It couldn’t be a housebreaker. The entire period of the spatio-temporal chart, grace period and all, had been painstakingly cleared and chosen out of other similar periods of Time because of the lack of complicating factors. On the other hand, he had introduced a micro-change (perhaps not so micro at that) by abstracting Noÿs.

            Heart pounding, he forced himself to turn. It seemed to him that the door behind him had just closed, moving the last millimeter required to bring it flush with the wall.

            He repressed the impulse to open that door, to search the house. With Noÿs’s delicacies in tow he returned to Eternity and waited two full days for repercussions before venturing into the far up when. There were none and eventually he forgot the incident.

            But now, as he adjusted the controls to enter Time this one last time, he thought of it again. Or perhaps it was the thought of the Change, nearly upon him now, that preyed on him. Looking back on the moment later, he felt that it was one or the other that caused him to misadjust the controls. He could think of no other excuse.

            The misadjustment was not immediately apparent. It pinpointed the proper room and Harlan stepped directly into Noÿs’s library.

            He had become enough of a decadent himself, now, to be not altogether repelled by the workmanship that went into the design of the film-cases. The lettering of the titles blended in with the intricate filigree until they were attractive but nearly unreadable. It was a triumph of aesthetics over utility.

            Harlan took a few from the shelves at random and was surprised. The title of one was Social and Economic History of our Times.

            Somehow it was a side of Noÿs to which he had given little thought. She was certainly not stupid and yet it never occurred to him that she might be interested in weighty things. He had the impulse to scan a bit of the Social and Economic History, but. fought it down. He would find it in the Section library of the 482nd, if he ever wanted it. Finge had undoubtedly rifled the libraries of this Reality for Eternity’s records months earlier.

            He put that film to one side, ran through the rest, selected the fiction and some of what seemed light non-fiction. Those and two pocket viewers. He stowed them carefully into a knapsack.

            It was at that point that, once more, he heard a sound in the house. There was no mistake this time. It was not a short sound of indeterminate origin. It was a laugh, a man’s laugh. He was not alone in the house.

            He was unaware that he had dropped the knapsack. For one dizzy second he could think only that he was trapped!

            10. Trapped

            ALL AT once it had seemed inevitable. It was the rawest dramatic irony. He had entered Time one last time, tweaked Finge’s nose one last time, brought the pitcher to the well one last time. It had to be then that he was caught.

            Was it Finge who laughed?

            Who else would track him down, lie in wait, stay a room away, and burst into mirth?

            Well, then, was all lost? And because in that sickening moment he was sure all was lost it did not occur to him to run again or to attempt flight into Eternity once more. He would face Finge.

            He would kill him, if necessary.

            Harlan stepped to the door from behind which the laugh had sounded, stepped to it with the soft, firm step of the premeditated murderer. He flicked loose the automatic door signal and opened it by hand. Two inches. Three. It moved without sound.

            The man in the next room had his back turned. The figure seemed too tall to be Finge and that fact penetrated Harlan’s simmering mind and kept him from advancing further.

            Then, as though the paralysis that seemed to hold both men in rigor was slowly lifting, the other turned, inch by inch.

            Harlan never witnessed the completion of that turn. The other’s profile had not yet come into view when Harlan, holding back a sudden gust of terror with a last fragment of moral strength flung himself back out the door. Its mechanism, not Harlan, closed it soundlessly.

            Harlan fell back blindly. He could breathe only by struggling violently with the atmosphere, fighting air in and pushing it out, while his heart beat madly as though in an effort to escape his body.

            Finge, Twissell, an the Council together could not have disconcerted him so much. It was the fear of nothing physical that had unmanned him. Rather it was an almost instinctive loathing for the nature of the accident that had befallen him.

            He gathered the stack of book-films to himself in a formless lump and managed, after two futile tries, to re-establish the door to Eternity. He stepped through, his legs operating mechanically. Somehow he made his way to the 575th, and then to personal quarters. His Technicianhood, newly valued, newly appreciated, saved him once again. The few Eternals he met turned automatically to one side and looked steadfastly over his head as they did so.

            That was fortunate, for he Jacked any ability to smooth his face out of the death’s-head grimace he felt he was wearing, or any power to put the blood back into it. But they didn’t look, and he thanked Time and Eternity and whatever blind thing wove Destiny for that.

            He had not truly recognized the other man in Noÿs’s house by his appearance, yet he knew his identity with a dreadful certainty. }

            The first time Harlan had heard a noise in the house he, Harlan, had been laughing and the sound that interrupted his laugh was of something weighty dropping in the next room. The second time someone had laughed in the next room and he, Harlan, had dropped a knapsack of book-films. The first time he, Harlan, had turned and caught sight of a door closing. The second time he, Harlan, closed a door as a stranger turned.

            He had met himself!

            In the same Time and nearly in the same place he and his earlier self by several physiodays had nearly stood face to face. He had misadjusted the controls, set it for an instant in Time which he had already used and he, Harlan, had seen him, Harlan.

            He had gone about his work with the shadow of horror upon him for days thereafter. He cursed himself for a coward, but that did not help.

            Indeed from that moment matters took a downward trend. He could put his finger on the Great Divide. The key moment was the instant in which he had adjusted the door controls for his entry into the 482nd for one last time and somehow had adjusted it wrongly. Since then things went badly, badly.

            The Reality Change in the 482nd went through during that period of despondency and accentuated it. In the past two weeks he had picked up three proposed Reality Changes which contained miner flaws, and now he chose among them, yet could do nothing to move himself to action.

            He chose Reality Change 2456-2781, V-5 for a number of reasons. Of the three, it was farthest up when, the most, distant. The error was minute, but was significant in terms of human life. It needed, then, only a quick trip to the 2456th to find out the nature of Noÿs’s analogue in the new Reality, by use of a little blackmailing pressure.

            But the unmanning of his recent experience betrayed him. It seemed to him no longer a simple thing, this gentle application of threatened exposure. And once he found the nature of Noÿs’s analogue, what then? Put Noÿs in her place as charwoman, seamstress, laborer, or whatever. Certainly. But what, then, was to be done with the analogue herself? With any husband the analogue might have? Family? Children?

            He had thought of none of this earlier. He had avoided the thought. “Sufficient unto the day...”

            But now he could think of nothing else.

            So he lay skulking in his room, hating himself, when Twissell called him, his tired voice questioning and a little puzzled.

            “Harlan, are you ill? Cooper tells me you’ve skipped several discussion periods. “

            Harlan tried to smooth the trouble out of his face. “No, Computer Twissell. I’m a little tired.”

            “Well, that’s forgivable, at any rate, boy.” And then the smile on his face came about as close as it ever did to vanishing entirely. “Have you heard that the 482nd has been Changed?”

            “Yes,” said Harlan shortly.

            “Finge called me,” said Twissell, “and asked that you be told that the Change was entirely successful.”

            Harlan shrugged, then grew aware of Twissell’s eyes staring out of the Communiplate and hard upon him. He grew uneasy and said, “Yes, Computer?”

            “Nothing,” said Twissell, and perhaps it was the cloak of age weighing down upon his shoulders, but his voice was unaccountably sad. “I thought you were about to speak.”

            “No,” said Harlan. “I had nothing to say.”

            “Well, then, I’ll see you tomorrow at opening in the Computing Room, boy. I have a great deal to say.”

            “Yes, sir,” said Harlan. He stared for long minutes at the plate after it went dark.

            That had almost sounded like a threat. Finge had called Twissell, had he? What had he said that Twissell did not report.

            But an outside threat was what he needed. Battling a sickness of the spirit was like standing in a quicksand and beating it with a stick. Battling Finge was another thing altogether. Harlan had remembered the weapon at his disposal and for the first time in days felt a fraction of self-confidence return.

            It was as though a door had closed and another had opened. Harlan grew as feverishly active as previously he had been catatonic. He traveled to the 2456th and bludgeoned Sociologist Voy to his own exact will..

            He did it perfectly. He got the information he sought.

            And more than he sought. Much more.

            Confidence is rewarded, apparently. There was a homewhen proverb that went: “Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy.”

            In short, Noÿs had no analogue in the new Reality. No analogue at all. She could take her position in the new society in the most inconspicuous and convenient manner possible, or she could stay in Eternity. There could be no reason to deny him liaison except for the highly theoretical fact that he had broken the law--and he knew very well how to counter that argument.

            So he went racing up when to tell Noÿs the great news, to bathe in undreamed-of success after a few days horrible with apparent failure.

            And at this moment the kettle came to a halt.

            It did not slow; it simply halted. If the motion had been one along any of the three dimensions of space, a halt that sudden would have smashed the kettle, brought its metal to a dull red heat, turned Harlan into a thing of broken bone and wet, crushed flesh.

            As it was, it merely doubled him with nausea and cracked him with inner pain.

            When he could see, he fumbled to the temporometer and stared at it with fuzzy vision. It read 100,000.

            Somehow that frightened him. It was too round a number.

            He turned feverishly to the controls. What had gone wrong?

            That frightened him too, for he could see nothing wrong. Nothing had tripped the drive-lever. It remained firmly geared into the up when drive. There was no short circuit. All the indicator dials were in the black safety range. There was no power failure. The tiny needle that marked the steady consumption of meg-megcoulombs of power calmly insisted that power was being consumed at the usual rate.

            What, then, had stopped the kettle?

            Slowly, and with considerable reluctance, Harlan touched the drive-lever, curled his hand about it. He pushed it to neutral, and the needle on the power gauge declined to zero.

            He twisted the drive--lever back in the other direction. Up went the power gauge again, and this time the temporometer flicked downwhen along the line of Centuries.

            Downwhen--downwhen--99,983--99,972--99,959--

            Again Harlan shifted the lever. Up when again. Slowly. Very slowly.

            Then 99,985--99,993--99,997--99,998--99,999--100,000--

            Smash! Nothing past 100,000. The power of Nova Sol was silently being consumed, at an incredible rate, to no purpose.

            He went downwhen again, farther. He roared up when, Smash!

            His teeth were clenched, his lips drawn back, his breath rasping. He felt like a prisoner hurling himself bloodily against the bars of a prison.

            When he stopped, a dozen smashes later, the kettle rested firmly at 100,000. Thus far, and no farther.

            He would change kettles! (But there was not much hope in that thought.)

            In the empty silence of the 100,000th Century, Andrew Harlan stepped out of one kettle and chose another kettle shaft at random.

            A minute later, with the drive-lever in his hand, he stared at the marking of 100,000 and knew that here, too, he could not pass.

            He raged! Now! At this time! When things so unexpectedly had broken in his favor, to come to so sudden a disaster. The curse of that moment of misjudgment in entering the 482nd was still on him.

            Savagely be spun the lever downwhen, pressing it hard at maximum and keeping it there. At least in one way he was free now, free to do anything he wanted. With Noÿs cut off behind a barrier and out of his reach, what more could they do to him? What more had he to fear?

