He noticed the small Mekkano behind her, gliding in on a smooth force-field.

            He had eaten sparingly that evening, picking lightly at dishes concerning which he had reported in full in past Observations but which (except for fact-searching nibbles) he had thus far refrained from eating. Against his will, he had liked them. Against his will, he had enjoyed the foaming, light green, peppermint-flavored drink (not quite alcoholic, something else, rather) that was currently fashionable. It had not existed in the Century two physioyears earlier, prior to the latest Reality Change.

            He took the second drink from the Mekkano with an austere nod of thanks to Noÿs.

            Now why had a Reality Change which had had virtually no physical effect on the Century brought a new drink into existence? Well, he wasn’t a Computer, so there was no use asking himself that question. Besides, even the most detailed possible Computations could never eliminate all uncertainty, all random effects. If that weren’t so, there would be no need for Observers.

            They were alone together in the house, Noÿs and himself. Mekkanos were at the height of their popularity these two decades past and would remain so for nearly a decade more in this Reality, so there were no human servants about.

            Of course, with the female of the species as economically independent as the male, and able to attain motherhood, if she so wished, without the necessities of physical childbearing, there could be nothing “improper” in their being together alone in the eves of the 482nd, at least.

            Yet Harlan felt compromised.

            The girl was stretched out on her elbow on a sofa opposite. Its patterned covering sank beneath her as though avid to embrace her. She had kicked off the transparent shoes she had been wearing and her toes curled and uncurled within the flexible foamite, like the soft paws of a luxuriant cat.

            She shook her head and whatever it was that had kept her hair arranged upward away from her ears in intricate intertwinings was suddenly loosened. The hair tumbled about her neck and her bare shoulders became more creamily lovely at the contrast with the black hair.

            She murmured, “How old are you?”

            That he certainly should not have answered. It was a personal question and the answer was none of her business. What he should have said at that point with polite firmness was: May I be left to my work? Instead what he heard himself saying was, “Thirty-two years.” He meant physioyears, of course.

            She said, “I’m younger than you. I’m twenty-seven. But I suppose I won’t always look younger than you. I suppose you’ll be like this when I’m an old woman. What made you decide to be thirty-two? Can you change if you wish? Wouldn’t you want to be younger?”

            “What are you talking about?” Harlan rubbed his forehead to clear his mind.

            She said softly, “You live forever. You’re an Eternal.”

            Was it a question or a statement?

            He said, “You’re mad. We grow old and die like anyone else.”

            She said, “You can tell me.” Her voice was low and cajoling. The fifty-millennial language, which he had always thought harsh and unpleasant, seemed euphonious after all. Or was it merely that a full stomach and the scented air had dulled his ears?

            She said, “You can see all Times, visit all places. I so wanted to work in Eternity. I waited the longest time for them to let me. I thought maybe they’d make me an Eternal, and then I found there were only men there. Some of them wouldn’t even talk to me because I was a woman. You wouldn’t talk to me.”

            “We’re all busy,” mumbled Harlan, fighting to keep off something that could only be described as a numb content. “I was very busy.”

            “But why aren’t there more women Eternals?”

            Harlan couldn’t trust himself to speak. What could he say? That members of Eternity were chosen with infinite care since two conditions had to be met. First, they must be equipped for the job; second, their withdrawal from Time must have no deleterious effect upon Reality.

            Reality! That was the word he must not mention under any circumstances. He felt the spinning sensation in his head grow stronger and he closed his eyes for a moment to stop it.

            How many excellent prospects had been left untouched in Time because their removal into Eternity would have meant the non-birth of children, the non-death of women and men, non-marriage, non-happenings, non-circumstance that would have twisted Reality in directions the Allwhen Council could not permit.

            Could he tell her any of this? Of course not. Could he tell her that women almost never qualified for Eternity because, for some reason he did not understand (Computers might, but he himself certainly did not), their abstraction from Time was from ten to a hundred times as likely to distort Reality as was the abstraction of a man.

            (All the thoughts jumbled together in his head, lost and whirling, joined to one another in a free association that produced odd, almost grotesque, but not entirely unpleasant, results. Noÿs was closer to him now, smiling.)

            He heard her voice like a drifting wind. “Oh, you Eternals. You are so secretive. You won’t share at all. Make me an Eternal.”

            Her voice was a sound now that didn’t coalesce into separate words, just a delicately modulated sound that insinuated itself into his mind.

            He wanted, he longed to tell her: There’s no fun in Eternity, lady. We work! We work to plot out all the details of everywhen from the beginning of Eternity to where Earth is empty, and we try to plot out all the infinite possibilities of all the might-have-beens and pick out a might-have-been that is better than what is and decide where in Time we can make a tiny little change to twist the is to the might-be and we have a new is and look for a new might-be, forever, and forever, and that is how it has been since Vikkor Mallansohn discovered the Temporal Field in the 24th, way back in the Primitive 24th and then it was possible to start Eternity in the 27th, the mysterious Mallansohn whom no man knows and who started Eternity, really, and the new might-be, forever and forever and forever and...

            He shook his head, but the whirligig of thought went on and on in stranger and more jagged breaks and leaps until it jumped into a sudden flash of illumination that persisted for a brilliant second, then died.

            That moment steadied him. He grasped for it, but it was gone.

            The peppemint drink?

            Noÿs was still closer, her face not quite clear in his gaze. He could feel her hair against his cheek, the warm, light pressure of her breath. He ought to draw away, but--strangely, strangely--he found he did not want to.

            “If I were made an Eternal...” she breathed, almost in his ear, though the words were scarcely heard above the beating of his heart. Her lips were moist and parted. “Wouldn’t you like to?”

            He did not know what she meant, but suddenly he didn’t care. He seemed in flames. He put out his arms clumsily, gropingly. She did not resist, but melted and coalesced with him.

            It all happened dreamily, as though it were happening to someone else.

            It wasn’t nearly as repulsive as he had always imagined it must be. It came as a shock to him, a revelation, that it wasn’t repulsive at all.

            Even afterward, when she leaned against him with her eyes all soft and smiling a little, he found he had to reach out and stroke her damp hair with slow and trembling delight.

            She was entirely different in his eyes now. She was not a woman, not an individual at all. She was suddenly an aspect of himself. She was, in a strange and unexpected way, a part of himself.

            The spatio-temporal chart said nothing of this, yet Harlan felt no guilt. It was only the thought of Finge that aroused strong emotion in Harlan’s breast. And that wasn’t guilt. Not at all.

            It was satisfaction, even triumph!

            In bed Harlan could not sleep. The lightheadedness had worn off now, but there was still the unusual fact that for the first time in his adult life a grown woman shared his bed.

            He could hear her soft breathing and in the ultra-dim glow to which the internal light of the walls and ceiling had been reduced he could see her body as the merest shadow next to his.

            He had only to move his hand to feel the warmth and softness of her flesh, and he dared not do that, lest he wake her out of whatever dreaming she might have. It was as though she were dreaming for the two of them, dreaming herself and himself and all that had happened, and as though her waking would drive it all from existence.

            It was a thought that seemed a piece of those other queer, unusual thoughts he had experienced just before...

            Those had been strange thoughts, coming to him at a moment between sense and nonsense. He tried to recapture them and could not. Yet suddenly it was very important that he recapture them. For although he could not remember the details, he could remember that, for just an instant, he had understood something.

            He was not certain what that something was, but there had been the unearthly clarity of the half-asleep, when more than mortal eye and mind seems suddenly to come to life.

            His anxiety grew. Why couldn’t he remember? So much had been in his grasp.

            For the moment even the sleeping girl beside him receded into the hinterland of his thoughts.

            He thought: If I follow the thread...I was thinking of Reality and Eternity...yes, and Mallansohn and the Cub!

            He stopped there. Why the Cub? Why Cooper? He hadn’t thought of him.

            But if he hadn’t, then why should he think of Brinsley Sheridan Cooper now?

