By the end of a week Cooper's mustache had become a p.r.o.nounced dark bristle that made him look ten years older and accentuated the narrowness of his chin. On the whole, Harlan decided, it would not be an improvement, that mustache.

Cooper said, "I've finished your book."

"What did you think of it?"

"In a way----" There was a long pause. Cooper began over again. "Parts of the later Primitive was something like the 78th. It made me think of home, you know. Twice, I dreamed about my wife."

Harlan exploded. "Your _wife?_"

"I was married before I came here."

"Great Time! Did they bring your wife across too?"

Cooper shook his head. "I don't even know if she's been Changed in the last year. If she has, I suppose she's not really my wife now."

Harlan recovered. Of course, if the Cub were twenty-three years old when he was taken into Eternity, it was quite possible that he might have been married. One thing unprecedented led to another.

What was going on? Once modifications were introduced into the rules, it wouldn't be a long step to the point where everything would decline into a ma.s.s of incoherency. Eternity was too finely balanced an arrangement to endure modification.

It was his anger on behalf of Eternity, perhaps, that put an unintended harshness into Harlan's next words. "I hope you're not planning on going back to the 78th to check on her."

The Cub lifted his head and his eyes were firm and steady. "No."

Harlan shifted uneasily, "Good. You have no family. Nothing. You're an Eternal and don't ever think of anyone you knew in Time."

Cooper's lips thinned, and his accent stood out sharply in his quick words. "You're speaking like a Technician."

Harlan's fists clenched along the sides of his desk. He said hoa.r.s.ely, "What do you imply? I'm a Technician so I make the Changes? So I defend them and demand that you accept them? Look, kid, you haven't been here a year; you can't speak Intertemporal; you're all misgeared on Time and Reality, but you think you know all about Technicians and how to kick them in the teeth."

"I'm sorry," said Cooper quickly; "I didn't mean to offend you."

"No, no, who offends a Technician? You just hear everyone else talking, is that it? They say, 'Cold as a Technician's heart,' don't they? They say, 'A trillion personalities changed--just a Technician's yawn.' Maybe a few other things. What's the answer, Mr. Cooper? Does it make you feel sophisticated to join in? It makes you a big man? A big wheel in Eternity?"

"I said I'm sorry."

"All right. I just want you to know I've been a Technician for less than a month and I personally have never induced a Reality Change. Now let's get on with business."

Senior Computer Twissell called Andrew Harlan to his office the next day.

He said, "How would you like to go out on an M.N.C., boy?"

It was almost too apposite. All that morning Harlan had been regretting his cowardly disclaimer of personal involvement in the Technician's work; his childish cry of: I haven't done anything wrong yet, so don't blame me.

It amounted to an admission that there was something wrong about a Technician's work, and that he himself was blameless only because he was too new at the game to have had time to be a criminal.

He welcomed the chance to kill that excuse now. It would be almost a penance. He could say to Cooper: Yes, because of something I have done, this many millions of people are new personalities, but it was necessary and I am proud to have been the cause.

So Harlan said joyfully, "I'm ready, sir."

"Good. Good. You'll be glad to know, boy," (a puff, and the cigarette tip glowed brilliantly) "that every one of your a.n.a.lyses checked out with high-order accuracy."

"Thank you, sir." (They were a.n.a.lyses now, thought Harlan, not guesses.) "You've got a talent. Quite a touch, boy. I look for great things. And we can begin with this one, 223rd. Your statement that a jammed vehicle clutch would supply the necessary fork without undesirable side effects is perfectly correct. Will you jam it?"

"Yes, sir."

That was Harlan's true initiation into Technicianhood. After that he was more than just a man with a rose-red badge. He had handled Reality. He had tampered with a mechanism during a quick few minutes taken out of the 223rd and, as a result, a young man did not reach a lecture on mechanics he had meant to attend. He never went in for solar engineering, consequently, and a perfectly simple device was delayed in its development a crucial ten years. A war in the 224th, amazingly enough, was moved out of Reality as a result.

Wasn't _that_ good? What if personalities were changed? The new personalities were as human as the old and as deserving of life. If some lives were shortened, more were lengthened and made happier. A great work of literature, a monument of Man's intellect and feeling, was never written in the new Reality, but several copies were preserved in Eternity's libraries, were they not? And new creative works had come into existence, had they not?

Yet that night Harlan spent hours in a hot agony of wakefulness, and when he finally drowsed groggily, he did something he hadn't done in years.

He dreamed of his mother.

Despite the weakness of such a beginning a physioyear was sufficient to make Harlan known throughout Eternity as "Twissell's Technician," and, with more than a trace of ill-humor as "The Wonder Boy" and "The Never-Wrong."

