Her smile vanished and was it his imagination or was there a trace of heightened color in her cheek? She said, “Why do you ask that?”
“To find out.”
“It’s silly,” she said. “I’d rather not talk about it.” She stared down at her graceful fingers, edged with nails that glittered colorlessly in the muted light of the kettle shaft. Harlan thought abstractedly and quite apropos of nothing that at an evening gathering, with a touch of mild ultraviolet in the wall
illumination, those nails would glow a soft apple-green or a brooding crimson, depending on the angle she held her hands. A clever girl, one like Noÿs, could produce half a dozen shades out of them, and make it seem as though the colors were reflecting her moods. Blue for innocence, bright yellow for laughter, violet for sorrow, and scarlet for passion.
He said, “Why did you make love to me?”
She shook her hair back and looked at him out of a pale, grave face. She said, “If you must know, part of the reason was the theory that a girl can become an Eternal that way. I wouldn’t mind living forever.”
“I thought you said you didn’t believe that.”
“I didn’t, but it couldn’t hurt a girl to take the chance. Especially—”
He was staring at her sternly, finding refuge from hurt and disappointment in a frozen look of disapproval from the heights of the morality of his homewhen. “Well?”
“Especially since I wanted to, anyway.”
“Wanted to make love to me?”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
“Because I liked you. Because I thought you were funny.”
“
Funny
!”
“Well, odd, if you like that better. You always worked so hard not to look at me, but you always looked at me anyway. You tried to hate me and I could see you wanted me. I was sorry for you a little, I think.”
“What were you sorry about?” He felt his cheeks burning.
“That you should have such trouble about wanting me. It’s such a simple thing. You just ask a girl. It’s so easy to be friendly. Why suffer?”
Harlan nodded. The morality of the 482nd! “Just ask a girl,” he muttered. “So simple. Nothing more necessary.”
“The girl has to be willing, of course. Mostly she is, if she’s not otherwise engaged. Why not? It’s simple enough.”
It was Harlan’s turn to drop his eyes. Of course, it was simple enough. And nothing wrong with it, either. Not in the 482nd. Who in Eternity should know this better? He would be a fool, an utter and unspeakable fool, to ask her now about earlier affairs. He might as well ask a girl of his own homewhen if she had ever eaten in the presence of a man and how dared she?
Instead he said humbly, “And what do you think of me now?”
“That you are very nice,” she said softly, “and that if you ever relaxed—Won’t you smile?”
“There’s nothing to smile about, Noÿs.”
“
Please.
I want to see if your cheeks can crease right. Let’s see.” She put her fingers to the corners of his mouth and pressed them backward. He jerked his head back in surprise and couldn’t avoid smiling.
“See. Your cheeks didn’t even crack. You’re almost handsome. With enough practice—standing in front of a mirror and smiling and getting a twinkle in your eye—
I’ll bet you could be really handsome.”
But the smile, fragile enough to begin with, vanished.
Noÿs said, “We
are
in trouble, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are, Noÿs. Great trouble.”
“Because of what we did? You and I? That evening?”
“Not really.”
“That was my fault, you know. I’ll tell them so, if you wish.”
“Never,” said Harlan with energy. “Don’t take on any fault in this. You’ve done nothing,
nothing
, to be guilty for. It’s something else.”
Noÿs looked uneasily at the temporometer. “Where are we? I can’t even see the numbers.”
“
When
are we?” Harlan corrected her automatically. He slowed the velocity and the Centuries came into view.
Her beautiful eyes widened and the lashes stood out against the whiteness of her skin. “Is that
right
?”
Harlan looked at the indicator casually. It was in the 72,000’s. “I’m sure it is.”
“But where are we going?”
“To
when
are we going. To the far upwhen,” he said, grimly. “Good and far. Where they won’t find you.”
And in silence they watched the numbers mount. In silence Harlan told himself over and over that the girl was innocent of Finge’s charge. She had owned up frankly to its partial truth and she had admitted, just as frankly, the presence of a more personal attraction.
