(FORTUNE Magazine) – You are lolling by the azure waters of a tropical atoll, 10,000 miles from workaday cares, suspended in the blissful limbo of a brochure-perfect honeymoon. At last you have a soul mate who appreciates the beauty of professional sports and the perfection of your recipe for oatmeal. A chirping sound from your beach bag intrudes upon this idyll. You pull out your satellite phone, which you have programmed to ring only when callers dial your unlisted lifetime personal telephone number and a special emergency code. It is your wife. Your first wife. As the sweat condenses on your palms, the microprinter on your minifax whirs to life, spitting out a summons to appear in court to discuss certain obligations pertaining to your settlement . . . Nightmares like this make phone companies edgy: They just might keep folks from buying personal phones that will let others reach them anywhere. Who wants to be on the receiving end of a phone that never stops ringing? The companies will assure you that it's easy enough to avoid intrusions. Iridium spokesman John Windolph says goodnaturedly: ''If you don't want to be reached, turn off your damn phone.'' But that's not the only sticking point. People -- even those who work for phone companies -- may be spooked by a wireless phone network that is less like Ma Bell than Big Brother, able to track them down all over the globe. Bell Labs once had an experimental system that could find employees anywhere on the premises; users carried a smart card that responded to radio waves from transmitters around the building. The system automatically forwarded calls to the nearest phone. ''After a while I took the card out of my pocket,'' says Bob Lucky, Bell Labs' executive director of communications sciences. ''The idea that the computer was tracking me around bothered me. I didn't like the idea that it knew when I went to the bathroom.'' Other fears may deter folks from wanting a single personal phone number from birth to death, which will soon be technologically possible. Even if you're a saint, aren't there one or two people from the past whose voices you never want to hear again? Lucky argues that society will need a new etiquette for using the phone, reflecting an obvious human truth: ''We all want access to other people, but we don't want all other people to have access to us.'' Callers may have to reveal more information about themselves if they don't want to be dumped into a voice mailbox most of the time. They may have to disclose their identities and even their reason for calling, which could appear as a few lines of text on a portable phone's liquid-crystal display. Only then would you decide whether to take the call. People disagree about how much information the phone system should pass on about callers -- witness the debate over existing caller-ID technology that displays the calling number. Some states have ruled that such services invade the caller's privacy. Devices already exist that let a caller block transmission of his number. ''It's like Stealth and counter-Stealth,'' Lucky says. All this is hardly to say that most folks will opt out of the phone system of the future. ''Personal telecommunications is a marvelous new capability,'' says Lucky. Plenty of people want to be found most of the time -- salespeople, say, or even doctors. So the old-fashioned phone call -- you dial a number and somebody answers and you have a conversation -- may one day seem as quaint as the custom of dropping by someone's house and leaving your calling card on a silver tray.