Spacemen Never Die!
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—
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 eventually blow over.
Unluckily for him, these three-dimensional wall pictures were made out of glaseine, and when he tried setting fire to it he nearly burned down the house. Upon feeding it to the old-fashioned fireplace nothing grew hot except his temper. Ripping the picture to shreds would have been the next step, but you can't rip glaseine.