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  Mitchell had not intended to imply moral disapproval. He said hastily, 'It's all right, Billy. When I was a boy, it was the guy who got a thing that owned it. None of this seeing-first stuff for us.' He smiled.

  Billy said, 'I only wanted to be the one who gave it to the museum.'

  The thunder of that vibrated through Mitchell's mind. 'Of course,' he thought, 'now I remember.'

  He even realized why he had forgotten. The museum-library had accepted the stone, which had become dull during the days he had carried it in his pocket, with reluctance. The librarian had murmured something about not discouraging small boys. With those words she had discouraged him so completely that he had needed an actual naming of the fact to remember it.

  It was hard to believe an impostor would have such detailed recollections. And yet, that meant that Billy Bingham, when he disappeared, had —

  His brain poised, stopped by the impossibility of this situation. His own doctor had already told him that mental disturbances, such as this boy had, were usually traced to an overactive imagination.

  Mitchell drew a deep breath. 'All right. Now, two more questions. What time of day was it?'

  'Seth and I went swimming after school,' said Billy. 'So it was late afternoon'.

  'Okay. According to the paper, it wasn't until nearly ten when you got back to your house. Where were you from four-thirty in the afternoon till ten o'clock at night?'

  'I wasn't anywhere,' said Billy. 'Seth and I were fighting over the stone. I fell. And when I picked myself up, it was pitch dark.' He was suddenly tearful. 'I don't know what happened. I guess he just left me lying there, somehow.'

  Mitchell climbed to his feet, thinking suddenly: This is ridiculous. I ought to have my head examined.

  Nevertheless, he paused at the door and flung one more question toward the bed, 'Has anyone else called you — besides the police, I mean, and the big man, and me?'

  'Just a woman from the library.'

  'Library?' Mitchell echoed blankly.

  'She wanted to know the exact time I woke up beside the lake. Her name is Edith Price, and she works in the library. Of course, I didn't know.'

  It seemed meaningless. Mitchell said quickly, simulating a friendliness he no longer felt, 'Well, Billy, I guess I'd better let you get back to your comic book. Thanks a lot.'

  He went out of the room and out of the hospital. He paid his bill at the hotel, got into his rented car, drove to the airport, and flew back to Miami. But the time the plane landed, the old, disturbing music from his childhood had faded from his mind.

  It seemed to Mitchell that the Musician had let him down. To ensure that it never happened again, he resolved to cancel his subscription to the Harkdale Inquirer.

  * *

  In Chicago.

  Seth Mitchell (of the Seth Mitchell Detective Agency) stared at the man who had just walked into his office as if he was seeing a hallucination. Finally he blinked and said: 'Am I crazy?'

  The stranger, a well-set-up young man in his mid-thirties, sat down in the visitor's chair, and said with an enigmatic smile, 'The resemblance is remarkable, isn't it?'

  He spoke in a firm baritone; and except that Mitchell knew better, he would have sworn it was his own voice.

  In fact, afterward, in telling Marge Aikens about the visitor, he confessed, 'I keep feeling that it was me sitting there.'

  'But what did he want?' Marge asked. She was a slim blond, taking her first look at thirty, and taking it well; Mitchell intended to marry her someday when he could find another associate as efficient. 'What did he look like?'

  'Me. That's what I'm trying to tell you. He was my spitting image. He even wore a suit that reminded me of one I've got at home.' He pleaded uneasily, 'Don't be too hard on me, Marge. I went to pieces. It's all vague.'

  'Did he give you his address?'

  Mitchell looked down unhappily at the interview sheet, 'It's not written down!'

  'Did he say if he intended to come to the office again?'

  'No, but he gave me this thousand dollars in bills, and I gave him a receipt. So we're committed.'

  'To what?'

  'That's the silliest part of it He wants me to find an onyx crystal. He says he saw it quite a while back in a small-town museum south of New York. He can't remember just where.'

  'That's going to be either very hard or very easy.' Marge was thoughtful; she seemed to be considering the problem involved.

