He hated and feared Sissy, but she was also the exception to the rule. Although she was insane, Sissy was still his mother. She fed him, sporadically; she clothed him, eccentrically. She was supposed to care about him, and she was capable of hurting him with her indifference.

He could tolerate the indifference of anyone but Sissy.

That was why, when he went to school for the first time in his life—five days late and in the company of a truant officer—he was driven to tears when everyone laughed at his torn pants, his food-stained shirt.

Not because he cared what they thought. It was Sissy who had wounded him, Sissy who had sent him off so badly dressed.

Sissy, why?

Didn’t she know any better?

Obviously, she didn’t. Sissy had moved into a land where reason and custom had given way to bright strokes of invisible lightning, fearsome revelations too private to share. Sissy, the adult Tyler recognized, had been schizophrenic. Sissy had been defending her home by stockpiling it with garbage and rags, and it was a miracle she had dressed him at all.

Sissy had been dead now for many years. But she visited Tyler regularly and she wasn’t shy about making her opinions known.

The phone call came while he was watching television. Tyler had installed a satellite dish on the roof and an illegal descrambler in his living room. The descrambler was a neat little sync regenerator based on a CMOS chip and a 3.58 MHz oscillator. He could decode anything, including C-SPAN, HBO, and military broadcasts—not that any of these were on the air anymore.

In fact, since mid-October, there had been only a couple of hours of national TV a day—skeleton CNN broadcasts, mostly coverage of the disarming of the world and the continuous slow unwinding of the octahedrons.

It was this last that interested Tyler. Today, another bright autumn morning, windows open and a breeze tangling the curtains, he sipped a diet soda and watched a videotape of a lone Helper, so-called, gliding along an empty highway near Atlanta.

He was fascinated by the look of it. Seven feet of matte-black formless menace. It was a “Helper” the way Stalin had been “Uncle Joe.”

These curious items had been unwinding steadily from their octahedral bases in New York and Los Angeles, spreading out, forming a network across the country—the world—for purposes unannounced. You can call them Helpers, Tyler thought, but he recognized an occupation force when he saw one.

What would you need to take out one of these dreadnoughts? Well, Tyler thought, let me see… And then, as if in answer, the telephone rang. He stood up from the chair with his heart battering his ribs. Christ! How long since he’d heard that sound?

He had just about given up waiting.

He thumbed the mute button on the remote TV control and snatched up the telephone handset. “Hello?”

It’ll be a wrong number, he thought. Some Contactee who dialed a 5 instead of a 6. Or did they still make such human errors?

“Colonel Tyler?” asked a male voice.

“Speaking,” he managed.

“Saw your sign, sir. Down at Quantico.” Pause. “One of the strings came loose, but I hooked it up again.”

“I thank you for that,” Tyler said. “Are you a Marine?”

Turned out he was, a fairly raw one: a weapons specialist, twenty-one years old. “Name’s A.W. Murdoch.”

“What’s the A for?”

“Alphonse, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. I won’t ask about the W. Do I understand you managed to turn down the invitation to Life Eternal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, we ought to get together.”

“We will. Uh, Colonel Tyler… I take it you’re thinking of offering some resistance here? Meaning no offense, I’m not in need of company for company’s sake. I thought, from your sign, you’d probably want to kick a little ass?”

Eager young buck, Tyler thought. Well, so am I. Eager, at least. “I think that’s a safe assumption. When can I see you?”

“You can see me right now if you step to the window, sir.”

Tyler did so. He peered down from his second-story bay window into the sunny street. Parked there…

…parked on a quiet tree-lined Arlington avenue…

…was a camouflage-brown M998 Hummer, the one-and-three-quarter-ton vehicle that had replaced the Jeep of Tyler’s youth, a sturdy and versatile machine…

… on the roof of which was mounted an M-109 TOW launcher, a tank killer par excellence, looking a little like a ray gun from an old science fiction movie…

… or like an answer to a prayer, Tyler thought…

…and grinning up from the interior of this vehicle was a lanky blond youth whose regulation haircut had grown a little shaggy but whose uniform remained relatively clean, holding in his right hand what appeared to be a cellular phone.

Obviously a smart-ass, Tyler thought, but a smart-ass bearing gifts.

Murdoch saluted, squinting into the sunlight.

“It appears we have a lot to talk about,” Tyler said.

“I’ll be right up, sir.”

“No. I’ll be right down.”

Tyler had learned how to establish a certain tone in male conversation, a certain rank. In the military, the rules of conduct were explicit. In civilian conversation the matter was more subtle; thus it was important to take command and do so quickly. It was the inability to take command that had frustrated him during his interview with the President, which was still a sore memory. He’d been off balance, at a disadvantage; taking a pistol to the White House was an impulse he should never have obeyed in the first place. It was hasty.

Here, the situation favored Tyler.

A. W. Murdoch was an active Marine Sergeant. John Tyler was a retired Army officer, technically a civilian, a superior officer by courtesy only. But it started well, Tyler thought, when Murdoch addressed him as “sir.” Given that, Tyler thought, all else falls into place.

They sat in the front of the Hummer and swapped stories of the invasion as a prelude to more serious talk.

Murdoch was a California boy, the kind of adolescent drifter that state had so often produced, until he drifted into the Corps and discovered a purpose in life. That purpose was the maintenance of portable weaponry and the instruction of recruits in the use of same, and it was the only thing Murdoch seemed to care much about. When Contact emptied Quantico, Murdoch was devastated. He kept driving back to the base, he said, every few days, like an ant to an empty nest.

Then he saw John Tyler’s sign and guessed there might be a future for him after all.

Tyler offered in exchange some of his own recent history. It was hard to explain the civilian work he’d done, since it crossed so many borders—Congress, the defense industry, banking. His job had been to know people, but not too well; to say things, but not too explicitly. In fact, that life was already beginning to feel vague and distant; the intricacies that had once intrigued and compelled him seemed as abstruse now as the mating dance of an extinct species…

He didn’t say exactly this to Murdoch. He did make some mention of the revolt that had been derailed, at the last minute, by Contact. Murdoch was fascinated: he’d been aware of the high-level alert that August night, the furtive troop movements. “It was exciting,” Murdoch said. “Like something out of the Civil War. Firing on Fort Sumter. I never did care for that windy old fart in the White House.”

Bolstered by this, the Colonel described his last meeting with the Commander in Chief—a somewhat polished version.

Murdoch was wide-eyed. “You actually had a pistol on him?”

“Yes,” Tyler said.

“You could have killed him.”