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leg into the aisle, his fists still grasping the armrests. He’d waived the windowseat to Linhouse. Despite his elaboration, last evening at the party, on the undoubted existence, as admitted by most astronomers of his school, of life on those hidden stars behind the cosmic dust, beyond the Milky Way, the immediate heavens, dark blue and drifting, seemed to interest him not at all. It came to Linhouse, sharply watching his charge—could it be that the old boy was afraid of flying?
    “Ah—?” He turned, just enough to scrutinize Linhouse. “Good to know that some of, er—us—still want to stay at home.” Head forward on his neck, he made that most English and useful of sounds, a hairy, noncommittal snuffle—“Mmmph?”—as far toward interrogation as he could decently go.
    Linhouse smiled. His quarter-cousins, the English, wore their politeness as they wore their braces, and for the same reason, to hold in and up a part of the natural man—in this case a curiosity not as innuendo as the French, nor as loose as the American, but as savage as either—and in their own gaming way quite as well rewarded. The old man wouldn’t dream of asking what any young native chit at the Center would have chirped out of habit, and been given the answer to with her handshake—as to exactly what Linhouse, clearly a hybrid, was. Indeed the old boy would be more content to dart at it from corners, puzzling it out. This game of origins and professions could last the trip—which for Linhouse, mentally still back on that snowy doorstep, might have been preferable. But his job was to sustain the old man, not exhaust him. He’d therefore given his dossier as ingenuously as the States had accustomed him to doing, as freely as once, holding a hand he had been made to give it to her.
    “Father was three parts Irish. I was brought up mostly by the fourth part, in Wiltshire. Mother’s an American, from Maine, if you know what that is, sir—but brought up partly in London. They married there, came—” he glanced at the window and away again, “here. My father fell in love with the States at once, from then on refused to leave it. Dead now. Mother always fancied London, wouldn’t live anywhere else. We children were shared out between, divided, not always evenly. I didn’t get to stay very long in the States until I was grown. Harvard. She’s got a brother at the Fogg, you see. Mother. But you might say my share was rather more”—Linhouse had given a slight bow—“on our side.” He had leaned back. Done rather neatly. He could do chit-chat well enough, except on doorsteps.
    “Gahn!” The old man shook his head, not at the information, Linhouse felt, but at the pace. The personal having been dealt with so much too summarily, he took the next step of politeness, that of general ideas, not too profound. “Solomon’s decision, eh. I happen to think that a man divided against himself isn’t such a bad idea. Liked a spot of difference in a person, my generation did. Really did, not just say. Expect we’re the last to feel comfortable with it.” He chuckled. “Hundred years from now, to get any differentiation, may have to take to sawing the babies in half.”
    “Because of genetic changes? Or psychological ones?”
    The old man made a face—a grown man asked by Johnnie to taste his alphabet soup. “They’re not so separate, you know. In the long run, psychology’s only what attaches to the other things. In the long run.” He looked down at his fists, carefully unclenched them and put his hands on his thighs. “No, it’ll be a matter of safety, don’t you see. Perfectly natural. For the young especially—ever watch a litter? When the physical world seems to be breaking up, everybody tries to be one and the same animal, mmmph? Or person.” He made a horse-jaw and smoothed it, telegraphing a joke he could still disown, if badly received. “Natural legacy too, of all this monotheism of the last few thousand years. Now