“Boy, do I feel good!” Myra said. “I think I could dance till dawn.”

He kept his eyes on the road, following it with the wheel. “In an hour you’d be screaming from the pain. You’re forgetting how Endolin burns out.” That was its great drawback, and he was glad to remind her of it. That, and the fact that you couldn’t take it constantly. If you did it paralyzed you.

For a moment she sounded crushed. “Honey,” she said, “I haven’t forgotten.” Then she brightened. “But lately my bad hours between pills have been easier.”

“That’s good,” he said. He tried to put conviction in it.

After a while they were driving along a ridge from which they could see, far off to the right, the lights of the Endolin packing plant and the little spaceport beside it.

“I didn’t know they worked at night,” Myra said.

“For the last six months they have.”

“Six months Earth time?” There was Belsin time, with its seventeen-hour day and short year, and there was Earth time. Edward had a way of shifting from one to the other without warning.

“Earth time,” he said, as if talking to a child.

“You almost never tell me about your work, Edward,” she said. “Have orders gone up?”

“Yes,” he said. “Business is booming. We’re sending out a shipload every month now.” He hesitated and then said, “Earth time.”

“That’s terrific, Edward. It must make you feel… useful to be so successful.”

He said nothing. It made no difference to him how well the business did, except that more shippings meant more supplies of gin and of television tapes and things like peanut butter and coffee and caviar from Earth. Nothing on Belsin could be eaten. And the only business—the only real reason for humanity to be there at all—was Endolin.

“Will you have to increase the number of workers?” Myra said. “To keep up with bigger harvests?”

He shook his head. “No. The equipment has been improved. Each man brings in two or three pounds a day now. Faster vehicles and better detectors.”

“That’s fascinating!” Myra said, sitting upright with a slight wince of pain. “I had no idea what was going on.”

“You never asked,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I suppose I didn’t.”

They drove on northward in silence for a long time, listening to the grass. Edward himself, despite his hidden anger and his frustrations, became calmed by it. Finally Myra spoke. “Listening to that singing is… is amazing,” she said softly. “It seems to go very deep. You know”—she turned abruptly in her seat to face him!—“the more I take Endolin the more… mystical my feelings are. Or spiritual.” She looked a little self-conscious saying it, probably because she knew how impatient he was with her interests in poetry and in music. And in reincarnation.

“It’s bound to affect your mind…” he said.

“No,” she said. “I know that’s not it. It’s something I’ve had since I was a child. Sometimes after the arthritic pain I’d have a… a burned-out feeling in my nerves and a certain clarity in my head. I would lie in my bed in the hospital or whatever and I felt I knew things just the other side of the edge of knowing.”