“Well, I look pretty awful,” he said.

“I know what you look like. Dear God, Roger, do you think Midge and Brenda and Callie and I haven’t talked this over for the last two years? Ever since the program started. We’ve seen the sketches. We’ve seen the photos of the mockups. And we’ve seen the pictures of Willy.”

“I’m not exactly like Willy any more. They’ve changed things—”

“And I know about that too, Roger. Brad told me all about it. I’d like to see you.”

At that moment his wife’s face changed without warning to a witch’s. The crochet hook she held became a peasant twig broom. “You’ve been seeing Brad?”

Was there a microsecond pause before she answered? “I suppose he shouldn’t have told me,” she said, “because of security and all. But I wanted him to. It’s not that bad, honey. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”

For a moment Roger wanted to snatch his hand away from the lens and let himself be seen, but he was becoming confused, feeling strange. He could not interpret his feelings. Was it vertigo? Emotion? Some malfunction in his machine half? He knew it would be only moments until Sulie or Don Kayman or someone came in, warned by the telltale telemetry outside. He tried to control himself.

“Maybe later,” he said without conviction. “I — I think I’d better hang up now, Dorrie.”

Behind her their familiar living room was changing too. The depth of field of the phone lens was not very good; even to his machine senses the rest of the room was blurred. Was that a man standing in the shadows? Was it wearing a Marine officer’s shirt? Would Brad be doing that?

“I have to hang up now,” he said, and did.

Clara Bly came in, full of questions and concern. He shook his head at her without speaking.

There were no lachrymeal ducts in his new eyes, so of course he could not cry. Even that relief was denied him.

Our trendline projections had shown that the time was right to let the world know about Roger Torraway, warts and all. So it had all gone out, and every TV screen in the world had seen Roger on point in a dozen perfect fouettes, in between the close-ups of the starved dead in Pakistan and the fires in Chicago.

It had the effect of making Dorrie a celebrity. Roger’s call had upset her. Not as much as the note from Brad saying that he wouldn’t be able to see her again, not nearly as much as the forty-five minutes the President had spent with her impressing on her what would happen if she messed up his pet astronaut. Certainly not as much as the knowledge that she was being followed, her telephone tapped, her home certainly bugged. But she hadn’t known how to deal with Roger. She suspected she never would, and did not mind at all that in a few days he would be launched into space, where there would be little necessity for her to worry about their relationship for at least a year and a half.

She also did not mind the sudden glare of publicity.

Now that the newspapers had it all the TV reporters had been to see her, and she had seen her own courageous face on the six o’clock report. Fem was sending someone around. The someone phoned first. She was a woman of about sixty, veteran of the lib years, who sniffed, “We never do this, interviewing somebody just because she’s somebody’s wife. But they wanted it. I couldn’t turn down the assignment, but I want to be honest with you and let you know that it’s distasteful to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Dorrie apologized. “Do you want me to cancel out?”

“Oh, no,” said the woman, speaking as though it were Dorrie’s fault, “it’s not your fault, but I think it’s a betrayal of everything Fem stands for. Never mind. I want to come up to your home. We’ll do a fifteen-minute spread for the cassette edition, and I’ll write it up for the print. If you can—”

“I—” Dorrie began.

“—try to talk about you, rather than him. Your background. Your interests. Your—”

“I’m sorry, but I’d really prefer—”

“—feelings about the space program and so on. Dash says it’s an essential American objective and the future of the world depends on it. What do you think? I don’t mean answer the question now, I mean—”

“I don’t want to have it in my home,” Dorrie inserted into the conversation, without waiting for a place for it.

“—think about it, and answer on camera. Not at your home? No, that’s not possible. We’ll be over in an hour.”

Dorrie was left with a dwindling spot of light to talk to, and then even that was gone. “Bitch,” she said, almost absent-mindedly. She didn’t really mind having the interview in her home. She minded not being given a choice. That she minded a lot. But there was no choice available to her, except to go out before the Fem person showed up.

Dome Torraway, Dee Mintz as was, felt strongly about having choices. One of the things that had attracted her to Roger in the first place, apart from the glamour of the space program and the security and money that went with it — and apart from Roger’s rather nice-looking, studly self — was that he was willing to listen to what she wanted. Other men had been mostly interested in what they wanted, which was not the same from man to man but very consistent within the range of relationships of any one man. Harold always wanted to dance and party, Jim always wanted sex, Everett wanted sex and parties, Tommy wanted political dedication, Joe wanted mothering. What Roger wanted was to explore the world with her along, and he seemed perfectly willing to explore the parts of it that she wanted as much as the parts that were important to him.

She had never regretted marrying him.

There were a lot of lonely times. Fifty-four days when he was in Space Station Three. Any number of shorter missions. Two years on tour duty all over the world, working with the whole system of ground monitoring stations from Aachen to Zaire, with no proper home anywhere. Dorrie had given that up, after a while, and gone back to the apartment in Tonka. But she hadn’t minded. Perhaps Roger had; the question had never crossed her mind. Anyway, they had seen each other quite often enough. He had been home every month or two, and she kept her time full. There was her shop — she had opened it while Roger was in Iceland, with a five-thousand-dollar check he sent her for her birthday. There were her friends. There were, from time to time, men.

None of these filled her life, but she didn’t expect it to be filled. She rather expected to be lonely. She had been an only child, with a mother who could not stand her neighbors, and so she had not had very many friends. The neighbors couldn’t stand her mother very well, either, because her mother was a speed freak on a small scale, likely to be burned right out of her mind most afternoons, which made things complicated for Dorrie. But she didn’t mind that; she didn’t know there was any other way to live.

At thirty-one Dorrie was as healthy, as pretty and as competent to deal with the world as she ever had been or would be again. She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?

She used the time until Ms. Hagar Hengstrom and her crew from Fem arrived to assemble a selection of ceramic ware from her shop on the coffee table before the couch she intended to sit in. What time was left she devoted to the less important task of brushing her hair, checking her make-up and changing into her newest laced-pants suit.

When the doorbell rang she was quite ready.

Ms. Hagar Hengstrom pumped her hand and walked in, brilliant blue hair and a curly black cigar. She was followed by her lightperson, her soundperson, her cameraperson and her prop boys. “Room’s small,” she muttered, appraising the furnishings with contempt. “Torraway will sit over there. Move it.”