Marian leaned back in her chair. Well, old gal, now you've got a reputation for screwing around with your pa- tients. She almost wished it were true.
She hauled the tape recorder out of its drawer and started to dictate her final report on Kinsman. But in the back of her mind she was thinking. What else can you do? Keep him here? That will kill him just as surely as cutting off his oxygen. You've got to let him go.
Over the faint hum of the air-conditioning she thought she heard distant piano music. From the recreation hall. A light, happy piece of Mozart. She listened for several min- utes. No one interrupted the pianist.
So now he can go to the Moon. Maybe he'll find what he needs there. But he won't. He's locked up inside himself. If you let him go, he'll never break free. He'll carry that shell around him forever. You know that. You know it and you're letting him go. He's going to kill himself, one way or the other. Himself, and maybe others besides. And you're letting him go out and do it because you're too weak to keep him here and watch him die one day at a time.
She turned on the tape recorder and watched the cassette slowly turning as she fought back an urge to cry.
Age 32
"ANY WORD FROM him yet?"
"Huh? No, nothing."
Kinsman swore to himself as he stood on the open platform of the little lunar rocket jumper. It was his second trip to the Moon and it was not going well.
"Say, where are you now?" Bok's voice sounded gritty with static in Kinsman's helmet earphones.
"Up on the rim. He must've gone inside the damned crater."
"The rim? How'd you get ..."
"Found a flat spot for the jumper. Don't think I walked this far, do you? I'm not as nutty as the priest."
"But you're supposed to stay down here on the plain! The crater's off-limits."
"Tell that to our holy friar. He's the one who marched up here. I'm just following the seismic rigs he's been planting every three, four klicks."
He could sense Bok shaking his head. "Kinsman, if there are twenty officially approved ways to do a job, I swear you'll pick the twenty-second."
"If the first twenty-one are lousy."
"Mission control is going to be damned upset with you. You won't get off with just a reprimand this time."
"I suppose mission control would prefer that we just let the priest stay lost."
"You're not going inside the crater, are you?" Bok's voice edged up half an octave. "It's too risky."
