The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spacemen Never Die!, by Morris Hershman

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Title: Spacemen Never Die!

Author: Morris Hershman

Release Date: September 9, 2009 [EBook #29947]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

Henry knew his wife had been married once
before; now he expected her to start a new life
with him--but to her the past was alive, and--

SPACEMEN NEVER DIE!

_By Morris Hershman_

Henry Weller stood facing a huge three-dimensional picture on the wall
of his dining room.

"Can't we get rid of it?" he asked, turning to his wife. "I mean, with
all due respect, of course."

No man enjoys coming into his dining room and having to sit at meals and
look at a full-sized picture of his wife's first husband arriving on
Venus. Fair's fair, but such a set-up is ridiculous.

"No," Phoebe shook her blonde head. "Don Manton loved me and he was
famous. I like to be reminded of the days when my picture was in all the
telepapers and my face on so many telescreens."

She might just as well have called him a tattered nonentity, though
Henry was doing pretty well as a foreman in the local humandroid
factory. He was stopped from reminding her by Phoebe's saying that she'd
leave for a bit of shopping. She left abruptly.

Henry watched her takeoff from the roof of their two-story fibroid house
and went back to the dining room. Now, even his warmest admirers would
give in that he had a streak of stubbornness in him a mile wide and six
miles deep. Henry took the three-dimensional monstrosity off the wall,
holding it hard by thumb and forefinger on its luminex frame, and
prepared to say good-by to the picture of Don Manton.

A foreman at one of the humandroid shops has to be able to consider
alternatives and Henry had done this. If he only hid the picture there'd
be a domestic crisis and the picture would sooner or later be back on
the wall; if he destroyed it there'd also be a crisis, but one that
would