Older, not newer. Lindy is in some kind of world. And up there are tons of junk between me and the stars, circling, circling, either beeping or dead, but junk regardless, like that golf ball on the moon.

"Talk to your kid today?"

"Yes. I made it person-to-person to make her feel important.

And I must confess it saved me at least ten minutes of aimless chatter with her grandma."

"How did she sound?"

"I don't know. Draggy. Polite. A little listless. But she gave me a telephone kiss. A squeaky one, and when I told her I love her, she told me she loves me, a good sign, I guess. She seems to be choosing her words more carefully. And talking more slowly these days."

"I remember. You have to be careful. People can cast spells if you are not careful. So you walk and talk and sit and eat and get ready for bed very, very carefully. It keeps the bad out."

He put his hand on her shoulder.

"You and Fred are good people."

"Glad we have you conned," she said, and laughed. It was a nervous sound. She popped a quick kiss on his cheek and said good night when she was thirty feet away, heading for the office.

An airplane droned by, so high the sound of it was entangled with the summer sound of the tree toads and insects. People going by up there at seven hundred and fifty feet per second.

Encapsulated in their roaring lounge, taking some of them toward something important, and taking others away from something dear. He wanted to be up there drinking coffee and reading one of those glossy airplane magazines about Hindus, mockingbirds and the best restaurants in Dayton, Ohio. He wanted to be up there heading for a city he had never seen before.

Ten.

The Reverend Doctor F. Walter Macy waited in his small office in the Administration Building for Mary Margaret Meadows to arrive. She had phoned saying she wanted to see him in his office, and that she would be along as soon as she could arrange it. She had not stated a time, and the phone call had come forty minutes before.

He was working on an old sermon which he had recently updated, shortened and had retyped. He was using colored pencils to indicate the particular emotions he wished to project. The underlining reminded him: red for anger, blue for grief, yellow for spiritual ecstasy, green for contempt. It had been typed using an IBM element called ORATOR, the largest typeface available in their offices. On Sunday morning he would deliver the sermon in the Affiliated Eternal Church of the Believer in Newmont, South Carolina. Finn Efflander had assigned him a Beechcraft and a pilot, pointing out that the landing strip at Newmont was not certified for jets. Leave at seven-thirty Sunday morning, back by at least one in the afternoon.

He had tried to work on the sermon the night before, Thursday night, at home, but Alberta had been in one of her moods, walking around and around him, whacking with her feather duster at things that did not need dusting, muttering and mumbling.

And so he had to stop and listen to it all again, about how here he was, the Reverend Doctor F. Walter Macy, the First Assistant Pastor of the Holy Tabernacle of the Eternal Church of the Believer, second only to John Tinker and Mary Margaret in the active religious hierarchy, and here they were, living in this dumb, dreary little house at 15 Malachi Road. So what if it is one of the big floor plans, it is still out here where the help live, and by all rights we should be living in the Manse.

There's room there for us even now, and if they'd come to their senses and put that old coot away somewhere like they did the nutty son, there'd be more than enough.

As usual, the more she talked, the more she got into the spirit of it. She came around in front of him and stood over him, bending forward slightly from the waist, a plain-faced woman with lifeless gray hair and a face that became mottled when she was agitated.

"Oh, you're a bear for work, aren't you, Reverend Walter?

The television talk show and the radio talk show, and all the Bible lessons on tape, and giving guest sermons at some God-forgotten place every other Sunday. All my life I've gotten second best and third best and fourth best. Stand back and let others go first. Now, by God, that you've earned a place at the top, we're still on the outside of everything. Over there in the Manse, I wouldn't even have to cook if I didn't feel like doing it, or make beds or clean! You keep telling me to be patient.

Well, I just don't feel like being patient anymore! I've stood by you all these years working my fingers to the bone and you've been telling me we'd get to the top. This is the top, isn't it? And there's no payoff."

She bent over further, so close that he could feel the fine spray of spittle as Alberta yelled, eyes bulging, "You do anything those damn Meadowses tell you! It isn't patience, mister. It's plain spinelessness. You like being walked on. It's a sickness! What you are, Walter Macy, you are just plain weak!"

She began to cry out of anger, and whirled and went back through the house, hooing and hawing as she went, and he heard the slam of the bedroom door.

He reread the parts of the sermon he had worked on, sighed, put it aside and went on back to where she waited. He wrote the sermons and she wrote their domestic scripts, their scenes and torments. He had always known this. This script called for certain words and actions on his part.

He tapped on the door and said, softly, "Alberta? Bertie?"

"Go away!"

"I have to talk to you, dear. I have to explain. Please."

When there was no answer, he opened the bedroom door.

She was on her bed, her back toward the door. He went and sat on the edge of the bed, behind her. He patted and stroked her shoulder, and in a mild and gentle voice he told her that they had to move very, very slowly, that to assert his rights too soon might cause disaster. He told her that he had planned everything very carefully so there would be no chance of things going wrong for them. If it works out, he told her, or rather when it works out, he would be the head of the Church.

After a predictable period of stroking and murmuring, she gave a great sigh and turned her tear-streaked face toward him and said she was sorry she had been so cross. Up until a few years ago this sort of scene had been one of the preludes to their lovemaking. Never passionate, she had, however, taken some pleasure from the act, he believed. But a few years ago it had begun to give her so much discomfort she had told him they had better not do that anymore. His disappointment was not quite genuine, and more intended to flatter than to argue for resumption. In a short time his vague desire for her faded completely away, and there was no longer any need to try to elicit some response from her slack white flesh.

After they had kissed and they had each apologized for making the other one unhappy, she went into the bathroom and washed her face and combed her hair. She came out and sat beside him on the edge of the bed and patted his arm and said, "Have you talked to Mary Margaret about... you know what?"

"Alberta, dearest, I don't even know if that is the right thing to do at this juncture."

"You keep telling me she's on your side."

"This is a very delicate matter. One has to anticipate what her choices will be, and which ones she will elect to take."

"Whatever the hell that means. I don't have the advantages of education you've got."

"It means that he is her brother, her only living brother. She has no husband. She has no lover. Her father is alive but beyond her reach. Sometimes it is not wise to be the bearer of bad tidings. She is the nearest thing to female royalty we have, and they have been known to order the messenger strangled."

"She wouldn't dare try to get rid of you! The affiliated ministers wouldn't allow it! Besides, after nothing at all happened after you told that magazine woman..."

"Hold it!" he shouted, glaring at her.

"Well, please excuse me for living. You said you were..."

"I said I was going to try to get in touch with that woman, yes. I was planning to send her a message through somebody I trust that I wanted to talk to her. But on second thought, I decided that it was not a valid idea."

"Why not? Wouldn't she want to know John Tinker is an adulterer? A hypocrite."

"Those people are very skeptical. They would consider the source. So I was trying to think of the proper person to go to her and tell her what was going on when all of a sudden she apparently went back to New York. Now, of course, we know she disappeared."

She stared at him for a moment, eyes narrow and lips compressed.

"I don't understand why you told me you were going to talk to that woman, and then told me you did."

"Dearest, I am guilty, I guess, of raising false hopes. I should have made it clear that it was what I intended to do. I wanted you to be happy and hopeful. So I raised false hopes. I'm sorry."

"Anyway, you promised me you would tell your precious Mary Margaret Meadows about it."

"What proof do I have, Bertie? The phone lines apparently got crossed somehow and I heard them making a date, and the way they talked, it was evident what they had in mind."

' "Evident what they had in mind," she said in a prissy voice, mocking him.