He exercises, moreover, a Svengali-like authority (but I think by pharmacological, not psychological, means) upon a young woman of our company, formerly his associate, who had fled to us in fear of her life last spring. We found her unconscious near the Prohibited Area that Sunday night with an obvious injection bruise on her buttock; upon her reviving, she was convinced that she was doomed. I later dispatched her to “Comalot” ostensibly for a week’s trial reconciliation with her nemesis, actually to survey the scene there and report to me. I anticipated hysterical objections, but she went like one whose will was not her own. (I should add that her lover, Reg Prinz, had abandoned her that same night; the girl was both desperate and drugged.) A week later she dutifully returned to Barataria and dutifully reported that Bea Golden is comatose, concealed, and “seeded” (?); that Todd Andrews himself had appeared at Comalot, made inquiries, had been sent packing; that she repented her mistaken defection of April and wished to return to Bray’s service. It was clear to me that she had already quite done so. I dismissed her; she is with him now. The question is, is he with us? And what is he?

It will not surprise me to see him again at Fort McHenry: Bray seems to understand that what began as Prinz’s movie — a film in its own right and for its own sake, however obscure its content and aesthetics — has become the vehicle for something else entirely, a vehicle whose original driver is now barely a passenger. Bray declares that his own “published literary works” (I have not seen them) are comparable — coded messages and instructions disguised as works of fiction — and that the “revolutionary new medium” which he and his computer have concocted will be in fact a “new medium of revolution.” I have in process a last long shot to rid us of him by his own agency before he decides to rid himself of us. Whether his madness is feigned or real, Bray has, like Hamlet, an exploitable weakness, which I believe I understand (he is a half relative of ours) and can play upon.

Now, the movie. Its two remaining “scenes”—the Attack on Fort McHenry and the Destruction of Barataria — should provide opportunity for me (Us? I pray so) to deal with at least some of these threats and nuisances, some final rehearsal in the diversion of media and “available action” to our purposes, and (as when the U.S. Navy destroyed Jean Lafitte’s base on Grande-Terre Island on September 16, 1814) a covering of our tracks in readiness for the fall/spring season. When, blending less obtrusively with our surroundings, we will ring down the curtain on Act One (the 1960’s, the First 7-Year Plan) and raise it on Act Two.

I had thought, Henry, to commence that act, and the new decade, and the Second 7-Year Plan, by marrying Jane Mack in January 1970. Last March I set that as my “target date” for enlisting you to me by putting in your way the record of our forebear’s proud and pathetic attempt to transcend the fateful Pattern of our history — that endless canceling of Cooks by Burlingames, Burlingames by Cooks, which he was the first of our line to recognize — by rebelling against himself before his children could rebel against him. Those four “prenatal” letters (which I myself discovered just two years ago in the archives of the Erie County Historical Museum in Buffalo, and which the historian Germaine Pitt was to have annotated and published) were meant to say to you what I yearned and feared to say myself. I would then have reintroduced myself to you in my proper person, who would in turn have introduced you to your prospective stepmother. Moreover, I would have introduced you, for the first time in your conscious life, to your biological mother, whom History and Necessity (read “Baron André Castine”) have dealt with sorely indeed in this particular.

Do I have your attention, son? You are not the half-orphan you have believed yourself these many years to be. I know who, I know where, your mother is. When you shall have represented yourself to me, when we are at one with each other and with the Second Revolution, I will bring you and her together. She has awaited that reunion for 29 years! For a certain reason (call it the Anniversary View of History) I propose we keep her waiting until November 5 next, your 30th birthday — and no longer.

Thus my plan. But events have accelerated and changed that original schedule. Lady Amherst’s defection (and that earlier-mentioned novelist’s lack of interest) obliged me to transcribe and attempt to send you Andrew IV’s “posthumous” letters, you having somehow acquired “on your own” some version of the “prenatals.” And Jane wants us married three weeks hence, at September’s end, instead of in the New Year. Andrew Burlingame Cook VI has therefore but a few days more to live. On our drama’s larger stage, the death of Ho Chi Minh, and Nixon’s announcement of further troop withdrawals from South Viet Nam and Thailand, signal that the war in Southeast Asia is grinding down to some appropriately ignominious dénouement, and with it the mainspring of our First 7-Year Plan.

On then to the Second! No more mass demonstrations, riots on the campuses, disruptions, “trashings,” “Fanonizings”; no more assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings, heavy drugs. All these will live their desperate half life into the 1970’s, as the 18th Century half-lives into the 19th, the 19th into the 20th — but they will not be Us. Our century has one “Saturnian revolution” to go. Its first fetched us out of the 19th Century, through the cataclysms of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the explosion of hard technology and totalitarian ideology, to the beginning of the end of the Industrial Revolution, of nationalism, of Modernism, of ideology itself. Our First 7-Year Plan marked, in effect (not to boast that it itself effected), our transition from the second to the third third of the century: the revolutionary flowering, scarcely begun, of microelectronics; the age of software, soft drugs, smart weapons, and the soft sell; of subtle but enormous changes in Where the Power Is; of subtle enormities in general: large atrocities in small places and small print.

This morning’s three headline stories reflect and portend these things: VIET CEASE-FIRE ENDS: U.S. “MAY RESPOND” TO DE-ESCALATION. ISRAELI PLANES RESUME ATTACK ON EGYPT. NIXON YIELDS TO CONSERVATIONISTS, NIXES EVERGLADES JETPORT. Note especially that second: it wants no prophet, Henry, to foresee that one day soon the nations of Islam will employ their oil production as an international diplomatic weapon. Just as the arrival of the sultan’s seneschals in Constantinople on a certain afternoon in 1453 may be said conveniently to mark the end of the Middle Ages, so that day just predicted will mark the beginning of the end of the 20th Century, and of many another thing.

What exploitable convulsions lie ahead, forecast on every hand but attended seriously by few save Us! Fossil-fuel reserves exhausted before alternatives can be brought on line; the wealthy nations poorer and desperate, certain poorer nations suddenly wealthy; doomsday weaponry everywhere (Drew Mack speaks of dynamiting certain towers and monuments; but you and I could build a nuclear bomb ourselves); intemperate new weather patterns in the temperate zones; the death of the Dollar, a greater bereavement than the death of God; old alliances foundered and abandoned, surprising new ones formed! The American 1950’s and 1960’s, that McCarthy-Nixon horror show, will seem in retrospect a paradise lost. The 1980’s and 90’s will be called the New Ice Age — and who can say what will be crystallized therein?

Why, we can, Henry.

I had been going to review for you in this letter my own history. There is not time, except for barest outline. You know already — from your copy of my letter to that novelist back in June — the circumstances of my birth and early youth. (I leave it to your mother to retail for you the circumstances of your own, and why it was necessary to raise you as if orphaned.) Though I understood by 1939 that my father was not a bona fide revolutionary, but an agent of the U.S. and Canadian secret services — whose infiltration of “subversive” groups was to the end of thwarting their own infiltration of, for example, U.S. Naval Intelligence at Pearl Harbor and the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos — I loved the man dearly and continued to work “with” him until his death (for which, my son, I was not responsible, though I acknowledge that its echo of his father’s death at the Welland Canal on September 26, 1917, seems incriminating), gently frustrating his aims to the best of my ability. Therefore, for example, Pearl Harbor was virtually undefended on that Sunday morning in December 1941, and although the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (by when dear Dad was dead), the balance of terror was soon after restored.