Free The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast Page A

if it repeated?”
    â€œHow could I know? My own consciousness is only for now—not for yesterday, not for tomorrow. How could I know?”
    Alice shook her head dumbly.
    â€œAnyway,” I continued desperately, “today, my today, our today, this morning, I decided to stop it. I had to stop it. I would go insane, the whole world would go insane if I didn’t stop it. But they—the gray herringbones—they didn’t want me to stop it.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause they were afraid. They were afraid that they would die. They want to live as much as I do. I am the first me, and therefore the real me; but they are also me—different moments of consciousness in me—but they are me. But they couldn’t stop me. They couldn’t interfere with me. When I told them to get out, they had to go. If they interfered, it might mean death for them too. So they left. But some of them watched downstairs—and some in other places, and all of them myself. Do you wonder that I am half insane?”
    â€œAll right, my dear,” Alice said gently. “What did you do then?”
    â€œI put on the blue suit, not the gray one. I climbed down the fire-escape, through the house opposite ours, hailed a cab, and checked in here at the hotel.”
    â€œBut if what you say is true,” Alice said, beginning to share my own fear and horror, “any one of you—of the gray herringbone—can go to Dunbar instead—”
    I nodded. “I thought of that. I’m not certain it would work that way. But to make sure, I took the transistor panel with me. It would take at least ten hours of work and a good electronics shop to duplicate it. They can repair the circuit—and maybe it will be enough power for a cat, but not for a man. I can swear that. Not for a man—”
    â€œBut if they do?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Nothing will ever again be the way it was. How many of me will the world contain? I don’t know—”
    â€œAnd if you stop it, Bob?” Whether she understood me or not, she believed me. Her eyes said that; the fear was deep and wet and sick in her eyes.
    â€œI can’t answer that,” I shrugged. “I don’t know. We just scraped at a great mystery. I don’t know. All we can do is sit and wait. Less than a half hour to five o’clock, so it’s not too long to wait.”
    Then we waited. At first we tried to talk, but we couldn’t talk much. Then we were silent. Then, a few minutes before five o’clock, Alice came over to me and kissed me. I pushed her back and into her chair. “I’ve got to be alone for this.” I waited for anything, more afraid than I ever have been, before that or since, and then it was five o’clock. We compared watches. We called the desk and checked the time. It was five minutes past the hour. Then Alice began to cry, and I let her cry it out. Then we decided to go home.
    There was a crowd and commotion down in the lobby, but we didn’t stop. Later I realized that one of them would have remembered that I liked the Waldorf and would go there, but then we didn’t stop.
    We got a cab. As we drove uptown, we saw seven separate crowds, accident crowds, which are unmistakable in New York. “This town is becoming a battlefront,” the driver said. We didn’t say anything at all. But there were no gray herringbones, not along the way, not in front of the house we lived in and not waiting for us in our apartment.
    We were home less than an hour when the police came. Two plainclothes men and two men in uniform. They talked like cops and wanted to know whether I was Professor Robert Clyde Bottman.
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œWhat do you do?”
    â€œI teach physics at Columbia University.”
    â€œYou got anything to identify yourself?”
    â€œWell, I live here,” I said. “Of course I