I was not certain what to tell him. What could he do, anyhow? Suffer a little more, perhaps.

20 .

"Well?"

My time is up, I told him.

"I see flashes," he said. "Sand and smoke, and a flam- ing baseball."

He was too sensitive. I thought I had covered those thoughts.

Well. . . The world is going to end at one o'clock,. ...

"That's good to know. How?"

There is a substratum of fissionable material, which Project Eden is going to detonate. This will produce an enormous chain reaction....

"Can't you do something to stop it?*'

/ don't know how. I don't know what could stop it. My knowledge is limited to the arts and the life-sciences.- You broke your leg when you were skiing in Vermont last winter. You never knew. Things like that, I can manage. ...

"And the horn blows at midnight," he observed.

One o'clock, I corrected. Eastern Standard Time.

"Might as well have another drink," he said, looking at his watch. "Ifs going on twelve."

My question ... I cleared an imaginary throat.

"Oh, yes, what did you want to know?"

-The other half of the tragic response. I've watched you go through it many times, but I can't get at it. I feel the terror part, but the pity-the pity always eludes me.

"Anyone can be afraid," he said, "that part is easy. But you have to be able to get inside people-not exactly the way you do-and feel everything they feel, just before they go smash-so that it feels you're going smash along with them-and you can't do a damn thing about it, and you wish you could-that's pity."

Oh? And being afraid, too?

"-and being afraid. Together, they equal the grand catharsis of true tragedy."

He hiccupped.

And the tragic figure, for whom you feel these things?

He must be great and noble, mustn't he?

"True," he nodded, as though I were seated across the room from him, "and in the last moment when the unalterable jungle law is about to prevail,, he must stare into the faceless mask; of God, and bear himself, for that

21.

brief moment, above the pleas of his nature and the course of events."

We both looked at his watch.

**What time will you be leaving?"

In about fifteen minutes.

**Good. You have time to listen to a record while I dress."

He switched on his stereo and selected an album.

I shifted uneasily.

// it isn't too long....

He regarded the jacket.

"Five minutes and eight seconds. I've always main- tained that it is music for the last hour of Earth."

He placed it on the turntable and set the arm.

"If Gabriel doesn't show up, this will do."

He reached for his tie as the first notes of Miles Davis* Saefa limped through the room, like a wounded thing climbing a hill.

He hummed along with it as he reknotted his tie and'

combed his hair. Davis talked through an Easter my with a tongue of brass, and the procession moved before us:

Oedipus and blind Gloucester stumbled by, led by Antigone and Edgar-Prince Hamlet gave a fencer's salute and plunged forward, whUe black Othello lumbered on behind-Hippolytus, all in white, and the Duchess of Malfi, sad, paraded through memory on a thousand stages.

Phillip buttoned his jacket as the final notes sounded, and shut down the player. Carefully rejacketting the rec- ord, he placed it among his others.

What are you going to do?

**Say good-bye. There's a party up the street I hadn*t planned on attending. I believe I'll stop in for a drink.

Good-bye to you also.

"By the way," he asked, "what is your name? I've known you for a long time, I ought to call you something now.'*

He suggested one, half-consciously. I had never really had a name before, so I took it.

Adrastea, I told him.

He smirked again.

**No thought is safe from you, is it? Good-bye."

Good-bye.