A Mirror for Observers

1

Drozma, tonight I am racked by an old malady, a love for the human race.

I have searched more than nine years. As you know from my reports, I have not found him. If living, Angelo is twenty-one. You have been kind, to support me with money and counsel. With the Russo-Chinese War reeling into a third dreary year and the rest of the world in a frenzy of indecision, I know you cannot spare other personnel to aid me, but I must go on searching. I will send this journal later in place of a formal report. A few hours ago something happened which will be a pleasure to record, but otherwise I have little to tell: frustrations, false clues, dead-end journeys. I have come here to New York and taken an apartment, because of a newspaper photograph that made me think of Billy Kell.

It was a picture of that fellow Joseph Max being interviewed by some journalist. Behind Max was a face alertly blank like a bodyguard’s, enough like Kell to excite my wondering. Namir (and his son?) may have been searching for Angelo as persistently as I. In the nine years I have had no more hint of their whereabouts than of his. I was in Cincinnati when I saw the picture a week ago. I had gone there because one of my hobo friends slipped word to me that someone resembling my “grandson” was hanging around the river docks. Nothing in it. One more dark-haired bum with a limp; a face like a woodchuck. The world’s full of dark young men with lame left legs. The tramps and prostitutes and petty criminals who try to help me are not people who know how to describe a face. When I make contact with them I am a crazy old coot hunting a grandson who might have died long ago or (they think) never lived. They try to be kind, supplying rumors to keep the old man going, partly for laughs. I have no good reason to suppose that Angelo sank into the shadows of the underworld: it’s only that those shadows are easier to explore than the endless multitudes of the respectable. Quite possibly some decent family gave him shelter and another name. I go on. I can’t mingle in any crowd without sooner or later seeing some dark youth with a limp. Once I saw one who not only resembled Angelo but had a scar over the right eye, as Angelo must have. That was on the copter-bus from Sacramento to Oakland. I trailed him home, watched him a few more times, made inquiries in the neighborhood. Nice kid, not even Italian, lived in Oakland all his life. Some hopes won’t die.

No doubt you have Observers keeping track of Joseph Max and the antics of his Unity Party. I shall be another, at least until I satisfy myself about Billy Kell. Maybe I can turn up something interesting as a by-product. Hell’s a-brewing around Joe Max. And by the way, what is there about his party to attract a man of the stature of Dr. Hodding? At risk of repeating what other Observers may have told you, this is the Hodding story as I saw it in the papers two years ago: Jason Hodding was director of the Wales Foundation (biochemical research and very good), and startled the world out of its pants with a propaganda blast for Max’s party in the congressional elections of ’70; supposed to have helped elect that freak Senator Galt of Alaska. Then Hodding quit the Foundation (or was fired?) and dropped out of sight of the public. Lives prosperously on Long Island, “retired”; said to know more about virus mutations than anyone else at large….

Max calls it the Organic Unity Party now. He no longer yelps in public about racial purity, though some of the whispers against the Federalists’ Negro-Indian candidate must originate with Max. In public he approves of human brotherhood: there are votes in it. He’ll make a try in the fall election, shouting for America to rule the world. “Clean up Asia!” — a banner with that legend decorates his headquarters on Lexington Upper Level, and nobody laughs. We must go in and reform Asia (for its own good of course) while the Russian and Chinese giants are (apparently) gasping their last. Maybe they are: everything Max says carries the virus of half-truth. The techs say, and Satellite observations are supposed to confirm, that no atomic explosions have taken place in Asia since last summer. I give the Satellite Authority credit for resisting the pressure a year ago to solve everything with a few hydrogen jobs. That took courage, up there on the Midnight Star, since the humanitarian opposition was, as so often, tiptoeing by on the other side. As of March, 30,972, we don’t know — frantically, elaborately, diplomatically don’t know. If you believe Satellite Authority communiqués (I do, more or less) there must be idiotic trench-and-outpost warfare all along the north-and-south backbone of Asia, Siberia remaining the darkness it always was. Now and then the Authority says plaintively that it really can’t collect social and economic data from 1075 miles up. Drozma, tell me when you write whether Asian Center is still safe. I had friends there.

Here, only the Organic Unity Party appears to have no doubts.

Nobody laughs at Max. That frightens me. The public is hardened to seeing his fanatic puss on the front page, telescreens, news-reels, always a bit sallow and sweat-shiny when they catch him without make-up, a bad animated caricature of John C. Calhoun with nothing of Calhoun’s honesty or personal gentleness. When, last year, Max developed a flopping cowlick — damn the thing, nobody laughed. He saves his juiciest venom for the newly formed Federalist Party. I haven’t made up my mind about them. Seems to be nothing disingenuous in the movement and much sense, if they’d tone down the doctrinaire certainty of their one-world members. They sometimes lose sight of their own good premise, that difference-within-union is the essence of federalism. Toward the Democrats and Republicans Max has only contempt — he says they are on the way out and that’s that. They make the mistake of paying him back in his own coin or trying to ignore him out of sight. The Republicans have been fresh out of ideas since ’968, when the Democrat Clifford got in (and how wrong I was about ’64! Would’ve lost my shirt, only I’m not the type.) Rooseveltian splash followed by Wilsonian bubbles. Nice chap, Clifford. Progressive they tell me. I sometimes wonder if he knows his aspirations from his elbow.

A word about the Philippines, Drozma. Watch that Institute of Human Studies. Founded in ’968. I have a hunch the personnel is earthquake-proof, same as the buildings, which I hope I’ll live to see someday. Not just another inflated foundation. It has the quiet sort of courage behind it. I like their prospectus: “To collect and make accessible to all the sum of available human knowledge” — large order, but they mean business. “To continue research in those studies most directly related to the nature and function of human beings.” And they explain that the use of the term “human beings” instead of “Man” is deliberate — that would naturally appeal to my cantankerous bias. Point is they’re thinking in terms of centuries and not scared by next week. You remember how Manila ought to have been one of the world’s greatest centers of trade and culture, if European rule-and-grab hadn’t smothered it in what they call the eighteenth century and later. I don’t know why it shouldn’t be the Athens of the twenty-first. When my mission is ended one way or another, I want to go there before returning to Northern City.

Tomorrow morning I shall visit Organic Unity Party headquarters and pose as a snarky old man with money. My new face suits me. I may have used a bit too much heat when I raised the cheekbones, but that merely makes me apple-cheeked, cute as hell, six feet two of short-tempered Santy Claus, talking slightly daown-East, and I’ve practiced a deadpan stare that comes in handy. I mean to be a potential angel for the campaign fund, not quite convinced but open to indoctrination. They’ll lay down some kind of carpet. If Billy Kell is in there I’ll smell him out.

Now I can turn to something that has lightened my 355 years.

After I left Latimer, to follow up a rumor that someone had seen a kid hitchhiker twenty miles out of town, I knew that the police were not uninterested in Benedict Miles. I had my new face, and it seemed best to inform Mrs. Wilks, through Toronto, that Miles had died, leaving the school provided for in his will. Less harassed and hurried judgment might have produced something better than that, but once it was done I couldn’t undo it. Mrs. Wilks wrote faithfully to the Toronto “trustees” until two years ago, and the Communicator sent her letters on to me when possible — often I had no address. Two years ago Sophia’s sister died. Sophia turned the school over to a successor, and took Sharon to London, feeling that her own teaching could carry the girl no further. Sharon’s family wasn’t mentioned in that last letter. I have not been too severely distressed by my separation from the child I loved, because I have known that, chance permitting, I would hear of her again. When I came to New York last week, Sharon’s debut was in the announcements. This evening she played, in Pro Arte Hall.

It is a new auditorium, part of a splendid development along the Hudson. You wouldn’t recognize New York, Drozma. I almost didn’t, for the last good view I had of it was back in 30,946. I have passed through a few times in the nine years, but with scarcely a chance to pause.

In the ’960s New York decided to make its waterfront beautiful instead of hideous. A great Esplanade runs from George Washington Bridge to Twenty-third Street, with tall buildings at intervals, some set back among the lower structures on the inner side of the Esplanade, others rising sheer from the river. They tell me the railroad still rumbles down below. Dock facilities have actually been expanded, but it doesn’t look so: to come in on a ship or ferry is to enter an archway in a gleaming cliff. When I have lime, think I’ll go over to Jersey in order to come back on one of the chubby Diesel ferries and see for myself. The heavy automotive traffic on the second level is not felt up on the Esplanade, as you don’t feel it when you walk on the upper levels of the north-and-south avenues. On the Esplanade you have only the sky, the graceful buildings, human beings, and the Hudson River wind that now seems not hostile, gritty, and snarling but a refreshing part; of the city’s majesty. It was difficult to have any patience with New York in the old days. Times change. Hell’s Kitchen was wiped away long ago; blest if I know what they did with Grant’s Tomb but I’m sure it’s tucked in down there somewhere. This waterfront was planned soon after they snatched the city from the politicians and tried the manager system. They have kept out catchpenny concessions. On the wide Esplanade itself not even bicycles are allowed, though children are everywhere.

The city’s resident population has gone down by about a million, with corresponding increase in the huge arc of the metropolitan district. There’s revival of the old proposal to make the district a separate state. Civic groups kick the idea around. One in particular is gathering petition signatures and doing spadework in Congress. They want the new state to be named Adelphi. I’ve got no objections.

Pro Arte Hall is high up in one of the buildings rising directly from the river — clean-shining steel and stone and glass. Conditioned as we have been, Drozma, to the hidden life, we’ll never quite know how they do it. These buildings are wholly human, artifacts of their complex science, yet married to nature also, to wind and sky, stars and sun.

The auditorium itself is severe. Cold white and self-effacing gray. Nothing irrelevant to tickle or distract the eye, only an uncomplicated stage and stern classical dignity of the piano. (But it was good, during intermission, to go into a lounge and find, beyond its glass west wall, an open space from which one looked down to the river. How far down I don’t know. A bright liner passing downstream was a playroom toy. In spite of the March chill I was happy to watch it until the bell rang for the second half of Sharon’s miracle.)

Few in the audience knew anything about her, I think. Just one more New York debut. I had a case of nerves, my heartbeat shaking me each minute. I read the program a dozen times, and knew nothing of what it said except that the first number was the Bach G Minor Fugue.

Then she was there. Slim, slight, seeming tall — oh, I’d known that! In white. I’d known that too. Her corsage was a tiny cluster of blue scillas and snowdrops, absurdly modest. She still wore her brown hair shoulder-length, misty with strange lights. She didn’t find it necessary to smile. Her bow was almost perfunctory. (She has told me she was totally petrified, couldn’t bow deeper for fear of going over flat on her face.) I remembered Amagoya.

She seated herself, touched her palms with a handkerchief, adjusted the long skirt to clear her ankles. Dimly I knew she was still sort of snub-nosed. Somewhere there must have been a red rubber ball on a string….

Then I had to pay her the best compliment: forgetting her. The fugue took hold with clear-cut authority. What unreal and therefore eternal cities did Bach know, to create his architecture out of the marble of dreams? Was the G Minor written after his blindness? I don’t remember. Not that it matters: his visions need no common eyesight. It was as if Sharon had said (to all of us): “Come here with me. I can show you what I saw.” No other way to play Bach, but who at nineteen is supposed to know that?

In spite of the fugue’s enormous ending there was not the usual burst of excitement killing the last chord. Instead they gave her some seconds of that enchanted silence all human performers pray to receive (an experience I can’t quite share, since Martian audiences grant the silence as a matter of course, for music’s sake). When the crash came it was not prolonged, for Sharon did smile then, and the shy grimace touched off sympathetic laughter, a way of saying they loved her, and the applause broke off short at the merest half turn of her head back to the piano.

The rest of the first half was all Chopin. The sonata; three nocturnes; two mazurkas; the F Sharp Minor Impromptu, which I think is the extremest distillation of Chopin, a union of ecstasy and despair nearly unbearable. Sharon thinks so, played it so. Even with that still burning inside us, we demanded an encore at the end of the first half, a thing unheard of nowadays. When the shouts were unmistakable, she gave us the little first Prelude, as she might have tossed a flower to a lover who deserved it but wasn’t too bright. Pianissimo all the way through, disregarding the conventional dynamic marks: like opening a window on a waterfall and closing it before you can guess what the river is saying. I never played it like that. Frederic Chopin didn’t, when I heard him in 30,848, but I don’t believe he’d have minded. I can’t fathom the phonograph-intellects who insist on “definitive interpretation.” You might as well insist, when a friend gives you a jewel, that only one facet may be looked at, world without end. You might as well ask for a definitive moonrise. Sharon grinned after that tour de force — not a definitive grin either, a big human one. She ran off. The lights went up.

It was an uncommonly long program, especially for a debut. A newcomer is still expected to be humble before tradition. A chunk of Bach for the critics, a chunk of Beethoven, maybe some Schumann to fill in the cracks, Chopin to prove you’re a pianist, finally a scintillant gob of Liszt for bravura and schmaltz. Sharon had paid her respects with Bach all right — what Bach! — but only because she wanted to. My mangled scrap of program told me the second half began with a suite by Andrew Carr, an Australian composer not known till a year ago. And it ended with Beethoven, Sonata in C, Opus 53.

Realization came slowly. I’m not in the habit of thinking in opus numbers, but it came through then to my dazed intelligence that 53 is the “Waldstein.” I think that was what made me reach one of those impulsive, wholly emotional decisions which I don’t expect to regret. I scratched on the rumpled program: Not dead, had to change face and name to help me hunt for A. No, dear, I haven’t found him. May I see you? Alone, please, and don’t tell anyone about me yet. You’re a musician. I love you beyond comprehemption.

I found an usher, a girl who promised to get my note to Miss Brand. I wandered outside. I watched that ship going downstream in the open night. After a while, as I’ve told you, I was quite happy. When I went back the popeyed usher located me, pushed a slip of paper in my hand, and whispered: “Hey, know what she did when she read your note? Kissed me! Well, I mean…”

I bumbled like Santy Claus. The lights had already dimmed, but I could read the huge scrawl: Blue River Café 2 blox down Esplan riverside wait for me lounge escape earliest poss O Ben Ben BEN!!!

She may have tried to see me in the audience, though I had mentioned a changed face. There was a blind look about her. I knew terror, fearing I might have upset her and hurt the second half of the concert. But then she was resting her fingers silently on the keys, as if the towering Steinway had its own will and could communicate, soothe, clear away confusion and leave her free. I needn’t have worried.

The Andrew Carr suite is excellent. Complex, serious, young; perhaps too heavy, too immense, but with a cumulative passion that justifies it. Likely a greater maturity will teach Carr the value of the light touch. In the program notes, I remember, he acknowledges a major debt to Brahms. All to the good, especially if it means that composers of the ’970s have finally buried the I-don’t-really-mean-it school of the ’930s and ’940s. Carr has learned more from the young Stravinsky than from the old; Beethoven glances over his shoulder; he needs more Mozart in his system….

I won’t play the “Waldstein” again. Anything else, yes — I don’t despise my own talent. Not the “Waldstein.” For anyone else it would have been bad programming to let the sonata follow the shattering climaxes and nearly impossible athletic demands of the Carr suite. Not for Sharon. She wasn’t tired. She made it a summing up, a final statement to throw the colors of a thousand flames on all the rest.

Maybe I’ve heard the opening Allegro done with more technical finish; never with more sincerity. In the melancholy of the brief Adagio I was lost. I don’t know all that Sharon meant; Beethoven’s meditations are not altogether ours at any time. She took the gentle opening of the Rondo more slowly than I would have done, but she was right, and the acceleration of the A Minor passage became all the more a terrifying flash, a blaze of longing abruptly revealed…. The sonata’s conclusion was blinding. No one looks at that much light.

I don’t recall much about the ovation they gave her: we were all hysterical. I don’t even remember what all her encores were. There were seven. We let her go at last only because she put on a small comic pantomime of exhaustion.

You could not imagine, Drozma, the first thing she said when she slipped into the Blue River Café, astonishingly small, shy, a mousy gray wrap over her gown — slipped in and knew me somehow through all my changes, caught up the clumsy skirt to run like a child and throw herself at me and bury her snub nose in my shirt. She said: “Ben, I fluffed the Prestissimo, I fluffed it, I went too fast, I scrabbled it — where, where have you been?”

“You never fluffed anything.” I must have muttered more such stuff while we struggled for calm.

We found a booth, with a window overlooking the river and the night. Tranquil and civilized, that restaurant, mild lighting, no fuss, hurry, or noise. It was past eleven o’clock, but they produced a hero-size dinner for Sharon, who admitted to fasting before the concert and now looked with pathetic astonishment at the lobster, saying: “Could I bodaciously have ordered that in my madness?” She ate it though, with all the fixings, and we grinned and mumbled and made groping reaches for the unsayable. Then the lobster was gone, coffee and cognac were with us; Sharon squared her little shoulders and sighed and said: “Now…!”

If there was anything in the nine years I failed to tell her it was either an unavoidable part of our Martian deception or too small to remember. I am “Will Meisel” at present. She found it difficult not to call me Ben. My departure from Latimer had been, in a way, cruel — I knew it at the time. She did not reproach me for it, or for the false message of my death — not directly. But once she took my fingers and pressed them against her cheek and said: “When Mrs. Wilks told me — you see, until Angelo went away I’d never lost anybody — and then you—” But rather than let me flounder and beg forgiveness she went on quickly: “Your hands are the same, just the same. How was it possible to change your face so much? I saw you recognize me, or maybe I’d’ve known you anyway, but—”

With careful vagueness and wholly genuine embarrassment, I lied about having suffered a serious face injury, years before my time in Latimer. I hinted that part of my facial structure was prosthetic, under a successful skin graft, and that I could play tricks with it. I conveyed too that I was sensitive and didn’t like talking of it. “Nine years’ aging too, Sharon, and the white hair is natural.”

“Ben — Will — why was it necessary? But, darling, don’t tell me unless you want to. You’re here. I’ll get used to it sometime….” I told her that my going away had made the police suspect me in connection with the disappearances of Angelo and Feuermann. She confirmed that Feuermann had never been found. My search had to be unhampered, I said, so I juggled personalities and faces, burying an old identity. It was all too far from the human norm and I don’t think it satisfied her, but it was the best I could do. She too remembered Amagoya. She hasn’t a suspicious heart. Sharon at ten had been somewhat sheltered from grown-up speculations and rumors, missing the real and unreal implications of that disaster in Latimer. Music and Mrs. Wilks had held her steady when the loss of Angelo and myself had shaken her world. Soon there had been time, and adolescence. I had foolishly not quite grasped the vast difference between nine of my years and Sharon’s nine between ten and nineteen…. I told her too how I thought Angelo might have been swallowed by the underworld — joined the hobos, something like that — or even suffered amnesia because he felt lost and condemned himself for his mother’s death.

“Why did he mean so much to you?”

“I felt responsible, perhaps. I ought to have kept him out of trouble because I knew he was supernormal and vulnerable, and I didn’t do it.” She wasn’t satisfied. “And I came to think of him as like a son.” There was too much truth in that. “I should have been a better guardian, because I don’t think anyone else saw the dangers.” Not for the first time, she started to ask another question, but held it back, frowning into her cigarette smoke, cherishing my hand. “How well do you remember him, Sharon?”

“I don’t know.” She has developed a number of vivid little mannerisms, none of them posed. A trick of leaning forward suddenly shoving both hands up into her hair and keeping them there, while a tiny frown-crease comes and goes in her smooth forehead; pouting her big sweet mouth without knowing it; smiling so fleetingly you can’t be sure afterward that she smiled at all. “I don’t know. I know that I loved him pretty terribly. Ten years old is such a long time ago, Ben…. Afraid I don’t even know much about the famous male sex. It’s been — you know: technique, not parties — Czerny, not boy friends. And worth it, too — I haven’t minded that.”

“Plenty of time.”

“Oh — time…. I suppose I began to feel he was dead, after Mother Sophia — I’m sort of in the habit of calling her that, she likes it — after she told me that you were. I never forgot him, Ben, I just had to let it go into the past, like a station on a train. I didn’t finish high school, by the way. My mother died when I was thirteen, and Pop remarried — oh well, make way for Cinderella, I couldn’t stand the stepmother and she sure-to-God couldn’t stand me, so Mother Sophia took me to live with her — all I could’ve prayed for. I — hear from Pop now and then. Stiff little letters. Exceedingly grammatical.”

“He wasn’t there tonight?”

“Ah no, he” — her wonderful fingers were gripping my hand hard I again — “he doesn’t get around much, as the jellyfish said to the sea serpent. Means, translated, that while the heller he married runs the store, he goes down to the corner. Got it in all its beauty, darling? He’s Brand Anonymous. And little daughter can no more reach him than — oh, the devil with it. He writes only when he’s sober, about I once in two months, Ben—”

“Will.”

“I’m sorry — Will, Will. I’ve thought so much about Ben…. Well, he wrote that he would like to come to the recital but was very busy and not well. Could be the lady dictated it. She knows he still loves me, in his fashion, that’s her cross. People are so… so…” She gave it up.

We were both silent too long. I said: “Oo ill i owioffsh?”

For some reason that made her cry, but even while she groped impatiently for a handkerchief, and snatched mine, she was saying: “O. Ah ery ush. But I could go another cognac….”

“And Mother Sophia?”

“Splendid.” She was still annoyed at her eyes, wiping them, and repairing make-up. “Immortal — my God, if only she were! I didn’t know what to say, about coming away tonight. Lousy liar. Said I had a whim to be completely alone an hour or so, guess she didn’t mind. She’ll sit up for the press notices and not sleep, so can’t I take you home to see her?”

“Not this time, dear. Later.” I had saved that newspaper photograph, and presently showed it to her. “The man just behind Max, on his left. Remind you of anything?”

“Heck, it almost does.” She held it at different angles, then leaned back, closing the veils on the ocean-blue, opening them widely. “Billy Kell!”

“Just could be. Old Will Meisel has to find out.”

She stared awhile, darkly perplexed, not distrusting me but perhaps hurt by her certainty that I was withholding too much. “Will — what for? Do I sit quiet and play the piano while you butt your head on a stone wall? I have you back just in time to see you get hurt.”

“Angelo is alive, somewhere.”

“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved. Well, you think if Angelo’s alive he might be in touch with — that fellow?”

“It’s possible.”

“I do remember Billy Kell, and a nasty piece of work he was, not that he ever actually did anything to me. He would grow up to be a Unity Party job, wouldn’t he! I’ve got to say it: what if you’re just breaking your heart over something that — I mean, it was so long ago! And none of it your fault anyway. Why, Ben — Will — the police must have looked, good and hard, it’s what they’re for and they have the means, they wouldn’t’ve let it drop. But you — look, if he’s — if he died, you probably wouldn’t ever even know it. Would you? Or maybe by this time he’s a bank teller or a physics professor or some ghastly thing, and you — I could shake you.”

“I’m old,” I said. “I have money. I could help him. Now that I know you’re a big girl, there’s nothing I want to do more.”

“Then I’ll eat my words. If it’s what you have to do….”

“It could mean a lot to you, if I find him. Couldn’t it?”

