'Are they all like you? Your height, your complexion?'
'It was decided,' said Athtar in a formal tone, 'that a body built thicker and closer to the ground has more utility. That was several hundred years before I was born. And so, yes. No one is over 177 centimeters.; That is, five feet, six inches.'
'How do you know you're the worst of all possible Athtars?'
'In my time,' was the reply, 'it is a felony for anyone but a member of the Scientists' Guild to have a weapon. Hence, political and economic power is part of the prize of the struggle for position in the Guild. On my way to becoming a tougher member, I wished many times to be there, relatively safe, among the faceless, unarmed masses. And the crystal, in creating other Athtars, solidified those wishes.'
There was an implication here that getting tougher was not the answer; not the way. Edith sighed her disappointment, and remembered her other questions. She told him, then, about the two pictures she had seen in the crystal, the one of the solar system and the other of the outline of a human body. Did he know what the pictures meant?
'When I first saw it,' said Athtar, 'the scene inside was of our galaxy. Later, it became the solar system. So what ,you saw was probably a carry-over from my time, where we occupy all the planets. And what I saw must derive from a time when man has moved out to the galaxy. It could mean that the crystal adjusts to the era in which it finds itself. Though why a human being, instead of the planet Earth in this era, is not obvious. Was the outline that of a woman or a man?'
Edith couldn't remember it that clearly.
Standing there in the bright, sunny day and on the dirty, narrow street, Athtar shook his head. There was awe in his ugly face. He said wonderingly, 'Such a small object; such a comprehensive ability.' He added, half to himself, 'It's got to be potential flow patterns. There are not enough atoms in such a crystal to act as a control board for so much,'
He had already, by implication, answered her next question, but she asked it anyway.
Athtar sighed, 'No, the crystal is definitely not from the thirty-fifth century. It appeared suddenly. I picture it as having fallen backward through time from some future era in drops of fifteen hundred years.'
'But why would they have sent it back?' Edith asked, bewildered. 'What are they after?'
The chunky little man gave her a startled 1ook. 'The idea of the crystal having been sent back for a purpose had not previously occurred to me. It's such a colossally valuable machine, we assumed it got away from them accidentally,' he said. He was silent; then, finally: 'Why don't you let me go and see this second Edith Price? And you go back to Harkdale? If I find the crystal, I'll report with it to you there.'
The implication seemed to be that he planned to cooperate with her. What he meant was that the crystal would be no good to him until he had found and murdered the Edith to whom it was oriented.
The tough part of Edith hesitated at the idea of trusting this man. But it occurred to her that he might have thirty fifth-century weapons and that therefore he was being generous from a position of total strength in offering to cooperate.
With such fear thoughts in her mind, and having no plans of her own, she agreed.
She watched him get into a shining new automobile and drive off down the narrow street. It was a middle-sized car, she noted absently. She had never been one who kept track of auto designs, so by the time she wondered what make it was, it was too late. Equally belatedly, it struck her that she ought to have looked at the license-plate numbers.
She stood there, and she thought sarcastically: What a third-rate Edith Price I am!
She was vaguely aware of a car pulling up at the near by curb. A young woman climbed out of it and casually walked toward her as if to go into the phone booth.
She stopped suddenly, stepped over beside Edith, and said, 'You're Miss Price?'
Edith turned.
The other woman was a bright, alert, thirty-year-old blond, and Edith had never seen her before. She had no sense of being threatened, but involuntarily she backed away several steps.
'Y-yes,' she said.
The woman turned toward the car and called, 'Okay, Seth.'
Seth Mitchell climbed from the car and came rapidly toward them. He was well dressed, like the Seth Mitchell in the gold Cadillac, but there was a subtle difference. His face had a firmer, more determined expression.
He said, 'I'm a detective. Who is that man you were talking to?'
And thus the story, as well as Edith knew it, was presently shared.
* *
They had gone into a coffee shop for their tense discussion. To Edith it was both relieving and disturbing to realize that these detectives had been in Harkdale for two days and had traced her down as a result of her call to the hospital, inquiring about Billy Bingham. Having thus spotted her, they had become aware that the squat man was also keeping track of her movements. And so that morning, not one but three cars had headed for New York — Edith's, Athtar's, and theirs.
The exchange of information took time and several cups of coffee — though Edith rejected the final cup, with the sudden realization that coffee was probably not good for people, and that the crystal might judge her on it at some later time. She smiled wanly at how many restraints she was placing on herself. Exactly as if God was no longer dead.
When they came out of the restaurant, Seth Mitchell phoned the other Edith Price. He emerged from the phone booth uneasy.
'The switchboard operator says that Miss Price went with a man about twenty minutes ago. I'm afraid we're too late.'
From Edith's description, he had already come to the conclusion that Athtar was a dangerous man. They decided to wait for the second Edith to return. But though they remained in New York until after eleven that night, the young woman did not come back to her hotel.
* *
She never would return. For some hours, a bullet in her brain, her body, weighed down by stones, had been lying at the bottom of the East River.
And Athtar had the crystal.
To his intense disappointment, that Edith was not the crystal's orientation.
