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 Noys.
Minus fifteen seconds.
Noys!
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.
Noys!
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-meetshimself 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 micro-pile energy source in 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 z4th. 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. "Noys!"