“Darling, to be filthily honest: how do I know?”

2

Today and yesterday make an ending and a beginning. Drozma, I am nearly certain Angelo is alive. I’ll fill in some background.

Damn the Organic Unity Party, at least it doesn’t hide itself. It occupies the first floor of an office building that went up when Lexington was remodeled as one of the two-level avenues — the others are Second and Eighth, a triumph of the Gadget. Lower levels are only for cars equipped with electronic controls; no wheeled traffic on the upper levels except busses in narrow center lanes; overpasses for crosstown traffic.

My apartment is in a plush downtown development near the ghost of the Bowery. I started early this morning and walked above Second Avenue Upper Level for the fun of it. There is a game for the young on those airy overpasses: you can’t climb the guard fences, but through the mesh you can register an occasional hit on a bus top with wet chewing gum. I don’t know what scoring system is used.

I took a bus on Lexington Upper Level. Organic Unity Party headquarters is uptown near 125th. And Harlem is not as you remember, Drozma. Negroes live anywhere in town, or almost anywhere: still some plague spots of white supremacy, but these are dwindling and unimportant. Harlem is merely another part of town, with as many pale faces as dark. I didn’t find any dark faces at the Organic Unity offices…. Prosperous place. Saving the world for the pure in heart is profitable. Always was, I reckon.

The receptionist blonde had glassy perfection like a rhinestone. She assessed my good clothes, turned on welcome — Smile, Standard B-1; semiautomatic; Sugar Daddies, for the control of — and waved me through a frosted glass door labeled DANIEL WALKER. He’s a synthetically jolly endomorphic mesomorph softening with fat in his thirties. Just a greeter, one step up from the blonde. I took my time and got a cigar out of it. Nothing too blatant about Walker. His gaze is carefully candid; he speaks with the odd hollow noise of a man whose every word is a quotation. “I’m interested,” I said. “You don’t seem to be getting a good press.”

“You’re from a newspaper, Mr. Meisel?”

“No.” I looked shocked. “Retired. Used to be in real estate.”

“Never worry about the press,” he quoted. “Joe doesn’t. It’s all reactionary. Doesn’t Express the Organic Unity of the People.” He talked in capitals while I nodded and looked grim and wise. “In the Larger Sense, we do get a good press. They hate us, that makes talk, and talk brings us Intelligent Inquiries like your own.” I bridled: a durned old goat. “What interests you most about The Party, Mr. Meisel?”

“Your Sense of Purpose,” I said. “You’re not afraid of Stating an Aim.” I lit the cigar with a lighter that cost me forty-eight bucks — lingeringly, so that Mr. Walker’s candid eyes could price-tag it. (I’ll bring it home, Drozma. It has a pop-up white-gold nude half an inch high who whangs the flint with a hammer and kicks up behind. Aesthetic value about a nickel — the kids might enjoy it.)

“When you’re Alone in the World—” I sighed. “Frankly, Mr. Walker, I feel the Party might give me a Sense of Purpose of my own.” I told him the world was dangerously drifting. Internationalist delusions. Losing touch with the Eternal Verities. Skepticism rampant. Speaking as a skeptic myself, wonder if it could ramp? Think maybe it could.

“Yes indeed,” said Mr. Walker kindly, and pumped me for autobiography. I let it be dragged out that I was from Maine widower, no children. Used to be a Republican of course. Not now, by God. They were Reactionary: didn’t understand the inevitability of taking steps in Asia. No Sense of Purpose. I was good and cross about the Republicans.

“They’re on the way out,” Walker quoted. “Don’t give ’em a thought. Have you wondered why we call it the Organic Unity Party?” He didn’t wait to hear. “Here’s something confidential, Mr. Meisel. You notice the word ‘unity’ has one inconvenience. Can’t call ourselves Unionists or Unitarians — heh-heh. Nor Organists for that matter. The word, Mr. Meisel, is Organite. Something the Leader gave us only a few days ago, so it isn’t in the literature yet, but I’m sure you get the point. Soon it will be on everyone’s tongue. On the tongues of our enemies too, who will make fun of it.” He pointed ten manicured fingers at me. “Let them! We profit by that too.” That was the only moment when true masochistic fanaticism peeked from behind the mask of this soft athlete. “Now! Why Organic? Because it’s the only word that expresses the Nature of Society and the Basic Needs of Man! Society is a Unitary Organism. Now! What must any unitary organism have? Simple, isn’t it? Means of locomotion. Means of satisfying hunger, of reproducing. Sense organs. Certainly a unitary nervous system. Now! What, for instance, is Society’s means of satisfying hunger?” Under his busy hands, his desk leaked pamphlets and throwaways till my pockets were full.

“Agriculture and its workers,” I said, having seen some of the pamphlets and memorized the patter for these ideas, ideas so old and stale that human beings had begun to be hypnotized or repelled by them at least five thousand years ago.

“And what is the nervous system of Society?”

“Well naow, that right there, that bothers me some, frankly. Everybody wants to be part of the nervous system, seems as though.”

“No, friend, there you’re wrong — you don’t mind my saying it? Not everybody. The man in the street, Mr. Meisel, wants to be ruled. Don’t forget, Democracy must be defined as the greatest good for the greatest number. Ask yourself, sir, how many people know what’s good for ’em? The man in the street, Mr. Meisel, is in need of Enlightened Re-education. He must find, understand, and accept his appropriate place in the Organism. Or accept without understanding, sometimes. Now! Who’s to tell him? Who can, except an elite body of the well informed, the natural rulers, in other words the nervous system of Society?”

I attempted to look as if I’d just thought of something bright and shiny. “Seems as though that’s where the Organic Unity Party might come in.” I had let the cigar go out, so that the forty-eight dollar nude could flip her lid again. I puffed, looking so pleased with myself that I am still queasy at the memory. Walker was pleased too. Nor was I mistaken about the glimmer of contempt I saw in him, swiftly hidden as a weasel peeping over a rock pile.

“You put it very well, Mr. Meisel.”

“Doesn’t the Forward Labor Party have kind of a similar idear?”

That may have been a slip, a question slightly too intelligent for Old Man Meisel. Walker grew more watchful. He said quietly: “They have several good ideas. Better understanding of Society than the old parties. They see, same as we do, where the greatest danger is.”

I tightened my tough old Martian neck, to make a flush appear in my well-made cheeks. “I guess you mean those damn Federalists?”

It was the right noise. I think he was reassured. He said, still softly: “Worst traitors to America since the Civil War. Yes, of course…. Have you had any connection with Forward Labor, Mr. Meisel?”

“Oh no.” So far as I can tell, Drozma, he was reassured.

He made up his mind. “Like you to have a talk with Keller.

Wonderful guy, you’ll like him. If you have any doubts about what we’re doing, what we stand for, he can clear them up better than me.” Studying me sidelong as if I were a work of art, he boomed into the telephone: “Bill? How’s it?” My throat was cold. This was what I came for. Bill Keller. Billy Kell…. I strained my wicked Martian hearing, but the voice at the other end was only a wiry squeak. “Uh-huh, Bill…. Like you to meet him when you get a bit of time.” Code, I guessed, for “allow time to check on the sucker.” Presently Walker covered the mouthpiece to ask me affectionately: “Going to be free this afternoon, latish?” I was free.

He was easing me to the door. He didn’t put an arm over my shoulder because I am three inches taller; he did everything else to make me feel like the Grand Old Man of the Kennebec. “Confidentially, Bill Keller is very high up. Don’t misunderstand — just as democratic as you and me. But you see, a Leader like Joe Max, all his responsibilities, worries, he can’t give as much time to everyone as he’d like. Has to rely on a chosen few.” Walker showed me crossed fingers. “Bill Keller is right up There!” He patted my back. Old Man Meisel marched out, squaring his shoulders with a Sense of Purpose.

I didn’t think they had anyone tailing me; didn’t care much. They had my address and could smell around if they chose. I wandered all morning. Had lunch I forget where and wound up at Central Park Zoo. That March day was like a little girl fresh out of her bath, cool, sweet, ready for mischief. I could respond to it now. We’re almost human, Drozma: if you can’t find the one you love maybe an enemy is the next best.

The bears were restless with spring. An old cinnamon patrolled the front of his enclosure in neurotic pacing, ten steps left, swing of the head, ten right, talking dolorously to himself. The only other watcher at the moment was a brown-faced boy who acknowledged my presence after a while with a bothered inquiry: “What he moaning about?”

“Doesn’t like being in a cage, specially this time of year.”

“Would you turn him loose, mister? If you could?”

“No — too fond of my own skin.”

“Bet he’d chaw us plenty. Wouldn’t he?”

“Uh-huh. Couldn’t blame him.”

“Naw?”

“It was people like us who put him in there.”

“Yeah. Gee!” He strolled off, frowning at it.

It was past four when I returned to the Organic Unity offices. The lounge was crowded. Walker was busy. I sat for a quarter hour watching the coming and going of Organites. Sad, strained, introverted faces, many of them; others had the power-hungry look. Several were shabby, several prosperous. Only one clear common denominator: they all wanted something. And between a little chap with a placating smirk who probably sought a job sealing envelopes, and a lean paranoid with some brand-new design for the universe, I couldn’t find a great deal to choose.

Walker at last escorted me down complex lanes between desks to an office in the rear. Big. They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk. When that door opened…

Drozma, the Martian scent was thick enough to slice.

Yet I would have known him without it, that heavy figure looming like Il Duce. He had altered his face only in the direction of maturity. Thicker cheeks; a practiced, half-genial scowl. He waited impressively before rising to greet us. An underling certainly — there’s no doubt in my mind that the grimly human Joseph Max is the fount of authority — nevertheless William Keller was bloated with power and loving it.

I had renewed scent-destroyer in a pay toilet, and my new face is good. True, Sharon had known me. But Sharon loved the memory of me, and saw my look of recognition before she ran to me. In Billy Kell (I must learn to call him William Keller) there was no recognition. He came solidly around the desk, shook hands, grandiosely tolerated Walker’s backslapping introduction, dismissed Walker with an eyebrow.

Keller didn’t spout ideology. He made me stiffly comfortable, and expected me to talk. I did. I used the lighter; I gabbled autobiography interlarded with Party catchwords. I couldn’t afford to be as crass as I had been with Walker. At length, contriving to be severe and yet respectful of my white hairs, he said: “I’m interested to know what brought you to us, Mr. Meisel. The Party’s greatest strength is among young people. We wake their crusading spirit, give them something to believe in — that’s why nothing can stop us. People with your background are more apt to be hostile. Or tired or discouraged. I’m happy you’re here, but tell me more about what made you come.”

I wondered: “What if I go around that desk and strangle you into telling all you know?” It was a moment of grueling loneliness, the full weight of nine bad years settling on me. I managed to say: “I think your Leader’s personality was a deciding factor, Mr. Keller. I’ve followed Joseph Max’s career — radio, television — and then, well, one morning I woke up wanting to do something…. I’ve studied his book….”

He nodded after stern reflection. “The bible of the movement. Can’t go wrong if you go by The Social Organism — it’s all there. And you do seem to have a grasp of the theory — actually not theory: plain social fact. What I want to be sure you understand: this is serious business. We don’t play at it, got no patience with dabblers, no time for ’em…. There are two types of Party membership: associate and sustaining. Associate membership is for anybody who cares to pay the dues and sign a card. Sustaining is something else again, given only after a period of study. And examination.”

“Seems reasonable. Don’t know if I could qualify for anything like that. But I do feel I belong at least among the rank and file of the” — I smiled most humbly — “of the Organites.”

He asked too softly: “Now where did you hear that word?”

“Why, Mr. Walker said it was to be used in the literature soon.”

“Oh….” His mask was cold as a funeral. “It happens he shouldn’t have said that.” Keller’s fingers drummed on the desk.

“Since he did, I’m obliged to tell you — that word is not going to be used. Some of the Leader’s minor advisers considered it at one time. Inappropriate, too open to ridicule. Naturally Max saw the objections at once. I suggest, Mr. Meisel, that you never heard it.”

Damn all calibrated jokes. These people are as humorless as the communazis. I stammered pathetically: “Well, of course — I didn’t realize—”

“Quite all right. You couldn’t know.”

“Mr. Keller, would it be possible for me to meet — Him?”

He watched secret meditations, shrugged, and nodded. He looked tired now, in almost a human, sympathy-stirring way. “Sure. Could be arranged. This evening if you’re free. Max — by the way, he avoids the Mister: just Max when you meet him the first time — Max has Thursday evening open house for friends of the Party. Take you up myself if you like.” He waved away thanks. “Glad to. Another thing — among other members of the Party he does like a certain formality. I think of it as a quirk of greatness. Don’t care a damn myself, but when we go there we call him Max and use the Mister for each other, you see?” I nodded reverently. “Drop by at my apartment about eight-thirty if you will. Green Tower Colony, last apartment building up the Esplanade short of the bridge. If you’re going back downtown now, a taxi on Eighth Lower Level is the best way to get back uptown to my place. Tell the driver to set the rob for Washington turnoff.” He reached for his telephone. “See you then.” As I left I heard him ask for Walker’s office.

I took wrong lanes among the clattering desks and ran into a snafu of dead ends from which I was rescued by a stenographer. It used up a few minutes. When I reached the lounge Walker was outside at the water cooler. His hyperthyroid gray eyes peered at me blindly, perhaps without recognition. Would a trifling error in the routine of Party terminology have made his big hand quiver so badly he couldn’t hold a paper cup?

I wanted to telephone Sharon. But after that interview with the cold and secret thing that used to be Billy Kell I was in a bad reaction, a foul temper. I would have snarled, and scared her, or said too much. I promised myself a talk with her after meeting Max, if it wasn’t too late in the evening. I ate a dull dinner alone, then trusted my fortunes and my sacred honor to a taxi driver who whisked me across town and into Eighth Lower Level. In a single-lane entrance radiant with white tile, the motor died of itself; the driver pressed a coin into a wall slot. A panel on his dashboard bloomed in orange light; he touched a tab on it marked W. The motor woke without his guidance and the taxi rolled into a mystery of humming and radiance. My driver lit a smoke with both hands off the wheel. “What the hell?”

“First time, bud? Never get used to it myself.” He slid to the right, to rest both arms on the back of the seat and face me companionably. By the speedometer, we were doing 120. “Uptown traffic ain’t heavy this time of evening. All done with this here Seeing Eye. It ain’t human. But you know, bud, it ain’t that I’m used to it, but I’m getting so all I think is, hell, here’s a chance to stretch. Got a little shocker on the wheel, don’t hurt, just reminds you to keep your hands off of it.” He yawned.

I watched a blur of lights and pillars. “Ever have any accidents?”

“Not a one, they say. It’s the scanner. Gives a once-over, the second you drop in your four bits. I got snagged that way once — points was bad, I hadn’t known it. Robbie shunted me over into the repair yard just inside the entrance. Repair man’s plenty human — cost me three bucks and you know what? My fare wouldn’t pay it. Sulked. Well, it was a dame with a date to meet. Funny thing, they still get a few folks that think the lower level will take any old car. Got a cop at each entrance to weed ’em out. Damn fool out-of-towners mostly…. Here comes the turnoff.”

“Already?”

He chortled. We hummed through a subterranean clover leaf and up to an exit, where he sighed and took over the wheel. “Thing of it is,” he said, “it ain’t human….”

Green Tower Colony is in soaring modern design. Whatever the surfacing material may be, the effect is of green jade with a muted shining. The tower dwarfs the uprights of the bridge, without diminishing the airy pride of a structure now thought of as very old. Keller’s apartment is on the fourteenth floor immediately above the twelfth.

Keller admitted me, absently friendly, tired but not relaxed. At his doorbell two other names were listed: Carl Nicholas and Abraham Brown.

As I entered the elaborate foyer I heard piano practice softened by closed doors. Someone was trying to make sense of the eighth Two-Part Invention of Bach, with fingers and brain by no means ready for it. The same left-hand blunder was repeated twice as Keller took my coat and steered me into a solemnly expensive living room. The player knew the error but hadn’t learned that only slow practice could correct it. Though muffled, it created a maddening background of frustration, impatience goaded to futility. “Scotch?” said Keller. “Still a bit too early to go up there.”

“Thanks.” He busied himself at a fantastic little bar. Something nagged me, besides the stumbling music. Not the lavish evidence of money: I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers — who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem? It wasn’t that: it was something the corner of my eye had noticed as I entered the room and then lost. I rediscovered it while Keller fussed with the drinks. Simply a painting near the arched entrance from the foyer. I had to drift toward it, and stare.

There was a background of melancholy darkness deepening to black. A mirror, and perhaps some light was felt as coming impossibly out of the mirror itself. A young man looked into it. Of him you saw only a bare arm and shoulder, part of an averted cheek; these alone were enough to speak, and poignantly, of extreme youth, whereas the face in the mirror was bitterly knowing with many years. There was in it no grotesque, no exaggeration of age. Taken alone, that sorrowing outward-gazing face might have belonged to a man with thirty or forty difficult and disappointing years behind him. I suppose any imaginative artist might have hit on such a conception, and while the technical skill was great, so is that of a thousand painters. But…

“Like it?” said Keller idly, coming behind me with my drink. “Abe gets the damnedest ideas sometimes. Not everybody cares for it.”

I put my face in order. “Rather startling work.”

“I guess so. He doesn’t really work at it, just tosses ’em off.”

“Abe — oh, Abraham Brown? I saw the name on your doorbell.”

“Uh-huh.” He was without suspicion: Will Meisel is quite functional. “Friend of mine, shares this apartment with my uncle and me. He’s practicing now, don’t like to bust in or I’d introduce you.”

I thought: “Your uncle?”

“Some other time,” I said. “Is he — uh — interested in the Party too?”

“More or less.” Keller sat down with his drink, sighed, waved smoke away from his face in a human gesture. “Not really politically conscious. Just a kid, Mr. Meisel. Hasn’t found himself. Only twenty-one.”

I had to change the subject or betray myself. “Max live near here?”

Keller smiled tolerantly; his eyes said I was a little slow with the drink. “Right upstairs. Penthouse….”

Angelo is alive.I finished my drink, not obsequiously but fast.

A gorilla searched me politely in the penthouse foyer, and Keller apologized for not warning me about it. It’s fortunate the grenade fits flat to the skin. Joseph Max was already in a chattering crowd. Keller ran interference for me through a forest of arms, bosoms, cocktail glasses. My mind was downstairs with “Abraham Brown.” I believe my foggy abstraction was mistaken for the tongue-tied veneration I was supposed to feel in the presence of a Great Man.

At close range the resemblance to Calhoun ends with the jaw. The rest of the big sallow face is blurred and puttyish under a graying mane. Hyperthyroid eyes like Walker’s and with the same weak look, almost of blindness. He probably avoids glasses out of vanity, but of course Max is anything but blind: he had Will Meisel weighed, taped, card-indexed in one smiling glance. I saw in him, Drozma, something of the paranoid intensity of Hitler; not very much of the peevish intellectual fury of Lenin and his mirthless bearded schoolboys; plenty of naked power hunger, but very little of the genuine ruggedness we associate with Stalin or Attila or Huey Long. Max is in the tyrant tradition, but there’s a weak core. His first major defeat may be his last — he’ll shoot himself or get religion. But the machine he’s built won’t necessarily crack when he does.

“Mr. Meisel! Mr. Keller spoke of you today. Fine to meet you, sir. Hope you’ll want to work right along with us.” He has charm.

I said: “This is a great year for America.”

Thought that one up all by myself. The large eyes thanked me. I watched him testing the words for a campaign banner. A bright platinum girl blazed a smile at me. Glasses went up in a toast to something or other. At a directive glance from Max, Platinum took me in tow, provided me with a drink, and clung. Miriam Dane, and a smoldering bundle she is.

Vividly, self-consciously female. Her mouth is unhappily petulant when she forgets to smile. She has an air of listening for something that might call her any moment. She was practicing little-girl awe at anything that fell from my lips. I guess I’m into the Party, Drozma, if I choose to play it that way. But now that I know Angelo is alive, all bets are off. I have no plan beyond tomorrow morning, when I shall go to that apartment after Keller should have left for his office.

Miriam was watching for someone, and presently asked: “Abe Brown didn’t come up with you and Bill, did he?” Her hand wandered toward a solitaire diamond on her finger as she spoke.

“No, he was practicing. I didn’t even meet him…. Honey, I’m a horribly observant old man.” I beamed a Santa Claus look on the diamond. “Abe Brown?”

There was something wrong with her little act of cute annoyance. It was acting twice removed: meant to look like pretty irritation hiding pleasure, what it hid was not pleasure but some sort of confusion. “You don’t miss much, Mr. Meisel — can I call you Will? Yes, that’s how it is.” And then she was introducing me here and there. I shook something moist and unappetizing that belonged to Senator Galt of Alaska, and he brayed. Has a hirsute fringe like William Jennings Bryan.

And Carl Nicholas. Yes, Drozma. Max’s big room was so full of smoke and women’s perfumes that I did not distinguish the scent from Keller’s until Miriam took me over to meet him. Gross, ancient, pathetic. His Salvayan eyes are far down in morbid flesh. The nine years have brought him into our change of old age, Drozma. And whereas you, my second father, accepted the change graciously as you accept all inevitable things, and spoke of it once in my presence as your “assurance of mortality,” this Abdicator, this Namir — why, he’s a bottle imp, irreconcilable, locked up in fat and weakness and still aching to overturn an uninterested universe. He wheezed and touched my hand but hardly looked at me, intent on Max’s performance. Nevertheless I was worried and escaped quickly. Miriam said under her breath: “Poor guy, he can’t help it, gives me the creeps though. Know I shouldn’t feel that way. He’s done a lot for the Party, Max thinks everything of him.” She patted my arm. “You’re nice. Silly, aren’t I?”

“No,” I said. “You ain’t. Just young and slim.” She liked that. “You’re — full time in Party work, Miriam?”

“Oops!” She round-eyed her lovely face at me. “Didn’t you know? Little me, I’m secretary to — Him.” The eyes indicated Max’s gaunt grandeur and misted over. “It’s wonderful. I just never get used to it.” After a pause resembling silent prayer (no, I don’t dislike Miriam: she’s funny and pretty and I think she’s going to get hurt) she took me to see Max’s famous collection of toy soldiers.

They have a room apart: broad tables, glass-covered cases. Red Indians, Persians, Hindus on elephants, Redcoats, Dutchmen of the Armada. Some are old; one set resembled some I saw at the Museum in Old City — French medieval. They say Max plays with them when he can’t sleep. A quirk of greatness? That room was dim when we entered. Miriam turned on overhead lights, disturbing a muttered conversation of two men in shadow at the far end. Miriam ignored them, leading me from case to case. One of them was Daniel Walker, and his smooth round face was ravaged, desolate. The other — old, white-haired, taller than I, absurdly cadaverous — was far gone in drink, glassy-eyed, holding himself upright with silly dignity. As we left, Miriam whispered: “The old man, that’s Dr. Hodding….”

Same Hodding, Drozma. Late of the Wales Foundation, and evidently still with this crowd. I don’t get it. May have a chance to dig up something.

