It is late afternoon and the shadows are beginning to lengthen but, within the grove, the warmth of day still lingers. I have a conviction that this is the last diary entry I shall make, but even if neither I nor these words survive, I need to record this day. It has been one of extraordinary happiness and I have spent it with four strangers. In the years before Omega, at the beginning of each academic year, I used to write an assessment of the applicants I had selected for admission to college. This record, with a photograph from their application form, I kept in a private file. At the end of their three years it used to interest me to see how often my preliminary pen-portrait was accurate, how little they had changed, how powerless I was to alter their essential natures. I was seldom wrong about them. The exercise reinforced my natural confidence in my judgement; perhaps that was its purpose. I believed that I could know them and did know them. I can’t feel that about my fellow-fugitives.