            He carried himself to the 575th and sprang from the kettle with a reckless disregard for his surroundings that he had never felt before. He made his way to the Section library, speaking to no one, regarding no one. He took what he wanted without glancing about to see if he were observed. What did he care?

            Back to the kettle and downwhen again. He knew exactly what he would do. He looked at the large clock as he passed, measuring off Standard Physiotime, numbering the days and marking off the three coequal work shifts to the physioday. Finge would be at his private quarters now, and that was so much the better.

            Harlan felt as though he were running a temperature when he arrived at the 482nd. His mouth was dry and cottony. His chest hurt. But he felt the hard shape of the weapon under his shirt as he held it firmly against his side with one elbow and that was the only sensation that counted.

            Assistant Computer Hobbe Finge looked up at Harlan, and the surprise in his eyes slowly gave way to concern.

            Harlan watched him silently for a while, letting the concern grow and waiting for it to change to fear. He circled slowly, getting between Finge and the Communiplate.

            Finge was partly undressed, bare to the waist. His chest was sparsely haired, his breasts puffy and almost womanish. His tubby abdomen lapped over his waistband.

            He looks undignified, thought Harlan with satisfaction, undignified and unsavory. So much the better.

            He put his right hand inside his shirt and closed it firmly on the grip of his weapon.

            Harlan said, “No one saw me, Finge, so don’t look toward the door. No one’s coming here. You’ve got to realize, Finge, that you’re dealing with a Technician. Do you know what that means?”

            His voice was hollow. He felt angry that fear wasn’t entering Finge’s eyes, only concern. Finge even reached for his shirt and, without a word, began to put it on.

            Harlan went on, “Do you know the privilege of being a Technician, Finge? You’ve never been one, so you can’t appreciate it. It means no one watches where you go or what you do. They all look the other way and work so hard at not seeing you that they really succeed at it. I could, for instance, go to the Section library, Finge, and help myself to any curious thing while the librarian busily concerns himself with his records and sees nothing. I can walk down the residential corridors of the 482nd and anyone passing turns out of my way and will swear later on he saw no one. It’s that automatic. So you see, I can do what I want to do, go where I want to go. I can walk into the private apartments of the Assistant Computer of a Section and force him to tell the truth at weapon point and there’ll be no one to stop me.”

            Finge spoke for the first time. “What are you holding?”

            “A weapon,” said Harlan, and brought it out. “Do you recognize it?” Its muzzle flared slightly and ended in a smooth metallic bulge.

            “If you kill me...” began Finge.

            “I won’t kill you,” said Harlan. “At a recent meeting you had a blaster. This is not a blaster. It is an invention of one of the past Realities of the 575th. Perhaps you are not acquainted with it. It was bred out of Reality. Too nasty. It can kill, but at low power it activates the pain centers of the nerve system and paralyzes as well. It is called, or was called, a neuronic whip. It works. This one is fully charged. I tested it on a finger.” He held up his left hand with its stiffened little finger. “It was very unpleasant.”

            Finge stirred restlessly. “What is all this about, for Time’s sake?”

            “There is some sort of a block across the kettle shafts at the 100,000th. I want it removed.”

            “A block across the shafts?”

            “Let’s not work away at being surprised. Yesterday you spoke to Twissell. Today there is the block. I want to know what you said to Twissell. I want to know what’s been done and what will be done. By Time, Computer, if you don’t tell me, I’ll use the whip. Try me, if you doubt my word.”

            “Now listen”--Finge’s words slurred a bit and the first edge of fear made its appearance, and also a kind of desperate anger--”if you want the truth, it’s this. We know about you and Noÿs.”

            Harlan’s eyes flickered. “What about myself and Noÿs?”

            Finge said, “Did you think you were getting away with anything?” The Computer kept his eyes fixed on the neuronic whip and his forehead was beginning to glisten. “By Time, with the emotion you showed after your period of observation, with what you did during the period of Observation, did you think we wouldn’t observe you? I would deserve to be broken as Computer if I had missed that. We know you brought Noÿs into Eternity. We knew it from the first. You wanted the truth. There it is.”

            At that moment Harlan despised his own stupidity. “You knew?”

            “Yes. We knew you had brought her to the Hidden centuries. We knew every time you entered the 482nd to supply her with appropriate luxuries; playing the fool, with your Eternal’s Oath completely forgotten.”

            “Then why didn’t you stop me?” Harlan was tasting the very dregs of his own humiliation.

            “Do you still want the truth?” Finge flashed back, and seemed to gain courage in proportion as Harlan sank into frustration.

            “Go on.”

            “Then let me tell you that I didn’t consider you a proper Eternal from the start. A flashy Observer, perhaps, and a Technician who went through the motions. But no Eternal. When I brought you here on this last job, it was to prove as much to Twissell, who values you for some obscure reason. I wasn’t just testing the society in the person of the girl, Noÿs. I was testing you, too, and you failed as I thought you would fail. Now put away that weapon, that whip, whatever it is, and get out of here.”

            “And you came to my personal quarters once,” said Harlan breathlessly, working hard to keep his dignity and feeling it slip from him as though his mind and spirit were as stiff and unfeeling as the whiplashed little finger on his left hand, “to goad me into doing what I did.”

            “Yes, of course. If you want the phrase exactly, I tempted you. I told you the exact truth, that you could keep Noÿs only in the then-present Reality. You chose to act, not as an Eternal, but as a sniveler. I expected you to;”

            “I would do it again now,” said Harlan gruffly, “and since it’s all known, you can see I have nothing to lose.” He thrust his whip outward toward Finge’s plump waistline and spoke through pale lips and clenched teeth. “What has happened to Noÿs?”

            “I have no idea.”

            “Don’t tell me that. What has happened to Noÿs?”

            “I tell you I don’t know.”

            Harlan’s fist tightened on the whip; his voice was low. “Your leg first. This will hurt.”

            “For Time’s sake, listen, Wait!”

            “All right. What has happened to her?”

            “No, listen. So far it’s just a breach of discipline. Reality wasn’t affected. I made checks on that. Loss of rating is all you’ll get. If you kill me, though, or hurt me with intent to kill, you’ve attacked a superior. There’s the death penalty for that.”

            Harlan smiled at the futility of the threat. In the face of what had already happened death would offer a way out that in finality and simplicity had no equal.

            Finge obviously misunderstood the reasons for the smile. He said hurriedly, “Don’t think there’s no death penalty in Eternity because you’ve never come across one. We know of them; we Computers. What’s more, executions have taken place, too. It’s simple. In any Reality, there are members of fatal accidents in which bodies are not recovered. Rockets explode in mid-air, aeroliners sink in mid-ocean or crash to powder in mountains! A murderer can be put on one of those vessels minutes, or seconds, before the fatal results. Is this worth that to you?”

            Harlan stirred and said, “If you’re stalling for rescue, it won’t work. Let me tell you this: I’m not afraid of punishment. Furthermore, I intend to have Noÿs. I want her now. She does not exist in the current Reality. She has no analogue. There is no reason why we cannot establish formal liaison.”

            “It is against regulations for a Technician--”

            “We will let the Allwhen Council decide,” said Harlan, and his pride broke through at last. “I am not afraid of an adverse decision, either, any more than I am afraid of killing you. I am no ordinary Technician.”

            “Because you are Twissell’s Technician?” and there was a strange look on Finge’s round, sweating face that might have been hatred or triumph or part of each.

            Harlan said, “For reasons much more important than that. And now...”

            With grim determination he touched finger to the weapon’s activator.

            Finge screamed, “Then go to the Council. The Allwhen Council; they know. If you are that important--” He ended, gasping.

            For a moment Harlan’s finger hovered irresolutely. “What?”

            “Do you think I would take unilateral action in a case like this? I reported this whole incident to the Council, timing it with the Reality Change. Here! Here are the duplicates.”

            “Hold on, don’t move.”

            But Finge disregarded that order. With a speed as from the spur of a possessing fiend Finge was at his files. The finger of one hand located the code combination of the record he wanted, the fingers of the other punched it into the file. A silvery tongue of tape slithered out of the desk, its pattern of dots just visible to the naked eye.

            “Do you want it sounded?” asked Finge, and without waiting threaded it into the sounder.

            Harlan listened, frozen. It was clear enough. Finge had reported in full. He had detailed every motion of Harlan’s in the kettle shafts. He hadn’t missed one that Harlan could remember up to the point of making the report.

            Finge shouted when the report was done, “Now, then, go to the Council. I’ve put no block in Time. I wouldn’t know how. And don’t think they’re unconcerned about the matter. You said I spoke to Twissell yesterday. You’re right. But I didn’t call him; he called me. So go; ask Twissell. Tell them what an important Technician you are. And if you want to shoot me first; shoot and to Time with you.”

            Harlan could not miss the actual exultation in the Computer’s voice. At that moment he obviously felt enough the victor to believe that even a neuronic whipping would leave him on the profit side of the ledger.

            Why? Was the breaking of Harlan so dear to his heart? Was his jealousy over Noÿs so all-consuming a passion?

            Harlan did scarcely more than formulate the questions in his mind, and then the whole matter, Finge and all, seemed suddenly meaningless to him.

            He pocketed his weapon, whirled out the door, and toward the nearest kettle shaft.

            It was the Council, then, or Twissell, at the very least. He was afraid of none of them, nor of all put together.

            With each passing day of the last unbelievable month he had grown more convinced of his own indispensability. The Council, even the Allwhen Council itself, would have no choice but to come to terms when it was a choice of bartering one girl for the existence of all of Eternity.

            11. Full Circle

            IT WAS with a dull surprise that Technician Andrew Harlan, on bursting into the 575th, found himself in the night shift. The passing of the physiohours had gone unnoticed during his wild streaks along the kettle shafts. He stared hollowly at the dimmed corridors, the occasional evidence of, the thinned-out night force at work.

            But in the continued grip of his rage Harlan did not pause long to watch uselessly. He turned toward personal quarters. He would find Twissell’s room on Computer Level as he had found Finge’s and he had as little fear of being noticed or stopped.

            The neuronic whip was still hard against his elbow as he stopped before Twissell’s door (the name plate upon it advertising the fact in clear, inlaid lettering).

            Harlan activated the door signal brashly on the buzzer level. He shorted the contact with a damp palm and let the sound become continuous. He could hear it dimly.

            A step sounded lightly behind him and re ignored it in the sure knowledge that the man, whoever he was, would ignore him. (Oh, rose-red Technician’s patch!)

            But the sound of steps halted and a voice said, “Technician Harlan?”

            Harlan whirled. It was a Junior Computer, relatively new to the Section. Harlan raged inwardly. This was not quite the 482nd. Here he was not merely a Technician, he was Twissell’s Technician, and the younger Computers, in their anxiety to ingratiate themselves with the great Twissell, would extend a minimum civility to his Technician.

            The Computer said, “Do you wish to see Senior Computer Twissell?”

