"Yessir."

"I thought I recognized you. Saw your picture in the papers or something a few years back. But you were in uniform then."

He can't know, Kinsman told himself. There's no way he could possibly know.

"I'm still in the Air Force," he said to Durban. "I'm on ... inactive duty."

"Astronaut?"

"I was."

Durban said, "Do I have to buy you another drink to get you to tell me your name?"

"Kinsman," he blurted. "Chet Kinsman." He grabbed the whisky in front of him and took a long pull from it. 154

"Chester A. Kinsman," Durban murmured. "Now where did I ... of, of course!" He grinned broadly. "The Zero Gee Club! Now I remember. Old Cy Calder told me about you."

Kinsman put his drink down with a trembling hand. "The Zero Gee Club. I had forgotten about that."

"Forgotten about it?" Durban looked impressed. "You mean you've gone on to even greater things?"

"No." Kinsman shook his head. "Different. But not greater."

"Calder died a couple of years ago," Durban said. "Ninety-three."

"I didn't know."

His voice lower, "Just about all my old friends are dead. That's the curse of a long life. You get to feel that you're the last of the Mohicans."

"You think dying young is better?"

Instead of answering, Durban picked up his lighter and started puffing his pipe to life. Clouds of bluish smoke rose slowly, swirled around his head, then were pulled ceilingward toward the vents in the solid rock.

"You said," he asked between puffs, "you're on ... inactive duty. . . . What brought that about?"

"Accident," Kinsman said automatically, feeling his in- sides congealing.

"Where? In orbit?"

"Yes."

"You got hurt? Funny, I didn't hear anything—"

"It happened a long time ago," Kinsman said, seeing the face of the cosmonaut screaming as she died. "It's just . . . one thing led to another. You know how it is."

Durban blew out another cloud of smoke. "Still, I've got a pretty good network of spies in all parts of this business. Odd I never heard about it."

Stop pumping me, Kinsman snarled silently. "Maybe it wasn't important enough to make the scuttlebutt rounds," he lied. "Except to me."