A warm morning in June, not a cloud in the sky, another winter and a long cold spring gone over at last and the lilac was in bloom again. The scent of it entering the open window of his room was so intoxicating it brought a mist to the eyes of the elderly man standing beside it. During his illness the past February he had wondered if he would ever smell lilac again. But now the sun was warming his veins and one more summer at least seemed assured to him, his seventy-fifth.
The buzzer stabbed the silence and made him start, for it had been more than three months since anyone had called him. He went to the instrument eagerly, wondering who it might be who had remembered he was still alive. What he heard was an unfamiliar and apparently youthful voice announcing itself as André Gervais and asking if this was Mr. John Wellfleet.
“Yes, I’m Wellfleet.”
The man Gervais then informed him that he had in his possession some papers and had good reason to believe that they were concerned with Wellfleet’s family. The old man’s eagerness vanished.
“Mr. Gervais, did you say? I don’t think I know you. Did I hear you say something about my family?”
“Yes, that’s what I said. Your family.”
“Well, I have no family.”
“But you must have had a family once. Let me explain. These papers aren’t new. They’re so old I can hardly believe they’re real. There could be quite a situation here. I can’t understand much about these papers, but they might turn out to be very important.”
The stranger spoke fluent English, but there was an intonation of French in his voice and Wellfleet, thinking he was an official, replied in that language.
“Je le répète, Monsieur. Ma famille n’existe plus.”
Gervais went on in English, “I don’t think you understand me. These papers are very old.”
Oh, for God’s sake, the old man thought, another of them! Papers and questionnaires, this form and that form and that form and this form, his life had been turned into a bog by them. He said nothing and the stranger went on.
“I went to the Bureau of Records, of course, before I called you.”
“What good did that do you?”
“It’s certainly unreliable, the Bureau. There are many gaps.”
“Did I hear you say gaps? You must be very young if you’ve just discovered that.”
“Yes, I’m young, but there is a Bureau. They’ve been trying to restore the data for quite a while now. You must have known that.”
“I did not know it.”
“The Bureau can’t be entirely useless. I certainly found the information that there were people called Wellfleet living in Metro a long time ago. So my question is – were you one of them?”
What’s he after? Wellfleet thought. Then he remembered how vulnerable he was.
“Yes,” he said bleakly, “I may have been one of them. But when I was young the city I lived in wasn’t called Metro, and what difference does it make where anyone lived that long ago?”
He was on the point of breaking the connection when he heard Gervais say eagerly, “I have a name here – Stephanie Wellfleet. Does that name mean anything to you?”
It was so sudden the old man’s throat seized up and for several seconds he could not articulate. When finally he spoke his voice was asthmatic.
“She was – she – she was my mother.”
The man called Gervais became excited: “I had hoped she was, but in a case like this I had to be absolutely sure. This is wonderful.”
Wellfleet felt as though someone had torn stitches from a wound in his soul. Over the years a hard-tested instinct of self-preservation had drilled him to control a naturally impulsive character, but now the control broke.
“Who the hell are you?” His voice rose almost to a scream. “Why can’t you people leave me alone? My mother? How do you know she even existed? How do you know her name? And what business is this of yours anyway?”
He was breathing thickly, noisily, because his pulmonary tract was congested. Gervais was talking, his voice was kind, he was trying to soothe the old man, but Wellfleet was hearing nothing. His mother! He had been told that all the records had been destroyed long ago. Completely obliterated. And since then the volume of disappointment, fear, humiliation, and loneliness had been what it had been. This young man, whoever he was, could know nothing of that. He could know very little about anything that had mattered.
Occasionally his mother returned to him in his sleep and was so real he could hear the caress of her voice. But it was a cold thing, a cruel thing. So often when he tried to remember those he had loved in his youth and younger manhood, tried to remember them when he was awake, they had no more life in them than the faded photographs you find in a drawer when you are looking for something else. And what could this mean but that those we have loved so vastly that they have been translated into the memory cells and the mystery of our minds, and have been so woven into our own lives that they were our reason for existing – after they have been dead long enough we can recover them only when we are asleep.
“No!” he shouted, and broke the connection.
When he stumbled to his feet the beauty of the morning was gone and the walls of his room were weaving as though he were drunk or seasick. He blundered outside and collapsed onto a bleached wooden chair on a patch of fresh grass. For several minutes his lungs rasped to his breathing, but gradually his blood pressure subsided and he was still.
Three other old men were taking the sun but they had no interest in him nor he in them. He watched a robin fly into the lilac bush with a worm in its bill. The sun heated his limbs and stirred a little color into his long, pale face. The sky was enormous this morning, deep blue over the fields and trees. Summer was certainly coming; on a day like this it was almost here. Even the hum of a mosquito was soothing.
But there was no way this solitary old man could soothe his mind. He went inside again among his books. The walls of his room were double-lined with them and if he still felt human it was they that had kept him so. In his youth he had been lazy and irregular but he had always enjoyed reading. Only when he had been discarded as inoperative had he become a student. These books out of a lost and marvellous past were his only friends. He had collected many before the Destructions and had found many more afterwards in out-of-the-way places where they had been lost or forgotten, but none of his books helped him now. He picked up one he had been reading with pleasure the night before but now the words refused to come alive for him. He sat still and cursed himself for the fool of fools for having cut off this André Gervais, or whoever he was, without having learned a single thing except that somehow he knew his mother’s name. He had no idea how to recover him.
Wellfleet had drilled himself to accept almost everything after his own world had vanished, but he had been isolated too long to know what had been happening in the last two decades. Vaguely he was aware that a new generation was coming alive again, but he had never met any members of it. Years ago the Third Bureaucracy had relegated him to this compound where he was allowed a small room and enough food and clothing to keep him alive.
The rest of his day passed in a slow tension and in the early twilight he went to bed hearing the birds singing until the last oboe-throb of an oriole ceased and it was dark.
Lying in the dark he sank slowly down into the sea of his own past. So long ago the morning of his life; so long ago even his middle years when the marvellous, tragic structure they had called civilization had shattered itself.
Inevitably, after a pause, a raw new bureaucracy had emerged out of the wreckage and this was the one that had ordered the past to be ciphered out as though it had never been. But how could this André Gervais have discovered his mother’s name? It unnerved him to know that he had. Then he remembered something he had not taken in when Gervais had been talking to him. The young man’s voice had been kind.