            He frowned! What was the truth that connected all this? What was it he was trying to find? What made him so sure there was something to find?

            Harlan felt chilled, for with these questions a distant glow of that earlier illumination seemed to break upon the horizons of his mind and he almost knew.

            He held his breath, did not press for it. Let it come.

            Let it come.

            And in the quiet of that night, a night already so uniquely significant in his life, an explanation and interpretation of events came to him that at any saner, more normal time he would not have entertained for a moment.

            He let the thought bud and flower, let it grow until he could see it explain a hundred odd points that otherwise simply remained--odd.

            He would have to investigate this, check this, back in Eternity, but in his heart he was already convinced that he knew a terrible secret he was not meant to know.

            A secret that embraced all Eternity!

            6. Life-Plotter

            A MONTH OF physiotime had passed since that night in the 482nd, when he grew acquainted with many things. Now, if one calculated by ordinary time, he was nearly 2000 Centuries in Noÿs Lambent’s future, attempting by a mixture of bribery and cajolery to learn what lay in store for her in a new Reality.

            It was worse than unethical, but he was past caring. In the physiomonth just gone he had, in his own eyes, become a criminal. There was no way of glossing over that fact. He would be no more a criminal by compounding his crime and he had a great deal to gain by doing so.

            Now, as part of his felonious maneuvering (he made no effort to choose a milder phrase) he stood at the barrier before the 2456th. Entry into Time was much more complicated than mere passage between Eternity and the kettle shafts. In order to enter Time the co-ordinates fixing the desired region on Earth’s surface had painstakingly to be adjusted and the desired moment of Time pin-pointed within the Century. Yet despite inner tension Harlan handled the controls with the ease and quick confidence of a man with much experience and a great talent.

            Harlan found himself in the engine room he had seen first on the viewing screen within Eternity. At this physiomoment Sociologist Voy would be sitting safely before that screen watching for the Technician’s Touch that was to come.

            Harlan felt no hurry. The room would remain empty for the next 156 minutes. To be sure, the spatio-temporal chart allowed him only 110 minutes, leaving the remaining 46 as the customary 40 per cent “margin.” Margin was there in case of necessity, but a Technician was not expected to have to use it. A “margin-eater” did not remain a Specialist long.

            Harlan, however, expected to use no’ more than 2 minutes of the 110. Wearing his wrist-borne field generator SO that he was surrounded by an aura of physiotime (an effluvium, so to speak, of Eternity) and therefore protected from any of the effects of Reality Change, he took one step toward the wall, lifted a small container from its position on a shelf, and placed it in a carefully adjusted spot on the shelf below.

            Having done that, he re-entered Eternity in a way that seemed as prosaic to himself as passage through any door might be. Had there been a Timer watching, it would have seemed to him that Harlan had simply disappeared.

            The small container stayed where he put it. It played no immediate role in world history. A man’s hand, hours later, reached for it but did not find it. A search revealed it half an hour later still, but in the interim a force-field had blanked out and a man’s temper had been lost. A decision which would have remained unmade in the previous Reality was now made in anger. A meeting did not take place; a man who would have died lived a year longer, under other circumstances; another who would have lived died somewhat sooner.

            The ripples spread wider, reaching their maximum in the 2481st, which was twenty-five Centuries up when from the Touch. The intensity of the Reality Change declined thereafter. Theorists pointed out that nowhere to the infinite up when from the Touch the Change had become too small to detect by the finest Computing, and that was the practical limit.

            Of course no human being in Time could ever possibly be aware of any Reality Change having taken place. Mind changed as well as matter and only Eternals could stand outside it all and see the change.

            Sociologist Voy was staring at the bluish scene in the 2481st, where earlier there had been all the activity of a busy space-port. He barely looked up when Harlan entered. He barely mumbled something that might have been a greeting.

            A change had indeed blasted the space-port. Its shininess was gone; what buildings there stood were not the grand creations they had been. A space-ship rusted. There were no people. There was no motion.

            Harlan allowed himself a small smile that flickered for a moment, then vanished. It was M.D.R. all right. Maximum Desired Response. And it had happened at once. The Change did not necessarily take place at the precise moment of the Technician’s Touch. If the calculations that went into the Touch were sloppy, hours or days might elapse before the Change actually took place (counting, of course, by physiotime). It was only when all degrees of freedom vanished that the Change took place. While there was even a mathematical chance for alternate actions, the Change did not take place.

            It was Harlan’s pride that when he calculated an M.N.C., when it was his hand that contrived the Touch, the degrees of freedom vanished at once, and the Change took place instantly.

            Voy said softly, “It had been very beautiful.”

            The phrase grated Harlan’s ears, seeming to detract from the beauty of his own performance. “I wouldn’t regret,” he said, “having space-travel bred out of Reality altogether.”

            “No?” said Voy. “

            “What good is it? It never lasts more than a millennium or two. People get tired. They come back home and the colonies die out. Then after another four or five millennia, or forty or fifty, they try again and it fails again. It is a waste of human ingenuity and effort.”

            Voy said dryly, “You’re quite a philosopher.”

            Harlan flushed. He thought: What’s the use in talking to any of them? He said, angrily, with a sharp change of subject, “What about the Life-Plotter?”

            “What about him?”

            “Would you check with the man? He ought to have made some progress by now.”

            The Sociologist let a look of disapproval drift across his face, as though to say: You’re the impatient one, aren’t you? Aloud he said, “Come with me and let’s see.”

            The name plate on the office door said Neron Feruque, which struck Harlan’s eye and mind because of its faint similarity to a pair of rulers in the Mediterranean area during Primitive times. (His weekly discourses with Cooper had sharpened his own preoccupation with the Primitive almost feverishly.)

            The man, however, resembled neither ruler, as Harlan recalled it. He was almost cadaverously lean, with skin stretched tightly over a high-bridged nose. His fingers were long and his wrists knobby. As he caressed his small Summator, he looked like Death weighing a soul in the balance.

            Harlan found himself staring at the Summator hungrily. It was the heart and blood of Life-Plotting, the skin and bones, sinew, muscle and all else. Feed into it the required data of a personal history, and the equations of the Reality Change: do that and it would chuckle away in obscene merriment for any length of time from a minute to a day, and then spit out the possible companion lives for the person involved (under the new Reality), each neatly ticketed with a probability value.

            Sociologist Voy introduced Harlan. Feruque, having stared in open annoyance at the Technician’s insigne, nodded his head and let the matter go.

            Harlan said, “Is the young lady’s Life-Plot complete yet?”

            “It is not. I’ll let you know when it is.” He was one of those who carried contempt for the Technician to the point of open rudeness.

            Voy said, “Take it easy, Life-Plotter.”

            Feruque had eyebrows which were light almost to invisibility. It heightened the resemblance of his face to a skull. His eyes rolled in what should have been empty sockets as he said, “Killed the space-ships?”

            Voy nodded. “Cut it down a Century.”

            Feruque’s lips twisted softly and formed a word.

            Harlan folded his arms and stared at the Life-Plotter, who looked away in eventual discomfiture.

            Harlan thought: He knows it’s his guilt too.

            Feruque said to Voy, “Listen, as long as you’re here, what in Time am I going to do about the anti-cancer serum requests? We’re not the only Century with anti-cancer. Why do we get all the applications?”

            “All the other Centuries are just as crowded. You know that.”

            “Then they’ve got to stop sending in applications altogether.”

            “How do we go about making them?”

            “Easy. Let the Allwhen Council stop receiving them.”

            “I have no pull with the Allwhen Council.”

            “You have pull with the old man.”

            Harlan listened to the conversation dully, without real interest. At least it served to keep his mind on inconsequentials and away from the chuckling Summator. The “old man,” he knew, would be the Computer in charge of the Section.

            “I’ve talked to the old man,” said the Sociologist, “and he’s talked to the Council.”

            “Nuts: He’s just sent through a routine tape-strip. He has to fight for this. It’s a matter of basic policy.”

