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personal to him aboard Universe. It would be strange, after all these years, not to be able to talk to anyone he wished - though in compensation he could also avoid unwanted callers. After a few days into the voyage, the ship would be far enough from Earth to make real-time conversation impossible, and all communication would have to be by recorded voice or teletext.
    ‘We thought you were our friend,’ complained George. ‘It was a dirty trick to make us your executors - especially as you’re not going to leave us anything.’
    ‘You may have a few surprises,’ grinned Floyd. ‘Anyway, Archie will take care of all the details. I’d just like you to monitor my mail, in case there’s anything he doesn’t understand.’
    ‘If he won’t, nor will we. What do we know about all your scientific societies and that sort of nonsense?’
    ‘They can look after themselves. Please see that the cleaning staff doesn’t mess things up too badly while I’m away - and, if I don’t come back - here are a few personal items I’d like delivered - mostly family.’
    Family! There were pains, as well as pleasures, in living as long as he had done.
    It had been sixty-three - sixty-three! - years since Marion had died in that air crash. Now he felt a twinge of guilt, because he could not even recall the grief he must have known. Or at best, it was a synthetic reconstruction, not a genuine memory.
    What would they have meant to each other, had she still been alive? She would have been just a hundred years old by now.
    And now the two little girls he had once loved so much were friendly, grey-haired strangers in their late sixties, with children - and grandchildren! - of their own. At last count there had been nine on that side of the family; without Archie’s help, he would never be able to keep track of their names. But at least they all remembered him at Christmas, through duty if not affection.
    His second marriage, of course, had overlain the memories of his first, like the later writing on a medieval palimpsest. That too had ended, fifty years ago, somewhere between Earth and Jupiter. Though he had hoped for a reconciliation with both wife and son, there had been time for only one brief meeting, among all the welcoming ceremonies, before his accident exiled him to Pasteur.
    The meeting had not been a success; nor had the second, arranged at considerable expense and difficulty aboard the space hospital itself - indeed, in this very room. Chris had been twenty then, and had just married; if there was one thing that united Floyd and Caroline, it was disapproval of his choice.
    Yet Helena had turned out remarkably well: she had been a good mother to Chris II, born barely a month after the marriage. And when, like so many other young wives, she was widowed by the Copernicus Disaster, she did not lose her head.
    There was a curious irony in the fact that both Chris I and II had lost their fathers to space, though in very different ways. Floyd had returned briefly to his eight-year-old son as a total stranger; Chris II had at least known a father for the first decade of his life, before losing him for ever.
    And where was Chris these days? Neither Caroline nor Helena - who were now the best of friends - seemed to know whether he was on Earth or in space. But that was typical; only postcards date-stamped CLAVIUS BASE had informed his family of his first visit to the Moon.
    Floyd’s card was still taped prominently above his desk. Chris II had a good sense of humour - and of history. He had mailed his grandfather that famous photograph of the Monolith, looming over the spacesuited figures gathered round it in the Tycho excavation, more than half a century ago. All the others in the group were now dead, and the Monolith itself was no longer on the Moon. In 2006, after much controversy, it had been brought to Earth and erected - an uncanny echo of the main building - in the United Nations Plaza. It had been intended to remind the human