Noys lifted her plucked eyebrows. "It's very complicated."
"Yes. Unfortunately." He rubbed his hands together and looked at the others as though nursing an inner doubt. Then he straightened, produced a fresh cigarette, and even managed a certain jauntiness as he said, "And now, boy, good luck." Twissell touched hands briefly with Harlan, nodded to Noys, and stepped out of the kettle.
"Are we leaving now?" asked Noys of Harlan when they were alone.
"In a few minutes," said Harlan.
He glanced sideways at Noys. She was looking up at him, smiling, unfrightened. Momentarily his own spirits responded to that. But that was emotion, not reason, he counciled himself; instinct, not thought. He looked away.
The trip was nothing, or almost nothing; no different from an ordinary kettle ride. Midway there was a kind of internal jar that might have been the downwhen terminus and might have been purely psychosomatic. It was barely noticeable.
And then they were in the Primitive and they stepped into a craggy, lonely world brightened by the splendor of an afternoon sun. There was a soft wind with a chilly edge to it and, most of all, silence.
The bare rocks were tumbled and mighty, colored into dull rainbows by compounds of iron, copper, and chromium. The grandeur of the manless and all but lifeless surroundings dwarfed and shriveled Harlan. Eternity, which did not belong to the world of matter, had no sun and none but imported air. His memories of his own homewhen were dim. His Observations in the various Centuries had dealt with men and their cities. He had never experienced this.
Noys touched his elbow.
"Andrew! I'm cold."
He turned to her with a start.
She said, "Hadn't we better set up the Radiant?"
He said, "Yes. In Cooper's cavern."
"Do you know where it is?"
"It's right here," he said shortly.
He had no doubt of that. The memoir had located it and first Cooper, now he, had been pin-pointed back to it.
He had not doubted precision pin-pointing in Time-travel since his Cubhood days. He remembered himself then, facing Educator Yarrow seriously, saying, "But Earth moves about the Sun, and the Sun moves about the Galactic Center and the Galaxy moves too. If you started from some point on Earth, and move downwhen a hundred years, you'll be in empty space, because it will take a hundred years for Earth to reach that point." (Those were the days when he still referred to a Century as a "hundred years.")
And Educator Yarrow had snapped back, "You don't separate Time from space. Moving through Time, you share Earth's motions. Or do you believe that a bird flying through the air whiffs out into space because the Earth is hurrying around the Sun at eighteen miles a second and vanishes from under the creature?"
Arguing from analogy is risky, but Harlan obtained more rigorous proof in later days and, now, after a scarcely precedented trip into the Primitive, he could turn confidently and feel no surprise at finding the opening precisely where he had been told it would be.
He moved the camouflage of loose rubble and rock to one side and entered.
He probed the darkness within, using the white beam of his flash almost like a scalpel. He scoured the walls, ceiling, floor, every inch.
Noys, remaining close behind him, whispered, "What are you looking for?"
He said, "Something. Anything,"
He found his something, anything, at the very rear of the cave in the shape of a flattish stone covering greenish sheets like a paperweight.
Harlan threw the stone aside and flipped the sheets past one thumb.
"What are they?" asked Noys.
"Bank notes. Medium of exchange. Money."
"Did you know they were there?"
"I knew nothing. I just hoped."
It was only a matter of using Twissell's reverse logic, of calculating cause from effect. Eternity existed, so Cooper must be making correct decisions too. In assuming the advertisement would pull Harlan into the correct Time, the cave was an obvious additional means of communication.
Yet this was almost better than he had dared hope. More than once during the preparations for his trip into the Primitive, Harlan had thought that making his way into a town with nothing but bullion in his possession would result in suspicion and delay.
Cooper had managed, to be sure, but Cooper had had time. Harlan hefted the sheaf of bills. And he must have used time to accumulate this much. He had done well, the youngster, marvelously well.
And the circle was closing!
The supplies had been moved into the cave, in the increasingly ruddy glow of the westering sun. The kettle had been covered by a diffuse reflecting film which would hide it from any but the closest of prying eyes, and Harlan had a blaster to take care of those, if need be. The Radiant was set up in the cave and the flash was wedged into a crevice, so that they had heat and light.
Outside it was a chill March night.
Noys stared thoughtfully into the smooth paraboloid interior of the Radiant as it slowly rotated. She said, "Andrew, what are your plans?"
"Tomorrow morning," he said, "I'll leave for the nearest town. I know where it is-or should be." (He changed it back to "is" in his mind. There would be no trouble. Twissell's logic again.)
"I'll come with you, won't I?"
He shook his head. "You can't speak the language, for one thing, and the trip will be difficult enough for one to negotiate."
Noys looked strangely archaic in her short hair and the sudden anger in her eyes made Harlan look away uneasily.
She said, "I'm no fool, Andrew. You scarcely speak to me. You don't look at me. What is it? Is your homewhen morality taking hold? Do you feel you have betrayed Eternity and are you blaming me for that? Do you feel I have corrupted you? What is it?"
He said, "You don't know what I feel."
She said, "Then describe it. You might as well. You'll never have a chance as good as this one. Do you feel love? For me? You couldn't or you wouldn't be using me as a scapegoat. Why did you bring me here? Tell me. Why not have left me in Eternity since you have no use for me here and since it seems you can hardly bear the sight of me?"
Harlan muttered, "There's danger."
"Oh, come now."
"It's more than danger. It's a nightmare. Computer Twissell's nightmare," said Harlan. "It was during our last panicky flash upwhen into the Hidden Centuries that he told me of thoughts he had had concerning those Centuries. He speculated on the possibility of evolved varieties of man, new species, supermen perhaps, hiding in the far upwhen, cutting themselves off from our interference, plotting to end our tamperings with Reality. He thought it was they who built the barrier across the 100,000th. Then we found you, and Computer Twissell abandoned his nightmare. He decided there had never been a barrier. He returned to the more immediate problem of salvaging Eternity.
"But I, you see, had been infected by his nightmare. I had experienced the barrier, so I knew it existed. No Eternal had built it, for Twissell said such a thing was theoretically impossible. Maybe Eternity's theories didn't go far enough. The barrier was there. Someone had built it. Or something.
"Of course," he went on thoughtfully, "Twissell was wrong in some ways. He felt that man must evolve, but that's not so. Paleontology is not one of the sciences that interest Eternals, but it interested the late Primitives, so I picked up a bit of it myself. I know this much: species evolve only to meet the pressures of new environments. In a stable environment, a species may remain unchanged for millions of Centuries. Primitive man evolved rapidly because his environment was a harsh and changing one. Once, however, mankind learned to create his own environment, he created a pleasant and stable one, so he just naturally stopped evolving."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Noys, sounding not the least mollified, "and you're not saying anything about us, which is what I want to talk about."