            “The Allwhen Council isn’t in the mood these days to consider changes in basic policy. You know the rumors going round.”

            “Oh, sure. They’re busy on a big deal. Whenever there’s dodging to do, the word gets round that Council’s busy on some big deal.”

            (If Harlan could have found the heart for it, he would have smiled at that point.)

            Feruque brooded a few moments, and then burst out, “What most people don’t understand is that anti-cancer serum isn’t a matter of tree seedlings or field motors. I know that every sprig of spruce has to be watched for adverse effects on Reality, but anti-cancer always involves a human life and that’s a hundred times as complicated.

            “Consider! Think how many people a year die of cancer in each Century that doesn’t have anti-cancer serums of one sort or another. You can imagine how many of the patients want to die. So the Timer governments in every Century are forever forwarding applications to Eternity to ‘please, pretty please ship them seventy-five thousand ampules of serum on behalf of the men critically stricken who are absolutely vital to the cultures, enclosed see biographical data.’ “

            Voy nodded rapidly, “I know. I know.”

            But Feruque was not to be denied his bitterness. “So you read the biographical data and it’s every man a hero. Every man an insupportable loss to his world. So you work it through. You see what would happen to Reality if each man lived, and for Time’s sake, if different combinations of men lived.

            “In the last month, I’ve done 572 cancer requests. Seventeen, count them, seventeen Life-Plots came out to involve no undesirable Reality Changes. Mind you, there wasn’t one case of a possible desirable Reality Change, but the Council says neutral cases get the serum. Humanity, you know. So exactly seventeen people in assorted Centuries get cured this month.

            “And what happens? Are the Centuries happy? Not on your life. One man gets cured and a dozen, same country, same Time, don’t. Everyone says, Why that one? Maybe the guys we didn’t treat are better characters, maybe they’re rosy-cheeked philanthropists beloved by all, while the one man we cure kicks his aged mother all around the block whenever he can spare the time from beating his kids. They don’t know about Reality Changes and we can’t tell them.

            “We’re just making trouble for ourselves, Voy, unless the Allwhen Council decides to screen all applications and approve only those which result in a desirable Reality Change. That’s all. Either curing them does some good for humanity, or else it’s out. Never mind this business of saying: ‘Well, it does no harm.’ “

            The Sociologist had been listening with a look of mild pain on his face, and now he said, “If it were you with cancer…”

            “That’s a stupid remark, Voy. Is that what we base decisions on? In that case there’d never be a Reality Change. Some poor sucker always gets it in the neck, doesn’t he? Suppose you were that sucker, hey?

            “And another thing. Just remember that every time we make a Reality Change it’s harder to find a good next one. Every physioyear, the chance that a random Change is likely to be for the worse increases. That means the proportion of guys we can cure gets smaller anyway. It’s always going to get smaller. Someday, we’ll be able to cure only one guy a physioyear, even counting the neutral cases. Remember that.”

            Harlan lost even the faintest interest. This was the type of griping that went with the business. The Psychologists and Sociologists, in their rare introvertive studies of Eternity, called it identification. Men identified themselves with the Century with which they were associated professionally. Its battles, all too often, became their own battles.

            Eternity fought the devil of identification as best it could. No man could be assigned to any Section within two Centuries of his homewhen, to make identification harder. Preference was given to Centuries with cultures markedly different from that of their homewhen. (Harlan thought of Finge and the 482nd.) What was more, their assignments were shifted as often as their reactions grew suspect. (Harlan wouldn’t give a 50th Century grafenpiece for Feruque’s chances of retaining this assignment longer than another physioyear at the outside.)

            And still men identified out of a silly yearning for a home in Time (the Time-wish; everyone knew about it). For some reason this was particularly true in Centuries with spacetravel. It was something that should be investigated and would be but for Eternity’s chronic reluctance to turn its eyes inward.

            A month earlier Harlan might have despised Feruque as a blustering sentimentalist, a petulant oaf who eased the pain of watching the electro-gravitics lose intensity in a new Reality by railing against those of other Centuries who wanted anti-cancer serum.

            He might have reported him. It would have been his duty to do so. The man’s reactions obviously could no longer be trusted.

            He could not do so, now. He even found sympathy for the man. His own crime was so much greater.

            How easy it was to slip back to thoughts of Noÿs.

            Eventually he had fallen asleep that night, and he awoke in daylight, with brightness shining through translucent walls all about until it was as though he had awakened on a cloud in a misty morning sky.

            Noÿs was laughing down at him. “Goodness, it was hard to wake you.”

            Harlan’s first reflexive action was a scrabble for bedclothes that weren’t there. Then memory arrived arid he stared at her hollowly, his face burning red. How should he feel about this?

            But then something else occurred to him and he shot to a sitting position. “It isn’t past one, is it? Father Time!”

            “It’s only eleven. You’ve got breakfast waiting and lots of time.”

            “Thanks,” he mumbled.

            “The shower controls are all set and your clothes are all ready.”

            What could he say? “Thanks,” he mumbled.

            He avoided her eyes during the meal. She sat opposite him, not eating, her chin buried in the palm of one hand, her dark hair combed thickly to one side and her eyelashes preternaturally long.

            She followed every gesture he made while he kept his eyes lowered and searched for the bitter shame he knew he ought to feel.

            She said, “Where will you be going at one?”

            “Aeroball game,” he muttered, “I have the ticket.”

            “That’s the rubber game. And I missed the whole season because of just skipping the time, you know. Who’ll win the game, Andrew?”

            He felt oddly weak at the sound of his first name. He shook his head curtly and tried to look austere. (It used to have been so easy.)

            “But surely you know. You’ve inspected this whole period, haven’t you?”

            Properly speaking, he ought to maintain a flat and cold negative, but weakly he explained, “There was a lot of Space and Time to cover. I wouldn’t know little precise things like game scores.”

            “Oh, you just don’t want to tell me.”

            Harlan said nothing to that. He inserted the pene-prong into the small, juicy fruit and lifted it, whole, to his lips.

            After a moment Noÿs said, “Did you see what happened in this neighborhood before you came?”

            “No details, N--Noÿs.” (He forced her name past his lips.)

            The girl said softly, “Didn’t you see us? Didn’t you know all along that--”

            Harlan stammered, “No, no, I couldn’t see myself. I’m not in Rea--I’m not here till I come. I can’t explain.” He was doubly flustered. First, that she should speak of it. Second, that he had almost been trapped into saying, “Reality,” of all the words the most forbidden in conversations with Timers.

            She lifted her eyebrows and her eyes grew round and a little amazed. “Are you ashamed?”

            “What we did was not proper.”

            “Why not?” And in the 482nd her question was perfectly innocent. “Aren’t Eternals allowed to?” There was almost a joking cast to that question as though she were asking if Eternals weren’t allowed to eat.

            “Don’t use the word,” said Harlan. “As a matter of fact, we’re not, in a way.”

            “Well, then, don’t tell them. I won’t.”

            And she walked about the table and sat down on his lap, pushing the small table out of the way with a smooth and flowing motion of her hip.

            Momentarily he stiffened, lifted his hands in a gesture that might have been intended to hold her off. It didn’t succeed.

            She bent and kissed him on his lips, and nothing seemed shameful any more. Nothing that involved Noÿs and himself.

            He wasn’t sure when first he began to do something that an Observer, ethically, had no right to do. That is, he began to speculate on the nature of the problem involving the current Reality and of the Reality Change that would be planned.

            It was not the loose morals of the Century, not ectogenesis, not matriarchy, that disturbed Eternity. All of that was as it was in the previous Reality and the Allwhen Council had viewed it with equanimity then.. Finge had said it was something very subtle.

            The Change then would have to be very subtle and it would have to involve the group he was Observing. So much seemed obvious.

            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 of 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 ho 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 ill, 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.

            7. Prelude to Crime

            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 up when 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 Scent 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?”

            “We do.”