Max was showing fatigue, darkness under the eyes, when I shook hands for good night. Interesting, being near enough to a Great Man to notice the bad breath. But what I saw at that leave-taking was not a Great Man but a scared child, the kind who’s just put an iron pipe on a railroad track. For that matter I met a really great man once. It makes a difference, a greater ease in meeting malign pygmies such as Joseph Max. I visited the White House in 30,864. One doesn’t forget.

3

Through the thick apartment door I heard limping footsteps, and turned my changed face away, though I knew I would never be any readier to look at what nine years had done. The door was opening. It was after ten-thirty; I assumed Keller would have gone to work. Namir? To hell with him.

The boy’s no taller than Sharon. I realized I was staring at his shoes. No brace; the left sole is thickened. “Mr. Keller home?”

“Why, no. He’s at his office.” He has a good voice, mature and musical. I had to meet his eyes, which haven’t changed. A V-shaped scar over the right one. No recognition. “He left about an hour ago.”

“I should’ve phoned. You must be — Mr. Brown?”

“That’s right. Phone him from here if you like.”

“Well, I…” I blundered in past him, a confused and silly old man. “Think I left something here last night. Stopped in for a drink before he took me upstairs to meet Max. You were practicing, I think.”

“Left something?”

“Think so. Can’t even recollect what — lighter, notebook, some damn thing. Ever have your memory go back on you? Guess not, at your age. Only had a couple of drinks at that. Name’s Meisel.”

“Oh yes. Bill spoke of you. Look around if you want to.”

“Hate to bother you. If I did leave something, guess Mr. Keller’s uncle wouldn’t’ve noticed — no, he’d already gone upstairs.”

“Mr. Nicholas? Hate to wake him. He’s not well, sleeps late—”

“Heavens no, don’t bother him…. Smoke?”

“Thanks.” I used the fancy lighter. While he was intent on the flame I managed for the first time to look directly at his face. The angel of Michelangelo has hurt himself, Drozma. “I’m always forgetting things too,” he said. Yes, even at twelve he had that sort of tact.

“Just my eighty-year-old memory playing tricks.”

“You don’t look eighty, sir.” Sir? Because I’m old, I guess. It’s an almost obsolete courtesy.

“Eighty just the same,” I said, and dropped in an armchair with a grunt. “You have another sixty to go before they call you well preserved.”

His beginning smile vanished as he cocked his young head at me. “Haven’t we met somewhere?” I couldn’t answer; before my eyes found the painting near the foyer entrance, I glimpsed fear in him. “It’s your voice,” he said. Fear, and defiance too. “I can’t place it though.”

“Maybe you heard me when I stopped in last night with Keller.” He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything when I’m practicing.”

Yes, that dreadful Bach…. “Going to music school?”

“No, I — Maybe next fall. I don’t know.”

But why was he afraid? “I heard a fine recital Wednesday. Newcomer. Sharon Brand. Audience went nuts and no wonder.”

“Yes,” he said with too much control. “I was there.”

So much for our celebrated Martian sixth sense! He was there, remembering Sharon. Perhaps even near me on that balcony, seeing the gleaming downstream passage of that ship as I saw it. Near enough to touch. And because his mind must have been full of Sharon, perhaps he even remembered me too, now and then — a ghost, a moving shadow. “Splendid talent,” I said. “She must’ve given up everything else for it, to get so far at nineteen. Well, I happen to know she did. Known her since she was a little girl.”

I still peered stupidly at the painting, knowing the hand with his cigarette had stopped halfway to his mouth. He said with desperate politeness: “Oh…? What sort of person is she, off the stage?”

“Very lovely.” I wanted to yell at him. He should have been bursting with a need to say: “So have I! So have I!” “Mr. Keller told me you painted that.”

“He shouldn’t’ve hung it there. Most people don’t care for it.”

“I suppose…. Still, why not?”

“Too gloomy maybe. I was trying to find out how Rembrandt made a heavy background mean so much. Unfortunately I’m not an artist, Mr. Meisel. I just…” Not an artist, Angelo? “Look, I could swear I’ve heard you speak somewhere, sometime.”

I gave it up, Drozma. A revulsion against all pretense. I know: that’s the medium in which we Observers must live. Yet if I didn’t have that vision of Union within a few centuries I don’t think I could stand this swimming in lies. The superimposing of a human lie on our inevitable Martian lie was too much for me, that’s all. I slumped back in my chair and watched him helplessly. I said: “Yes, Angelo.”

“No…” He started toward me. He gazed foolishly at his cigarette fallen on the carpet, and did not bend to retrieve it until a feather of smoke was curling upward. “No,” he said.

“Nine years.”

“I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”

“My face?”

“Well?”

I shut my eyes and talked into reeling darkness: “Angelo, when I was middle-aged, years before I met you in Latimer, my face was badly injured. A gasoline explosion. I’d been a lot of things before then — actor, teacher (as I told your mother), even a sort of hobo for a while. Shortly before that injury I’d struck it rich — invention, happened to catch on. So I had money, took a chance on a surgeon who was working out a new technique. Prosthetic material I don’t begin to understand myself. Unfortunately he had success in only about a third of his attempts, and it raised hell with the failures. Never publicized. He had to give it up. Died a few years ago, knocked himself out trying to develop a test that would eliminate the sixty-odd per cent who couldn’t use it. But I was one of his successes, Angelo. What it amounts to: the stuff is malleable under heat; I can alter the cheekbones if I like, and that changes the whole face.” A smaller lie anyway: one that needn’t cloud our relation — if we were to have any relation. “I did that, when I left Latimer. Took on a new personality, as most people can’t readily do. There was a possibility the police would think I had something to do with your disappearance, and Feuermann’s. Do you remember Jacob Feuermann?”

“Of course,” he whispered, and I could look at him. “What — what became of Uncle Jacob?”

I wobbled on the edge of forbidden truth. “Disappeared, same night you did. All we ever knew. Tried to find you maybe. As I have.”

“Find me…. Why?”

I didn’t even try to answer that. “Do you believe I’m Ben Miles?”

“I — don’t know.”

“Remember the headstone of Mordecai Paxton?”

“Mordecai… Why, yes.”

“Ever tell anyone, who might have passed word to me (whoever I am), that you put dandelions around that headstone?”

“No, I — never did.” And Namir was somewhere close by — sleeping? The doors were closed, our voices very low.

“Did you ever tell anyone about that mirror?”

“Oh! No, never.” He sat on the floor by my chair, his head on his knees. “You must have had better things to do than look for me.”

“No. I still have that mirror, Angelo.”

“Abraham. Abraham Brown, please.”

“All right, it’s a good name.”

“I had — reasons, for taking it in place of my own.”

“Well,” I mumbled, “what’s a self? I’ve lived a long time and don’t know…. Glad to see me?” A stumbling human question.

He looked up and tried to smile along with his muttered “Yes.” A smile of confusion.

“What do you want to do, Abraham? Music?”

“I don’t know.” He stood clumsily and walked to the painting, his back to me; lit another smoke as if cruelly hungry for it. “Bill got me a piano a year ago. I — oh, I work at it.”

“Mm. Billy Kell.”

He didn’t look around. “So you recognized him too.”

“Newspaper photograph. Looked him up on the chance he’d be in touch with you, I’m pretending to be interested in the Organic Unity Party.”

“Only pretending, huh? You never liked Bill, did you?”

“No…. Look at me, Abraham.”

He wouldn’t. “Bill Keller and his uncle have done everything for me. They saved my life, really. A chance to start over, when—”

He stopped.

“I met your fiancée last night, at Max’s.” He just grunted. “Keller and his crowd didn’t buy your brain, Abraham. You know that gang of power-hunters isn’t your dish. You can’t look at me and say it is.”

“Don’t!” He choked on it, but wouldn’t turn around, and somehow there was little force in his protest. “My brain! If you knew — if I had a good one, would I be—” Again he couldn’t go on.

“How long have you been Abraham Brown?”

“Ever since I was picked up in K. C. for breaking a window.”

“What did they do with you?”

“Home for the homeless. Reform school — we weren’t supposed to call it that. The court was my legal guardian. Unfortunately it was a jeweler’s window, though I hadn’t noticed it.”

“Kansas City — that was soon after you left Latimer?”

“Soon? I guess.” He spoke as though suddenly indifferent whether he relived this dream of the past or not. “Latimer — I simply walked away. Junk yard, patch of woods, think I slept there. Didn’t eat anything for two or three days. Later I happened on a rail siding, couple of hobos gave me a hand up. Kansas City. They wanted me to stick with them, but I didn’t belong — not with them or anywhere—”

“Wait a minute—”

“You wait a minute. I’ve never belonged anywhere. I wasn’t even a good hobo, so I walked out on ’em.” He faced me at last, quickly as if to catch me off guard. “I didn’t want anything. Can you understand that? Can you? Twelve years old, hungry, not a cent, but I did — not — want anything! Oh, Christ, there’s not a worse Goddamn thing in the world — well, all right, I saw that plate-glass window — late at night — nice half brick in the gutter, so I thought: ‘Here! Suppose I do that, maybe it’ll make me interested in something’ — like a nightmare — you try to wake yourself up by hurting yourself….”

“Was it interesting?”

“Made a hell of a fine smash…. I graduated six years later.”

“Never told about the real past?”

“I did not.” He grinned savagely. “History’s a process of selection, remember, Mr. Miles?”

“I met some of your mother’s relatives after her death. Nice people.”

“They were nice people,” said Abraham Brown. “At the school I told three or four different stories. Safer than faking amnesia. They followed up the first two or three, you see, and then decided I was a pathological liar. K. C.’s a long way from Massachusetts. Homeless kids a dime a dozen.”

“Are they, Abraham?”

“That was the impression I received for six years.”

“And it was important not to go back to Latimer?”

“Do you understand your mind?”

“No. But you’re still the boy who was interested in ethics—”

“Oh, Ben!”

“And you’re still blaming yourself for your mother’s death: I want you to stop that.”

He stared blindly, but not without understanding. “Who else—”

“Why blame anyone? Dunn maybe, for hauling you in there without warning and looking like the wrath of God, but he was merely doing his job as he saw it. Why blame anyone? Is blame so important?”

“Yes, if it reminds me that I’m capable of spoiling anything I touch — reminds me never to love anyone too much, or care too much—”

I scrambled up and caught hold of his wrists. “That’s one of the worst damn-fool monkey traps in the world. And there you are, with the biggest mind and heart I’ll ever know, running circles inside the trap with your tail in your teeth. You think nobody ever got hurt before? You’ve got life, and you’re saying: ‘Oh no, there’re flies on it, take it away!’”

“I’ll live,” he said, and tugged at his wrists a little. “Miriam, for instance, she’s just my size, a nice brassbound decorator’s job with her heart in the right place and I don’t mean her chest.” I guess he was trying to hurt me with words thrown back in my face. “Just bitchy enough so I don’t have to care whether I’m in love with her or not—”

“Nuts! She’s a harmless little woman who could be hurt like anybody else. I think you got engaged to her because Keller and Nicholas and maybe Max planned it that way.”

“What!”

“Yes…. What happened after you graduated?”

He stopped pulling at his frail wrists. “Oh, I — saw Bill on a telecast. Hitchhiked to New York. That’s all. What did you—”

“Three years ago?”

“Two.”

“After a year of what, Abraham?”

“What did you mean about — Keller and Nicholas—”

“Skip it — I could be wrong, if I am I’m sorry. Tell me about that year after you graduated, Abraham.”

“I — oh, I’d never make a good criminal, I’m simply one of the school’s failures. Matter of fact I was a good boy. Grease monkey in a filling station for a month, till they missed something out of the cash register. Hadn’t taken it, but there was the record. Couple of dishwashing jobs. Not good at that either. Often wondered if I’d make a good flagpole sitter—”

“Why not stop whipping yourself?”

“Ever sleep in a barrel, Mr. Meisel?”

The doorbell rang. “Abraham, you must promise me never to tell Keller or Nicholas or anyone about knowing me in Latimer.”

He looked up with his wounded, half-cruel smile. “I must promise?”

“If anything connected me with that ancient history, it could mean my life.” His anger vanished. “Like you, Abraham, I’m vulnerable.”

He asked softly with no wrath at all: “Outside the law?”

The bell rang again, long, urgently. “Yes, in a way, and I can’t explain it. If you ever spoke of that it could be a death sentence.”

He said with immediate sincerity: “Then I won’t speak of it.” I let go his wrists. He limped into the foyer, where I heard him exclaim: “Hey, take it easy! Are you ill, Dr. Hodding?”

He looked ill, that old man, so ill and changed that without hearing his name I might have failed to recognize him from the evening before. He had been drunk then, fish-eyed drunk. Now there were fires in his cheeks; his necktie was under one ear, his silvery hair wild. He lurched past Abraham as if the boy were intrusive furniture. “Walker — let me see Walker—”

“Dan Walker? He isn’t here. Haven’t seen him for days.”

“Well, damn the thing, boy, you know where he is.”

“But I don’t.”

I stepped forward. Hodding looked frantic enough for physical violence. But then he shuddered and collapsed in the chair I had abandoned. “Not at the office,” he said, and fumbled at his wrinkled lips. “I called.” He noticed me and croaked weakly: “Brown, who the devil is that?”

“Friend of mine. Look, I don’t know, haven’t heard anything—”

“You will. You will if you don’t find him. You’ll see—”

One whose voice I remembered said: “Hodding, cut that out!”

He stood in the silently opened doorway, massive and sodden. His bulk was wrapped in a huge black and orange dressing gown almost hiding the wobbling columns of his ankles. His artificial hair is appropriately white; it was rumpled from the pillow, not much whiter than bloated slabs of cheek.

He still has power. He glanced unconcernedly at Abraham and me. He walked — not a waddle but relentless rolling motion — to stand over Hodding with a mountain’s calm. Hodding was choking. “Ten years. Ten stupid years ago, that’s when I should’ve died—”

“You’re hysterical,” said Nicholas-Namir.

“That strange?” Hodding groaned. “You people bought me — I didn’t bargain much, did I? Damn the thing, I was sincere, too. I thought—”

Nicholas slapped him. “Get up, man!”

Hodding stood, weaving like a dry weed in the wind. “You’ve got to find Walker. He’s crazy. I am too, or I wouldn’t — listen, Nicholas, I was drunk. I let him get in there — yes, sure, into the laboratory. Last night. I was drunk. I must’ve told him. And now—”

“Be quiet. Come in the back room.”

“Never mind me, damn the thing. You’ve got to find Walker—”

Nicholas raised his puffy hand again. Hodding cringed. “Back room. You need a drink. Quit worrying. I’ll take care of everything.”

“But Walker—”

“I can find Walker.” While Abraham and I stood bewildered and silly, they were gone. The door closed without a slam.

“Abraham, what was that all about? — if you know.”

He said shortly: “I don’t.”

“They worked on virus mutations at the Wales Foundation. Before Dr. Hodding left the place…. Got a laboratory of his own now?”

“How would I — hell, yes, you heard him speak of it.”

“Money and incentive supplied by the Organic Unity Party?”

“Ben, I don’t have anything to do with all that, with — with the Party. And why should you?”

“I shan’t, from now on. It was just a device for getting in touch with Keller, in the hope of finding you.”

“Well,” he said emptily, “you found me. But why question me about the Party?” He was frightened. In some limited, unwilling way, he was lying to me. “I’m not even a member, and nobody’s urged me to join. I just live here.”

There was an answer to that, but he knew it as well as I. “Abraham, come and have lunch with me. We need to talk about a lot of things.”

He moved away. “I ought to be practicing….”

“I saw Sharon Wednesday evening, after the recital. I think I’ll see her again this evening. Will you come along?”

He was far away across the room, pressing his forehead against the coolness of window glass. Presently he said: “No…. She wouldn’t remember me. That was childhood. Can’t you understand?”

“She does remember you of course. We talked of you.”

“Then let her remember the kid she used to play with, and leave me out of it. Ben, please understand. All right — I’ve got a brain. I was a damned prodigy, and ran away from it. Because I couldn’t stand what my brain showed me. So I’m a coward. Born one.”

“You use an imaginary cowardice as a shield.”

He winced at that, but went on as if I had not spoken: “And the only way I can keep from going nuts is not to think at all. You mean well. But you’re trying to stir me up into being something important. I don’t think I could. I don’t think I want to be anything.”

“Except maybe a musician?”

“Different sort of thinking. You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it.”

“Quite sure they’re going to?”

“Aren’t they?”

“I wouldn’t even dare predict whether the baby will have a harelip. Will you come and have lunch with me?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tomorrow? Meet me tomorrow noon, Blue River Café?”

“I’m — going away for the week end.”

I wrote my address on a notebook leaf and tore it out. “Keep this somewhere, Abraham.” He reached for it, red-faced, miserable at his refusal but not changing it. The voices of Namir and Hodding were blurred noise beyond the door. I think Abraham watched me as I went out. I don’t know….

4

I wrote that last entry here in my apartment only a few hours ago. I feel so changed tonight that the day seems a long time past. When I finished writing this afternoon I telephoned Sharon Brand. I told her nothing of Abraham: she didn’t ask, unless some of her silences were questions. I invited myself to call on her and Sophia Wilks in the evening. They live in Brooklyn. Yes, I remember you did too for a few months, Drozma; 30,883, wasn’t it — the year the bridge was opened to traffic? It’s still in use, parts of it a hundred years old. (Don’t know yet how the Dodgers are shaping up this spring.) I needed Sharon, if only to remind me that I don’t always blunder…. Now it is midnight, and I imagine new sounds out there, underneath the city’s murmurous quiet. They are not there: my mind is creating them because I am frightened.

Drozma, you must have often reviewed the logic of our Observers’ laws. By what right do we intrude on Abraham’s or any other life?

No right at all, I should say, since “right” in this case would imply the existence of a superworldly authority dispensing privileges and prohibitions. We Salvayans are agnostics born. Having neither belief nor dogmatic disbelief in any such authority, we interfere in human affairs simply because we can; because, conceitedly or humbly, we hope to promote human good and diminish human evil, so far as we ourselves can know good and evil. How far is that?

After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior. Unrecognized cruelties, cruelties generated by primitive fears or sanctified by institutional habit — these may continue for centuries; but when human nature sees Caligula in his plainest shapes it will vomit him up and sicken at the memory. Conversely, I recognize nothing as evil unless cruelty is its dominant element. Here, manifestly, human nature isn’t quite so willing to follow the logic through. To satisfy semantic order, one must distinguish between mindless cruelty and the malevolent sort. It’s a humanly evil thing if a tiger chews a man, but the tiger is impersonal as lightning or avalanche, merely getting his dinner with no malevolence involved. A butcher killing a lamb is similarly impersonal, and I think he drives a rather decent bargain, though an articulate lamb might bleat reproach at me for saying so: the lamb’s juicy little carcass in return for a sheltered, well-fed life and a death more merciful than nature is at all likely to provide. If the term “cruelty” is allowed to include the non-malevolent causes of suffering I think the axiom will stand. I notice that a massive amount of human cruelty is non-malevolent, a result of ignorance or inertia or simple bad judgment and misinterpretation of fact.

It doesn’t follow that any such mild and limited conception as kindness is synonymous with good. Men trick themselves with the illusion that good and evil are neat opposites: one of the mental short cuts that turn out to be dead-end traps. Good is a far wider and more inclusive aspect of life. I see its relation to evil as little more than the relation of coexistence. But evil nags us, obsesses us like a headache, while we take good for granted as we take health for granted until it is lost. Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass — no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree? Recognizing many partial ambivalences between birth and death, we overlook their partial quality and are fooled into supposing that ambivalence is exact and omnipresent. It seems to me that men and Martians will never be very wise until they carry their thinking much further beyond the sign language of deceptive and tempting pictures. I would defy anyone to measure, as in a scale, even the homely equipoise of night and day.

If I must justify my actions on the impersonal level (and I think I should), I concern myself with the life of Abraham Brown because I believe him to have potentially great insight. If I am right, he is bound to train that insight (he cannot help himself) on the more dangerous and urgent of human troubles. If he can reach maturity without disaster, with that growing insight fully grown, I don’t know why he shouldn’t aid others of his breed to hold the glass steady and throw away the dregs. His means might be any of several — artistic creation, ethical teaching, even political action; that question is secondary, I think. It is certainly not his intelligence alone that made me search nine years for him. Intelligence alone is nothing, or worse: Joseph Max is damned intelligent. Nor is it his heart, which is wounded and confused, nor is it his present self. His present self can be foolish, timid, and disagreeable, as I found out this afternoon. No: in Angelo (and in Abraham) there was and there remains a blend of intelligence, curiosity, courage, and good will. The intelligence is perplexed and tormented by the enormous complexity of life outside him and within. His curiosity and courage, reinforced by blind chance and the inevitable loneliness of the intelligent, have brought him face to face at twenty-one with more ugliness than his heart is ready to endure — he will see greater ugliness in the future, if he lives, and find that his heart is stronger than he thought. His good will is a river blocked with rubbish, but it cannot remain so: it will flow.

I suppose that, like anyone else, Abraham Brown would like to be happy now and then before he dies. I have had much happiness, and expect more. I never won it by seeking it. Long ago, when I loved and married Maja, I thought (just like a human being!) that I was engaged in the pursuit of happiness. Neither she nor I ever found it until we stopped searching; until we learned that love is no more to be possessed than sunshine and that the sun shines when it will. When she survived the difficult birth of Elmaja, we were richly happy, I remember. If one must hunt a reason for happiness, I say it was because we were living to the full extent of our natures: we had our work, our child, our companionship; the sun was high. After I lost her at the birth of our son, my next happiness came a year later, when I was playing the “Emperor” Concerto with the Old City orchestra, and found that for the first time I knew what to do with that incredible octave passage — you remember it: the rolling storm diminishes and dies away without a climax, where anyone but Beethoven would have written crescendo. I understood then (I think I understood) why he did not. My hands conveyed my understanding, and I was happy, no longer enslaved by a backward-looking grief but living as best I could — not a bad best. And so I think that if his maturing mind can guide him through the complex into the simple, if his curiosity and courage can show him the relative smallness of a reform school in Kansas City, if the river of his good will can find its channel, Abraham Brown will be happy enough, more than most. And I think, with all respect to one of the most vital of human documents, that the pursuit of happiness is an occupation of fools.