  'Let me finish,' said Mitchell grimly. 'I know where that crystal is. Just think of what I said. I know that region like a book. I was born there, remember?'

  'It had slipped my mind,' said Marge. 'You think you can locate the crystal because — '

  Mitchell said, 'It's in the museum annex of the public library in the town of Harkdale, where I was born. And now — get this. I presented that crystal to the library, and, what's even more amazing, I dreamed about that stone the other night.'

  Marge did not let him get off the subject. 'And he came to you? Out of the scores of detective agencies in Chicago, he came to the one man in the world who looks like him and who knows where that crystal is?'

  'He came to me.'

  Marge was pursing her beautiful lips. 'Seth, this is fantastic, You shouldn't have let him get away. You're usually so sharp.'

  'Thanks.' Dryly.

  'Why didn't you tell him where it is?'

  'And lose a thousand dollars? My dear, a detective is sometimes like a doctor. People pay him for information he already has.'

  Marge held out her hand. 'Let me see that interview sheet' As she read it, she said without looking up, 'What are you going to do?'

  'Well, I told him the truth, that I've got several days of workload to get rid of; and then — '

  He fell silent, and the silence grew so long, the woman finally looked up. She was relieved at the expression she saw on his face, for it was the shrewd, reasoning look that was always there when he was at his detective best.

  He caught her glance, said, 'It would be a mistake to appear in Harkdale until three or four mysteries have been cleared up. Like, how come there's two of us.'

  'You have no relations?'

  'Some cousins.'

  'Ever see them?'

  He shook his head. 'Not since I was around nineteen, when my mother died.' He smiled grimly. 'Harkdale is not a town one goes back to. But scotch that thought you've got. None of my cousins looked like me.' He shuddered. 'Ugh, no.'

  Marge said firmly, 'I think when you do finally go, you ought to be disguised.'

  'You may count on it!' was the steely reply. 'This calls for all our ingenuity,'

  * *

  Elsewhere on earth, about two dozen of the total of l,8l 1 Seth Mitchells — among whom was the best of all possible Seth Mitchells — also considered the crystal, remembered their dreams of a few nights earlier, and had a strange, tense conviction of an imminent crisis.

  As the Seth Mitchell in Montreal, Canada, described it to his French-Canadian wife, 'I can't get over the feeling that I'm going to have to measure up. Remember, I mentioned that to you when I awakened the other morning.'

  His wife, a pretty blond who had a French-Canadian woman's practical contempt for such fantasies, remembered it well, and wanted to know, measure up to what?

  Her husband said unhappily, 'I have a feeling I could have made, better decisions, made more of myself, I am not the man I could have been.'

  'So what?' she wanted to know, 'Who is? And what of it?'

  'Kaput. That's what's of it.'

  'How do you mean?' sharply

  'Kaput' He shrugged. 'I'm sorry to be so negative, my dear. But that's the feeling. Since I didn't measure up, I'm through.'

  His wife sighed. 'My mother warned me that all men get crazy ideas as they approach forty. And here you are.'

  'I should have been braver, or something,' he moaned.

  'What's wrong with being a tax consultant?' she demanded. Her husband seemed not to hear, 'I have a feeling I ought to vis
it my hometown.' He spoke in an anxious tone.

  She grabbed his arm. 'You're going straight to Dr Ledoux,' she said. 'You need a checkup.'

  Dr Ledoux could find nothing wrong. 'In fact, you seem to be in exceptionally good health.'

  The Seth Mitchell of Montreal had to concede that his sudden alarm was pretty ridiculous.

  But he decided to visit Harkdale as soon as he cleared up certain business.

  V

  The man's voice came suddenly, with a slight foreign accent 'Miss Price, I want to talk to you.'

  In the darkness, Edith saw the speaker, and saw that he stood in the shadows between the garage and the rooming house where she lived, barring her way.

  Seeing him, she stopped short.

  Before she could speak, the voice continued, 'What did you do with the crystal?'

  'I — don't — understand.'

