However, I shall try to give positive answers to the problems you bring me, keeping always in mind that the only real answers are those a person finds for himself. But remember that these are the opinions of one who has long shut himself away from modern reality. I think it has afforded a gain in perspective, but I look out of an old reality, now becoming quite alien, out of salt water and rowan trees and huge winter nights, on the active human world. Surely you are far more competent to handle its practical details than I.

  First, then, I do not recommend that you devote your life to philosophy, or to basic scientific research. “The time is out of joint,” and there would be nothing for you but a sterile repetition of what other men have said and done. In this judgment I am guided by no Spenglerian mystique of an aged civilization, but by the very hardheaded observation of Donne that no man is an island. Be you never so gifted, you cannot work alone; the cross-fertilization of equally interested colleagues, the whole atmosphere must be there, or originality becomes impossible. Doubtless the biological potential of a Periclean era or a Renaissance always exists: genetic statistics guarantee that. But social conditions must then determine the extent to which this potential is realized, and even the major forms of expression it takes. I hope I am not being a sour old man in thinking that the present age is as universally barren as the Rome of Commodus. These things happen.

  But—second—you ask implicitly if something can be done to change this. In all frankness, I have never believed so. There may be theoretical ways, just as it is theoretically possible to turn winter into summer by hastening the planet along its orbit. But practical limitations intervene; and it is just as well that mortal men with mortal scope do not have the power of destiny.

  You seem to think that I was, on the contrary, once active in politics, a founder of the Constitutionalist movement. This is a popular fallacy; I had nothing to do with it, and never even met Laird. (He is rather a mysterious figure anyway, I gather, suddenly appearing without any background—presumably of Lowlevel birth, self-educated—and vanishing as completely after a decade. Murdered, perhaps?) He was an enthusiastic and understanding reader of mine, but made no attempt at personal contact. He said he was only applying my principles to a concrete situation. His phenomenal rise came after the suppression of the North American revolt, when a crushed, despairing socioeconomic-ethnic group turned toward a leader who put their inchoate beliefs into sharp focus and who offered them a practical set of rules to live by. Actually these rules amounted to little more than the traditional virtues of patience, courage, thrift, industry, with an interwoven scientific rationalism, but if it has heartened them in their comeback I am honored that Laird quoted me.

  However, I see no long-range hope for them. The tide is ebbing too strongly. And now, I hear, the masters have decided to eliminate Constitutionalism as a danger to the status quo. It is being very cleverly done, in the guise of free education; but it amounts to absorbing the next generation into the common ruck. Let me be grateful that this poor district does not qualify for a public school.

  If we cannot reform society, then, can we save ourselves? There is a traditional way. As the Old Americans would have put it: Get the hell out! The monastic orders of the post-Roman past, or of feudal China, India, and Japan, did this, in effect; and I note that their latter-day equivalent is becoming more prominent every decade. It has been my own solution too, though I prefer being an anchorite to a cenobite. The advice grieves me, Saburo, but this may be the only answer for you.

  There was once another way out, Christian leaving the City of Destruction in the most literal sense. American history is full of examples, Puritan, Quaker, Catholic, Mormon. And today the stars are a new and more splendid America.

  But I fear this is not the right century. The pioneering misfits I speak of departed from a vigorous society which took expansion for granted. It is not characteristic of moribund cultures to export their radicals. The radicals themselves have little interest in departure. I would personally love to end my days on this new planet Rustum, deep though my roots are here, but who would come with me?

  Therefore, Saburo, we can only endure, until

  Anker’s hands fell off the keys. The pain through his breast seemed to rip it open.

  He stood up, somehow, clawing for air. Or his body did. His mind was suddenly remote, knowing that it had perhaps a minute to look down upon the fjord and out to the sky. And he said to himself, with a strange thankful joy, the promise three thousand years old, Odysseus, death will come to you out of the sea, death in his gentlest guise.

