“I’ll get in,” Heather said, “if you’ll sing me a high B natural. Remember when you—”

He thrust her bodily into the flyship, squeezed in after her, turned to help Al Bliss close the door, and then they were up and into the rain-clouded nighttime sky. The great gleaming sky of Los Angeles, as bright as if it were high noon. And that’s what it is for you and for me, he thought. For the two of us, in all times to come. It will always be as it is now, because we are sixes. Both of us. Whether they know it or not.

And it’s not, he thought grimly, enjoying the bleak humor of it. The knowledge which they together had, the knowledge unshared. Because that was the way it was meant to be. And always had … even now after it had all turned out so badly. Badly, at least, in the designers’ eyes. The great pundits who had guessed and guessed wrong. Forty-five beautiful years ago, when the world was young and droplets of rain still clung to the now-gone Japanese cherry trees in Washington, D.C. And the smell of spring that had hovered over the noble experiment. For a short while, anyhow.

“Let’s go to Zurich,” he said aloud.

“I’m too tired,” Heather said. “Anyhow, that place bores me.”

“The house?” He was incredulous. Heather had picked it out for the two of them, and for years there they had gotten away—away especially from the fans that Heather hated so much.

Heather sighed and said, “The house. The Swiss watches. The bread. The cobblestones. The snow on the hills.”

“Mountains,” he said, feeling aggrieved still. “Well, hell,” he said. “I’ll go without you.”

“And pick up someone else?”

He simply could not understand. “Do you want me to take someone else with me?” he demanded.

“You and your magnetism. Your charm. You could get any girl in the world into that big brass bed with you. Not that you’re so much once you get there.”

“God,” he said with disgust. “That again. Always the same old gripes. And the ones that’re fantasy—they’re the ones you really hang on to.”