“No,” he said. “I’m a backup station to yours.”

“It’s all the same.” She sipped the mug of tea which he had fixed for her. “It’s too hot. I’ll let it cool.” Tremblingly, she reached to set down the mug on a table beside her bed; the mug fell, and hot tea poured out over the plastic floor. “Christ,” she said with fury. “Well, that does it; that really does it. Nothing has gone right today. Son of a bitch.”

McVane turned on the dome’s vacuum circuit and it sucked up the spilled tea. He said nothing. He felt amorphous anger all through him, directed at nothing, fury without object, and he sensed that this was the quality of her own hate: it was a passion which went both nowhere and everywhere. Hate, he thought, like a flock of flies. God, he thought, how I want out of here. How I hate to hate like this, hating spilled tea with the same venom as I hate terminal illness. A one-dimensional universe. It has dwindled to that.

In the weeks that followed, he made fewer and fewer trips from his dome to hers. He did not listen to what she said; he did not watch what she did; he averted his gaze from the chaos around her, the ruins of her dome. I am seeing a projection of her brain, he thought once as he momentarily surveyed the garbage which had piled up everywhere; she was even putting sacks outside the dome, to freeze for eternity. She is senile.

Back in his own dome, he tried to listen to Linda Fox, but the magic had departed. He saw and heard a synthetic image. It was not real. Rybus Rommey had sucked the life out of the Fox the way her dome’s vacuum circuit had sucked up the spilled tea.

McVane heard the words, but they didn’t matter. What had Rybus called it? Recycled sentimentality and crap. He put on a Vivaldi concerto for bassoon. There is only one Vivaldi concerto, he thought. A computer could do better. And be more diverse.

“You’re picking up Fox waves,” Linda Fox said, and on his video transducer her face appeared, star-lit and wild. “And when those Fox waves hit you,” she said, “you have been hit!”

In a momentary spasm of fury, he deliberately erased four hours of Fox, both video and audio. And then regretted it. He put in a call to one of the relay satellites for replacement tapes and was told that they were back-ordered.

Fine, he said to himself. What the hell does it matter?

That night, while he was sound asleep, his telephone rang. He let it ring; he did not answer it, and when it rang again ten minutes later he again ignored it.

The third time it rang he picked it up and said hello.

“Hi,” Rybus said.

“What is it?” he said.

“I’m cured.”

“You’re in remission?”

“No, I’m cured. M.E.D. just contacted me; their computer analyzed all my charts and tests and everything and there’s no sign of hard patches. Except, of course, I’ll never get central vision back in my bad eye. But other than that I’m okay.” She paused. “How have you been? I haven’t heard from you for so long—it seems like forever. I’ve been wondering about you.”

He said, “I’m okay.”

“We should celebrate.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ll fix dinner for us, like I used to. What would you like? I feel like Mexican food. I make a really good taco; I have the ground meat in my freezer, unless it’s gone bad. I’ll thaw it out and see. Do you want me to come over there or do you—”

“Let me talk to you tomorrow,” he said.

“I’m sorry to wake you up, but I just now heard from M.E.D.” She was silent a moment. “You’re the only friend I have,” she said. And then, incredibly, she began to cry.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re well.”

“I was so fucked up,” she said brokenly. “I’ll ring off and talk to you tomorrow. But you’re right; I can’t believe it, but I made it.”

“It is due to your courage,” he said.

“It’s due to you,” Rybus said. “I would have given up without you. I never told you this, but—well, I squirreled away enough sleeping pills to kill myself, and—”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said, “about getting together.” He hung up and lay back down.

He thought, When Job had lost his children, lands, and goods, Patience assuaged his excessive pain. And when his sorrows came as fast as floods, Hope kept his heart till comfort came again. As the Fox would put it.

Recycled sentimentality, he thought. I got her through her ordeal and she paid me back by deriding into rubbish that which I cherished the most. But she is alive, he realized; she did make it. It’s like when someone tries to kill a rat. You can kill it six ways and it still survives. You can’t fault that.

He thought, That is the name of what we are doing here in this star system on these frozen planets in these little domes. Rybus Rommey understood the game and played it right and won. To hell with Linda Fox. And then he thought, But also to hell with what I love.

It is a good trade-off, he thought: a human life won and a synthetic media image wrecked. The law of the universe.

Shivering, he pulled his covers over him and tried to get back to sleep.

The food man showed up before Rybus did; he awoke McVane early in the morning with a full shipment.

“Still got your temp and air illegally boosted,” the food man said as he unscrewed his helmet.

“I just use the equipment,” McVane said. “I don’t build it.”

“Well, I won’t report you. Got any coffee?”

They sat facing each other across the table drinking fake coffee.

“I just came from the Rommey girl’s dome,” the food man said. “She says she’s cured.”

“Yeah, she phoned me late last night,” McVane said.

“She says you did it.”

To that, McVane said nothing.

“You saved a human life.”

“Okay,” McVane said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m just tired.”

“I guess it took a lot out of you. Christ, it’s a mess over there. Can’t you clean it up for her? Destroy the garbage, at least, and sterilize the place; the whole goddam dome is septic. She let her garbage disposal get plugged and it backed up raw sewage all over her cupboards and shelves, where her food is stored. I’ve never seen anything like it. Of course, she’s been so weak—”

McVane interrupted, “I’ll look into it.”

Awkwardly, the food man said, “The main thing is, she’s cured. She was giving herself the shots, you know.”

“I know,” McVane said. “I watched her.” Many times, he said to himself.

“And her hair’s growing back. Boy, she looks awful without her wig. Don’t you agree?”

Rising, McVane said, “I have to broadcast some weather reports. Sorry I can’t talk to you any longer.”

Toward dinnertime Rybus Rommey appeared at the hatch of his dome, loaded down with pots and dishes and carefully wrapped packages. He let her in, and she made her way silently to the kitchen area, where she dumped everything down at once; two packages slid off onto the floor and she stooped to retrieve them.

After she had taken off her helmet, she said, “It’s good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” he said.

“It’ll take about an hour to fix the tacos. Do you think you can wait until then?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking,” Rybus said as she started a pan of grease heating on the stove. “We ought to take a vacation. Do you have any leave coming? I have two weeks owed me, although my situation is complicated by my illness. I mean, I used up a lot of my leave in the form of sick leave. Christ’s sake, they docked me one-half day a month, just because I couldn’t operate my transmitter. Can you believe it?”

He said, “It’s nice to see you stronger.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Shit, I forgot the hamburger. Goddam it!” She stared at him.