Henry knew his wife had been married once before; now he expected her to start a new life with him—but to her the past was alive, and—

SPACEMEN NEVER DIE!

By Morris Hershman

Henry Weller stood facing a huge three-dimensional picture on the wall of his dining room.

"Can't we get rid of it?" he asked, turning to his wife. "I mean, with all due respect, of course."

No man enjoys coming into his dining room and having to sit at meals and look at a full-sized picture of his wife's first husband arriving on Venus. Fair's fair, but such a set-up is ridiculous.

"No," Phoebe shook her blonde head. "Don Manton loved me and he was famous. I like to be reminded of the days when my picture was in all the telepapers and my face on so many telescreens."

She might just as well have called him a tattered nonentity, though Henry was doing pretty well as a foreman in the local humandroid factory. He was stopped from reminding her by Phoebe's saying that she'd leave for a bit of shopping. She left abruptly.

Henry watched her takeoff from the roof of their two-story fibroid house and went back to the dining room. Now, even his warmest admirers would give in that he had a streak of stubbornness in him a mile wide and six miles deep. Henry took the three-dimensional monstrosity off the wall, holding it hard by thumb and forefinger on its luminex frame, and prepared to say good-by to the picture of Don Manton.

A foreman at one of the humandroid shops has to be able to consider alternatives and Henry had done this. If he only hid the picture there'd be a domestic crisis and the picture would sooner or later be back on the wall; if he destroyed it there'd also be a crisis, but one that would eventually blow over.

Unl