  Everybody knew Jan Svoboda was estranged from his father the Commissioner. But no orders for his arrest or even his harassment, had ever come, so presumably the parent retained a certain affection for the child and a reconciliation was possible. This would in fact, if not officially, re-elevate the young Citizen to Guardian status. Therefore it was advisable to stay on the right side of him.

  And thus Jan Svoboda could never be sure how much of his rise was due to himself and how much to some would-be sycophant in the Oceanic Minerals office. With few exceptions, he could not even be sure how many of his friends really meant it. Nor did his attempts to find out, or his occasional blunt questions, lead anywhere. Certainly not! He became a bitter man.

  His father’s educational decree provoked a tirade from him which brought envy to the eyes of his fellow Constitutionalists. They would have liked to make those remarks, but they weren’t Commissioner’s sons. Their own formal appeals were denied, and they settled down to make the best of a foul situation. After all, they were a literate, well-to-do, pragmatically oriented class; they could give supplemental instruction at home, or even hire tutors.

  The new system was established. A year passed.

  On a gusty fall evening, Jan Svoboda set his aircar down at home. Great gray waves marched from the west and roared among the house caissons.

  Their spume and spindrift went over the roof. The sky streamed past, low and ragged. Visibility was so narrow that he could see no other houses at all.

  Which suited him, he thought. A sea dwelling was expensive, and though well paid, he could only afford this one because a Constitutionalist normally led a quiet life. Even so, he felt the pinch. But where else could a man live these days without a horizon cluttered by oafs?

  His car touched wheels to the main deck, the garage door opened for him and closed behind, he got out into an insulated quietness. Faintly came a whisper that was gymbal mountings, gyrostabilizers, air conditioner, power plant; louder were the hoot of wind and the ocean where it brawled. He had a wish to step out and take the cold wet air in his face. Those idiots in the office today, couldn’t they see that the ion exchange system now in use was inefficient at tropical concentrations, and a little basic research could produce a design which—Svoboda hit the car with a knotted fist. It was no use. There was nothing to fight, you might as well try to catch water in a net.

  He sighed and entered the kitchen. He was a medium-sized, rather slender man, dark, with high cheekbones and hooked nose and a deep, premature wrinkle between his eyes.

  “Hullo, darling.” His wife gave him a kiss, “Ouch,” she added. “That was like bussing a brick wall. What happened?”

  “The usual,” grunted Svoboda. He heard startling silence, “Where’re the kids?”

  “Jocelyn wanted to stay ashore overnight with a girl friend. I said it was all right.”

  Svoboda stopped, He stared at her for a long time. Judith took a backward step. “Why, what’s the matter?” she asked.

  “What’s the matter?” His voice rose as he spoke. “Do you realize we broke off yesterday in the middle of the conformal-mapping theorem? She just can’t get it through her head. No wonder, with her whole day given to Homemaking or some such ridiculous thing, as if her only choice in life fell between being a rich man’s toy and a poor man’s slave. And how do you expect she’ll ever be able to think without knowing how language functions? Great horny toads! By tomorrow night she’ll have forgotten everything I said!”

  Svoboda grew aware he was shouting. He stopped, swallowed, and considered the situation objectively. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry. You did not know, I guess.”

  “Perhaps I did,” said Judith slowly.

  “What?” Svoboda, who had been leaving the kitchen, spun on his heel.

  She braced herself and told him: “There’s more to life than just discipline. You can’t expect healthy youngsters to go to the mainland four days a week, six hours a day, meeting other children who live there, hearing games planned, excursions, parties—after school—and then return here, where there isn’t anyone their age, nothing but your lessons and your books.”

  “We go sailing,” he argued, taken aback. “Diving, fishing…visiting, even. The Lochabers have a boy David’s age, and the de Smets—”

  “Somebody they meet once a month!” interrupted Judith. “Their friends are on the mainland!”

