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...."
The doctor watched Pete thoughtfully and made notes on the paper before him. And the next day the mail brought the message that Peter Cooper, Master Engineman First Class, was retired from the service. There was a personal letter of congratulations from an undersecretary, and a notice that his pension would start the first of the following month.
"It's a mistake!" Pete told his wife angrily. "Something's wrong! They didn't talk to Capt............