He looked up, then, as Noÿs shifted position. She had moved to his side of the kettle and, with a resolute gesture, brought the kettle to a halt at a most uncomfortable temporal deceleration.
Harlan gulped and closed his eyes to let the nausea pass. He said, “What’s the matter?”
She looked ashen and for a moment made no reply. Then she said, “I don’t want to go any further. The numbers are so high.”
The temporometer read: 111,394.
He said, “Far enough.”
Then he held out his hand gravely. “Come, Noÿs. This will be your home for a while.”
They wandered through the corridors like children, hand in hand. The lights along the mainways were on, and the darkened rooms blazed at the touch of a contact. The air was fresh and had a liveliness about it which, without sensible draft, yet indicated the presence of ventilation.
Noÿs whispered, “Is there no one here?”
“No one,” said Harlan. He tried to say it firmly and loudly. He wanted to break the spell of being in a “Hidden Century,” but he said it in only a whisper after all.
He did not even know how to refer to anything so far upwhen. To call it the one-one-one-three-ninety-fourth was ridiculous. One would have to say simply and indefinitely, “The hundred thousands.”
It was a foolish problem to be concerned with, but now that the exaltation of actual flight was done with, he found himself alone in a region of Eternity where no human footsteps had wandered and he did not like it. He was ashamed, doubly ashamed since Noÿs was witness, at the fact that the faint chill within him was the faint chill of a faint fear.
Noÿs said, “It’s so clean. There’s no dust.”
“Self-cleaning,” said Harlan. With an effort that seemed to tear at his vocal cords he raised his voice to near-normal level. “But no one’s here, upwhen or downwhen for thousands and thousands of Centuries.”
Noÿs seemed to accept that. “And everything is fixed up so? We passed food stores and a viewing-film library. Did you see that?”
“I saw that. Oh, it’s fully equipped. They’re all fully equipped. Every Section.”
“But why, if no one ever comes here?”
“It’s logical,” said Harlan. Talking about it took away some of the eeriness. Saying out loud what he already knew in the abstract would pin point the matter, bring it down to the level of the prosaic. He said, “Early in the history of Eternity, one of the Centuries in the 300’s came up with a mass duplicator. Do you know what I mean? By setting up a resonating field, energy could be converted to matter with subatomic particles taking up precisely the same pattern of positions, within the uncertainty requirements, as those in the model being used. The result is an exact copy.
“We in Eternity commandeered the instrument for our own purposes. At that time, there were only about six or seven hundred Sections built up. We had plans for expansion, of course. ‘Ten new Sections a physioyear’ was one of the
slogans of the time. The mass duplicator made that all unnecessary. We built one new Section complete with food, power supply, water supply, all the best automatic features; set up the machine and duplicated the Section once each Century all along Eternity. I don’t know how long they kept it going—millions of Centuries, probably.”
“All like this, Andrew?”
“All exactly like this. And as Eternity expands, we just fill in, adapting the construction to whatever fashion turns out to be current in the Century. The only troubles come when we hit an energy-centered Century. We—we haven’t reached this Section yet.” (No use telling her that the Eternals couldn’t penetrate into Time here in the Hidden Centuries. What difference did that make?)
He glanced at her and she seemed troubled. He said hastily, “There’s no waste involved in building the Sections. It took energy, nothing more, and with the nova to draw on—”
She interrupted. “No. I just don’t remember.”
“Remember what?”
“You said the duplicator was invented in the 300’s. We don’t have it in the 482nd. I don’t remember viewing anything about it in history.”
Harlan grew thoughtful. Although she was within two inches of being as tall as himself, he suddenly felt giant-size by comparison. She was a child, an infant, and he was a demigod of Eternity who must teach her and lead her carefully to the truth.
He said, “Noÿs, dear, let’s find a place to sit down and—and I’ll have to explain something.”
The concept of a variable Reality, a Reality that was not fixed and eternal and immutable was not one that could be faced casually by anyone.
In the dead of the sleep period, sometimes, Harlan
would remember the early days of his Cubhood and recall the wrenching attempts to divorce himself from his Century and from Time.
