On Tuesday, October 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth.

Into the boom mike Jason said smoothly, “Keep all those cards and V-letters coming in, folks. And stay tuned now for The Adventures of Scotty, Dog Extraordinary.”

The technician smiled; Jason smiled back, and then both the audio and the video clicked off. Their hour-long music and variety program, which held the second highest rating among the year’s best TV shows, had come to an end. And it had all gone well.

“Where’d we lose half a minute?” Jason said to his special guest star of the evening, Heather Hart. It puzzled him. He liked to time his own shows.

Heather Hart said, “Baby bunting, it’s all right.” She put her cool hand across his slightly moist forehead, rubbed the perimeter of his sand-colored hair affectionately.

“Do you realize what power you have?” Al Bliss, their business agent, said to Jason, coming up close—too close as always—to him. “Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight. That’s a record of sorts.”

“I zip up my fly every week,” Jason said. “It’s my trademark. Or don’t you catch the show?”

“But thirty million,” Bliss said, his round, florid face spotted with drops of perspiration. “Think of it. And then there’s the residuals.”

Jason said crisply, “I’ll be dead before the residuals on this show pay off. Thank God.”

“You’ll probably be dead tonight,” Heather said, “with all those fans of yours packed in outside there. Just waiting to rip you into little tiny squares like so many postage stamps.”

“Some of them are your fans, Miss Hart,” Al Bliss said, in his doglike panting voice.

“God damn them,” Heather said harshly. “Why don’t they go away? Aren’t they breaking some law, loitering or something?”

Jason took hold of her hand and squeezed it forcefully, attracting her frowning attention. He had never understood her dislike for fans; to him they were the lifeblood of his public existence. And to him his public existence, his role as worldwide entertainer, was existence itself, period. “You shouldn’t be an entertainer,” he said to Heather, “feeling the way you do. Get out of the business. Become a social worker in a forced-labor camp.”

“There’re people there, too,” Heather said grimly.

Two special police guards shouldered their way up to Jason Taverner and Heather. “We’ve got the corridor as clear as we’re going to get it,” the fatter of the two cops wheezed. “Let’s go now, Mr. Taverner. Before the studio audience can trickle around to the side exits.” He signaled to three other special police guards, who at once advanced toward the hot, packed passageway that led, eventually, to the nocturnal street. And out there the parked Rolls flyship in all its costly splendor, its tail rocket idling throbbingly. Like, Jason thought, a mechanical heart. A heart that beat for him alone, for him the star. Well, by extension, it throbbed in response to the needs of Heather, too.

She deserved it: she had sung well, tonight. Almost as well as—Jason grinned inwardly, to himself. Hell, let’s face it, he thought. They don’t turn on all those 3-D color TV sets to see the special guest star. There are a thousand special guest stars scattered over the surface of earth, and a few in the Martian colonies.

They turn on, he thought, to see me. And I am always there. Jason Taverner has never and will never disappoint his fans. However Heather may feel about hers.

“You don’t like them,” Jason said as they squirmed and pushed and ducked their way down the steaming, sweatsmelling corridor, “because you don’t like yourself. You secretly think they have bad taste.”

“They’re dumb,” Heather grunted, and cursed quietly as her flat, large hat flopped from her head and disappeared forever within the whale’s belly of close-pressing fans.

“They’re ordinaries,” Jason said, his lips at her ear, partly lost as it was in her great tangle of shiny red hair. The famous cascade of hair so widely and expertly copied in beauty salons throughout Terra.

Heather grated, “Don’t say that word.”

“They’re ordinaries,” Jason said, “and they’re morons. Because”—he nipped the lobe of her ear—“because that’s what it means to be an ordinary. Right?”

She sighed. “Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That’s what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.”

“You really do hate them,” he said.

“Yes.” She nodded briskly. “And so do you.” She halted briefly, turning her head to confront him. “You know your goddamn voice is gone; you know you’re coasting on your glory days, which you’ll never see again.” She smiled at him, then. Warmly. “Are we growing old?” she said, above the mumbles and squeaks of the fans. “Together? Like man and wife?”

Jason said, “Sixes don’t grow old.”

“Oh yes,” Heather said. “Oh yes they do.” Reaching upward, she touched his wavy brown hair. “How long have you ‘been tinting it, dearheart? A year? Three?”

“Get in the flyship,” he said brusquely, maneuvering her ahead of him, out of the building and onto the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard.

“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.”