Whatever they are, I cannot return to Northern City if it means abandoning this mission. I will yield no such victory to Namir and his kind. We are a little less than human, Drozma, and a little more.
Part Two
In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.
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 telclass="underline" 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.