“Yes,” he said, without volition; the goat-creature controlled his words, even the intonation.
“Well, that is so thoughtful of you. I have a whole bunch of animals already, but I don’t have a goat. I guess I’ll put it in with my sheep, Herman W. Mudgett.”
“What a strange name for a sheep,” Herb Asher said. “Herman W. Mudgett was the greatest mass-murderer in En- glish history,” Linda Fox said.
“Well,” he said, “I guess it’s okay.”
“I’ll see you in a minute. Land carefully. You don’t want to hurt the goat.” She broke the connection.
A few minutes later his car settled gently down on the roof of her house. He shut the engine off.
Open the door, the goat-creature thought to him.
He opened the car door.
Coming toward the car, lit by pale lights, Linda Fox smiled at him, her eyes sparkling; she waved in greeting. She wore a tank top and cutoffs, and, as before, her feet were bare. Her hair bounced as she hurried and her breasts rose and fell.
Within the car the stench of the goat-creature grew.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “Where’s the little goat?” She looked into the car. “Oh,” she said. “I see. Get out of the car, little goat. Come here.”
The goat-creature leaped out, into the pale light of the Califor- nia evening.
“Belial,” Linda Fox said. She bent to touch the goat; hastily, the goat scrambled back but her fingers grazed its flanks.
The goat-creature died.
CHAPTER 20
There are more of them,” she said to Herb Asher, who stood gazing numbly at the corpse of the goat. “Come inside. I knew by the scent. Belial stinks to high heaven. Please come in.” She took him by the arm and led him to the doorway. “You’re shaking. You knew what it was, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “But who are you?”
“Sometimes I am called Advocate,” Linda Fox said. “When I defend I am the Advocate. Sometimes Comfort; that is when I console. I am the Beside-Helper. Belial is the Accuser. We are the two adversaries of the Court. Please come inside where you can sit down; this has been awful for you, I know. Okay?”
“Okay.” He let her lead him to the roof elevator.
“Haven’t I consoled you?” Linda Fox asked. “In the past? As you lay alone in your dome on an alien world, with no one to talk to or be with? That is my job. One of my jobs.” She put her hand on his chest. “Your heart is pounding away. You must have been terrified; it told you what it was going to do with me. But you see, it didn’t know where you were taking it. Where or to whom.”
“You destroyed it,” he said.” And-”
“But it has proliferated throughout the universe,” Linda said. “This is only an instance, what you saw on the roof. Every man has an Advocate and an Accuser. In Hebrew, for the Israelites of
Philip K. Dick The Divine Invasion
antiquity, yetzer ha-tov was the Advocate and yetzer ha-ru was the Accuser. I’ll fix you a drink. A good California zinfandel; a Buena Vista zinfandel. It’s a Hungarian grape. Most people don’t know that.”
In her living room he sank down in a floating chair, gratefully. He could still smell the goat. “Will I ever-” he began.
“The smell will go away.” She glided over to him with a glass of red wine. “I already opened it and let it breathe. You’ll like it.”
He found the wine delicious. And his heartbeat had begun to return to normal.
Seated across from him, Linda Fox held her own wine glass and gazed at him attentively. “It didn’t harm your wife, did it? Or Elias?”
‘No,” he said. “I was alone when it came up to me. It pre- tended to be a lost animal.”
Linda Fox said, “Each person on Earth will have to choose between his yetzer ha-ra and his yetzer ha-ru. You choose me and so I saved you . . . you choose the goat-thing and I cannot save you. In your case I was the one you chose. The battle is waged for each soul individually. That is what the rabbis teach. They have no doctrine of fallen man as a whole. Salvation is on a one by one basis. Do you like the zinfandel?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I will use your FM station,” she said. “It will be a good place to air new material.”
“You know about that?” he said.
“Elijah is too stern. My songs will be appropriate. My songs gladden the human heart and that is what matters. Well, Herb Asher; here you are in California with me, as you imagined in the beginning. As you imagined in another star system, in your dome, with your holographic posters of me that moved and talked, the synthetic versions of me, the imitations. Now you have the real me with you, seated across from you. How does it feel?”
He said, “Is it real?”
“Do you hear two hundred sugary strings?”
“No.”
Linda Fox said, “It’s real.” She set her wine glass down, rose to her feet, came toward him and bent to put her arms around him.
He woke up in the morning with the Fox against him, her hair brushing his face, and he said to himself, This is actually so; it is not a dream, and the evil goat-creature lies dead on the roof, my particular goat-thing that came to degrade my life.
This is the woman I love, he thought as he touched the dark hair and the pale cheek. It is beautiful hair and her lashes are long and lovely, even as she sleeps. It is impossible but it is true. That can happen. What had Elias told him about religious faith? ‘Cer- turn est quia impossibile est.” “This is therefore credible, just because it is absurd.” The great statement by the early Church father Tertullian, regarding the resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est.” And that is the case here.
What a long way I have gone, he thought, stroking the woman’s bare arm. Once I imagined this and now I experience this. I am back where I began and yet I am totally elsewhere from where I began! It is a paradox and a miracle at the same time. And this, even, is California, where I imagined it to be. It is as if in dreaming I presaw my future reality; I experienced it before- hand.
And the dead thing on the roof is proof that this is real. Be- cause my imagination could not give rise to that stinking beast whose mind glued itself to my mind and told me lies, told me ugly stories about a fat, short woman with bad skin. An object as ugly as itself-a projection of itself.
Has anyone loved another human as much as I love her? he asked himself, and then he thought, She is my Advocate and my Beside-Helper. She told me Hebrew words that I have forgotten that describe her. She is my tutelary spirit, and the goat-thing came all the way here, three thousand miles, to perish when she put her fingers against its flank. It died without even a sound, so easily did she kill it. She was waiting for it. That is-as she said
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-her job, one of her jobs. She has others; she consoled me, she consoles millions; she defends; she gives solace. And she is there in time; she does not arrive too late.
Leaning, he kissed Linda on the cheek. In her sleep she sighed. Weak and in the power of the goat-creature, he thought; that is what I was when I came here. She protected me because I was weak. She does not love me as I love her, because she must love all humans. But I love her alone. With everything that I am. I, the weak, love her who is strong. My loyalty is to her, and her protection is for me. It is the Covenant that God made with the Israelites: that the strong protect the weak and the weak give their devotion and loyalty to the strong in return; it is a mutuality. I have a covenant with Linda Fox, and it will not be broken ever, by either one of us.
I’ll fix breakfast for her, he decided. Stealthily, he got up from the waterbed and made his way into the kitchen.
A figure stood there waiting for him. A familiar figure.
“Emmanuel,” Herb Asher said.
The boy shone in a ghostly way, and Herb Asher realized that he could see the wall and the counter and cabinets behind the boy. This was an epiphany of the divine; Emmanuel was in fact somewhere else. And yet he was here; here and aware of Herb Asher.
“You found her,” Emmanuel said.