As drowsiness seeped through him there welled up the images of some girls and women he had known, and he had known many. A few of them were the only treasures he had left, apart from his books. Now it was Joanne. He dozed, came awake a short time later, saw light from a risen moon washing the spines of his books, then faded off into the depths of sleep. How long he slept he did not know but it must have been several hours, for when he woke the moonlight was gone and the room was dark.
Once more he was a man in his prime, for in a long dream Joanne had returned to him in the full reality of her living flesh and spirit. Small, so near-sighted she was almost blind without her glasses, surely she had been as valiant as anyone he had ever known. She had been absolutely honest. With herself first of all, for her essence had always been private. Only those who had been truly loved by her had discovered how rarely beautiful she was, for only they had seen the wonder of her love-smile. He lay still. She had returned to him with uncanny accuracy – her eyes when she loved, her lips when she loved, the body of a profound human being as supple as the muscles of sea tides when all of her moved and rippled in a whiteness of love – where was she now? What was she now? Her body had been dust for years but she had never been more real than she had been a few minutes ago.
His eyes closed and after a while he slept dreamless until the morning.
A ground mist veiling the trees, the sun seeping through it, the feeling of a hot day coming, a true summer day after the long cold in this cold land. He had eaten a light breakfast when the instrument stabbed the silence and he went to it as fast as his stiff knee could move. It was André Gervais again.
“How kind of you to call me! I never thought you would. I’m so ashamed about yesterday. I don’t think there’s anything serious the matter with my brain but it was so sudden. Your mentioning my mother’s name, I mean. She vanished so long ago. I’m forgetful, I suppose, but I think it’s because I’ve been alone so long. I see it in the others here where I live. We try to like each other, but we don’t really find each other interesting. My best friend is a chipmunk. I save crumbs from my meals and when I go outside he comes to me and eats off the palm of my hand.”
Gervais spoke quietly, carefully. “I’m the one who should apologize, Mr. Wellfleet. I was far too eager. Now I’d like to explain why I called you. When I called I was only taking a chance on your name. I mean, I was astonished to find you were real. But when you told me that this lady – this lady Stephanie Wellfleet – that she was your mother, it was such marvellous luck I could hardly believe it and I suppose I became excited. You see, this proved that what I had found was genuine, and if it’s genuine it’s absolutely priceless.”
The old man was as bewildered as ever. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, so perhaps you could explain.”
Gervais, still speaking quietly, told him that he was a young man, twenty-five years old, and that he was calling from the ruins of the old Metro where he worked. A few years ago a group of men had formed a small company to commence the building of a new city on a section of the ruins because, so said Gervais, they had been told by several travellers that this was one of the great natural sites in the world. From some old books they had learned that in the far distant past many famous cities had been destroyed and new ones built on top of their ruins. In the central part of the wrecked Metro they had found a wall standing and had blown it down to level the place. While the debris was being cleared away, Gervais himself had found two large castiron boxes, each one weighing about twelve kilograms without the contents. On each box was engraved the name “James Wellfleet” and the number 1872.
Wellfleet listened in a daze. Then he sat down.
“Give me time to think,” he said. “It was so long ago. James Wellfleet was my great-great-grandfather and he died long before I was born. I suppose 1872 was a date under the old system.” A memory blazed up in his mind. “This is incredible. Yes, suddenly I remember. It was after my stepfather’s death. His name was Dr. Dehmel. He was a German.”
“A man called Dehmel has left a lot of records in these boxes, but I can’t understand much of anything I found in them. Do you know about the boxes themselves?”
Wellfleet began to tremble and his voice was unsteady. “Yes, I do remember.”
“You saw those boxes?”
“No. No, I never saw them, but I knew they had been lost. It was the only time I heard my mother cry. She’d had a hard life and she had terrific control. All our lives were in those boxes, I remember her saying. All our lives. I was only a boy and I thought she meant money.”
The young man’s voice became eager again: “Something far more valuable than money was in them. They had heavy padlocks and they were so corroded I had to burn them off. When I opened the lid I found hundreds of papers and photographs and rolls called tapes, whatever that means. The boxes had been perfectly airtight and the contents were as fresh as yesterday.”
The old man was silent, trying to remember. Yes, those boxes must have been stored in the basement of the house where she and Uncle Conrad had lived. A year after her husband’s death she had gone to England to spend half a year with a sister who lived there. While she was away a developer had bought the property, smashed the houses down, and dug a hole thirty meters deep and a block long. His mother’s furniture had been taken out and put into storage but there was no sign of the boxes.
He told Gervais this and added, “All this happened on top of what had happened to her before.” His breathing became asthmatic again. “This is unbelievable. Did I hear you say that some of that building was still standing?”
“Only a wall and a half. It was an empty shell.”
“It was one of those crate-shaped buildings we had everywhere. It was forty floors high.”
He sat in a daze, motionless, lost in a confusion of memories. Then he heard Gervais speaking.
“We want to know where the truth is. We’ve heard all sorts of stories about the past, but how true were they? In school they gave us the Diagram, but you were a teacher once and you know what that was worth.”
“So you’ve checked out my record since you last called me? Well, why not? What was the Diagram worth? It was their chief instrument in obliterating the Past. It was supposed to be history, but it omitted nearly all the history of the human race before the Third Bureaucracy. Do you know what the word ‘history’ means?”
“I know what it means, but I don’t know what it was. We’ve found many books, but very little from the time when you were young. Everyone knows the Destructions happened, but we weren’t told why. Do you know why?”
“Oh, Mr. Gervais, how can I answer a question like that? What happened – yes, I know that. What happened was that hundreds of millions of human beings and animals were obliterated within a few hours and the metros turned into graveyards. For years we’d known there was a chance of this happening, but we never believed it would. Afterwards the Bureaucracy – I’ve already called it the Third Bureaucracy – the people in it now were babies when the Destructions came. Their parents had survived because they didn’t live in the metros. They were on farms and in small towns and pockets outside the action.” He paused. “I wonder if I can possibly make you understand. The metros had become the central nervous system of the entire world. Communications – and they were marvellous – the bureaucrats, the organizers, the planners, the headquarters of everything – they were all in the metros. Nobody could be independent of them. When they were destroyed, the whole system ceased to exist. Those who were on the outside were in horror, just as I was myself. The first few years were so terrible that I can’t bring myself to remember them. There was no control at all. It was every man for himself. It was as though the whole world had been thrown back six or seven hundred years without having the organizations those ancient people had.” He paused, breathing heavily. “Of course, there were many survivors who understood small skills. Some of them could repair small engines, but they couldn’t manufacture them. They couldn’t refine fuels. Fortunately a good many doctors who had practised in small towns and in the country survived. They had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed. Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being.