Accordingly, he spent the evening and a portion of the night fitting together parts in the construction of a special weapon. He had a peculiar prescience that he would need its superfine power the following day against the Edith who, he believed, was back in Harkdale.
VII
Since it was late, and since, after all, they could phone the second Edith again by long distance, in the morning shortly after eleven — the three of them, Edith and the detectives, set out for Harkdale in the two cars. Seth Mitchell, at Edith's request, drove her car. Marge Aikens followed in the larger machine.
En route, Detective Mitchell told Edith that he believed she was the original Edith, and that it was to her that the crystal was still oriented. He considered also that her analysis of Seth Mitchell, the farmer, as the worst Seth, had doomed that unfortunate Mitchell duplicate. The crystal accepted her judgment and probably uncreated Seth, the farmer, when the package with the crystal addressed to him had barely been deposited in the post office.
Edith was taken aback by the detective's logic. 'But,' she stammered, 'I didn't mean it that way.' Tears streamed down her cheeks. 'Oh, that poor man!'
'Of course you didn't mean it,' was the reply. 'And so just to make sure that I heard you correctly, tell me again in what sequence that judgment of yours came. Was it before or after your various impulses to leave Harkdale?'
'Oh, after.'
"And did I hear you correctly, that you thought of going into the post office, and asking for the package you had mailed to be returned to you?'
'Yes, I had that thought' She added, 'But I didn't do it.'
'I would analyze that at least one other Edith did go back in,' said Mitchell.
'But it's all so complicated,' Edith said. 'How would any Edith just go, leaving clothes, money, car?'
'I've been thinking of my own background on that,' said Mitchell. 'Evidently the cryst
al can excise all confusions like that. For example, I never again even thought of going back to Harkdale. It didn't even cross my mind.'
He broke off. 'But there are no blanks like that in your mind?'
'None that I can think of.'
Seth. Mitchell nodded. 'That's what I heard. So I think I've got the solution to this whole crazy business — and we don't even have to know where the crystal is.'
* *
What he analyzed was simple. In bringing back Billy Bing ham at her command, the crystal had deposited the boy nearly two miles away. True, at the time, she had been holding the crystal in her hand. But that didn't apply to her negative thought about farmer Seth Mitchell, which had occurred after she had mailed the crystal and was approximately a hundred yards from the post office.
So if she had indeed uncreated the mentally ill farmer, then the distance of the crystal's human orientation — in this instance one of the Edith Prices — from the crystal was not a factor.
When he had finished, Edith did not speak at once.
'You don't agree?' said the detective.
'I'm thinking,' Edith said. 'Maybe I'm not really the orientation.'
'We'll test that tomorrow.'
'What about Athtar?' Edith asked. 'I keep feeling he may have special weapons. And besides, the crystal cannot affect him. What about that?'
'Let me think about Athtar,' said the man.
While she waited, Edith was reminded of what Athtar had asked about the figure in the crystal: Was it of a man or a woman?
It was her first time for trying to remember, and so she sat there in the darkness next to the man, and was aware of two separate lines of thought in her mind.
The first: She attempted to visualize the human design in the crystal.
The second —
VIII
She watched his profile, as he drove in silence. And she thought: How brilliant he is! Yet surely a mere detective, no matter how keen his logic, cannot be the best of all possible Seth Mitchells. A man in such a profession has got to be somewhere in the middle — which in this competition is the same as the worst.
And he disappeared.
For many seconds after she had that thought, the suddenly driverless car held to its straight direction. Its speed, which had been around seventy, naturally started to let up the instant there was no longer a foot on the accelerator.
The only error was when Edith uttered a scream, and grabbed at the wheel, turning it. The machine careened wildly. The next second she grasped it in a more steadying way; and, holding it, slid along the seat into a position where presently she could apply the brake. She pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. She sat there, dazed.
The detective's aide, Marge, had slowed as soon as she saw that there was a problem. She now drew up behind Edith, got out of the car, and walked to the driver's side of the other machine.
'Seth,' she began, 'what — '
Edith pushed the door open and climbed, trembling, out onto the road. She had a mad impulse to run somewhere. Her body felt strange, her mind encased in a blank anguish. She was vaguely aware of herself babbling about what had happened.
It must have taken a while for the incoherent words to reach through to the blond woman. But suddenly Marge gasped, and Edith felt herself grabbed by the shoulders. She was being shaken; a breathless voice was yelling at her, 'You stupid fool! You stupid fool!'
Edith tried to pull away, but Marge's fingers seemed embedded in the shoulders of her dress.
The shaking became pain. Her neck hurt, then her arms. Edith thought for the first time: I must be careful. I mustn't do or say anything that will affect her.
With that thought, sanity returned. For the first time she saw that Marge was in a state of hysteria. The shaking was actually an automatic act of a person almost out of her mind with grief.
Pity came. She was able to free herself by a simple action. She slapped Marge lightly on the cheek, once, twice, three times. The third time, the woman let go of her and leaned against the car, sobbing. 'Oh, my God!' she said.