            Harlan fidgeted and said, “Yes, sir.” (The fool! What did he think anyone would be standing signaling at a man’s door for? To catch a kettle?)

            “I’m afraid you can’t,” said the Computer.

            “This is important enough to wake him,” said Harlan.

            “Maybe so,” said the other, “but he’s outwhen. He’s not in the 575th.”

            “Exactly when is he, then?” asked Harlan impatiently.

            The Computer’s glance became a supercilious stare. “I wouldn’t know.”

            Harlan said, “Brit I have an important appointment first thing in the morning.”

            “You have,” said the Computer, and Harlan was at a loss to account for his obvious amusement at the thought.

            The Computer went on, even smiling now, “You’re a little early, aren’t you?”

            “But I must see him.”

            “I’m sure he’ll be here in the morning.” The smile broadened.

            “But--”

            The Computer passed by Harlan, carefully avoiding any contact, even of garments.

            Harlan’s fists clenched and unclenched. He stared helplessly after the Computer and then, simply because there was nothing else to do, he walked slowly, and without full consciousness of his surroundings, back to his own room.

            Harlan slept fitfully. He told himself he needed sleep. He tried to relax by main force, and, of course, failed. His sleep period was a succession of futile thought.

            First of all, there Was Noÿs.

            They would not dare harm her, he thought feverishly. They could not send her back to Time without first calculating the effect on Reality and that would take days, probably weeks. As an alternative, they might do to her what Finge had threatened for him; place her in the path of an untraceable accident.

            He did not take that into serious consideration. There was no necessity for drastic action such as that. They would not risk Harlan’s displeasure by doing it. (In the quiet of a darkened sleeping room, and in that phase of half sleep where things often grew queerly disproportionate in thought, Harlan found nothing grotesque in his sure opinion that the Allwhen Council would not dare risk a Technician’s displeasure.)

            Of course, there were uses to which a woman in captivity might be put. A beautiful woman from a hedonistic Reality...

            Resolutely Harlan put the thought away as often as it returned. It was at once more likely and more unthinkable than death, and he would have none of it.

            He thought of Twissell.

            The old man was out of the 575th. Where was he during hours when he should have been asleep? An old man needs his sleep. Harlan was sure of the answer. There were Council consultations going on. About Harlan. About Noÿs. About what to do with an indispensable Technician one dared not touch.

            Harlan’s lips drew back. If Finge reported Harlan’s assault of that evening, it would not affect their considerations in the least. His crimes could scarcely be worsened by it. His indispensability would certainly not be lessened.

            And Harlan was by no means certain that Finge would report him. To admit having been forced to cringe before a Technician would put an Assistant Computer in a ridiculous light, and Finge might not choose to do so.

            Harlan thought of Technicians as a group, which, of late, he had done rarely. His own somewhat anomalous position as Twissell’s man and as half an ‘Educator had kept him too far apart from other Technicians. But Technicians lacked solidarity anyway. Why should that be?

            Did he have to go through the 575th and the 482nd rarely seeing or speaking to another Technician?” Did they have to avoid even one another? Did they have to act as though they accepted the status into which the superstition of others forced them?

            In his mind he had already forced the capitulation of the Council as far as Noÿs was concerned, and now he was making further demands. The Technicians were to be allowed an organization of their own, regular meetings--more friendship--better treatment from the others.

            His final thought of himself was as a heroic social revolutionary, with Noÿs at his side, when he sank finally into a dreamless sleep....

            The door signal awoke him. It whispered at him with, hoarse impatience. He collected his thoughts to the point of being able to look at the small clock beside his bed and groaned inwardly.

            Father Time! After all that he had overslept.

            He managed to reach the proper button from bed and the view-square high on the door grew transparent. He did not recognize the face, but it carried authority whoever it was.

            He opened the door and the man, wearing the orange patch of Administration, stepped in.

            “Technician Andrew Harlan?”

            “Yes, Administrator? You have business with me?”

            The Administrator seemed in no wise discommoded at the sharp belligerence of the question. He said, “You have an appointment with Senior Computer Twissell?”

            “Well?”

            “I am here to inform you that you are late.”

            Harlan stared at him. “What’s this all about? You’re not from the ‘575th, are you?”

            “The 222nd is my station,” said the other frigidly. “Assistant Administrator Arbut Lemm. I’m in charge of the arrangements and I’m trying to avoid undue excitement by by-passing official notification over the Communiplate.”

            “What arrangements? What excitement? What’s it all about? Listen, I’ve had conferences with Twissell before. He’s my superior. There’s no excitement involved.”

            A look of surprise passed momentarily over the studious lack of expression the Administrator had so far kept on his face. “You haven’t been informed?”

            “About what?”

            “Why, that a subcommittee of the Allwhen Council is holding session here at the 575th. This place, I am told, has been alive with the news for hours.”

            “And they want to see me?” As soon as he asked that, Harlan thought: Of course they want to see me. What else could the session be about but me?

            And he understood the amusement of the Junior Computer last night outside Twissell’s room. The Computer knew of the projected committee meeting and it amused him to think that a Technician could possibly expect to see Twissell at a time like that. Very amusing, thought Harlan bitterly.

            The Administrator said, “I have my orders. I know nothing more.” Then, still surprised, “You’ve heard nothing of this?”

            “Technicians,” said Harlan sarcastically, “lead sheltered lives.”

            Five besides Twissell! Senior Computers all, none less than thirty-five years an Eternal.

            Six weeks earlier Harlan would have been overwhelmed by the honor of sitting at lunch with such a group, tongue-tied by the combination of responsibility and power they represented. They would have seemed twice life-size to him.

            But now they were antagonists of his, worse still, judges. He had no time to be impressed. He had to plan his strategy.

            They might not know that he was aware they had Noÿs. They could not know unless Finge told them of his last meeting with Harlan. In the clear light of day, however, he was more than ever convinced that Finge was not the man to broadcast publicly the fact that he had been browbeaten and insulted by a Technician.

            It seemed advisable, then, for Harlan to nurse this possible advantage for the time being, to let them make the first move, say the first sentence that would join actual combat.

            They seemed in no hurry. They stared at him placidly over an abstemious lunch as though he were an interesting specimen spread-eagled against a plane of force by mild repulsors. In desperation Harlan stared back.

            He knew all of them by reputation and by trimensional reproduction in the physiomonthly orientation films. The films co-ordinated developments throughout the various sections of Eternity and were required viewing for all Eternals with rating from Observer up.

            August Sennor, the bald one (not even eyebrows or eyelashes), of course attracted Harlan most. First, because the odd appearance of those dark, staring eyes against bare eyelids and forehead was remarkably greater in person than it had ever seemed in trimension. Second, because of his knowledge of past collisions of view between Sennor and Twissell. Finally, because Sennor did not confine himself to watching Harlan. He shot questions at him in a sharp voice.

            For the most part his questions were unanswerable, such as: “How did you first come to be interested in Primitive times, young man?” “Do you find the study rewarding, young man?”

            Finally, he seemed to settle himself in his seat. He pushed his plate casually onto the disposal chute and clasped his thick fingers lightly before him. (There was no hair on the back of the hands, Harlan noticed.)

            Sennor said, “There is something I have always wanted to know. Perhaps you can help me.” Harlan thought: All right, now, this is it. Aloud he said, “If I can, sir.”

            “Some of us here in Eternity--I won’t say all, or even enough” (and he cast a quick glance at Twissell’s tired face, while the others drew closer to listen) “but some, at any rate--are interested in the philosophy of Time. Perhaps you know what I mean.”

            “The paradoxes of Time-travel, sir?”

            “Well, if you want to put it melodramatically, yes. But that’s not all, of course. There is the question of the true nature of Reality, the question of the conservation of mass-energy during Reality Change and so on. Now we in Eternity are influenced in our consideration of such things by knowing the facts of Time-travel. Your creatures of the Primitive era, however, knew nothing of Time-travel. What were their views on the matter?”

            Twissell’s whisper carried the length of the table. “Cobwebs!”

            But Sennor ignored that.  He said, “Would you answer my question, Technician?”

            Harlan said, “The Primitives gave virtually no thought to Time-travel, Computer.”

            “Did not consider it possible, eh?”

            “I believe that’s right.”

            “Did not even speculate?”

            “Well, as to that,” said Harlan uncertainly, “I believe there were speculations of sorts in some types of escape literature.  I am not well acquainted with these, but I believe a recurrent theme was that of the man who returned in Time to kill his own grandfather as a child.”

            Sennor seemed delighted.  “Wonderful! Wonderful! After all, that is at least an expression of the basic paradox of Time-travel, if we assume an indeviant Reality, eh? Now your Primitives, I’ll venture to state, never assumed anything but an indeviant Reality.  Am I right?”

            Harlan waited to answer.  He did not see where the conversation was aiming or what Sennor’s deeper purposes were, and it unnerved him.  He said, “I don’t know enough to answer you with certainty, sir.  I believe there may have been speculations as to alternate paths of time or planes of existence.  I don’t know.”

            Sennor thrust out a lower lip.   “I’m sure you’re wrong.  You may have been misled by reading your own knowledge into various ambiguities you may have come across.  No, without actual experience of Time-travel, the philosophic intricacies of Reality would be quite beyond the human mind.  For instance, why does Reality possess inertia?  We all know that it does.  Any alteration in its flow must reach a certain magnitude before a Change, a true Change, is effected.  Even then, Reality has a tendency to flow back to its original position.

            “For instance, suppose a Change here in the 575th.  Reality will change with increasing effects to perhaps the 600th. It will change, but with continually lesser effects to perhaps the 650th. Thereafter, Reality will be unchanged.  We all know this is so, but do any of us know why it is so?  Intuitive reasoning would suggest that any Reality Change would increase its effects without limit as the Centuries pass, yet that is not so.

            “Take another point.  Technician Harlan, I’m told, is excellent at selecting the exact Minimum Change Required for any situation. I’ll wager he cannot explain how he arrives at his own choice.

            “Consider how helpless the Primitives must be. They worry about a man killing his own grandfather because they do not understand the truth about Reality. Take a more likely and a more easily analyzed. case and let’s consider the man who in his travels through time meets himself--”

            Harlan said sharply, “What about a man who meets himself?”

            The fact that Harlan interrupted a Computer was a breach of manners in itself. His tone of voice worsened the breach to a scandalous extent, and all eyes turned reproachfully on the Technician.

            Sennor harumphed, but spoke in the trained tone of one determined to be polite despite nearly insuperable difficulties. He said, continuing his broken sentence and thus avoiding the appearance of answering directly the unmannerly question addressed to him, “And the four subdivisions into which such an act can fall. Call the man earlier in physiotime, A, and the one later, B, Subdivision one, A and B may not see one another, or do anything that will significantly affect one another. In that case, they have not really met and we may dismiss this case as trivial.

            “Or B, the later individual, may see A while A does not see B. Here, too, no serious consequences need be expected. B, seeing A, sees him in a position and engaged in activity of which he already has knowledge. Nothing new is involved.

