“I’ve kept us going so far.”

“You’ve kept us here at this—kibbutz,” Mary said. “For eight years.”

“But now I’ve gotten us off.”

“To something worse, probably. What do we know about this new assignment? Nothing, except what Gossim knows—and he knows because he makes it his business to read over everyone else’s communications. He read your original prayer… I didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would make you so—”

“That bastard.” He felt red, huge fury well up inside him, spiked with impotence. “It’s a moral violation to read another person’s prayers.”

“He’s in charge. He feels everything is his business. Anyhow we’ll be getting away from that. Thank God. Come on; cool off. You can’t do anything about it; he read it years ago.”

“Did he say whether he thought it was a good prayer?”

Mary Morley said, “Fred Gossim would never say if it was. I think it was. Evidently it was, because you got the transfer.”

“I think so. Because God doesn’t grant too many prayers by Jews due to that covenant back in the pre-Intercessor days when the power of the Form Destroyer was so strong, and our relationship to him—to God, I mean—was so fouled up.”

“I can see you back in those days,” Mary said. “Kvetching bitterly about everything the Mentufacturer did and said.”

Morley said, “I would have been a great poet. Like David.”

“You would have held a little job, like you do now.” With that she strode off, leaving him standing in the doorway of the noser, one hand on his row of stored-away marmalade jars.

His sense of impotence rose within him, choking his windpipe. “Stay here!” he yelled after her. “I’ll leave without you!”

She continued on under the hot sun, not looking back and not answering.