The Edge of Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF

and blocked in us. I think that they have opened it. I think they are teaching and learning to listen to thoughts.”
    There was a silence after that, and then Atwater, one of our psychologists, said uneasily, “I don’t think I believe it. I’ve investigated every test and report on telepathy ever published in this country—the Duke stuff and all the rest of it. We know how tiny and feeble brain waves are—it is fantastic to imagine that they can be a means of communication.”
    â€œThere is also a statistical factor,” Rhoda Lannon, a mathematician, observed. “If this faculty existed even as a potential in mankind, is it conceivable that there would be no recorded instance of it?”
    â€œMaybe it has been recorded,” said Fleming, one of our historians. “Can you take all the whippings, burnings and hangings of history and determine which were telepaths?”
    â€œI think I agree with Dr. Goldbaum,” Mark said. “The children are becoming telepaths. I am not moved by a historical argument, or by a statistical argument, because our obsession here is environment. There is no record in history of a similar group of unusual children being raised in such an environment. Also, this may be—and probably is—a faculty which must be released in childhood or remain permanently blocked. I believe Dr. Haenigson will bear me out when I say that mental blocks imposed during childhood are not uncommon.”
    â€œMore than that,” Dr. Haenigson, our chief psychiatrist, nodded. “No child in our society escapes the need to erect some mental block in his mind. Whole areas of every human being’s mind are blocked in early childhood. This is an absolute of human society.”
    Dr. Goldbaum was looking at us strangely. I was going to say something—but I stopped. I waited and Dr. Goldbaum said:
    â€œI wonder whether we have begun to realize what we may have done. What is a human being? He is the sum of his memories, which are locked in his brain, and every moment of experience simply builds up the structure of those memories. We don’t know as yet what is the extent or power of the gift these children of ours appear to be developing, but suppose they reach a point where they can share the totality of memory? It is not simply that among themselves there can be no lies, no deceit, no rationalization, no secrets, no guilts—it is more than that.”
    Then he looked from face to face, around the whole circle of our staff. We were beginning to comprehend him. I remember my own reactions at that moment, a sense of wonder and discovery and joy and. heartbreak too; a feeling so poignant that it brought tears to my eyes.
    â€œYou know, I see,” Dr. Goldbaum nodded. “Perhaps it would be best for me to speak about it. I am much older than any of you—and I have been through, lived through the worst years of horror and bestiality that mankind ever knew. When I saw what I saw, I asked myself a thousand times: What is the meaning of mankind—if it has any meaning at all, if it is not simply a haphazard accident, an unusual complexity of molecular structure? I know you have all asked yourselves the same thing. Who are we? What are we destined for? What is our purpose? Where is sanity or reason in these bits of struggling, clawing, sick flesh? We kill, we torture, we hurt and destroy as no other species does. We ennoble murder and falsehood and hypocrisy and superstition; we destroy our own body with drugs and poisonous food; we deceive ourselves as well as others—and we hate and hate and hate.
    â€œNow something has happened. If these children can go into each other’s minds completely—then they will have a single memory, which is the memory of all of them. All experience will be common to all of them, all knowledge, all dreams—and they will be immortal. For as one dies, another child is linked to the whole, and another