            “The third and fourth possibilities are that A sees B, while B does not see A, and that A and B see one another. In each possibility, the serious point is that A has seen B; the man at an earlier stage in his physiological existence sees himself at a later stage. Observe that he has learned he will be alive at the apparent age of B. He knows he will live long enough to perform the action he has witnessed. Now a man in knowing his own future in even the slightest detail can act on that knowledge and therefore changes his future. It follows that Reality must be changed to the extent of not allowing A and B to meet or, at the very least, of preventing A from seeing B. Then, since nothing in a Reality made un-Real can be detected, A never has met B. Similarly, in every apparent paradox of Time-travel, Reality always changes to avoid the paradox and we come to the conclusion that there are no paradoxes in Time-travel and that there can be none.”

            Sennor looked well pleased with himself and his exposition, but Twissell rose to his feet.

            Twissell said, “I believe, gentlemen, that time presses.”

            Far more suddenly than Harlan would have thought the lunch was over. Five of the subcommittee members filed out, nodding at him, with the air of those whose curiosity, mild at best, had been assuaged. Only Sennor held out a hand and added a gruff “Good day, young man” to the nod.

            With mixed feelings Harlan watched them go. What had been the purpose of the luncheon? Most of all, why the reference to men meeting themselves? They had made no mention of Noÿs. Were they there, then, only to study him? Survey him from top to bottom and leave him to Twissell’s judging?

            Twissell returned to the table, empty now of food and cutlery. He was alone with Harlan now, and almost as though to symbolize that, he wielded a new cigarette between his fingers.

            He said, “And now to work, Harlan. We have a great deal to do.”

            But Harlan would not, could not, wait longer. He said flatly, “Before we do anything, I have something to say.”

            Twissell looked surprised. The skin of his face puckered up about his faded eyes, and he tamped at the ash end of his cigarette thoughtfully.

            He said, “By all means, speak if you wish, but first, sit down, sit down, boy. “

            Technician Andrew Harlan did not sit down. He strode up and back the length of the table, biting off his sentences hard to keep them from boiling and bubbling into incoherence. Senior Computer Laban Twissell’s age-yellowed pippin of a head turned back and forth as he followed the other’s nervous stride.

            Harlan said, “For weeks now I’ve been going through films on the history of mathematics. Books from several Realities of the 575th. The Realities don’t matter much. Mathematics doesn’t change. The order of its development doesn’t change either. No matter how else the Realities shifted, mathematical history stayed about the same. The mathematicians changed; different ones switched discoveries, but the end results--Anyway, I pounded a lot of it into my head. How does that strike you?”

            Twissell frowned and said, “A queer occupation for a Technician?”

            “But I’m not just a Technician,” said Harlan. “You know that.”.

            “Go on,” said Twissell and he looked at the timepiece he wore. The fingers that held his cigarette played with it with unwonted nervousness.

            Harlan said, “There was a man named Vikkor Mallansohn who lived in the 24th Century. That was part of the Primitive era, you know. The thing he is known best for is the fact that he first successfully built a Temporal Field. That means, of course, that he invented Eternity, since Eternity is only one tremendous Temporal Field shortcircuiting ordinary Time and free of the limitations of ordinary Time.”

            “You were taught this as a Cub, boy.”

            “But I was not taught that Vikkor Mallansohn could not possibly have invented the Temporal Field in the 24th Century. Nor could anyone have. The mathematical basis for it didn’t exist. The fundamental Lefebvre equations did not exist; nor could they exist until the researches of Ian Verdeer in the 27th Century.”

            If there was one sign by which Senior Computer Twissell could indicate complete astonishment, it was that of dropping his cigarette. He dropped it now. Even his smile was gone.

            He said, “Were you taught the Lefebvre equations, boy?”

            “No. And I don’t say I understand them. But they’re necessary for the Temporal Field. I’ve learned that. And they weren’t discovered till the 27th. I know that, too.”

            Twissell bent to pick up his cigarette and regarded it dubiously. “What if Mallansohn had stumbled on the Temporal Field without being aware of the mathematical justification? What if it were simply an empirical discovery? There have been many such.”

            “I’ve thought of that. But after the Field was invented, it took three centuries to work out its implications and at the end of that time there was no one way in which Mallansohn’s Field could be improved on. That could not be coincidence. In a hundred ways, Mallansohn’s design showed that he must have used the Lefebvre equations. If he knew them or had developed them without Verdeer’s work, which is impossible, why didn’t he say so?”

            Twissell said, “You insist on talking like a mathematician. Who told you all this?”

            “I’ve been viewing films.”

            “No more?”

            “And thinking.”

            “Without advanced mathematical training? I’ve watched you closely for years, boy, and would not have guessed that particular talent of yours. Go on.”

            “Eternity could never have been established without Mallansohn’s discovery of the Temporal Field. Mallansohn could never have accomplished this without a knowledge of mathematics that existed only in his future. That’s number one. Meanwhile, here in Eternity at this moment, there is a Cub who was selected as an Eternal against all the rules, since he was overage and married, to boot. You are educating him in mathematics and in Primitive sociology. That’s number two.”

            “Well”

            “I say that it is your intention to send him back into Time somehow, back past the downwhen terminus of Eternity, back to the 24th. It is your intention to have the Cub, Cooper, teach the Lefebvre equations to Mallansohn. You see, then,” Harlan added with tense passion, “that my own position as expert in the Primitive and my knowledge of that position entitles me to special treatment. Very special treatment.”

            “Father Timer” muttered Twissell.

            “It’s true, isn’t it? We come full circle, with my help. Without it...” He let the sentence hang.

            “You come so close to the truth,” said Twissell. “Yet I could swear there was nothing to indicate--” He fell into a study in which neither Harlan nor the outside world seemed to playa part.

            Harlan said quickly. “Only close to the truth? It is the truth.” He could not tell why he was so certain of the essentials of what he said, even quite apart from the fact that he so desperately wanted it to be so.

            Twissell said, “No, no, not the exact truth. The Cub, Cooper, is not going back to the 24th to teach Mallansohn anything.”

            “I don’t believe you.”

            “But you must. You must see the importance of this. I want your co-operation through what is left of the project. You see, Harlan, the situation is more full circle than you imagine. Much more so, boy. Cub Brinsley Sheridan Cooper is Vikkor Mallansohn!”

            12. The Beginning of Eternity

            HARLAN WOULD not have thought that Twissell could have said anything at that moment that could have surprised him. He was wrong.

            He said, “Mallansohn. He--”

            Twissell, having smoked his cigarette to a stub, produced another and said, “Yes, Mallansohn. Do you want a quick summary of Mallansohn’s life? Here it is. He was born in the 78th, spent some time in Eternity, and died in the 24th.”

            Twissell’s small hand placed itself lightly on Harlan’s elbow and his gnomish face broke into a wrinkled extension of his usual smile. “But come, boy, physiotime passes even for us and we are not completely masters of ourselves this day. Won’t you come with me to my office?”

            He led the way and Harlan followed, not entirely aware of the opening doors and the moving ramps.

            He was relating the new information to his own problem and plan of action. With the passing of the first moment of disorientation his resolution returned. After all, how did this change things except to make his own importance to Eternity still more crucial, his value higher, his demands more sure to be met, Noÿs more certain to be bartered back to him.

            Noÿs!

            Father Time, they must not harm her! She seemed the only real part of his life. All Eternity beside was only a filmy fantasy, and not a worth-while one, either.

            When he found himself in Computer Twissell’s office, he could not clearly recall how it had come about that he had passed from the dining area here. Though he looked about and tried to make the office grow real by sheer force of the mass of its contents, it still seemed but another part of a dream that had outlived its usefulness.

            Twissell’s office was a clean, long room of porcelain asepsis. One wall of the office was crowded from floor to ceiling and wall to distant wall with the computing micro-units which, together, made up the largest privately operated Computaplex in Eternity and, indeed, one of the largest altogether. The opposite wall was crammed with reference films. Between the two what was left of the room was scarcely more than a corridor, broken by a desk, two chairs, recording and projecting equipment, and an unusual object the like of which Harlan was not familiar with and which did not reveal its use until Twissell flicked the remnants of a cigarette into it.

            It flashed noiselessly and Twissell, in his usual prestidigitational fashion, held another in his hands.

            Harlan thought: To the point, now.

            He began, a trifle too loudly, a bit too truculently, “There is a girl in the 482nd--”

            Twissell frowned, waved one hand quickly as though brushing an unpleasant matter hastily to one side. “I know, I know. She will not be disturbed, nor you. All will be well. I will see to it.”

            “Do you mean--”

            “I tell you I know the story. If the matter has troubled you, it need trouble you no more.”

            Harlan stared at the old man, stupefied. Was this all? Though he had thought intently of the immensity of his power, he had not expected so clear a demonstration.

            But Twissell was talking again.

            “Let me tell you a story,” he began, with almost the tone he would have used in addressing a newly inducted Cub. “I had not thought this would be necessary, and perhaps it still isn’t, but your own researches and insight deserve it.”

            He stared at Harlan quizzically and said, “You know, I still can’t quite believe that you worked this out on your own,” then went on:

            “The man most of Eternity knows as Vikkor Mallansohn left the record of his life behind him after he died. It was not quite a diary, not quite a biography. It was more of a guide, bequeathed to the Eternals he knew would someday exist. It was enclosed in a volume of Time--stasis which could be opened only by the Computers of Eternity, and which therefore remained untouched for three Centuries after his death, until Eternity was established and Senior Computer Henry Wadsman, the first of the great Eternals, opened it. The document has been passed along in strictest security since, along a line of Senior Computers ending with myself. It is referred to as the Mallansohn memoir.

            “The memoir tells the story of a man named Brinsley Sheridan Cooper, born in the 78th, inducted as a Cub into Eternity at the age of twenty-three, having been married for a little over a year, but having been, as yet, childless.

            “Having entered Eternity, Cooper was trained in mathematics by a Computer named Laban Twissell and in Primitive sociology by a Technician named Andrew Harlan. After a thorough grounding in both disciplines, and in such matters as temporal engineering as well, he was sent back to the 24th to teach certain necessary techniques to a Primitive scientist named Vikkor Mallansohn.

            “Once having reached the 24th, he embarked first on a slow process of adjusting himself to the society. In this he benefited a great deal from the training of Technician Harlan and the detailed advice of Computer Twissell, who seemed to have an uncanny insight into some of the problems he was to face.

            “After the passage of two years, Cooper located one Vikkor Mallansohn, an eccentric recluse in the California backwoods, relationless and friendless but gifted with a daring and unconventional mind. Cooper made friends slowly, acclimated the man to the thought of having met a traveler from the future still more slowly, and set about teaching the man the mathmematics he must know.

            “With the passage of time, Cooper adopted the other’s habits, learned to shift for himself with the help of a clumsy Diesel-oil electric generator and with wired electrical appliances which freed them of dependence on power beams.

