He had been shocked that comic books were twenty times more expensive than when he was reading them-- $2.50 instead of twelve cents. He'd gone out with just a couple of bucks in his pocket and had to charge the damn things. But what bothered him more was that he couldn't tell the comic-book good guys from the bad guys. Superman had long hair and a mean temper, Batman was a borderline psychotic, Robin was no longer clean-cut Dick Grayson but some brat, and a cigarette-smoking sociopath named Wolverine got his jollies ripping people apart with his claws.

If Melissa doesn't approve of SweetTarts, these sure aren't going to go down real easy.

Rodgers dropped the stack of comic books on the floor, beside his slippers. He wouldn't give these to a kid.

Maybe I should wait and buy him a Hardy Boys book, he thought, though he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to see what had become of Frank and Joe. The brothers probably had lip rings, choppers, and attitude. Like Rodgers, their father Fenton was probably prematurely gray and dating a succession of marriage-minded women.

Hell, Rodgers decided. I'll just stop at a toy store and pick up an action figure. That, and maybe a chess set or some kind of educational videotape. Something for the hands and something for the mind.

Rodgers absently rubbed his high-ridged nose, then reached for the remote. He sat up on his pillows, punched on the TV, and surfed through vividly colored vacuous new movies and washed-out vacuous old sitcoms. He finally settled on an old-movie channel that was showing something with Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Wolfman. Chaney was pleading with a young man in a lab coat to cure him, to relieve his suffering.

"I know how you feel," Rodgers muttered.

Chaney was lucky, though. His pain was usually ended by a silver bullet. In Rodgers's case, as with most survivors of war, crime, or genocide, the suffering diminished but never died. It was especially painful now, in the small hours of the night, when the only distractions were the drone of the TV and the intrusion of headlights from passing cars. As Sir Fulke Greville once noted in an elegy, "Silence augmenteth grief."

Rodgers shut off the TV and switched off the light. He bunched his pillows under him and lay on his belly.

He knew he couldn't change the way he felt. But he also knew he couldn't afford to surrender to sorrow. There was a widow and her son to think about, plus the sad task of finding a new commander for Striker, and he had to run Op-Center for the rest of the week that Paul Hood would be in Europe. And today was going to be a low point on the job, what Op-Center's attorney Lowell Coffey II accurately described as "the welcoming of the Fox to the warren."