  She spoke the words automatically. She could see her interrogator more clearly now. He was short and broad of build. Abruptly, she recognized him as the man who had been with the Seth Mitchell look-alike in the gold Cadillac.

  'Miss Price, you removed that crystal from the display cabinet. Either give it to me or tell me what you did with it, and that'll be the end of the matter.'

  Edith had the tense feeling of a person who has acted unwisely and who therefore cannot possibly make any admissions, not even to a stranger.

  'I don't know what you're talking about,' she half-whispered.

  'Look, Miss Price.' The man stepped out of the shadows. His tone was conciliatory. 'Let's go into your apartment and talk this over.'

  His proposal was relieving. For her apartment was only a little suite in a rooming house in which the other tenants were never more than a wall away.

  Incredibly — afterward she thought of it as incredible — she was instantly trusting, and started past him, unsuspecting. And so the surprise as he grabbed her was total. One of his arms engulfed both her arms and body. Simultaneously, he put a hard, unyielding palm over her mouth and whispered, 'I've got a gun!'

  Half-paralyzed by that threat, she was aware of her captor carrying her toward the back alley. And she allowed him to shove her into a car that was parked against a fence.

  He climbed in beside her, and sat there in the almost dark of the night, gazing at her. It was too dark to see the expression on his face. But as the seconds went by, and he made no threatening move, her heart slowed in its rapid beating, and she finally gasped, Who are you? What do you want?'

  The man chuckled satirically and said, 'I'm the worst of all possible Athtars from the thirty-fifth century.' He chuckled again, more grimly 'But I turned out to have a high survival faculty.'

  His voice tightened. 'Where I come from, I'm a physicist I sensed my danger, and I analyzed a key aspect of the nature of the crystal in record time. In dealing with human beings, it operates on the vibrations a body puts forth from all its cells. In re-creating that vibration, it creates the person. Conversely, in canceling the vibration, it uncreates him. Recognizing this — and since I was not its orientation in my era — I simply put up a barrier on the total vibration level of my own body, and thus saved my life when it uncreated all the lesser Athtars.'

  The man added somberly, 'But evidently, by defeating it, I remained attached to it. on some other level. As it fell back through time to the twentieth century, I fell with it. Not — unfortunately — to where and when it went Instead, I arrived last week beside that ledge overlooking Lake Naragang.'

  He finished in a wondering tone, 'What a remarkable, intricate internal energy-flow system it must have. Imagine! In passing through time it must have detected this twenty-five-year inactive period, and its reawakening, and dropped me off within days of its own reactivation.'

  The voice became silent; and there was the darkness again. Edith ventured a small movement; she changed her position on the seat to ease a growing discomfort in one leg. When there was no countermovement from him, she whispered, 'Why are you telling me this? It all sounds perfectly mad!'

  Even as she uttered the stereotype, she realized that a quality of equal madness in herself believed every word that he had spoken. She thought in a spasm of self-criticism: I really must be one of the lesser Edith Prices. She had to fight to suppress an outburst of hysterical laughter.

  'From you,' said the worst of all possible Athtars, 'I want information.

  'I don't know anything about a crystal.'

  'The information I want,' said the man in an inexorable voice, "is this: At any time recently have you had a thought about wishing you had taken a different path in life instead of ending up in Harkdale as a librarian?'

  Edith's mind flashed back to her series of impulses after she had mailed the crystal — and back farther to some of the times she had thought about in that moment. 'Why, yes,' she breathed.

  'Tell me about one of them,' said the man.

  She told him of the thoughts she had had of just getting on a bus or train and leaving.

  In the darkness the man leaned back in the seat. He seemed surprisingly relaxed. He said with a chuckle, 'Are you the best of all possible Edith Prices?'

  Edith made no reply. She was beginning to have the feeling that perhaps she could confide in this man; should tell him where the crystal was.

  Athtar was speaking again: 'I have a conviction that the Edith Price who is the twentieth-century orientation for the crystal is on that bus, or is heading for safety somewhere else. And that therefore you are under the same threat as I am — of being uncreated as soon as the crystal selects the perfect Edith Price.'

  For Edith, terror began at that moment.

