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the transient-executive recruitment dept at the Kansas City HQ of Ground-to-Space Industries Inc., world’s largest builders of orbital factories.
    The question was, though: tough enough?
    She thought of the old saying about being promoted to your level of incompetence—what was it called, the Peter-Pays-Paul Principle, or something like that?—and fumed and fretted. Her daughter kept declining to quit school, just signed up year after year for weirder and wilder courses of study (and all at the same university, for heaven’s sake! Wouldn’t be so bad if she’d consent to go someplace else). Ina felt tied, wanted to break away, move to the Gulf or Colorado or even the Bay Area, given that the slippage techniques were as efficient as the seismologists claimed and there wasn’t going to be another million-victim quake, not ever … or at least for fifty years.
    On her own terms, of course—no one else’s.
    Last year she’d rejected five offers. This year, so far only one. Next year?
    Having a daughter out of step like Kate—hell! Why couldn’t the stupid slittie act normal like everybody else, dig up her roots and plug them in some other socket, preferably on a different continent?
    If Anti-Trauma Inc. had started up soon enough …!
    Tactless people sometimes wondered publicly why Ina insisted on remaining in the same city as her daughter who was, after all, twenty-two and had had her own apt since entering college and was not noticeably clinging or dependent. But Ina hated to be asked about that.
    She never like being asked questions she couldn’t answer.
     
    One week into her two-week vacation Ina wanted to be cheered up but the man she’d kept company with since arrival had left today. That meant dining alone. Worse and worse. Eventually, with much effort she put on her favorite red-and-gold evening gear and went to the open-air dining terrace where soft music mingled with the hush of waves. She felt a little better after two drinks. To put the regular sparkle back in her world, what about champagne?
    And a minute later she was shouting at the waiter (this being an expensive and exclusive establishment instead of the cast-from-a-mold type where you dealt always with machines that kept going wrong … not that human beings were immune from that ): “What the hell do you mean, there isn’t any?”
    Her shrill voice caused heads to turn.
    “That gentleman over there”—pointing—“just ordered the last bottle we have in stock.”
    “Call the manager!”
    Who came, and explained with regret that was probably unfeigned (who likes to find his pride and joy deeveed by a mere bunch of circuitry?) why there was nothing he could do. The computer in charge of resources utilization at the HQ of the chain controlling this and a hundred other hotels had decided to allot what champagne was available to resorts where it could be sold at twice the price the traffic in the Sea Islands could bear. The decision was today’s. Tomorrow the wine list would have been reprinted.
    Meanwhile the waiter had faded in response to a signal from another table, and when he returned Ina was struggling not to scream with fury.
    He laid a slip of paper in front of her. It bore a message in firm clear handwriting, unusual now that most literate kids were taught to type at seven. She read it at a glance:
    The lucky shivver with the champagne has an idea. Share the bottle?—Sandy Locke
    She raised her eyes and found grinning at her a man in a fashionable pirate shirt open to the waist, a gaudy headband, gilt wristers, one long lean finger poised at arm’s length on the cork.
    She felt her anger fade like mist at sunrise.
     
    He was a strange one, this Sandy. He dismissed her complaint about how ridiculous it was never to have any more champagne at this hotel and steered the conversation into other channels. That made her ill-tempered all over again, and she went to bed alone.
    But when the breakfast-trolley rolled automatically to her