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love-lives and ask his experienced opinion. Thanks to contagious puerperal fever, CPF, men outnumbered women five to three, and the disease was still rife even in those underprivileged communities where desperation had turned the ancient preference for sons topsy-turvy and they were actually trying to breed for girls, which meant there was no surplus to be disposed of into the ranks of the skelter-traveling elite, and until sufficient vaccine to treat half a billion people all at one go could be deployed the pattern would remain constant: any female who was even passably attractive could and generally would ignore marriage, trading in one man for another because he was younger or had better prospects or simply because there had been a row the night before.
    In any case, Dany was stupid, and would never put two and two together from his outfit, because she had so often seen him come home similarly clad from a day’s work.
    Nothing to be afraid of!
    So get her out as fast as possible, which meant going to any lengths to avoid a quarrel. He said peaceably, invoking the authorized hobby which he had adopted as a cover for his real pastime, ‘I’ve been out shooting photographs asusual. What’s the trouble, and what can I do?’
    And looked at her for once, instead of merely registering her presence.
    The sight was remarkable. She had on a pathetically glamorous new outfit, obviously expensive, hand-embroidered with huge flowers: Shapex leotards, Shapex bolero, wrinkled skin between, a tropical or sub-tropical style more extreme than was common around the Med in winter, tipped with hood, boots, and gauntlets lined with fur (genuine, as he well knew because his team had found skins during a survey they had lately mounted in Saskatchewan), and framed with an all-zones climatized coat currently wide open as though she were too desperate for time to take it off even in the temperate air of Malta. Not only her face, but her legs, bare midriff and presumably arms had been plastered with inexpert makeup; she jangled with jewelry and stank of far too much perfume. But so long as she was content with her appearance …
    ‘I’ve been invited to a party at Chaim Aleuker’s!’ she half-screamed, holding up a slip of card. ‘But I can’t figure out the clue in the invitation!’
    Hans started in disbelief. Invited to a party by Chaim Aleuker? This – this
wreck?
Oh, it must be a hoax! Everybody knew that Aleuker was probably the richest man alive, thanks to having invented the privateer, the code-shifting device which changed the skelter from a wild beast to a domesticated draft-animal … as it were. Millions of people who had never met him reacted to his name as to an electric shock, and Hans did so now.
    For an instant he wondered whether he could be the one in the wrong, making ill-founded judgments. After six years of marriage, he was sharing little of his daily life with Dany. Perhaps she did possess some outstanding quality; perhaps the fact that she had stayed married to him had singled her out, or some other aspect of her personality had –
    But she was disillusioning him already.
    ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ she snapped. ‘It’s perfectly true. Apparently Aleuker is bored with the people he knows and wants to meet some new ones, so he’s sent out cards like this all over the world. Molly Chu got one as well, but the bitch won’t join forces to work out what it means!’
    ‘You should consult the library computer,’ Hans suggested, his tone still level and polite.
    ‘Think I’m an idiot?’ Dany blasted. ‘Think I’d have asked you if the computer had been any help, you – you pompous sod?’
    Alarm signal. Next she would be raking up his past, about which he was five years too old not to feel embarrassed even if living with Giuseppe and Hakim had been
faute de mieux.
Their quarrels always followed an identical pattern because they had not grown up in the atmosphere of tolerance displayed by the