“Dan Walker? He isn’t here. Haven’t seen him for days.”
“Well, damn the thing, boy, you know where he is.”
“But I don’t.”
I stepped forward. Hodding looked frantic enough for physical violence. But then he shuddered and collapsed in the chair I had abandoned. “Not at the office,” he said, and fumbled at his wrinkled lips. “I called.” He noticed me and croaked weakly: “Brown, who the devil is that?”
“Friend of mine. Look, I don’t know, haven’t heard anything—”
“You will. You will if you don’t find him. You’ll see—”
One whose voice I remembered said: “Hodding, cut that out!”
He stood in the silently opened doorway, massive and sodden. His bulk was wrapped in a huge black and orange dressing gown almost hiding the wobbling columns of his ankles. His artificial hair is appropriately white; it was rumpled from the pillow, not much whiter than bloated slabs of cheek.
He still has power. He glanced unconcernedly at Abraham and me. He walked — not a waddle but relentless rolling motion — to stand over Hodding with a mountain’s calm. Hodding was choking. “Ten years. Ten stupid years ago, that’s when I should’ve died—”
“You’re hysterical,” said Nicholas-Namir.
“That strange?” Hodding groaned. “You people bought me — I didn’t bargain much, did I? Damn the thing, I was sincere, too. I thought—”
Nicholas slapped him. “Get up, man!”
Hodding stood, weaving like a dry weed in the wind. “You’ve got to find Walker. He’s crazy. I am too, or I wouldn’t — listen, Nicholas, I was drunk. I let him get in there — yes, sure, into the laboratory. Last night. I was drunk. I must’ve told him. And now—”
“Be quiet. Come in the back room.”
“Never mind me, damn the thing. You’ve got to find Walker—”
Nicholas raised his puffy hand again. Hodding cringed. “Back room. You need a drink. Quit worrying. I’ll take care of everything.”
“But Walker—”
“I can find Walker.” While Abraham and I stood bewildered and silly, they were gone. The door closed without a slam.
“Abraham, what was that all about? — if you know.”
He said shortly: “I don’t.”
“They worked on virus mutations at the Wales Foundation. Before Dr. Hodding left the place…. Got a laboratory of his own now?”
“How would I — hell, yes, you heard him speak of it.”
“Money and incentive supplied by the Organic Unity Party?”
“Ben, I don’t have anything to do with all that, with — with the Party. And why should you?”
“I shan’t, from now on. It was just a device for getting in touch with Keller, in the hope of finding you.”
“Well,” he said emptily, “you found me. But why question me about the Party?” He was frightened. In some limited, unwilling way, he was lying to me. “I’m not even a member, and nobody’s urged me to join. I just live here.”
There was an answer to that, but he knew it as well as I. “Abraham, come and have lunch with me. We need to talk about a lot of things.”
He moved away. “I ought to be practicing….”
“I saw Sharon Wednesday evening, after the recital. I think I’ll see her again this evening. Will you come along?”
He was far away across the room, pressing his forehead against the coolness of window glass. Presently he said: “No…. She wouldn’t remember me. That was childhood. Can’t you understand?”
“She does remember you of course. We talked of you.”
“Then let her remember the kid she used to play with, and leave me out of it. Ben, please understand. All right — I’ve got a brain. I was a damned prodigy, and ran away from it. Because I couldn’t stand what my brain showed me. So I’m a coward. Born one.”
“You use an imaginary cowardice as a shield.”
He winced at that, but went on as if I had not spoken: “And the only way I can keep from going nuts is not to think at all. You mean well. But you’re trying to stir me up into being something important. I don’t think I could. I don’t think I want to be anything.”
“Except maybe a musician?”
“Different sort of thinking. You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it.”
“Quite sure they’re going to?”
“Aren’t they?”
“I wouldn’t even dare predict whether the baby will have a harelip. Will you come and have lunch with me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tomorrow? Meet me tomorrow noon, Blue River Café?”
“I’m — going away for the week end.”
I wrote my address on a notebook leaf and tore it out. “Keep this somewhere, Abraham.” He reached for it, red-faced, miserable at his refusal but not changing it. The voices of Namir and Hodding were blurred noise beyond the door. I think Abraham watched me as I went out. I don’t know….
4
I wrote that last entry here in my apartment only a few hours ago. I feel so changed tonight that the day seems a long time past. When I finished writing this afternoon I telephoned Sharon Brand. I told her nothing of Abraham: she didn’t ask, unless some of her silences were questions. I invited myself to call on her and Sophia Wilks in the evening. They live in Brooklyn. Yes, I remember you did too for a few months, Drozma; 30,883, wasn’t it — the year the bridge was opened to traffic? It’s still in use, parts of it a hundred years old. (Don’t know yet how the Dodgers are shaping up this spring.) I needed Sharon, if only to remind me that I don’t always blunder…. Now it is midnight, and I imagine new sounds out there, underneath the city’s murmurous quiet. They are not there: my mind is creating them because I am frightened.
Drozma, you must have often reviewed the logic of our Observers’ laws. By what right do we intrude on Abraham’s or any other life?
No right at all, I should say, since “right” in this case would imply the existence of a superworldly authority dispensing privileges and prohibitions. We Salvayans are agnostics born. Having neither belief nor dogmatic disbelief in any such authority, we interfere in human affairs simply because we can; because, conceitedly or humbly, we hope to promote human good and diminish human evil, so far as we ourselves can know good and evil. How far is that?
After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior. Unrecognized cruelties, cruelties generated by primitive fears or sanctified by institutional habit — these may continue for centuries; but when human nature sees Caligula in his plainest shapes it will vomit him up and sicken at the memory. Conversely, I recognize nothing as evil unless cruelty is its dominant element. Here, manifestly, human nature isn’t quite so willing to follow the logic through. To satisfy semantic order, one must distinguish between mindless cruelty and the malevolent sort. It’s a humanly evil thing if a tiger chews a man, but the tiger is impersonal as lightning or avalanche, merely getting his dinner with no malevolence involved. A butcher killing a lamb is similarly impersonal, and I think he drives a rather decent bargain, though an articulate lamb might bleat reproach at me for saying so: the lamb’s juicy little carcass in return for a sheltered, well-fed life and a death more merciful than nature is at all likely to provide. If the term “cruelty” is allowed to include the non-malevolent causes of suffering I think the axiom will stand. I notice that a massive amount of human cruelty is non-malevolent, a result of ignorance or inertia or simple bad judgment and misinterpretation of fact.