He foned his home. After a long pause Rybys answered. "I thought you were in California," she murmured. "You woke me up. Do you realize what time it is?"

"I had to turn back," he said. "I'm wanted by the police."

Rybys said, "I'm going back to sleep." The screen darkened; its light went out and he found himself facing nothing, confronted by nothingness.

They are all asleep or on tape, he thought. And when you manage to get them to say something they tell you you're no good. The domain of Belial insinuates the paucity of value in everything. Great. Just what we need. The only bright spot was the cop asking me to pray for him. Even Elias is acting erratically, suggesting that we buy an FM radio station for thirty million dollars so that we can tell people-well, whatever he's going to tell people. On a par with selling them a home audio system and baptizing them as a bonus. Like giving them a free stuffed animal.

Animal, he thought. Belial is an animal; it was an animal voice that I heard on the radio just now. Lower than human, not greater. Animal is the worst sense: subhuman and gross. He shiv- ered. And meanwhile Rybys sleeps, dreaming of malignancy. Her perpetual cloud of illness, whether she is conscious or not; it is always with her, always there. She is her own pathogen, infecting herself.

He shut off the lights, left the store, locked up the front door and made his way to his parked car, wondering to himself where to go. Back to his ailing, complaining wife? To California and the mechanical, pudgy image he had seen on the fone screen?

On the sidewalk, near his parked car, something small moved. Something that hesitantly retreated from him, as if in fear. An animal, larger than a cat. Yet it didn't seem to be a dog.

Herb Asher halted, bent down, holding out his hand. The animal came uncertainly toward him, and then all at once he heard its thoughts in his mind. It was communicating with him telepathically. I am from the planet in the CY3O-CY3OB star sys- tem, it thought to him. I am one of the autochthonic goats that in former times was sacrificed to Yah.