CHAPTER II

Birrel still couldn't take it in.

Two hours had passed, and he sat in Connor's office, listening, arguing, still not believing.

Paley was there, hunched as though half asleep in a chair in the corner. There was another man there, a young man named Garlock, with glittering eyeglasses and teeth and a sharp voice. But Connor did most of the talking.

"I
know
it's fantastic," he said, for the tenth time. "But it's so."

"But he looks human—," Birrel said, again.

"He
is
human. But he's different. His blood is a type no one ever saw before. His cells, his nervous-system, his bone-and-muscle tissue, they're all different from an Earthman's. Unmistakably. I could give you Dr. Blount's report, but it wouldn't mean anything to you. If you'd seen Blount's face, that alone would have convinced you."

"But this is 1956," Birrel argued. "We're still only talking about space-flight. And only crackpots believe in ships and people from other worlds."

Connor winced. "Don't. It's like hearing a playback of what I said to Blount. Listen. We had the two most qualified biologists in the country check that body. They agree utterly. It's non-terrestrial."

Birrel opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. He had nothing more to say.

He faced the enormity of an impossible fact, just as these men had had to face it. A man, a visitor, a secret visitor, from another world. In this hard, matter-of-fact office, it seemed impossible, like a story read and thrown away, like a crazy movie you laughed at as you went out. The George Washington Bridge was only a few miles away, and tomorrow the Giants played the Pirates, and Friday was payday, and a man had come from another world.

"But from where?" Birrel whispered, finally. "And
why
?"

Connor sighed heavily. "Now we're getting somewhere. I know how hard it is to take. Every morning I wake up, I think at first it was just a wild dream—" He broke off, then said harshly, "From where? We don't know, haven't an idea. The sky is full of worlds. Take your pick."

A nightmare kaleidoscope of all the stars and planets of the universe rushed through Birrel's head. The sky is full of worlds. Yes. He'd never quite realized it before.

"As to why, there's no doubt at all," Connor was saying. "The man was killed near one of the most heavily guarded atomic weapon depots we have. He was killed trying to escape. He was a spy."

"A spy, for—" Birrel's voice trailed away.

"That's right, Birrel. For someplace else, someplace not on Earth."

Garlock spoke up to Connor, interrupting. "You're giving it to him too fast, John. It took us weeks, and yet you haul him in and hit him in the face with the whole picture. More time—"

"I'm running this, and we haven't
got
more time," Connor said roughly.

Birrel hardly heard them. He felt as though an earthquake had rocked his mind, had shaken up all his preconceived ideas, all the bases of his thinking for a lifetime.

"But," he said slowly to Connor, "a spy from someplace outside, from another world—does that mean danger? A threat, out there?"

Connor spread his big, spatulate hands on the desk. "We don't know. We don't know what it means. But this agency has top responsibility for the country's safety against secret enemies. Whether they're Earthmen or not! We have to assume it
does
mean a threat."

"Yet it could be just accident, his being near the atomic depot?" A thought sprang into Birrel's mind. "A visitor from outside, coming secretly, wanting to learn about our science—"

Connor smiled grimly. "I wish I could think so. But we know it isn't so. Show him what we found, Jay."

Garlock went to a safe and unlocked it and took out a small object and came back. He said to Birrel,

"We found two things beside the man himself. A quarter-mile from him we found a queer burned place in the ground, a charred gouge. We don't understand it at all. The other thing we found was in his pocket. This."

He put the little object on the desk. To Birrel, it looked rather like a black plastic film-viewer of the type used for looking at colored slides. He said so, and Garlock nodded.

"That's just what it is. Only it's the someplace-else type of viewer. I'll turn it on. Then you look into it."

His nerves taut, Birrel put the lenses to his eyes. Would he look at the incredible vistas of another planet, at—

But no. He was looking at a colored picture of a big laboratory's interior, and it was definitely an Earth lab of the present day. He could name many of the gadgets in the room. It looked like an atomic experimenter's workshop, on a big scale.

Birrel got that one glimpse and then started violently and tore the viewer away from his eyes.

A man's voice had spoken, close to his ear—small in volume but rapid, authoritative, precise in diction.

The language it spoke was one he had never heard.

"What—?" he cried, startled. Connor and Garlock nodded. "The voice," said the latter, "is on the film."

