The End of Eternity: A Novel by Asimov Isaac

Author:Asimov, Isaac [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780765319180
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2010-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

10. TRAPPED!

All at once it had seemed inevitable. It was the rawest dramatic irony. He had entered Time one last time, tweaked Finge’s nose one last time, brought the pitcher to the well one last time. It had to be then that he was caught.

Was it Finge who laughed?

Who else would track him down, lie in wait, stay a room away, and burst into mirth?

Well, then, was all lost? And because in that sickening moment he was sure all was lost it did not occur to him to run again or to attempt flight into Eternity once more. He would face Finge.

He would kill him, if necessary.

Harlan stepped to the door from behind which the laugh had sounded, stepped to it with the soft, firm step of the premeditated murderer. He flicked loose the automatic door signal and opened it by hand. Two inches. Three. It moved without sound.

The man in the next room had his back turned. The figure seemed too tall to be Finge and that fact penetrated Harlan’s simmering mind and kept him from advancing further.

Then, as though the paralysis that seemed to hold both men in rigor was slowly lifting, the other turned, inch by inch.

Harlan never witnessed the completion of that turn. The other’s profile had not yet come into view when Harlan, holding back a sudden gust of terror with a last fragment of moral strength, flung himself back out the door. Its mechanism, not Harlan, closed it soundlessly.

Harlan fell back blindly. He could breathe only by struggling violently with the atmosphere, fighting air in and pushing it out, while his heart beat madly as though in an effort to escape his body.

Finge, Twissell, all the Council together could not have disconcerted him so much. It was the fear of nothing physical that had unmanned him. Rather it was an almost instinctive loathing for the nature of the accident that had befallen him.

He gathered the stack of book-films to himself in a formless lump and managed, after two futile tries, to re-establish the door to Eternity. He stepped through, his legs operating mechanically. Somehow he made his way to the 575th, and then to his personal quarters. His Technicianhood, newly valued, newly appreciated, saved him once again. The few Eternals he met turned automatically to one side and looked steadfastly over his head as they did so.

That was fortunate, for he lacked any ability to smooth his face out of the death’s-head grimace he felt he was wearing, or any power to put the blood back into it. But they didn’t look, and he thanked Time and Eternity and whatever blind thing wove Destiny for that.

He had not truly recognized the other man in Noÿs’s house by his appearance, yet he knew his identity with a dreadful certainty.

The first time Harlan had heard a noise in the house he, Harlan, had been laughing and the sound that interrupted his laugh was of something weighty dropping in the next room. The second time someone had laughed in the next room and he, Harlan, had dropped a knapsack of book-films.

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