“This Bureaucracy couldn’t have been anything else but bad. One of their leaders was a maniac who went around preaching ‘They brought the wrath of God upon themselves and upon us all. So let their names and deeds be obliterated forevermore.’ That’s why they concocted the Diagram, and for a while anyone who tried to tell young people about the past was in danger of his life.”
Again he stopped, waiting for Gervais to speak, but Gervais said nothing.
“This part of the world,” he went on, “was probably luckier than most others because one of the hydro dams survived. Well, of course you know all about that. At least we had electricity and there were men who understood how to use it.”
“Quite a few factories have been built lately,” Gervais said quietly. “We’re learning. We know how to manufacture wires and repair turbines. We’re learning very quickly.”
“Of course, I always knew there were survivors who had enough skills to restore a little of what was lost, but there was no will for it. The Bureaucracy was hopelessly ignorant. They couldn’t endure their memories or face their future. They also had power, and were crafty enough to know that if the intelligent survivors became organized, they would lose that power.”
Wellfleet’s breathing had become congested and he felt weakness coming over him. It was the old trouble. He had been sitting with his head down and his neck bent forward and the calcium deposits along the back of his neck had been restricting the flow of blood to his brain. He lifted his head and breathed rhythmically and heard Gervais speaking again. Gervais was saying that he wanted to turn the papers over to the old man. He was saying he longed to meet him and talk with him. Wellfleet shook his head.
“If these papers are personal, I can’t understand who would care about them today. If my mother is in them they must be at least fifty years old.”
“I’m not sure, but I think some are much older than that.”
What was the use? Wellfleet was thinking. How could anyone explain to a man of Gervais’s age, brought up on the Diagram, what the world had been like before the Destructions came? He said it aloud.
“I think I might understand if I had a chance,” Gervais said.
“It would be too dangerous even to try.”
Gervais was surprised. He felt pity, even sorrow, for this old man he had never seen or heard of until yesterday. Where had they been keeping him?
“Mr. Wellfleet,” he said quietly, “believe me, there’s no danger any more. The Bureaucracy has changed. There’s a new mentality. It’s the books we’ve been finding. Some with pictures of cities long before Metro. They’re very beautiful. Those metros – we’ve collected many photographs of them and they all look the same. I can’t understand why people wanted to live in places like that.”
Wellfleet gave a sad laugh. “Most of them didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry, Mr, Gervais, it’s not your fault. I understand that. But what you don’t know must be just about everything there ever was. Let me ask you a simple question. Do you know how many people are in the world now?”
“We’re trying to find out. Would you know?”
“How could I possibly know? I’d guess the population might be what it was three or four hundred years ago, but it’s only a guess, and a wild one. When I was your age there were hundreds of millions more people than there are now. None of my friends survived. Lately the faces of a few of them have been coming to me like photographs printed one on top of the other. Some of them were beautiful. Some were gentle and some were even happy. It was nothing in their characters that killed them. It just happened. So perhaps this damned Bureaucracy is right after all. Maybe it’s just as well that you should be prevented from knowing what was lost. Your parents would understand what I’m trying to say.”
There was another silence, then Gervais said, “I love my parents, but they refuse to say anything about what it was like when they were young.”
“I can believe it.”
Again buried emotions surged up and the old man was unable to speak. The young man told him he had made a list of names connected with the papers and he began to read them off a paper he had before him – Stephanie Wellfleet, Dr. Conrad Dehmel, many more whose names John Wellfleet had never heard. Finally Gervais asked him if he had been named after his grandfather, John Wellfleet, and was he old enough to remember him?
When he heard this, the old man went out of control. It was too much and it was coming at him too fast. For years that had become a long blur of empty time he had tried to lock away the meaning of everything he had been, known, and valued. For the next few minutes young Gervais wondered if Wellfleet had gone out of his mind, for he was sobbing and crying.
“You don’t know! You can’t know! Nobody ever will know for ever and ever. They obliterated their lives and then they obliterated their names. Every remaining record they found they deliberately destroyed. It wasn’t like that ever before. My grandfather knew the names of his family going back for more than two hundred years into the Old Country and now he might never have been. People like him and my mother and Valerie and Joanne and everyone I knew and loved – even famous men we all knew – where are they? Only in my memory and sometimes I’m not even sure they’re there. My memory is a blur.”
The young man felt fear. He listened to Wellfleet’s breathing grow steady and a moment later he heard his voice come out strong and firm.
“Mr. Gervais, it so happens that I never knew the name of my real father. My mother, I think, was the purest soul I ever knew in my life. When I was sixteen, she told me that my actual father was a distinguished Englishman who hadn’t informed her that he was married to somebody else until she discovered she was pregnant. Previously she had believed she was engaged to him.”
Gervais said nothing.
“But when I was a child,” the old man went on, “this did not matter because of Grandfather. His own children were grown up and married and his wife – my grandmother – she had died a few years before. That’s what Mother told me. Mother used to keep his house and look after him and he was the kindest man you could imagine. He’d lost his money in business. There were some very smart business operators around then, but at least he wasn’t classified inoperative as the Bureaucracy classified me. Nobody was then. Grandfather loved all young and growing things. You’d never believe this, but in those days in the pre-Metro city there were wild animals on the mountain. You should have seen the squirrels. Somebody called it the City of Squirrels. And the wildflowers! There were all kinds of them on the mountain and Mother and Grandfather knew the names of them all. Just think of that. They knew the names of the flowers.”
He stopped abruptly and with an effort he quieted his breathing again.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gervais, I talked too much and couldn’t stop. Talking to somebody real is like eating after you’ve been nearly starved to death.”
After a short silence, Gervais said, “Of course, we’ve all heard stories. And the Diagram. Was there any truth in it?”
“Oh, that! Yes, I suppose there was some. If you want to make a good lie stick, you’ve got to put at least a little truth into it.”
“Then let me ask you another question. Was it when you were a child that the old System began to fall apart?”
“I’ve often thought you could make a case for that idea. But let me tell you, there was a long, long trail a-winding before the final Destructions came. Am I confusing you? Of course I am.”
