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                           The MARRYING MAN

                           BY JOSEPH FARRELL

                  _Pete never heard of that old adage
                   about "What's sauce for the goose
                     is sauce for the gander"...._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
              Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1958.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


It wasn't that Pete Cooper didn't love his wives, or that he wanted to
see them hurry on into the next world. He always felt real grief when
he found himself a widower.

But a man must be practical. They were all healthy young women, or at
least middle aged when he married them, good insurance risks, and no
insurance agent was turning down the business when Pete asked for a
policy that big, especially when Pete was putting the cash on the line
to pay up the policy when he bought it.

That was the most sensible way for a man in the interstellar service
to invest his money, Pete said. When he was out in space traveling at
near light speed, and time slowed almost to a stop for him, the few
months he spent on an expedition meant that nine years passed for a
wife on Earth for a Centauri trip, and Sirius meant fifteen, and Altair
twenty-five. So a man only saw his wife two or three times between
trips, and maybe the last time he saw her he had to take her to the
old ladies' home, and the next time he pulled into Earth the insurance
company was waiting for him with a check. Safer than stocks, and there
was always the possibility that the loving wife might come to an
accidental end, which would sadden him, but it meant a double indemnity
payment. That sort of satisfied a man's natural desire to have a little
speculation attached to his investment.

Sally was the seventh. Pete sat fingering the check, feeling genuine
sadness at his bereavement.

"Lovely girl," he told the insurance agent. "It makes a man feel empty
to come home from the stars and find that his wife has gone to her
reward."

The insurance man disguised a cynical smirk behind his sympathetic
mask. "Yes ... a wonderful woman. But it must happen to all of us."

He patted Pete's shoulder gently. Pete rose, folded the check
carelessly and put it into a pocket. He shook the insurance agent's
hand.

"You've been very kind. I'll take your card ... in case I ever need
another policy...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Pete expected to need another policy before he left for his next trip.
He felt unhappy about Sally's being gone, but a man mustn't give in to
morbid self pity. And hadn't he heard somebody say that a man without a
wife was like a spaceship without a motor?

He strolled about the city, unimpressed by the changes since his last
visit. An interstellar man with as much service as Pete was beyond
showing surprise at superficial differences. He was a little annoyed
to find that the moving sidewalks were old-fashioned and had been torn
out. People now wore little repulsor units on their belts.

Walking was tiresome. He stopped at a corner and watched the
pedestrians as they whizzed by a few inches off the ground. At least
they were clothed; the nudity of the previous century had been somewhat
unnerving even to the blasé eyes of a time man. And he was glad to see
that the women were back to wearing long, well groomed hair. That
period when fashion had called for smoothly shaven heads hadn't suited
his taste at all.

In fact, none of it seemed to appeal to him very much any more. That
was sophistication, the price that must be paid by a man in the
interstellar service, watching the centuries go by without belonging to
any one of them. He watched a group of young people flit laughing by,
felt an unreasoning irritation. They'd be gone and forgotten when he'd
made a few more trips.

One of the young girls noticed him. She broke from the group and
approached.

"You're an interstellar, aren't you? I hope you'll join me. I'm
Nancy...."

Pete straightened up and looked her over. A little young, maybe
nineteen, but that meant a lower premium. Nice blond hair, big waves of
it that stayed in place even when she was moving fast, and even when
she was standing still she seemed to be moving. She was really alive,
smiling and laughing and talking easily, and in a pleasant low voice.
Really healthy--that slender but nicely rounded body was good for a
hundred years.

But then, money isn't everything.

"A lovely name," he told her. "I like girls with old-fashioned
names...."

Nancy, it seemed, wanted to interview a time man in connection with a
thesis, and in this particular age there was no taboo against a young
girl introducing herself to a strange man. Pete didn't mind at all
being interviewed and having dinner with her and seeing the town with
her. And even when he had given her enough material for a dozen theses,
she didn't seem in any hurry to break off their friendship.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pete was spending half his waking hours with Nancy and the other
half in the men's beauty parlor. Not that he was old--a little
prematurely gray and somewhat wrinkled from the hard sun of space
and the unkind atmospheres of alien planets. And he had his contact
lenses changed--paper was scarce in this era and they were using finer
print to stretch the supply. But he was still young. He studied the
full length mirror and decided he'd pass for thirty-five. His actual
age--that would be hard to guess. Someday he'd look into the company
records and figure it out. But mentally, he told himself, I'm a young
man, even though I walked through this city five hundred years ago.

A young man in love.

They knew in this era how to make it nice for young people in love, if
you could afford one of the better places. Pete sat across the table
from Nancy at a tiny table on a roof far above the city. The room was
crowded, but some trick of design made it seem that they were alone
together. There was real music played by real people. Some of the
melodies were old ones that brought a mood of nostalgia to the time
man, with memories of past loves. But then he looked across at Nancy,
with her innocent laughing eyes, and the beauty of her brought a lump
to his throat that drove out all the small loves of the past. This was
it. This time he was really in love.

"Pete," she said, "don't you ever get tired of it? Of jumping through
the ages, coming back to find your old friends gone, being a stranger
in a strange world? For instance, how about me? You'll be back from
Sirius or Altair some day, a year or two older, and I'll be an old
woman? How does it really feel?"