            “But progress was slow and Cooper found himself something less than a marvelous teacher. Mallansohn grew morose and unco-operative and then one day died, quite suddenly, in a fall down a canyon of the wild, mountainous country in which they lived. Cooper, after weeks of despair, with the ruin of his life-work and, presumably, of all Eternity, staring him in the eye, decided on a desperate expedient. He did not report Mallansohn’s death. Instead, be slowly took to building, out of the materials at band, a Temporal Field.

            “The details do not matter. He succeeded after mountains of drudgery and improvisation and took the generator to the California Institute of Technology, just as years before be had expected the real Mallansohn to do.

            “You know the story from your own studies. You know of the disbelief and rebuffs he first met, his period under observation, his escape and the near-loss of his generator, the help he received from the man at the lunch counter whose name he never learned, but who is now one of Eternity’s heroes, and of the final demonstration for Professor Zimbalist, in which a white mouse moved backward and forward in Time. I won’t bore you with any of that.

            “Cooper used the name of Vikkor Mallansohn in all this because it gave him a background and made him an authentic product of the 24th. The body of the real Mallansohn was never recovered.

            “In the remainder of his life, he cherished his generator and co-operated with the Institute scientists in duplicating it. He dared do no more than that. He could not teach them the Lefebvre equations without outlining three Centuries of mathematical development that was to come. He could not, dared not, hint at his true origin. He dared not do more than the real Vikkor Mallansohn had, to his knowledge, done.

            “The men who worked with him were frustrated to find a man who could perform so brilliantly and yet was unable to explain the whys of his performance. And he himself was frustrated too, because he foresaw, without in any way being able to quicken, the work that would lead, step by step, to the classic experiments of Ian Verdeer, and how from that the great Antoine Lefebvre would construct the basic equations of Reality. And how, after that, Eternity would be constructed.

            “It was only toward the end of his long life that Cooper, staring into a Pacific sunset (he describes the scene in some detail in his memoir) came to the great realization that he was Vikkor Mallansohn; he was not a substitute but the man himself. The name might not be his, but the man history called Mallansohn was really Brinsley Sheridan Cooper.

            “Fired with that thought, and with all that implied, anxious that the process of establishing Eternity be somehow quickened, improved, and made more secure, he wrote his memoir and placed it in a tube of Time-stasis in the living room of his house.

            “And so the circle was closed. Cooper-Mallansohn’s intentions in writing the memoir were, of course, disregarded. Cooper must go through his life exactly as he had gone through it. Primitive Reality allows of no changes. At this moment in physiotime, the Cooper you know is unaware of what lies ahead of him. He believes he is only to instruct Mallansohn and to return. He will continue to believe so until the years teach him differently and he sits down to write his memoir.

            “The intention of the circle in Time is to establish the knowledge of Time-travel and of the nature of Reality, to build Eternity, ahead of its natural Time. Left to itself, mankind would not have learned the truth about Time before their technological advances in other directions had more racial suicide inevitable.”

            Harlan listened intently, caught up in the vision of a mighty circle in Time, closed upon itself, and traversing Eternity in part of its course. He came as close to forgetting Noÿs, for the moment, as he ever could.

            He asked, “Then you knew all along everything you were to do, everything I was to do, everything I have done.”

            Twissell, who seemed lost in his own telling of the tale, his eyes peering through a haze of bluish tobacco smoke, came slowly to life. His old, wise eyes fixed themselves on Harlan and he said reproachfully, “No, of course not. There was a lapse of decades of physiotime between Cooper’s stay in Eternity and the moment when he wrote his memoir. He could remember only so much, and only what he himself had witnessed. You should realize that. “

            Twissell sighed and he drew a gnarled finger through a line of updrafting smoke, breaking it into little turbulent swirls. “It worked itself out. First, I was found and brought to Eternity. When, in the fullness of physiotime, I became a Senior Computer, I was given the memoir and placed in charge. I had been described as in charge, so I was placed in charge. Again in the fullness of physiotime, you appeared in the changing of a Reality (we had watched your earlier analogues carefully), and then Cooper.

            “I filled in the details by using my common sense and the services of the Computaplex. How carefully, for instance, we instructed Educator Yarrow in his part while betraying none of the significant truth. How carefully, in his. turn, he stimulated your interest in the Primitive.

            “How carefully we had had to keep Cooper from learning anything he did not prove he had learned by reference in the memoir.” Twissell smiled sadly. “Sennor amuses himself with matters such as this. He calls it the reversal of cause and effect. Knowing the effect, one adjusts the cause. Fortunately, I am not the cobweb spinner Sennor is.

            “I was pleased, boy, to find you so excellent an Observer and Technician. The memoir had not mentioned that since Cooper had no opportunity to observe your work or evaluate it. This suited me. I could use you in a more ordinary task that would make your essential one less noticeable. Even your recent stay with Computer Finge fitted in. Cooper mentioned a period of your absence during which his mathematical studies were so sharpened that he longed for your return. Once, though, you frightened me.”

            Harlan said, at once, “You mean the time I took Cooper along the kettle ways.”

            “How do you come to guess that?” demanded Twissell.

            “It was the one time you were really angry with me. I suppose now it went against something in the Mallansohn memoir.”

            “Not quite. It was just that the memoir did not speak of the kettles. It seemed to me that to avoid mention of such an outstanding aspect of Eternity meant he had little experience with it. It was my intention therefore to keep him away from the kettles as much as possible. The fact that you had taken him up when in one disturbed me greatly, but nothing happened afterward. Things continued as they should, so all is well.”

            The old Computer rubbed one hand slowly over the other, staring at the young Technician with a look compounded of surprise and curiosity. “And all along you’ve been guessing this. It simply astonishes me. I would have sworn that even a fully trained Computer could not have made the proper deductions, given only the information you had. For a Technician to do it is uncanny.” He leaned forward, tapped Harlan’s knee lightly. “The Mallansohn memoir says nothing about your life after Cooper’s leaving, of course.”

            “I understand, sir,” said Harlan.

            “We will be free then, in a manner of speaking, to d9 as we please with it. You show a surprising talent that must not be wasted. I think you are meant for something more than a Technician. I promise nothing now, but I presume that you realize that Computership is a distinct possibility.”

            It was easy for Harlan to keep his dark face expressionless. He had had years of practice for that.

            He thought: An additional bribe.

            But nothing must be left to conjecture, His guesses, wild and unsupported at the start, arrived at by a freak of insight in the course of a very unusual and stimulating night, had become reasonable as the result of directed library, research. They had become certainties now that Twissell had told him the story. Yet in one way at least there had been a deviation. Cooper was Mallansohn.

            That had simply improved his position, but, wrong in one respect, he might be wrong in another. He must leave nothing to chance, then. Have it out! Make certain!

            He said levelly, almost casually, “The responsibility is great for me, also, now that I know the truth.”

            “Yes, indeed?”

            “How fragile is the situation? Suppose something unexpected were to happen and I were to miss a day when I ought to have been teaching Cooper something vital.”

            “I don’t understand you.”

            (Was it Harlan’s imagination, or had a spark of alarm sprung to life in those old, tired eyes?)

            “I mean, can the circle break? Let me put it this way. If an unexpected blow on the head puts me out of action at a time when the memoir distinctly states I am well and active, is the whole scheme disrupted? Or suppose, for some reason, I deliberately choose not to follow the memoir. What then?”

            “But what puts all this in your mind?”

            “It seems a logical thought. It seems to me that by a careless or willful action, I could break the circle, and well, what? Destroy Eternity? It seems so. If it is so,” Harlan added composedly, “I ought to be told so that I may be careful to do nothing unfitting. Though I imagine it would take a rather unusual circumstance to drive me to such a thing.”

            Twissell laughed, but the laughter rang false and empty in Harlan’s ear. “This is all purely academic, my boy. Nothing of this will happen since it hasn’t happened. The full circle will not break.”

            “It might,” said Harlan. “The girl of the 482nd--”

            “Is safe,” said Twissell. He rose impatiently. “There’s no end to this kind of talk and I have quite enough of logic-chopping from the rest of the subcommittee in charge of the project. Meanwhile, I have yet to tell you what I originally called you here to hear and physiotime is still passing. Will you come with me?”

            Harlan was satisfied. The situation was clear and his power unmistakable. Twissell knew that Harlan could say, at will: “I will no longer have anything to do with Cooper.” Twissell knew Harlan could at any moment destroy Eternity by giving Cooper significant information concerning the memoir.

            Harlan had known enough to do this yesterday. Twissell had thought to overwhelm him with the knowledge of the importance of his task, but if the Computer had thought to force Harlan into line in that way, he was mistaken.

            Harlan had made his threat very clear with respect to Noÿs’s safety, and Twissell’s expression as he had barked, “Is safe,” showed he realized the nature of the threat.

            Harlan rose and followed Twissell.

            Harlan had never been in the room they now entered. It was large and looked as though walls had been knocked down for its sake. It had been entered through a narrow corridor which had been blocked off by a force-screen that did not go down until after a pause sufficient for Twissell’s face to be scanned thoroughly by automatic machinery.

            The largest part of the room was filled by a sphere that reached nearly to the ceiling. A door was open, showing four small steps leading to a well-lit platform within.

            Voices sounded from inside and even as Harlan watched, legs appeared in the opening and descended the steps. A man emerged and another pair of legs appeared behind him. It was Sennor of the Allwhen Council and behind him was another of the group at the breakfast table.

            Twissell did not look pleased at this. His voice, however, was restrained. “Is the subcommittee still here?”

            “Only we two,” said Sennor casually, “Rice and myself. A beautiful instrument we have here. It has the level of complexity of a spaceship.”

            Rice was a paunchy man with the perplexed look of one who is accustomed to being right yet finds himself unaccountably on the losing side of an argument. He rubbed his bulbous nose and said, “Sennor’s mind is running on space-travel lately.”

            Sennor’s bald head glistened in the light. “It’s a neat point Twissell,” he said. “I put it to you. Is space-travel a positive factor or a negative factor in the calculus of Reality?”

            “The question is meaningless,” said Twissell impatiently. “What type of space-travel in what society under what circumstances?”

            “Oh, come. Surely there’s something to be said concerning space-travel in the abstract.”

            “Only that it is self-limiting, that it exhausts itself and dies out.”

            “Then it is useless,” said Sennor with satisfaction, “and therefore it is a negative factor. My view entirely.”

            “If you please,” said Twissell, “Cooper will be here soon. We will need the floor clear.”

            “By all means.” Sennor hooked an arm under that of Rice and led him away. His voice declaimed clearly as they departed. “Periodically, my dear Rice, all the mental effort of mankind is concentrated on space-travel, which is doomed to a frustrated end by the nature of things. I would set up the matrices except that I am certain this is obvious to you. With minds concentrated on space, there is neglect of the proper development of things earthly. I am preparing a thesis now for submission to the Council recommending that Realities be changed to eliminate all space-travel eras as a matter of course.”

