"I could have had any one of a dozen United States Senators bail you out of your precious Academy. But no, you were too busy to come and ease your mother's last days on Earth."
"None of us knew she was that close to the end."
"She was in pain!" The old man's voice was rising, filling the nearly empty room with its hard, angry echoes.
"I couldn't come," Kinsman insisted.
"Why not?"
"Because I didn't want to see you!" he blurted.
If it surprised his father, the old man did not show it. He merely nodded. "You mean you couldn't face me."
"Call it what you want to."
"Sneaking around behind my back. Forcing your sick mother to consent to your joining the Air Force. The only son of the most prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania —joining the Air Force! Learning how to become a killer!"
"I'm not going to kill anyone," Kinsman answered. "I'm going in for astronaut duty."
"You'll do what they order you to do. You surrendered your soul when you put on that uniform. If they order you to kill, you'll kill. You'll bomb cities and strafe helpless women and children. You'll drop napalm on babies when they order you to."
"I'm not going to be involved in anything like that!"
"My only child, a warrior. A killer. No wonder your mother died. You killed her."
Kinsman could feel waves of fire sweeping through him. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he said, "That's a rotten thing to tell me . . ."
"It's true. You killed her. She'd still be alive if it weren't for you."
The pain flaming through him was too much. Fists clenched against his sides, Kinsman brushed past his father and strode out of the room, out of the house, out into the bright hot sunshine and clear blue sky that he neither felt nor saw.
By the time he realized the sun had set, he found himself in Berkeley, walking aimlessly along a wide boulevard, car- ried along by the flow of students and other pedestrians streaming past shops and restaurants. Music blared from car radios passing by. Garish lights flickered from shop-front windows.
He stepped into a bar. The sign on its window said it was a coffee shop, but the only coffee they served had Irish whiskey in it. Kinsman ordered a beer and hunched over the frosted glass, staring blankly into its foamy head. He heard a sweet woman's voice singing, looked up into the mirror behind the bar, and saw a girl sitting on a stool in front of a microphone, strumming a guitar as she sang.
"Jack of diamonds, queen of spades, Fingers tremble and the memory fades, And it's a foolish man who tries to cheat the dealer ..."
The people sitting around the bar wore shabby denims or faded khaki fatigues. A couple of suits and casual sports coats. Kinsman felt out of place in his crisp sky-blue uniform.
As he watched the night deepen over the clapboard buildings and the lights on the Bay Bridge stretch a twinkling arch across the water, he realized he had spent most of his life alone. He had no home. The Academy was cold and friend- less. There was no place on Earth that he could call his own. And deep inside he knew that his soul was as austere and rigid as his father's. I'll look like him one day, Kinsman thought. If I live long enough.
"You can't win,
And you can't break even, You can't get out of the game . . .
She has a really sweet voice, he thought. Like a silver bell. Like water in the desert.
It was a haunting voice. And her face, framed by long midnight-black hair, had a fine-boned, dark-eyed ascetic look to it. She perched on a high stool, under a lone spotlight, bluejeaned legs crossed and guitar resting on one thigh.
