That would be one nice thing about leaving the Earth behind. I wouldn’t have to worry about bodyguards. Though I’d never faced a more dangerous adversary.

So much for my romantic stroll with Elza (and our usually invisible companion), ending in a random restaurant. I’d thought Dustin was going to be in Houston till the next morning.

“I was a fifth wheel down there anyhow,” he explained as I sat down at the elegant table. “My two projects put on hold for half a century. They’ll be political curiosities when I come back.”

“We’re political curiosities already,” I said. “What’s a spook without a country?” He politely didn’t say that I should know.

We talked shop for a few minutes. I’d worked out of Houston for a year sometime back and made friends there.

When Elza showed up, I nodded to the human waiter, and he poured us each a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé and returned the bottle to ice.

I held up a glass. “To getting back alive.”

“To getting there alive,” she said, and we all touched glasses. “You wrote to Carmen Dula and the others?”

“It went up on the Elevator day before yesterday.” Since ad Astra was technically part of the fleet, we weren’t allowed to contact it electronically. So I sent a paper note telling them we’d be on the next Elevator.

“It’s too strange,” Dustin said. “We’re going to spend thirteen years with these people, and we can’t even chat beforehand.”

“Worse for them. We can at least look up their bios and news stories—millions of words, for her and Paul Collins. But they shouldn’t be able to find a single word about us.”

“You enjoy being a man of mystery,” she said. “Poor little Mars Girl won’t have a chance.”

“You doctors are all about sex. It hadn’t crossed my mind.”

Elza looked at me over her glass. “She’s an old hag anyhow.”

“Eight months older than you. But you knew that.”

“Maybe we should have just snuck up on them,” Dustin said. “This way, they’ll have plenty of time to get dressed and put away the sex toys.”

“Dream on,” Elza said.

The maître d’ came over, and we negotiated the complex combination of food- ration credits, legitimate currency, and hard cash that dinner would cost. Maybe by the time we got back, they’d have that mess straightened out. Meanwhile, it cost the same no matter what your entrée was, so I had pheasant under glass, very very good.

With the coffee and dessert, we mostly talked about what we were leaving behind.

We’d all been visiting family, Elza in Kansas and Dustin in California. I told them about the uncomfortable meeting with my father. Elza’d had a warm family reunion all weekend, but Dustin’s parents were even worse than mine. They’re old anarchists and have hardly spoken to him since he joined the service. Now they’re deniers, convinced that the whole thing is a government conspiracy. They live in an Earthlove commune, surrounded by like- minded zealots. Dustin fled when he turned eighteen, eleven years ago.