            “I see. There’s nothing in the rules against this, Technician”--he dusted the finger with which he had touched the object against the side seam of his trouser leg--”but I don’t know that it’s advisable to allow the culture of the homewhen to affect one. The true Eternal adopts whatever culture he is surrounded by. I doubt, for instance, if I have eaten out of an energic utensil more than twice in five years. “ He sighed. “And yet to allow food to touch matter has always seemed unclean. But I don’t give in. I don’t give in.”

            His eyes returned to the wooden object, but now he held both hands behind his back, and said, “What is it? What is its purpose?”

            “It’s a bookcase,” said Harlan. He had the impulse to ask Finge how he felt now that his hands rested firmly upon the small of his back. Would he not consider it cleaner to have his clothes and his own body constructed of pure and undefiled energy fields?

            Finge’s eyebrows lifted. “A bookcase. Then those objects resting upon the shelves are books. Is that right?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Authentic specimens?”

            “Entirely, Computer. I picked them up in the 24th. The few I have here date from the 20th. If--if you intend to look at them, I wish you’d be careful. The pages have been restored and impregnated, but they’re not foil. They take careful handling.”

            “I won’t touch them. I have no intention of touching them. Original 20th Century dust is on them, I imagine. Actual books!” He laughed. “Pages of cellulose, too? You implied that.”

            Harlan nodded. “Cellulose modified by the impregnation treatment for longer life. Yes.” He opened his mouth for a deep breath, forcing himself to remain calm. It was ridiculous to identify himself with these books, to feel a slur upon them to be a slur upon himself.

            “I dare say,” said Finge, still on the subject, “that the whole content of those books could be placed on two meters of film and stored in a finger’s end. What do the books contain?”

            Harlan said, “They are bound volumes of a news magazine of the 20th.”

            “You read that?”

            Harlan said proudly, “These are a few volumes of the complete collection I have. No library in Eternity can duplicate it.”

            “Yes, your hobby. I remember now you once told me about your interest in the Primitive. I’m amazed your Educator ever allowed you to grow interested in such a thing. A complete waste of energy.”

            Harlan’s lips thinned. The man, he decided, was deliberately trying to irritate him out of possession of calm reasoning faculties. If so, he must not be allowed to succeed.

            Harlan said flatly, “I think you’ve come to see me about my report.”

            “Yes, I have.” The Computer looked about, selected a chair, and sat down gingerly. “It is not complete, as I said over the communicator.”

            “In what way, sir?” (Calm! Calm!)

            Finge broke into a nervous twitch of a smile. “What happened that you didn’t mention, Harlan?”

            “Nothing, sir.” And though he said it firmly, he stood there, hangdog.

            “Come, Technician. You spent several periods of time in the society of the young lady. Or you did if you followed the spatio-temporal chart. You did follow it, I suppose?”

            Harlan’s guilt riddled him to the point where he could not even rise to the bait of this open assault upon his professional competence.

            He could only say, “I followed it.”

            “And what happened? You include nothing of the private interludes with the woman.”

            “Nothing of importance happened,” said Harlan, dry-lipped.

            “That is ridiculous. At your time of life and with your experience, I don’t have to tell you that it is not for an Observer to judge what is important and what is not.”

            Finge’s eyes were keenly upon Harlan. They were harder and more eager than quite befitted his soft line of questioning.

            Harlan noted that well and was not fooled by Finge’s gentle voice, yet the habit of duty tugged at him. An Observer must report everything. An Observer was merely a sense-perceptive pseudopod thrust out by Eternity into Time. It tested its surroundings and was drawn back. In the fulfillment of his function an Observer had no individuality of his own; he was not really a man.

            Almost automatically Harlan began his narration of the events he had left out of his report. He did it with the trained memory of the Observer, reciting the conversations with word-for-word accuracy, reconstructing the tone of voice and cast of countenance. He did it lovingly, for in the telling he lived it again, and almost forgot, in the process, that a combination of Finge’s probing and his own healing sense of duty was driving him into an admission of guilt.

            It was only as he approached the end result of that first long conversation that he faltered and the shell of his Observer’s objectivity showed cracks.

            He was saved from further details by the hand that Finge suddenly raised and by the Computer’s sharp, edgy voice. “Thank you. It is enough. You were about to say that you made love to the woman.”

            Harlan grew angry. What Finge said was the literal truth, but Finge’s tone of voice made it sound lewd, coarse, and, worse than that, commonplace. Whatever else it was, or might be, it was not commonplace.

            Harlan had an explanation for Finge’s attitude, for his anxious cross-examination, for his breaking off the verbal report at the moment he did. Finge was jealous! That much Harlan would have sworn was obvious. Harlan had succeeded in taking away a girl that Finge had meant to have.

            Harlan felt the triumph in that and found it sweet. For the first time in his life he knew an aim that meant more to him than the frigid fulfillment of Eternity. He was going to keep Finge jealous, because Noÿs Lambent was to be permanently his.

            In this mood of sudden exaltation he plunged into the request that originally he had planned to present only after a wait of a discreet four or five days.

            He said, “It is my intention to apply for permission to form a liaison with a Timed individual.”

            Finge seemed to snap out of a reverie. “With Noÿs Lambent, I presume.”

            “Yes, sir. As Computer in charge of the Section, it will have to go through you....”

            Harlan wanted it to go through Finge. Make him suffer. If he wanted the girl himself, let him say so and Harlan could insist on allowing Noÿs to make her choice. He almost smiled at that. He hoped it would come to that. It would be the final triumph.

            Ordinarily, of course, a Technician could not hope to push through such a matter in the face of a Computer’s desires, but Harlan was sure he could count on Twissell’s backing, and Finge had a long way to go before he could buck Twissell.

            Finge, however, seemed tranquil. “It would seem,” he said. “that you have already taken illegal possession of the girl.”

            Harlan flushed and was moved to a feeble defense. “The spatio-temporal chart insisted on our remaining alone together. Since nothing of what happened was specifically forbidden, I feel no guilt.”

            Which was a lie, and from Finge’s half-amused expression one could feel that he knew it to be a lie.

            He said, “There will be a Reality Change.”

            Harlan said, “If so, I will amend my application to request liaison with Miss Lambent in the new Reality.”

            “I don’t think that would be wise. How can you be sure in advance? In the new Reality, she may be married, she may be deformed. In fact I can tell you this. In the new Reality, she will not want you. She will not want you.”

            Harlan quivered. “You know nothing about it.”

            “Oh? You think this great love of yours is a matter of soul-to-soul contact? That it will survive all external changes? Have you been reading novels out of Time?”

            Harlan was goaded into indiscretion. “For one thing, I don’t believe you.”

            Finge said coldly, “I beg pardon.”

            “You’re lying.” Harlan didn’t care what he said now. “You’re jealous. It’s all it amounts to. You’re jealous. You had your own plans for Noÿs but she chose me.”

            Finge said, “Do you realize--”

            “I realize a great deal. I’m no fool. I may not be a Computer, but neither am I an ignoramus. You say she won’t want me in the new Reality. How do you know? You don’t even know yet what the new Reality will be. You don’t know if there must be a new Reality at all. You just received my report. It must be analyzed before a Reality Change can be computed, let alone submitted for approval. So when you affect to know the nature of the Change, you are lying.”

            There were a number of ways in which Finge might have made response. Harlan’s heated mind was aware of many. He did not try to choose among them. Finge might stalk out in affected dudgeon; he might call in a member of Security and have Harlan taken into custody for insubordination; he might shout back, yelling as angrily as Harlan; he might put in an immediate call to Twissell, lodging a formal complaint; he might--he might...

            Finge did none of this.

            He said gently, “Sir down, Harlan. Let’s talk about this.”

            And because that response was completely unexpected, Harlan’s jaw sagged and he sat down in confusion. His resolution faltered. What was this?

