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investigations. You see, in the Air Force, assignment to that bureau is usually the kiss of death. Nobody in the Air Force takes it seriously, it's just a public relations gimmick they came up with to placate a bunch of crackpots. He told me that he knew it was time to resign his commission and return to civilian life."
    She was not stupid. She saw immediately where this was leading. "Have you just been assigned to UFO investigations, Mr. Taggart?"
    "I'm afraid so. When my boss told me this morning that I was going to work with a defector, I knew I had trouble. When I learned that the defector wasn't military or intelligence, I knew it was deep trouble. When I heard that bit about the comets, I knew I'd been kissed off."
    "So, your government really is not interested in what I had to tell them? They think I am just another crackpot, like your UFO enthusiasts? Then why are they bothering? What will they do with our findings?"
    "They'll make up a file. They're great ones for filing things. They'll look like they're keeping busy. And I'll be out of their way for a while."
    "Is that a matter of some importance to them?" She did not want to rub salt in his wounds, but she had to know.
    "It's beginning to look like it. You see, people like my straw boss, Morgan, or that man Steinberg back there, they're desk men. I'm a field operative. They call us spooks or cowboys but we just call ourselves grunts. That's a word that came out of the Viet Nam war. It meant an infantryman, a ground-pounder. Now it means the people who go out and put it on the line. The expendable ones."
    Despite his colloquialisms, she could understand most of what he was saying, "There is little love then, between the desk men and the 'grunts'?"
    In spite of himself, he had to grin at the pronunciation she put on the last word. He'd never heard it said that way. "Very little. And less every day. Years ago, they made heroes of us. It was taken for granted that we were in a war, even if it was an unofficial one, and rough stuff was expected. We got our assignments and we went out and accomplished them. Or we failed and that usually meant we didn't come back. In any case the hero stuff was a lot of crap but at least we were pretty free to do what had to be done.
    "Now, they don't want field operatives to have any autonomy. And they don't like rough work. That's supposed to be a relic of the bad old days, before we all got civilized and polite. It seems that I 'm a relic of the bad old days, too. My last couple of jobs got pretty rough."
    Their orders arrived. So this was one of the American hatchetmen she had been hearing about all her life from official propaganda. He certainly looked tough enough, but he didn't seem to be a sadistic maniac. But then, she thought, what does a sadistic maniac look like? He had ordered the biggest steak she had ever seen. Americans, apparently, were beef fanatics. His potato looked like something that belonged in a sporting event. She had ordered only a salad, but even that shocked her. She had seen smaller gardens.
    "Anyway," he went on, "the time came, as it had to, when I muffed one. I won't go into the details, which I'm not free to discuss anyway, but I got shot up pretty bad. Nothing much to be done about it, I took the only course open as I saw it, but it cost me. They had to put up with my cowboy antics as long as I turned in positive results, but they can be unforgiving when an operation goes sour. This is the first assignment I've been handed since that one. I was wondering what it would be."
    "And now you know?"
    "Now I know." He wasn't sure why he was telling her all this. It was none of her business.
    She studied him differently this time. She should have seen the signs, she thought, but she was still unused to this alien physiognomy. His extreme gauntness was unnatural, but she came from a place where most people were either gaunt or overweight by American standards, and she was not used to deeply tanned men. Now that she