Despite the limit which such precautions imposed on our opportunities to meet them, it didn’t take us more than a week or two to notice that Fitzpiers’s girl-friends conformed to a rigid pattern: they were all thin and over thirty; they all had children who cried almost as much as their mothers did but whom Fitzpiers loved, on sight, as if they were his own; they were all the ex-wives or mistresses of SF writers whose success had come too early (or whose failure had gone on too long) for them to be reasonably expected to persist with domestic life; they all dressed, even while they merely sat and moped in Fitzpiers’s kitchen, more or less in the fashion expected of the average get-up-and-go space-girl – that’s to say they wore leather suits or thigh boots or satin tunics with wide shoulders and lacing up the sides; and they were all not just temporarily and circumstantially but forever and constitutionally, in the blood and genes and marrow, miserable.

‘Considering how much time they spend sniffling,’ I quipped to Sharon, ‘you would think their husbands would have provided them with astro-hankies to match their suits.’

But Sharon didn’t think I was all that smart. ‘You don’t suppose those outfits were their husbands’ idea, do you?’ I remember she was quite astonished by my naivety. ‘I think you’ll find that Fitz buys them those the minute he falls in love with them.’

‘Fitz? But they’re all dressed like that. You never see them looking any other way. Even the newest of them.’

‘That’s because he falls in love with them the minute that he meets them.’

I whistled through my teeth. ‘It must cost him a fortune,’ I said. But that wasn’t what was really on my mind. What was really on my mind was how much better Sharon would look as a she-astronaut, how much more amusing a companion on a long inter-stellar voyage she would be, than the wan creatures with sore noses that Fitzpiers was vainly dressing to fit his fantasies. I had an idea that that was on Sharon’s mind too. And on Fitz’s.

‘This is Suzi,’ he announced one evening on our doorstep, presenting a hollow-eyed girl lost in the uniform of an air-hostess of the twenty-fifth century but carrying what seemed to be an ordinary contemporary baby at her breast.

Fitz had said he was coming to dinner on his own. However, he often changed his plans at the last minute and we had cooked enough for forty let alone for four. I mention this to make it clear that although we weren’t expecting Suzi we were only too pleased that she had come. I know that I was all smiles and welcomes. ‘Hello Suzi,’ I said. ‘I think Fitz has forgotten that we met you in his kitchen last week.’