His contact with Cooper became almost comfortable. They never grew completely friendly. (If Cooper could have brought himself to make advances, Harlan might not have known how to respond.) Nevertheless they worked well together, and Cooper's interest in Primitive history grew to the point where it nearly rivaled Harlan's.

One day Harlan said to Cooper, "Look, Cooper, would you mind coming in tomorrow instead? I've got to get up to the 3000's sometime this week to check on an Observation and the man I want to see is free this afternoon."

Cooper's eyes lit up hungrily, "Why can't I come?"

"Do you want to?"

"Sure. I've never been in a kettle except when they brought me here from the 78th and I didn't know what was happening at the time."

Harlan was accustomed to using the kettle in Shaft C, which was, by unwritten custom, reserved for Technicians along its entire immeasurable length through the Centuries. Cooper showed no embarra.s.sment at being led there. He stepped into the kettle without hesitation and took his seat on the curved molding that completely circled it.

When Harlan, however, had activated the Field, and kicked the kettle into upwhen motion, Cooper's face screwed up into an almost comic expression of surprise.

"I don't feel a thing," he said. "Is anything wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. You're not feeling anything because you're not really moving. You're being kicked along the temporal extension of the kettle. In fact," Harlan said, growing didactic, "at the moment, you and I aren't matter, really, in spite of appearances. A hundred men could be using this same kettle, moving (if you can call it that) at various velocities in either Time-direction, pa.s.sing through one another and so on. The laws of the ordinary universe just don't apply to the kettle shafts!"

Cooper's mouth quirked a bit and Harlan thought uneasily: The kid's taking temporal engineering and knows more about this than I do. Why don't I shut up and stop making a fool of myself?

He retreated into silence, and stared somberly at Cooper. The younger man's mustache had been full-grown for months. It drooped, framing his mouth in what Eternals called a Mallansohn hairline, because the only photograph known to be authentic of the Temporal Field inventor (and that a poor one and out of focus) showed him with just such a mustache. For that reason it maintained a certain popularity among Eternals even though it did few of them justice.

Cooper's eyes were fixed on the shifting numbers that marked the pa.s.sing of the Centuries with respect to themselves. He said, "How far upwhen does the kettle shaft go?"

"Haven't they taught you that?"

"They've hardly mentioned the kettles."

Harlan shrugged. "There's no end to Eternity. The shaft goes on forever."

"How far upwhen have you gone?"

"This will be the uppest. Dr. Twissell has been up to the 50,000's."

"Great Time!" whispered Cooper.

"That's still nothing. Some Eternals have been up past the 150,000th Century."

"What's _that_ like?"

"Like nothing at all," said Harlan morosely. "Lots of life but none of it human. Man is gone."

"Dead? Wiped out?"

"I don't know that anyone exactly knows."

"Can't something be done to change that?"

"Well, from the 70,000's on----" began Harlan, then ended abruptly. "Oh, to Time with it. Change the subject."

If there was one subject about which Eternals were almost superst.i.tious, it was the "Hidden Centuries," the time between the 70,000th and the 150,000th. It was a subject that was rarely mentioned. It was only Harlan's close a.s.sociation with Twissell that accounted for his own small knowledge of the era. What it amounted to was that Eternals couldn't pa.s.s into Time in all those thousands of Centuries. The doors between Eternity and Time were impenetrable. Why? No one knew.

Harlan imagined, from some casual remarks of Twissell's, that attempts had been made to Change the Reality in the Centuries just downwhen from the 70,000th, but without adequate Observation beyond the 70,000th not much could be done.

Twissell had laughed a bit one time and said, "We'll get through someday. Meanwhile, 70,000 Centuries is quite enough to take care of."

It did not sound wholly convincing.

"What happens to Eternity after the 150,000th?" asked Cooper.

Harlan sighed. The subject, apparently, was not to be changed. "Nothing," he said. "The Sections are there but there are no Eternals in it anywhere after the 70,000th. The Sections keep on going for millions of Centuries till all life is gone and past that, too, till the sun becomes a nova, and past that, too. There isn't any end to Eternity. That's why it's called Eternity."

"The sun _does_ become a nova, then?"

"It certainly does. Eternity couldn't exist if that weren't so. Nova Sol is our power supply. Listen, do you know how much power is required to set up a Temporal Field? Mallansohn's first Field was two seconds from extreme downwhen to extreme upwhen and big enough to hold not more than a match head and that took a nuclear power plant's complete output for one day. It took nearly a hundred years to set up a hair-thin Temporal Field far enough upwhen to be able to tap the radiant power of the nova so that a Field could be built big enough to hold a man."

