He didn’t know. Help, he supposed. Well, what came would be acceptable, as Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe had said.

He set the needle carefully on the outer groove, and lay down beside the phonograph on the dusty floor.

Do you need anybody? I need somebody to love.

The machine was automatic; when it had played the record it grumbled softly a moment, clicked its innards, and returned the needle to the first groove.

I get by, with a little help,

With a little help from my friends.

During the eleventh replay Orr fell sound asleep.

Awakening in the high, bare, twilit room, Heather was disconcerted. Where on earth?

She had been asleep. Gone to sleep sitting on the floor with her legs stretched out and her back against the piano. Marijuana always made her sleepy, and stupid, too, but you couldn’t hurt Mannie’s feelings and refuse it, the poor old pothead. George lay flat as a skinned cat on the floor, right by the phonograph, which was slowly eating its way through “With a Little Help” right down to the turntable. She cut the volume down slowly, then stopped the machine. George never stirred; his lips were slightly parted, his eyes firmly closed. How funny that they had both gone to sleep listening to the music. She got up off her knees and went out to the kitchen to see what was for dinner.

Oh for Christsake, pig liver. It was nourishing and the best value you could get for three meat-ration stamps by weight. She had picked it up at the Mart yesterday. Well, cut real thin, and fried with salt pork and onions...yecchh. Oh well, she was hungry enough to eat pig liver, and George wasn’t a picky man. If it was decent food he ate and enjoyed it and if it was lousy pig liver he ate it. Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.

As she set the kitchen table and put two potatoes and half a cabbage on to cook, she paused from time to time: she did feel odd. Disoriented. From the damn pot, and going to sleep on the floor at all hours, no doubt.

George came in, disheveled and dusty-shirted. He stared at her. She said, “Well. Good morning!”

He stood looking at her and smiling, a broad radiant smile of pure joy. She had never received so great a compliment in her life; she was abashed by that joy, which she had caused. “My dear wife,” he said, taking her hands. He looked at them, palms and backs, and put them up against his face. “You should be brown,” he said, and to her dismay she saw tears in his eyes. For a moment, just that moment, she had a notion of what was going on; she recalled being brown, and remembered the silence in the cabin at night, and the sound of the creek, and many other things, all in a flash. But George was a more urgent consideration. She was holding him, as he held her. “You’re worn out,” she said, “you’re upset, you fell asleep on the floor. It’s that bastard Haber. Don’t go back to him. Just don’t. I don’t care what he does, we’ll take it to court, we’ll appeal it, even if he slaps a Constraint injunction on you and sticks you in Linnton we’ll get you a different shrink and get you out again. You can’t go on with him, he’s destroying you.”

“Nobody can destroy me,” he said, and laughed a little, deep in his chest, almost a sob, “not so long as I have a little help from my friends. I’ll go back, it’s not going to last much longer. It’s not me I’m worried about, any more. But don’t worry....”  They hung on to each other, in touch at all available surfaces, absolutely unified, while the liver and onions sizzled in the pan. “I fell asleep too,” she said into his neck, “I got so groggy typing up old Rutti’s dumb letters. But that’s a good record you bought. I loved the Beatles when I was a kid but the Government stations never play them any more.”

“It was a present,” George said, but the liver popped in the pan, and she had to disengage herself and see to it. At dinner George watched her; she watched him a good bit, too. They had been married seven months. They said nothing of any importance. They washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other’s arms, holding love, asleep. In her sleep Heather heard the roaring of a creek full of the voices of unborn children singing.

In his sleep George saw the depths of the open sea.

Heather was the secretary of an aged and otiose legal partnership, Ponder and Rutti. When she got off work at four-thirty the next day. Friday, she didn’t take the monorail and trolley home, but rode the funicular up to Washington Park. She had told George she might come meet him at HURAD, since his therapy session wasn’t till five, and after it they might go back downtown together and eat at one of the WPC restaurants on the International Mall. “It’ll be all right,” he told her, understanding her motive and meaning that he would be all right. She replied, “I know. But it would be fun to eat out, and I saved some stamps. We haven’t tried the Casa Boliviana yet.”

She got to the HURAD tower early, and waited on the vast marble steps. He came on the next car. She saw him get off, with others whom she did not see. A short, neatly made man, very self-contained, with an amiable expression. He moved well, though he stooped a little like most desk workers. When he saw her his eyes, which were clear and light, seemed to grow lighter, and he smiled: again that heartbreaking smile of unmitigated joy. She loved him violently. If Haber hurt him again she would go in there and tear Haber into little bits. Violent feelings were foreign to her, usually, but not where George was concerned. And anyhow, today for some reason she felt different from usual. She felt bolder, harder. She had said “shit” aloud, twice, at work, making old Mr. Rutti flinch. She had hardly ever said “shit” before aloud, and she hadn’t intended to do so either time, and yet she had done it, as if it were a habit too old to break....

“Hello, George,” she said.

“Hello,” he said, taking her hands. “You are beautiful, beautiful.”

How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.

“It’s five already,” she said. “I’ll wait down here. If it rains, I’ll be in the lobby. It’s like Napoleon’s Tomb in there, all that black marble and stuff. It’s nice out here, though. You can hear the lions roaring down in the Zoo.”

“Come on up with me,” he said. “It’s raining already.” In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring—the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it. “He’s got a nice waiting room. You’ll probably be sharing it with a mess of Fed-peep bigwigs and three or four Chiefs of State. All dancing attendance on the Director of HURAD. And I have to go crawling through and get shown in ahead of them, every damn time. Dr. Haber’s tame psycho. His exhibition. His token patient....” He was steering her through the big lobby under the Pantheon dome, onto moving walkways, up an incredible, apparently endless, spiral escalator. “HURAD really runs the world, as is,” he said. “I can’t help wondering why Haber needs any other form of power. He’s got enough, God knows. Why can’t he stop here? I suppose it’s like Alexander the Great, needing new worlds to conquer. I never did understand that. How was work today?”

He was tense, that’s why he was talking so much; but he didn’t seem depressed or distressed, as he had for weeks. Something had restored his natural equanimity. She had never really believed that he could lose it for long, lose his way, get out of touch; yet he had been wretched, increasingly so. Now he was not, and the change was so sudden and complete that she wondered what, in fact, had worked it All she could date it from was their sitting down in the still-unfurnished living room to listen to that nutty and subtle Beatles song last evening, and both falling asleep. From then on, he had been himself again.