about the Risk Profession Retirement Plan?" he asked me.

"I've heard of it," I said truthfully. "That's about all."

He nodded. "Most of the policies are sold off-planet, of course. It's a
form of insurance for non-insurables. Spaceship crews, asteroid
prospectors, people like that."

"I see," I said, unhappily. I knew right away this meant I was going to
have to go off-Earth again. I'm a one-gee boy all the way. Gravity
changes get me in the solar plexus. I get g-sick at the drop of an
elevator.

* * *

"Here's the way it works," he went on, either not noticing my sad face
or choosing to ignore it. "The client pays a monthly premium. He can be
as far ahead or as far behind in his payments as he wants--the policy
has no lapse clause--just so he's all paid up by the Target Date. The
Target Date is a retirement age, forty-five or above, chosen by the
client himself. After the Target Date, he stops paying premiums, and we
begin to pay him a monthly retirement check, the amount determined by
the amount paid into the policy, his age at retiring, and so on. Clear?"

I nodded, looking for the gimmick that made this a paying proposition
for good old Tangiers Mutual.

"The Double R-P--that's what we call it around the office here--assures
the client that he won't be reduced to panhandling in his old age,
should his other retirement plans fall through. For Belt prospectors, of
course, this means the big strike, which maybe one in a hundred find.
For the man who never does make that big strike, this is something to
fall back on. He can come home to Earth and retire, with a guaranteed
income for the rest of his life."

I nodded again, like a good company man.

"Of course," said Henderson, emphasizing this point with an upraised
chubby finger, "these men are still uninsurables. This is a retirement
plan only, not an insurance policy. There is no beneficiary other than
the client himself."

And there was the gimmick. I knew a little something of the actuarial
statistics concerning uninsurables, particularly Belt prospectors. Not
many of them lived to be forty-five, and the few who would survive the
Belt and come home to collect the retirement wouldn't last more than a
year or two. A man who's spent the last twenty or thirty years on
low-gee asteroids just shrivels up after a while when he tries to live
on Earth.

It needed a company like Tangiers Mutual to dream up a racket like that.
The term "unin