Drozma, if you’re as clever as I know you are, you may deduce from the tone of these reflections that I have already seen Abraham again. That is true. He is in the next room, a room of his own if he cares to use it so. I don’t think Max’s people have followed him here, but I don’t intend to sleep anyway, and I dare say I could handle any of them. There may be a worse thing abroad in the city, or perhaps beyond the city by now, a thing before which the human or Martian mind winces and draws back, refusing belief. Abraham thinks it’s there. I am still able to doubt, to cherish a hope that he could be wrong. Being helpless in any case to act against it tonight, I stay awake in partial contemplation, and have written these subjective matters for you, Drozma, with a sense that there may be no opportunity for such things in the days and nights coming toward us. Abraham is sleeping off a pill I prescribed. It should hold him in peace until morning. He snores occasionally, rather like a puppy who’s run himself ragged during the day. Now about Sharon:

It’s still tough to find your way around Brooklyn: good thing for humanity, to hang onto a few problems it just never can solve. Nowadays you can go over in a new tunnel equipped with an electronic road — Robbie-roads they call ’em — which is actually a continuation of Second Avenue Lower Level. Sharon had claimed that if I took the Greene Avenue turnoff I couldn’t miss it — sure, she’s human. Maybe I couldn’t, but my taxi could. We got lightly involved in something that was called Greenpoint, it didn’t say why, and then we tried a handsome avenue which gradually became more or less Flatbush. In the course of time we located Sharon’s quiet street, away the other side of Prospect Park. She was right about the turnoff, I’m sure, only we were supposed to turn right after leaving it and then do some other rights and lefts and then — the hell with it. Next time I’ll use the subway.

The apartment house is a sort of colony of musicians, refugees from exasperated neighbors. A feminine living room, but Sharon’s studio is severe as a laboratory — nothing but the piano, a bookcase, a few chairs. No decoration at all, not even the conventional bust of Chopin or Beethoven. When she took me in there I said: “Not even one flower vase?” And she said: “Nup.”

But that was later. When I arrived she was maturely concerned with getting a drink in my hand and surrounding me with cushions. Almost a snowstorm of cushions. I could have done without them, but it made Sharon happy to work away at it, inserting a cushion here and a damn cushion there, wherever I had or might have a bone. Some of them spilled when I stood up to shake hands with Mrs. Wilks, but Sharon got them back. Laughing at herself, but quite determined. Inexorable. And pretty enough to make you want to cry out loud.

To Mrs. Wilks I was an ancient ex-teacher and musicologist, old enough to remember hearing Rachmaninoff in Boston almost fifty years ago. I had taught “out West” until my health began to fail. I was fascinated by Sharon’s talent, and had introduced myself when I “happened to recognize” her at the Blue River Café. The lies come so easily, Drozma! I didn’t mind that one too much. Sharon was quite willing to collaborate on it. It would have been impractically difficult to explain a resurrected Ben Miles to Sophia Wilks, for she has aged greatly in the human way. In every part of life except music and Sharon’s welfare, Sophia has grown dim and forgetful. Faraway memories have taken on a present life, confusing her. She met me graciously, but did not even ask to “see” my face with her fingers. She settled in what was evidently her accustomed corner of the living room with some complex knitting, aware of us but not quite with us, tranquil among images not ours. When she joined the conversation, as she did only two or three times, her remarks were not completely apropos, and once she spoke in Polish, which Sharon has never learned. However, by unspoken consent, Sharon and I did not talk then about Angelo…. I had bought a late-edition newspaper on my way over, and stuffed it in my overcoat without a glance. Coming back from the kitchen with a second martini for me, Sharon pulled out the paper for a look at the headlines and said: “Huh!” I got up, spilling cushions but holding fast to the drink, and looked over her shoulder. Because it was an ugly and tragic thing which might have disturbed Sophia to no purpose, Sharon made no more comment except for a silent finger on the black front-page type:

“Let me show you the studio,” said Sharon. She hovered briefly by Sophia’s chair. “Comfortable, darling?”

“Yes, Sharon.” Sharon inserted a cushion or two to be on the safe side. She hooked a finger in my shirt so that I could walk, drink, and read the paper at the same time.

That was when I looked around the good sober studio and made my maundering contribution about a flower vase. “Nup,” said Sharon. “Ben, you’re acting different, as if something had happened. Come clean.”

“I found him.”

“Ah?” She whispered it, and caught hold of my coat lapels and stared up a long time, trying, I think, to learn without words what finding him had done to me. “He — is he mixed up the way you thought he might be, with those” — she nodded in distaste at the paper — “those people?”

“Yes, indirectly.” I told her everything — everything in the way of fact, that is. In trying to describe what Abraham Brown was like in this year 1972, I probably made a mess of it. “He heard your debut. He thinks you wouldn’t remember him….”

“Reform school — poor kid!” But I hadn’t made him real to her as a person: words can’t do that. She was still concerned with what might be happening to me, and though it was sweet and flattering, I wished she would abandon that preoccupation.

“I met Walker yesterday. A sort of greeter for high-class suckers, and rather good at it. He pulled a very small boner on Party slanguage, and I believe Billy Kell alias William Keller reamed him out for it.”

“So for that he jumps off the roof?”

“I had a glimpse of him when I was leaving the office. Keller’d had him on the phone. Walker looked as if he’d had it — between the eyes.”

“And this — Hodding?”

“I don’t know, sugar. And I’m sure Abraham didn’t. It’s like seeing only the tail of a beast vanishing behind a tree.”

She shivered, thrust her hands into her hair, looked for comfort to her other friend in the room, the piano. “Not that I know beans about politics, seems like a terrible lot of noise for small returns, but I did join the Federalist Party a while back. Infant school branch, seeing the lady’s under twenty-one. Card and everything, heck. Was that sense, Ben — I do mean Will, Will — or was I swope off my feet by good dialectic?”

“I like their views.”

“You’re going to try to get Angelo away from those neo-nazis?”

“He must get away under his own power.”

“And if he doesn’t?” She studied me with worried tenderness. “What if he’s sold on their stuff and spits in your eye?” Somehow I must make her stop thinking about me.

“He isn’t and wouldn’t. He hasn’t changed that much, not down inside. He’s tied by gratitude to Keller for practical kindnesses — as I don’t doubt Keller meant he should be. Trapped into loyalty toward something that’s foreign to him, a loyalty with roots dangerously deep in childhood. He’s still the boy who admired Billy Kell. Funny: I just remembered watching you and Angelo bury that little pup of his in the back yard. You probably didn’t know I was in my window. You were wrassling a chunk of paving stone — I remember the way your skinny little behind stuck up in the air—”

“Mister! My present dignity!”

“Well, previously you’d been sitting on something dusty, you and your white drawers. Yes, the old things come back.”

“Ah, they come back!” she said. “Or they’ve never gone away.”

“The cloud-capped towers — look at them again, Sharon.”

“Why, we had a country, Ben, one of our own. A year or so before you came to Latimer. It began at a special crack on the sidewalk of Calumet Street, a twisty crack that looked like S and A together….”

“Go on, Sharon.”

“We’d known for a long time that the country was there. And speculated about it. The population was primitive, or say quasi-medieval — mighty high percentage of kings and villainous viziers, afreets all the time monkeying around, heck, you couldn’t hold ’em…. Angelo drew a gorgeous map of the place, so I had to draw one too, only his was better. I had a river going right over a mountain range, he wouldn’t stand for that. It was my river, and I got mad, so” — she pressed light finger tips over her eyelids — “so he said, ‘Well, then it’s a river that goes underground, under the mountains.’ And redrew his own map to accommodate it, worked swell — caverns and subterranean lakes and stuff….”

“There might have been a blue-white light that came from nowhere, and your voices came back to you from the wet rocks.”

“Oh — you’d know! Well, one day we decreed that we’d step over that crack at last in a certain way, and remain in — the name of the country was Goyalantis — remain there as long as we chose. Of course to others it looked as if we were still in this world. A necessary convention. We felt quietly sorry for the poor souls because they’d look at us (and oh! even make us wash and comb our hair and eat oatmeal and not say damn) and they’d think we were with them when heaven knows we weren’t at all. We stayed — in fact I don’t remember any ceremony of coming back. I think we never did bother to come back.” She opened her eyes, and they were swimming. “Your hands haven’t changed. Play for me.”

Small stuff. One of Field’s sentimental nocturnes I happened to remember, because there was a warming night of March beyond the windows. And then the First Prelude of Chopin, as Sharon had taught me it might be played. She was looking down at me, but seeing Goyalantis too, never having left it, and though there were colored mists in Goyalantis, its air could be crystal, a crystal lens for observation of this other world which is not alone in possession of a special seeing we like to call truth. She said: “I wasn’t mistaken.”

“About what, dear?”

“About you. You see, I never believed you were dead. I remember flatly denying it when I was told. I think I went on denying it, though I learned I couldn’t talk about you even to Mother Sophia. I knew all along that the ‘Waldstein,’ at the recital — that it was for you. You know, they didn’t want me to program it — even Mother Sophia didn’t like having it follow the Carr suite. But it had to be there. As I knew three years ago when I started serious toiling over it….” She added, so softly that I barely heard it above an idle chord I had touched: “You want me to see him?”

“Only if you want to.”

“I’m afraid to, Ben.”

“Then let it wait. But he hasn’t left Goyalantis.”

“Do you know that?”

“Almost.”

“But maybe he ought to leave it. It’s good country for me. I live with dream stuff, and now they’re beginning to pay me for it, bless ’em. But for Angelo? You said he was trying for music.”

“Miserably. Fighting it. Like this.” I spoiled a few measures of the Two-Part Invention as Abraham had done. Sharon winced. “Then goes back and plays it again — same way, du lieber Gott!”

“That won’t help,” said Sharon Brand. “Think he’s reaching for what he can’t ever have?”

“Kid with both hands full of cake reaches for a plum and drops the cake. But you could judge of that better than I.”

She laughed, not happily. “You get sort of wicked now and then. Oh, you know I’ll see him — sometime soon. Feminine curiosity.”

“I’ll settle for feminine curiosity.”

I left early, for I learned that Sharon had been working hard that day. An appearance with the Philharmonic, in response to popular demand, had been arranged for April, a first fruit of her triumph. Time to prepare for it was short. She was to give the Franck Symphonic Variations, and told me she still had the thing only three-quarters memorized. Wasn’t worried about it either — brr!

The door of my apartment was locked. But I had left it off the latch, on the chance that Abraham might come while I was away — sneering at myself for such a hope but compelled to act on it. Now I had trouble with the key.

The light was off when I opened the door and glimpsed the coal of his cigarette. He knocked a lamp over by groping, laughed helplessly as I found the wall switch. “Graceful,” he said, and lost his cigarette trying to retrieve the lamp. We got straightened around. He was glad to see me, ashamed, scared. He said: “The c-cat came back. Kind of singed.”

“Did you think I was sore?”

“You had a right to be.”

“Nah. Hold everything.” I mixed him my Double Grenade: three fingers brandy to one of applejack. Nobody can like it, but if you already feel ghastly, it likes you. Abraham gasped and commented: “Why’d they bother to split the atom?”

“Go another?”

“Soon as I get the burnt meat out of my throat, not right away….”

“I read about Walker in the paper.”

He shuddered, not at the drink. “What’re they saying?”

“They quote Max: nervous breakdown from overwork.”

“And that’s all?”

“His speech was incoherent, it says here.”

“It wasn’t, Ben. I was there.”

“Will — Will Meisel. Get used to it. Could be important.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try. I’ve thought of you the other way.”

I built a milder drink. “Take this one slow. It’s supposed to glaze over the charred spots.” He was looking at horror, and words wouldn’t come. But his young face was not, as it had been this morning, a battleground. It was the face of a sleeper beginning to wake — to a most ugly day, but at least waking. “Abe, suppose I run through what I know or guess. You catch me up if I have any facts wrong.” He nodded gratefully. “Daniel Walker is — was — a man for big emotional conversions. He couldn’t just step out of the Organic Unity Party. If he fell out of love with it he’d have to hate it, probably with a phase of hating the whole world and everyone in it. Call him manic-depressive, for a label. No middle ground: all black and white for Daniel Walker. I was at the Party office twice yesterday. Walker slipped up, told me something that was out of favor, already obsolete when I went back in the afternoon. Keller jumped on him for it. Walker’s mind flopped over on its other side. Much faithful service and then a kick in the teeth—”

“Bill? Bill jumped on him?”

“Yes. Had him on the phone, and I happened to see Walker afterward on my way out. Looked sandbagged. So — Walker, in his tailspin, and Dr. Hodding, pie-eyed drunk, conferred last night. I saw ’em at Max’s, among the pretty toy soldiers. Then Walker got into Hodding’s laboratory and took — something.” Abraham whitened under his tan; I was afraid the glass would jump from his hand. “Just guessing: a new virus?”

He managed to set his glass on the floor. “New. Can be airborne. Indefinitely viable, and no defenses in the human — no, no! — mammalian organism, that’s what Dr. Hodding was mumbling when — well, Mr. Nicholas gave him sleeping powders, after you left, but, poor devil, he wasn’t quite out, he started mumbling and tossing on the bed after Mr. Nicholas went upstairs and left me with him. Mammalian — it isn’t just us, Ben — Will — it’s everything. Medium of distribution too — some stuff like pollen — green—”

“Slow down, boy. Walker did get it, then?”

“Yes.”

“Contagious-plus, of course.”

“Respiratory system. He kept muttering about his monkeys and hamsters. Kept saying: ‘Macacus rhesus eighty-five per cent.’ I don’t know if that meant mortality. I think it did. Neurotoxin. Reaches the nervous system through the respiratory. Spinal paralysis….”

“And Walker?”

“Had it with him this afternoon. I stayed with Hodding — hours, I guess — chewing my damn nails, not knowing anything to do. Bill came home early, at three. Hodding was sound asleep then. Bill went up to Max’s. I tagged along, don’t think he wanted me to. They were out on the roof garden: Senator Galt sounding off about nothing much, Max pretending to listen. Miriam was there. That drip Peter Fry. Mr. Nicholas” — Abraham was shaking all over, reaching toward the drink but not taking it up — “Nicholas, taking it easy in a lounge chair built to hold him. God, what a beautiful afternoon! Warm…. I don’t think Galt and Fry knew Walker was there in the penthouse. I saw Miriam was worried about something, got her alone a second and asked. She started to tell me something about Walker in there building up a jag, but right then he came tearing out, ran to the parapet. Nobody could’ve stopped him, but nobody tried. He was balancing there with that — that damned peewee test tube, looked like green powder. Waved it at us. He was yelling: ‘Airborne! Airborne!’ He wasn’t incoherent. Laughing like crazy, but wasn’t incoherent. He flung it out over the Esplanade — must’ve shattered into dust, you wouldn’t even find the cork. Then he went after it. Not like jumping. Like floating out, as if he thought he could fly…. Max — Max had some kind of fit. Heart maybe. Turned white and started to fold. I think Miriam took care of him. Mr. Nicholas said: ‘Get the kid out of here!’ And Bill hustled me downstairs. I didn’t see the police. The others must have agreed to say nothing about me, I don’t know why they bothered. Police didn’t hear about Bill’s being there either, I think. He stayed with me, couple of hours, I guess, until somebody phoned down from Max’s and he went back up there. Then I — then I—”

“Then you came to me. Do they know you’re here?”

“I don’t think so. Just walked out, didn’t meet anybody.” He could finish the drink now, the glass rattling against his teeth.

“Are you through with them, Abraham?”

He cried out: “Christ, I had every chance to ask myself, ‘What’s a political party doing, paying a man to invent — to discover — I knew! I must have known, and wouldn’t look. Just some important abstract research, Bill said — yes, that’s something Bill said to me, when I was curious—”

“Quiet down, friend. Probably what Hodding thought himself, at least when it started. He used to be a good scientist. Emotional flaw somewhere, maybe just an overdeveloped ability to kid himself about anything not related to his field—”

“But why didn’t I — why didn’t I—”

“Why don’t you get some sleep?”

He raved then about how he’d only bring trouble to me too. I won’t record that. There were questions I could have asked. Nicholas, “taking it easy in a lounge chair,” must certainly have known what Walker had with him. Max perhaps didn’t know until too late. Max and Nicholas together could surely have overpowered Walker and taken the thing away. I asked none of those questions. I fetched a sleeping pill and made the boy swallow it.

So it’s out there, Drozma — probably. I cling to frail scraps of possibility. Walker stole the wrong test tube — no, because Hodding discovered the loss in a horribly sober morning and knew what it meant.

Maybe it’s not as “successful” as Hodding thought. He couldn’t be positive that the human organism has no defenses. Maybe wind will sweep it away, and factors not discoverable in the laboratory will make it not so viable. Maybe the tube fell unbroken in the river. Oh sure, Drozma, maybe there are “canals” on Mars.

5

Sunrise was gradual and deep this morning. I sat by one of my living-room windows and saw the grayness above the East River take on a slow flush and then a hint of gold. Spires and rooftops on the Brooklyn side were catching hold of light like cobwebs on the grass after a rain. I watched a tug slip across the river on some errand clothed in magic by the latter end of night. It drew a soft line of smoke on the water, for there was a small breeze out of the east. The line broadened to a pathway, white and gold at my end, total mystery beyond.

Abraham stirred and sighed. Without turning my head, I knew it when he crept into the room with his shoes in his hand. I said: “Don’t go.”

He set the shoes on the floor and limped toward me in stockinged feet. In that dimness I could see that his face was calm, without anger and perhaps without fear. An empty calm, spent, like despair. “Lordy, didn’t you even go to bed?”

“I never need much sleep. You don’t need to go, Abraham.”

“But I do.”

“Well, where?”

“I don’t know — haven’t thought.”

“Not back to Keller and Nicholas.”

“No…. I can’t bring on you the trouble I bring to everyone who knows me.”

“That’s nothing but vanity upside down. Something made you come here, so why go away?”

“I had to talk to someone who could listen. Selfish need. So I — did talk. But—”

“You never brought any trouble on Keller and Nicholas. They brought it on you. You could see that if you’d look at it straight.”

“I don’t know….” He knelt at the window sill, staring out with his chin on his arms. “Good, isn’t it? And doesn’t need the human to be good. Except for eyes to see it. Ears for the boat whistles — that won’t be there if — oh well, who’s to say a chipmunk couldn’t enjoy a sunrise? But then, maybe there won’t even be—” He was silent a long time. “Have you thought about it that way? Will? What if all those buildings over there were empty? Heaps of steel and stone. How long would they stand, with nobody to care about ’em? Maybe not even any rats to gnaw away at the wooden parts. Birds might use the roofs, don’t you think? Gulls — where do seagulls build?”

“Dead trees.”

“Other birds might use ’em, though. They ought to make good small mountains, cliffs. A world of birds and bugs and reptiles. Orioles, ephemerids, little snakes with nobody to tread and kill ’em. Trees everywhere, or grass. First just a funny little green finger between two paving stones, and then before too long — you know, I read somewhere that the water level is rising much faster than in the last century. Maybe that’ll take care of everything. The big waves would make short work of the best of towers, I’m sure of that. Nice old Hudson an inland sea. And the Mohawk Valley. New England would be a big island, New York State a bunch of little mountainous islands, and just nobody to bother the garter snakes.”

“Kind of rough on Gimbel’s Basement. Abe, the Black Death of the fourteenth century probably knocked over only about half of Europe, and that was in a time when everybody and his brother had fleas, to make things easy for Bacillus pestis. The flu of 1918 killed more than the First World War, but statistically it hardly made a dent in the human race.”

He rolled his forehead on his arms. “Yes, they might find it necessary to use a few hydrogen bombs to help things along. That’ll do it, that and a rising water level.”

“Abe, I really do believe there’s time for coffee before the end of the world.”

He sighed sharply and stood up, smiling faintly, perhaps making up his mind, or yielding to my insistence only because he no longer cared much about anything. “All right. Let me get it. I won’t run away.”

“You mean you won’t ever run away from anything again?”

He glanced back at me from the doorway, stooping to push his shoes on. “Why, I wouldn’t even predict, and I quote, whether the baby will have a harelip. You like it strong and black?”

“Strong enough to grow short hair on a billiard ball.”

We were still lingering over breakfast in the kitchen — a good breakfast at that, and Abraham didn’t refuse to enjoy it — when Sharon came.

I write that baldly, because I don’t know any words that tell what it is that happens when someone enters a room. The air changes. The whole orientation is something that never happened before. If the person is Sharon, the changed air has spice and sparkle, the orientation is toward warmth, toward what we call hope: merely another name for a desire to go on living. A lot of talk, maybe, for the process of hearing the doorbell, telling Abraham to sit still, walking through to the door, seeing a bright bit of human stuff in a wrapping of bunny fur — and of course, being Sharon, no hat.

“I’m coming in anyway, so may I? How can anyone be so early? How do I know it’s early? Because you’ve still got egg on your chin.” She kicked the door shut behind her. “Nup, on this side.” She rubbed the place with a peewee handkerchief and pulled me down to kiss it. “Just to make it well, poor egg.” She flung the coat somewhere or other. She was wearing leaf-brown trousers — they don’t call ’em slacks any more — and a crisp yellow blouse that made music with ocean-blue eyes. It’s always trousers nowadays except for evening dress-up, unfortunate for fat girls but fine for Sharon. “Smoke me a light, Will — I mean light me — I mean I couldn’t stay away. You won.”

“Things happened when you couldn’t sleep?”

She watched me with a rather helpless smile above the match flame. “Do you telepath or something? Not that I’d mind awfully…. Oh, I began remembering more and more, couldn’t stop — please, Will, without prejudice to my right of being nine years older, huh? But — take me to him.”

“Sure?”

“Why, you sevenfold so-and-so, I can’t rest till I see him. Once anyway. And you knew I couldn’t. Green Tower, you said — I sort of wouldn’t care to go alone. Well, look—” She unfastened a button of my shirt, puffed a lungful of smoke through the opening, and stood back to study the effect. “Like that, you — you character. Make people start smoldering with silly ideas, you’ve got to take the consequences.”

I slipped an arm around her and walked her into the kitchen. I felt the shock in her like an electric charge, and took my arm away.

Abraham was standing on the other side of the cluttered table. I saw his small brown hands spread out, finger tips supporting him, and heard him say raggedly: “Don’t look now, Will, but you’re still smoking.”

I ignored that, as Sharon did. I don’t know how long they stood quietly, staring at each other. Long enough for a universe to spin a while. I remember picking up a spoon and setting it down with great care lest I hurt the silence. Neither had spoken when Sharon walked around the table. She raised her hands to his forehead and moved them down slowly, over his eyes and cheeks and mouth, until they were resting on his shoulders. He said nothing, but she spoke as if answering something, with gravity and a little surprise: “Why, did you think you could love any woman but me?”

I said: “For your information, Abraham, the world won’t blow up.” He might have heard it; I don’t know. I stepped into the living room and shrugged on my overcoat. At the door I glanced down and muttered: “Nah, Elmis, not slippers.” My shoes were by the armchair where I had kicked them off, so I studiously shoved my old four-toed feet into them. I didn’t hear any conversation from the kitchen. I went out to the elevator and rode down and walked a mile or so into the city’s morning. The wind was chilly but very fresh and sweet.

After a time I was aware that someone was following me. I put on an act of window-shopping in one or two places, but couldn’t get a fair look at him. A small man in nondescript gray-brown, busily peering into windows himself, his face averted. I tried a few aimless turnings, enough to make certain that I was his quarry: there was no doubt of it; he clung. I climbed to Second Avenue Upper Level, and walked a few blocks before pausing at a bus stop to look back. He was no longer with me. That I found strange — if a bus came now he’d lose me — unless he had turned over the task to some other shadow. I strolled away from the bus stop and entered a drugstore on the Upper Level, finding a seat at the soda counter from which I could study the sidewalk over my coffee. No one else came in while I lounged there. No one even looked in, except a harmless-seeming woman who halted to glance at the menu in the window and moved on.