            Rice’s treble sounded. “But you can’t be that drastic. Space-travel is a valuable safety-valve in some civilizations. Take Reality 54 of the 290th, which I happen to recall offhand. Now there--”

            The voices cut off and Twissell said, “A strange man, Sennor. Intellectually, he’s worth two of any of the rest of us, but his worth is lost in leapfrog enthusiasms.”

            Harlan said, “Do you suppose he can be right? About space--travel, I mean.”

            “I doubt it. We’d have a better chance of judging if Sennor would actually submit the thesis he mentioned. But he won’t. He’ll have a new enthusiasm before he’s finished and drop the old. But never mind--” lie brought the flat of his hand against the sphere so that it rang resoundingly, then brought his hand back so that he could remove a cigarette from his lip. He said, “Can you guess what this is, Technician?”

            Harlan said, “It looks like an outsize kettle with a top.”

            “Exactly. You’re right. You’ve got it. Come on inside.”

            Harlan followed Twissell into the sphere. It was large enough to hold four or five men, but the interior was absolutely featureless. The floor was smooth, the curved wall was broken by two windows. That was all.

            “No controls?” asked Harlan.

            “Remote controls,” said Twissell. He ran his hand over the smoothness of the wall and said, “Double walls. The entire interwall volume is given over to a self-contained Temporal Field. This instrument is a kettle that is not restricted to the kettle shafts but can pass beyond the downwhen terminus of Eternity. Its design and construction were made possible by valuable hints in the Mallansohn memoir. Come with me.”

            The control room was a cut-off corner of the large room. Harlan stepped in and stared somberly at immense bus bars.

            Twissell said, “Can you hear me, boy?”

            Harlan started and looked about. He had not been aware that Twissell had not followed him inside. He stepped automatically to the window and Twissell waved to him. Harlan said, “I can hear you, sir. Do you want me outside?”

            “Not at all. You are locked in.”

            Harlan sprang to the door and his stomach turned into a series of cold, wet knots. Twissell was correct and what in Time was going on?

            Twissell said, “You will be relieved to know, boy, that your responsibility is over. You were worried about that responsibility; you asked searching questions about it; and I think I know what you meant. This should not be your responsibility. It is mine alone. Unfortunately, we must have you in the control room, since it is stated that you were there and handled the controls. It is stated in the Mallansohn memoir. Cooper will see you through the window and that will take care of that.

            “Furthermore, I will ask you to make the final contact according to instructions I will give you. If you feel that that, too, is too great a responsibility, you may relax. Another contact in parallel with yours is in charge of another man. If for any reason you are unable to operate the contact, he will do so. Furthermore, I will cut off radio transmission from within the control room. You will be able to hear us but not to speak to us. You need not fear, therefore, that some involuntary exclamation from you will break the circle.”

            Harlan stared helplessly out the window.

            Twissell went on. “Cooper will be here in moments and his trip to the Primitive will take place within two physiohours. After that, boy, the project will be over and you and I will be free.”

            Harlan was plunging chokingly through the vortex of a waking nightmare. Had Twissell tricked him? Had everything he had done been designed only to get Harlan quietly into a locked control room? Having learned that Harlan knew his own importance, had he improvised with diabolical cleverness, keeping him engaged in conversation, drugging his emotions with words, leading him here, leading him there, until the time was ripe for locking him in?

            That quick and easy surrender over Noÿs. She won’t be hurt, Twissell had said. All will be well.

            How could he have believed that! If they were not going to harm her, or touch her, why the temporal barrier across the kettleways at the 100,000th? That alone should have given Twissell completely away.

            But because he (fool!) wanted to believe, he allowed himself to be led through those last physiohours blindly, placed inside a locked room where he was Do longer needed, even to close the final contact.

            In one stroke he had been robbed of his essentiality. The trumps in his hand had been neatly maneuvered into deuces and Noÿs was out of his reach forever. What punishment might lie in wait for him did not concern him. Noÿs was out of his reach forever.

            It had never occurred to him that the project would be so close to its end. That, of course, was what had really made his defeat possible.

            Twissell’s voice sounded dimly. “You’ll be cut off now, boy.”

            Harlan was alone, helpless, useless....

            13. Beyond the Downwhen Terminus

            BRINSLEY COOPER entered. Excitement flushed his thin face and ‘made it almost youthful, despite the heavy Mallansohn mustache that draped its upper lip.

            (Harlan could see him through the window, hear him clearly over the room’s radio. He thought bitterly: A Mallansohn mustache! Of course!)

            Cooper strode toward Twissell. “They wouldn’t let me in till now, Computer.”

            “Very right,” said Twissell. “They had their instructions.”

            “Now’s the time, though? I’ll be heading out?”

            “Almost the time.”

            “And I’ll be coming back? I’ll be seeing Eternity again?” Despite the straightness Cooper gave his back, there was an edge of uncertainty in his voice.

            (Within the control room Harlan brought his clenched hands bitterly to the reinforced glass of. the window, longing to break through somehow, to shout: “Stop it! Meet my terms, or I’ll--” What was the use?)

            Cooper looked about the room, apparently unaware that Twissell had refrained from answering his question. His glance fell on Harlan at the control-room window.

            He waved his hand excitedly. “Technician Harlan! Come on out. I want to shake your hand before I go.”

            Twissell interposed. “Not now, boy, not now. He’s at the controls.”

            Cooper said, “Oh? You know, he doesn’t look well.”

            Twissell said, “I’ve been telling him the true nature of the project. I’m afraid that’s enough to make anyone nervous.”

            Cooper said, “Great Time, yes! I’ve known about it for weeks now and I’m not used to it yet.” There was a trace of near-hysteria in his laugh. “I still haven’t got it through my thick head that it is really my show. I--I’m a little scared.”

            “I scarcely blame you for that.”

            “It’s my stomach, mostly, you know. It’s the least happy part of me.”

            Twissell said, “Well, it’s very natural and it will pass. Meanwhile, your time of departure on Standard Intertemporal has been set and there is still a certain amount of orientation to be gone through. For instance, you haven’t actually seen the kettle you will use.”

            In the two hours that passed Harlan heard it all, whether they were in sight or not. Twissell lectured Cooper in an oddly stilted manner, and Harlan knew the reason. Cooper was being informed of just those things that he was to mention in Mallansohn’s memoir.

            (Full circle. Full circle. And no way for Harlan to break that circle in one, last defiant Samson-smash of the temple--round and round the circle goes; round and round it goes.)

            “Ordinary Kettles,” he heard Twissell say, “are both pushed and pulled, if we can use such terms in the case of Intertemporal forces. In traveling from Century X to Century y within Eternity there is a fully powered initial point and a fully powered final point.

            “What we have here is a kettle with a powered initial point but an unpowered destination point. It can only be pushed, not pulled. For that reason, it must utilize energies at a level whole orders of magnitude higher than those used by ordinary kettles. Special power-transfer units have had to be laid down along the kettleways to siphon in sufficient concentrations of energy from Nova Sol.

            “This special kettle, its controls and power supply, are a composite structure. For physiodecades, the passing Realities have been combed for special alloys and special techniques. The 13th Reality of the 222nd was the key. It developed the Temporal Pressor and without that, this kettle could not have been built. The 13th Reality of the 222nd.”

            He pronounced that with elaborate distinctness.

            (Harlan thought: Remember that, Cooper! Remember the 13th Reality of the 222nd so you can put it into the Mallansohn memoir so that the Eternals will know where to look so they will know what to tell you so you can put it....Round and round the circle goes....)

            Twissell said, “The kettle has not been tested past the downwhen terminus, of course, but it has taken numerous trips within Eternity. We are convinced there will be no bad effects.”

            “There can’t be, can there?” said Cooper. “I mean I did get there or Mallansohn could not have succeeded in building the field and he did succeed.”

            Twissell said, “Exactly. You will find yourself in a protected and isolated spot in the sparsely populated southwestern area of the United States of Amellika--”

            “America,” corrected Cooper.

            “America, then. The Century will be the 24th; or, to put it to nearest hundredth, the 23.17th. I suppose we can even call it the year 2317, if we wish. The kettle, as you saw, is large, much larger than necessary for you. It is being filled now with food, water, and the means of shelter and defense. You will have detailed instructions that will, of course, be meaningless to anyone but you. I must impress upon you now that your first task will be to make certain that none of the indigenous inhabitants discovers you before you are ready for them. You will have force-diggers with which you will be able to burrow well into a mountain to form a cache. You will have to remove the contents of the kettle rapidly. They will be stacked so as to facilitate that.”

            (Harlan thought: Repeat! Repeat! He must have been told all this before, but repeat what must go into the memoir. Round and round...)

            Twissell said, “You will have to unload in fifteen minutes. After that, the kettle will return automatically to starting point, carrying with it all tools that are too advanced for the Century. You will have a list of those. After the kettle returns, you will be on your own.”

            Cooper said, “Must the kettle return so quickly?”

            Twissell said, “A quick return increases the probabilities of success.”

            (Harlan thought: The kettle must return in fifteen minutes because it did return in fifteen minutes. Round and...)

            Twissell hurried on. “We cannot attempt to counterfeit their medium of exchange of any of their negotiable scrip. You will have gold in the form of small nuggets. You will be able to explain its possession according to your detailed instructions. You will have native clothing to wear or at least clothing that will pass for native.”

            “Right,” said Cooper.

            “Now, remember. Move slowly. Take weeks, if necessary. Work your way into the era, spiritually. Technician Harlan’s instructions are a good basis but they are not enough. You will have a wireless receiver built on the principles of the 24th which will enable you to come abreast of the current events and, more important, learn the proper pronunciation and intonation of the language of the times. Do that thoroughly. I’m sure that Harlan’s knowledge of English is excellent, but nothing can substitute for native pronunciation on the spot.”

            Cooper said, “What if I don’t end up in the right spot? I mean, not in the 23.17?”

            “Check on that very carefully, of course. But it will be right. It will be right.”

            (Harlan thought: It will be right because it was right. Round...)

            Cooper must have looked unconvinced, though, for Twissell said, “The accuracy of focus was carefully worked out. I intended to explain our methods and now is a good time. For one thing, it will help Harlan understand the controls.”

            (Suddenly Harlan turned away from the windows and fixed his gaze on the controls. A corner of the curtain of despair lifted. What if--)

            Twissell still lectured Cooper with the anxious overprecise tone of the schoolteacher, and with part of his mind Harlan still listened.

            Twissell said, “Obviously a serious problem was that of determining how far into the Primitive an object is sent after the application of a given energy thrust. The most direct method would have been to send a man into the downwhen via this kettle using carefully graduated thrust levels. To do that, however, would have meant a certain lapse of time in each case while the man determined the Century to its nearest hundredth through astronomical observation or by obtaining appropriate information over the wireless. That would be slow and also dangerous since the man might well be discovered by the native inhabitants with probably catastrophic effects on our project.