“There’s another name here – Timothy Wellfleet. Do you think he’s alive still?”
The old man passed a long-fingered hand over a long, narrow forehead.
“For God’s sake, what next? Timothy, did you say? He was an older cousin of mine but I never met him. When I was a schoolboy he was famous for a while. He was a star on what we called the networks. I won’t waste your time trying to explain it, but it was a picture system we called television. It went everywhere. He was what we called a star for a short time and then he disappeared. I never knew what happened to him. I can’t believe he’s alive. If he is, he’s in his nineties. I know Mother knew him well. She was his first cousin and a good many years older. I have a vague idea that for a short while she helped bring him up. Otherwise I never thought he had anything to do with any of us.”
The young man hesitated, then asked carefully, “How long is it, sir, since you were in Metro?”
The shock of it returned and brought a buzzing to Wellfleet’s ears. He had gone into Metro shortly after it was destroyed. He had gone in with the impossible hope of finding his mother and Joanne. After a short time among the ruins he had lost his way and had vomited from the stench of the decomposing bodies. He had never gone near the place again.
Gervais’s voice now became urgent. “It might make problems if I went out to see you, but you can certainly see me. There’s a transporter service into Metro and it passes the place where you’ve been located. You know that, I suppose?”
“Somebody told me about it.”
“You must come in to look at these papers. I told you I’m lost in them, but I’ve made a kind of catalogue. There are nearly a thousand personal letters. All kinds of photographs. Diaries and journals. And the narratives! I’ve never seen anything like them. Some by Timothy Wellfleet. Many by Dr. Dehmel – many diaries from him. Not much from your mother.” He paused. “There are a lot of items called tapes. Would you know what they are?”
“Yes. I won’t try to explain it to you, but I even have two machines and possibly those tapes would fit them.”
“I think they were planning a book,” Gervais said, “but I’m very confused. Much of the language I don’t understand very well, and some is in a language I don’t even recognize. Timothy seems to have been the one who was to put the book together. He writes in a wild kind of way and I can’t understand much of it.”
“From what I’ve heard of him I’m not surprised you can’t understand him. I never knew him personally. But Conrad Dehmel! He married my mother when my sister and I were seven years old. We were twins. I called him Uncle Conrad. He was what was called an historian. He was even an archaeologist for a time.”
“A what?”
“They used to dig up lost cities. Something like you seem to be doing now. He spent a long time studying the records of one of them. I can’t remember the name of the place but it was in the Sahara Desert somewhere.”
“What happened to it?”
“I was only a schoolboy when Uncle Conrad died and I can’t answer that question. I suppose there was another time when the cities broke down and the people abandoned them. There might have been a war. There were always wars. Uncle Conrad spoke and wrote in five different languages. All I know about his earlier life is that it was a miracle he was not liquidated in one of our own wars. He knew a lot. He knew an enormous lot.”
“Were there many people like him when you were young?”
“In Europe there were quite a few.”
“But if there were men with all that knowledge, why couldn’t they stop what happened?”
Wellfleet gave a rueful laugh. “I used to hear Uncle Conrad say those very words himself. He belonged to something called the Club of Rome. The members were afraid of what was coming and made plans to avert it, but it made no difference at all. When everyone’s having a ball, who wants to stop the music?”
He knew that Gervais did not understand him but he made no attempt to explain further. It would do no good if he tried. Then Gervais mentioned still another name.
“There’s a girl here. Her name is Esther Stahr. Did you know her?”
“I never heard of her.”
“She was one of Timothy’s girls and she seems to have been his partner for a time in something I can’t understand. There’s a lot of record about their conversations. She says several times that in those days the real power was hidden. What does that mean – conspiracies in the Bureaucracy?”
Wellfleet broke into a laugh that sounded to Gervais slightly insane.
“It’s not your fault, but I can’t possibly make you understand what it used to be like in the world. I know the Diagram told you that it was about this time that we cracked up. I can’t deny there’s some real truth in that. But let me tell you there never was a time in the history of the Galaxy – I don’t suppose you even know what that word means – never such a time as when I was young. It was marvellously exciting. Anything could happen. You name it – anything. It was a golden age. The golden age of the Common Man. Nothing like it had ever happened before and nothing like it will ever happen again.”
He stopped and after a pause he heard Gervais ask quietly, “But if this was a golden age, why did it destroy itself?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Anyway this Esther Stahr, whoever she was, what she said was right. The bureaucracies – we called them governments – it wasn’t them that mattered. It was the geniuses. Vehicles out in space with equipment so sophisticated they could photograph gophers sitting in front of their holes. Anything was possible. The efficiency was unbelievable. Of course, there were a few accidents. That spaceship that got away from them – yes, that spaceship. But of course you know about that.”
“Spaceship? What do you mean – spaceship?”
“Are you telling me you don’t know about that?”
“I never heard that word.”
“That God-damned Third Bureaucracy! Yes, that’s right. Now I remember. It was one of their forbidden words. Do you know what space is?”
“Mr. Wellfleet, of course I know what space is.”
“Okay, but this spaceship. It aborted. It got clean out of control. Afterwards, their computers – you don’t know what they were but never mind – they buzzed like beehives and still the boys couldn’t find out what went wrong. Then they gave up and issued that communiqué, and brother, was it ever beautiful! I remember it word for word. Listen and I’ll tell you. ‘Exhaustive check-outs on every detail of Mission U.E. 31 – that meant Universe Explorer No. 31 – confirm abort self-inducted. It is therefore assumed that an unknown factor was operative in this abort.’ Then they handed out the usual crap about sympathy for the families and about not letting this balls-up interfere with the continuation of the space program. And now you tell me you never even heard the name of it!”
Gervais had not been able to understand more than half of the old man’s vocabulary. Wellfleet went on.
“This mission was special because there were two girls aboard. Two guys and two girls. Women were getting into everything then and they organized a big protest against the space program. Why should men get the high of being shot out there and no women? It wasn’t fair, they said. By this time the organizers were getting worried because everyone was getting bored by the space trips, so they said okay, this one will be different. The idea took on. Nobody said it officially, but maybe they’d be having sex out there in space and would it be possible when they were weightless? We were all agog and then it aborted.” Wellfleet paused. “You know, that thing about the unknown factor bugs me to this day. Those girls and boys still out there wandering through the light years on account of that unknown factor. Of course, they may have sailed into the sun and been burned to death.”
