Asimov, Isaac - The End of Eternity

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6 Life-Plotter

7 Prelude to Crime

8 Crime

9 Interlude

10 Trapped!

11 Full Circle

12 The Beginning of Eternity

13 Beyond the Downwhen Terminus

14 The Earlier Crime

15 Search through the Primitive

16 The Hidden Centuries

17 The Closing Circle

18 The Beginning of Infinity

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

upwhen through Eternity.

He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of opera-

tions assigned him two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been

the farthest upwhen he had ever traveled. Now he was moving upwhen

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 Cen-

tury, 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

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 his plan heavy on

his heart. He was a little frightened, a little 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 any-

thing. 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 con-

sidered 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

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

Tempo-

ral 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 cur-

tain 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.

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 Cen-

tury 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 a 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 impres-

sion of the 2456th. Every surface reflected and glinted light. Every-

where was the illusion of complete smoothness; the effect of a mo-

lecular film. And in the ever-repeated reflection of himself, of Soci-

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 reflection,up a ramp,through an anteroom,into an of-

fice.

In all the short journey no human being had been visible.Harlan was

so used to that,took it so for

granted,that he would have been surprised,almost shocked,if a

glimpse of a human figure hurrying away had

caught his eyes.No doubt the news had spread that a Technician was

coming through.Even Voy kept his

thinner,there could only be one reason for that.

Noÿs!

Sociologist Kantor Voy leaned forward toward the Technician in

what seemed a friendly enough

fashion,but Harlan noted automatically that they were seated on

opposite sides of the long axis of a fairly large

table.

Voy said,“I am pleased to have a Technician of your reputation in-

terest himself in our little problem

here.”

“Yes,” said Harlan with the cold impersonality people would expect

of him..“It has its points of

interest.” ((Was he impersonal enough?Surely his real motives must

be apparent,his guilt be spelled out in

beads of sweat on his forehead.)

He removed from an inner pocket the foiled summary of the pro-

jected Reality Change.It was the very

paramagnetic field,Harlan paused a split moment.

The molecular film that covered the table was subdued but was not

zero.The motion of his arm fixed his

eye and for an instant the reflection of his own face seemed to

stare somberly up at him from the table top.He

was thirty-two,but he looked older.He needed no one to tell him

that.It might be partly his long face and dark

eyebrows over darker eyes that gave him the lowering expression

and cold glare associated with the caricature

of the Technician in the minds of all Eternals.It might be just his

own realization that he was a Technician.

But then he flicked the foil out across the table and turned to the

matter at hand.

“I am not a Sociologist,sir.”

Voy smiled.“That sounds formidable.When one begins by expressing

lack of competence in a given

field,it usually implies that a flat opinion in that field will follow al-

most immediately.”

restless fingers.He must not bite his lips.He must not show his

feelings in any way.

Ever since the whole orientation of his life had so changed itself,he

had been watching the summaries

of projected Reality Changes as they passed through the grinding

administrative gears of the Allwhen Council.

As Senior Computer Twissell ’s personally assigned Technician,he

could arrange that by a slight bending of

professional ethics.Particularly with Twissell ’s attention caught

ever more tightly in his own overwhelming

project.(Harlan ’s nostrils flared.He knew now a little of the nature

of that project.).Harlan had had no assurance that he would ever find

what he was looking for in a reasonable time.

When he had first glanced over projected Reality Change 2456--

2781,Serial Number V-5,he was half inclined

to believe his reasoning powers were warped by wishing.For a full

day he had checked and rechecked

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摘要：

6Life-Plotter7PreludetoCrime8Crime9Interlude10Trapped!11FullCircle12TheBeginningofEternity13BeyondtheDownwhenTerminus14TheEarlierCrime15SearchthroughthePrimitive16TheHiddenCenturies17TheClosingCircle18TheBeginningofInfinityHarlansetthecontrolsandmovedthesmoothlyworkingstartinglever.Thekettledidnotmo...

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