            “What we did then instead was this: We sent back a known mass of the radioactive isotope, niobium-94, which decays by beta-particle emission to the stable isotope, molybdenum-94. The process has a half-life of almost exactly 500 Centuries. The original radiation intensity of the mass was known. That intensity decreases with time according to the simple relationship involved in first-order kinetics, and, of course, the intensity can be measured with great precision.

            “When the kettle reaches its destination in Primitive times, the ampule containing the isotope is discharged into the mountainside and the kettle then returns to Eternity. At the moment in physiotime that the ampule is discharged, it simultaneously appears at all future Times growing progressively older. At the place of discharge in the 575th (in actual Time and not in Eternity) a Technician detects the ampule by its radiation and retrieves it.

            “The radiation intensity is measured, the time it has remained in the mountainside is then known, the Century to which the kettle traveled is also known to two decimal places. Dozens of ampules were then sent back at various thrust levels and a calibration curve set up. The curve was a check against ampules sent not all the way into the Primitive but into the early Centuries of Eternity where direct observations could also be made.

            “Naturally, there were failures. The first few ampules were lost until we learned to allow for the not too major geological changes between the late Primitive and the 575th. Then, three of the ampules later on never showed up in the 575th. Presumably, something went wrong with the discharge mechanism and they were buried to deeply in the mountain for detection. We stopped our experiments when the level of radiation grew so high that we feared that some of the Primitive inhabitants might detect and wonder what radioactive artifacts might be doing in the region. But we had enough for our purposes and we are certain we can send back a man to any hundredth of a Century of the Primitive that is desired.

            “You follow all this, Cooper, don’t you?”

            Cooper said, “Perfectly, Computer Twissell. I have seen the calibration curve without understanding the purpose at the time. It is quite clear now.”

            But Harlan was exceedingly interested now. He stared at the measured arc marked off in centuries. The shining arc was porcelain on metal and the fine lines divided it into Centuries, Decicenturies and Centicenturies. Silvery metal gleamed thinly through the porcelain-penetrating lines, marking them clearly. The figures were as finely done and, bending close, Harlan could make out the Centuries from 17 to 27. The hairline was fixed at the 23.17th Century mark.

            He had seen similar time-gauges and almost automatically he reached to the pressure-control lever. It did not respond to his grasp. The hairline remained in place.

            He nearly jumped when Twissell’s voice suddenly addressed him.

            “Technician Harlan!”

            He cried, “Yes, Computer,” then remembered that he could not be heard. He stepped to the window and nodded.

            Twissell said, almost as though chiming in with Harlan’s thoughts, “The time-gauge is set for a thrust back to the 23.17th. That requires no adjustment. Your only task is to pour energy through at the proper moment in physiotime. There is a chronometer to the right of the gauge. Nod if you see it.”

            Harlan nodded.

            “It will reach zero-point backward. At the minus-fifteen-second point, align the contact points. It’s simple. You see how?”

            Harlan nodded again.

            Twissell went on, “Synchronization is not vital. You can do it at minus fourteen or thirteen or even minus five seconds, but please make every effort to stay this side of minus ten for safety’s sake. Once you’ve closed contact, a synchronized force-gear will do the rest and make certain that the final energy thrust will occur precisely at time zero. Understood?”

            Harlan nodded still again. He understood more than Twissell said. If he himself did not align the points by minus ten, it would be taken care of from without.

            Harlan thought grimly: There’ll be no need for outsiders.

            Twissell said, “We have thirty physiominutes left. Cooper and I will leave to check on the supplies.”

            They left. The door closed behind them, and Harlan was left alone with the thrust control, the time (already moving slowly backward toward zero)--and a resolute knowledge of what must be done.

            Harlan turned away from the window. He put his hand inside his pocket and half withdrew the neuronic whip it still contained. Through all this he had kept the whip. His hand shook a little.,

            An earlier thought recurred: a Samson-smash of the temple!

            A corner of his mind wondered sickly: How many Eternals have ever heard of Samson? How many know how he died?

            There were only twenty-five minutes left. He was not certain how long the operation would take. He was not really certain it would work at all.

            But what choice had he? His damp fingers almost dropped the weapon before he succeeded in unhinging the butt.

            He worked rapidly and in complete absorption. Of all the aspects of what he planned, the possibility of his own passage into nonexistence occupied his mind the least and bothered him not at all.

            At minus one minute Harlan was standing at the controls.

            Detachedly he thought: The last minute of life?

            Nothing in the room was visible to him but the backward sweep of the red hairline that marked the passing seconds.

            Minus thirty seconds.

            He thought: It will not hurt. It is not death.

            He tried to think only of Noÿs.

            Minus fifteen seconds.

            Noÿs!

            Harlan’s left hand moved a switch down toward contact. Not hastily!

            Minus twelve seconds.

            Contact!

            The force-gear would take over now. Thrust would come at zero time. And that left Harlan one last manipulation. The Samson-smash!

            His right hand moved. He did not look at his right hand.

            Minus five seconds.

            Noÿs!

            His right hand mo--ZERO--ved again, spasmodically. He did not look at it.

            Was this nonexistence?

            Not yet. Nonexistence not yet.

            Harlan stared out the window. He did not move. Time passed and he was unaware of its passage.

            The room was empty. Where the giant, enclosed kettle had been was nothing. Metal blocks that had served as its base sat emptily, lifting their huge strength against air.

            Twissell, strangely small and dwarfed in the room that had become a waiting cavern, was the only thing that moved as he tramped edgily this way and that.

            Harlan’s eyes followed him for a moment and then left him.

            Then, without any sound or stir, the kettle was back in the spot it had left. Its passage across the hairline from time past to time present did not as much as disturb a molecule of air.

            Twissell was hidden from Harlan’s eyes by the bulk of the kettle, but then he rounded it, came into view. He was running.

            A flick of his hand was enough to activate the mechanism that opened the door of the control room. He hurtled inside, shouting with an almost lyrical excitement. “It’s done. It’s done. We’ve closed the circle.” He had breath to say no more.

            Harlan made no answer.

            Twissell stared out the window, his hands flat against the glass. Harlan noted the blotches of age upon them and the way in which they trembled. It was as though his mind no longer had the ability or the strength to filter the important from the inconsequential. but were selecting observational material in a purely random manner.

            Wearily he thought: What does it matter? What does anything matter now?

            Twissell said (Harlan heard him dimly), “I’ll tell you now that I’ve been more anxious than I cared to admit. Sennor used to say once that this whole thing was impossible. He insisted something must happen to stop it--What’s the matter?”

            He had turned at Harlan’s odd grunt.

            Harlan shook his head, managed a choked “Nothing.”

            Twissell left it at that and turned away. It was doubtful whether he spoke to Harlan or to the air. It was as though he were allowing years of pent-up anxieties to escape in words.

            “Sennor,” he said, “was the doubter. We reasoned with him and argued. We used mathematics and presented the results of generations of research that had preceded us in the physiotime of Eternity. He put it all to one side and presented his case by quoting the man-meets-himself paradox. You heard him talk about it. It’s! his favorite.

            “We knew our own future, Sennor said. I, Twissell, knew, for’ instance, that I would survive, despite the fact that I would be quite old, until Cooper made his trip past the downwhen terminus. I knew other details of my future, the things I would do.

            “Impossible, he would say. Reality must change to correct your knowledge, even if it meant the circle would never close and Eternity never established.

            “Why he argued so, I don’t know; Perhaps he honestly believed it, perhaps it was an intellectual game with him, perhaps it was just the desire to shock the rest of us with an unpopular viewpoint. In any case, the project proceeded and some of the memoir began to be fulfilled. We located Cooper, for instance, in the Century and Reality that the memoir gave us. Sennor’s case was exploded by that alone, but it didn’t bother him. By that time, he had grown interested in something else.

            “And yet, and yet”--he laughed gently, with more than a trace of embarrassment, and let his cigarette, unnoticed, burn down nearly to his fingers--”you know I was never quite easy in my mind. Something might happen. The Reality in which Eternity was established might change in some way in order to prevent what Sennor called a paradox. It would have to change to one in which Eternity would not exist. Sometimes, in the dark of a sleeping period, when I couldn’t sleep, I could almost persuade myself that that was indeed so--and now it’s all over and I laugh at myself as a senile fool.”

            Harlan said in a low voice, “Computer Sennor was right.”

            Twissell whirled. “What?”

            “The project failed.” Harlan’s mind was coming out of the shadows (why, and into what, he was not sure). “The circle is not complete.”

            “What are you talking about?” Twissell’s old hands fell on Harlan’s shoulders with surprising strength. “You’re ill, boy. The strain.”

            “Not ill. Sick of everything. You. Me. Not ill. The gauge. See for yourself.”

            “The gauge?” The hairline on the gauge stood at the 27th Century, hard against the right-hand extreme. “What happened?” The joy was gone from his face. Horror replaced it.

            Harlan grew matter-of-fact. “I melted the locking mechanism, freed the thrust control.”

            “How could you--”

            “I had a neuronic whip, I broke it open and used its micropile energy source iii one flash, like a torch. There’s what’s left of it.” He kicked at a small heap of metal fragments in one corner.

            Twissell wasn’t taking it in. “In the 27th? You mean Cooper’s in the 27th--”

            “I don’t know where he is,” said Harlan dully. “I shifted the thrust control downwhen, further down than the 24th. I don’t know where. I didn’t look. Then I brought it back. I still didn’t look.”

            Twissell stared at him, his face a pale, unhealthy yellowish color, his lower lip trembling.

            “I don’t know where he is now,” said Harlan. “He’s lost in the Primitive. The circle is broken. I thought everything would end when I made the stroke. At zero time. That’s silly. We’ve got to wait. There’ll be a moment in physiotime when Cooper will realize he’s in the wrong Century, when he’ll do something against the memoir, when he--” He broke off, then broke into a forced and creaky laughter. “What’s the difference? It’s only a delay till Cooper makes the final break in the circle. There’s no way of stopping it. Minutes, hours, days. What’s the difference? When the delay is done, there will be no more Eternity. Do you hear me? It will be the end of Eternity.”

            14. The Earlier Crime

            “WHY? WHY?”

            Twissell looked helplessly from the gauge to the Technician, his eyes mirroring the puzzled frustration in his voice.

            Harlan lifted his head. He had only one word to say. “Noÿs!”

            Twissell said, “The woman you took into Eternity?”

            Harlan smiled bitterly, said nothing.

            Twissell said, “What has she to do with this? Great Time, I don’t understand, boy.”

            “What is there to understand?” Harlan burned with sorrow. “Why do you pretend ignorance? I had a woman. I was happy and so was she. We harmed no one. She did not exist in the new Reality. What difference would it have made to anyone?”

            Twissell tried vainly to interrupt.