"And that," Connor said flatly, "was a picture of the most secret atomic laboratory at Los Alamos." He reached out and took the viewer into his own hand. "There are fifty-six pictures in this thing, each with a detailed vocal commentary like that you heard. They're pictures—
detailed
pictures—of top-secret atomic depots, storehouses and arsenals."

"But how could they—," Birrel began. Connor cut him off.

"We haven't the faintest idea how. They've obviously got instruments that we don't have, for looking into places. 'Why' and 'who' are what we want to know. Especially, 'Who'."

He got up and walked back and forth in a little pattern. With a shock of surprise, Birrel realized that it was not yet midnight. It seemed that an eternity must have passed, not just a few hours.

Connor stopped and turned toward him. "That's where you come in, Birrel."

It wrenched Birrel suddenly back from his chaotic imaginings of far-away worlds and stars, of a cosmic plot and an unsuspecting Earth.

"Me?"

"You're going to help us find this ring of Someplace-else agents."

"But you said yourself you had better agents than me!"

Connor nodded. "But, as I told you, you have the right face. We went through photos of several thousand former agents to find your face, Birrel." He paused. Then—"Our only concrete lead to this bunch of whoever-they-are, is that dead man. He was one of them. If he were alive, he could be trailed back to the others. But he isn't alive. So, to find that trail, we have to use a ringer."

Birrel was numb with amazement, but he was not a fool, and he got Connor's implication instantly.

It was one of the oldest tricks in the book of counter-espionage. You had one of your own men pose as an enemy spy, so that a contact would be made that could lead you to the others. An old trick, and a risky one—even in ordinary circumstances. But in this case, it was fantastic.

"Oh, no," said Birrel. "It wouldn't work, there isn't a chance. I don't look that much like him—"

"You have the necessary basic feature," Connor said. "The skull-shape, the ears, the things that can't be disguised. Our make-up experts can do the rest."

"But how can I pose for a minute as that man, when I don't know his language? The first moment any of the others spoke to me, I'd be through."

"We can teach you a fair bit of the language," Connor said. "Enough so that you won't be instantly recognized as a fake. You'd soon be found out—but by then we'd be jumping on them."

Birrel stared, wondering if the strain of this hadn't been too much for the man. "
You
can teach me some of that other-world language?"

Connor said, "Grossman can. He is, in case you don't know, one of the world's greatest philologists. He was called in on this weeks ago. Using that spoken commentary on the film-viewer, that voice that each time described a specific pictured scene, he worked away relating words and pictures until he built up the whole language. It's rough yet—but he's got a vocabulary of a couple thousand words, a set of grammar-rules, and—above all—an accurate reproduction of accent and pronunciation, in that recorded voice. Enough, with luck, to get you by for a little time with the others. That should be time enough for us."

Garlock interrupted, saying heatedly to Connor, "Look at his face! I tell you, you're giving this to him too fast, you can't throw it at him like this."

Connor ignored the protest. He sat down again at the desk, and his bleak eyes held on Birrel's face.

"This is how it stands. Where they came from, what that place is like, we haven't a glimmering. How many of them there are on Earth, we don't know either. But one man couldn't come alone. So there are others. All right."

He bent forward, his harsh voice beating at Birrel. "We make you look like that dead man. We have Grossman cram you with that language till you can get by. Then we stick you in jail. We announce that an unidentified spy was caught near an atomic installation, weeks ago, and that we're still holding him for questioning. We let that out in the newspapers."

"And then?"

Connor said, "The others—they'll be wondering what happened to their boy. He was alone on that job, we're sure of that. When they hear he's in prison, they'll surely try to contact him—you."

"What makes you so sure they will?"

"Because," Connor said slowly, "they have to. This is a secret operation. They must prevent our finding out who our prisoner is, finding out that he's from outside Earth."

His voice became raw-edged. "They're a threat, Birrel. Wherever they came from, they're danger. Perhaps the worst danger that ever threatened us. We have to find them. You have to help."

He did not ask for that help, he commanded it. And with a feeling of unreality, Birrel knew that he could not disobey that command.

Connor rose. "You'll stay here, while we set this up. It'll take weeks, working every minute, to get you ready."

Weeks later, wearing another man's face, Birrel sat solitary in an isolated cell of a New York prison. He sat there unbelievingly waiting for the impossible, for the secret ones from the wider cosmos.

He did not have to wait long.