            “You remember, of course,” said Finge, “that I told you that our problem with the 482nd involved an undesirable attitude on the part of the Timers of the current Reality toward Eternity. You do remember that, don’t you?” He spoke with the mild urging of a schoolmaster toward a somewhat backward student, yet Harlan thought he could detect a kind of hard glitter in his eye.

            Harlan said, “Of course.”

            “You remember, too, that I told you that the Allwhen Council was reluctant to accept my analysis of the situation without specific confirming Observations. Doesn’t that imply to you that I had already Computed the necessary Reality Change?”

            “But my own Observations represent the confirmation, don’t they?”

            “They do.”

            “And it would take time to analyze them properly.”

            “Nonsense. Your report means nothing. The confirmation lay in what you told me orally moments ago.”

            “I don’t understand you.”

            “Look, Harlan, let me tell you what is wrong with the 482nd. Among the upper classes of this Century, particularly among the women, there has grown up the notion that Eternals are really Eternal, literally so; that they live forever....Great Time, man, Noÿs Lambent told you as much. You repeated her statements to me not twenty minutes ago.”

            Harlan stared blankly at Finge, He was remembering Noÿs’s soft, caressing voice as she leaned toward him and caught at his eyes with her own lovely, dark glance: You live forever. You’re an Eternal.

            Finge went on, “Now a belief like that is bad, but, in itself, not too bad. It can lead to inconveniences, increase difficulties for the Section, but Computation would show that only in a minority of cases would Change be necessary. Still, if a Change is desirable, isn’t it obvious to you that the inhabitants of the Century who must, above all, change maximally with the Change, be those who are subject to the superstition. In other words, the female aristocracy. Noÿs.”

            “It may be, but I’ll take my chance,” said Harlan.

            “You have no chance at all. Do you think your fascinations and charm persuaded the soft aristocrat to fall into the arms of an unimportant Technician? Come, Harlan, be realistic about this.”

            Harlan’s lips grew stubborn. He said nothing.

            Finge said, “Can’t you guess the additional superstition which these people have added to their belief in the actual eternal life of the Eternals? Great Time, Harlan! Most of the women believe that intimacy with an Eternal will enable a mortal woman (as they think of themselves) to live forever!”

            Harlan swayed. He could hear Noÿs’s voice again so clearly: It I were made an Eternal...

            And then her kisses.

            Finge went on. “The existence of such a superstition was hard to believe, Harlan. It was unprecedented. It lay within the region of random error so that a search through the Computations for the previous Change yielded no information respecting it one way or the other. The Allwhen Council wanted firm evidence, direct substantiation. I chose Miss Lambent as a good example of her class. I chose you as the other subject--”

            Harlan struggled to his feet. “You chose me? As a subject?”

            “I’m sorry,” said Finge stiffly, “but it was necessary. You made a very good subject.”

            Harlan stared at him.

            Finge had the grace to squirm a bit under that wordless stare. He said, “Don’t you see? No, you still don’t. Look, Harlan, you’re a cold-fish product of Eternity. You won’t look at a woman. You consider women and all that concerns them unethical. No, there’s a better word. You consider them sinful. That attitude shows alt over you, and to any woman you’d have all the sex appeal of a month-dead mackerel. Yet here we have a woman, a beautiful pampered product of a hedonistic culture, who ardently seduces you on your first evening together, virtually begging for your embrace. Don’t you understand that that is ridiculous, impossible, unless--well, unless it is the confirmation we were looking for.”

            Harlan struggled for words. “You say she sold herself--”

            “Why that expression? There is no shame attached to sex in this Century. The only strange thing is that she chose you as partner, and that she did for the sake of eternal life. It’s plain.”

            And Harlan, arms raised, hands claw-bent, with no rational thought in his mind, or any irrational one other than to choke and throttle Finge, sprang forward.

            Finge stepped back hastily. He brought out a blaster with a quick, trembling gesture. “Don’t touch me! Back!”

            Harlan had just enough sanity to halt his rush. His hair was matted. His shirt was stained with perspiration. His breath whistled through pinched white nostrils.

            Finge said shakily, “I know you very well, you see, and I thought your reaction might be violent. Now I’ll shoot if I have to.”

            Harlan said, “Get out.”

            “I will. But first you’ll listen. For attacking a Computer, you can be declassified, but we’ll Jet that go. You will understand, however, that I did not lie. The Noÿs Lambent of the new Reality, whatever else may be or not be, will lack this superstition. The whole purpose of the Change will be to wipe out the superstition, And without it, Harlan”--his voice was almost a snarl--”how could a woman like Noÿs want a man like you?”

            The pudgy Computer backed toward the door of Harlan’s personal quarters, blaster still leveled.

            He paused to say, with a sort of grim gaiety, “Of course, if you had her now, Harlan, if you had her now, you could enjoy her. You could keep your liaison and make it formal. That is, if you had her now. But the Change will come soon, Harlan, and after that, you will not have her. What a pity, the now does not last, even in Eternity, eh, Harlan?”

            Harlan no longer looked at him. Finge had won after all and was leaving in clear and leering possession of the field. Harlan stared unseeingly at his own toes, and when he looked up Finge was gone--whether five seconds earlier or fifteen minutes Harlan could not have said.

            Hours had passed nightmarishly and Harlan felt trapped in the prison of his mind. All that Finge had said was so true, so transparently true. Harlan’s Observer mind could look back upon the relationship of himself and Noÿs, that short, unusual relationship, and it took on a different texture.

            It wasn’t a case of instant infatuation. How could he have believed it was? Infatuation for a man like himself?

            Of course not. Tears stung his eyes and he felt ashamed. How obvious it was that the affair was a case of cool calculation. The girl had certain undeniable physical assets and no ethical principles to keep her from using them. So she used them and that had nothing to do with Andrew Harlan as a person. He simply represented her distorted view of Eternity and what it meant.

            Automatically Harlan’s long fingers caressed the volumes in his small bookshelf. He took one out and, unseeingly, opened it.

            The print blurred. The faded colors of the illustrations were ugly, meaningless blotches.

            Why had Finge troubled to tell him all this? In the strictest sense he ought not to have. An Observer, or anyone acting as Observer, ought never to know the ends attained by his Observation. It removed him by so much from the ideal position of the objective non-human tool.

            It was to crush him, of course; to take a mean and jealous revenge!

            Harlan fingered the open page of the magazine. He found himself staring at a duplication, in startling red, of a ground vehicle, similar to vehicles characteristic of the 45th, 182nd, 590th, and 984th Centuries, as well as of late Primitive times. It was a very common sort of affair with an internal-combustion motor. In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractions were the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels. That was true of none of the later Centuries, of course.

            Harlan had pointed that out to Cooper. He had made quite a point of it, and now his mind, as though longing to turn away from the unhappy present, drifted back to that moment. Sharp, irrelevant images filled the ache within Harlan.

            “These advertisements,” he had said, “tell us more of Primitive times than the so-called news articles in the same magazine. The news articles assume a basic knowledge of the world it deals with. It uses terms it feels no necessity of explaining. What is a ‘golf ball,’ for instance?”

            Cooper had professed his ignorance readily.

            Harlan went on in the didactic tone he could scarcely avoid on occasions such as this. “We could deduce that it was a small pellet of some sort from the nature of the casual mentions it receives. We know that it is used in a game, if only because it is mentioned in an item under the heading ‘Sport.’ We can even make further deductions that it is hit by a long rod of some sort and the object of the game is to drive the ball into a hole in the ground. But why bother with deduction and reasoning? Observe this advertisement! The object of it is only to induce readers to buy the ball, but in so doing we are presented with an excellent close-range portrait of one, with a section cut into it to show its construction.”

            Cooper, coming from an era in which advertisement was not as wildly proliferative as it was in the later Centuries of Primitive times, found all this difficult to appreciate. He said, “Isn’t it rather disgusting the way these people blow their own horn? Who would be fool enough to believe a person’s boastings about his own products? Would he admit defects? Is he likely to stop at any exaggeration?”

