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.All that Finge had said was so true, so transparently true.Harlan'sObserver mind could look back upon the relationship of himself and Noys, thatshort, unusual relationship, and it took on a different texture.It wasn't a case of instant infatuation.How could he have believed it was?Infatuation for a man like himself?Of course not.Tears stung his eyes and he felt ashamed.How obvious it wasthat the affair was a case of cool calculation.The girl had certainundeniable physical assets and no ethical principles to keep her from usingthem.So she used them and that had nothing to do with Andrew Harlan as aperson.He simply represented her distorted view of Eternity and what itmeant.Automatically Harlan's long fingers caressed the volumes in his smallbookshelf.He took one out and, unseeingly, opened it.The print blurred.The faded colors of the illustrations were ugly,meaningless blotches.Why had Finge troubled to tell him all this? In the strictest sense he oughtnot to have.An Observer, or anyone acting as Observer, ought never to knowthe ends attained by his Observation.It removed him by so much from the idealposition of the objective non-human tool.It was to crush him, of course; to take a mean and jealous revenge!Harlan fingered the open page of the magazine.He found himself staring at aduplication, in startling red, of a ground vehicle, similar to vehiclescharacteristic of the 45th, 182nd, 590th, and 984th Centuries, as well as oflate Primitive times.It was a very common sort of affair with aninternal-combustion motor.In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractionswere the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels.That wastrue of none of the later centuries, of course.Harlan had pointed that out to Cooper.He had made quite a point of it, andnow his mind, as though longing to turn away from the unhappy present, driftedback to that moment.Sharp, irrelevant images filled the ache withinHarlan."These advertisements," he had said, "tell us more of Primitive times than theso-called news articles in the same magazine.The news articles assume a basicknowledge of the world it deals with.It uses terms it feels no necessity ofPage 43ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlexplaining.What is a 'golf ball,' for instance?"Cooper had professed his ignorance readily.Harlan went on in the didactic tone he could scarcely avoid on occasions suchas this."We could deduce that it was a small pellet of some sort from thenature of the casual mentions it receives.We know that it is used in a game,if only because it is mentioned in an item under the heading 'Sport.' We caneven make further deductions that it is hit by a long rod of some sort andthat the object of the game is to drive the ball into a hole in the ground.But why bother with deduction and reasoning? Observe this advertisement! Theobject of it is only to induce readers to buy the ball, but in so doing we arepresented with an excellent close-range portrait of one, with a section cutinto it to show its construction."Cooper, coming from an era in which advertisement was not as wildlyproliferative as it was in the later Centuries of Primitive times, found allthis difficult to appreciate.He said, "Isn't it rather disgusting the waythese people blow their own horn? Who would be fool enough to believe aperson's boastings about his own products? Would he admit defects? Is helikely to stop at any exaggeration?"Harlan, whose homewhen was middling fruitful in advertisement, raised toleranteyebrows and merely said, "You'll have to accept that.It's their way and wenever quarrel with the ways of any culture as long as it does not seriouslyharm mankind as a whole."But now Harlan's mind snapped back to his present situation and he was back inthe present, staring at the loudmouthed, brassy advertisements in the newsmagazine.He asked himself in sudden excitement: Were the thoughts he had justexperienced really irrelevant? Or was he tortuously finding a way out of theblackness and back to Noys?Advertisement! A device for forcing the unwilling into line.Did it matter toa ground-vehicle manufacturer whether a given individual felt an original orspontaneous desire for his product? If the prospect (that was the word) couldbe artificially persuaded or cajoled into feeling that desire and acting uponit, would that not be just as well?Then what did it matter if Noys loved him out of passion or out ofcalculation? Let them but be together long enough and she would grow to lovehim.He would _make_ her love him and, in the end, love and not its motivationwas what counted.He wished now he had read some of the novels out of Timethat Finge had mentioned scornfully.Harlan's fists clenched at a sudden thought.If Noys had come to _him_, to_Harlan_, for immortality, it could only mean that she had not yet fulfilledthe requirement for that gift.She could have made love to noEternal previously.That meant that her relationship to Finge had been nothingmore than that of secretary and employer.Otherwise what need would she havehad for Harlan?Yet Finge surely must have tried--must have attempted.(Harlan could notcomplete the thought even in the secrecy of his own mind.) Finge could haveproved the superstition's existence on his own person.Surely he could nothave missed the thought with Noys an everpresent temptation.Then she musthave refused him.He had had to use Harlan and Harlan had succeeded [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]