"I've done my share of flying," she replied. "But you have to come down sometime. You have to-return and face things."

"I suppose so." He looked toward the window and the hot Texas afternoon on the other side of the blinds. "You know, I sometimes wonder if some airplane crashes . . . some of the unexplained ones . . . aren't caused by the pilot's unconscious desire to get away from his problems for good."

"Suicide?" She suppressed an impulse to make a note in his file. Do it after he leaves; don't do anything now to break his train of thought.

"Not suicide exactly. Not the desire to die. But . . . well, every now and then a really good pilot wracks up his plane for no apparent reason. Maybe he just didn't want to put his feet back on the ground."

"How do you think you'd feel if you were allowed to fly again?"

His grin was immediate. "Terrific!"

"You wouldn't try to ... avoid your problems?"

"No." The grin turned into a knowing smile. "I've got a better way to get rid of my problems. That's what the Moon is for."

Colonel Campbell thought. Never-never land.

"That's the one thing I want," Kinsman said. "The one 123 thing I need. To return to active astronaut status. To get in on the lunar program."

"But that's not an Air Force program," Colonel Camp- bell said. "The civilians are doing it—NASA and the Rus- sians, isn't it? It's a cooperative program."

Nodding, he answered, "But they're looking for experi- enced astronauts. The Air Force is letting some of our people work for NASA on detached duty. Friends of mine have already been to the Moon."

He was set up for the tough questions now.

"What do you think your real problem is?" Colonel Campbell asked, letting her voice grow to its normal powerful volume.

Kinsman looked startled for a moment. "I killed that Russian girl . . ." His facial expression went from surprise to pain.

"She tried to kill you, didn't she?"

"Yes."

"You're a military officer. You were on a military mission. The satellite you were inspecting might have had weaponry on it that could have killed millions of people."

"I know that."

"Then why did you become ..." She reached for the glasses on her desk and perched them on the tip of her nose. Reading from the file, ". . . despondent, withdrawn, hostile to your fellow officers." She looked up at him. "It also says you lost weight and complained of insomnia."

Kinsman hunched forward in his chair, clasped his long- fingered hands together. Looking up at her, he asked, "Have you ever killed someone?"

Marian Campbell moved her head the barest centimeter to indicate no.

"Lots of Air Force officers have," Kinsman said. "But at remote distances. You press a button and a machine falls out of the air or a building on the ground explodes. I killed her in hand-to-hand combat. I saw her face."

"You were doing your duty . . ."

"I could have done my duty without killing her!"