It was only that his passions inclined to youth, a certain androgynous beauty he craved but couldn’t define. He came to the Asian boys, Asian girls, telling himself it was simply a need to be satisfied, and he left hating them for their grace, their wantonness, their doe-eyed acquiescence.

He learned discretion. Discretion served him well for some years. Discretion did not fail him until his posting to West Germany, where his military career came to an end. He had found a whorehouse in Stuttgart, in a pretty little building next to a pretty little beer garden in a part of the city not much frequented by Americans; and he had selected a Turkish immigrant girl who claimed to be thirteen years old and by her looks might not have been lying; and he had been upstairs with her, the girl naked and mumbling “Bitte, bitte,” through a mouth filled with the Colonel’s erect penis, while he held his service revolver to her head and stroked its trigger, gently, not even near the point of firing the weapon—when the house matron came through the door screaming at him.

Apparently it was her custom to keep an eye on her employees through a number of peepholes in the old plaster walls, and she had seen Tyler put his revolver to the girl’s head—but it was really only a kind of play; was that so hard to understand?—and believed he was about to commit a murder.

Tyler was startled by the woman, and when he turned the revolver did go off—he shot the girl through her skinny left arm. It was a mistake.

An ambulance came, the police came, he was arrested. He was held for questioning by a red-faced man who told him, “This is not the Wild West! This is not where you shoot and fuck!”

He was never charged. But he was held for three days, and the incident was reported to his superiors; there was an investigation, some local scandal-mongering. People began to look at him differently. That was the hard part. People knew. They looked at him… well, the way people used to look at Sissy.

He resigned his commission. He had made enough friends to ease the transition into civilian life, but it was a difficult time. The Stuttgart incident seemed to be always at his heels, seemed to follow him like some odorous lost dog.

It fades, Sissy said. Memory fades. Everyone forgets everything. That’s the rule.

But the nights were long. Some nights were too long, and on those nights he would drive his second car, an anonymous brown sedan, along dark city streets where the girls were usually black or Hispanic and very young, to cheap hotel rooms that stank of insecticide and perspiration, where he would sometimes, even after Stuttgart, play the Gun Game with them.

And in the aftermath, home before dawn, alone, he might toy with his service revolver, pick it up, put it down, put it to his temple, the touch of the steel a familiar sensation after all these years, the oily smell of it a comforting smell. Sissy always talked him out of pulling the trigger. The Sissy in his head. Sad ghost. Don’t kill yourself and be like me.

And in time his daylight life grew bearable. He was trustworthy, he was discreet—he had learned all about discretion—and he was smart. He moved between the military, the defense contractors, and the congressional committees with a growing familiarity. His job was to say plainly what his employers could only hint at, and to hint at what his employers would publicly deny.

And his madnesses came and ebbed in their own slow, tidal rhythm; never predictable and impossible to resist. And the years passed.

Meeting A.W. Murdoch and wearing himself out on the firing range had postponed the madness for now. But it would come again, Tyler knew. It always came. And came again.

When he had learned the basics of the TOW, he drove with Murdoch to an empty stretch of U.S. 95 and parked in the breakdown lane under a stand of shade trees.

Yesterday Murdoch had roamed up and down this pike in a commandeered sports car making notes on the position of the Helpers. A stream of the devices had been flowing through Baltimore on 95 for some weeks now, always travelling at a steady forty miles per hour and at regular intervals. Some turned west on 70 or installed themselves in road towns like Columbia or Wheaton ; most continued south on 95. One had taken up a position on the White House lawn.

Tyler himself hadn’t seen one with his own eyes, only the TV pictures. It was worse close up, Murdoch told him. “They aren’t just black, like painted black or anodized black. They don’t shine in the sunlight at all. They’re blacker than their own shadows. And when they move, Colonel, they don’t tremble or bounce. They glide. You ever play a computer game, sir? You know how things move on a video screen? Like math. Like oiled perfection. That’s how these things move.” The idea of trying to stop one, Murdoch confessed, as much as it appealed to him, it also… well, it scared him a little.

“You can deal with it, though?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Sir, I’m anxious to deal with it.”

So here they were, parked on a sunny stretch of road at the edge of a cow pasture where a few Holsteins grazed, or perhaps they were Guernseys, Tyler got those confused; a dairy breed, in any case. Crickets sang in the high grass and faint clouds dappled the horizon. The air was cool. November was only a day away.

“Any old minute now, sir,” said Murdoch, who had calculated this somehow.

Tyler focused his attention on the highway where it crossed a low ridge a couple of thousand yards north. The Helper would be coming over that ridge. Well within range. But nothing moved there now, not even traffic. The roads were sparsely travelled these days.

Murdoch popped a can of Dr. Pepper, which made Tyler jump. “Christ’s sake.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Tyler’s mouth was dry. He envied Murdoch that can of pop fresh from the cooler. But he had to be ready to man the TOW. He guessed this was Murdoch’s revenge for not being allowed first shot at a Helper. Tough luck, Tyler thought. I guess I can wait for a cold drink.

“Sir? I think you have a target, sir.”

Tyler stood up on the shooting platform and manned the weapon.

The TOW was manufactured by Hughes, a company Tyler had done some business with. He had a lot of respect for the TOW. It was a wire-guided weapon, almost mind-numbingly complex, but reliable in service. It was designed to penetrate heavy armor plate and render even the best-protected tank functionally unserviceable, i.e., blow it the hell up.

He got his first good look at a Helper through the cross hairs of the 13x optical sight.

The Helper looked like a death-black ball and cone—the aliens seemed to love these Euclidian shapes—and it was travelling well below the speed limit along the slow curve of the road. The image rippled slightly in the heat rising from the asphalt.

The cattle shuffled and raised their heads as if they sensed this presence.

Tyler was suddenly nervous—suddenly this seemed like real combat—but he didn’t let the anxiety affect his timing. He kept the Helper in his sights until it cleared the high spot in the road. He wanted this target clean.

“Sir,” Murdoch said nervously. “We’re a little exposed here.”

“Keep your shirt on, Mr. Murdoch.”

A long pause, then: “Sir?”

Tyler triggered the weapon.

The TOW performed a number of complex tasks between one eyeblink and the next. Tyler’s finger on the firing button ignited a rocket motor, which popped the missile from its launch container. All the rocket fuel was used up before the missile left the tube, which was what protected Tyler, Murdoch, and the vehicle they were sitting in from the backwash. The sound of the launch was blisteringly loud. It was a sound Murdoch had compared to the hiss of Satan’s own steam press.