Whit sat silent, and Suzy kept on talking. She could always talk. No matter what you said to her, no matter how you felt, no matter where you were, Suzy could always talk to you and make your life seem brighter, and the trip back home again worth fighting to make. You fell in love with Suzy, they all did, but as she always said, they made her promise not to say she loved you back. Not until you got back home, safe and sound and sane. That was Suzy's job on earth, in a drab little office with an engineer who controlled her channels, and sometimes blushed at what he heard go out over them. She spoke, sometimes gaily, sometimes gently, sometimes with all the frail strength of her body, into a microphone beamed to each capsule in turn, and in those capsules were men, who, but for her, would go mad before their time was up. And Suzy never cheated, and she never lied, and she never changed. She was the love light of outer space, she and a dozen others at Point Magu. She kept men sane, and she brought them home, and she kept her promise never to love and never to marry until they came back again. "Whit? What we were talking about yesterday. Did you think about that?" "You mean about the gardenias?" "Umhummm. My gardenias, to pin on my blouse." "Suzy, I'll bring you a thousand, one each day, until you say you love me. I'm drawing them now, on paper, one every day, for you." "Aw, Whit, you're awful nice." Then, after frantic good-byes, shouting, screaming, pounding on the microphone, hoping that the dead metal would somehow speak once more, Whit would settle back for another day's dreaming of Suzy, while he kept his tiny house-in-space, read his little gauges, and kept his dreams alive. It was only in the afternoon that madness came too close, and in the power-saving darkness he raged and cursed and pled and begged, until Suzy's voice came winging out of space to comfort him for another day, when they talked of all the beautiful things that people talk about when there is love between them. * * * * * For Suzy loved her men, all seven of them. To know them well, to listen time and again to their recorded conversations, to pick out points that were worth repeating, to avoid the subjects that depressed them, to say what would bring them home in love with her was a pleasure to her, and she worked hard at the job. All alone, late into the night, Suzy would sit in her little office, listening to her records, and planning the next day's battle for the sanity of her men. "Now Al," she'd muse, "he'll want to know how that recipe came out, the one with the mushrooms. Poor guy, he does like to eat. I'll tell him about the party I went to with Sheila, and how she ate up all the rum cakes and could hardly find her way home again. He'll like that."