Cavs had learned long before that revealing one’s actual condition in a competitive situation – be it a professional squash match, a “friendly” game of billiards, or a personal injury lawsuit – did little to advance one’s cause. Better to play it close to the vest, to push out an unending stream of disinformation, and to quietly gather one’s faculties for the big push.

Stacy was the opposite in this regard, which was one of the elements that initially drew the two together. (Their formerly frequent adventures between the sheets did not always demonstrate these individualistic approaches, as the horizontal tango tended to bring each dancer more in sync with the other’s rhythms.) What you saw was what you got with Stacy, and she had always relied on a powerful presence to seize momentum at the start of the race or case or match or melee, then gradually increase her throttle-hold over the course of the competition. Her momentary descent into madness had made this personality style problematic, especially when it came to interactions with psychiatric nurses, parole officers and PTA matriarchs, but in the end it served her well.

Henry and Reid both tended to inhabit a kind of middle ground in this regard. Both had cultivated a degree of reserve through their business endeavors; both understood that revealing too much, too early, could undermine one’s position, but both also knew that being genuine, or at least coming across that way, was essential to building trust among their clients. Henry’s signature move was the big deal, Reid’s the small tip, and both depended on a perception of trustworthiness. So each cultivated a mien of openness that masked a subtle gathering of data points in day-to-day operations.

Finn had tried to learn from this quartet of adults omnipresent in his life, recognizing and integrating those strategies that seemed useful and resisting those that seemed counter-productive. And the young founder, CEO and chief pilot of Interplanetary Luxury Lines had succeeded to an improbable and impressive extent.

“Let’s buckle up, folks,” he thought confidently into the language dissemination sensors woven into his eyesight enhancers. As he did so, that same sentence, adjusted slowly in terms of tone and timing to suit the mood and mindset of each recipient, entered the audio integration and modulation strands of each of the passengers’ ear chips. This adorable archaism on his part – there was absolutely no buckling involved on the ILL’s Mars Mover – was appreciated by the quartet of soon-to-be senior citizens on board. His co-pilot (and co-founder / COO) Winnifred simply selected and sent the eyerolling emoji holograph (known within the A.I. crowd, which was by this point completely computerized, as an e-hole) as her virtual reply.

Instead of buckling up, of course, the passengers settled in – to their pods, that is. With the magic of SATS, or the sleep-acceleration / time-suspension protocol, each would awaken in sixth months feeling as if they had gotten a good night’s sleep. Each was able to program the perceived length of slumber, style of bedding, type(s) and duration of dreams, etc. (It hadn’t taken the engineers long to realize that their original one-sleep-fits-all approach was not ideal, and at half a million bucks per journey, the clientele could reasonably expect a satisfactory slumber on the way.)

Finn and Winnifred could have opted for the same transit modality as their passengers, with the caveat being instantaneous awakening alerts if things begin to go amiss with the mission. By mutual consent, however, they both elected a modified approach, being roused at one-week increments to check the instruments, correspond with the lunar dispatchers, and play yet another of their ongoing series of squash matches. Finn and Winnifred, like Nadal and Federer a generation earlier, had been able to sustain their racket rivalry long after the rest of the world had turned its attention to younger stars.

The on-craft “court,” if you wished to call it that, was an engineering marvel in its own right. Given the obstacles presented by interplanetary squash, the science-and-sports team had resorted to their full bag of tricks. Space limitations of the craft necessitated a virtual experience, though each competitor was still required to “move” within the space of his/her sensory skeleton and to replicate the gestures of hitting the holographic ball into theoretical space. The “ball” was also capable of speeding up or slowing down in holographic flight to allow, or to evade, countering swings by the opponent. The team had even allowed the users to choose the “era” in which to compete in any given contest: tiny wooden frames and hardballs on a virtual century North American court; larger composite weapons with softballs on a century international court; or the laser-and-leather wands favored to sling the smooth new meteor sphere around a contemporary interplanetary court.

In the end, everybody got pretty much what they had wanted all along, regardless of what they deserved. Cavs had been signed to direct rackets & recreation, or R & R, at the soon-to-be opened MO-PACS: the Martian Orbital – Princeton Alumni Center for Sports. The center had been bankrolled by the great and powerful Chet Beau-Zeau, who transferred his considerable terrestrial assets through Reid’s firm into more space-directed assets.

Reid, meanwhile, had filed for 403-B status for Elite Retreat, his successful not-for-profit start-up with Stacy. They had begun to offer counseling and support to the large numbers of high-powered Los Angelenos who had lost their positions, and their sanity, as a result of the Californian Secession initiated by the ageless Jerry Brown early in the Trump Regime’s third five-year term. Although Reid and Stacy never moved their partnership beyond the professional level, each took comfort in the proximity of an old friend and in the frequency of their interactions.

Henry had the inside track on the first-ever interplanetary time-share at the brand new Martian condo complex. He had begun the process of updating the name of the region to CA-Tharsis, thus echoing the origins of the genesis of this Martian mission and the new red soil it had taken root in. The site for construction was the massive summit of Olympus Mons – Mars. Also known as OMM, the mountain complex was being billed, more or less accurately, as “The Highest Address in the Solar System.” Drone technology had accelerated at such a pace that individual patrons, and their luggage (including their ludicrously light squash rackets), could be conducted one by one to the landing pods within their own proprietary aerial chutes.

You still needed to get people into Martian orbit, of course, and this was where Finn and Winnifred’s venture paid off in spatial spades. Thus we see the four principals of this narrative – Reid and Stacy and Cavanaugh and Henry, sometime lovers and litigants, friends and foes -- preparing to enter SATS mode in their pods, on the way to Mars, for their first-ever site visit to the brave new world they had helped to create (and to market).