“Christ!” he said, startled. “You can’t make me read.” There was something petulant in his voice. He could hear it and it disturbed him. Something of the sound of a small boy trying to defy his mother. “I want to have another drink and go back to bed.”

“You know I don’t like insisting,” Myra said. “And you’re perfectly right, Edward. I can’t make you read. But I can shake the house and keep you awake.” Abruptly the house shook from another tremor, probably a quarter of a point on the Richter scale. “And,” Myra said, “I can grow food for you or not grow food for you. And I can give you what you want to eat or not give you what you want. I could feed you nothing but persimmons for a few months. And make the water taste terrible.”

“Jesus Christ!” he said. “I’m tired.”

“It’ll only be a couple of chapters,” Myra said. “And then maybe a couple of old songs on the player, and I’ll go back to contemplating my interior and the other planets around here.”

He didn’t move.

“You’ll be wanting me to grow tobacco for you. There are only a few cartons of cigarettes left.” Edward smoked three packs a day. Three packs in a short Belsin day.

He still didn’t move.

“Well,” Myra said, conciliatory now. “I think I could synthesize a little ethyl alcohol. If I could do Endolin, I suppose I could do that too. Maybe a quart or so every now and then. A hundred ninety proof.”

He stood up. He was terribly weary. “The King’s Mistress?” he said.

“That’s right!” the grass said, sweetly, joyfully. “I’ve always liked your voice, Edward. It’ll be good to hear you read.”

And then, before he turned to go into the house, to the big console that held thousands of books—thousands of dumb Gothic novels and books on gardening and cooking and self-improvement and a few technical books on geology—he saw everything get suddenly much lighter and looked up to see that the great rings of Belsin were now fully visible, bright as bands of sunlight in the abruptly brightened sky above his head. They glowed in full realization of themselves, illuminating the whole, nearly empty planet.

And Myra’s voice came sighing joyfully in a great, horizon-wide ripple of grass. “Ooooooh!” it said happily. “Ooooooh!”

OUT OF LUCK

It was only three months after he had left his wife and children and moved in with Janet that Janet decided she had to go to Washington for a week. Harold was devastated. He tried not to let her see it. The fiction between them was that he had left Gwen so he could grow up, change his life and learn to paint again. But all he was certain of was that he had left Gwen to have Janet as his mistress. There were other reasons: his recovery from alcoholism, the years he had wasted his talent as an art professor, and Gwen’s refusal to move to New York with him. But none of these would have been sufficient to uproot him and cause him to take a year’s leave from his job if Janet had not worn peach-colored bikini panties that stretched tightly across her lovely ass.