Well, I'm not as young as I used to be, I tell her, but once a day sounds reasonable. In fact it's a perfectly practical question to ask of a guest. We'll all be sleeping on the same futon. The girls have rented a two video set of the 1979 Ray Bradbury epic The Martian Chronicles . Before jet lag carries me off to the futon I watch a poignant episode.
Some astronauts arrive on Mars to discover why colleagues from earlier missions have gone silent.
It's the Illinois town where the mission captain grew up. They feed him chocolate cake and the prom date takes the astronaut outside for a kiss. He goes to sleep in an exact replica of the family house, his brother in the next bed. Only when he decides he should go back to the ship to radio a report back to Earth does his brother reveal that he and the whole cast of this little scene are Martians . It's all been an illusion, a seductive stage set built by telepathy in the mind of each astronaut.