You'll think all those things, but I have reason to believe you will do what you had always done: be a good girl.

The BC isn't telling you the whole truth. It mentioned a trip of a few million years, when it is actually sending us much farther than that. The Earth is severely wounded, and needs a lot of time to heal.

But it will heal, and we will arrive.

I can't tell you much beyond that, as I am about to die. I also know that more details will only increase your agony of indecision. So I will say only this: The revitalizer is right. You are pregnant.

And you are right. You will last about a year here in this brave new world. I know it's not-

much time, but I guarantee you won't be bored. And you'll have one year with him, and three months with her. (It's a girl!) Your death will not be too painful-at least it hasn't been so far.

And on your deathbed you will have no assurances your daughter will survive you by very long. It is a hard life. But she will be here with you, she will be healthy, and you will be very happy. You will sit with her and write a last message to your poor, confused, earlier self, and wonder how in hell it ever got back to her. (I can't tell you, but what would life be without some mystery?) Get on the ship, Louise. Go with him.

Testimony of Sherman

I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.

I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things -- a completion that can never be achieved.

The accounts are about what one would expect. Everyone is. the star of his or her own show. Minor characters are usually trotted tin only to make a point. They have a way of vanishing when their usefulness is over.

Bill Smith never mentioned his ex-wife's name, for instance. He never mentioned that he had two children, or that he never went to see them because it hurt him too much to do so. C.

Gordon Petcher is a caricature in Smith's eyes, whereas my own observation through the timetank revealed Petcher to be a hardworking, conscientious man who had good reasons for everything he did.

On the other hand, to give him his due, Smith was not unaware of his own weaknesses, nor shy about revealing them. One might say -- if one were as cynical as Louise loved to pretend to be- that he was too aware of his problems. But he seemed to be fighting them.

It is a great temptation to read between the lines. It is not hard for me to see that Smith really believed he loved Louise. He was afraid to say it, even to himself, and with good reason. He did not love her. Events will bear me out on this, the BC assures me. He. will not be a good father to Louise's child.

Louise ...

I can work with an insane person as well as with a sane one. There can be no doubt that she was crazy, but she had achieved a good functional adjustment to an impossible situation.

Her delusion about the skinsuit is a prime example. She so strongly believed she was wearing one that she could "take it off" and see some horror of her own creation. I humored her because it served a purpose. Only when she had removed it could she open up to me, tell me the things I already knew but which she had to bring to the surface herself. Oh, I was some analyst, all right. It must have been inevitable that I fall in love with her, in my cold, heartless, mechanical way.

One more irony. She believed she did not love Smith, whereas in fact she did.

Oh, and Mayer. Let's be tidy here. Over a period of thirty years he had convinced himself that he loved his daughter. When she woke up, she had other ideas. She even had the bad grace to tell him what really killed his beloved wife.

So I sit here and remember them though they are not yet gone.

"Here" is the control room of one of the "surface-to-orbit" spacecraft that used to sit beside the bigger, escape Ship. In fact, it is a much more powerful vehicle. We are some millions of miles away from the Earth and we got here very quickly. The BC assures me we are far enough away to avoid both the physical and temporal backlashes of the flight to the "future."

In my lap is the transcript of the two stories. Beside me a small black box, about the size of a Cockpit Voice Recorder.

A silly little bit of twentieth-century philosophy keeps running through my head. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

Define day. Define life.

I said, "Listen up, motherfucker."

And a voice from the black box said, "That is not your access code."

"No. I just thought you ought to hear it once more, before she goes, to remind you of someone who wasn't impressed by you: "The point is taken," said the Big Computer.

"I sit here," I said, "and I wonder. I wonder why they all thought they had anything to do with the running of the world. Why did none of them ever ask just where and what the Big Computer was? Why did they all believe in the Gate?"

"The Gate is as real as next week," the BC said.

It didn't say anything else, but it didn't have to. I knew the answers. Things like misdirection, and the power of words. Call something "big" enough times and everyone will believe it is big. Or they will confuse size with capacity. The capacity of the BC was, in truth, infinite. But Louise would assume the BC was going to be destroyed in the holocaust that was about to devour her city.

"Did she get aboard?" I asked.

"Of course she did. And it's about to happen. Take a look."

The image of it was on a screen before me. f saw the Gate expand to several miles across, and I saw the Ship dive into it.

It must have been noisy. It was certainly bright. I could see the light of it out my window.

When it was over, when the destruction of the Gate and the arrival of the paradox had combined and things had settled down, the Earth still rolled on. But it was worse than the Last Age. Louise had been right. Nothing lived down there.

"In this new, changed reality," the BC said, "the last human died over ten thousand years ago, in a chronological manner of speaking."

"It's the only way I know of speaking."

"Yes. Fortunately, there are other ways."

"Must I do this?"

"You are my only begotten Son."

"And not my will, but throe be done. All right. Wake me up when they get here."

"Imagine their surprise when you greet them, in a hundred million years."

Prologue: The End of Eternity

Sherman is a good boy, just like Louise. And he'll be useful to them. I'm counting on him to keep the thousand elements of the polyglot Noah's Ark from destroying themselves as soon as they disembark. He'll do it. They'll get their chance, just like the others did.

In a way I hated to lie to him, but he had to have a number. He wanted to know how long he would sleep. Machines, like humans, do a lot better with numbers. They apply them even where they have no meaning, as in the "quantity" they call time. Sherman didn't understand time any more than Louise did.

I understand it thoroughly. Years have nothing to do with it.

Free will is one of my favorite inventions. I'd hate to give it up. Yet it causes endless problems. If they are allowed free will, it becomes necessary to lie to them.

I gave serious thought to discarding humans entirely for this sequence. After all, I had the machines; this time around, I had even been one myself. Maybe I'd get better results with metal and silicon than with the old carbon-based life forms. Twice in a row it had come to nothing. First with evolution -- which had seemed such a sound concept -- then with the two o f them in the Garden.