The foodman set down his cup. "I have to go.

"Fine," Asher said. "I'm sorry; you upset me by telling me about Ms. Rommey."

"Call her and talk to her. She needs someone to talk to and you're the closest dome. I'm surprised she didn't tell you."

Herb Asher thought, I didn't ask.

"It is the law, you know," the foodman said.

"What law?"

'If a domer is in distress the nearest neighbor-"

"Oh." He nodded. "Well, it's never come up before in my case. I mean-yeah, it is the law. I forgot. Did she tell you to remind me of the law?"

"No," the foodman said.

After the foodman had departed, Herb Asher got the code for Rybys Rommey's dome, started to run it into his transmitter and then hesitated. His wall clock showed 18:30 hours. At this point in his forty-two-hour cycle he was supposed to accept a sequence of high-speed entertainment, audio- and video-taped signals emanating from a slave satellite at CY3O III; upon storing them he was to run them back at normal and select the material suitable for the overall dome system on his own planet.

He took a look at the log. Fox was doing a concert that ran two hours. Linda Fox, he thought. You and your synthesis of old-time rock, modern-day streng and the lute music of John Dowland. Jesus, he thought; if I don't transcribe the relay of your live concert every domer on the planet will come storming in here and kill me. Outside of emergencies-which really didn't occur -this is what I'm paid to handle: information traffic between planets, information that connects us with home and keeps us human. The tape drums have to turn.

He started the tape transport at its high-speed mode, set the module's controls for receive, locked it in at the satellite's operating frequency, checked the wave form on the visual scope to be sure that the carrier was coming in undistorted and then patched into an audio transduction of what he was getting.