Voy said softly, "It had been very beautiful."
The phrase grated Harlan's ears, seeming to detract from the beauty of his own performance. "I wouldn't regret," he said, "having spacetravel bred out of Reality altogether."
"No?" said Voy.
"What good is it? It never lasts more than a millennium or two. People get tired. They come back home and the colonies die out. Then after another four or five millennia, or forty or fifty, they try again and it fails again. It is a waste of human ingenuity and effort."
Voy said dryly, "You're quite a philosopher."
Harlan flushed. He thought: What's the use in talking to any of them? He said, angrily, with a sharp change of subject, "What about the Life-Plotter?"
"What about him?"
"Would you check with the man? He ought to have made some progress by now."
The Sociologist let a look of disapproval drift across his face, as though to say: You're the impatient one, aren't you? Aloud he said, "Come with me and let's see."
The name plate on the office door said Neron Feruque, which struck Harlan's eye and mind because of its faint similarity to a pair of rulers in the Mediterranean area during Primitive times. (His weekly discourses with Cooper had sharpened his own preoccupation with the Primitive almost feverishly.)
The man, however, resembled neither ruler, as Harlan recalled it. He was almost cadaverously lean, with skin stretched tightly over a high-bridged nose. His fingers were long and his wrists knobby. As he caressed his small Summator, he looked like Death weighing a soul in the balance.
Harlan found himself staring at the Summator hungrily. It was the heart and blood of Life-Plotting, the skin and bones, sinew, muscle and all else. Feed into it the required data of a personal history, and the equations of the Reality Change; do that and it would chuckle away in obscene merriment for any length of time from a minute to a day, and then spit out the possible companion lives for the person involved (under the new Reality), each neatly ticketed with a probability value.
Sociologist Voy introduced Harlan. Feruque, having stared in open annoyance at the Technician's insigne, nodded his head and let the matter go.
Harlan said, "Is the young lady's Life-Plot complete yet?"
"It is not. I'll let you know when it is." He was one of those who carried contempt for the Technician to the point of open rudeness.
Voy said, "Take it easy, Life-Plotter."
Feruque had eyebrows which were light almost to invisibility. It heightened the resemblance of his face to a skull. His eyes rolled in what should have been empty sockets as he said, "Killed the spaceships?"
Voy nodded. "Cut it down a Century."
Feruque's lips twisted softly and formed a word.
Harlan folded his arms and stared at the Life-Plotter, who looked away in eventual discomfiture.
Harlan thought: He knows it's his guilt too.
Feruque said to Voy, "Listen, as long as you're here, what in Time am I going to do about the anti-cancer serum requests? We're not the only Century with anti-cancer. Why do we get all the applications?"
"All the other Centuries are just as crowded. You know that."
"Then they've got to stop sending in applications altogether."
"How do we go about making them?"
"Easy. Let the Allwhen Council stop receiving them."
"I have no pull with the Allwhen Council."
"You have pull with the old man."
Harlan listened to the conversation dully, without real interest. At least it served to keep his mind on inconsequentials and away from the chuckling Summator. The "old man," he knew, would be the Computer in charge of the Section.
"I've talked to the old man," said the Sociologist, "and he's talked to the Council."
"Nuts. He's just sent through a routine tape-strip. He has to fight for this. It's a matter of basic policy."
"The Allwhen Council isn't in the mood these days to consider changes in basic policy. You know the rumors going round."
"Oh, sure. They're busy on a big deal. Whenever there's dodging to do, the word gets round that Council's busy on some big deal."
(If Harlan could have found the heart for it, he would have smiled at that point.)
Feruque brooded a few moments, and then burst out, "What most people don't understand is that anti-cancer serum isn't a matter of tree seedlings or field motors. I know that every sprig of spruce has to be watched for adverse effects on Reality, but anti-cancer always involves a human life and that's a hundred times as complicated.
"Consider! Think how many people a year die of cancer in each Century that doesn't have anti-cancer serums of one sort or another. You can imagine how many of the patients want to die. So the Timer governments in every Century are forever forwarding applications to Eternity to 'please, pretty please ship them seventy-five thousand ampules of serum on behalf of the men critically stricken who are absolutely vital to the cultures, enclosed see biographical data.'"
Voy nodded rapidly, "I know. I know."
But Feruque was not to be denied his bitterness. "So you read the biographical data and it's every man a hero. Every man an insupportable loss to his world. So you work it through. You see what would happen to Reality if each man lived, and for Time's sake, if different combinations of men lived.
"In the last month, I've done 572 cancer requests. Seventeen, count them, seventeen Life-Plots came out to involve no undesirable Reality Changes. Mind you, there wasn't one case of a possible desirable Reality Change, but the Council says neutral cases get the serum. Humanity, you know. So exactly seventeen people in assorted Centuries get cured this month.
"And what happens? Are the Centuries happy? Not on your life. One man gets cured and a dozen, same country, same Time, don't. Everyone says, Why that one? Maybe the guys we didn't treat are better characters, maybe they're rosy-cheeked philanthropists beloved by all, while the one man we cure kicks his aged mother all around the block whenever he can spare the time from beating his kids. They don't know about Reality Changes and we can't tell them.
"We're just making trouble for ourselves, Voy, unless the Allwhen Council decides to screen all applications and approve only those which result in a desirable Reality Change. That's all. Either curing them does some good for humanity, or else it's out. Never mind this business of saying: 'Well, it does no harm.'"
The Sociologist had been listening with a look of mild pain on his face, and now he said, "If it were you with cancer…"
"That's a stupid remark, Voy. Is that what we base decisions on? In that case there'd never be a Reality Change. Some poor sucker always gets it in the neck, doesn't he? Suppose you were that sucker, hey?
"And another thing. Just remember that every time we make a Reality Change it's harder to find a good next one. Every physioyear, the chance that a random Change is likely to be for the worse increases. That means the proportion of guys we can cure gets smaller anyway. It's always going to get smaller. Someday, we'll be able to cure only one guy a physioyear, even counting the neutral cases. Remember that."
Harlan lost even the faintest interest. This was the type of griping that went with the business. The Psychologists and Sociologists, in their rare introvertive studies of Eternity, called it identification. Men identified themselves with the Century with which they were associated professionally. Its battles, all too often, became their own battles.
Eternity fought the devil of identification as best it could. No man could be assigned to any Section within two Centuries of his homewhen, to make identification harder. Preference was given to Centuries with cultures markedly different from that of their homewhen. (Harlan thought of Finge and the 482nd.) What was more, their assignments were shifted as often as their reactions grew suspect. (Harlan wouldn't give a 5oth Century grafenpiece for Feruque's chances of retaining this assignment longer than another physioyear at the outside.)