I’m able to sit up in bed (actually I can get around as well or as badly as before but it tires me too much to walk so I remain abed). Sunday is here at last and from the excited bustle in the air which I feel rather than hear, Butler’s colleague must have arrived. I am not ready for him yet and I have hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, composed emphatically in four languages. It should keep them out for a few days. I have a premonition of disaster which, though it is no doubt perfectly natural at my age with the last catastrophe almost upon me, seems to be of a penultimate nature, a final _human_ crisis. All that I have heard from Butler about this young man, this colleague of his, disposes me to fear him. For although my existence has been kept a secret from the newer generations, the others, the older ones, the chief counselors are well aware of me and though I have so far evaded their agents and though they undoubtedly assume that I am long since dead it is still possible that a shrewd young man with a career in the making might grow suspicious and one word to the older members of the hierarchy would be enough to start an inquisition which could end in assassination (ironic that I should fear _that_ at this point!) or, more terrible, in a course of indoctrination where my apostasy would be reduced by drugs to conformity. It would be the most splendid triumph for Cave if, in my last days, I should recant: the best victory of all, the surrender of the original lutherist upon his deathbed. Yet I have a trick or two up my sleeve and the game’s not yet over. Should the new arrival prove to be the one I have so long awaited, I shall know how to act: I have planned for this day. My adversary will find me armed. But now old days draw me back; the crisis approaches in my narrative. 4 The first summer was my last on the Hudson, at peace. Iris wrote me regularly from the Florida keys: short, brisk letters completely impersonal and devoted largely to what “he” was doing and saying. It seems that “he” was enchanted by the strangeness of the keys, yet was anxious to begin traveling again. With some difficulty, I gathered between the lines, Iris had restrained him from starting out on a world tour: “He says he wants to see Saigon and Samarkand and so forth soon because he likes the names. I don’t see how he can get away yet, though maybe in the fall after his tour. They say now he can make his talks on film all at once which will mean of course he won’t have to go through anything like last winter again.” There followed more news, an inquiry into my health (in those days I was confident I should die early of a liver ailment: my liver of course now seems the one firm organ in my body; in any case, I enjoyed my hypochondria) and a reference to the various things I was writing for the instruction of converts and detractors both. I pushed the letter away and looked out across the river.