            Harlan shouted. “But there are rules in Eternity, aren’t there? I know them all. Liaisons require permission; liaisons require computations; liaisons require status; liaisons are tricky things. What were you planning for Noÿs when all this was over? A seat in a crashing rocket? Or a more comfortable position as community mistress for worthy Computers? You won’t make any plans now, I think.”

            He ended in a kind of despair and Twissell moved quickly to the Communiplate. Its function as a transmitter had obviously been restored.

            The Computer shouted into it till he aroused an answer. Then he said, “This is Twissell. No one is to be allowed in here. No one. No one. Do you understand?...Then see to it. It goes for members of the Allwhen Council. It goes for them particularly.”

            He turned back to Harlan, saying abstractedly, “They’ll do it because I’m old and senior member of the Council and because they think I’m cranky and queer. They give in to me because I’m cranky and queer.” For a moment he fell into a ruminative silence. Then he said, “Do you think I’m queer?” and his face turned swiftly up to Harlan’s like that of a seamed monkey.

            Harlan thought: Great Time, the man’s mad. The shock has driven him mad.

            He took a step backward, automatically aghast at being trapped with a madman. Then he steadied. The man, be he ever so mad, was feeble, and even madness would end soon.

            Soon? Why not at once? What delayed the end of Eternity?

            Twissell said (he had no cigarette in his fingers; his hand made no move to take one) in a quiet insinuating voice, “You haven’t answered me. Do you think I’m queer? I suppose you do. Too queer to talk to. If you had thought of me as a friend instead of as a crotchety old man, whimsical and unpredictable, you would have spoken openly to me of your doubts. You would have taken no such action as you did.”

            Harlan frowned. The man thought Harlan was mad. That was it!

            He said angrily, “My action was the right one. I’m quite sane.”

            Twissell said, “I told you the girl was in no danger, you know.”

            “I was a fool to believe that even for a while. I was a fool to believe the Council would be just to a Technician.”

            “Who told you the Council knew of any of this?”

            “Finge knew of it and sent in a report concerning it to the Council.”

            “And how do you know that?”

            “I got it out of Finge at the point of a neuronic whip. The business end of a whip abolishes comparative status.”

            “The same whip that did this?” Twissell pointed to the gauge with its blob of molten metal perched wryly above the face of the dial.

            “Yes.”

            “A busy whip.” Then, sharply, “Do you know why Finge took it to the Council instead of handling the matter himself?”

            “Because he hated me and wanted to make certain I lost all status. He wanted Noÿs.”

            Twissell said, “You’re naive! If he had wanted the girl, he could easily have arranged liaison. A Technician would not have been in the way. The man hated me, boy.” (Still no cigarette. He looked odd without one and the stained finger he laid on his chest as he spoke the last pronoun looked almost indecently bare.)

            “You?”

            “There’s such a thing, boy, as Council politics. Not every Computer is appointed to the Council. Finge wanted an appointment. Finge is ambitious and wanted it badly. I blocked it because I thought him emotionally unstable. Time, I never fully appreciated how right I was....Look, boy. He knew you were a protégé of mine. He had seen me take you out of a job as an Observer and make you a master Technician; He saw you working for me steadily. How better could he get back at me and destroy my influence? If he could prove my pet Technician guilty of a terrible crime against Eternity, it would reflect on me. It might force my resignation from the Allwhen Council, and who do you suppose would then be a logical successor?”

            His empty hands moved to his lips and when nothing happened, he looked at the space between finger and thumb blankly.

            Harlan thought: He’s not as calm as he’s trying to sound. He can’t be. But why does he talk all this nonsense now? With Eternity ending?

            Then in agony: But why doesn’t it end then? Now!

            Twissell said, “When I allowed you to go to Finge just recently, I more than half suspected danger. But Mallansohn’s memoir said you were away the last month and no other natural reason for your absence offered itself. Fortunately, Finge underplayed his hand.”

            “In what way?” asked Harlan wearily. He didn’t really care, but Twissell talked and talked and it was easier to take part than to try to shut the sound out of his ears.

            Twissell said, “Finge labeled his report: ‘In re unprofessional conduct of Technician Andrew Harlan.’ He was being the faithful Eternal, you see, being cool, impartial, unexcited. He was leaving it to the Council to rage and throw itself at me. Unfortunately for himself, he did not know of your real importance. He did not realize that any report concerning you would be instantly referred to me, unless its supreme importance were made perfectly clear on the very face of things.”

            “You never spoke to me of this?”

            “How could I? I was afraid to do anything that would disturb you with the crisis of the project at hand. I gave you every opportunity to bring your problem to me.”

            Every opportunity? Harlan’s mouth twisted in disbelief, but then he thought of Twissell’s weary face on the Communiplate asking him if he had nothing to say to him. That was yesterday. Only yesterday.

            Harlan shook his head, but turned his face away now.

            Twissell said softly, “I realized at once that he had deliberately goaded you into your--rash action.”

            Harlan looked up. “You know that?”

            “Does that surprise you? I knew Finge was after my neck. I’ve known it for a long time. I am an old man, boy. I know these things. But there are ways in which doubtful Computers can be checked upon. There are some protective devices, culled out of Time, that are not placed in the museums. There are some that are known to the Council alone.”

            Harlan thought bitterly of the time-block at the 100,000th.

            “From the report and from what I knew independently, it was easy to deduce what must have happened.”

            Harlan asked suddenly, “I suppose Finge suspected you of spying?”

            “He might have. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

            Harlan thought back to his first days with Finge when Twissell first showed his abnormal interest in the young Observer. Finge had known nothing of the Mallansohn project, and he had been interested in Twissell’s interference. “Have you ever met Senior Computer Twissell?” he had once asked and, thinking back, Harlan could recall the exact tone of sharp uneasiness in the man’s voice. As early as that Finge must have suspected Harlan of being Twissell’s finger-man. His enmity and hate must have begun that early.

            Twissell was speaking, “So if you had come to me--”

            “Come to you?” cried Harlan. “What of the Council?”

            “Of the entire Council, only I know.”

            “You never told them?” Harlan tried to be mocking.

            “I never did.”

            Harlan felt feverish. His clothes were choking him. Was this nightmare to go on forever. Foolish, irrelevant chatter! For what? Why?

            Why didn’t Eternity end? Why didn’t the clean peace of non-Reality reach out for them? Great Time, what was wrong?

            Twissell said, “Don’t you believe me?”

            Harlan shouted, “Why should I? They came to look at me, didn’t they? At that breakfast? Why should they have done that if they didn’t know of the report? They came to look at the queer phenomenon who had broken the laws of Eternity but who couldn’t be touched for one more day. One more day and then the project would be over. They came to gloat for the tomorrow they were expecting.”

            “My boy, there was nothing of that. They wanted to see you only because they were human. Councilmen are human too. They could not witness the final kettle drive because the Mallansohn memoir did not place them at the scene. They could not interview Cooper since the memoir made no mention of that either. Yet they wanted something. Father Time, boy, don’t you see they would want something? You were as close as they could get, so they brought you close and stared at you.”

            “I don’t believe you.”

            “It’s the truth.”

            Harlan said, “Is it? And while we ate, Councilman Sennor talked of a man meeting himself. He obviously knew about my illegal trips into the 482nd and my nearly meeting myself. It was his way of poking fun at me, enjoying himself cutely at my expense.”

            Twissell said, “Sennor? You worried about Sennor? Do you know the pathetic figure he is? ‘ His homewhen is the 803rd, one of the few cultures in which the human body is deliberately disfigured to meet the aesthetic requirements of the time. It is rendered hairless at adolescence.

            “Do you know what that means in the continuity of man? Surely you do. A disfigurement sets men apart from their ancestors and descendants. Men of the 803rd are, poor risks as Eternals; they are too different from the rest of us. Few are chosen. Sennor is the only one of his Century ever to sit on the Council.

            “Don’t you see how that affects him? Surely you understand what insecurity means. Did it ever occur to you that a Councilman could be insecure? Sennor has to listen to discussions involving the eradication of his Reality for the very characteristic that makes him so conspicuous among us. And eradicating it would leave him one of a very few in all the generation to be disfigured as he is. Someday it will happen.

            “He finds refuge in philosophy. He overcompensates by taking the lead in conversation, by deliberately airing unpopular or unaccepted viewpoints. His man-meeting-himself paradox is a case in point. I told you that he used it to predict disaster for the project and it was we, the Councilmen, that he was attempting to annoy, not you. It had nothing to do with you. Nothing!”

            Twissell had grown heated. In the long emotion of his words he seemed to forget where he was and the crisis that faced them, for he slipped back into the quick-gestured, uneasily motioned gnome that Harlan knew so well. He even slipped a cigarette from his sleeve pouch and had all but frictioned it into combustion.

            But then he stopped, wheeled, and looked at Harlan again, reaching back through all his own words to what Harlan had last said, as though until that moment, he had not heard them properly.

            He said. “What do you mean, you almost met yourself?”

            Harlan told him briefly and went on, “You didn’t know that?”

            “No.”

            There were a few moments of silence that were as welcome to the feverish Harlan as water would have been.

            Twissell said, “Is that it? What if you had met yourself?”

            “I didn’t.”

            Twissell ignored that. “There is always room for random variation. With an infinite number of Realities there can be no such thing as determinism. Suppose that in the Mallansohn Reality, in the previous turn of the cycle--”

            “The circle goes on forever?” asked Harlan with what wonder he could still find in himself.

            “Do you think only twice? Do you think two is a magic number? It’s a matter of infinite turns of the circle in finite physiotime. Just as you can draw a pencil round and round the circumference of a circle infinitely yet enclose a finite area. In previous turns of the cycle, you had not met yourself. This one time, the statistical uncertainty of things made it possible for you to meet yourself. Reality had to change to prevent the meeting and in the new Reality, you did not send Cooper back to the 24th but--”

            Harlan cried, “What’s all this talk about? What are you getting at? It’s all done. Everything. Let me alone now! Let me alone!”

            “I want you to know you’ve done wrong. I want you to realize you did the wrong thing.”

            “I didn’t. And even if I did, it’s done.”

            “But it is not done. Listen just a little while longer.” Twissell was wheedling, almost crooning with an agonized gentleness. “You will have your girl. I promised that. I still promise it. She will not be harmed. You will not be harmed. I promise you this. It is my personal guarantee.”

            Harlan stared at him wide-eyed. “But it’s too late. What’s the use?”

            “It is not too late. Things are not irreparable. With your help, we can succeed yet. I must have your help. You must realize that you did wrong. I am trying to explain this to you. You must want to undo what you have done.”

            Harlan licked his dry lips with a dry tongue and thought: he is mad. His mind can’t accept the truth--or, does the Council know more?

            Did it? Did it? Could it reverse the verdict of the Changes?

            Could they halt Time or reverse it?

            He said, “You locked me in the control room, kept me helpless, you thought, till it was all over.”‘

            “You said you were afraid something might go wrong with you; that you might not be able to carry on with your part.”