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 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."
"That was meant to be a threat."
"I took it literally. Forgive me. I must have your help."
It came to that. Harlan's help must be had. Was he mad? Was Harlan mad? Did madness have meaning? Or anything at all, for that matter?
The Council needed his help. For that help they would promise him anything. Noys. Computership. What would they not promise him? And when his help was done with, what would he get? He would not be fooled a second time.
"No!" he said.
"You'll have Noys."
"You mean the Council will be willing to break the laws of Eternity once the danger is safely gone? I don't believe it." How could the danger safely be passed, a sane scrap of his mind demanded. What was this all about?
"The Council will never know."
"Would you be willing to break the laws? You're the ideal Eternal. With the danger gone, you would obey the law. You couldn't act otherwise."
Twissell reddened blotchily, high on each cheekbone. From the old face all shrewdness and strength drained away. There was left only a strange sorrow.
"I will keep my word to you and break the law," said Twissell, "for a reason you don't imagine. I don't know how much time is left us before Eternity disappears. It could be hours; it could be months. But I have spent so much time in the hope of bringing you to reason that I will spend a little more. Will you listen to me? Please?"
Harlan hesitated. Then, out of a conviction of the uselessness of all things as much as out of anything else said wearily, "Go on."
I have heard (began Twissell) that I was born old, that I cut my teeth on a Micro-Computaplex, that I keep my hand computer in a special pocket of my pajamas when I sleep, that my brain is made up of little force-relays in endless parallel hookups and that each corpuscle of my blood is a microscopic spatio-temporal chart floating in computer oil.
All these stories come to me eventually, and I think I must be a little proud of them. Maybe I go around believing them a bit. It's a foolish thing for an old man to do, but it makes life a little easier.