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interest in Primitive history grew to the point where it nearly rivaled Harlan’s.
    One day Harlan said to Cooper, “Look, Cooper, would you mind coming in tomorrow instead? I’ve got to get up tothe 3000’s sometime this week to check on an Observation and the man I want to see is free this afternoon.”
    Cooper’s eyes lit up hungrily. “Why can’t I come?”
    “Do you want to?”
    “Sure. I’ve never been in a kettle except when they brought me here from the 78th and I didn’t know what was happening at the time.”
    Harlan was accustomed to using the kettle in Shaft C, which was, by unwritten custom, reserved for Technicians along its entire immeasurable length through the Centuries. Cooper showed no embarrassment at being led there. He stepped into the kettle without hesitation and took his seat on the curved molding that completely circled it.
    When Harlan, however, had activated the Field, and kicked the kettle into upwhen motion, Cooper’s face screwed into an almost comic expression of surprise.
    “I don’t feel a thing,” he said. “Is anything wrong?”
    “Nothing’s wrong. You’re not feeling anything because you’re not really moving. You’re being kicked along the temporal extension of the kettle. In fact,” Harlan said, growing didactic, “at the moment, you and I aren’t matter, really, in spite of appearances. A hundred men could be using this same kettle, moving (if you can call it that) at various velocities in either Time-direction, passing through one another and so on. The laws of the ordinary universe just don’t apply to the kettle shafts!”
    Cooper’s mouth quirked a bit and Harlan thought uneasily: The kid’s taking temporal engineering and knows more about this than I do. Why don’t I shut up and stop making a fool of myself?
    He retreated into silence, and stared somberly at Cooper. The younger man’s mustache had been full grown for months. It drooped, framing his mouth in what Eternals called Mallansohn hairline, because the only photograph known to be authentic of the Temporal Field inventor (andthat a poor one and out of focus) showed him with just such a mustache. For that reason it maintained a certain popularity among Eternals even though it did few of them justice.
    Cooper’s eyes were fixed on the shifting numbers that marked the passing of the Centuries with respect to themselves. He said, “How far upwhen does the kettle shaft go?”
    “Haven’t they taught you that?”
    “They’ve hardly mentioned the kettles.”
    Harlan shrugged. “There’s no end to Eternity. The shaft goes on forever.”
    “How far upwhen have you gone?”
    “This will be the uppest. Dr. Twissell has been up to the 50,000’s.”
    “Great Time!” whispered Cooper.
    “That’s still nothing. Some Eternals have been up past the 150,000th Century.”
    “What’s
that
like?”
    “Like nothing at all,” said Harlan morosely. “Lots of life but none of it human. Man is gone.”
    “Dead? Wiped out?”
    “I don’t know that anyone exactly knows.”
    “Can’t something be done to change that?”
    “Well, from the 70,000’s on—” began Harlan, then ended abruptly. “Oh, to Time with it. Change the subject.”
    If there was one subject about which Eternals were almost superstitious, it was the “Hidden Centuries,” the time between the 70,000th and the 150,000th. It was a subject that was rarely mentioned. It was only Harlan’s close association with Twissell that accounted for his own small knowledge of the era. What it amounted to was that Eternals couldn’t pass into Time in all those thousands of Centuries.
    The doors between Eternity and Time were impenetrable. Why? No one knew.
    Harlan imagined, from some casual remarks of Twissell’s,that attempts had been made to Change the Reality in the Centuries just downwhen from the 70,000th, but without adequate Observation beyond the 70,000th not much could be done.
    Twissell had laughed a bit one time and said,