There was a long silence until Gervais said, “Is this really true?”
“But are you sure it happened just as you said?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” The old voice became querulous. “You came to me, I didn’t come to you. I’ve been badly treated. Everyone my age has been shucked off into nowhere. Well, let me tell you there are still a few of us left and we’ve seen things you can’t even imagine. And let me tell you something else. We were young too, once.”
In another silence Gervais heard the old man breathing noisily. Then he said shyly, “My friends call me André.”
Startled, Wellfleet asked if he rated as one of his friends.
“If you’ll permit me.”
The old man almost choked up. “If I’ll permit you! Thank you, André. Thank you very much for that. It almost makes me feel human again.”
“And now,” Gervais said, “when will you be coming into Metro to take over these papers?”
Wellfleet hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Is your health not good enough?”
“I’m not sure I want to see those papers.”
“But why not? I can’t understand you.”
“André, it was such a long time ago. There is something you’ll never understand till you’re as old as I am. Everyone I ever knew and cared about was destroyed. After that came the years of virtual slavery teaching lies in the Diagram in order to eat. Then they declared me inoperative and put me out into this compound. I suppose I should be grateful for that, but I’m not.”
There was a silence. Then Gervais’s voice became almost commanding: “I’m asking you to come back to life again. I want you to make a book out of this. Thousands will read it and you’ll be alive again.”
“Did you say a book!”
“I said a book. Even under the Diagram there were printing presses. Now they can be used for something real. They can be used for the truth.”
“It’s too late.”
The young man’s voice became even more commanding. “You can’t do this to yourself, Mr. Wellfleet. It will be awful if you back out.”
The old man sighed, then he gave an incredulous laugh. “I thought everyone real was dead, and then you appear! For years I’ve tried to forget I was ever inside Metro.” He laughed again. “It’s marvellous to hear a young man’s voice again after all these years. Okay, André why not? When do you want me?”
“The sooner the better.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I’ll be here waiting for you. I want you here because we have a mock-up of the nucleus of a new city and I want you to see it. So tomorrow it is?”
“If I don’t go in tomorrow I probably never will. Is it true that Metro’s all overgrown now?”
“A lot of it is, but some large fragments of the ruins are jutting up all over the place. There’s been a lot of excavating and levelling in the old center – that’s where I’m located. I should warn you that it isn’t pretty. But in time it will be cleaned up.”
Gervais explained in detail how he could be found in Metro, and it was with a feeling of not knowing where or when he was that the old man heard the names of the very streets that had been his haunts when he was young. The streets were no longer thoroughfares but their names had remained. He knew there was nothing new in this. Place names had always been the most permanent things in the short little human story.
After deactivating the instrument, Wellfleet went outside and sat on the chair near the lilac. Yesterday he had been low and used up as though his soul had arthritis, but now beauty was returning to him in waves. Those he had loved in his youth had not vanished after all. Somebody else knew they had existed. Perhaps in time many would know, for André had asked him to write their story.
The lilac candles nodded in a stir of wind. These ones were white, full-bodied, and of a fine original rootstock. He remembered some lines his mother had repeated to him one evening in spring when he was a child and couldn’t sleep:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring …
But he was not mourning now, he was feeling almost joyous. He smiled to himself as he remembered those experts who had predicted that a time would soon come when there would be no more animals or birds or lilac trees. As usual, they had been wrong. A later generation of experts explained their survival by proving that they had developed better adaptation techniques. A farmer he had known had put it more simply: “The buggers have learned to hide so well it takes you half a day to find them.”
He fell into a reverie. He remembered passages of poetry and surges of music and he was thankful that the period was over when he could not bear to listen to the symphonies in his record collection because they so terribly increased his sense of loss for the great coherent time in which they were born. Even before the Destructions he had felt like this. Finally his thoughts returned to André Gervais, who had been born so many years after the Great Fear; many years even after the Destructions.
Nobody of André’s age could imagine what the Great Fear had been like. There had been a few others in the pre-scientific past which psychologists said were caused by sexual hallucinations, but none of them were as uncanny as this one. During it he had even tried to deny its presence, but he had known, like everyone else, that suddenly everything had become unreal. So what could he say to André if the young man asked him to explain the Great Fear? André was sure to ask him some time because this was one of the folk legends the people were conscious of today. Tell him that the planners had planned the people into paralysis? Tell him that every problem the Bureaucracy tried to solve only produced four or five worse ones? Tell him that the metros went out of control? André had seen photographs of those colossal cities, but he could have no idea of what they had really been like. Or simply tell him that the Smiling Bureaucracy reached the end of its rope and was replaced by the Second Bureaucracy which was probably insane?
The mists had lifted and as the sun heated the air he remembered the line about the earth abiding forever. He burst into a gale of laughter as he recalled a famous scientist explaining that it had not abided forever; that it was, as earth, only about eight billion years old, give or take a few billion either way. This was something he would not bother telling André.
A delicious languor spread through him as he watched the parent robins flying in and out of the lilac where their little ones were waiting in the nest for the worms. He rose, stretched, and went inside, and after a light lunch of a composite he lay down to doze. The emotions of the morning had left him happy but fatigued.
Fully dressed he lay on his cot and closed his eyes, and while he was still half asleep and half awake Joanne returned to him again. It was the night they had met in the empty house they had found. He was not promiscuous then, for she was his only woman. Her hips were moving slowly, lovingly, sinuously, with the twilight soft on her head as he lay on his back watching and loving her intense little face and her shoulders the color of mother-of-pearl, and then the peace came and she was curled up beside him as they both fell asleep.
How long he slept he did not know because his watch had stopped, but the position of the sun told him it was late afternoon. Again he went outside and sat in his chair and watched the robins at work in their last shift of the day.
After he had made and eaten his supper he went outside again and watched the sun go down. Twilight darkened away from the corona of burnt-orange in the west, and when finally it was dark the perfume of the lilacs was stronger than ever. The atmosphere was so clear he could imagine himself able to recognize the spaces between the constellations. The stars owned the sky completely, for the moon, still carrying its quota of plastic national flags, was on the other side of the earth in its intimate hideousness and distant beauty.
He thought how pleasant it would be if André and his friends, and their successors and the successors of their successors, actually did manage to create a new city on the ruins of the old one. He could not believe they would, but it was pleasant to think about it. One thing at least was sure: it would be several generations before they could put together the technical equipment to turn it into a metro.