  “Fine lot of friends,” snapped Svoboda. “Who’s Jocelyn staying with?” She hesitated. “Well?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  He nodded, stiff in the neck muscles. “I thought so. You see, we’re old fogies. We wouldn’t approve of a fourteen-year-old girl at a harmless little marijuana party. If that’s all they have planned.” He shouted again: “Well, this is the last time it happens. Any more such requests are to be turned down flat, and hell take their precious social lives!”

  Judith caught a shaky lower lip between her teeth. She looked away from him and said, “It was so different last year.”

  “Of course it was. We had our own schools then. No need for extra instruction, because the right things were taught during the regular hours. No need to worry about their schoolmates—all our kind, with decent behavior and sensible prestige symbols. But now, what can we do?”

  Svoboda passed a hand across his eyes. His head ached. Judith came over and rubbed her cheek across his breast. “Don’t take it so hard, sweetheart,” she murmured. “Remember what Laird always used to say. ‘Co-operate with the inevitable.’”

  “You’re omitting what he meant by ‘co-operation,’” replied Svoboda gloomily. “He meant to use it the way a judo master uses his opponent’s attack. We’re forgetting his advice, all of us are forgetting, now that he’s gone.”

  She held him close for a wordless minute. The glory came back, he looked beyond the wall and whispered, “You don’t know what it was like, coming into the movement as late as you did. I was just a child myself, and my father jeered at him all the time, but I saw the man speak, both video and live, and even then I knew. Not that I really understood. But I knew here was a tall man and a beautiful voice, talking about hope to people whose kin lay dead in bombed-out houses. I think afterward, when I began to study the theory of it, I was trying to get back the feeling I had had then…And my father could do nothing but make fun of it!” He stopped. “I’m sorry, dear. You’ve heard this from me often enough.”

  “And Laird is dead,” she sighed.

  He blurted in reborn anger what he had never told her before: “Murdered. I’m sure of it. Not just some chance Brother, on a dark street…no, I got a word here, a hint there, my father had spoken to Laird privately, Laird had grown too big…I accused him to his face of having had Laird done away with. He grinned and did not deny it. That was when I left him. And now he’s trying to murder Laird’s work!”

  He tore free of her and stormed from the kitchen, through the dining room on his way out. A taste of the gale might cool the boiling in him.

  On the living room floor, his son David sat cross-legged, swaying with half shut eyes.

  Svoboda stopped. He was not noticed.

  “What are you doing?” he said at last.

  The nine-year-old face turned up to him, briefly dazed as if wakened from sleep. “Oh…hello, sir.”

  “I asked what you were doing,” rapped Svoboda.

  David’s lids drooped. Looking from beneath them, he had a curious sly appearance. “Homework,” he muttered.

  “What kind of homework is that? And since when has that flatheaded wretch of a teacher made any demand on your intellect?”

  “We’re to practice, sir.”

  “Quit evading me!” Svoboda planted himself above the boy, fists on hips, and glared down. “Practice what?”

  David’s expression was half mutinous, but he seemed to decide on co-operation. “El, el, elementary attunement,” he said. “Just to get the technique. It takes years to have the actual experience.”

  “Attunement? Experience?” Svoboda stood back. He had again the sense of trying to net a river. “Explain yourself. Attunement to what?”

  David flushed. “The Ineffable All.” It was a defiance.

  “Now wait,” said Svoboda, fighting for calm. “You’re in a secular school. By law. You’re not being taught a religion, are you?” For a moment, he hoped so. If the government ever started favoring one of the million cults and creeds over another, it would guarantee trouble—which might make a wedge for—

  “Oh, no, sir. This is fact. Mr. Tse explained it all.”

  Svoboda sat down beside his son. “What kind of fact?” he asked. “Scientific?”

  “No. No, not exactly. You told me yourself, science don’t have all the answers.”

