by James Gunn
Chapter 18. Nos admits she is from the Hidden Centuries and challenges Harlan to kill her [H 41]. When he is willing to listen to her explanation, she talks about the future of humanity and Eternity's effect upon it [E 3]. She also describes the actions of the Hidden Centuries when their residents discovered time travel and Eternity and the Basic State. During this, Harlan remembers the reactions of Voy to the elimination of electro-gravity spaceflight [H 24; - 2481st 1] and Life-Plotter Neron Feruque, to ease his guilt, railing at Eternity's handling of anti-cancer serums [H 25]. Nos talks about the reaction of humanity to the discovery that the Galaxy already was in alien hands [HC (Hidden Centuries) 2] and about the alternate reality in which Eternity is not found and humanity reaches the stars more than a hundred thousand Centuries earlier [BS (Basic State) 1]. She also tells Harlan that she was educated for her job to destroy Eternity [N 1] but had a choice of five Realities that seemed least complex. She chose the one in which she went back to the 482nd [N 2], met Finge and then Harlan [N 3], in which Harlan loved her, misdirected Cooper, and returned with her to the Primitive where they lived out their lives together [N 4]. But Harlan, holding her at gunpoint, is in a slightly different Reality, just as Twissell accompanying him in his last trip to the 111,394th [H 36] was not part of that Reality [N 4]. When Harlan asks why it was not enough just to misdirect Cooper, Nos says that the probability of the creation of Eternity must be reduced to nearly zero. The Minimum Necessary Change to achieve that is for her to send a letter to "a man of Italy" who will begin experimenting with the neutronic bombardment of uranium. Harlan is horrified at the prospect of destroying Eternity [H 42] but responds to her accusation that Eternals are psychopaths by recalling his group of Cubs learning about Reality [H 2] and recalling the abnormal life led by Eternals [H 2-37]. His decision [H 43] is signaled by the disappearance of the kettle [-E 1-31 (Of course, almost everything else turns to minuses as well, for now no Reality exists except the Basic State strengthened by the results of Nos's letter.)
Asimov probably did not plan this labyrinthine complex of time relationships as a way of providing a stylistic counterpoint to the theme. Certainly he was aware of the complexities of the subject. Heinlein had already exploited the paradoxes of time travel in "By His Bootstraps," although the solipsism of "All You Zombies" was still in the future. Reality-changing was not as thoroughly explored as it would be after Fritz Leiber's Change War stories, culminating in The Big Time (Galaxy, March-April 1958/book 1961), and Philip K. Dick's reality-questioning stories and novels of the fifties and sixties, but H. Beam Piper's Paratime Police stories began running in Astounding in July 1948 and his Time Crime was serialized beginning February 1955, and Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories were first published in F&SF in May 1955 but not collected (Guardians of Time) until 1960. The idea of time manipulation wasn't new, but Asimov considered in detail the complications of a systematic effort to change reality.
When Twissell is instructing Cooper, Harlan thinks:
Remember that, Cooper! Remember the 13th Reality of the 222nd so that you can put it into the Mallansohn memoir so that the Eternals will know where to look so they will know what to tell you so you can put it. . . . Round and round the circle goes. . . ."
After Harlan sends Cooper off to the wrong time, Twissell brings up the question of why Reality changes immediately after an alteration in Time: a Technician, he says, could go back and reverse the Change he has made. It must, he says, have to do with intention: the Technician has no intention of reversing his alteration, so Reality changes. But Eternity has not yet vanished, so Harlan must intend to reverse his action with Cooper. As a concluding nicety in Asimov's toying with the nature of reality and an action carefully prepared by Twissell's previous theorizing, the kettle disappears at the end even before Harlan is aware he has reached a decision: the kettle knows before he does.
These are only two examples among many that might be cited in support of Asimov's understanding of the complexities with which he was dealing and the thoroughness with which he dealt with them. The End of Eternity lacks the inspired madness of Dick's explorations of reality, but Dick's purpose was to raise doubts about reality. Asimov's was to understand it and to work his way through the difficulties to a reasonable basis for action.
The flashback technique, appropriate as it is, probably was the result of Campbell's early advice to Asimov, given while Asimov was working on his second published robot story, "Reason":
Asimov, when you have trouble with the beginning of a story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story and begin again.
In his autobiography Asimov wrote, "Ever since then, I have always started my stories as late in the game as I thought I could manage." That, no doubt, is the case with The End of Eternity and explains why Harlan is left standing at the gateway of Time for five chapters and why readers must pick their ways gingerly through a minefield of past tenses.
In The End of Eternity Asimov tackles sex for the first time (the titillation of the moment in The Naked Sun in which Gladia removes her glove and touches Baley on the cheek still lies a year ahead). Doubleday raised a brief question about it Asimov, like Verne before him, was known for the purity of his writing but Asimov's wife read through the chapter, looked up, and asked, "Where was it?" For Asimov it was a breakthrough. Not so his characterization. The minor characters have some vitality Finge, Twissell, even Cooper but Harlan is so subordinated to his role that Nos's love for him seems incredible. Harlan is stiff, cold, unyielding, and unlikable, and Nos gets no chance to exist as an individual until the final chapter. The novel is dominated by its theme.
