"Look," he said, "you know damned well that something clicked in my head during the show, when I grabbed for your hand. And I know you know. But you're trying to lead up to the subject subtly, to see if you can get me to talk about it."
"What clicked?" Marian felt eager, as if she were a hunter close to her quarry.
"During that song I finally realized what the hell has been bothering me."
"Yes?"
"They got to me," he said flatly.
Marian felt her eyebrows rise. "They got to you? Who . . . ?"
Kinsman said, "All these years I've been telling myself T33 that I'm my own man. I joined the Air Force to get into space, to get away from all the ugliness of Earth. But I didn't escape it. I couldn't."
"You brought the ugliness along with you."
"Yeah." He was silent for a long moment. "I murdered that cosmonaut. Maybe if she had been a man I wouldn't feel so badly about it. But the thing is—they got to me."
"Who?" Marian demanded.
"The Air Force," he said. "The training. The military mind-set."
"I don't understand."
Gesturing with one hand in the cramped cabin, Kinsman said, "Look, when I joined the Air Force it was strictly to be an astronaut. Sure, they put me through the same training everybody gets and even made me fly combat in Cyprus. But I never fired a gun or a missile. Never."
"So?"
"So once I got into the astronaut program I thought I had it made. I had what I wanted. The Air Force hadn't gotten to me. Their training hadn't turned me into a military machine. I was my own man."
Marian began to feel the inner tingle she always got when a puzzle became clear to her.
"But I was wrong," Kinsman went on. His voice was serious now, but not somber. Not morose or wooden. "When I got into a combat situation—hand-to-hand fight, yet—all that military training took over. I wasn't an astronaut any- more. I was a fighting machine. A trained killer. A military automaton. I killed her just the way an infantryman becomes conditioned to sticking a bayonet into another human being's belly."
"And you think that's what's been bothering you?" Marian asked, as softly as she knew how.
"For the past five months I've been trying to figure it out. How could I have done it? How in the hell could I have deliberately ripped out a human being's air line? How could I willingly kill somebody?"
"And now you have the answer."