  “Doesn’t,” corrected Svoboda mechanically. “Agreed. To maintain that proposition is equivalent to maintaining that the discovery of structured data is the sum total of human experience; which is a self evident absurdity.” He felt pleased at the control in his own voice. There was some childish misunderstanding here, which could be cleared up with sensible talk. Looking down on the curly brown head, Svoboda was almost overwhelmed by tenderness. He wanted to rumple the boy’s hair and invite him to the sun porch for a game of catch. However—

  “In normal usage,” he explained, “the word ‘fact’ is reserved for empirical data and well-confirmed theories. This Ineffable All is an obvious metaphor, and thus has no place in factual discourse. You must mean you’re studying some form of aesthetics.”

  “Oh, no, sir.” David shook his head vigorously. “It’s true. A higher truth than science.”

  “But then you are speaking of religion!”

  “No, sir. Mr. Tse told us about it, and all the older kids in his school are already in, uh, in some degree of attunement. I mean, by these exercises you not only ap, ap, apprehend the All but become the All, which you aren’t every day, I mean—”

  Svoboda leaped back to his feet. David stared. The father said in a tone that shook: “What sort of nonsense is this? What do those words All and Attunement mean? What structure has this identification, which is somehow only an identification on alternate Thursdays, got? Go on! You know enough basic semantics to explain it to me clearly. You can at least show me where definitions fail and ostensive experience takes over. Go on, tell me!”

  David sprang up, too. His fists were clenched at his sides and tears stood in his eyes. “That don’t mean anything!” he yelled. “You don’t! Mr. Tse says you don’t! He says all this playing with words and d-d-definitions, logic, it’s all a lot of hooey! He says it’s all down on the material plane, and the real fact is Attunement and I’m only hindering myself by studying logic and, and, and the older kids all laughed at me! I don’t want to study your old semantics! I don’t want to! I won’t!”

  Svoboda regarded him for an entire minute. Then he strode back through the kitchen. “I’m going out,” he said. “Don’t wait for me.” The garage door shut behind him. Moments afterward, Judith heard his car take off into the storm.

  Theron Wolfe shook his head. “Tsk-tsk-tsk,” he scolded. “Temper, temper.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s immature to get angry,” said Jan Svoboda in a dull voice. “Anker never wrote any such thing. Laird said once it was nonsane not to get angry, in atrocious situations.”

  “Agreed,” said Wolfe. “And no doubt you relieved your glands considerably by flying to the mainland, storming into poor little Tse’s one-room apartment, and beating him up before the eyes of his wife and children. I don’t see that you accomplished much else, though. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  They left the jail. A respectful policeman bowed them toward Wolfe’s car. “Sorry about the misunderstanding, sir,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” said Wolfe. “You had to arrest him, since he wasn’t doing his brawling in Lowlevel and you didn’t know he was the Psychologics Commissioner’s son.”

  Svoboda lifted a tired lip. “But you did well to call me as he insisted.”

  “Do you wish to file any charges against the Tse person?” asked the officer. “We’ll take care of him, sir.”

  “No,” said Svoboda.

  “You might even send him some flowers,” suggested Wolfe. “He’s only a hack, executing his orders.”

  “He doesn’t have to be a hack,” clipped Svoboda, “I’m sick of this whine, ‘Don’t blame me, blame the System.’ There isn’t any system: there are men, who act in certain ways.”

  Wolfe’s jovian form preceded him into the car. The merchant took the controls and they murmured up the ramp. Presently they were airborne. It was still night, still windy; the jeweled web of Highlevel illumination stretched thin above the city darkness; low in the east, a hunchbacked moon sent flickers of light off a black, restless Atlantic.

  “I had your car picked up and shot a message to Judith,” said Wolfe. “How about staying overnight with me and taking a holiday tomorrow?”

  “All right.” Svoboda slumped.

  Wolfe put the autopilot on Cruise, offered a cigar, and struck one for himself. Its red glow as he sucked sketched his features upon shadow, a goateed Buddha with a faint Mephistophelean smile. “Look here,” he said, “you were always a hairtrigger type, but basically levelheaded. Otherwise you wouldn’t be a Constitutionalist. Let’s examine the situation. Why do you care what your children become? I mean, naturally you want them to be happy and so on, but does it have to be your kind of happiness?”