CHAPTER III

They came at ten minutes before midnight.

Birrel had been sitting in this cell for some twenty hours. The cell was deep in a jail in downtown Manhattan. It was a solitary cell, for a solitary and important prisoner.

He had a different face now, a dead man's face. The clothing he wore had belonged to that man. He could speak that man's language, to a certain extent. He was not Ross Birrel, he was a man from Someplace-else.

"
What's my name, on that other world?
" Birrel wondered. "
I'm impersonating somebody and don't know who, or what, he was—
"

Except that the man he impersonated had been a spy. Secret agent of an unguessable, distant world, ferreting out Earth's defense secrets.

A wave of cold disbelief swept Birrel. It was still too fantastic, too incredible. The scientists were wrong about that body, they must be wrong. Connor was wrong.

But Connor remained grimly convinced. Before his men took Birrel to the prison, he had said,

"They've lost an agent, those people from outside. A valuable man with valuable information. They'll contact you, somehow when our newspaper story appears."

"In a locked cell in prison?" Birrel had said, incredulously. "How can they?"

"I've an idea," Connor had said, "that they can do quite a lot of things we can't. But we'll be ready for them. The prison guards aren't in on our set-up, of course. But we'll be in the building, watching."

He had added, "You may not fool them long. But try. Remember, the important thing is to get them to lead you to the others, to the center of this thing, to their base, wherever it is. We'll follow."

That had been twenty hours ago. And now Birrel sat in the cold, stone-walled little cell, and stared at the blank steel door, and told himself that he was a fool, and that Connor was mad.

No one could reach him here, even if anybody tried.

Birrel suddenly looked up. Something had happened to the light, the single bulb that illuminated his cell.

A greenish tinge had come into the light. It deepened, and there was a buzzing in his ears, and—

Birrel pitched to the floor, unconscious.

He came out of blackness, later, with a vague consciousness of someone touching him and the sound of a voice in his ears.

It was a woman's voice, low and hurried and husky with strain. He didn't know what it was saying, the words didn't make sense—

Of a sudden, Birrel's heart pounded. Some of those words, those strange-sounding syllables,
did
make sense. They were words he had learned in the weeks of preparation—words that Grossman, the philologist, had beaten into him by endless repetitions.

The words—the language—of the secret ones from Someplace-else.

He wrenched his eyes open. He looked into the dark, handsome face of a young woman. Her eyes were brilliant with excitement, and her hands were shaking Birrel by the shoulders. She spoke swiftly to him again, and now his clearing mind could translate the words.

"Rett, there's little time! Please!"

"Rett?" That was a word he didn't know. But of course—that would be his name. Or, rather, the name of the man he impersonated. Rett—

Birrel was too foggy yet to try to answer, in that alien language. He was dazed, off balance, and dared not make a slip.

She helped him to his feet. His legs were like strings. He felt as though a pile-driver had hit him. What had happened?

Hanging to the edge of the bunk for support, Birrel stared groggily. He saw now that the girl wore an ordinary tan suit, with no covering on her shoulder-length black hair. Beyond her, the steel door now gaped wide open. How had it been opened? And what had struck him senseless? There had been a sudden greenishness in the light—

The light was
still
green, a baleful emerald tinge. He didn't understand. He looked down at himself, and found that around his neck now hung a chain from which depended an egg of silvery metal. The egg hummed.

Birrel reached numb fingers toward the thing, but the girl caught away his hand. Again in that alien tongue, she said quickly,

"No, Rett—don't touch your shield! We have to get out fast—Holmer can't blank this building forever. Please try to walk!"

His shield? Shield against what? He saw now that she too wore a humming metal egg around her neck.

Birrel's brain was beginning to clear. But he purposely kept his bewildered expression. Acting dazed would give him a little more time.

"Holmer?" he said.

"He's outside," the girl said. "Holding the"—(and here she used a word Birrel did not know at all)—"on the whole building. But we must hurry!"

Birrel began to understand. They had come indeed, the secret ones from beyond the world. One of them, outside, had hit the whole prison with some stunning force, some super-encephalographic vibration. That was what had knocked him out. But the greenish glow was still there, the force still on. How was it he was conscious now?

Was the "shield" a shield against the stunning force? The girl had put it on him, and he had revived. And she was wearing one herself—

It suddenly rushed over Birrel, the full, overwhelming realization that he was face to face with someone not of Earth. He stared into her dark, smooth face, into her wide, worried black eyes, and he felt the short hairs on his neck bristle.

She seemed utterly human and Earthly, and she was not. The eyes meeting his had looked on unguessable vistas across the cosmic abyss. The strong hands that steadied him were alien hands.

Woman not of this world....

He shivered involuntarily and the girl misunderstood that. She said urgently,

"I know you're shaken up but you must walk! We must get out of here—come—"

She tugged him toward the open door of the cell. Birrel stumbled through it, with her. His feet would not coordinate, they kept scuffling and tripping as he went down the corridor and up the stair.

There was a guard office at the top of the stair. Two jail guards in uniform sprawled, one in a chair, the other on the floor. They were not dead, for he could see the rise and fall of their chests. But they were gripped by an insensibility like death.

Birrel began to get it. "Holmer can only hold the building blanked for a little longer!" The one outside, the confederate of the girl, had stricken everyone in the prison into a coma. Protected by a shield-device, she had walked right in, unchallenged.

The thought appalled Birrel. Connor and Paley and their men were in this building, waiting to follow Birrel and whoever contacted him. And Connor and Paley and the others must right now be as unconscious as these guards. Their whole plan was shattered.

