Again the static. He knew the missing line. It went: Greater find.
Angrily, he signaled the source to replay the last ten seconds of its transmission; obligingly, it rewound, paused, gave him the signal back, and repeated the quatrain. This time he could make out the final line, despite the eerie static.
Silly wretch, let me rail
At a voyage that is blind.
Holy hopes do require
Your behind.
"Christ!" Asher said, and shut his tape transport down. Could he have heard that? "Your behind"?
It was Yah. Screwing up his reception. This was not the first time.
The local throng of Clems had explained it to him when the interference had first set in several months ago. In the old days before humans had migrated to the CY3O-CY3OB star system, the autochthonic population had worshiped a mountain deity named Yah, whose abode, the autochthons had explained, was the little mountain on which Herb Asher's dome had been erected.
His incoming microwave and psychotronic signals had gotten cooked by Yah every now and then, much to his displeasure. And when no signals were coming in, Yah lit up his screens with faint but obviously sentient driblets of information. Herb Asher had spent a long time fussing with his equipment, trying to screen out this interference, but with no success. He had studied his manuals and erected shields, but to no avail.
This, however, was the first time that Yah had wrecked a Linda Fox tune. Which, as far as Asher was concerned, put thematter over a crucial line.
The fact of the matter was, whether it was healthy or not, he was totally dependent on the Fox.
He had long maintained an active fantasy life dealing with the Fox. He and Linda Fox lived on Earth, in California, at one of the beach towns in the Southland (unspecified beyond that). Herb Asher surfed and the Fox thought he was wonderful. It was like a living commercial for beer. They had campouts on the beach with their friends; the girls walked around nude from the waist up; the portable radio was always tuned to a twenty-four-hour no-commercials-at-all rock station.
