The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

ultra-dim glow to which the internal light of the walls and ceiling had been reduced he could see her body as the merest shadow next to his.
    He had only to move his hand to feel the warmth and softness of her flesh, and he dared not do that, lest he wake her out of whatever dreaming she might have. It was as though she were dreaming for the two of them, dreaming herself and himself and all that had happened, and as though her waking would drive it all from existence.
    It was a thought that seemed a piece of those other queer, unusual thoughts he had experienced just before . . .
    Those had been strange thoughts, coming to him at a moment between sense and nonsense. He tried to recapture them and could not. Yet suddenly it was very important that he recapture them. For although he could not remember the details, he could remember that, for just an instant, he had understood something.
    He was not certain what that something was, but there had been the unearthly clarity of the half-asleep, when more than mortal eye and mind seems suddenly to come to life.
    His anxiety grew. Why couldn’t he remember? So much had been in his grasp.
    For the moment even the sleeping girl beside him receded into the hinterland of his thoughts.
    He thought: If I follow the thread . . . I was thinking of Reality and Eternity . . . yes, and Mallansohn and the Cub!
    He stopped there. Why the Cub? Why Cooper? He
hadn’t
thought of him.
    But if he hadn’t, then why should he think of Brinsley Sheridan Cooper now?
    He frowned! What was the truth that connected all this? What was it he was trying to find? What made him so sure there
was
something to find?
    Harlan felt chilled, for with these questions a distant glow of that earlier illumination seemed to break upon the horizons of his mind and he almost knew.
    He held his breath, did not press for it. Let it come.
    Let it come.
    And in the quiet of that night, a night already so uniquely significant in his life, an explanation and interpretation of events came to him that at any saner, more normal time he would not have entertained for a moment.
    He let the thought bud and flower, let it grow until hecould see it explain a hundred odd points that otherwise simply remained—odd.
    He would have to investigate this, check this, back in Eternity, but in his heart he was already convinced that he knew a terrible secret he was not meant to know.
    A secret that embraced all Eternity!

6. LIFE-PLOTTER
    A month of physiotime had passed since that night in the 482nd, when he grew acquainted with many things. Now, if one calculated by ordinary time, he was nearly 2000 Centuries in Noÿs Lambent’s future, attempting by a mixture of bribery and cajolery to learn what lay in store for her in a new Reality.
    It was worse than unethical, but he was past caring. In the physiomonth just gone he had, in his own eyes, become a criminal. There was no way of glossing over that fact. He would be no more a criminal by compounding his crime and he had a great deal to gain by doing so.
    Now, as part of his felonious maneuvering (he made no effort to choose a milder phrase) he stood at the barrier before the 2456th. Entry into Time was much more complicated than mere passage between Eternity and the kettle shafts. In order to enter Time the coordinates fixing the desired region on Earth’s surface had painstakingly to be adjusted and the desired moment of Time pinpointed within the Century. Yet despite inner tension Harlan handled the controls with the ease and quick confidence of a man with much experience and a great talent.
    Harlan found himself in the engine room he had seen first on the viewing screen within Eternity. At this physiomoment Sociologist Voy would be sitting safely before that screen watching for the Technician’s Touch that was to come.
    Harlan felt no hurry. The room would remain empty for the next 156 minutes. To be sure, the spatio-temporal chart allowed him only 110 minutes, leaving the