"Hurry, Rett!" She was urging him almost fiercely forward, out of the office and into a main hall.

They came to a barred door, now swinging open. How had she opened the doors, Birrel wondered? But a science that could throw this deathlike trance on a building full of men would make short work of locks.

The girl quickened her pace, urging him along faster. In a moment they came out into the darkness of the summer night, in a parking-court with a half-dozen official cars in it. The high gate to the street was closed. Just inside it was a long sedan whose motor purred softly. She ran toward it, her strong fingers clutching Birrel's wrist.

As she opened the rear door of the sedan, the flashing-on of the roof-light disclosed a man sitting at the wheel.

He was older than the girl, dark like her but with a craggy lined face, and eyes that might have been humorous if they were not so alert and alarmed. He too wore around his neck a silver egg that hummed.

"Kara, you took too long!" he said. "Any minute—"

"It took time to find him," she said. "I'll open the gate. No, Rett—you get in, quick!"

As Birrel climbed unsteadily into the rear seat, the girl—so her name was Kara?—ran and swung open the street-gate, then ran back to the car.

Birrel's mind was clearing but things were happening too fast. He heard a continuous thin, whining sound that was coming from the front seat. It came from a square black box that rested on the seat beside the driver.

The girl Kara leaped into the back with Birrel and said, "Turn it off now, Holmer—and
go
!"

The man at the wheel reached and touched the box, and the whining sound ceased. Then, instantly, he snicked on the headlights, and sent the car leaping out through the open gate into the alley.

Within two minutes, they were out in the glittering stream of Fourth Avenue's night traffic, heading north.

Only then did the girl turn to Birrel. She said, almost passionately,

"Rett, where have you
been
? All these weeks, Holmer and I almost going crazy—"

Birrel had an answer for that, all prepared. "They caught me. They questioned me, time after time. Finally, when they couldn't get anything out of me, they were going to hold me for trial."

Kara nodded swiftly. "We guessed that, when we finally saw the newspaper mention of an unidentified spy being held. They didn't suspect who you really are?"

He had his answer ready for that too. "No. They still don't dream of such a thing. They thought I was from another country here."

"But the Irrian?" Kara pressed. "What became of
him
?"

It took Birrel completely by surprise. "Irrian?" It was only a meaningless name to him. He had no answer for this, at all.

He said, floundering, "What do you mean—"

"Vannevan's man," she said, impatiently. "The Irrian you were trailing. Rett, try to clear your mind. Did the Earthmen catch the Irrian too?"

It made no sense at all to Birrel. All he could gather was that the dead spy, Rett, had, when killed near that atomic depot, been trailing someone. Someone called "the Irrian" and "Vannevan's man." Who was Vannevan?

He had to take a chance. He said, slowly, "I was the only one they captured."

She said again, "But what about the Irrian? Did you have to blast him?"

Birrel, his mind racing like a trapped animal seeking escape, suddenly remembered something. The word "blast" made him remember. It was the thing that had puzzled Connor's agents, the charred gouge in the ground that they had found near the dead spy.

Again, he had to gamble. Aware that it was a complete leap in the dark he said,

"Yes. I had to blast him."

Her small, strong hands clenched together. "If only you could have taken him, as you planned. If we could have taken him back, it would be complete proof of what Vannevan's doing here."

Birrel couldn't get this at all. He was bewildered, all his previous assumptions and those of Connor completely upset.

They had had it figured out, they thought. The dead man was a spy from another world. He would have colleagues, a group who had come here to search out Earth's most potent defense secrets, with some deadly purpose surely. Birrel's job, his imposture, was to lead to the others.

But—it seemed now that these secret ones, this Kara and Holmer, themselves had enemies. The dead man, Rett, had been trailing one. An Irrian. Who were the Irrians? Who was Vannevan, and what was
he
up to?

A sense of nightmare unreality suddenly swept Birrel. Their car was crossing lower Times Square. The blaze of lights, the after-show crowds, the winking signs—all were so utterly normal. And here, in the midst of it, he rode with a man and woman of a far world, speaking their language, talking tensely of things he didn't even understand.

Birrel felt a frantic desire to rip the door open and plunge out of the car, to run and lose himself in the cheerful crowds.

He couldn't. He'd taken the job and he had to go through with it—to find out where their base was, to find out what threat they represented.

"But I have to play it alone," he thought, with sinking heart.

Connor and Paley and the rest, who had planned so carefully to follow them, had never foreseen that stunning force that had struck.

Birrel became aware that they had crossed town and were running through the Lincoln Tunnel. In a few minutes they were on a main highway, heading north.

How long could he keep up this imposture? How long till he made some slip, some blunder—

Holmer, his voice quiet but with a sudden edge to it, said, "There's a car following us. I wasn't sure till we got through the Tunnel."

With sudden reaction, Birrel's hopes leaped. Then Connor and the others had come to in time to follow? Yet it hardly seemed possible....

"
Vannevan!
" Kara's exclamation was so fierce that it startled him.

"It can't be anybody else," Holmer grimly agreed. "That newspaper story about the captured spy—it drew
him
to the prison too, it seems."

Whoever Vannevan might be, Birrel thought, it was evident that these two hated and feared him like the devil.

Holmer gripped the wheel tighter, and the car suddenly lunged faster. He said, without turning, "You know what it means. The Irrians know now that we followed them to Earth. Hold on, we have to lose them!"

As by a lightning-flash, the shocking truth was abruptly revealed to Birrel.
Two
groups of secret agents, bitterly hostile to each other, playing a vast and deadly game against each other, were on the unsuspecting Earth!