I couldn’t detect anyone tailing me as I gradually retraced my course to the apartment house. I had used up about an hour and a half. It was past ten o’clock and the sky had grown dingy, preparing a spring storm.

Someone with a familiar back was hurrying for the self-service elevator when I came into the lobby. Bright platinum hair, a fine hip-swing. Not good. I grabbed the elevator door as she was about to close it. “Oh, hello, Will! But how lucky! I was on my way to see you.”

“Fine.” I searched a bumbling and semiparalyzed brain for something that might work. “Things are kind of upset — can’t I take you out somewhere? Had breakfast? Coffee anyhow—”

“Oh my, no!” She batted cute eyelashes at me. “Too much trouble, and anyway I had breakfast.” She poked the button and the cage started up. I could have asked how she happened to know my floor. I didn’t. “I don’t mind a bit, Will — I’ve seen how you helpless men keep house, everything just everywhere—”

“But—”

“Now, that’s all right, don’t give it a thought!” She captured my arm and hugged it to her side. “Simply had to talk to you about something, awfully important, that is to me—” Miriam Dane chattered on, managing to say actually nothing at all, until we were in front of my door.

I tried again. “Got a friend staying with me, he’s been ill and — well, sleeping late. Small apartment. Really be better if we—”

“Now you stop fretting. I’ll be so quiet, and it’s only for a minute.” She wasn’t exactly the woman I had met at Max’s. In some subtle fashion she looked older. I had not sensed any steel of determination in her then. She had it now, and there was coldness in the steel. She quit smiling and chattering, because I had quit being Santa Claus. She watched me as if she intended to hypnotize the key ring out of my pocket. It wouldn’t do. I stared back at her, not wanting to get rough or disagreeable, not reaching for my keys either. The smile was all gone. A tiny shoe with a rhinestone buckle began to tap on the floor. She said without any pretense, evenly and clearly: “It’s necessary that I see Abe Brown.”

So they had followed him last night. Followed, but hadn’t done anything. Until now. Too busy maybe: Max and his boys might not be having an easy time over the death of Daniel Walker, with a New York police force which they say has been incredibly honest for the last thirteen or fourteen years. “Why, Miriam?”

“Why!” Her neat shoulders rose and fell. “After all! We’re engaged. As you know. I could ask, why’s it any of your business?”

“He came to me. That made it my business.”

“Really! He’s of age. And this happens to be Party business.” It was already open war. I said: “I still want to know why.”

“You’re not a member. What right’ve you got to know?”

“He’s not a member either.” I was making my voice reasonably strong, hoping it might carry through the thick door.

“Needn’t shout.” She was showing the whites of her eyes. “That’s got nothing to do with it, Mr. Meisel. Don’t be so difficult.”

“All right. Come in. But do you mind if I look in your handbag?”

“My — handbag?” I saw then that she used a trace of rouge: her cheeks displayed unhealthy little roses as the blood drained out of them. Her right hand darted to the blue bag, and my hand closed over hers before she could open the catch. It could be tough for me, if she screamed. I didn’t think she would, and I was right. She let the bag go, stood away with fingers pressed to her bright mouth. It was there, in the bag. A .22, like a toy but big enough. I hate the things anyway. I made sure of the safety, dropped the gun in my hip pocket, and returned the bag. “I carry it for protection,” she said, pathetic now. “Have to go around — queer places sometimes.” The pathos became precariously held dignity. “I’ve got a license for it. I can show you. It’s here — somewhere.” As she groped in the bag a tear spilled and rolled to her mouth corner. Uncalculated. So was the sniff, the flirt of her little tongue to her mouth corner while her hands were flutteringly busy. “You don’t have to be so damn mean—”

“Keep the license,” I said, “and I’ll give you back the ordnance, when you leave.” I punched the bell a couple of times and thrust my key noisily in the lock. “Coming in?” Impolitely I marched in ahead of her.

Sharon was in the armchair by the window with her feet tucked under her. Abraham at least had not noticed our voices out there. He sat on the floor beside her, full of quiet, drowsily conscious of her hand in his hair, not of much else maybe. Sharon smiled and murmured: “Knew it was you so I didn’t get up. We’ve talked ourselves into a coma, and—”

Then Miriam stepped in behind me and said: “Oh.”

I waved my hand, a foggy human gesture that tried to say this wasn’t my doing. At the sound of Miriam’s exclamation Abraham looked around but didn’t rise at once, only stared in shock. When he did stand up Sharon laced her fingers in his, and I could see he wanted that. Sharon was intent, outwardly cool. So is a good artilleryman getting ready for a big one.

Miriam had probably never looked prettier herself. She had won her small brush with tears: they only swam in her eyes without falling. Trim and exquisite in her blue trousers, white fur jacket, a little sparkling something-or-other of a hat on the white shining of her hair, she was a gentle pin-up deeply wronged. Sharon said neutrally: “Miss Dane, I think?”

Miriam tried to dismiss her with one contemptuous flickering glance. “Abe, don’t on any account let me disturb anything, but Bill Keller wants to see you, I do mean right away.”

“I’m sorry.” Abraham spoke evenly; painfully conscious of his own words, but there was quiet in him; I knew it. “I don’t want to see him.”

“What!”

“I’m sorry, Miriam. That’s how it is.” I leaned back feebly against the wall, an old man obscurely minding his own business. That would do, what Abraham had said. The next few minutes were not going to be nice, but the boy needed no help. “If you see Bill, you might as well tell him that. I’m not going back there, Miriam, not seeing any of them again.”

I don’t believe Miriam had been braced for anything like that. She had come looking for a confused, easily managed boy. She stared into her hands, flushed and paled, unable to conceal her growing sense of defeat and a growing panic which, I sensed, had little to do with her relation to Abraham. After a few false starts she said softly: “Abe, there’s such a thing as loyalty. Or wouldn’t you know?”

Abraham nodded. “They’ll have to think of me as a heel, Bill and Mr. Nicholas and the rest. That’s all right. I do myself, but for a different reason: I gave my loyalty where I should’ve known it couldn’t remain. I’m not going back, Miriam.”

Sharon said: “There are other loyalties, Miss Dane. Your leader Joseph Max is what I’d have to call disloyal to his fellow men.”

I didn’t think Miriam’s policy of ignoring Sharon would work much longer. But she went on trying it. Staring at Abraham and then at the ring on her left hand, she whispered: “None even to me, apparently….”

Sharon said: “People change.”

Even that did not make Miriam look at her. It was like another answer to the same thing when Abraham said: “Dr. Hodding was already broken when the Party bought him — wasn’t he, Miriam? Sick, turning to alcohol dreams for escape because even the good work he did at the Wales Foundation had alarmed him, alarmed part of him anyway. Miriam, tell me this: why did a thing supposed to be an openly registered political party want to subsidize a man to invent a new disease—”

“That’s a lie! It wasn’t like that, Abe!”

“It’s what happened.” Abraham shook his head. I could see pain growing in the deep shadow of his eyes, pain and perhaps a hint of uncertainty. “You were there on the roof garden, Miriam. Once you told me yourself that nothing happens in the Party without your knowing all about it.”

“But you don’t understand. We didn’t know what Hodding

“Didn’t know!”

“No, we did not. He — I could tell you — all right, I will tell you, though I wasn’t supposed to….”

Sharon noticed her free hand had become a fist. She relaxed it carefully. She said: “Yes, do.” And still Miriam managed to ignore her.

“Abe, Max has only just found out what Hodding really was, only just this morning. That’s why you’ve got to come back. Nicholas says you were alone with Hodding, heard some of his talk. Max has got to see you, hear about it directly from you — you owe us that much, seems to me. And Bill, Bill Keller is sick, Abe. He broke down. We didn’t have any sleep, any of us, and Bill is sick, can’t get hold of himself, keeps asking for you….”

She could see as well as I did that it made him waver. Perhaps she didn’t see Sharon’s hand, which was saying more than I could have said with any verbal interference. “Why, Bill’s never sick—”

“But he is! I just came from him. Oh, Abe, he’s done so much for you — and nobody’s asking you to do any Party work, just to come and see him, talk to him. Did he ever ask you for any help before—”

“Miriam, if he’s sick it’s not going to help him to see me, when I’ve rejected the things he believes in. And you haven’t told me what you started to…. What is Dr. Hodding, as of this morning?”

“That’s a nasty thing to say.” Miriam had dignity when she wanted to use it. “I don’t think your present company’s improved you, Abe, do you mind my mentioning it? Hodding’s what he always was, only we didn’t know it. All right — and you’d better listen. You won’t like it, maybe you’ll refuse to believe what we finally got out of that poor crazy old man—”

Sharon said to no one in particular: “Methods?”

Miriam swung toward her at last. “I beg your pardon?”

“Interested in the methods used, for getting information from a poor crazy old man.”

It was war of course, and Sharon had chosen a moment when a little goading might sweep Miriam toward revealing hysteria. It didn’t quite work. Miriam stared, and sputtered, and turned back to Abraham. “Abe, if you can get your mind off your imaginative friends long enough to listen: we haven’t done a single thing that wasn’t justified by the emergency. A man like Hodding can’t be handled with gloves. I’m trying to tell you what he is. We found out.” Her voice was rising. “Never mind how — you’ve got that weak, soft streak — it doesn’t matter anyway. Abe, Hodding has been in the pay of China for the last three years.” I believe I laughed; Abraham didn’t. “He’s been using our American facilities to work up something to use in Asia. And fooling us with talk of abstract research, research that might have a humanitarian purpose — Max went for that, naturally — Max thought Hodding was working on a — a—”

Abraham had gone very white. He understood her hesitation too, I think. He said: “Is that going to be given to the press? Like that?”

“Certainly!” Miriam cried, and the high edge of hysteria was there. “Certainly, when we’re ready.”

Sharon cocked her head at her little stockinged feet and dropped them softly. She started to speak, but Abraham checked her. He said: “All you need now is a written confession from Hodding? Something like that?”

“We have it already,” she snapped.

“Then you don’t need me. Miriam, it stinks.”

She pressed her hand to her forehead with the pathos of weariness. “So you can’t see. Like a spoiled child. With a new toy too.” She studied Sharon with the same show of weariness, dazed indifference: “Just who are you, or aren’t I supposed to ask?”

“A junior member of the Federalist Party.”

“Oh. One of those. I might’ve known. And this cheap clumsy spy” — she looked me up and down; I let it ride — “what do you pay him, may one ask? Not that it matters. Well, Miss — Miss—”

“Brand. Sharon Brand.”

“Oh yes. Thought I’d seen your picture somewhere. You write children’s books or something, don’t you?”

Sharon chuckled. “Uh-huh. Nice big ones.”

“Well, you might tell your nigger boss in the Federalist Party that, as a spy, friend Meisel is a flop—”

“Oh, that tail you had on me this morning,” I said. “Wondered why he quit so easy. It was to phone you, wasn’t it? Let you know I was away from the apartment house or something?”

But she was ignoring me now. “Your own methods seem to have worked better, Miss — Brant? Must be hard on the heels, starting so young. My fault really, only I never would have thought Abe had a yen for children. Oh, here, you might want this when you’re of age.” She twisted off the ring and flung it clumsily. Except to twitch her feet aside so that the ring rolled under the armchair, Sharon didn’t look at it or move.

Even after yielding to that need for a gesture, Miriam must have held some frail hope of success, slow in dying. She approached Abraham with outstretched appealing hands. Though I had almost no doubt of the outcome, I found I was holding my breath. Miriam had talent.

It was not his distant quiet that broke her control. Something else; something I saw in him, and though I know he tried to hide it, Miriam must have seen it too. Pity. I heard her gasp, saw her make a savage unthinking motion toward her handbag. I saw Sharon jump up; if Miriam had completed the motion, I believe Sharon would have thrown herself in front of Abraham before he could stop her. But Miriam’s mind remembered where the gun was, more quickly than her hand. She choked and turned away, harmless and pitiful. “I’ll take — what you said, to Joe Max.” It was interesting to me that she said “Joe Max” just then. “Abe, you’re making a terrible mistake.”

I was glad that Abraham answered nothing. She went by me slowly, not looking at me, perhaps not even thinking about the gun, which I would not have returned to her. She didn’t slam the door.

Sharon’s arms were around Abraham, tight and close. “Will,” she said over her shoulder, “Will, is the sun by any chance over the yardarm, and I don’t mean on my account?”

6

Sharon went into the country with us today. A holiday, a half-impromptu picnic. Not an escape, unless Sharon may have thought of it that way, a little. Spring has come earlier than ever this year. There was some small rain last night, and today the earth was washed and sweet and ready; we found bright winter aconite in the woods, and the first of the tiny white violets that hide in corners of the rocks.

We rented a car, Abe and I, and rather than oblige us to grope through Brooklyn, Sharon met us at a subway exit uptown. We didn’t venture on a Robbie-road, but went over the old bridge and followed one of the fine North Jersey highways until we came on a modest road that promised to lead into the Ramapos. Just the three of us, and by unspoken consent we said not a word during the drive about what had happened or might have happened at the Green Tower Colony Friday afternoon.

It seems that in order to contemplate a major calamity to the human species you need distance. More than the Martian distance. When the black wings swoop too close your eyes blur; Martian or human, you must look away, not so much for the sake of hoping or pretending, but because your heart says: “I am not ready.” Or it says, perhaps: “There was no need of this. There could have been another way….” The pilot over Hiroshima — could he look down?

Certainly there was nothing in the spring woods to remind us of grief.

There had been no more approaches from Max’s people since Miriam’s visit. Abraham and I were not followed when we hunted up that rental garage. Nothing was prowling behind us when we took that little road off the highway. Sharon had brought a basket with lunch, and we had wine — good Catawba wine from somewhere in the smiling lake country.

I could turn my face away from the homely ugliness of our rented car; I could forget our stuffy American clothes and imagine that we were — no matter where. Perhaps a mountainous island in that country where once upon a time human life was a pleasant thing to explore — or so said Theocritus, Anacreon, other voices. Pan never died. He watches and breathes across the pipes, wherever earth and forest, field and sky can come together and make their harmony for the Arcadian son of Hermes.

Often enough, Drozma, I think of your great-grandfather, how he labored to collect and recopy the writings of his own greatgrandfather, who knew Hellas as it truly was, when the sun was high. Those writings could be published, if Union is ever possible. I tried to imagine Union, this afternoon. The dream was blotted away by another image — the image of a neat little tube full of green powder.

I saw Abraham stretch comfortably with his head in Sharon’s lap. He said: “Will, I begin to tell myself it couldn’t happen. Anyway there’s a good chance. Isn’t there?”

“A chance.”

“What Hodding developed wasn’t as powerful as he thought. Or maybe not as easy to spread, not as viable outside the laboratory. Or the tube fell into the river and was carried unbroken out to sea.”

“In Hodding’s ramblings, did he say anything about the incubation period?” I asked that, not wanting to know.

“Not that I heard…. Out to sea — but the cork would come loose sometime, and Lord, what then? The sea’s mammalian life — transmission sooner or later back to—”

“Don’t,” said Sharon, and slid her hand over his eyes.

“Well, it didn’t happen,” said Abraham, for her sake. “So far as today is concerned, it didn’t happen.” She bent down until her tumbling hair hid his face, to whisper something that they thought was none of my business; no doubt something to do with the hour when they left me in a contemplation that looked like human sleepiness, and strolled away into the woods. They are very sweet and natural children, when civilization relaxes its grip on them. Capable of unspoken understanding, too — that should help, if it turns out that they have years together and not just a few bright moments snatched before the climax of a world disaster. It seemed to me that he was following a train of thought parallel to mine, for presently he said: “Will, assuming nothing happened when Walker threw that thing — assuming any of us can have such a thing as another slice of, say, forty or fifty years — what about my forty or fifty? I’m thinking about work. This blue-eyed lady’s got no such problem: she already knows what she can do. And it looks to me as if most people had no such problem: a few have a very plain call to one kind of achievement or another, and the big majority just think of work as an unavoidable unpleasantness, something to be got out of the way so that they can play at nothing in particular, if they can’t find some means of dodging it altogether — which is no good for me, but if I have a call to anything, damn it, it usually sounds like a hundred voices calling all at once. Locomotive with no rails…. You told me a while ago that you’d bummed around a lot, tried several different things. Ever hit on the one kind of work you really wanted to do? Something that made all the rest a prologue?”

Yes, but I couldn’t say so. Forcing myself back into the human frame of reference, and hastily, I said: “Nothing to offer but a moth-eaten bromide: find out what you can do best and stay with it. Finding out might take awhile. I’m merely passing it back to you.”

He smiled. “Yes, but that might be one of the hard bromides the moths can’t chew. And one finds out by trial and error? Mostly error?”

“Maybe. At twelve you were rather preoccupied by the plague-take-it mysteries we like to wrap up in a bundle named ethics.”

“Yes.” He watched me a long while, his dark eyes hazy. “Yes, I was, Will….”

“And?”

“Yes, I still am. Learning more and knowing less all the time.”

“Oh, after a while you work out a synthesis that holds up to your satisfaction. In your thirties perhaps, if you’re lucky.”

“And to translate preoccupation with ethics into terms of life work?”

“Teach. Write. Preach. Act, though action is always dangerous.”

“Always?” said Sharon.

“Always, unless you can trace out the possible consequences to a pretty large distance. Sometimes you can, with a moderate degree of certainty, enough for practical purposes. If you can’t, then the time-tested actions are — well, safer anyway, as the man in the street has always recognized: not necessarily better of course.”

“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.”

“If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”

He chuckled and threw a handful of pine needles at me. Sharon framed his head in her hands and moved it from side to side, not very playfully. “I’d like to take you home with me this evening. You haven’t met Mother Sophia yet.” I could see her face as he did not. She was thinking not only of Mother Sophia but of the piano. “How long, Abe, since you’ve done any painting?”

He hesitated; there was a frown that she rubbed away with a finger. “Quite a while, Sharon.”

“Maybe,” I suggested, “it doesn’t hitch up closely enough to a preoccupation with ethics?”

“Maybe.” He was startled and interested. “You can preach in oils, but—”

“Not really,” said Sharon. “Propaganda is bad art.”

“Aren’t you thinking in terms of music, though?”

“No. In music the problem just doesn’t exist. You don’t even start looking for propaganda in music unless your head’s already addled.”

“Yes. But in art — well, Daumier, Goya, Hogarth—”

“They live,” said Sharon, “because they were good artists. If their social ideas had been the kind we don’t happen to like in the twentieth century, their work would last just the same. Cellini was a louse. The piety of Blake and El Greco almost doesn’t exist nowadays. Their work does.”

“I think you’re right,” said Abraham after a while. “I think Will is right too. Painting isn’t enough for a frustrated moralist late of reform school.”

Sharon winced and tightened her fingers, but Abraham was still smiling. I thought I had heard something she missed. I said: “Abe, that’s the first time I’ve heard you speak of the past without bitterness.”

He twisted his head to look up at his sweetheart almost with merriment, reminding her, I think, to share the memory of some words they must have spoken earlier. “I don’t think I have any, Will. Not any more.”

“Not even for Dr. Hodding and the men who bought him?”

Abraham murmured: “Bound on the wheel.” He sat up then and pulled Sharon into the hollow of his arm, kissing her hair, sensing that for the moment she wanted to be the sheltered one.

“So now the boy is a Buddhist,” said Sharon.

“Of course. Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Mohammedan—”

“One moment. One wife will be quite enough—”

“Hoy! Mohammedan, Christian, Socratic, Hindu—”

“Okay, only kind of hard for a girl to keep up with on a Sunday afternoon, and I still say—”

“You get used to it,” said Abraham. “We dispense with the veil. It merely means you have to take your shoes off when you go through the house in order to reach the bo tree in the back yard.”

I said: “You forgot Mithra.”

“Tradesmen’s entrance,” said Abraham. “Plenty room. Not forgetting the Greek Pantheon, which can use the front door any time.” He stuck out his tongue at me, not much more than twelve years old. “Syncretism in North Jersey yet! Will, this bottle still has life in it.”

We killed it without help from Sharon, who didn’t want to move.

But it seemed to make Abraham more sober, not less. He watched me over her drowsy head, and at length he asked: “Do you still have that mirror?”

Dubiously I said: “I’ve always carried it with me, Abraham.”

“So…?”

“And never exactly forgiven myself for letting you see it when you were twelve.” Sharon looked up at him, with questions unspoken. “Since then I’ve looked in it many times.”

“And found…?”

“Oh, if you can stand it, if you turn it often enough this way and that, you can usually find something like the truth you look for. Most people would say it’s only a distortion in the bronze, imagination supplying the rest. I wouldn’t say yes or no to that.”

“Mirror?” said Sharon sleepily.

“Just something I carry around with me. Call it a talisman. It was given me years ago by an archaeologist. A little Cretan hand mirror, Sharon, said to be about seven thousand years old.”

“You see, honey? Just modern stuff after all.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Yes, if you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time. Well, Sharon, you can’t find any wave or imperfection in the reflecting surface, but there must be one, for the plague-take-it thing never looks the same twice. I wouldn’t care to have you peep into it unprepared. Usually it doesn’t show your face as other people see it. It might show you very old, or very young. Different. Things you might never have guessed yourself — and who’s to claim there’s any truth in it? A trick. A toy…”

When I said nothing more and made no move to take out the mirror, Sharon spoke with her head drowsy again on Abraham’s shoulder: “Will, don’t be so damn gentle.”

“Really I’m not. But I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.”

Meeting my eyes tranquilly, Abraham said: “We wouldn’t be scared to look, Will.”

I unfastened the mirror from the strap hidden under my shirt, the same strap that holds my old grenade and the new one Supply sent me, and put it in Abraham’s hand. They gazed into it, two young and uncorrupted faces side by side. Not so very young. Twenty-one and nineteen. But out of certain black places even I could never explore, Twenty-one had groped his way, undefiled; and Nineteen was a grown-up, proud, and humble priestess in what may be the greatest of the arts.

Drozma, I felt the beginning of that peace which we Observers know when the end of a mission is not far away. What Abraham had predicted was not quite true: they were frightened. That was almost unimportant. What mattered was that nothing they felt — fright, shock, amazement, disappointment — made them turn away from what they saw. I can’t know what that was. They are both articulate with words. They also knew as I did that this was beyond the narrow territory of words. I could guess, from the passage of emotional lights and shadows in their faces — puzzled, rapt, startled, hurt, sometimes amused and often tender. I could guess as much as I had any right to know. I asked nothing when Abraham handed the mirror back to me. Showing that sleepy smile which I remembered from long ago, from a summer afternoon in the cemetery at Byfield, from a few other nearly silent summer afternoons in the pine woods, Abraham said: “Well, it would seem we’re human. I did have a suspicion of it all along.”

“Yes. You, and the maker of the mirror, and Mordecai Paxton.”

He grinned and remarked softly: “Hi-ho, Mordecai! Wha’ d’ya know — is she asleep?”