Pete took her hands and stared earnestly into her eyes. She was more
serious than he'd ever seen her as she gazed back at him.

"It's not the right way to live, Nancy. A man doesn't really live, in
the real meaning of life. A man needs a woman, a wife he can come home
to." He squeezed her hands gently. "Nancy, will you marry me?"

Her hands trembled in his grasp.

"I will, Pete--oh, Pete, I've been so hoping--and so afraid. But, Pete,
your job...?"

He smiled reassuringly.

"I'm signed up for a trip, but it's only a short one--that planet of
Proxima Centauri they just discovered is on the list for a complete
survey. But I'll be back in--seven, eight years. Then we can really
settle down."

She bent over the table and kissed him.

"I'll wait, Pete."

"No, Nancy. Now. We'll be married first; I'll still be here a couple of
months, why waste them? I don't want to take any chances of losing you."

"I wanted to hear that, Pete." Her eyes were shining with happiness.
"About getting married now, I mean--there's no chance of your losing
me."

Pete was serious about settling down after the short trip to Proxima.
At least he was serious about it now. But after that trip was over....

He didn't think about that sort of thing any more. He had tried to
puzzle it out a few times, how he could tell a girl he was making one
more trip, and mean it, and then one more and then one more until a
happy young girl was suddenly a disillusioned embittered old woman.
There was a paradox of conscience here that he had given up trying to
resolve. When he said he was making one more trip, he meant it. But at
the same time he knew that when he came back he'd sign up for another.
If he meant what he said when he said it, even though he knew he'd
change his mind later--

His conscience was clear.

And of course a man must be practical. His earnings must be invested,
and the future provided for. The honeymoon was still new when the
insurance agent responded to Pete's call.

"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...."

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 Captain Drago like I told them, and--"

Nancy's eyes were indignant. She sent him steaming back with fire in
his eyes, but he couldn't change the decision. He did get as far as
the office of the doctor who had asked him all the fool questions, and
he saw a paper he wasn't meant to see. It stunned him into temporary
silence.

But it wasn't true! Positively not!

Definite signs of senility, the notes read. Irritable reaction to
questioning. Mind wanders, fixes on irrelevancies. Preoccupation with
casual remarks of associates....

And more. He didn't tell Nancy this, nor did he show her the reply he
received to his protest.

"While a search of our records indicates a subjective--chronological
age of approximately 48.6 years, physiological analysis puts the
condition of your body at a much higher figure--it would be guesswork
to try to name a figure. However, recent studies indicate that
interstellar personnel with long terms of service tend to age at an
increasingly rapid rate, due probably to psychological factors stemming
from the knowledge of separation from the natal culture....

"We are sorry...."

He kept his hair dark and the wrinkles smoothed out and forced the
tiredness from his bones. Other things were harder to fake, but Nancy
wasn't a demanding wife. She thought he was about thirty-five, and she
thought the blow of being dropped from the service had taken the life
from him. She took his part firmly.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, Pete. Not one person in a thousand
could pass the examination for the interstellar service--they're really
tough. And we're together."

"What will we live on?" Pete demanded, knowing he was being too
irritable, but unable to control it. He waved the pension check. "Can
we live on that? A fine payment for my years of service."

Nancy looked dubiously at the check. "I thought it was a lot ... but
don't worry, Pete. You have a wife to stand by you."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Pete found out how his wife had gone about standing by him, he was
almost shocked speechless. Almost.

"You signed up as my replacement on the Proxima expedition! But you
can't! It's no job for a woman! And you're leaving me alone--for seven
or eight years! They won't take you!"

"They already did." She smiled bravely at him. "As the wife of a
retired serviceman I had preference. We need the extra money, Pete. And
it won't be for long. When I come back, we'll still be young enough to
enjoy life, darling. And they pay well--a few years of sacrifice now
will make so much difference in our future...."

Pete closed his eyes and thought of how many times he had said the same
words to starry eyed young women. It won't be long ... we'll still be
young ... good pay....

Her loving lips tenderly brushed his dark hair.

       *       *       *       *       *

On nice days, Pete sits in a rocking chair on the porch with the other
old men. He doesn't bother to dye his hair any more and he reads now
with a thick glass, complaining about the small type they use nowadays.
The attendants laugh off his irritability, and some of the visitors who
come to see the other old men don't mind listening to his stories about
the interstellar service.

When it gets toward dusk, he looks into the sky sometimes as the
stars appear. Centaurus isn't really there, not here in the northern
hemisphere, but he looks anyway. Out there in space, his wife is doing
a man's job. Wonderful woman, Elsie.

Not Elsie--Nancy. How could he have made that mistake. Nancy, a
laughing young girl who had grown swiftly into a strong mature woman
defending her man and her marriage vows.

He leans back and rocks faster then, a smile on his face. Sometimes the
visitors see him and shake their heads sympathetically, and sometimes
he sees them doing it, but it doesn't matter. They don't know. They
don't know about his nest egg, that insurance policy he's going to
collect some day now, because he's going to straighten them out down at
the interstellar bureau. Captain Drago will straighten them out, and
then he's going back into space and support his wife as a man should.

And sometimes the smile fades and a tear rolls down his cheeks when
he thinks of Nancy growing old and passing away and the insurance man
giving him a check and a few words of sympathy. But a man has to be
practical about such things.