In his childhood in the pre-Metro city the evening star had shone like a pharos over the gap where the great street curved up through the pass in the mountain that was the city’s heart. Year after year that star had welcomed the breadwinners home from their daily work. It had been one of the many friendly things that had made his city the most beloved on the continent to those who knew it. They never understood what the star had meant to them until a developer blotted it out with another huge oblong of concrete and glass. Not long afterwards the local bureaucracy renamed the historic old place Metro.
Next morning he waited at the embarkation point for the LIMT – they still called it that, the Linear Induction Motor Transporter. Its principles had been discovered when he was a schoolboy but nobody had done anything about it so long as they still had enough oil.
When the transporter arrived he climbed aboard and noticed that it was cleaner than it had been the last time he had used it. That was seven years ago when he had travelled thirty kilometers east to visit an acquaintance in another compound. He had been allowed three vouchers a year for the transporter but had used hardly any of them. He looked out the window at farmland that seemed more prosperous than the last time he had seen it. They stopped in a number of villages and he saw some horses and wagons on their streets. The transporter continued westward toward the ruins of Metro. In the outer grid, the section originally named the South Shore Development Zone, some buildings seemed at least half intact, but they looked tired and ill-used and reminded him of the faces of men who had spent years in prison. The broken shell of a high oblong building stood alone, but closer to the river the concrete was visible only as a kind of outcropping.
Across the river, nearly five kilometers distant, was a wide tumble of grassy mounds with many fragments of buildings jutting out of it and the contours looking like mountain foothills. The invincible grass, the all-concealing and all-healing grass, had mantled the wreckage of Metro, had made it look soft and green and shadowed in the hollow places. One bridge only was intact and the transporter swept silently across it. The river was violet-colored and shivered in patches of wind. The transporter followed the old curving route into the heart of what once was the Old City. There were thousands of birds. Red-winged blackbirds balanced on shrubs and long stalks of coarse grass, in the softer grass robins hunted for worms, and many seagulls were white against the green of the mounds. He had been told that fish had returned to the river after nearly a century.
The transporter passed through this eerie beauty and entered a hideous area of about four square kilometers. Most of it was bare and acrid-looking and reminded him of the parking lots of his boyhood. He noticed deep, raw cavities and recognized them as the foundation holes dug by the developers who had destroyed the Old City and built a metro on top of it. On the edge of one of these he saw a dusty pile of debris and realized it was composed of human bones and broken skeletons. It might have been on the edge of this very hole that young Gervais had found the boxes with those papers he was so excited about.
In the heart of this empty area the transporter stopped and he and seven other men got out. These others were all young.
Wellfleet stood still, looked around, and felt weird. Metal standards had been erected with the names of the excavated streets, and just as André had told him, they were the same names the streets had borne when he was young. For a moment he felt faint and had to lean against the nearest standard.
It had once been such a wonderful city, even though it had been made ugly many years before the Destructions came. He was standing in front of what once had been the campus of the university. Even during his time as a student the towers of glass and concrete had been built up around it, yet he had been happy there. He remembered walking slowly down the university avenue from a late lecture talking about Plato with his professor. He remembered lying on the grass with friends on warm autumn days. Then it came over him that it was on this very spot that he had first met Joanne. Now it was buried in rubble, for when the Destructions came the glass and concrete of the high buildings had been blasted in all directions.
“I must stop remembering,” he whispered. “I didn’t come here to remember.”
He steadied himself and walked slowly to the address André had given him and finally emerged from the ruins into a cleared area near the river. There he counted twenty-one new buildings set around a square with infant trees growing in front of them. In one of these buildings he found his new friend.
André Gervais was a strongly built, vivacious man, short-haired and clean-shaven, with a pale olive complexion. He was about seven centimeters shorter than Wellfleet and seemed very young. What Gervais saw was a gray-bearded man stooped in the shoulders and gaunt, with loose gray hair receding from a high, rectangular forehead with a prominent vein on the left side. The nose was also long and there was a slight twist in it, as though it once had been broken. The eyes were gray, resigned and watchful and to Gervais unfathomable. He felt awe at what those eyes must have seen, but he also thought that if this pathetic survivor had anyone who cared for him, or for whom he himself might care, he would look distinguished. He held out both his hands and the old man took them gratefully.
John Wellfleet was experiencing a sensation he had seldom known in the past forty years; it was happiness. Gervais had introduced him to a few of his colleagues, had showed him the two heavy cast-iron boxes with the name and the dates cut into their flanks, and had left him alone with them while he went off to work in another room.
He had also left him alone with the mock-up of the nucleus of the new city and Wellfleet had been studying it. The influence of the books they had found on Renaissance architecture was obvious, yet there was a real difference. These buildings, if they were ever made, would give out a suggestion of surprise, of delight, even of wings in the air. And he thought – it could be possible! Yes, it could. One of them might be a genius. Having been papfed on lies and bureaucracy, having rejected both, perhaps their native wits were free. Free as no native wits had been for more than a century in his own time, for all of his own contemporaries had had to labor under such a monstrous weight of information and theories that an elephant the size of Mount Everest would not have been able to digest it all.
Looking out the window he was surprised to see some ships at a few docks near by. He had heard in a vague way that trade was reviving farther down the river where the communities had been too small to have been worth destroying. Gervais came in and his face was expectant.
“This could be wonderful,” Wellfleet said, pointing to the mockup.
Gervais smiled. “It is wonderful. A wonderful man imagined it. But I don’t think you believe it will ever be real.”
Wellfleet hesitated. “Pay no attention to anything I say. I’ve seen everything I valued ruined. I’m not a good witness. However –” he hesitated again, then said, “cities aren’t planned, you know. They grow.”
“On a site like this a city is sure to grow. Were you ever in Florence?”
“I thought you’d ask me that. The Florence I saw was a museum.”
“But this I can’t understand. If your people had examples like Florence, why did they build those metros?”
Wellfleet smiled. “My dear André, they just grew. Nobody planned them. They were the places where the power was, and for most of us life in them was marvellously exciting. The old people never had much of a chance, but who cared about them?”
The young man had not been listening to him. His fine-drawn face was rapt as he talked of his dream.
“What we’re going to do isn’t new. We’ve read about it. We don’t have to live in these ruins all our lives. A city is born. If it’s a beautiful city it grows. Men with wonderful ideas come to it and live there. They meet each other and exchange ideas and the city itself becomes a kind of genius. This could never happen in a metro.”