            Harlan, whose homewhen was middling fruitful in advertisement, raised tolerant eyebrows and merely said, “You’ll have to accept that. It’s their way and we never quarrel with the ways of any culture as long as it does not seriously harm mankind as a whole.”

            But now Harlan’s mind snapped back to his present situation and he was back in the present, staring at the loudmouthed, brassy advertisements in the news magazine. He asked himself in sudden excitement: Were the thoughts he had just experienced really irrelevant? Or was he tortuously finding a way out of the blackness and back to Noÿs?

            Advertisement! A device for forcing the unwilling into line. Did it matter to a ground-vehicle manufacturer whether a given individual felt an original or spontaneous desire for his product? If the prospect (that was the word) could be artificially persuaded or cajoled into feeling that desire and acting upon it, would that not be just as well?

            Then what did it matter if Noÿs loved him out of passion or out of calculation? Let them but be together long enough and she would grow to love him. He would make her love him and, in the end, love and not its motivation was what counted. He wished now he had read some of the novels out of Time that Finge had mentioned scornfully.

            Harlan’s fists clenched at a sudden thought. If Noÿs had come to him, to Harlan, for immortality, it could only mean that she had not yet fulfilled the requirement for that gift. She could have made love to no Eternal previously. That meant that her relationship to Finge had been nothing more than that of secretary and employer. Otherwise what need would she have had for Harlan?

            Yet Finge surely must have tried--must have attempted...(Harlan could not complete the thought even in the secrecy of his own mind.) Finge could have proved the superstition’s existence on his own person. Surely he could not have missed the thought with Noÿs an ever-present temptation. Then she must have refused him.

            He had had to use Harlan and Harlan had succeeded. It was for that reason that Finge had been driven into the jealous revenge of torturing Harlan with the knowledge that Noÿs’s motivation had been a practical one, and that he could never have her.

            Yet Noÿs had refused Finge even with eternal life at stake and had accepted Harlan. She had that much of a choice and she had made it in Harlan’s favor. So it wasn’t calculation entirely. Emotion played a part.

            Harlan’s thoughts were wild and jumbled, and grew more heated with every moment.

            He must have her, and now. Before any Reality Change. What was it Finge had said to him, jeering: The now does not last, even in Eternity.

            Doesn’t it, though? Doesn’t it?

            Harlan had known exactly what he must do. Finge’s angry taunting had goaded him into a frame of mind where he was ready for crime and Finge’s final sneer had, at least, inspired him with the nature of the deed he must commit.

            He had not wasted a moment after that. It was with excitement and even joy that he left his quarters, at all but a run, to commit a major crime against Eternity.

            8. Crime

            NO ONE had questioned him. No one had stopped him.

            There was that advantage, anyway, in the social isolation of a Technician. He went via the kettle channels to a door to. Time and set its controls. There was the chance, of course, that someone would happen along on a legitimate errand and wonder why the door was in use. He hesitated, and then decided to stamp his seal on the marker. A sealed door would draw little attention. An unsealed door in active use would be a nine-day wonder.

            Of course, it might be Finge who stumbled upon the door. He would have to chance that.

            Noÿs was still standing as he had left her. Wretched hours (physiohours) had passed since Harlan had left the 482nd for a lonely Eternity, but he returned now to the same Time, within a matter of seconds, that he had left. Not a hair on Noÿs’s head had stirred.

            She looked startled. “Did you forget something, Andrew?”

            Harlan stared at her hungrily, but made no move to touch her. He remembered Finge’s words, and he dared not risk a repulse. He said stiffly, “You’ve got to do as I say.”

            She said, “But is something wrong, then? You just left. You just this minute left.”

            “Don’t worry,” said Harlan. It was all he could do to keep from taking her hand, from trying to soothe her. Instead he spoke harshly. It was as though some demon were forcing him to do all the wrong things. Why had he come back at the first available moment? He was only disturbing her by his almost instantaneous return after leaving.

            (He knew the answer to that, really. He had a two-day margin of grace allowed by the spatio-temporal chart. The earlier portions of that period of grace were safer and yielded least chance of discovery. It was a natural tendency to crowd it as far downwhen as he could. A foolish risk, too, though. He might easily have miscalculated and entered Time before he had left it physiohours earlier. What then? It was one of the first rules he had learned as an Observer: One person occupying two points in the same Time of the same Reality runs a risk of meeting himself.

            Somehow that was something to be avoided. Why? Harlan knew he didn’t want to meet himself. He didn’t want to be staring into the eyes of another and earlier [or later] Harlan. Beyond that it would be a paradox, and what was it Twissell was fond of saying? “There are no paradoxes in Time, but only because Time deliberately avoids paradoxes.”)

            All the time Harlan thought dizzily of all this Noÿs stared at him with large, luminous eyes.

            Then she came to him and put cool hands on either burning cheek and said softly, “You’re in trouble.”

            To Harlan her glance seemed kindly, loving. Yet how could that be? She had what she wanted. What else was there? He seized her wrists and said huskily, “Will you come with me? Now? Without asking any questions? Doing exactly as I say?”

            “Must I?” she asked.

            “You must, Noÿs. It’s very important.”

            “Then I’ll come.” She said it matter-of-factly, as though such a request came to her each day and was always accepted.

            At the lip of the kettle Noÿs hesitated a moment, then stepped in.

            Harlan said, “We’re going up when, Noÿs.”

            “That means the future, doesn’t it?”

            The kettle was already faintly humming as she entered it and she was scarcely seated when Harlan unobtrusively moved the contact at his elbow.

            She showed no signs of nausea at the beginnings of that indescribable sensation of “motion” through Time. He was afraid she might.

            She sat there quietly, so beautiful and so at ease that he ached, looking at her, and gave not the particle of a damn that, by bringing a Timer, unauthorized, into Eternity, he had committed a felony.

            She said, “Does that dial show the numbers of the years, Andrew?”

            “The Centuries.”

            “You mean we’re a thousand years in the future? Already?”

            “That’s right.”

            “It doesn’t feel like it.”

            “I know.”

            She looked about. “But how are we moving?”

            “I don’t know, Noÿs.”

            “You don’t?”

            “There are many things about Eternity that are hard to understand. “

            The numbers on the temporometer marched. Faster and faster they moved till they were a blur. With his elbow Harlan had nudged the speed stick to high. The power drain might cause some surprise in the power plants, but he doubted it. No one had been waiting for him in Eternity when he returned with Noÿs and that was nine tenths the battle. Now it was only necessary to get her to a safe place.

            Again Harlan looked at her. “Eternals don’t know everything.”

            “And I’m not an Eternal,” she murmured. “I know so little.”

            Harlan’s pulse quickened. Still not an Eternal? But Finge said...

            Leave it at that, he pleaded with himself. Leave it at that. She’s coming with you. She smiles at you. What more do you want?

            But he spoke anyway. He said, “You think an Eternal lives forever, don’t you?”

            “Well, they call them Eternals, you know, and everyone says they do.” She smiled at him brightly. “But they don’t, do they?”

            “You don’t think so, then?”

            “After I was in Eternity a while, I didn’t. People didn’t talk as though they lived forever, and there were old men there.”

            “Yet you told me I lived forever--that night.”

            She moved closer to him along the seat, still smiling. “I thought: who knows?”

            He said, without being quite able to keep the strain out of his voice, “How does a Timer go about becoming an Eternal?”

            Her smile vanished and was it his imagination or was there a trace of heightened color in her cheek. She said, “Why do you ask that?”

            “To find out.”

            “It’s silly,” she said. “I’d rather not talk about it.” She stared down at her graceful fingers, edged with nails that glittered colorlessly in the muted light of the kettle shaft. Harlan thought abstractedly and quite apropos of nothing that at an evening gathering, with a touch of mild ultraviolet in the wall illumination, those nails would glow a soft apple-green or a brooding crimson, depending on the angle she held her hands. A clever girl, one like Noÿs, could produce half a dozen shades out of them, and make it seem as though the colors were reflecting her moods. Blue for innocence, bright yellow for laughter, violet for sorrow, and scarlet for passion.

