here?"
"It's logical," said Harlan. Talking about it took away some of the eeriness. Saying out loud what he already knew in the abstract would pin-point the matter, bring it down to the level of the prosaic. He said, "Early in the history of Eternity, one of the Centuries in the 300's came up with a mass duplicator. Do you know what I mean? By setting up a resonating field, energy could be converted to matter with subatomic particles taking up precisely the same pattern of positions, within the uncertainty requirements, as those in the model being used. The result is an exact copy.
"We in Eternity commandeered the instrument for our own purposes. At that time, there were only about six or seven hundred Sections built up. We had plans for expansion, of course. 'Ten new Sections a physioyear' was one of the slogans of the time. The mass duplicator made that all unnecessary. We built one new Section complete with food, power supply, water supply, all the best automatic features; set up the machine and duplicated the Section once each Century all along Eternity. I don't know how long they kept it going-millions of Centuries, probably."
"All like this, Andrew?"
"All exactly like this. And as Eternity expands, we just fill in, adapting the construction to whatever fashion turns out to be current in the Century. The only troubles come when we hit an energy-centered Century. We-we haven't reached this Section yet." (No use telling her that the Eternals couldn't penetrate into Time here in the Hidden Centuries. What difference did that make?)
He glanced at her and she seemed troubled. He said hastily, "There's no waste involved in building the Sections. It took energy, nothing more, and with the nova to draw on-"
She interrupted. "No. I just don't remember."
"Remember what?"
"You said the duplicator was invented in the 300's. We don't have it in the 482nd. I don't remember viewing anything about it in history."
Harlan grew thoughtful. Although she was within two inches of being as tall as himself, he suddenly felt giant-size by comparison. She was a child, an infant, and he was a demigod of Eternity who must teach her and lead her carefully to the truth.
He said, "Noys, dear, let's find a place to sit down and-and I'll have to explain something."
The concept of a variable Reality, a Reality that was not fixed and eternal and immutable was not one that could be faced casually by anyone.
In the dead of the sleep period, sometimes, Harlan would remember the early days of his Cubhood and recall the wrenching attempts to divorce himself from his Century and from Time.
It took six months for the average Cub to learn all the truth, to discover that he could never go home again in a very literal way. It wasn't Eternity's law, alone, that stopped him, but the frigid fact that home as he knew it might very well no longer exist, might, in a sense, never have existed.
It affected Cubs differently. Harlan remembered Bonky Latourette's face turning white and gaunt the day Instructor Yarrow had finally made it unmistakably clear about Reality.
None of the Cubs ate that night. They huddled together in search of a kind of psychic warmth, all except Latourette, who had disappeared. There was a lot of false laughter and miserably poor joking.
Someone said with a voice that was tremulous and uncertain, "I suppose I never had a mother. If I go back into the 95th, they'd say: 'Who are you? We don't know you. We don't have any records of you. You don't exist.'"
They smiled weakly and nodded their heads, lonely boys with nothing left but Eternity.
They found Latourette at bedtime, sleeping deeply and breathing shallowly. There was the slight reddening of a spray injection in the hollow of his left elbow and fortunately that was noted too.
Yarrow was called and for a while it looked as though one Cub would be out of the course, but he was brought around eventually. A week later he was back in his seat. Yet the mark of that evil night was on his personality for as long as Harlan knew him thereafter.
And now Harlan had to explain Reality to Noys Lambent, a girl not much older than those Cubs, and explain it at once and in full. He had to. There was no choice about that. She must learn exactly what faced them and exactly what she would have to do.
He told her. They ate canned meats, chilled fruits, and milk at