I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though. Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a few people--too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries. I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the missionary myself. To get a by-line. Ego in a low form. And I also slowly realized that the truth would be there, always--and since it was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it again." "You just write off your whole civilization--like that." "It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off." "Usefully." "Well--our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to last for millenniums. We served a purpose." Tom looked at his watch--and sighed. "Gotta go." "I thought we were to have a long evening together." "So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before supper. There's a peculiar pneumonia up there--and something that isn't leukemia but acts like it." We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and stepping around prone figures. "You seem all right," he said. "I'm all right." "I still think we could use that book--and I hope that we'll get it." "Thanks." "Need anything?" He meant medicine. I said I didn't. We both waved and a cab stopped. He thanked me rather formally for dinner. "So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope." "I've got plenty of hope--it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal prospects of department stores." "I mean for yourself." "Hope isn't for yourself," I said. "Night!" His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked. The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag. I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me. A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose. "Alllll--thuh worrrrld--is waiting for the sunnnnrise--alll--" All that was coming up was the stone moon. Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat had poked the girl who looked like my daughter. I went over there. On the cement sidewalk--a broad, pale path that sparkled in the street light--I saw the stains of that bastard's blood. I wanted to spit in them. I had an impulse to look around for a tooth--something to have mounted for a watch charm. I supposed he'd put them in his pocket to give to his dentist. I didn't feel so lonely after that. 10