  During the minutes that followed, she was only vaguely aware of words mumbling out of her mouth.

  Listening to her revelation, Athtar suppressed an impulse to murder her out of hand. He played it cautiously, thinking that if anything went wrong, this Edith was all he had to help him to trace the other Ediths.

  So he spoke reassuring words, put her out of the car, and watched her as she staggered off ... safe ... she thought.

  VI

  The note read: 'He Wasn't there. It wasn't there. The farm was deserted. Did you lie to me? Athtar.'

  Edith felt a chill the first time she read the words; particularly she reacted to the last line with fear. But on her tenth of twelfth reading, she was more determined. She thought: If this whole crazy business is real, I'd better — what? Be brave? Consider the problem? Act with decisiveness?

  It was Saturday.

  Before going to work, she bought a small Browning automatic at the Harkdale Hardware. She had often gone target-practicing with the second of her two college boyfriends, the one who had a gay philosophy that God was dead, and that therefore one need only avoid jail — and otherwise do anything one pleased. Eventually, he departed without marrying her, presumably feeling guiltless about having lured her away from a man who might have offered her a wedding ring.

  But this man did show her how to shoot an automatic firearm, and so she put the little pistol into her purse — and felt a hardening of her conviction that it was time this Edith started measuring up.

  One doubt remained: Was willingness to shoot in self-defense a step forward, or a step away, from being the best of all possible Edith Prices?

  At the library that day, Tilsit was waiting for her with another news item:

  -=-

  YOUNG FARMER MISSING

  Seth Mitchell, Abbotsville farmer, has not been at his farm for several days. A neighbor, Carey Grayson, who called on Mitchell yesterday to buy seed grain, found his cows unmilked, a horse in the stable starving, chickens unfed, and no sign of life around the house. Grayson fed the animals, then contacted Mitchell's cousin in a neighboring county and notified the sheriff's office, An investigation is under way.

  -=-

  Edith handed the paper back with a meaningless comment But she was thinking: So that's what Athtar had discovered.

  In spite of her resolve, she trembled. It seeme
d to her that there was no turning back; she must carry forward inexorably with all the thoughts that she had had.

  Sunday.

  She had driven to New York and parked two blocks from the little hotel for women only where she had formerly lived. Surely, she told herself, that was where at least one Edith duplicate could have gone.

  From a phone booth she called the hotel and asked for Edith Price. There was a pause, then, 'I'm ringing,' said the woman desk clerk's voice.

  Instantly breathless, Edith hung up. She sagged limply inside the booth, eyes closed. It was not clear to her even now what she. had expected. But the only hopeful thought in her mind was: Can it be that I'm the only Edith who knows that there are others? And does that give me an advantage over the unknowing ones?

  Or was there already somewhere an Edith Price who had naturally become the best of them all?

  Her thought ended. She realized that a short, stocky man was standing beside the booth, partly out of her line of vision. There was something familiar about him.

  The familiarity instantly grew sensational. She straightened and she turned.

  Athtar!

  The Edith Price who stepped out of the phone booth was still shaky and still not brave. But in two days fear and threat and gulps of terror had transformed her. She had been a vaguely sad, wish-my-mistakes-won't-doom-me young woman. Now, at times she trembled with anxiety, but at other times she compressed her lips and had thoughts that were tough and realistic.

  The sight of Athtar caromed her into anxiety. Which was just as well, the tough part of her analyzed realistically. She didn't trust the worst of all possible Athtars. And he would feel safer with a frightened Edith, she was sure.

  Seen close in broad daylight on a deserted New York street on Sunday morning, Athtar — short, broad, with a thick face and gray cheeks — was surprisingly as she remembered him. Totally unprepossessing.

  He said softly, 'Why don't you let me talk to her?' Edith scarcely heard. The first question of her forty-eight-hour, stop-only-for-sleep, stream of consciousness siphoned through her voice. 'Are you really from the thirty-fifth century?'

  He gave her a quick, shrewd look, must have realized how wound up she was, and said receptively, 'Yes.'