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.
