Even among this past year's epidemic of suicides, Ambrose Harmon's death would stand out like Lyndon Johnson in a lineup. ![]() "We won't find a note," Trimble predicted.Įven three months earlier Trimble would have thought, How incredible! or Who could have pushed him? Now, riding up in the elevator, he thought only, Reporters. "So late, you mean." Bentley had beaten him to the scene by twenty minutes. For the call had come in at 8:03, just as Trimble arrived at headquarters. "But why was he up so early?" Trimble wondered. There was little to be learned from seeing him in his present condition. Others would take samples of his blood, to learn if he had acted under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He wore a bright silk dressing gown and a sleeping jacket with a sash. The pavement was splattered red for yards around him. In the early morning light he lay, more a stain than man, thirty-six stories below the edge of his own penthouse roof. Why would a man like Ambrose Harmon go off a building? Too many suicides, too many casual murders, not enough men. Another emergency? The department couldn't handle it all. Through the closed door to his office came the sounds of men hurrying. To Trimble, cleaning his gun was like knitting, a way to keep his hands busy while his mind wandered off. He'd never fired it except on the target range and never expected to. From the bottom drawer he took his gun-cleaning equipment, then his. Gene Trimble spread the morning paper on his desk. Each of these trying to deal, alone, with the city's endless, inexplicable parade of suicides. Streaming out of police headquarters in all their multitudes, leaving a multitude of Trimbles behind them. ![]() Many had left on time, and were now halfway home to dinner, out to a movie, watching a strip show, racing to the scene of another death. Gene Trimble thought of other universes parallel to this one, and a parallel Gene Trimble in each one. Not that he was really accomplishing anything.īut if he left now, he'd only have to take it up again tomorrow.Īnd the branchings began again. ![]() For he had his teeth in the problem, and he couldn't let go. He stood up to go home and slowly sat down again. Trimble suspected that it was worldwide, that other nations were simply keeping it quiet. It was enough to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, who had other problems to worry about. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn't understand the theory, though God knows he'd tried. There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute.
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