Cooper sighed. "I wish they would get to the point where they stopped making me learn equations and field mechanics and start telling me some of the interesting stuff. Now if I had lived in Mallansohn's time----"

"You would have learned nothing. He lived in the 24th, but Eternity didn't start till late in the 27th. Inventing the Field isn't the same as constructing Eternity, you know, and the rest of the 24th didn't have the slightest inkling of what Mallansohn's invention signified."

"He was ahead of his generation, then?"

"Very much so. He not only invented the Temporal Field, but he described the basic relationships that made Eternity possible and predicted almost every aspect of it except for the Reality Change. Quite closely, too--but I think we're pulling to a halt, Cooper. After you."

They stepped out.

Harlan had never seen Senior Computer Laban Twissell angry before. People always said that he was incapable of any emotion, that he was an unsouled fixture of Eternity to the point where he had forgotten the exact number of his homewhen Century. People said that at an early age his heart had atrophied and that a hand computer similar to the model he carried always in his trouser pocket had taken its place.

Twissell did nothing to deny these rumors. In fact most people guessed that he believed them himself.

So even while Harlan bent before the force of the angry blast that struck him, he had room in his mind to be amazed at the fact that Twissell could display anger. He wondered if Twissell would be mortified in some calmer aftermath to realize that his hand-computer heart had betrayed him by exposing itself as only a poor thing of muscle and valves subject to the twists of emotion.

Twissell said, in part, his old voice creaking, "Father Time, boy, are you on the Allwhen Council? Do you give the orders around here? Do you tell me what to do or do I tell you what to do? Are you making arrangements for all kettle trips this Section? Do we all come to you for permission now?"

He interrupted himself with occasional exclamations of "Answer me," then continued pouring more questions into the boiling interrogative caldron.

He said finally, "If you ever get above yourself this way again, I'll have you on plumbing repair and for good. Do you understand me?"

Harlan, pale with his own gathering embarra.s.sment, said, "I was never told that Cub Cooper was not to be taken on the kettle."

The explanation did not act as an emollient. "What kind of an excuse is a double negative, boy? You were never told not to get him drunk. You were never told not to shave him bald. You were never told not to skewer him with a fine-edged Tav curve. Father Time, boy, what _were_ you told to do with him?"

"I was told to teach him Primitive history."

"Then do so. Do nothing more than that." Twissell dropped his cigarette and ground it savagely underfoot as though it were the face of a lifelong enemy.

"I'd like to point out, Computer," said Harlan, "that many Centuries under the current Reality somewhat resemble specific eras of Primitive history in one or more respects. It had been my intention to take him out to those Times, under careful spatio-temporal charting, of course, as a form of field trip."

"What? Listen, you chucklehead, don't you ever intend to ask my permission for _anything?_ That's out. Just teach him Primitive history. No field trips. No laboratory experiments, either. Next you'll be changing Reality just to show him how."

Harlan licked his dry lips with a dry tongue, muttered a resentful acquiescence, and, eventually, was allowed to leave.

It took weeks for his hurt feelings to heal over somewhat.

4 Computer

Harlan had been two years a Technician when he re-entered the 482nd for the first time since leaving with Twissell. He found it almost unrecognizable.

It had not changed. He had.

Two years of Technicianhood had meant a number of things. In one sense it had increased his feeling of stability. He had no longer to learn a new language, get used to new styles of clothing and new ways of life with every new Observation project. On the other hand, it had resulted in a withdrawal on his own part. He had almost forgotten now the camaraderie that united all the rest of the Specialists in Eternity.

Most of all, he had developed the feeling of the _power_ of being a Technician. He held the fate of millions in his finger tips, and if one must walk lonely because of it, one could also walk proudly.

So he could stare coldly at the Communications man behind the entry desk of the 482nd and announce himself in clipped syllables: "Andrew Harlan, Technician, reporting to Computer Finge for temporary a.s.signment to the 482nd," disregarding the quick glance from the middle-aged man he faced.

It was what some people called the "Technician glance," a quick, involuntary sidelong peek at the rose-red shoulder emblem of the Technician, then an elaborate attempt not to look at it again.

Harlan stared at the other's shoulder emblem. It was not the yellow of the Computer, the green of the Life-Plotter, the blue of the Sociologist, or the white of the Observer. It was not the Specialist's solid color at all. It was simply a blue bar on white. The man was Communications, a subbranch of Maintenance, not a Specialist at all.

And _he_ gave the "Technician glance" too.

Harlan said a little sadly, "Well?"

Communications said quickly, "I'm ringing Computer Finge, sir."