            He said, “Why did you make love to me?”

            She shook her hair back and looked at him out of a pale, grave face. She said, “If you must know, part of the reason was the theory that a girl can become an Eternal that way. I wouldn’t mind living forever.”

            “I thought you said you didn’t believe that.”

            “I didn’t, but it couldn’t hurt a girl to take the chance. Especially--”

            He was staring at her sternly, finding refuge from hurt and disappointment in a frozen look of disapproval from the heights of the morality of his homewhen. “Well?”

            “Especially since I wanted to, anyway.”

            “Wanted to make love to me?”

            “Yes.”

            “Why me?”

            “Because I liked you. Because I thought you were funny.”

            “Funny!”

            “Well, odd, if you like that better. You always worked so hard not to look at me, but you always looked at me anyway. You tried to hate me and I could see you wanted me. I was sorry for you a little, I think.”

            “What were you sorry about?” He felt his cheeks bumming.

            “That you should have such trouble about wanting me. It’s such a simple thing. You just ask a girl. It’s so easy to be friendly. Why suffer?”

            Harlan nodded. The morality of the 482nd! “Just ask a girl,” he muttered. “So simple. Nothing more necessary.”

            “The girl has to be willing, of course. Mostly she is, if she’s not otherwise engaged. Why not? It’s simple enough.”

            It was Harlan’s turn to drop his eyes. Of course, it was simple enough. And nothing wrong with it, either. Not in the 482nd. Who in Eternity should know this better? He would be a fool, an utter and unspeakable fool, to ask her now about earlier affairs. He might as well ask a girl of his own homewhen if she had ever eaten in the presence of a man and how dared she?

            Instead he said humbly, “And what do you think of me now?”

            “That you are very nice,” she said softly, “and that if, you ever relaxed--Won’t you smile?”

            “There’s nothing to smile about, Noÿs.”

            “Please. I want to see if your cheeks can crease right. Let’s see.” She put her fingers to the comers of his mouth and pressed them backward. He jerked his head back in surprise and couldn’t avoid smiling.

            “See. Your cheeks didn’t even crack. You’re almost handsome. With enough practice--standing in front of a mirror and smiling and getting a twinkle in your eye--I’ll bet you could be really handsome.”

            But the smile, fragile enough to begin with, vanished.

            Noÿs said, “We are in trouble, aren’t we?”

            “Yes, we are, Noÿs. Great trouble.”

            “Because of what we did? You and I? That evening?”

            “Not really.”

            “That was my fault, you know. I’ll tell them so, if you wish.”

            “Never,” said Harlan with energy. Don’t take on any fault in this. You’ve done nothing, nothing, to be guilty for. It’s something else.”

            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 up when,” 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 up when. 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.

            Nays 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, up when 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.

            The anger reached her face and turned it a glowing pink while her dark eyes seemed somehow the darker for it.

            “But that’s criminal,” she said. “Who are the Eternals to do this?”

            “It’s done for humanity’s good,” said Harlan. Of course, she couldn’t really understand that. He felt sorry for the Time-bound thinking of a Timer.

            “Is it? I suppose that’s how the mass duplicator was wiped out.”

            “We have copies still. Don’t worry about that. We’ve preserved it.”

            “You’ve preserved it. But what about us? We of the 482nd might have had it.” She gestured with little movements of two clenched fists.

            “It wouldn’t have done you good. Look, don’t get excited, dear, and listen.” With an almost convulsive gesture (he would have to learn how to touch her naturally, without making the movement seem a sheepish invitation to a repulse) he took her hands in his and held them tightly.

            For a moment she tried to free them, and then she relaxed. She even laughed a bit. “Oh, go ahead, silly, and don’t look so solemn. I’m not blaming you.”

            “You mustn’t blame anyone. There is no blame necessary. We do what must be done. That mass duplicator is a classic case. I studied it in school. When you duplicate mass, you can duplicate persons, too. The problems that arise are very complicated.”

            “Isn’t it up to the society to solve its own problems?”

            “It is, but we studied that society throughout Time and it doesn’t solve the problem satisfactorily. Remember that its failure to do so affects not only itself but all its descendant societies. In fact, there is no satisfactory solution to the mass-duplicator problem. It’s one of those things like atomic wars and dreamies that just can’t be allowed. Developments are never satisfactory.”

            “What makes you so sure?”

            “We have our Computing machines, Noÿs; Computaplexes far more accurate than any ever developed in any single Reality. These Compute the possible Realities and grade the desirabilities of each over a summation of thousands and thousands of variables.”

            “Machines!” She said it with scorn.

            Harlan frowned, then relented hastily. “Now don’t be like that. Naturally, you resent learning that life is not as solid as you thought. You and the world you lived in might have been only a probability shadow a year ago, but what’s the difference? You have all your memories, whether they’re of probability shadows or not, haven’t you? You remember your childhood and your parents, don’t you?”

            “Of course.”

            “Then it’s just as if you lived it, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I mean, whether you did or not?”

            “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. What if tomorrow it’s a dream world again, or a shadow, or whatever you call it?”

            “Then there would be a new Reality and a new you with new memories. It would be just as though nothing had happened, except that the sum of human happiness would have been increased again.”

            “I don’t find that satisfying, somehow.”

            “Besides,” said Harlan hastily, “nothing will happen to you now. There will be a new Reality but you’re in Eternity. You won’t be changed.”

            “But you say it makes no difference,” said Noÿs gloomily. “Why go to all the trouble?”

            With sudden ardor Harlan said, “Because I want you as you are. Exactly as you are. I don’t want you changed. Not in any way.”

            He came within a hair of blurting out the truth, that without the advantage of the superstition about Eternals and eternal life she would never have inclined toward him.

            She said, looking about with a slight frown, “Will I have to stay here forever, then? It would be--lonely.”

            “No, no. Don’t think of it,” he said wildly, gripping her hands so tight that she winced. “I’ll find out what you will be in the new Reality of the 482nd, and you’ll go back in disguise, so to speak. I’ll take care of you. I’ll apply for permission for formal liaison and see to it that you remain safely through future Changes. I’m a Technician and a good one and I know about Changes.” He added grimly, “And I know a few other things as well,” and stopped there.

            Noÿs said, “Is all this allowed? I mean, can you take people into Eternity and keep them from changing? It doesn’t sound right, somehow, from the things you’ve told me.”

            For a moment Harlan felt shrunken and cold in the large emptiness of the thousands of Centuries that surrounded him up when and down. For a moment he felt cut off even from the Eternity that was his only home and only faith, doubly cast out from Time and Eternity; and only the woman for whom he had forsaken it all left at his side.

            He said, and he meant it deeply, “No, it is a crime. It is a very great crime, and I am bitterly ashamed. But I would do it again, if I had to, and any number of times, if I had to.”

            “For me, Andrew? For me?”

            He did not raise his eyes to hers. “No, Noÿs, for myself. I could not bear to lose you.”

            She said, “And if we are caught...?”

            Harlan knew the answer to that. He knew the answer since that moment of insight in bed in the 482nd, with Noÿs sleeping at his side. But, even yet, he dared not think of the wild truth.

            He said, “I am hot afraid of anyone. I have ways of protecting myself. They don’t imagine how much I know.”

            9. Interlude

            IT WAS, looking back at it, an idyllic period that followed.

            A hundred things took place in those physioweeks, and all confused itself inextricably in Harlan’s memory, later, making the period seem to have lasted much longer than it did. The one idyllic thing about it was, of course, the hours he could spend with Noÿs, and that cast a glow over everything else.

            Item One: At the 482nd he slowly packed his personal effects; his clothing and films, most of all his beloved and tenderly handled news-magazine volumes out of the Primitive. Anxiously he supervised their return to his permanent station in the 575th.

            Finge was at his elbow as the last of it was lifted into the freight kettle by Maintenance men.