“Not entirely,” said Sharon. I think that’s what she murmured. I had glanced into the mirror before putting it away, and I saw nothing of myself.

I saw nothing of myself, Drozma.

Did you know, my second father, that there might be a time when I would look there and see only the motion behind me of friendly trees and open sky? A bush of viburnum, a rank of heavy undergrowth dividing the clearing from the forest and full of the innocent secret hurry of birds. This and the maples with leaf buds newly stirring, and the pines, and far and high the passage of a white cloud…. Did you also foresee that there might be no pain in that moment at all — or at least only such daylong, nightlong pain as we and humanity must live with because of our mortality, finding it a sort of background music not very different from the love song of tree frogs at night or the imagined music of May-flies in the late sun? Did you know that I might be able to smile, and put the mirror carelessly away, stretch like a human being, and remind Sharon that we ought to be starting home?

“He’s right,” she said. “I don’t want Mother Sophia trying to get supper for herself….”

This time we ventured with the car into the maze of Brooklyn, Sharon acting as guide and pretending there was nothing to it. I observed a different Abraham there at Sharon’s apartment, one I had known about but never truly seen. It was manifest in his behavior toward Sophia Wilks, a tenderness and consideration without any of the condescension of extreme youth. He liked her, and found easy ways of making it plain. She looked at his face with her fingers, prolonging that inquiry probably because of the singing note in Sharon’s voice, and she smiled at whatever she found there — she who seldom smiled even when she was amused. After supper, when Sharon and Abraham went into the studio, I sat and talked with Sophia about Abraham. Most of her questions had unspoken ones behind them: she was more interested in his temperament than in any practical circumstances, and I told her only those things Sharon might have told me of the boy who used to live in Latimer. In Latimer Sophia had never known him, except after his disappearance, and then only through the halting and grief-confused words of a ten-year-old girl. I was careful with my voice, but there was scant danger that Sophia could ever connect Meisel with the funny old quasi-Polish gentleman who had wanted a monument: her mind was elsewhere, and her own quiet memory of Benedict Miles another monument. “Should an artist marry, Mr. Meisel? I did, but only after I had learned that the heights were not for me — in any case my husband was also a teacher. Sharon is all fire and devotion.

Do you know that for seven years now she has never practiced less than six hours a day, often ten or twelve?”

I said something comfortably useless, about how it had to be a separate problem for every artist, one that only the artist could answer. Unfortunately that was true as well as useless, but Sophia already knew it as well as I. “We never drove her, my sister and I. There was a year, Mr. Meisel, when she was fifteen, after she had come to live with us — she would get up from the piano not knowing where she was. Once my sister saw her blunder into the doorframe on the way to her bedroom because, you understand, she was not in the room at all, she was in some place — I think you understand — some place where nobody else could be with her. We were so frightened that year, my sister and I. It was too much, we thought — we never drove her, and sometimes tried to hold her back, but that we couldn’t do either. The fears were foolish, you see. Such a flame does not ever burn out. It is only the little flames that — ah there!” The piano in the studio had spoken. “No — no, that isn’t Sharon. Why, does he—”

I said quickly: “He’s a beginner. Something pulled him toward music, I don’t know what. He’ll probably find out his talent is elsewhere, before too long.”

“I see.” I am not sure she did, and she was not pleased. Abraham was playing the somber Fourth Prelude of Chopin almost correctly, with a fair touch and some insight. I muttered to Sophia that I would be back in a moment, and I strolled into the studio as Abraham was finishing it. I saw his upward glance of inquiry — why, there was amusement in it too, how genuine I don’t know, defensive perhaps. I also saw Sharon shake her head a little, involuntarily, I believe.

She softened it at once by saying: “Not yet.” And stepped behind the piano chair to put her arms around him, bring her mouth close to his ear. “Do you really want it, Abe?”

“I don’t quite know.”

“It’s rougher’n hell — well, you know that. Point is I don’t think you’d want it just for your own pleasure — if you did it would be good, but if I know you, Abe, you’d want to give, with it. That takes eight hours a day, for years, and it might not be there.” She glanced up at me over his head, and she was very frightened. “And it might take away from — oh, other things, things worth more, things you could do better.” Yes, she was horribly frightened, and I couldn’t help.

But Abraham said: “I think it was a fever, Sharon. I think I notice some nice cool sweat on the brow.” His mouth was unsteady, but he was smiling with it. “Do something for me?”

“Anything,” she said, nearly crying. “Anything, now or any time.”

“Just play it the way it ought to be.”

“Well, there’s no one way it ought to be,” said Sharon Brand. “But I’ll play it as well as I can.” She did of course. It would have been a cruelty to play at anything less than her best, since he would have known it; but I wonder how many others would have sensed that at such a moment? I’ve known a lot of pianists, human and Martian. They fall readily into two classes: Sharon and then all the rest of ’em. I never could quite bear that prelude anyhow. She blinked at me rather desperately, and followed the prelude immediately with the tiny, half-humorous one in A Major, the Seventh, simply because something had to follow it, it couldn’t hang in the air.

“I have a special corner in the temple,” said Abraham, and put a cigarette between her lips and lit it for her and kissed her forehead. “The corner where you can hear best. Remind me to tell you sometime that you’re slightly snub-nosed.”

“Are you p-partial to pug noses?”

I went back to Sophia….

Abraham needed to talk to me, a little, as we started home. Fortunately the automobile is one human gimmick that doesn’t overawe me. I feel almost at home with it so long as it stays on the ground. Don’t think I’ll ever try the plane-car they’re experimenting with nowadays. The damn thing has wings folded over its back like a beetle’s; it’s supposed to snap them out at a comfortable seventy miles per hour and take off. Retractile propeller. Slow stuff, not intended to do anything over three hundred when it’s airborne, but all the same I think they can keep that one. Nice, of course, for kids anxious to find some new way of breaking their necks. Poking through those quiet and sober streets that had grown empty toward midnight, I was able to listen to Abraham without thinking much about my driving. He wanted to talk about the reform school. Not, I think, on his own account, but to satisfy possible questions that I had not spoken.

He had grown a shell in that environment, except for a few friendships. And those, he said, were all shadowed by the sense that nothing could ever last very long. I said something commonplace to suggest that human growth had much in common with the growth of insects: old chrysalids tossed on the rubhish heap and new ones grown. “Still,” he said, “as a larger bug I probably have a better memory of earlier states of bugginess than, say, a weevil.” He went on to make a rather horrible and intricate pun deriving pupil from pupa which, out of respect for our Martian community, I decline to record. He told me more about how the lost boys came and went. It had been a large school with, I guess, a fairly sensitive conscience somewhere at the top. The boys were of all sorts — the sickly, the morons, the majority called normal, the few bright ones; making a fenced-in, neurotic community, it seemed to Abraham that they had had little in common except bewilderment. Even bitterness was curiously absent in some of them. They were abused more by each other than by authority. Such violence as he saw was mostly furtive. Discipline was rigid enough, and the school had made a serious effort to weed out bullies or clip their claws. “I carried a knife,” Abraham told me. “Never could have used it, but it was the thing to do. Like a fraternity pin, I guess. A new boy would get beat up a few times, then someone would befriend him, see that he learned to carry a knife, talk the accepted language, and he’d be let alone. I was able to get some books. Last two years I had a sort of trusty job, in the so-called library. Except for the physical thrills, even beating up a new candidate was a sort of — oh, dutiful routine…. Well, they did have one thing in common besides bewilderment. The nobody-loves-me feeling. Those who had parents coming to see them had it worst. But we all felt or imagined or tried to imagine that no one had ever cared much about us. I knew better, Will, so did a lot of the others, but you couldn’t say so. Saying so would have been admitting that you might be partly to blame yourself, but it was more than that. You had to believe you were unwanted, or you’d be a social outcast. The school of paradox. Maybe not such a bad preparation for what’s outside. You know, Will — the old school tie. Alumnus Brown recalls the golden age.” But there was no overtone of bitterness. “Will, I wonder — can anything turn around and kick itself in the teeth like the human mind?”

“I dunno. Did you ever help beat up a new one?”

He said with remarkable gentleness: “You could almost guess the answer to that one.”

“Uh-huh — you never did.”

“Almost right. I never helped beat up anyone, but to offset that, I never had the guts to try to stop it either. Except once.”

“And that time?”

He rolled up his left sleeve and showed me his arm in the dashboard light. The scar was nearly white, running from elbow to wrist. “I’m proud of that hash mark,” he said. “It tells that on one occasion I did have a little guts, and it taught me something.” Still I heard nothing in his voice except a reflective serenity neither sad nor happy. “It taught me: unless you’re a gorilla, don’t interfere with the pleasures of chimps.” And somewhat later he said: “Punishment — that’s the idea that taints the whole system, reform schools, prisons, four fifths of the criminal law. Cure the curable, keep the incurable where they can’t hurt others — anything else is just humanity picking at a sore and half enjoying the pain.” He was talking to himself as much as to me. “From all I’ve read, Will, it seems that enlightened people with experience have been hammering that idea for at least a hundred years. Reckon the law will catch up with them in another hundred?”

“First you need a science of human nature, that doesn’t exist. I don’t blame the law for being not much impressed by the battle of terms we call psychology. The various Freudianities can’t stop to hear the various behaviorisms, and vice versa. We have the beginnings of a knowledge of human nature, but it’s a study that has to creep slowly because it scares people to death. It was all right for the Greek to say, ‘Know thyself’ — but how many would dare to do it even if they had the means?”

I spoke mainly because I hoped he would go on talking to me, in any way he chose. He would have, I think, but the world stood still.

Is it my biased sense of history, Drozma, that makes me use those curious eroded human phrases for such a thing as this?

I saw the man step off the sidewalk half a block away. It was a well-lit street near the bridge approach, and quiet. There were no headlights behind me, only one red taillight a block or two away. Endless time. No urgency. My foot found the brake, without panic, for we were not moving fast, and there was no possible danger of hitting the man, who had dropped to his knees in front of us, under my lights, under the orange glow of a sodium street lamp. All in control. I came to an easy, soundless stop five or six feet away from him. He was in profile to us but never turned his head, only knelt there, first with his hands raised toward his chin in the ancient attitude of prayer. The arms dropped, limp; I saw the fingers of the left hand go into a lively dance as if he were scratching the air at his thigh. His mouth hung open and he began to sway from the knees as I forced myself to clamber out of the car and go to him.

He was toppling over when I reached him. I was able to ease him down on his back and keep his head from striking the asphalt. A small, elderly man, well dressed, clean. He made me think of a sparrow, with his little jutting nose and brilliant eyes that would not shut. His cheek was flame-hot. I never felt such fever but once before, long ago, in a human friend who died of blackwater malaria. I think this man was trying to say something; nothing came out but “Uh — ah—” sounds without control of throat or tongue. There was no choking. For several moments the glitter of his eyes was firmly, intelligently focused on me. I am sure he would have liked to speak.

I stared across him at Abraham, who had also touched his burning flesh. There was no speech for us either, then.

7

Only today comes the first newspaper announcement of the disaster. Last night at ten o’clock — Wednesday night, just one little week after I heard Sharon’s miracle — there was confusing mention of trouble on the radio. We heard it, Abraham and I, heard the repressed hysteria in the broadcaster’s voice as if someone were plucking a taut deep wire behind his rapid gabble. He said only that there were “several” cases of what might be a new disease in Cleveland, Washington, New York, and the West Coast. Medical circles were interested, although there was “obviously” no occasion for alarm. “West Coast?” said Abraham. The broadcaster lurched on hastily to the most recent vital information on a divorce case involving a video star and a wrestler.

“Plane travel,” I said. “Paris and London are only a few hours away….” Abraham brought me a drink. We couldn’t talk much, or read. He sat near me most of the evening in my dull little living room, which seemed to me more than ever like a well-upholstered cave in a jungle of the unknown; both of us haunted, understanding the panic in each other’s minds. Now and then we tried the radio again, but there was nothing except the usual loud confusion of trivialities. Toward bedtime Abraham telephoned Sharon. It was just a lovers’ conversation — “What’ve you been up to all evening?” — and since he didn’t mention the broadcast to her I assumed she hadn’t heard it. After hanging up he simply said: “I couldn’t….”

The three days since Sunday had allowed us to crawl back on a flimsy raft of hope. That man we found in the street — oh, it could have been pneumonia, a dozen other things. So we told each other then and for three days. Abraham had called an ambulance, which came quickly and whisked the fallen man away, after a few inquiries from an intern who seemed to have a worry in the back of his mind that wouldn’t come into words. Other similar cases? I almost asked the young doctor that, but held my tongue. As we drove home Abraham and I began passing each other counterfeit words. We knew they were counterfeit, but they bought us a little phony peace.

This morning the Times as usual had the best soberly factual account, offering statistics with a rather terrible restraint. There have been 50 hospitalized cases in the New York metropolitan area, and 16 deaths. In Chicago, 21 reported cases, 6 deaths. New Orleans, 13 and 3. Los Angeles, 10 and 3. This is the fourth day since Sunday, the sixth since Friday. The first reported case, according to the Times, was a Bronx housewife — Sunday morning. She died Monday afternoon.

The Times prints a statement from the A.M.A.: the disease “resembles an unusually virulent type of flu, with several atypical features. Nationwide medical resources are being mobilized to meet the unlikely event of an emergency, and there is no cause for alarm.” Close quote.

The Times goes on to describe the thing without quotation marks and apparently without pulling any punches. The first symptoms are merely those of the common cold — sniffles, moderate fever, general malaise. After a few hours of this, fever rises abruptly, there is deafness with violent head noises, perversion of the senses of smell and taste. Numbness of hands and feet, legs and forearms, followed quickly by more general motor paralysis, which in all cases so far has included paralysis of throat and tongue; patients cannot speak or swallow. Fever remains at a very high point for several hours — twelve in one case; it follows no pattern of fluctuation. Evidence of delirium in most cases, and the behavior of the speechless patients suggests vivid visual hallucinations before unconsciousness intervenes — as it does at the third or fourth hour after onset of major symptoms. Death, when it has occurred, has come during deep coma, after a gradual subsidence of fever, and may be due to paralysis of cardiac muscle. Cheyne-Stokes breathing very marked in all fatal cases so far. In “some” other patients the temperature, instead of dropping to deep subnormal, has leveled off at about 101°, the patients remaining unconscious but with some improvement of involuntary reflexes: prognosis obviously unknown. Except for the quote from the A.M A. the Times isn’t telling us there’s nothing to worry about. Nor do they speculate about origin and cause. Nor do they say directly that the arsenal of drugs and antibiotics has proved ineffective, but there is one small sentence difficult to forget: “Patients have responded to supportive treatment in some cases.” So it’s that bad. I suppose a newspaper reader would have to be somewhat familiar with medical argot, to grasp the implications. You couldn’t expect the Times to say: “They try to keep them comfortable, knowing nothing else to do.”

I have seen no follow-up account on the death of Daniel Walker. No mention anywhere, these three days, of Max or the Organic Unity Party. I commented on that this morning, wondering out loud if Max had gotten away with it. Abraham said: “No. He won’t.”

It is terrifying to see controlled and quiet anger in a face designed for gentleness. It was all the worse because of his physical slightness and soft voice. I waited for the look to go away. It did not. He had spread the paper on the table and stood looking down at it, but as if the black and white square were a window, as if there were immeasurable distances beyond. “What’s going on in your mind, Abraham?”

He only said: “They won’t get away with it.”

“You’re thinking of what Miriam said? Hodding in the pay of China and all that?”

“Hell, they won’t use that pipe dream, Will. I think that was spur-of-the-moment, and a poor effort. No, I think they’ll hope for silence, hope that nobody can make the connection. And nobody could, unless one of us talks — I mean one of those who were up there on the roof garden. I don’t think Fry or Senator Galt understood anything of it — they’re freaks, nobodies. Nicholas, Max, Miriam — and Bill, and me — those five may be the only ones who know.”

“Should you speak, Abraham?”

He was all grownup when he said, with no tension in his voice, without even looking at me: “I haven’t quite decided….”

We went for a walk that afternoon. No objective, simply here and there in the streets, a bus uptown, west on 125th, back downtown through the West Side, walking. We saw no one collapsing in the street. Perhaps things were rather too quiet for a weekday afternoon. There wasn’t quite the normal amount of talk and laughter in those who passed us. We heard the bell and siren of ambulances five or six times in our aimless journey — but one does anyhow: illness and accident have always claimed their victims through the nights and days of any city….

Hodding is dead. We got that from the evening paper.

His house and laboratory in a Long Island suburb caught fire from “an explosion of unknown origin.” His body and those of his wife, daughter-in-law, and grandson, aged nine, have been identified. The four were in the laboratory when the explosion occurred. The laboratory, says the paper, was a private enterprise which Dr. Hodding had carried on after his retirement from the Wales Foundation. Dr. Hodding’s son had been away from the house; the paper quotes him as saying that the laboratory was designed for some limited type of biological research, hardly more than a retired man’s hobby. Young Hodding is an architect, and claims he knew nothing about his father’s line of work; but he is certain that nothing was ever kept in the laboratory that could have caused an explosion. Police, says the paper, are investigating the possibility that a bomb may have been set by a crank. “One,” said Abraham. “One who can’t talk any more. If Fry and Galt are insured, the companies ought to be worrying a bit.” And then, pursuing another line of thought: “Will, such a thing could be no use to anyone as a weapon, unless there were a means of immunizing the users. I keep coming back to that. I think Max wanted to dictate terms to the world, including Asia. I think he hates the Federalists worse than others because he sees himself as — oh, the first President of a world government, something like that. He’d feel it was quite all right to kill off a few million commonplace human animals if that would make him Leader — for the world’s good of course, always for the world’s good. But first he would have to have a means of immunizing the faithful.”

“Perhaps Hodding was working on that, and got only halfway. He developed the disease but not the protection.”

“I think so,” said Abraham, with the same dangerous quiet that had been in him all day. “So now, in order to hide the truth and escape the consequences, they’ve killed the one man who knew most about it, who must have already done a lot of work toward finding an immunization or a cure. Killed his family too, but they wouldn’t consider that — another product of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. I met the little boy once. He was a bright kid….”

“Promise me something, Abraham?”

“If I can.”

“Don’t start anything unless I’m with you.”

He came and stood over my chair, smiling down with more straightforward unconsidered affection than he had ever shown me. “I can’t promise that, Will.”

Presently I said: “I know you can’t.” Nor could I have made the same promise to him, so I had to tell myself that it was fair enough. I have learned a little since that night in the cemetery when Namir escaped me. Namir will not escape again, and I think Keller will have to die with him: Keller is a well-trained son of his father, and I don’t think the Old City hospital could do anything with him. The only problem now is to isolate them from human contact long enough to do what I must. And I must do it before this flame in Abraham explodes into some action he may not have the strength to carry through.

That evening paper added nothing to our knowledge of the spread of the disease. More demoralized than the Times. No statistics. The radio has been silent about it all evening. Abraham is sleeping, I think. Fortunately I do not need to.

From this morning’s paper: New York area, 436 reported cases, 170 deaths.

I think they were right to hold the St. Patrick’s Day parade. It would have been against the public interest to cancel such an expected and time-honored thing, in spite of the clear danger that large gatherings might help to spread the contagion. We didn’t go to see it. Abraham has been in a faraway abstraction all day, his mind talking to his mind, demanding answers. The evening paper says the crowds were small, and there was “some disturbance” when one of the paraders fell from his horse in a “sudden heart attack.” A heart attack?

There was also a broadcast statement from the White House at six o’clock, urging the nation to keep calm. Panic, said President Clifford, was more dangerous than epidemic. The country’s medical resources are adequate to deal with the — emergency. He had some slight trouble with that word, his voice not quite in control, his deep-lined, still handsome face tightening itself to force out the syllables smoothly. His television make-up wasn’t too good. I think they had tried to soften the furrows in his forehead, but they couldn’t make him anything except a frightened, essentially brave and decent little man carrying a burden too heavy for anyone. Civil Defense organizations, he said, have been placed under the direction of the Surgeon General of the Army — who followed Clifford on the video with a fair display of jaw and stop-this-nonsense eyebrows. Avoid crowds, said Surgeon General Craig, stay home from everything but essential work, obey all, repeat all, orders of local medical authorities and Civil Defense personnel. All theaters, stadia, bars, other public meeting places will be closed for the duration of the emergency. Use your radio to keep in touch with the efforts of your government. The pandemic — Craig stopped there for a second, shaking his big head as if at a buzzing fly; he had meant to say “epidemic” but the other slipped out. The pandemic, Craig said, is caused by a new virus, possibly a mutation from the virus of poliomyelitis. Promising efforts are under way to isolate it and to develop a serum. This will take time. Repeat, avoid crowds, stay home except—

From a ten o’clock broadcast: the disease is reported from Oslo, Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Honolulu, Kyoto.

I have got up from a sleepless bed to write down something Abraham said before he went to his room. I force myself to admit that the disease could strike him too; that he could die tomorrow; my need to write what he said derives from that admission.

After I turned off the radio we talked a little of what men call the Second World War, meaning that phase of the twentieth-century war which came to a partial end in 30,945, six years before Abraham was born. In giving him some (humanly censored) memories, I referred to the “expendable millions.”

Abraham said: “No one is expendable.”

8

From the Times: in the nation at large, 14,623 reported cases, 3561 deaths, as of Friday, 8 p.m. More than twenty-five per cent mortality: the proportion is rising. Those patients whose fevers level off above normal merely take longer in dying. But several of those stricken earliest are showing “probable” signs of recovery — temperature normal or nearly so, consciousness recovered although usually with sense impairment and varying degrees of localized paralysis apparently due to damaged or destroyed neural tissue. They are calling it paralytic polyneuritis. The headlines have already shortened that to para.

Abraham went over to Brooklyn early this morning to see Sharon. I went to the Green Tower Colony.

Para….

The streets are not as they were Thursday afternoon. Human beings still pass you, in groups of two or three, not more. They glance at you quickly, and away quickly, huddling together, clinging to the selves and the faces they know, afraid of strangers. You hear their voices, not always like individual voices. The city is whispering para. Over and over, the one word, a faraway drumbeat, or a giant muttering in tormented sleep. Para. One word, which means…

A man staggers on the sidewalk, reaches out for the wall of a building to steady himself with one hand; the other hand joins it, as if he wanted to embrace what was never there. Both hands begin to dance at the finger ends. No one hurries to help him as his knees give way and his forehead touches the wall. The couple who had been walking behind him swerve and run scramblingly across the street, the woman pressing a handkerchief over her mouth, the man glaring back as he runs with a meaningless square-mouthed smile. They would like to help, but…

Para means a little dog trotting down the center of Third Avenue dragging a leash. Traffic has thinned to nearly nothing. The golden spaniel isn’t quite right in the legs: a hind leg gives way now and then, but he hurries on, hunting for something — help, I suppose. The small head jerks repeatedly to the left; he tries to bark, with only a strangled wheeze. Then both hind legs fail him, and he struggles to keep moving, pulling with his forepaws, a dog’s patient determination in unaccusing eyes. A car approaches slowly, turns out to avoid him. A woman screams at the driver, pointing: “He’s got it! Finish him!” Obediently the car backs and shoots forward, then crazily off uptown as if the mechanism itself had sickened at a thing which at the moment seemed necessary. The woman snatches up a wire waste receptacle and hurls it at the little smear of blood and golden hair. Ordinarily she could hardly have lifted it. She takes out her lipstick, carefully paints a new mouth, fumbles at a place where the wire snagged her dress, but walks away without looking for the compact that fell from her fingers and rolled into the street.

