion people? There was

just one. One person.

He became aware that the kettle was stationary and with the merest pause to pull

his thoughts together, put himself into the cold, impersonal frame of mind a Technician

must have, he stepped out. The kettle he left, of course, was not the same as the one he

had boarded, in the sense that it was not composed of the same atoms, He did not worry

about that any more than any Eternal would. To concern oneself with the mystique of

Time-travel, rather than with the simple fact of it, was the mark of the Cub and newcomer

to Eternity.

He paused again at the infinitely thin curtain of non-Space and non-Time which

separated him from Eternity in one way and from ordinary Time in another.

This would be a completely new section of Eternity for him. He knew about it in a

rough, way, of course, having checked upon it in the Temporal Handbook. Still, there

was no substitute for actual appearance and he steeled himself for the initial shock of

adjustment.

He adjusted the controls, a simple matter in passing into “Eternity (and a very

complicated one in passing into Time, a type of passage which was correspondingly less

frequent). He stepped through the curtain and found himself squinting at the brilliance.

Automatically he threw up his hand to shield his eyes.

Only one man faced him. At first Harlan could see him only blurrily.

The man said, “I am Sociologist Kantor Voy. I imagine you are Technician

Harlan.”

Harlan nodded and said, “Father Time! Isn’t this sort of ornamentation

adjustable?”

Voy looked about and said tolerantly, “You mean the molecular films?”

“I certainly do,” said Harlan. The Handbook had mentioned them, but had said

nothing of such an insane riot of light reflection.

Harlan felt his annoyance to be quite reasonable. The 2456th Century was matter-

oriented, as most Centuries were, so he had a right to expect a basic compatibility from

the very beginning. It would have none of the utter confusion (for anyone born matter-

oriented) of the energy vortices of the 300’s, or the field dynamics of the 600’s. In the

2456th, to the average Eternal’s comfort, matter was used for everything from walls to

tacks.

To be sure, there was matter and matter. A member of an energy-oriented Century

might not realize that. To him all matter might seem minor variations on the theme that

was gross, heavy, and barbaric. To matter-oriented Harlan, however, there was wood,

metal (subdivisions, heavy and light), plastic, silicates, concrete, leather, and so on.

But matter consisting entirely of mirrors!

That was his first impression of the 2456th. Every surface reflected and glinted

light. Everywhere was the illusion of complete smoothness; the effect of a molecular

film. And in the ever-repeated reflection of himself, of Sociologist Voy, of everything he

could see, in scraps and wholes, in all angles, there was confusion. Garish confusion and

nausea!

“I’m sorry,” said Voy, “it’s the custom of the Century, and the Section assigned to

it finds it good practice to adopt the customs where practical. You get used to it after a

time.”

Voy walked rapidly upon the moving feet of another Voy, upside down beneath

the floor, who matched him stride for stride. He reached to move a hair-contact indicator

down a spiral scale to point of origin.

The reflections died; extraneous light faded. Harlan felt his world settle.

“If you’ll come with me now,” said Voy. Harlan followed through empty

corridors that, Harlan knew, must moments ago have been a riot of made light and

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ABOUTTHEAUTHORIsaacAsimovisregardedasoneofthegreatestscience-fictionwritersofourtime,aswellasavaluedcontributortotheworldofscience.HeholdsaPh.D.inChemistryfromColumbiaUniversity(1948)and,thoughhenolongerlivesintheBostonarea,isanAssociateProfessorofBiochemistryatBostonUniversity.Hehasreceivednumerous...

展开>> 收起<<

End of Eternity, The - Isaac Asimov.pdf

共131页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

End of Eternity, The - Isaac Asimov

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: