Jesus Christ! he thought silently. But then he began to think that if she had no hands, even needed him to run microfilm, that she could not stop him from leaving. She was only a voice, and rings, and ripples in the grass. What could she do? She couldn’t alter the orbits of her moons.

“What about the other people here on Belsin?” he said, still careful with his words. “One of them might want to read to you. A younger man, maybe…”%

This time her laughter was clearly laughter. “Oh no, Edward,” she said. “I don’t want them. It’s you I want.” There was silence for several long moments. Then she continued, “They’ll be going back to Earth in a few months anyway. I’ve stopped making Endolin.”

“Stopped…?”%

“When you were asleep. I was planning things then. I realized that if I stopped Endolin they would all go away.”

“What about all those people on Earth who need it?” he said, trying to play on her sympathies. He did not give a damn, himself, for the pains of other people. That was why living with Myra had not really been difficult for him.

“They’ll be making it synthetically before the supplies run out,” she said. “It’s difficult, but they’ll learn. It would make people rich to find out how. Money motivates some people strongly.”

He said nothing to that except “Excuse me” and got up and went into the kitchen for another drink. The sky was lightening; the first little sun would be up soon. He had never known Myra to think as clearly as she could think now. He shuddered and poured himself a bigger drink. Then, through the terrace doors, he heard her voice. “Come on back out, Edward.”

“Oh, shut up!” he said and went over and slammed the doors shut and locked them. It was triply thick glass and the room became silent. He walked into the living room, with its brown-enameled steel walls and brown carpet and the oil paintings and Shaker furniture. He could hear the grass from the windows in there, so he closed them and pulled the thick curtains over them. It was silent. “Christ!” he said aloud and sat down with his drink to think about it.

Myra kept several antique plates on little shelves over the television set. They were beginning to vibrate. And then, shockingly, he heard a deep bass rumbling and the plates fell to the floor and broke. The rumbling continued for a moment before he realized that it had been an earthquake. He was suddenly furious and he hung on to the fury, covering up the fear that had come with it. He got up and went through the kitchen to the terrace doors, flung them open into the still night. “For Christ’s sake, Myra,” he said, “what are you trying to do?”

“That was a selective tremor,” the grass said. There was a hint of coyness in its tone. “I pushed magma toward the house and let a fissure fall. Just a tiny bit, Edward. Hardly any at all.”