"That's what they say, do they?" he asked Wynne.
The older man nodded, his expression blank.
"Well, you can tell them for me that they're all crazy."
Wynne nodded gravely. "Glad to hear it. But how come nobody's ever seen you go out with a woman? In ail the time since you've been in the District ..."
The sonofabitch thinks I'm gay! "Listen. I am heterosex- ual and I'm not sterile. I've never been involved in any accidents in space or anywhere else that would impair my ability to make a woman pregnant. Is that clear?"
"Major, you have a way of making your points."
"Good." And it's not a lie, either. Not completely. I'm not impotent—except when I'm with a woman.
The office of the Deputy Secretary made Colonel Mur- dock's painfully acquired luxuries seem petty and vain. The office was huge, and in a corner of the Pentagon so that it had two windows. Rich dark wood paneling covered the walls. Deep carpeting. Plush chairs. Flags flanking the broad, polished mahogany desk.
General Sherwood was a picturebook Aerospace Force officer: handsome chiseled profile, silver-gray hair, the pierc- ing eyes of an eagle. He sat before the Deputy Secretary's desk looking perfectly at ease in his blue, beribboned uni- 197 form, yet so alert and intelligent that one got the impression he could instantly take command of an airplane, a spacecraft, or an entire war.
He carries those two stars on his shoulders, thought Kinsman, with plenty of room to add more,
The Deputy Secretary, Ellery Marcot, was a sloppy civilian. Tall, high-domed, flabby in the middle, and narrow in the chest, he peered at the world suspiciously through thick old-fashioned bifocals. His suit was gray, his thinning hair and mustache grayer, his skin as faded as an old manila file folder. Kinsman had never seen the man without a cigarette. His desk was a chaotic sea of papers marked by islands of ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts,
"Gentlemen," he said after the polite handshakes were finished and the four uniformed officers seated according to rank before his desk, "we have reached a critical decision point."
General Sherwood nodded crisply but said nothing. It would have been easy to assume that his Academy-perfect exterior was nothing but an empty shell. His eyes were too sky-blue, his hair just the right shade of experienced yet virile silver. But Kinsman knew better. He'll get those other two stars. And soon.
Marcot blinked myopically at them. "For the past four years the Aerospace Force has struggled to maintain some semblance of an effective program for manned spaceflight. We have had to battle against NASA, the Congress, and the White House."
"And our own SDI Office," Colt added.
Murdock turned sharply toward Colt. But then he saw General Sherwood smiling and nodding.
"Yes, the Strategic Defense group," Marcot agreed, "and their ideas of doing everything with automation."
"But we have made significant progress," the General said.
"Along the wrong road," Marcot snapped.
"It was the only road available at the time," General Sherwood replied, his voice just a trifle harder than it had been a moment earlier. "We had no way of knowing that the SDI Office would try to outflank us with this manned inter- ceptor program."
