The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov Page A

remaining 46 as the customary 40 percent “margin.” Margin was there in case of necessity, but a Technician was not expected to have to use it. A “margin-eater” did not remain a Specialist long.
    Harlan, however, expected to use no more than 2 minutes of the 110. Wearing his wrist-borne field generator so that he was surrounded by an aura of physiotime (an effluvium, so to speak, of Eternity) and therefore protected from any of the effects of Reality Change, he took one step toward the wall, lifted a small container from its position on a shelf, and placed it in a carefully adjusted spot on the shelf below.
    Having done that, he re-entered Eternity in a way that seemed as prosaic to himself as passage through any door might be. Had there been a Timer watching, it would have seemed to him that Harlan had simply disappeared.
    The small container stayed where he put it. It played no immediate role in world history. A man’s hand, hours later, reached for it but did not find it. A search revealed it half an hour later still, but in the interim a force field had blanked out and a man’s temper had been lost. A decision which would have remained unmade in the previous Reality was now made in anger. A meeting did not take place; a man who would have died lived a year longer, under other circumstances; another who would have lived died somewhat sooner.
    The ripples spread wider, reaching their maximum in the 2481st, which was twenty-five Centuries upwhen fromthe Touch. The intensity of the Reality Change declined thereafter. Theorists pointed out that nowhere to the infinite upwhen from the Touch the Change had become too small to detect by the finest Computing, and that was the practical limit.
    Of course no human being in Time could ever possibly be aware of any Reality Change having taken place. Mind changed as well as matter and only Eternals could stand outside it all and see the change.
     
    Sociologist Voy was staring at the bluish scene in the 2481st, where earlier there had been all the activity of a busy spaceport. He barely looked up when Harlan entered. He barely mumbled something that might have been a greeting.
    A change had indeed blasted the spaceport. Its shininess was gone; what buildings there stood were not the grand creations they had been. A spaceship rusted. There were no people. There was no motion.
    Harlan allowed himself a small smile that flickered for a moment, then vanished. It was M.D.R. all right. Maximum Desired Response. And it had happened at once. The Change did not necessarily take place at the precise moment of the Technician’s Touch. If the calculations that went into the Touch were sloppy, hours or days might elapse before the Change actually took place (counting, of course, by physiotime). It was only when all degrees of freedom vanished that the Change took place. While there was even a mathematical chance for alternate actions, the Change did
not
take place.
    It was Harlan’s pride that when
he
calculated an M.N.C., when it was
his
hand that contrived the Touch, the degrees of freedom vanished at once, and the Change took place instantly.
    Voy said softly, “It had been very beautiful.”
    The phrase grated Harlan’s ears, seeming to detract from the beauty of his own performance. “I wouldn’t regret,” he said, “having space-travel bred out of Reality altogether.”
    “No?” said Voy.
    “What good is it? It never lasts 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