Free The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast Page B

have.”
    â€œYou got pictures of yourself?”
    I wanted to know if they had gone out of their minds, but Alice smiled sweetly and brought our scrapbook and our family album. That seemed to satisfy them a little; wholly satisfied, they never were. For in three places in New York, friends of mine had been talking to me when I disappeared. Just disappeared—poof, and done with.
    One of the plainclothes men asked if I was twins, and the other said, “He’d have to be better than triplets.”
    Then they called downtown, and discovered that the number of men around town—gray herringbone suits and bald—reported to have disappeared into thin air, poof, at exactly 5:00 o’clock, had reached seventy-eight, and was mounting steadily. They stared at me without saying anything.
    They argued about arresting me; one wanted to, the other didn’t. They called downtown again, and then they told me not to leave town without notifying them, and then they left. A little while later, Professor Dunbar rang our doorbell.
    â€œAh, there you are,” he said. “I turned my back for a moment, and you were gone. Really, Bob, you must trace that circuit again.”
    Alice smiled and promised that I would come tomorrow and fix the circuit once and for all.
    As the professor was leaving, he said, “Most interesting thing, you know. There must have been two dozen cats outside when I left. All of them exactly like Prudence.”
    â€œPrudence is the Professor’s cat,” I explained to Alice.
    â€œOh, I have Prudence back—oh, yes. I’m very fond of cats. But I never realized how alike they can be.”
    â€œAnd I am sure we look alike to cats, Professor Dunbar,” Alice said.
    â€œOh, good. Very good indeed. I never thought of it that way. But I suppose we do. Well, tomorrow’s another day.”
    â€œThank God it is,” Alice said.
    We let him out and Alice made scrambled eggs for dinner, and then the press began to arrive. They were tiring, but we stuck to our ignorance and smiled disbelievingly about men in gray herringbone suits disappearing into thin air. I don’t know whether it is for better or worse. For a few days, it was a bigger thing than flying saucers, and it made me rather uncomfortable at school. But Alice says it won’t last.
    It’s her theory that I and my gray herringbone suit will be forgotten in a general problem of cats. Professor Dunbar lives in the North Bronx, and when we drove up to his house the following day, to fix a circuit once and for all and to fix it properly, we counted over a hundred cats. Those were the ones we saw. Alice says that cats that don’t disappear—poof—have more lasting interest than college professors who do. Alice says if man can learn to live with the atom, he can learn to live with cats. Anyway, you can’t hold science back, and sooner or later, someone else will tie a knot in time. Only I don’t like to think about it.

They spoke only one language on Mars—which was one of the reasons why Earth languages fascinated them so. Mrs. Erdig had made the study of English her own hobby. English was rather popular, but lately more and more Martians were turning to Chinese; before that, it had been Russian. But Mrs. Erdig held that no other language had the variety of inflection, subtlety and meaning that English possessed.
    For example, the word righteousness . She mentioned it to her husband tonight.
    â€œI’m telling you, I just cannot understand it,” she said. “I mean it eludes me just as I feel I can grasp it. And you know how inadequate one feels with an Earth word that is too elusive.”
    â€œI don’t know how it is,” Mr. Erdig replied absently. His own specialty among Earth languages was Latin—recorded only via the infrequent Vatican broadcasts—and this tells a good deal about what sort of Martian he was. Perhaps a thousand Martians