Wellfleet said nothing; did not even permit his face a flicker of expression. Obviously the young man had found some books about ancient Athens and Florence. He did not tell him that the Athens he himself had known had a population seven times larger than the Athens of Pericles and that the traffic jams in Florence had been deafening. He heard Gervais asking if the metros had choked themselves to death, and if that was why they had died. The conversation frustrated him and he shook his head.
“Look, André, they might well have choked themselves to death, but they were blown to pieces before they got around to it. What difference does it make? There’s never been anything immortal in a city. Some great ones withered away and were forgotten. Many were destroyed by wars. There were always wars. I saw a city that was destroyed by trees. Once it had been a city of a million people, but when I saw it the only inhabitants were rats and the cobras that crawled into the ruins to eat them. I don’t know why the people abandoned it. Maybe a war. Maybe a pestilence. I don’t know. But the trees grew up and rived that city apart. I saw it with a lovely girl of the region. Dark eyes and skin the color of old ivory. She was so supple. Even her bones were pliant. A few years later the bomber planes came and after them came the politicians. I’m sure she never survived, but I’d hate to think she was burned alive by napalm. When Florence was the most cultivated city in Europe they used to burn people alive to support the religion, and they did it individually and with great ceremony. In my time the burning was completely technocratic. The bomb-aimers never saw the people they burned to death. However, let’s change the subject. Tell me – is the Bureaucracy working with you people in this?”
He listened with some scepticism while André explained that the whole character of the Bureaucracy had changed now that people of his own generation had become a part of it. Wellfleet did not mention that so far as his own generation was concerned, the Bureaucracy was behaving the same as ever. Why not? When he had been André’s age, the young had never given a thought to the old people. While André continued to talk he was looking out the window to the river.
There it still was, that wonderful stream born in the lake-chain flowing at high water down its channel to the distant sea. Pure and wind-flecked it poured through the green mounds and the outcroppings of mangled steel and concrete. He knew, as he was sure André did not, that this was the youngest of the world’s great rivers, yet was much older than the earliest city ever built. In the long story of the earth, it too would probably be mortal.
Gervais stopped talking and Wellfleet said quietly, “I can’t believe it was all useless.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
“All the human energy expended here. All the human love. It was delightful to watch the children on their little skis on the mountain. Tell me, André – are you married?”
“Any children?”
A shy smile. “The first one is on its way. What of your own children?”
“I don’t know.”
Gervais looked puzzled, and Wellfleet’s eyes were steady on his.
“I mean, I don’t know whether they’re alive or dead. I had two children, and then they went off with their mother when she left me for another man. Don’t look so surprised. That happened pretty often in those days. It was almost routine. I may even have had one more child, but I’m not sure.”
Wellfleet swayed slightly in his chair and Gervais looked at him anxiously and asked if he was all right.
“It’s nothing. It will pass in a moment. I’m not used to luxury any more. For so long a time, emotions have been a luxury I couldn’t afford.”
Gervais got to his feet. “You’re probably hungry and it’s lunchtime. I’ve got a treat for you, I think.”
“Yes, lunch would be fine. I’m not hungry – but yes, it would be excellent.”
“This time I can promise it will be. One of my friends caught a salmon last night.”
“Where did he find the salmon?”
“Out there, of course.” He pointed to the river. “Didn’t you know there are thousands of salmon in the river now?”
“Good God!” Wellfleet also got to his feet. “When I was your age that river was an open sewer mixed up with every kind of chemical waste you could imagine. If the Destructions brought salmon back to the rivers, maybe they were worth while after all. I haven’t tasted salmon for fifty years.”
When he joined the others at the table he was ravenous. It had been nearly twenty years since he had tasted any food that had not been processed.
Afterwards Gervais filled a small case with papers from the heavy iron boxes.
“You may as well take these back with you today,” he said. “They’ll do for a start. The boxes would be far too heavy for you to carry and I wouldn’t dare trust them to the public service from Metro to Outside. But don’t worry about them. Two of our people are going out in your direction the day after tomorrow and they’ll deliver the whole lot to you.”
Gervais walked with him to the transporter embarkation point and waved to him after he had got aboard. The transporter moved off and when it was across the river the old man closed his eyes. He could hardly believe what had happened to him today. He had broken a routine as deadening as a prison term and he was at once elated and tired out. “Am I really back in the world again? Am I really?” And a little later he thought, “Are people really becoming kind again?” He was afraid to fall asleep least he sleep on past his compound.
Two weeks later his four peony bushes were in bloom and it was pleasant to have still another witness that the invisible time-clocks in the plants and migratory birds had paid no attention to what mankind had been doing to itself. He went into Metro again and this time he discovered something priceless, that he was at least a quarter as valuable to André as André had become to him. After his own children had left, the need of young people had grown in him so that the lack of them had become an ache. Now he was experiencing an intoxicating emotion: the pleasure of an old man when he discovers that a young man wishes to learn from him.
“I want to know where the truth is,” André had said in their first conversation, and how could he answer such a question? Could any important truth come out of these papers he had been given?
“There’s an enormous quantity of material in those boxes,” he said. “I’m not one-tenth through reading it. Yes, they’re genuine. There’s no possible doubt of that. Your lists were a help, but the whole package is in confusion. It’s all got to be sifted and pieced together and some of it is as distant from me as the last pages are from you. There’s also the problem of language. Conrad Dehmel has left a long section written in German. I used to speak German fairly well, but I’ve forgotten so much I’ll have to relearn it. Fortunately I’ve got a dictionary.”
“So you think it will take a long time?”
“Two years at least. Perhaps longer. And that’s another problem. I’m not young any more. But the worst thing is that I can’t believe that anyone alive today will be interested in these people. After hundreds of millions have vanished, why should they be?”
“No, John, you’re wrong. Absolutely wrong. Can’t you understand what it means that you’re the only person I ever met who was alive in those days?”
It was another fine day, the sun was bright on the river and huge white clouds were floating slowly out of the west.