The theme of The End of Eternity is as significant as anything Asimov ever touched. Since it was virtually Asimov's last extended thought about science fiction until unusual circumstances produced The Gods Themselves and the later bestsellers, the 1955 novel may define the values Asimov was upholding after nearly twenty years of writing science fiction. It may also provide clues to his decision to leave the fantasy world of fiction writing for the real world of science writing.
The End of Eternity shares with other Asimov fiction his basic concern for intelligent choice. Although Harlan begins as a cold and withdrawn Eternal, apparently moved only by intellectual concerns and sharing the values of a group that can change other people's Realities and lives at will, and although Harlan changes only because of his love for Nos, reason still wins out over emotion. In the final chapter, Harlan is persuaded by Nos's rational arguments, not by his love for her. Out of resentment that his love has been manipulated, Harlan has made up his mind to kill Nos, but when he matches his own experience with Nos's accusations, he is persuaded.
In another sense, perhaps, Asimov's old science-fiction enthusiasms may have emerged victorious over his rationality. After her comments on Eternity's choosing safety and mediocrity, Nos says, "The real solutions . . . come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it." Carried to their ultimate conclusion, these statements, which Asimov implicitly accepted for the sake of the novel, imply that humanity cannot improve its lot by rational choice. Or perhaps, if Asimov were given credit for dealing with a special case, they mean only that humanity cannot change the past.
If one wished to personalize the message of the novel, one might speculate that Asimov, looking back over his own past, had concluded that no amount of tinkering would have changed it for the better. This is, indeed, one of the messages of his autobiographical writings. Everything happened for the best: Campbell's early rejections, Sam Merwin's rejection of "Grow Old with Me," the change of administration at the Boston University School of Medicine that led to his full-time writing (which still awaited him). . . . If he had had the opportunity to make things happen differently, he might have made the wrong choice, he might have said, might have chosen safety and mediocrity over risk and greatness. In The End of Eternity, at least, Asimov chose, as rationally as he could, uncertainty over certainty and
infinity over not eternity but Eternity, that is, over the limitation of man's possibilities by too much tinkering with them. Asimov was not denying humanity's potential for rationality or the need for considering choices rationally but humanity's capacity to play God. Humanity will not consciously choose the uncertainty of adventure, or the adventure of uncertainty.
Within two years Asimov was to turn away from the certainty of science fiction to the uncertainty of science writing as well as from the certainty of a regular paycheck to the uncertainty of full-time writing. But he was by nature a cautious man: he had already pretested the market and had five science books behind him before he cast himself adrift from the science fiction he had lived with, suffered with, triumphed with, and profited from for twenty years.
7 The Stuff Itself
In 1970 Asimov returned to New York alone. Talk of divorce had increased in frequency in recent years. "After 1969," Asimov reported in his autobiography, "which seemed to consist, in retrospect, of one long slide toward divorce, there had been an upturn, a kind of pleasant Indian summer, a glimmering twilight that had lasted six weeks. . . ." Then he (and his wife, apparently) accepted the fact that the marriage was beyond saving.
In his 1994 memoir Asimov attributed the divorce in part to the fact that his wife smoked and he detested smoking. "If I had felt then [when he married Gertrude] as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I married her, nothing would possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. . . . When I discovered that living with Gertrude meant [a house or apartment that was always filled with smoke and with the reek of dead ash tray contents] and that there was no escape, our relationship withered." But he also mentioned Gertrude's rheumatoid arthritis whose pain made her less than reasonable, and his own increasing absorption in his writing that swelled their bank account but, because of Asimov's interest only in "clean paper and a working typewriter," left his wife feeling she got no good out of it.
At first, Asimov was going to take an apartment in nearby Wellesley while the divorce went forward. Then he learned that his wife would allow only a separation. Divorce in Massachusetts without his wife's cooperation was virtually impossible for a man with Asimov's stern ethical imperatives, so he moved to New York where he could institute no-fault proceedings.
His future second wife, Dr. Janet Jeppson, whom he had met earlier on a few occasions, helped him to find an apartment and adjust to life as a single man after nearly thirty years of marriage. Once more he was back in the city where he had grown from a child of three to a young man of twenty-nine who was a successful but not well-paid science-fiction author. Now he was fifty years old. His hundredth book had been celebrated in 1969 with Opus 100 and numerous interviews, some on television. He was becoming known as the most prolific man of letters of his time, and his reputation as a child prodigy had been supplanted by the image, however exaggerated, of an authority on almost everything.
Asimov was much in demand as a public speaker, commanding substantial fees. He could find a publisher for almost anything he wished to write and for some books he did not. He was wealthy; in spite of the impending divorce settlement he would never have to worry about money again, even if he never wrote another word. But that, of course, was unthinkable. Writing was his life, even if it was no longer his livelihood. He accepted small advances so publishers would let him write what he wanted to write.