A wind was blowing out of the darkness from the west. Car headlights kept glaring past them, lighting the scene briefly. The two women were now in a relatively normal state, and they discussed the problem. Edith tried to recreate Marge's employer with the same command that she had used for Billy Bingham.
'Seth Mitchell, the detective, back here, now!'
She had had a feeling that it wouldn't work — the Seth Mitchells were undoubtedly due to be eliminated one by one — and it didn't. The minutes ticked by. Though she yelled the command in many variations into the night, there was no sign of the vanished Seth whose presence had for a long half-day brought to the whole situation the reassurance that derives from a highly intelligent and determined mind.
In the end, defeated, the two women in their separate cars drove on to Harkdale. Since Marge had a room reserved at the Harkdale Hotel, she went there, and Edith drove wearily to the rooming house where she lived.
It was nearly four o'clock when she finally limped into her little suite. She lay down without undressing. As she was drifting off to sleep, she had a tense fear: Would the best of all possible Ediths be this sloppy about personal cleanliness?
Literally hurting with exhaustion, she rolled off the bed, undressed, bathed, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, changed the linens and climbed into a clean pair of pajamas.
She awakened with a horrible start shortly after 5:30 with the thought that conformism might not be it. Such toiletry amenities as she had performed were products of early training and did not necessarily have anything to do with life and living as it should be.
She fell asleep imagining a series of rebel Ediths, each one of whom had some special characteristic that was noble and worthy.
The next time she awakened, it was light outside. It occurred to her that all of her concepts, so compulsively visualized, where probably being created somewhere by the crystal. And so undoubtedly there were already beatnik and hippie Ediths as well as rougher, tougher types.
For the first time she realized what a mad whirl of possibilities she had considered in the previous thirty-six hours. Ediths who were hard-boiled and could coldly shoot to kill, or, conversely, were superfeminine, sweet, tantalizing temptresses.
'And it's all unnecessary,' she whispered, lying there. 'The decision will probably be made as arbitrarily as my own impulsive condemnation of the inarticulate farmer and the courageous — but presumably not perfect — detective.'
Having no standards that applied to the twentieth century; the crystal had uncreated a powerful and good man on the passing judgment of the person to whom it had by chance become oriented. Accordingly, the future looked grim for all Seth Mitchells and Edith Prices, including the original.
When she next awakened, it was time to get up and go to work — and think some more about what the perfect Edith would be like.
As she dressed, she looked out of her window with its distant view of the blue waters of Lake Naragang, and the nearby downtown section that at one place, opposite the Harkdale Hotel, crowded the water's edge. Pretty little town, Harkdale. She remembered that on her arrival she had thought that at least here she could be more casual in her dress than in New York.
Edith gave a curt, rueful laugh as that thought struck her. She had come full circle during the night, back to the notion that appearance would count. Trying to think feminine — 'After all, I am a woman' — she put on her frilliest dress.
Yet in some back closet of her brain there was a fearful conviction that all this was in vain. The crisis was imminent; she might be dead — uncreated — before this day was out
It seemed ridiculous to go to work on the day you were going to die. But she went.
As she moved about her duties, Edith was conscious of her subdued manner. Twice, when she unthinkingly looked into the rest-room mirror, she was startled by the pale face and sick eyes that looked hack at her.
'This is not really m
e,' she told herself. 'I can't be judged on this.'
Surely the crystal wouldn't reject her because she was in a daze. Every passing minute, fleeting images of other Ediths passed before her mind's eye; each one had in it the momentary hope that maybe it held the key to the best. There was an Edith living out her life as a nun; another chaste Edith, married but holding sex to a minimum, placing all her attention on her children; and an Edith who was a follower of Zen Buddhism.
She had, earlier, put through a call to Marge Aiken at the Harkdale Hotel. About two o'clock Marge called back. She reported that she had phoned New York and discovered that the second Edith had not returned to her hotel at all the previous night.
After imparting this grim news, Marge said, 'And so, if Athtar contacts you, don't be alone with him under any circumstances until he produces the Seth Mitchell in the gold Cadillac and the Edith in New York.'
After that call, more images, mostly of saintly and good-hearted, unsophisticated Ediths, now haunted her. Somehow, they stemmed from her childhood conditioning, against which she had rebelled in college, as seen through a child's unnoticing eyes.
Into this haze of thoughts, Tilsit's voice suddenly intruded: 'Phone call for you, Edith.'
As she picked up the phone, Edith was vaguely aware of Miss Davis' disapproving face in the background. Though it was the first day she had received personal calls in her six months in the library, the chief librarian had the outraged expression of an employer whose patience has been tried beyond reason.
Edith forgot that as she heard the familiar voice on the phone — Athtar's.
The man said, 'I want to see you right after work.'
Edith said, in a suddenly faint voice, 'At the Harkdale Hotel — in the lobby.'
IX
Athtar stepped out of the phone booth from which he had called. A cruel smile twisted his broad face. For him there were two possibilities of victory, now that he had the crystal.
The first solution was to kill its current orientation — Edith. He intended to take no chances with that She would never, he was resolved, reach the Harkdale Hotel.
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