Vic Moosic had been a big bear of a man, with bright eyes and walrus moustache. He looked a little like all those pictures of another Georgian, Joe Stalin, and always had claimed to be related to the Soviet dictator. “Old Joe got all the meanness,” he often said. Later, when Vic’s son needed an exhaustive security check, it was found that the Moosic family was not even originally Georgian, but rather Uzbeck. Young Ron had always rather liked the idea of being an Uzbeck. Nobody else he’d ever met could make that claim.

Insurance and the union helped out a little—his mother had needed it, with six kids ranging from ages seven to fourteen—but they were not a wealthy family. His older brothers had gone into the mines, but he had not. He’d always been more intellectual and reclusive than his brothers and sisters, but he’d worshipped his father and his father had understood his peculiarities. “You’re not like them,” Vic kept telling him. “You got the family brains, boy. Don’t go into the mines. Find a way out. You’ll be the first one.”

And he had found the way. It was called the U.S. Air Force, and it offered a smart, young high school graduate free college for a set number of years of service. He’d majored in geography at Penn State, with a minor in computer science, and done pretty well. The Air Force, at least, thought highly of him, and after graduation they assigned him to intelligence work.

It sounded romantic, but it wasn’t. Nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly—cryptography, aerial photo interpretation, that sort of thing. Still, at the end of twelve years he was thirty, a major, and on the right career track. He also, along the way, met and married Barbara.