A couple of questions, however, disturbed him. He was not sure he could write in new surroundings: radical changes always brought this terrible possibility into his mind. Each time, however, the fears had been unnecessary, and this time was no different. One question remained to be answered: would he ever write serious science fiction again? In spite of his statement at the end of his collection, The Bicentennial Man, that he had never stopped writing science fiction, the intensity with which he had written his early stories, the amount of himself that he had poured into those hopeful works, had been missing for a number of years.
If anything, Asimov's social life improved in New York. He soon was seeing his editors more regularly than ever and, in addition, his old science-fiction friends, Lester del Rey, Judy-Lynn Benjamin (who became Mrs. del Rey), Robert Silverberg, and others, including John Campbell, until his untimely death, on July 11, 1971 of a ruptured aorta, at the age of 61. And Asimov attended various local science-fiction conventions. At one of them on January 23, 1971, Robert Silverberg and Lester del Rey participated in a dialogue about ''the ins and outs of science fiction." At one point Silverberg illustrated the greater importance of the human aspects of a science-fiction story over the scientific detail by asking why anyone should be overly concerned with some trivial matter concerning, say, plutonium-186.
In the audience Asimov laughed because he knew there was no plutonium-186 and could not be. After the dialogue he told Silverberg this, and Silverberg shrugged it off. Asimov said, "But just to show you what a real science-fiction writer can do, I'll write a story about plutonium-186."
"Go ahead," Silverberg said. He was putting together the first issue of an anthology of original fiction to be entitled New Dimensions. "If you write one that meets my minimum standard of literacy, I'll publish it."
This kind of banter was exchanged among Asimov, del Rey, Silverberg, Ellison (see Asimov's two introductions to Ellison's Dangerous Visions), and a few others. In his autobiography Asimov described an exchange of insults with an editor and added, "You can't fool around that way if you don't like a guy." He also described how he was always getting "wiped out" by his friends. Occasionally, however, these exchanges got under the skin. When Asimov described the above conversation with Silverberg in his 1980 autobiography, he inserted the phrase "who knew that very well" between ''Silverberg" and "shrugged it off," but in an early introduction to the 1972 novel Asimov told the story differently. Silverberg did not remember it that way, however, and Asimov, no doubt feeling that the introduction might damage their friendship, had it removed from the later versions of The Gods Themselves.
The incident, nevertheless, may have provided the inspiration for what would turn out to be Asimov's only original science-fiction novel in the twenty-five years between The Naked Sun in 1957 and Foundation's Edge in 1982. The Gods Themselves might never have been started if Asimov had conceived it as a novel from the beginning.
Asimov described his attitude toward science-fiction writing in the mid-1960s when Harlan Ellison asked him to write a story for Dangerous Visions. Asimov begged off, offering instead to write an introduction because, he said, he lacked the time for a story. (He ended up writing two introductions, one describing the changes in science fiction and why he did not write a story for the collection, the second recounting his first put-down meeting with Ellison.) His real reason was, he wrote in his autobiography, "I couldn't face trying to write a story that could pass muster in the 1960s, when such talent as I had suited only the 1950s. I felt that I couldn't measure up any longer and I didn't want to prove it."
Evelyn del Rey helped to dispel some of this feeling when she asked him why he didn't write science fiction anymore. Asimov replied sadly, "Evelyn, you know as well as I do that the field has moved beyond me." And she replied, "Isaac, you're crazy. When you write, you are the field." He returned to writing short stories.
A novel, nevertheless, was something different; it may have been for the best that this one sneaked up on him. His story kept growing beyond the five thousand words that he had promised Silverberg until it reached twenty thousand. That was a short novel. Thinking that Doubleday, which was to publish New Dimensions, might expand the volume to include the extra length of the story, Asimov took it to Larry Ashmead, Doubleday's current science-fiction editor. Ashmead telephoned to say that anthologization was out; he wanted the story expanded into a novel.
Asimov did not want to expand it. On the spot, however, he offered to write two more sections of equal length: "The story involves an energy source that depends on communication between ourselves and another universe, and it end
s downbeat. What I can do is retell the story from the standpoint of the other universe and still leave it down-beat. Then I can take it up a third time in still a third setting, and this time make it upbeat."
"Are you sure you can do this?" Ashmead asked.
"Absolutely positive," Asimov responded, although he had made up the idea on the spur of the moment. But as he added in his autobiography, "If I couldn't, I wasn't Isaac Asimov." On March 8, 1971, he dropped in at Doubleday and signed a contract to write the novel. He also set to work on a different story for Silverberg's anthology, a short story titled "Take a Match'' that appeared in New Dimensions II (1972).
Asimov might have been reluctant at first to tackle a new science-fiction novel not only because of his feeling that he belonged to another, perhaps outmoded, generation of science-fiction writers he had divided science fiction into periods he called "adventure-dominant, science-dominant, sociology-dominant, and style-dominant," and it was not difficult to perceive that he thought style-dominance was a perversion of Campbell's vision but because he had not written an adult science-fiction novel for more than fifteen years (or any kind of science-fiction novel, including juveniles, for thirteen).
