"Always be joyful," Emmanuel said.

"OK," Herb Asher said. "I will."

At the stove Linda Fox fixed breakfast and he thought he heard her sing. It was hard for him to tell, because he carried in his mind the beauty of her tunes. It was always there. "She is singing," Emmanuel said. "You are right." Singing, she put on coffee. The day had begun.

"That thing on the roof," Herb Asher said. But Emmanuel had disappeared, now; only he himself and Linda Fox remained.

"I'll call the city," Linda Fox said. "They'll haul it away. They have a machine that does that. Hauls away the poisonous snake. From the lives of people and the roofs of houses. Turn on the radio and get the news. There will be wars and rumors of wars. There will be great upheavals. The world-we've seen only a little part of it. And then let's call Elijah about the radio sta- tion."

"No more string versions of South Pacific," he said.

"In a little while," Linda Fox said, "things will be all right. It came out of its cage and it is going back."

He said, "What if we lose?"

"I can see ahead," Linda said. "We will win. We have al- ready won. We have always already won, from the beginning, from before creation. What do you take in your coffee? I forget."

Later, he and Linda Fox went back up on the roof to view the remains of Belial. But to his surprise he saw not the carcass of a wizened goat-thing~ instead he saw what looked like the remains of a great luminous kite that had crashed and lay in ruins all across the roof.

Somberly, he and Linda gazed at it as it lay broken every- where, vast and lovely and destroyed. In pieces, like damaged light.

"This is how he was once," Linda said. "Originally. Before he fell. This was his original shape. We called him the Moth. The Motl1 that fell slowly, over thousands of years, intersecting the Earth, like a geometrical shape descending stage by stage until nothing remained of its shape."