"You can see her better from here," Manny said.

It was true. He was now much closer to the stage. He and the boy stood together in silence as Linda Fox sang "Weep You No More Sad Fountains."

When the song ended, Manny said, "You don't remember, do you? She has enchanted you. Wake up, Herbert Asher. You know me well, and I know you. Linda Fox does not sing her songs at an obscure cocktail lounge in Hollywood; she is famous throughout the galaxy. She is the most important entertainer of this decade. The chief prelate and the procurator maximus invite her to-"

"She's going to sing again," Herb Asher interrupted. He barely heard the boy's words and they made no sense to him. A babbling boy, he thought, making it hard for me to hear Linda Fox. Just what I need.

After the song had ended, Manny said, "Herbert, Herbert; do you want to meet her? Is that what you want?"

"What?" he murmured, his eyes-his attention-fixed on Linda Fox. God, he thought; what a figure she has. She's practi- cally falling out of her dress. He thought, I wish my wife was built like that.

"She will come this way," Manny said, "when she finishes. Stand here, Herb Asher, and she will pass directly by you."

"You're joking," he said.

"No," Manny said. "You will have what you want most in the world . . . that which you dreamed of as you lay on your bunk in your dome."

"What dome?" he said.

Manny said, " 'How you have fallen from heaven, bright morning star, felled-'

"You mean one of those colony-planet domes?" Herb Asher said.

"I can't make you listen, can I?" Manny said. "If I could say to you-"

"She is coming this way," Herb Asher said. "How did you know?" He moved a few steps toward her. Linda Fox walked rapidly, with small steps, a gentle expression on her face.

"Thank you," she was saying to people who spoke to her. For a moment she stopped to give her autograph to a black youth nattily dressed.