It took six months for the average Cub to learn all the truth, to discover that he could never go home again in a very literal way. It wasn’t Eternity’s law, alone, that stopped him, but the frigid fact that home as he knew it might very well no longer exist, might, in a sense, never have existed.
It affected Cubs differently. Harlan remembered Bonky Latourette’s face turning white and gaunt the day Instructor Yarrow had finally made it unmistakably clear about Reality.
None of the Cubs ate that night. They huddled together in search of a kind of psychic warmth, all except Latourette, who had disappeared. There was a lot of false laughter and miserably poor joking.
Someone said with a voice that was tremulous and uncertain, “I suppose I never had a mother. If I go back into the 95th, they’d say: ‘Who are you? We don’t know you. We don’t have any records of you. You don’t exist.’ ”
They smiled weakly and nodded their heads, lonely boys with nothing left but Eternity.
They found Latourette at bedtime, sleeping deeply and breathing shallowly. There was the slight reddening of a spray injection in the hollow of his left elbow and fortunately that was noted too.
Yarrow was called and for a while it looked as though one Cub would be out of the course, but he was brought around eventually. A week later he was back in his seat. Yet the mark of that evil night was on his personality for as long as Harlan knew him thereafter.
And now Harlan had to explain Reality to Noÿs Lambent, a girl not much older than those Cubs, and explain it at once and in full. He had to. There was no choice about that. She must learn exactly what faced them and exactly what she would have to do.
He told her. They ate canned meats, chilled fruits, and milk at a long conference table designed to hold twelve, and there he told her.
He did it as gently as possible, but he scarcely found need for gentleness. She snapped quickly at every concept and before he was half through it was borne in upon him, to his great amazement, that she wasn’t reacting badly. She wasn’t afraid. She showed no sense of loss. She only seemed angry.
The anger reached her face and turned it a glowing pink while her dark eyes seemed somehow the darker for it.
“But that’s criminal,” she said. “Who are the Eternals to do this?”
“It’s done for humanity’s good,” said Harlan. Of course, she couldn’t really understand that. He felt sorry for the Time-bound thinking of a Timer.
“Is it? I suppose that’s how the mass duplicator was wiped out.”
“We have copies still. Don’t worry about that. We’ve preserved it.”
“
You’ve
preserved it. But what about us? We of the 482nd might have had it.” She gestured with little movements of two clenched fists.
“It wouldn’t have done you good. Look, don’t get excited, dear, and listen.” With an almost convulsive gesture (he would have to learn how to touch her naturally, without making the movement seem a sheepish invitation to a repulse) he took her hands in his and held them tightly.
For a moment she tried to free them, and then she relaxed. She even laughed a bit. “Oh, go ahead, silly, and don’t look so solemn. I’m not blaming you.”
“You mustn’t blame anyone. There is no blame necessary. We do what must be done. That mass duplicator is a classic case. I studied it in school. When you duplicate mass, you can duplicate persons, too. The problems that arise are very complicated.”
“Isn’t it up to the society to solve its own problems?”
“It is, but we studied that society throughout Time and it doesn’t solve the problem satisfactorily. Remember that its failure to do so affects not only itself but all its descendant societies. In fact, there is no satisfactory solution to the mass-duplicator problem. It’s one of those things like atomic wars and dreamies that just can’t be allowed. Developments are never satisfactory.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“We have our Computing machines, Noÿs; Computaplexes far more accurate than any ever developed in any single Reality. These compute the possible Realities and grade the desirabilities of each over a summation of thousands and thousands of variables.”
“Machines!” She said it with scorn.
Harlan frowned, then relented hastily. “Now don’t be like that. Naturally, you resent learning that life is not as solid as you thought. You and the world you lived in might have been only a probability shadow a year ago, but what’s the difference? You have all your memories, whether they’re of probability shadows or not, haven’t you? You remember your childhood and your parents, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then it’s just as if you lived it, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I mean, whether you did or not?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. What if tomorrow it’s a dream world again, or a shadow, or whatever you call it?”
“Then there would be a new Reality and a new you with new memories. It would be just as though nothing had happened, except that the sum of human happiness would have been increased again.”