            Finge said, choosing his words with unerring triteness, “Leaving us, I see.” His smile was broad, but his lips were carefully held together so that only the barest trace of teeth showed. He kept his hands clasped behind his back and his pudgy body teetered forward on the balls of his feet.

            Harlan did not look at his superior. He muttered a monotoned “Yes, sir.”

            Finge said, “I will report to Senior Computer Twissell concerning the entirely satisfactory manner in which you performed your Observational duties in the 482nd.”

            Harlan could not bring himself to utter even a sullen word of thanks. He remained silent.

            Finge went on, in a suddenly much lower voice, “I will not report, for the present, your recent attempt at violence against me.” And although his smile remained and his glance remained mild, there was a relish of cruel satisfaction about him.

            Harlan looked up sharply and said, “As you wish, Computer.”

            Item Two: He re-established himself at the 575th.

            He met Twissell almost at once. He found himself happy to see that little body, topped by that lined and gnomelike face. He was even happy to see the white cylinder nestling smokily between two stained fingers and being lifted rapidly toward Twissell’s lips.

            Harlan said, “Computer.”

            Twissell, emerging from his office, looked for a moment unseeingly and unrecognizingly at Harlan. His face was haggard and his eyes squinted with weariness.

            He said, “Ah, Technician Harlan. You are done with your work on the 482nd?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            Twissell’s comment was strange. He looked at his watch, which, like any watch in Eternity, was geared to physiotime, giving the day number as well as the time of day, and said, “On the nose, my boy, on the nose. Wonderful. Wonderful.”

            Harlan felt his heart give a small bound. When he had last seen Twissell he would not have been able to make sense of that remark. Now he thought he did. Twissell was tired, or he would not have spoken so close to the core of things, perhaps. Or the Computer might have felt the remark to be so cryptic as to feel safe despite its closeness to the core.

            Harlan said, speaking as casually as he could to avoid letting it seem that his remark had any conception at all with what Twissell had just said, “How’s my Cub?”

            “Fine, fine,” said Twissell, with only half his mind, apparently, on his words. He took a quick puff at the shortening tube of tobacco, indulged in a quick nod of dismissal, and hurried off.

            Item Three: the Cub.

            He seemed older. There seemed to be a greater feeling of maturity to him as he held out his hand and said, “Glad to see you back, Harlan.’

            Or was it merely that, where earlier Harlan had been conscious of Cooper only as a pupil, he now seemed more than a Cub. He now seemed a gigantic instrument in the hands of the Eternals. Naturally he could not help but attain a new stature in Harlan’s eyes..

            Harlan tried not to show that. They were in Harlan’s own quarters, and the Technician basked in the creamy porcelain surfaces about him, glad to be out of the ornate splash of the 482nd. Try as he might to associate the wild baroque of the 482nd with Noÿs, he only succeeded in associating it with Finge. With Noÿs he associated a pink, satiny twilight and, strangely, the bare austerity of the Sections of the Hidden Centuries.

            He spoke hastily, almost as though he were anxious to hide his dangerous thoughts. “Well, Cooper, what have they been doing with you while I was away?”

            Cooper laughed, brushed his drooping mustache self-consciously with one finger and said, “More math. Always math.”

            “Yes? Pretty advanced stuff by now, I guess.”

            “Pretty advanced.”

            “How’s it coming?”

            “So far it’s bearable. It comes pretty easy, you know. I like it. But now they’re really loading it on.”

            Harlan nodded and felt a certain satisfaction. He said, “Temporal Field matrices and all that?”

            But Cooper, his color a little high, turned toward the stacked volumes in the bookshelves, and said, “Let’s get back to the Primitives. I’ve got some questions.”

            “About what?”

            “City life in the 23rd. Los Angeles, especially.”

            “Why Los Angeles?”

            “It’s an interesting city. Don’t you think so?”

            “It is, but let’s hit it in the 21st, then. It was at its peak in the 21st.”

            “Oh, let’s try the 23rd.”

            Harlan said, “Well, why not?”

            His face was impassive, but if the impassiveness could have been peeled off, there would have been a grimness about him. His grand, intuitional guess was more than a guess. Everything was checking neatly.

            Item Four: research. Twofold research.

            For himself, first. Each day, with ferreting eyes, he went through the reports on Twissell’s desk. The reports concerned the various Reality Changes being scheduled or suggested. Copies went to Twissell routinely since he was a member of the Allwhen Council, and Harlan knew he would not miss one. He looked first for the coming Change in the 482nd. Secondly he looked for other Changes, any other Changes, that might have a flaw, an imperfection, some deviation from maximum excellence that might be visible to his own trained and talented Technician’s eyes.

            In the strictest sense of the word the reports were not for his study, but Twissell was rarely in his office these days, and no one else saw fit to interfere with Twissell’s personal Technician.

            That was one part of his research. The other took place in the 575th Section branch of the library.

            For the first time he ventured out of those portions of the library which, ordinarily, monopolized his attention. In the past he had haunted the section on Primitive history (very poor indeed, so that most of his references and source materials had to be derived from the far downwhen of the 3rd millennium, as was only natural, of course).To an even greater extent he had ransacked the shelves devoted to Reality Change, its theory, technique, and history; an excellent collection (best in Eternity outside the Central branch itself, thanks to Twissell) of which he had made himself full master.

            Now he wandered curiously among the other film-racks. For the first time he Observed (in the capital-O sense) the racks devoted to the 575th itself; its geographies, which varied little from Reality to Reality, its histories, which varied more, and its sociologies, which varied still more. These were not the books or reports written about the Century by Observing and Computing Eternals (with those he was familiar), but by the Timers themselves.

            There were the works of literature of the 575th and these stirred memories of tremendous arguments he had heard of concerning the values of alternate Changes. Would this masterpiece be altered or not? If so, how? How did past Changes affect works of art?

            For that matter, could there ever be general agreement about art? Could it ever be reduced to quantitative terms amenable to mechanical evaluation by the Computing machines?

            A Computer named August Sennor was Twissell’s chief opponent in these matters. Harlan, stirred by Twissell’s feverish denunciations of the man and his views, had read some of Sennor’s papers and found them startling.

            Sennor asked publicly and, to Harlan, disconcertingly, whether a new Reality might not contain a personality within itself analogous to that of a man who had been withdrawn into Eternity in a previous Reality. He analyzed then the possibility of an Eternal meeting his analogue in Time, either with or without knowing it, and speculated on the results in each case. (That came fairly close to one of Eternity’s most potent fears, and Harlan shivered and hastened uneasily through the discussion.) And, of course, he discussed at length the fate of literature and art in various types and classifications of Reality Changes.

            But Twissell would have none of the last. “If the values of art can’t be computed,” he would shout at Harlan, “then what’s the use of arguing about it?”

            And Twissell’s views, Harlan knew, were shared by the large majority of the Allwhen Council.

            Yet now Harlan stood at the shelves devoted to the novels of Eric Linkollew, usually described as the outstanding writer of the 575th, and wondered. He counted fifteen different “Complete Works’ collections, each, undoubtedly, taken out of a different Reality. Each was somewhat different, he was sure. One set was noticeably smaller than all the others, for instance. A hundred Sociologists, he imagined, must have written analyses of the differences between the sets in terms of the sociological background of each Reality, and earned status thereby.

            Harlan passed on to the wing of the library which was devoted to the devices and instrumentation of the various 575th’s. Many of these last, Harlan knew, had been eliminated in Time and remained intact, as a product of human ingenuity, only in Eternity. Man had to be protected from his own too flourishing technical mind. That more than anything else. Not a physioyear passed but that somewhere in Time nuclear technology veered too close to the dangerous and had to be steered away.

            He returned to the library proper and to the shelves on mathematics and mathematical histories. His fingers skimmed across individual titles, and after some thought he took half a dozen from the shelves and signed them out.

            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 up when 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 to 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 fie 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-cheeked 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.