"Doesn't everybody?"

She could see him visibly relaxing. They were barely five thousand feet above the ground but already he felt safe and insulated from the pressures below.

"Want to take over for a while?" she asked.

"Sure." She let go of the controls and Kinsman took the wheel in his hands.

"No aerobatics unless you warn me first," she offered.

"I'm not a stunt flier,"

"It's a good thing you're slim," Marian said. "It's usually a pretty tight squeeze in here with most men. I take up more than my fair share of space."

He did not take his eyes off the horizon, but he asked, "Is this supposed to be some form of therapy? I mean, why'd you invite me for this?"

"Because I know you like to fly and I thought you could use some relaxation. We're not just brain-pickers, you know. We're doctors. We're concerned about your overall health."

Kinsman made a small sound that might have been a grunt. "One of your doctors liked to talk to me whenever I tried playing the piano down in the rec hall. Every time I'd sit down to play he'd pop up and start asking me questions. Then he said I was hostile and suspicious."

Marian laughed. "That was Jeffers. He's the idiot on my staff."

They flew for a while and chatted easily enough, but he never got close to anything about his emotional problems. Finally Marian had to dredge the subject up to the surface. "We had to check back into your family history," she said.

"I know. I got a phone call from a friend." 128

"Senator McGrath?"

"Yes. He wanted to know if it was okay to talk to you. I told him it was."

"We had a good chat on the telephone."

"What did you find out about me?"

Marian pursed her lips for a moment and considered what she would do if he suddenly decided to dive the plane into the ground.

"He told me about your parents. The conflict with your father. He died while you were stationed in California, didn't he?"

Kinsman nodded. "While I was in orbit, as a matter of fact. I had gone to see him while he was in the hospital, like a dutiful son. He didn't recognize me. Or at least, he didn't admit to recognizing me."

"That's a pity," Marian said.

Very coolly, Kinsman replied, "We didn't see each other very clearly when he was alive and well, you know."

He talked easily enough, seemingly holding nothing back. But it was like a blank wall. All he wanted was to be reassigned to astronaut duty for the lunar missions. Nothing else seemed to matter to him. And yet there was something choking him. Something inside his brain that had put a wall around him, an invisible barrier that cut him off from any real human contact.

"I've been waiting for the zinger," he said, after nearly an hour of talk.

Marian's hands were resting in her lap. "The zinger? What's that?"