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for Cooper. He suspects that the barrier at the 100,000th had been set up by Nos and her confederates to lead him into the acts of rebellion that resulted in Cooper's being cast away in Time. He threatens to kill her with a blaster, then to take Cooper back to his correct destination and save Eternity. |
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Nos admits she is from the Hidden Centuries. People there had learned of Eternity's existence before it reached them, even before it had reached the 10,000th. The Hidden Centuries had time travel, but it was based on a different set of postulates. They viewed rather than shifted masses and were able to perceive alternate Realities. They discovered that they were in a Reality of low probability, and traced their way down to Eternity and up to the 125,000th, where humanity at last had discovered the secret of the interstellar drive and the Jump through hyperspace. But humanity found the Galaxy occupied by other intelligent races. Humanity returned to Earth and died out. |
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Nos says that Eternity must be destroyed. It has persistently eliminated spaceflight from humanity's Realities. The Hidden Centuries have discovered what they call the Basic State. In this Reality, humanity discovers spaceflight early, goes out to the stars, and builds a human Galactic Empire (one might call this The Foundation Trilogy Reality). If Eternity had not been established, Nos says, the energies that went into temporal engineering would have gone into nucleonics, the interstellar drive would have been invented, and humanity would have reached the stars more than a hundred thousand centuries earlier. At that time the stars would have been untenanted, and mankind would have established itself throughout the Galaxy. |
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"Any system like Eternity," Nos says, "which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach." Nos wants to send a letter to an Italian scientist (Enrico Fermi?) so that the first nuclear explosion will take place in 1945, not in the 30th century. There is a chance that Earth will end up with a radioactive crust (the Pebble in the Sky Reality), but before that happens a Galactic Empire can be achieved, an actual intensification of the Basic State. Nos says, ''Cooper will disappear along with his advertisement; Eternity will go and the Reality of my Century, but we will remain to have children and grandchildren, and mankind will remain to reach the stars." |
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Before Harlan himself knows whether he will carry out his threat to kill Nos and rescue Cooper or do as Nos asks, the kettle disappears, signaling the final end of Eternity . . . "and the beginning of Infinity." |
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The plot, thus outlined, is reasonably straightforward. Its time se- |
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