The End of Eternity - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,26

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