Para means a man throwing open a front door to stare up and down the street. He is crying, and shouts (not to me or anyone else): “Those bastards won’t ever get here!”

Para means a mob looting a liquor store. I saw that on Third Avenue from the corner of Twenty-third Street. There were a dozen or so, including a few women. The store must have been locked, for there were plate-glass fragments on the pavement. The looters seemed comically serious about it, until a woman broke away from them and plunged toward me, clasping three bottles like a baby to her breasts. She called back: “You can’t live forever!” And squalled with laughter when two men started after her. I don’t know what happened when they caught her; I turned into Twenty-third Street to get out of the way. By evening they will be shooting down looters, most likely. Vigilantes will organize to do it if the police can’t.

Para means a man lying in the gutter, his gray hair moving curiously in a brown stream from a leaky hydrant. He has a four-day beard and his clothes are frayed, with buttons sprung open on innocent meaningless nakedness. He is elderly. He isn’t drunk. His stiffly upright shoes are cracked, with holes in the bottom, and he isn’t drunk: the wagon will come when it can.

Para means a rat running out of an empty restaurant. There weren’t supposed to be any rats left in New York. This one stops in front of me, not frightened, not aware of me, just dying. No resistance when my foot pushes him into the street.

The busses weren’t running on Lexington Upper Level. As I went back down the stairway I noticed eight or ten crows flying northwest. Odd — you never see crows over the city. Northwest toward Central Park. I think the Robbie-road was functioning, but I didn’t see a taxi anywhere. I went on down to the subway level, and there the robot change-maker was in operation. I passed through a turnstile to a deserted platform and waited a dreary while. One other man came through, saw me, and walked to the other end of the platform to wait.

The train came in at low speed. I noticed two men in the motor-man’s cab, another outside — in case one should collapse? The car I entered had only two other passengers in it, a thin woman whose lips moved silently, a frozen-faced Negro studying his shoe tips. They sat at opposite ends of the car; something in the way they both glanced at me suggested that I ought to sit in the middle or go to the next car. I sat in the middle…. Only a few pedestrians were on Lexington Upper Level when I climbed back to it at 125th Street. They hurried as if on desperate secret missions, giving each other wide clearance. I saw no one stirring when I looked through the big windows of the Organic Unity Party office. A policeman stopped me at the entrance. “Staff?”

“No. Place closed?”

He spoke with the harassed patience of a man forced to repeat the same thing to the point of nausea: “No public gatherings allowed. Only the office staff goes in.”

“Do you happen to know Mr. Keller by sight?”

He looked me up and down coldly. My Santa Claus appearance may have restrained things he would have liked to say. “I don’t know any of ’em, mister. I just work here. On the sidewalk. Only staff goes in.”

“Okay, I don’t want in. But — uh — it’s just the rule about public gatherings, isn’t it? What I mean, there isn’t anything to the rumor that’s going around about these Organic Unity people?”

He was large and quiet and Irish and most unhappy. “Now what rumor would that be?”

Drozma, I shall never know if what I did was right. It was an action deriving more from emotion than from reason. It had the human thread of vengeance in it: I have been away from Northern City too long. I said: “Talk I overheard in the subway. Other places too — everyone’s whispering it. I’ve got nothing to do with this damn Party, but I’m slightly acquainted with Keller, man who works here, thought I’d like to ask him about it, about that rumor.”

He was monumentally patient. “What rumor?”

“Hell, you must’ve heard it.” I tried to look more than ever distressed and stupid and ancient. “About that fella Walker who jumped off Max’s roof garden, week ago Friday, I think it was.” He stiffened with alertness, and some woman, half seen, was passing on the sidewalk as I spoke. I can’t be certain that her steps paused for a listening second. I think they did. “The rumor was that Walker had a test tube with some kind of bugs in it, virus or something, and chucked it over before he jumped.”

It went home, I know. A moment of dark intentness, perhaps horror, before he rumbled: “I wouldn’t be repeating stuff like that.”

“Why, I won’t. But other people are. On the subway was where I just now heard it, one guy yakking at another.” I shrugged and moved away. “Well, hell, Keller wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway.” I walked on slowly, terrified that he might call me back for questioning. He didn’t. My impersonation of a half-witless antique must have been convincing. With the tail of my eye I saw him step inside the building — to a telephone, I imagine. I don’t know, Drozma. Maybe it was the old bum in the gutter. Or that little golden spaniel. It was not what an Observer should have done, yet under the same pressures I would very likely do it again.

I walked on, west, on 125th Street.

I cannot see the thing as a whole, Drozma. Not yet and maybe never. I know (with my mind only) that, because of the blind madness of a few and the almost unknowing acquiescence of the many, human beings have once again stumbled into calamity with no assurance of survival. I know (in theory) that a wiser society might be able to detect and isolate such creatures as Joseph Max before they have done their work. Yet who can shape the realities of any such society in his mind, or tell how to arrive at it? With the study of human nature in its half-sickly infancy, we come back (in theory at least) to the unwillingness of men to look at themselves: but that is too simple. Even self-knowledge, if it should ever be achieved by more than a handful in each generation, is simply a means to some end that neither man nor Martian is wise enough to guess. I know these things with some clarity, but at this moment I can truly see only certain disconnected pictures from today’s bleak journey.

Para means a little Negro girl, about the age Sharon was when I first knew her, walking directly into me on 125th Street, wide-eyed and tearless. She said mechanically: “I’m sorry, mister. I didn’t see you. My pop’s dead.” I kept her from stumbling; maybe she knew it, but she moved on, stiff-legged, while I fought back the need to follow and tell her — well, what? What? I couldn’t make him live.

I climbed from 125th Street to the Esplanade. Not many blocks north of here, a small tube of glass…

The express elevators in the Green Tower Colony were not running. There was a bank of self-service elevators, and there has been no power failure — yet. I used one of those, and stood for a time outside Keller’s door, not thinking much. It was like waiting for some signal which of course never came. I noticed that the card with Abraham’s name was still above the bell; I took it out and dropped it in my pocket, a touch of cold metal reminding me, quite casually, that I was still carrying Miriam’s automatic. Then it was also a casual thing to punch the bell. One and perhaps both of my grenades would have to be used. Both, if Keller and Nicholas were both here, or if I should be wounded and unable to escape.

Nicholas opened the door.

I reminded myself further that I had not used scent-destroyer for several days. It hadn’t seemed to matter. And although as soon as Abraham decided to go over to Brooklyn I knew where I would go, it still hadn’t mattered. Nicholas opened the door. He recognized Will Meisel and stood back with a human stare of resentment, dislike, anger, sternness — all quite irrelevant, as he understood himself when I had shut the door behind me and my Martian scent reached him. He said with sober quiet: “I should have known.”

“Is your son here, who goes by the name of William Keller?” I spoke in English; it has become almost more natural than my native tongue.

He waddled away to close the door on the back rooms, and held his voice to a neutral dead level: “My son is in Oregon, or maybe Idaho, with a new face. You’d only waste your time trying to find him — I couldn’t myself, probably.” It had a flat sound of truth; I think it was truth. If it was, then I must leave Keller to be dealt with by other Observers in the course of the years. Such a being cannot hide himself long, and we have always had patience on our side.

I indicated the closed door. “What’s there?”

He leaned against it, perhaps to block me away with his mass. “One of my students, who should have lived to do his work.”

“Joseph Max? He took refuge here?”

“Refuge? No one was looking for him. He came to consult me, and he was stricken while he was here. The hospitals are already crowded, and have nothing to offer. It shouldn’t matter to you, Elmis. He’s dead.”

“Para….”

“Yes.”

“It’s fitting, I think…. The Organic Unity Party is dead too, Namir. Or will be soon. There may be some trouble down there at your office. A mob perhaps. At any rate the party will receive due credit for what’s happened. Did you think it could be any other way?”

“Why, I hadn’t thought.” He lifted and dropped his fat hands. I think he laughed a little. “It doesn’t matter where the credit goes, if the thing works, does it? The Party doesn’t matter — a tool useful once, thrown aside. Like myself — as you see, I have only a year or two to five.”

“Well, less than that. A year or so could be too long.”

“Vengeful, Elmis?”

“No. A matter of sanitation. I shouldn’t have fumbled, nine years ago.” He didn’t look interested. “If there’s anything you want to say to me, I’ll hear it. The laws require that much.” I showed him the automatic. “Sit down over there.”

He obeyed me, smiling dimly. With my left hand behind me I locked the door on the back rooms. He asked: “May I have a cigarette? I’ve become quite fond of them.”

“Of course. Just keep your hands in sight.” I tossed him a pack, and matches. “In the future as you saw it, you’d have had to keep a lot of human beings alive — you know, to cultivate food and tobacco, run a few machines, sweep the streets if you intended to have streets.”

Namir laughed in the smoke. “I never racked my head over blueprints. I only wanted to help get the creatures out of the way. The building of a sensible culture would have been for others — but as you say, they might have wanted to make human beings good for something.”

“I think you came to enjoy destruction as an end in itself, didn’t you? Any other ends you might have had at the beginning were swallowed up in the pleasures of smashing windows, tying a can to the tail of the poor human dog, chalking up words on blank walls. Is there any way I could show you that the pursuit of evil is a triviality?”

“You see it that way.” He shut his eyes. “I see, as I always have, that it was best to help men destroy themselves, because they aren’t fit to live.”

“Not fit, by whose decision? Whose scale of values?”

“Mine of course.” He was tranquil behind closed eyes. “Mine, because I see them as they are. There’s no truth in them. They project the wishes of a little greedy ape against the blank of eternity, and call it truth — there’s triviality if you like. They invent a larger ape somewhat beyond the clouds — or somewhat beyond the Galaxy, which is the same thing — and call it God; they use this invention as an authority, to justify every vice of cruelty or greed or vanity or lust that their small minds can imagine. They talk of justice, and say that their laws derive from a sense of justice (which they have never defined); but no human law ever derived from anything except fear — fear of the unknown, the different, the difficult, fear of man’s own self. They make war, not for any of the noisy noble reasons they produce, but simply because they hate themselves almost as much as they hate their neighbors. They gibber of love, love, but human love is merely one more projection of the ape-self, superimposed on the invented image of another person. They invent religions of charity such as Christianity — if you want to know how they practice them, look at the prisons, the slums, the armies, the concentration camps and execution chambers; better still, look into the not very well hidden hearts of the respectable, and watch the maggots squirm, the maggots of jealousy and hate and fear and greed. They are stupid, Elmis. They have always done their best to smother and destroy the few abnormal ones who have a little vision, a little ability beyond the ordinary, and they always will. Do you think Christ could live any longer in the twentieth century than he did two thousand years ago? Galileo recants again, Socrates drinks the hemlock again, every day of every year — but now there are three billion units in the swarm, in a smaller world, and they have learned simpler methods of crucifixion, without embarrassing publicity. The three billion crawl about, all over the helpless earth, destroying and defiling, killing the forests, polluting the air with smoke and radioactive dust and the torturing noises of the machine. In place of meadows, filling stations. The lakes are puddles of human filth. Two years ago the whole area of San Francisco Harbor was covered with dead fish: even the ocean is sick from the human taint, and this they call progress. I have done what I can, Elmis, and I hope you will make my death reasonably tidy. The floor of this room is some new kind of glass — the grenade won’t affect it. I always hated disorder.”

“You make a reasoned indictment,” I said. “I notice you put it all on abstract grounds. You must have had a more personal reason, to hate them as you do.”

“No.” His half-hidden Salvayan eyes watched me curiously, honestly, I think, temporarily interested in what I said. “No, I don’t believe so. As an Observer, I suddenly realized the blindness of Salvayan hopes, the futility of any effort depending on human nature. I abdicated because I saw that the only cure for the human situation was annihilation. Of course, once you declare war on the human race” — he shrugged amiably — “it tends to become a personal matter. Possibly my own vanity and ambition entered into it, after a while. Unimportant. Oh, I worked hard over Joe Max.” He yawned heavily. “I didn’t overlook the pitiful instability of creatures like Walker and Hodding — that was the material I had to work with, the chance I took…. As a favor to me, Elmis, would you spare me listening to the counsel for the defense, and use that gun now? I’m tired.”

“No defense. I admit almost every charge of the indictment. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s too partial, too trivial. You’ve spent your life hunting for counterfeit money in a pile of treasure. You looked for evil all your life, to prove your case — naturally you found it, and where it was absent you created it. Any fool can do that. I’ve looked for good in human nature and elsewhere, and found it, heaped up and flowing over. Anyone can do that too, though good may be a little harder to see, because it’s all around you, no further away than the nearest leaf, the nearest smile or pleasant word, no further away than every breath of air. You say there’s no truth in men. Do you know what truth is, any more than Pilate did? Human beings are in the early stages of trying to accept and understand empirical truth. It’s difficult. It’s like going into a jungle without weapons or foreknowledge. No other terrestrial animal ever tried it, or even guessed the jungle was there. Well, Namir, our views of man are not altogether different. We both see him as someone stumbling through that jungle. You want to slip a knife in his back because you don’t like him. I’d rather take his hand, knowing that he, and I, and you are all in the same jungle, and the jungle is only a small part of the universe. Justice? That’s an ideal, a light they see ahead of themselves, and try to reach. Certainly they stumble: because they try. If that weren’t so, they couldn’t even have invented the word. The same is true of their visions of love and peace. Fear goads them from behind, because they’re flesh and blood. If you blame them for being afraid, you’re only blaming them for being alive and capable of suffering. The products of fear — war, hate, jealousy, even greed develops from fear — those will diminish as fear diminishes, if they have a few more centuries to learn. Centuries are short for us, rather long for them, Namir. On the whole, I don’t think they’re much more stupid than Martians. As for the ugly aspects of their twentieth-century progress — another temporary sickness, I think, like the different sickness of, say, the ninth century, probably no more important. The earth will heal — my planet Earth, Namir, that might have been your planet too if you hadn’t blinded yourself with the very human sickness of hate — it will heal, when they learn how to live with it. Perhaps another century of learning how to control the machine—”

“Oh yes, yes.” He spat out his cigarette on the floor. “They want the stars. Kill me, Elmis. It turns my stomach, to think of men reaching the stars. Regard it as an act of mercy, if it troubles you.”

“It is,” I said, for I could regard it in no other way. I suppose the little gun finding the center of his forehead — because even now I had to remember the cemetery in Byfield — I suppose that was as merciful as death ever is. I rolled back the rug. The floor was inorganic, as he had said. I spread his pathetic bulk there, and stood well away until the purple flaring and sputtering had ended, and nothing remained but some coins from his pocket and the distorted bullet. The rest was dust; the rug could cover it. A lump of lead, a half dollar, two quarters, a dime, and a handful of dust — Namir is dead.

But not his son.

I went through the back rooms, having a certain need to know with my own senses that Joseph Max was dead.

I found him in a bedroom at the back. He was quite dead, lying in pallid dignity; someone had had the courtesy to close his mouth and eyes — Miriam, I think, for she was not dead, not yet. She sat beside him on the bed, her hand moving aimlessly through his hair and over his cheek. Her nose was reddened, but not from tears: her eyes were dry and somewhat feverish. The first symptoms are those of the common cold….

It was of interest (to state it in the coldest way) to note that as a woman she had loved Joseph Max, perhaps a great deal; that her engagement to Abraham had been on her side a matter of politics, a device of Keller and Nicholas to bind Abraham into the Party in the hope of using his abilities. I had guessed that, much earlier; now it was hardly even of academic importance. When history moves swiftly it leaves us all behind, men and Martians. She said something to me, hoarsely and with difficulty. I think it was: “Go away….” I could not speak to her, as one cannot speak to an insect forced to live a while after its body is crushed. In this room, para was and would be merciful.

Abraham had not returned. It was early afternoon when I got back to the apartment. The subway was still functioning and there were more passengers, though nothing like the normal crowds. In the walk from the subway to my apartment I saw nothing more that I want to record. Other Observers, Drozma, will be telling you of these things. I knew, as I came home, that I had seen only the small beginnings of the disaster. Before long — a day, a week — there will be, not one old man dead in the gutter and waiting for a wagon that can’t come quickly, but many more. There will not be a wall in the city that doesn’t hide a human loss. There will be breakdown of communication, transport — for New York and most other modern cities, that means starvation. There will be riots; some will die even while throwing stones at what they believe to be some enemy. There will be lime pits. If even the rats die of it…

Abraham did not come home all afternoon. At three I telephoned Sharon, and she answered quickly, asking at once whether I was well. Abraham had been there in the morning, she said, and had left a little before noon. She took it for granted that he would be going home, though he hadn’t said so. She was well, Sharon told me; she and Sophia were well….

Never mind the next six hours. I lived through them. Abraham came home at nine, and limped to the sofa, taking off the prosthetic shoe and nursing his left foot on his knee. “Just standing on the damn thing too much,” he said. “I wanted to call you from the hospital, but every line was jammed all day.”

“Hospital—”

“Working there. Cornell Center. Impulse — one I should’ve had sooner, only that brain you say I have wasn’t operating. Sure, just walked in, volunteered. Maybe it takes a pestilence to slice the red tape. They’ll use anybody who can still crawl, run errands, carry a bedpan. I’m to go back at 3 a.m. — bit of sleep and something to eat.” He gulped the drink I brought him, half blind with an exhaustion more than physical. “Will, I didn’t know — you couldn’t imagine — the babies, the old, the great husky men who look as if nothing could hurt ’em — down like the corn in a hailstorm. There aren’t any beds left, you know. We’ll use the floor while the extra mattresses last, and then — go on using the floor. We try to be sure they’re really dead before we—”

“I’ll go along with you at three.”

This was not the first time that human nature has put me to shame, but it is the time I shall always remember best.

9

Sophia Wilkanowska died this morning. So did President Clifford, but I think of Sophia, and one other.

Yes, the President of the United States died this morning. According to the newspaper, he went out like a gentleman, after some seventy-two hours without sleep, upholding the massive burden of duties and decisions even after the cold symptoms began and he knew the virus was in him. Disaster, as human beings would say, always does separate the men from the boys. He was still quite young — fifty-nine. Rest in peace. Vice-President Borden is the usual political unknown; time enough to worry about him if he survives the siege. I am thinking of Sophia and one other.

Abraham and I came home at one o’clock Sunday, after ten hours at the hospital. We were to return at eight in the evening. Sharon’s telephone did not answer. I think that for Abraham the hours had become a black tunnel with a light at the end, the light of the moment when he could talk to Sharon. Now the telephone did not answer, and I had to watch the light go out. I heard the dead impersonal rings. He broke the connection. “Maybe I dialed wrong.” He tried again. He hadn’t dialed wrong. “I’ll go over,” he said. “You’d better get some sleep.”

“What about that leg?” His left leg had swollen at the ankle. He had not stumbled at the hospital; now he did, a little, as he crossed the room to retrieve a wet raincoat. There was a sorry drizzle on the streets, and March chill had returned.

“That? Oh, the hell with it, it works. You’re going back at eight, Will?”

“I think I’d better. But you should stay with Sharon. You’ll find she’s just stepped out somewhere, but — stay with her anyhow.”

“Sophia — almost never goes out, Sharon said: her blindness.”

“I know. You stay with them. It’s more important.”

“Yes — ‘importance’ is a word” — he was reeling with fatigue — “and you taught me not to be used by words.”

“Besides, another ten hours on that leg and you couldn’t walk, Abraham — better admit it.”

He found second wind — or third, or fourth. It was not to steady himself that he turned in the doorway and caught hold of my coat lapel. “Will — thanks for everything.”

I tried to look irritated. “Cut that out — this isn’t good-by. I’m coming over to Brooklyn myself tomorrow, soon as I’m through at the hospital. You stay with them, and keep off that leg as much as you can.”

“All the same, thanks.” His dark eyes were upturned, inescapable, blazing with the unsayable. “Sharon told me how it happened that Mrs. Wilks started her school. I was thinking about the woods too — the woods in Latimer.” He grinned suddenly, and shook my coat lapel, and limped hurriedly for the elevator, leaving me — not exactly alone.

He called back in the late afternoon, but found it difficult to talk. I asked: “Sharon—”

“She’s all right. She’s all right, Will, but—”

“Sophia?”

“Has it…. Sharon had gone out, when I was trying to call, out to find a doctor. There aren’t any available. Not one.”

“Yes, it would have come to that by now. Better to keep her there, I think. Better than a hospital.”

“Yes, we’ve seen that.” Sophia would die. We both knew it; both remembered a statement in a newspaper we read on the way home from the hospital: So far, all patients showing signs of recovery are under thirty-five years of age. “They say, Will, they say two Brooklyn hospitals are turning them away — simply no place to put them.”

“I’ll come tomorrow, soon as I’m through. You stay there.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re certain that Sharon—”

“I’m certain,” said Abraham, and his voice cracked all to pieces as if someone had struck him in the chest. “I’m certain.” He hung up.

Abraham had not stumbled there at the hospital. I did, a few times, that night, not so much from fatigue as from a sense of helplessness that became physical, as if I were trying to swim in molasses. They came in so fast! There was no such thing as separating the light cases from the severe — there were no light cases, not there at the Center. My duties were to fetch and carry on three wards, lend a hand wherever I was at anything the nurses or doctors thought I could do. I did my best, but it was not like Abraham’s best, and now and then I stumbled.

They were strangely silent wards. Full of the sound of tortured breath, the feeble scraping and shuffling of bodies that could move a little, but no groaning, no speech except among us who tried to care for them. When one died there was scant struggle; no convulsions or violent contractions of the muscle: you might not be sure until you stooped to feel the coldness. The smell of the wards was foul of course — two or three worn attendants can’t keep paralyzed patients clean, when there are sixty or seventy of them in a room meant to hold not more than twenty. Ten million are said to have died in the flu of 1918; that was nothing, Drozma, compared to this. There has been nothing like this since the fourteenth century. Statistical charts have gone into a fever like that of para. By this time, I suppose, technicians will have fed the nightmare figures into some of the electronic brains that have become so important in the last twenty years; but I don’t think the papers will publish what the machines have to say.

As night crawled into morning I found I was leaning more and more on the memory of how Abraham had done this same work with me the day before, and yet his way would be difficult for me to describe to you, Drozma. In actual work, perhaps he did no more than the other devoted attendants, although he seemed to: he was everywhere. There was what I must call some kind of communication between him and the conscious patients, even when the deafness of the disease prevented them from hearing anything he said. Sometimes I saw him shaping words carefully for them; sometimes he would scribble a note, or it might be only a smile or pressure of the hand or an almost telepathic understanding of an unspoken need. They knew it when he was there; those who could moved their heads to watch for him….

