"I'll kill you, you sonofabitch." But he stopped and let his hands fall to his sides.
"I don't blame you," Kinsman said softly. "What hap- pened last night ... it was completely unexpected. Hell, Neal, I came to your house looking for you. Neither of us planned it. It just happened. You ought to know about things like that."
"Don't hand me that!"
"I know, I know," Kinsman said, keeping his voice low. "Now we're talking about your wife, and that's different. Okay. But maybe now at least you know a little of what she's been going through."
McGrath said nothing. He stood in the middle of the small room panting like a bull in the arena that was confused by the noise and the light.
"It's not going to happen again," Kinsman added. "We both agreed on that."
"I thought you were my friend," McGrath said, his voice cracking with misery.
"Yeah, I thought so, too." Kinsman turned and pulled 257 the chair away from the desk. "Come on, sit down. I'll get you a beer. We've got a lot to talk about."
Numbly McGrath took the chair. Kinsman went to the refrigerator and pulled out two cold bottles of Bass ale. Fumbling in the drawer for a bottle opener, he wondered, Will the English ever come into the twentieth century and put screwtops on their beer? He found the opener, pried the tops off, then walked over and handed one bottle to McGrath.
"Hope you don't want a glass. They're both dirty."
McGrath gave a grunt that was almost a laugh. "What are we drinking to?" he asked, not looking up at Kinsman.
"To understanding," Kinsman said, stretching out on the open sofabed.
"Understanding what?"
The real world, man. The real world. "Understanding why I came over to your house last night, trying to find you. Understanding what's happening in the Pentagon and the White House, and what's going to hit the Congress in the next few days."
McGrath sat up straighter in his chair. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I'm not authorized to tell you, Neal, but I'm going to anyway and if anybody's snooping on this conversation they can go rush their tapes to whoever they want to."
Inadvertently McGrath's eyes scanned the room, looking for microphones.
"The Aerospace Force has been working for some time," Kinsman said, "on the development of a manned interceptor spaceplane that will be used to destroy Soviet ABM satel- lites."
"I know that. Nobody in the Pentagon has seen fit to brief me about it, but I've got my own sources."
"Okay. You know, then, that this will mean we're going to actively pursue the objective of preventing the Soviets from deploying a Star Wars type of defensive shield in orbit."
