The End of Eternity - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,28

him and he shot to a sitting position. "It isn't past one, is it? Father Time!"

"It's only eleven. You've got breakfast waiting and lots of time."

"Thanks," he mumbled.

"The shower controls are all set and your clothes are all ready."

What could he say? "Thanks," he mumbled.

He avoided her eyes during the meal. She sat opposite him, not eating, her chin buried in the palm of one hand, her dark hair combed thickly to one side and her eyelashes preternaturally long.

She followed every gesture he made while he kept his eyes lowered and searched for the bitter shame he knew he ought to feel.

She said, "Where will you be going at one?"

"Aeroball game," he muttered, "I have the ticket."

"That's the rubber game. And I missed the whole season because of just skipping the time, you know. Who'll win the game, Andrew?"

He felt oddly weak at the sound of his first name. He shook his head curtly and tried to look austere. (It used to have been so easy.)

"But surely you know. You've inspected this whole period, haven't you?"

Properly speaking, he ought to maintain a flat and cold negative, but weakly he explained, "There was a lot of Space and Time to cover. I wouldn't know little precise things like game scores."

"Oh, you just don't want to tell me."

Harlan said nothing to that. He inserted the pene-prong into the small, juicy fruit and lifted it, whole, to his lips.

After a moment Noys said, "Did you see what happened in this neighborhood before you came?"

"No details, N-noys." (He forced her name past his lips.)

The girl said softly, "Didn't you see us? Didn't you know all along that-"

Harlan stammered, "No, no, I couldn't see myself.I'm not in Rea-- I'm not here till I come. I can't explain." He was doubly flustered. First, that she should speak of it. Second, that he had almost been trapped into saying, "Reality," of all the words the most forbidden in conversation with Timers.

She lifted her eyebrows and her eyes grew round and a little amazed. "Are you ashamed?"

"What we did was not proper."

"Why not?" And in the 482nd her question was perfectly innocent. "Aren't Eternals allowed to?" There was almost a joking cast to that question as though she were asking if Eternals weren't allowed to eat.

"Don't use the word," said Harlan. "As a matter of fact, we're not, in a way."

"Well, then, don't tell them. I won't."

And she walked about the table and sat down on his lap, pushing the small table out of the way with a smooth and flowing motion of her hip.

Momentarily he stiffened, lifted his hands in a gesture that might have been intended to hold her off. It didn't succeed.

She bent and kissed him on his lips, and nothing seemed shameful any more. Nothing that involved Noys and himself.

He wasn't sure when first he began to do something that an Observer, ethically, had no right to do. That is, he began to speculate on the nature of the problem involving the current Reality and of the Reality Change that would be planned.

It was not the loose morals of the Century, not ectogenesis, not matriarchy, that disturbed Eternity. All of that was as it was in the previous Reality and the Allwhen Council had viewed it with equanimity then. Finge had said it was something very subtle.

The Change then would have to be very subtle and it would have to involve the group he was Observing. So much seemed obvious.

It would involve the aristocracy, the well-to-do, the upper classes, the beneficiaries of the system.

What bothered him was that it would most certainly involve Noys.

He got through the remaining three days called for in his chart in a gathering cloud that dampened even his joy in Noys's company.

She said to him, "What happened? For a while, you seemed all different from the way you were in Eter-in that place. You weren't stiff at all. Now, you seem concerned. Is it because you have to go back?"

Harlan said, "Partly."

"Do you have to?"

"I have to."

"Well, who would care if you were late?"

Harlan almost smiled at that. "They wouldn't like me to be late," he said, yet thought longingly just the same of the two-day margin allowed for in his chart.

She adjusted the controls of a musical instrument that played soft and complicated strains out of its own creative bowels by striking notes and chords in a random manner; the randomness weighted in favor of pleasant combinations by intricate mathematical formulae. The music could no more repeat itself