The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

know.”
    â€œIt will be easier, now that your sister has explained it.”
    â€œI don’t think it will be easier,” Felton said tiredly. “I do not think that she has explained it.”
    â€œNot to you and me, perhaps. But we’ll put the eggheads to work on it. They’ll figure it out. They always do.”
    â€œPerhaps not this time.”
    â€œOh, yes,” the Secretary nodded. “You see, we’ve got to stop it. We can’t have this kind of thing—immoral, godless, and a threat to every human being on earth. The kids were right. We would have to kill them, you know. It’s a disease. The only way to stop a disease is to kill the bugs that cause it. The only way; I wish there was another way, but there isn’t.”

There have been all kinds of notions and guesses as to how it would end. One held that sooner or later there would be too many people; another that we would do each other in, and the atom bomb made that a very good likelihood. All sorts of notions, except the simple fact that we were what we were. We could find a way to feed any number of people and perhaps even a way to avoid wiping each other out with the bomb; those things we are very good at, but we have never been any good at changing ourselves or the way we behave.
    I know. I am not a bad man or a cruel man; quite to the contrary, I am an ordinary, humane person, and I love my wife and my children and I get along with my neighbors. I am like a great many other men, and I do the things they would do and just as thoughtlessly. There it is in a nutshell.
    I am also a writer, and I told Lieberman, the curator, and Fitzgerald, the government man, that I would like to write down the story. They shrugged their shoulders. “Go ahead,” they said, “because it won’t make one bit of difference.”
    â€œYou don’t think it would alarm people?”
    â€œHow can it, alarm anyone when nobody will believe it?”
    â€œIf I could have a photograph or two.”
    â€œOh, no,” they said then. “No photographs.”
    â€œWhat kind of sense does that make?” I asked them. “You are willing to let me write the story—why not the photographs so that people could believe me?”
    â€œThey still won’t believe you. They will just say you faked the photographs, but no one will believe you. It will make for more confusion, and if we have a chance of getting out of this, confusion won’t help.”
    â€œWhat will help?”
    They weren’t ready to say that, because they didn’t know. So here is what happened to me, in a very straightforward and ordinary manner.
    Every summer, sometime in August, four good friends of mine and I go for a week’s fishing on the St. Regis chain of lakes in the Adirondacks. We rent the same shack each summer; we drift around in canoes, and sometimes we catch a few bass. The fishing isn’t very good, but we play cards well together, and we cook out and generally relax. This summer past, I had some things to do that couldn’t be put off. I arrived three days late, and the weather was so warm and even and beguiling that I decided to stay on by myself for a day or two after the others left. There was a small flat lawn in front of the shack, and I made up my mind to spend at least three or four hours at short putts. That was how I happened to have the putting iron next to my bed.
    The first day I was alone, I opened a can of beans and a can of beer for my supper. Then I lay down in my bed with Life on the Mississippi , a pack of cigarettes, and an eight ounce chocolate bar. There was nothing I had to do, no telephone, no demands and no newspapers. At that moment, I was about as contented as any man can be in these nervous times.
    It was still light outside, and enough light came in through the window above my head for me to read by. I was just reaching for a fresh cigarette, when I looked up and saw it on the