"I've always believed in insurance," he told Nancy. "Of course, no amount of money could console me if I came back and found that something had happened to you. But people must prepare for the unpleasant things in life." "Of course," said Nancy, who never disagreed with her husband. "We have to be sensible about things. I might have an accident, and so might you. We have to face things like that." The insurance man was a little dazed. He'd never sold a policy nearly as big as the amount Pete had named. "Nobody's had an accident on an interstellar ship in hundreds of years," he assured Nancy. "The rate for your husband will be negligible--we expect him to be around for a real long time. Now, sir," he told Pete, "your best buy is our family special--the full value to be paid to the survivor. As I said, the cost for you is trivial, and for your wife...." He thumbed his rate book nervously. Pete wrote a check to pay the policy in full, and the insurance man walked out in a trance, spending his commission. And Nancy hadn't noticed that Pete's signature had gone on a guarantee that he wouldn't resign from the interstellar service for at least two hundred years, objective Earth time. * * * * * Pete felt a little sad when his leave began to run out. They sat around evenings adoring each other, not too late, because Pete was a man who needed plenty of sleep or he felt irritable the next day. Nancy never took his bad days seriously. The laughing happiness of youth was still in her eyes, but there was a firmness behind it now, the maturity of a girl who knows how to become a woman. He went down to the spaceport a few times to look over the ship he was signed up for, and took the routine physical. Doctors went over his mind and his body, probing with needles and tubes and questions that were pointless. "What do you think of the popular songs of today, Mr. Cooper?" "What do you remember of your mother, Mr. Cooper?" "Are you interested in girls, Mr. Cooper?" "Do you have a close friendship with any of the other men in the crew, Mr. Cooper...?" The routine this time seemed worse than ever. Actually he'd had worse ones, when the medical fashions of the time called for it, but somehow it seemed more annoying this time. "Five hundred years," he told the doctor. "Five hundred years I've been living this life and I know more about it than you ever will. Captain Drago told me on the trip to Altair--no, Sirius it was, that I was the most devoted man in the service. Pete, he said, when you're aboard, I never worry about the engines, I'd rather have you sitting on them than anybody else. That's the way he talked--sitting on the engines, he called it...."