He looked away from her and mumbled again, "I wish I knew."
"What's the secret, Chet?"
Don't act surprised; you knew she was going to dig that deep, he told himself. For a long moment he was silent, trying to identify the feelings swirling inside him: anger? fear? pain?
"Whatever it is," Diane said softly, "it won't hurt half so much after you've shared it."
How do you know you can trust her? he asked himself. You've known her almost all your life and yet you hardly know her at all.
But he heard himself saying, "It was on an orbital mission, years ago. Before we started cooperating with the Russians, before we came back to the Moon. I was inspecting one of their satellites ..."
His mind detached from his body. He watched himself numbly reciting the ancient story, sitting there in bed beside this beautiful woman and opening himself to her as he had never opened himself to anyone in his life.
"It was a big mother, just launched. Our intelligence people were afraid it might be an orbital bomb. The cosmo- naut came up in a separate capsule while I was in the midst of examining their satellite. We fought—like a couple of sea 365 elephants barging into each other. We didn't have any real weapons. We just pawed at each other."
He was floating again. Weightless.
"I could have backed off and gotten back to my own spacecraft, but I stayed and fought. Very patriotic. Very full of righteous wrath. I fought, I wanted to fight. I pulled out her airhose. I killed her."
"Her?"
Nodding, seeing her face in the bulbous helmet behind the heavily tinted visor, screaming silently, going rigid.
"I didn't know it was girl." His voice was as dead as she was. "Not until I had already ripped out her air line. That's when I got close enough to see into her helmet."
He stopped.
"And you've been carrying around this load of guilt about it ever since." Diane took one of his hands in both of hers.
"I swore to myself that I'd never kill anyone again ... I wouldn't let them make me kill anyone . . ."
"Chet, it wasn't your fault."
"Of course it was. / fought the cosmonaut. I wanted to kill! I wanted to rip the sonofabitch's airhose out of his helmet. I didn't have to. But I wanted to."
"And you didn't know it was a woman."
"No. How could I?"
