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She glanced irritably across the room, where a Veenie family was trying to quiet a screaming child. Then she shrugged. “Oh, they’re annoying,” she admitted. “But they’re not such bad people. Consider what they started from—half of them came here because they were misfits on the Earth and the other half got exiled as criminals.”
    “Misfits and criminals, right! The dregs of society! And they haven’t got much better here!”
    But there was no sense spending our last day together arguing politics. I swallowed and changed direction. “Some of them aren’t so bad,” I conceded. “Especially the kids.” That was safe enough, everybody’s in favor of kids, and the poor little tyke hadn’t stopped screaming. “I wish I could cheer him up,” I offered tentatively, “but I think I’d scare him out of his mind—some big huck coming at him that way—”
    “Let him yell,” said Mitzi, gazing out the window.
    I sighed—but silently. There were times when I wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to keep up with Mitzi’s moods and peculiarities. But it was. The important thing about Mitzi Ku was that she was a gorgeous woman. She had that perfect silky-brassy honey-almond skin and, for a person of Oriental ancestry, quite a womanly figure. Her eyes weren’t that Oriental shoe-button black, either; they were light blue—some fooling around among the progenitors, no doubt. And she had perfect teeth and knew just when to, very delicately, use them. Take her all in all, she was well worth the taking.
    So I tried again. I reached out for her hand and said sentimentally, “There’s something about that little boy, honey. I look at him and I wish you and I could some day have—”
    She flared, “Knock it off, Tarb!”
    “I only meant—”
    “I know what you meant! Let me tell you the facts. One, I don’t like kids. Two, I don’t have to like kids, because I don’t have to have any —there are plenty of consumers to keep the population up. Three, you’re not interested in a kid anyway, you’re only interested in what you do to get one started, and the answer is no.”
    I let it drop. It wasn’t true, though. Not much more than half-true, anyway.
    But then things began to get a little better. I had a powerful ally in the Veenie wine; however it tasted, it had a handsome kick. And the other ally I had was Mitzi herself because the logic of the situation convinced her the way it had convinced me: there was no sense getting into a spat when we had so little time left.
    By the time we finished the capsule I had moved over next to her. When I slid my hand around her waist it was just like old times, and, like old times, she leaned into my arm. With my free hand I lifted my glass, with the last quarter-inch of wine in it, and offered a toast: “Here’s to us, Mits, and to our last time together.” Funny, I thought, peering past her —that bus-person clearing off the tables at the far end of the room: she looked a lot like the woman I’d sat next to on the flight from the Pole.
    But I thought no more of it, because Mitzi raised her own glass, smiling at me over the brim, and gave back the toast: “To our last day together, Tenn, and our last night.”
    That was as clear an exit line as I’d ever heard. We got up and headed for the stairs to the tram station, arms around each other. We were definitely fuzzy from the wine, but even so I nudged Mitzi as we passed the table by the door. Half the Veenies I had ever met seemed to be in this place today; this one was old red-hair green-eyes again. Evidently he’d settled his argument out at the ambulance chopper because he was sitting alone, pretending to be reading the menu—as if that could take more than ten seconds! He glanced up just as we passed. What the hell. I wouldn’t have to be seeing any of their bleached dumb faces any more after the shuttle took off, so I gave him a smile. He didn’t smile back.
    I didn’t expect him to, after all. So I