Most dreadful of all were those patients in the stage before unconsciousness, when their eyes glared at unknown images and their hands twitched frantically in a struggle to rise and push away some monster of the mind. Three times I saw Abraham achieve communication with such patients, making them aware of him so that his real and human face became a shield between them and the hallucinations. For one of these, a giant Negro who could have strangled a bull a few days earlier, Abraham lifted the straining hand and brought its fingers against his cheek to prove the reality; the wildness passed, and there was a kind of peace, a third victory. That man, and one of the other two, were still living when I went back Sunday night; their fevers were not very high, and the nurse had tagged their mattresses with a blue X, which was emergency shorthand for Good resistance, possible recovery. If Abraham lives, I can return soon to Northern City.

Mission accomplished. If Abraham lives…

I worked a twelve-hour shift that night, and it was ten o’clock in a rainy morning when I reached Sharon’s apartment in Brooklyn. She let me in, and cried in my arms. I could see Abraham sitting across the room frowning at the floor, and through an open door beyond him I saw Sophia’s room, and Sophia herself, already composed, her eyes shut, hands quiet. Abraham nodded, though it wasn’t necessary to tell me. Two men were coming up the stairs behind me. I had not closed the door because Sharon still clung to me, and one of the men tapped my shoulder gently. “You sent for us, sir?” They had gauze masks over mouth and nose, a singular futility. Sharon smothered a scream.

Abraham took charge, motioning Sharon and me to the studio. She was explaining to me: “You see, there can’t be any regular funerals—”

“I know, Sharon. Let Abraham—”

“Because the dead outnumber the living, do you see? Why, they always did, didn’t they? Oh yes.” She coughed and blew her nose and shivered. “And so they just come and take them, do you see?” She pulled the chair away from the piano and sat down facing me, lacing her hands together, wanting to explain. “Ben, she always liked a little ceremony. Oh, she was a very formal lady, I always tried to live up to it. I think she’d’ve liked me to play a Polonaise — not the Marche funèbre — no, no! But a Polonaise, only I don’t think I could, anyway she’s not here, is she? We have to think of it that way, don’t we?”

“Of course. Let yourself go, Sharon. You’re all wound up—”

“Oh no, because the dead outnumber us, and some of them like a little formality, I’m sure of it. It’s a matter of keeping up appearances.” I heard the front door softly close. “Would you get me a wrap, Ben? It’s miserably chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was somewhat chilly, but she was warmly dressed. “The janitor is sick, I heard. I suppose the furnace is out. I think I’d like to sit here awhile. Look at the keyboard, but I don’t think I could play anything. Would you like to, Ben?”

“No, I — I’ll get you a coat.”

Abraham came in then, and I went to look for a coat or blanket. I found her bunny fur in a closet, and as I was taking it down I heard the piano for a moment. Not playing, just an upward ripple of notes. She would be standing by it, moving the back of her finger up the keyboard, a kind of caress to a friend, as if she were saying — I hurried back with the coat, but Abraham was bringing her out of the studio then, and she smiled brilliantly. “Thanks, Ben. That’s what I wanted.” Putting out her arms for it, she stumbled. Abraham kept her from falling. I picked her up and carried her to her bedroom — cool it was, orderly and virginal, with white walls, a blue bedspread. Simplicity and innocence. She said carefully: “I’ve had a bit of a cold all morning, but I don’t think it’s anything. Feel my hand, Abe. See? I’m not feverish.” I had carried her; she was hot as a coal, and the hand that Abraham was not holding was restless at the finger ends.

“Of course you’re all right, Sharon,” he said. “Shoes off. I want you to get under the covers—”

“What did you say, Abe?”

“Shoes—”

“I can’t hear you.” She must have known it, must have been living with the thought for hours, but this was the first time that the shield of brave pretense had been torn away from her, and now she cried out: “Abe, I love you so! I wanted to live—”

After that she could not speak….

It must be near midnight. Abraham has never left her, of course. I spent some of the morning and afternoon trying to find a doctor who could come. A desperate waste of time: they are all red-eyed wrecks, working twenty-four hours a day at the hospitals and elsewhere. Not only with para: people still run their cars into lamp-posts, carve each other with knives, die of other diseases. There can be no home visits, and to send a victim to the hospital at this stage is merely to give him a more crowded place to die. I do not feel able to think of Union, Drozma. The end justifies the means, Joseph Max believed, following certain earlier theorists who should have died in infancy. I doubt if I ever knew before what it is to hate. Loving their best and hating their worst as I do, I can never go out again as an Observer. I am disqualified. I shall be old before I can look at this under the aspect of eternity.

I was right that what I saw Saturday was only a beginning. These streets are full of the dead; crews work with panel and half-ton trucks, taking them — I don’t know where. Such a crew is usually followed by a protecting patrol car. Other police cars cruise slowly, watching, I think, for any knot of citizens that might become a mob. I bought a paper. It was a Times, down to an eight-page skeleton with no advertising. Some foreign news, almost all of the spread of para. Nothing about Asia. The death of President Clifford — that, of course, is the long banner headline, and at any other time the front page would have held almost nothing else; but the story of his death reads as though the writer had done it with his left hand, or as though his own head were aching with the symptoms of the common cold…. The front page carries public notices, giving the telephone numbers of what they call Civil Defense Relief Crews — those are the men with the panel trucks. Statistics too — I’ve already forgotten most of them: over a million cases in the New York metropolitan area alone. In boldface type, standing instructions for treating victims who cannot be hospitalized. Supportive measures: keep the patient warm and quiet; don’t try to make him swallow, too likely that he will strangle; keep the head level with the body to avoid constriction of the windpipe; the room should be darkened, since the eyes are hypersensitive during the conscious phase….

Sharon passed through the delirium in the middle afternoon. We were both with her. I could only be quiet while Abraham fought with devils, and the gentleness of his hands and face were the only weapons he could use. As I knew from our service in the hospital, there have been many deaths during the delirium, from a spasmodic closing off of breath, perhaps due to pure fright at the nightmare hallucinations. Sharon did not die.

I think she knew even at the height of her distress that Abraham was there, touching her, watching for every shadow that might cross her face, demanding that she stay with him and be afraid of nothing. It was natural to see my friend as the young St. George — it would have been so much easier, so much simpler, if he could have opposed his frail body to a tangible dragon spouting flames! But the real dragons are always quiet, without form, and the profoundest courage a man can have is the kind that will uphold him against the attack of shadows.

We knew it when Sharon passed into unconsciousness, and shut her eyes in the stupor of the high fever. Abraham lost his grip then, briefly; probably because she had gone beyond communication, and there was nothing he could do. He was shaken with a kind of convulsive crying that had no tears in it. I forced him to swallow some black coffee. I found a cot in the spare bedroom, and brought it into Sharon’s room, and made Abraham lie down, though I knew he would not sleep. He came out of the collapse quickly, and sat up again to watch her. At the hospital, a few patients have been kept alive with artificial respiration. He could not take his eyes away from her, for fear of missing the moment when she might need it. There had been something on an inner page of the newspaper: no more oxygen cylinders; a transportation breakdown was blamed. Since I knew there was no way to get any for Sharon, I couldn’t care….

It must be nearly midnight. I am in the living room with this notebook, where I can hear if Abraham calls me. The fever is 105°. But average for this phase of the sickness is nearer 107°, and she is breathing well. She is strong; she wants to live; she is very young.

These hours stretching ahead of us must be moving toward some sunrise. It is quiet here, everywhere. I can hear her breathing, evenly, not too weakly. The city is strangely silent. This journal will be miserably unimportant, if she dies. I’ll go in now, see if there is anything I can do.

Sharon’s fever broke this morning at four o’clock, after fourteen hours of the burning. There was no ominous leveling off at a high point. She is unconscious still, but it could almost be taken for natural sleep. 99.1° — you can’t call that a fever. In the early afternoon I went out to buy a paper — the radio broadcasts are maddening gabbles, and two of the best stations have gone silent — and found a newsstand with a few of the four- and eight-page sheets they are putting out. The dealer wore one of the useless gauze masks, and tossed change to me, careful not to touch my fingers….

Monday afternoon, it seems, a mob destroyed the offices of the Organic Unity Party. The policeman guarding the entrance — I shall always wonder if it was the same big decent Irishman — fired into the crowd as a last resort, but they trampled him to death in spite of that. They set fire to the interior, and slaughtered another man who was probably an innocent caretaker. Partly my doing. I can never go out again as an Observer. I threw away the paper, and told Abraham I couldn’t find one.

He was at last willing to sleep. I have promised to wake him if there is any change, and I will. Incredible that in spite of all Martian and human science of the last thirty thousand years I can do nothing but sit here, sponge her lips, watch, wait.

She is still unconscious, but her temperature is 98.7°; her breathing is excellent, not entirely mouth breathing now; there have been some apparently voluntary swallowing motions. I thought I saw her hand move slightly, but may have imagined it. That was early this evening; Abraham did not see it, and I did not mention it for fear I was wrong. I thought too that there was some dim responding motion when I felt her pulse just a few minutes ago, but again I could have been wrong. Anyway the pulse was good: regular, strong, fairly slow, none of the fluttering, pounding, hesitation that were so marked during the fever.

They recommend stimulants as well as liquid nourishment as soon as the patient can swallow. She must be conscious first. That will come. The wasting, the terrible hollows under her cheekbones that have appeared in the last forty-eight hours — those will pass. We have coffee and warm milk ready. It may be difficult to buy food outside now, but they had a well-stocked freezer, and so far the power has not failed. Canned stuff too, enough for four or five days. In the few exhausted words that Abraham and I have for each other, we take it for granted that very soon she will open her eyes and be able to see us. He speaks to her often; there has been no response to that, but I thought or imagined that the unknowing mask did change faintly once, when he kissed her.

We talked of other matters too, this evening. I wanted to draw Abraham away from the inner violence of his personal ordeal, and I said something vague, to the effect that human society as we knew it could never be quite the same again after the pandemic had run its course.

“It must be known,” said Abraham, “that this thing was man-made. They must have that fact driven into them, driven into their guts, driven into the germ plasm. And I think their great-grandchildren had better remember it.”

“It is known,” I told him. I told him what I had done, and what the mob had done.

“I think you were right—”

“That I’ll never know, Abraham. It’s done, and I shall be judging myself the rest of my life — likely with a hung verdict.”

“For what my opinion’s worth, you did right. But it’s not enough. After this is all over, Will, I ought to write down everything I know — after all, Hodding and Max are dead: who else is there to talk? Somehow I ought to see to it that there isn’t a corner of the planet where that truth hasn’t reached.”

“Are men going to listen any better when it’s over, Abraham? If you approach authority, for instance, and they say, ‘Where’s your proof?’”

“Why, I’d even lie and say I had a hand in it myself, if that was the only way to get the fact across.”

“Wrong, for several reasons—”

“Oh, Will, the individual isn’t so much as all that—”

“He is, but that’s not the greatest reason. I’ll ask you to look at this one in particular: if you did that, you’d be a scapegoat, nothing more, and haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves? This is the kind of world where it’s possible for a Joseph Max to run wild. If there must be blame, then all citizens — you, I, everyone — are responsible for letting it be that kind of world, for not placing ethical development ahead of every other kind. We understand ethical necessities quite well; we’ve been capable of understanding them for several thousand years; but we haven’t been willing to let them rule our actions — it’s that simple. Spend yourself in the long labor, Abraham, not in the passionate gesture or the unheeded sacrifice. On the personal level — because I’ve always seen a special flame in you that burns more dimly in others, and because I’ve always loved you — I forbid you to give yourself to crucifixion for no purpose.”

After a while he said, to me, to himself, to the girl who was so silent but not dying: “Is maturity the acceptance of conflict?”

And I said, silently, to myself only: Mission accomplished.

Early this morning, before dawn, she moved her hands up to her face, and her eyes opened — wide, knowing, full of recognition. “Sharon—”

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “I’m all right, Abe.”

“Yes, you’re out of it. You—”

“Darling, don’t whisper. I want to hear everything you say.”

“Sharon! Sharon—”

“I can’t hear you,” said Sharon Brand. “I can’t hear you.”

The ocean, forever changing and the same, was awake with deep music tonight; I was alone and not alone at all. Not alone, looking down some hours from the moving bow, seeing the flash and lingering subsidence of the noctilucae, those living diamonds of the sea, their light as transient as the sea foam and eternal as life, if life is eternal. Everything goes with me, the cherished faces, the words that endure although no embodied voice is near my body but only the great continuing voice of the sea and of a westerly wind out of the open regions of the world. I am not alone.

As we measure time it is not long, my second father, since I was in Northern City with you: nine years, a moment — it will seem nothing indeed when I am there with you again, in a few weeks or months.

You have my journal. Now that more time has passed, letting some pain recede, some anger die away, I must ask you to destroy that letter which I wrote to accompany the journal. I wrote it only one day after I knew that Sharon was deaf; I should have known better than to write anything at such a time. It was several weeks before I dared entrust the journal to the crippled human transportation system with any hope that it would reach Toronto and be forwarded to you, but in those weeks the anger and despair did not release me, and perhaps I could have written nothing better at the end of them. Now, however, I ask you to destroy that letter. From pride and vanity, and from the thought that my children are almost old enough to study my work, I do not want such a mood to be preserved. Put with the journal this message I am writing you now, and throw away what was written at a time when I was too heartsick to know what I said.

I cannot truly hate human beings for anything they do. If I said I did, that was an aberration of weakness, because I love Sharon more than any Observer should allow himself to love, and because I knew, as well as anyone can, what effort, sacrifice, and devotion it had cost her to make herself so fine an artist, only to have it torn away. “I live with dream stuff,” she said. Yes, she did; and to all who could hear she gave those dreams with a most free sharing. And the world responded — with para, with permanent deafness, not curable, not to be remedied with any device, for the beautiful magic nerves themselves are destroyed: she must live all the rest of her life in total silence. And for a while, as I admit now, I was not myself and I could not endure it.

It was Abraham who saved my reason, and probably Sharon’s. He upheld all three of us, forcing us to understand what richness of life remained in spite of everything. Well, let me tell in a couple of dozen words what Abraham has done since I wrote that wretched letter. He married her in April, as soon as she could be up and about, and took her to a small village in Vermont. Now he’s a clerk there, in a general store: dry goods and fishhooks and a pound of this and a pound of that. Laugh at it, Drozma — he does — and you’ll see that it makes sense. I’ll come back to that presently.

This freighter is an old tramp in no hurry. The air liners are flying again. There are fast boats. The whole huge complex of human transport and commerce and communication has staggered back to maybe forty per cent of normal; by the end of a year I suppose things will seem very much as they did a year ago. Superficially. I chose this old tub because I wanted a month with the ocean, and near it, where I could feel the voice of it, not slipping across it in a vast fission-driven city or soaring above it more swiftly than sound, but down here in the swells, the salt smell, the long whispering, the blue and green and gray. I wanted to watch the humorous pace-setting of the fulmars, whose flying is a kind of singing; the hasty brilliance of the flying fish; the large unhurried fins of danger that sometimes follow; the distant spouting of leviathan. I wanted to see the Pacific sunshine on the water through the hot days, the uncaring splendor of its setting in the evening — and with the sense that I was in that sunset, not overtaking it, not challenging it with my tiny conceptions of duration and motion. I wonder whether, some day, human beings will settle down, relax a little, discover that eternity is a long time.

I’ll talk with you directly from Manila, Drozma, if I can. If there should be difficulty about that, I suppose this may reach you first. I want to arrange matters so that Sharon and Abraham will learn of my “death” in a way that will distress them as little as possible and yet leave no doubt. They know I am going to Manila — “for a sort of vacation and to see some old friends.” I told Abraham once, casually, how I had always hoped that when I died it would be in the ocean, a relinquishment, a slipping downward into calm without a grave. That was not true, to be sure — I want to die in Northern City, after many more years of interesting work. But it was a humanlike notion that Abraham would not find strange in me, and I said it to prepare the way. I want about two months in Manila. Then I’ll take another slow ship for the States. If one of our little exploration subs could meet the ship, say about thirty miles out of Cavite? I could be a “man overboard” with not too much fuss, and Abraham would think that the old man died the way he wanted to. But if this would be too expensive and troublesome to arrange, Drozma, we can work out some other gentle fraud when I get in touch with you.

The worst was over at the end of April. Gradually, grudgingly, the curve on the graph sagged downward. By the end of May the fire was out: no new cases were reported, and the survivors found that there was still civilization, of a sort. How much it may have set back the “progress” that Namir hated so badly, I don’t know; and about ten years from now, I think we might begin to assess what it has done to men’s thinking.

It is known everywhere, as Abraham desired, that the tragedy was man-made. Known from a rather unexpected source: Jason Hodding’s son, who found a tormented diary the old man had kept during the final weeks of his work, and gave it to the authorities — and then shot himself. He must have felt, as Abraham did, that it was a thing men had to know; he was also the son of a man who was neither good nor bad, but human.

These are some of the figures I remember. The United States, with a population of more than two hundred million, lost forty-two million dead. This was from para alone: it does not include those who died in riots, and in the famines that gripped many communities, causing panic evacuations into a countryside that had no means of caring for the refugees. It does not include the millions who survived with major disablements — usually deafness like Sharon’s, but there were some who came out of it with limbs crippled as if by poliomyelitis, and some whose throats never recovered speech; and there were a few — I am speaking in terms of thousands — whose brain tissue was so damaged that they are not actually among the living. The United States of Europe, and South America, suffered in about the same proportion; Africa and India rather more. Interesting to note, however, that the death rate was only slightly higher in those countries where sanitation and public health work had never advanced to anything like the American level. It is supposed to have been somewhat higher in those countries merely because convalescents could not receive the care they did in more prosperous places, and therefore many died from inevitable neglect who might have lived.

The disease certainly reached Asia. That much we know. It must have done its slaughter there, after two years of major war, more horribly than anywhere else. But we also know, from the Satellite Authority, that some kind of war still goes on there, a slow fire of death, perhaps dying down, perhaps not. There is talk of sending in medical rescue expeditions — with armies in front of them for protection. I don’t know. It couldn’t be done soon; not until the rest of the world has had a little time to recover. It should be easy enough to by-pass Canton, Murmansk, Vladivostok, where they combined demolition with radioactive cobalt, but all effort at communication since the war began has been met with the sullen fury of silence; so far as I know all the land approaches to the sick continent are still viciously guarded in depth; their radar is good, and somehow they still have the means — aircraft, anti-aircraft, guided missiles — to destroy all foreign planes without inquiry, as they have done for the last three years. To break through would require a major military operation. The Western world has no heart for that at present; quite probably the slave populations would consider it an invasion, and hate the foreign devils as thoroughly as their masters do. It may be the logical finish for a national paranoia — all the same, you can’t throw away a third of a planet. Sooner or later sanity will have to tear down the barrier, if only for its own sake.

What has been the quality of the years for you, Drozma? In your letters you say little of yourself. I know you stand apart, watching both worlds with a clarity I have never achieved. I hope (though you do not say so) that the administrative burdens have been lightened, to give you better hours of contemplation. In spite of the plague, in spite of the continuing division of the world and the great weariness that will linger everywhere for a long time, I still believe that Union may be possible toward the close of my son’s lifetime. We must discuss that when I see you, that and many other slow-maturing fruits of the centuries. I gave the Minoan mirror to Sharon and Abraham, thinking you would approve the gift.

They have the essentials of maturity. Now I wish you could see Abraham waiting on the customers in that little store, or sometimes presiding over the rambling talk of old men and young on the rickety porch! He has even picked up a trace of the accent, though nobody could take him for a Vermonter. The small village was ravaged by para, like all the rest of the world — about a hundred dead from a population of less than four hundred — but it coheres and goes on about its decent business in the stubborn Vermont way. The owner of the store is an old man who lost all his family to para; he is worn down to a gray shred of humanity, but he is not confused. He thinks of Sharon and Abraham as his “new children,” and for himself he chiefly wants just to sit in the sun and wait a while.

They live over the store. One room has become a library, and Sharon reads a great deal…. “We shan’t be here always,” Abraham said to me. It is a pleasant and probably necessary temporary retirement from the livelier world. They need some years of quiet and study — Sharon to build a wholly new life on the ruins of what she lost, Abraham to digest and understand the past and the present and go on to new discoveries, new efforts that I would never dare to predict. He learned the deaf-mute sign language before Sharon did; learning it from him was one of the first steps she took out of her private maze of despair. He has other methods too of bringing the world to her. Sharon had never read a great deal before; the piano took the place of it. Now she is following his mind wherever it goes, and they are never lonely.

There is no undercurrent of guilt in his devotion to her, only love and a receptive interest in the endless mystery of another personality. He has no tendency now to blame himself for the world’s troubles. He sees himself very simply, I think — as a human being with possibilities that are not to be thrown away or lost or stultified. He has learned, Drozma, how to look in a mirror.

He is painting, too, for his pleasure, and Sharon’s, and for whatever others may choose to see in his work. I have two new canvases he gave me, in a waterproof cylinder, and am bringing them home to you. I wish you could see a certain fantasy of the underground river of Goyalantis — but I couldn’t accept that one, because I knew that Sharon wanted it even more. And tentatively, not too humbly, Sharon is approaching that art herself, partly under his guidance, more under the guidance of her own warm imagination — something may come of that; it’s too soon to tell. They are never lonely.

All that I have told you has the pathetic incompleteness of words. I remember my report of 30,963, and my journal of this year, and I am constantly amazed to think how intricate was the reality, how partial my story of it, like those telescopic photographs of Mars that tickle and excite the human imagination with a sense of truth just beyond reach. I remember Latimer, New England’s queer blend of history and tomorrow: I can smell it, and hear again the street sounds, yet my words were feebler than a photograph, and a photograph would have told you very little.

I remember my first meeting with Angelo Pontevecchio. How can I describe the certainty of recognition in myself when he limped into the house, set down the Crito, studied me with twelve-year-old curiosity behind his mother’s friendliness — the certainty that I was in the presence of what I must always love without ever understanding it?

Did I make you see Feuermann? Or any of those other bewildering complexes of contradiction we call human? Mac — I’ll never know if I wounded him by shoving that damn toothbrush out of alignment. Mrs. Keith and her amethyst brooch…

I shall always remember Rosa, the pretty eyebrows in her round face always slightly lifted in wonder at her son and at the world beyond him.

I remember Amagoya.

I remember too the first time I saw the Satellite. In the Americas they call it the Midnight Star, and I saw it rising from the north and passing, not swift like a meteor but far more hurried to the eye than any star. The most dramatic achievement of human science, I think, and something more than science too — a bright finger groping at the heavens. It moves in daytime, invisible, over the Pacific, but I shall see it again when I am coming home.

I remember the sea, from centuries past and from tonight, the sea that changes forever only to be the same.

Never, beautiful Earth, never even at the height of the human storms have I forgotten you, my planet Earth, your forests and your fields, your oceans, the serenity of your mountains; the meadows, the continuing rivers, the incorruptible promise of returning spring.