“Yes, I was certainly alive then,” Wellfleet said quietly, “but I was too young to be involved in anything these characters were doing. When Timothy was famous I was barely fourteen. By the time I reached college the mood had changed and Timothy was forgotten. Don’t get any romantic ideas about me, André. I wasn’t a very good example of my generation. Most of the others deserved a better chance, but I’m not sure I deserved anything better than what I got. For a time I was hooked on hash – that was a drug we smoked. I had no ambition and I used to wander around the world. Once in London I met this Welsh girl. Her father had been a miner, but she had education and she sang like an angel. The only job she wanted was to teach small children. Her name was Valerie.” He paused, thinking back. “After we’d lived together for a week she said, ‘Let’s go to India’ – just like that. We hadn’t anything you could call money but we didn’t care. We’d be going to warm climates and we’d sleep in bedrolls on the ground if there were no youth hostels. Maybe we’d be able to get a few short-term jobs. We didn’t, of course, but we did get to India. Valerie was so frank and open about everything. ‘You won’t mind if I love other boys besides you?’ she said. ‘And of course you must love other girls besides me.’ Is it like that now?”
Gervais looked at him almost with pity. “No,” he said.
“She was so graceful, André. She was really a joyous girl who lived for every moment. Waking up with her in the mornings was always exciting. Once in the foothills of the mountains I woke up and she wasn’t there and I nearly went crazy. I ran around in all directions calling her name and all I heard was my own voice echoed back from the cliffs. Finally I heard her call me and guess where I found her. There was a stream pouring down from a bowl in the rocks where the water was white with foam and there was Valerie stark naked in the pool. This was the highest mountain range in the world. The water came down from the high glaciers to the foothills where the climate was tropical. Pure cold water and blazing sunshine. Is this boring you?”
André just looked at him.
“This was a lyric,” the old man went on. “She had golden hair and blue eyes and I’ll never forget how she laughed. But the strange thing was that I never really knew her. When we returned to Europe she said goodbye to me and I found out she could be quite hard. I’d never suspected that. She told me to think of it as a lovely holiday but now it was over and she was going to marry someone else. He was an older man with a lot of money. I was devastated, but I knew I had no right to complain.”
“Was she the mother of one of your children?”
“No. And she never wrote to me again. I decided to come home and got a job as a teacher in what we called a high school. Then I married a woman I never should have married.” He shrugged. “I already told you about that.”
There was a long silence and finally Wellfleet nodded towards the pages on which he had assembled a tentative work plan.
“This material seems awfully patchy to me. I’m not sure I can find any real pattern in it. But that’s not the main problem. The real problem is to make anyone believe there ever was a world like these people lived in. Sometimes I find it hard to believe it myself.”
He got up and cupped his chin in his hand, feeling the bristle of his beard in his palm.
“The problem is where to begin,” he said.
“Why not at the beginning?”
“But where is the beginning in all this stuff? Conrad Dehmel when he was a boy? That was in another country in a time I knew very little about when I was young. I know much more about it now because I was Outside when the Destructions came and I had a great many books. One priceless one – we called it an encyclopedia.” He looked at André steadily. “I’m still confused about these papers. I don’t know for sure whether there’s a story in them or not, though I think there is. Voices in time, that’s what they are, and who cares about any of them now?”
“You care about them yourself, don’t you?”
Wellfleet sighed. “I’m beginning to care very much, but in a way you may not be able to understand. They’ve made me ask so many questions I should have asked when I was young. Questions about myself. I’m involved in this too, and it troubles me.”
“Do it, John, and you won’t feel alone any more.”
“I may feel even more so.” He rose to his feet. “There’s another problem and it’s serious. If I write this I’ll have to write it for myself. This will mean there’ll be all kinds of things I’ll talk about that nobody today can understand. It’s going to require a glossary, and you’ll have to help me with that. When it’s finished – if it ever is – you must read it and note down every item that needs explaining.”
“That sounds easy enough.”
“Wait and see. I don’t think you’ll find it so.” He paused. “There’s one thing more. Those tapes I explained to you. Most of them are what we called audiotapes and by good luck they fit my old machine. But several are videotapes.” He explained to Gervais what they were. “From the date on one of them I think it’s of vital importance. They’ll be useless unless I can have the use of a projector. I’ll describe it to you and if you make enquiries you may find one somewhere. I took courses in what we called Communications and if one turns up, I’ll be able to use it.”
The autumn leaves were falling before Wellfleet began to write. By now he felt he had been living in a vast time-house divided into many separate rooms. The first lines he wrote, believing that he would cut them out later, were these:
“As it is with the individual, so it may be with the whole world. When the individual is wounded in his soul he often wishes to die. But time passes and then, for no reason he understands, he wants to live again. Can it be the same with communities?”
His thoughts returned to Conrad Dehmel. He realized at last that his stepfather had lived through something of a preview of what he had lived through himself, for in the war which had been fought before he was born, nearly every city in Conrad Dehmel’s country had been blasted to fragments. He had been too young really to know Conrad Dehmel when he was alive. Now through these papers it seemed that he would have the chance to know him at last. At least Uncle Conrad had been sure of where he was, which was more than he could say for himself. His own youth? What chance did it have, really? Bombarded by pentillions of words, pictures, ideas, explanations, counter-explanations – who could have sorted out a fraction of what had been thrown at them? That was why marijuana had been such a relief.
So, facing a blank sheet of paper one morning and trying to write, he recalled a night from long ago that had no connection with anything in his life before or since. They were smoking and it was like a rocking cradle. Voices from far off, delicious visions so vivid you could reach out and caress them, a girl lying on the floor with her cheek against his thigh while the others were talking distantly, but so wisely and fascinatingly, out of a cloud and he had wondered whether he and the girl were really mating in the depths of the ocean millions of years ago. He could not remember her name or even what she looked like.
He forced the recollection away and concentrated on Timothy, who had been twenty years older than himself and had come out of a luxurious and conforming era before he revolted. At this stage Wellfleet was reasonably sure that Timothy intended to use this material for a book that would make him rich and perhaps even free. And how typical of his mother that she had never told him that she and Timothy were planning a book together.
Wellfleet smiled, thinking that after all these years he could afford to smile at Timothy, who had been one of those men who can write only when the impulse moves them. There were some finished passages in Timothy’s unmistakable style, but few of them were linked up. In between were hundreds of sketches and comments of the sort you might find in any writer’s notebook, but there was little continuity and this meant it was impossible to let Timothy speak entirely for himself. The more he thought about it, the more complicated his task became. In most parts he would have to weave this divergent material into some kind of form and he doubted if he would be able to do it.
Then panic seized him. What if he did not live long enough to finish it?
“I’ll have to begin somewhere,” he muttered to himself, “and I’ll have to begin now.”
He decided to begin with Timothy.