The Sinister Invasion

It was strange, how easy it was to step right out of your own life, right out of the familiar Earth into cosmic mystery! As easy, Birrel was to think later, as opening a door....

As Birrel walked into his 71st Street apartment, snapping on the light and pocketing his keys, he suddenly stopped, tense with surprise.

A man he had never seen before stood facing him. A commonplace-looking man with a gray hat, gray suit, and a grayish, young-middle-aged face. His voice was mild as he said,

"Ross Birrel?"

"That's right," said Birrel. Then anger swept away his astonishment. "Who are you and how the hell did you get in here?"

"We'll discuss that later," said the gray man. "Right now, I want you to come with me. Official business."

"What kind of official business?"

"We'll discuss that later too."

Birrel started forward, his temper dangerously high. Then he stopped. The gray man's hand was in his coat pocket, and it was gripping something in that pocket. He said,

"Please don't be difficult, Mr. Birrel."

Birrel said, "If you're an official of some sort, let's see your credentials."

"I'm afraid," said the other, "I don't have any."

"I thought so." Birrel began to breathe hard. "Listen, you've made a mistake. I'm not a rich man, or a rival gangster, or anybody you want. I'm an electrical engineer, a bachelor, and I'm stone broke."

"We know that," murmured the gray man. "Now will you come along?"

Birrel suddenly decided that the man was crazy. New York was full of nuts these days, people flipping their lids and doing daffy things. This was one of them—and there was only one thing to do.

"All right, but you'll regret this," he said. He started to turn his back on the gray man. "When you find out you're wrong—"

Birrel, turning, whirled with sudden speed, his arm snaking out to catch the gray man's neck with the edge of his hand, the old trick they'd taught him in the OSS in war-time.

It didn't work.

The gray man ducked and chopped expertly with his left hand. A numbing pain hit Birrel's extended arm.

For the first time, the gray man smiled. "Sorry. But I was in the OSS too, you see."

Birrel, holding his aching arm, stared. This wasn't a nut after all. But what—?

"Look, Mr. Birrel. I have no sinister designs against you, in any way. We merely have a proposition to put to you. You can accept or refuse it. But unfortunately, I have to do this secretly. That's why I couldn't phone or write or approach you in public."

Birrel thought rapidly. Not a nut, no. But what kind of official business would have to be done
this
secretly? He didn't like it, not at all.

"Shall we go?"

Birrel looked at the hand in the coat pocket. He went.

He came out into the cool dark wetness of 71st Street, the summer shower over and the red and white neon signs toward Broadway reflected cheerily on wet asphalt. A sedan, with a man at its wheel, was waiting.

He heard the mild voice close behind his ear. "Get right in, Mr. Birrel."

The car swept them up the West Side Highway, with the electric glow of Manhattan behind them. Ahead, the strung-out lights of George Washington Bridge arched the black gulf of the river.

Birrel sat in the back seat, with the gray man keeping well away from him at the other end of the seat. He could see nothing of the driver but a thick neck under a crusher hat.

They crossed the Hudson and went on westward, skirting cities and running quietly and fast through a region of small factories and junk-heaps and power-plants.

Birrel felt a mounting panic. What the devil had he got mixed up in? He tried to think why anyone would want to grab him like this.

He couldn't think of anything. Since the war he'd completed his education, taken his engineering degree, landed a job in a Long Island electric company, and—that was all. He didn't know any technical secrets, he wasn't doing any top-secret work, he was an utterly undistinguished thirty-year-old engineer and nothing more.

Then why?

"Listen," he said, "I know there's a mistake—"

"No mistake," said the gray man. He added, "We're nearly there."

"There" was a high wire fence with a locked gate and a red sign, INDUSTRIAL CYANOGEN COMPANY—DANGER, KEEP OUT. A man came out of a little wooden building inside the gate, and unlocked and opened it. The car went on through.

It stopped, after a moment, in front of a big, dark old-fashioned brick factory building with a forlorn, out-of-date look about it. The only light was a dingy bulb over the door in front.

"This is it, Birrel. Come along."

Inside, Birrel got a shock of surprise. It wasn't the cavernous, dark interior he expected. There was light, the sound of clicking typewriters and teletypes, the clack of heels on corridor floors.

The old factory building, he saw now was a blind. Behind its dingy walls and masked windows were at least two floors of offices. The doors of them all were closed, but he heard the hum and buzz of earnest activity from behind them.

Gray-face nudged him toward one of the doors. The thick-necked driver went on somewhere.

Birrel looked around a featureless little office with a battered table, some office chairs, and nothing else.

He turned. "What the devil is this place?"

"A government agency," said Gray-face.

Birrel said, "Listen, how long are you going to keep this—"

He stopped, and was aware that his jaw was hanging in foolish surprise. A man had come into the office.

A stocky, iron-haired man of fifty or more, with a heavy, seamed face and eyes not much softer than flint. Birrel had never seen him face to face before, but he knew him.

"Why—"

"Yes," said Gray-face, obviously enjoying himself. "It's Mr. John Connor." He turned and said, "Here he is, Mr. Connor. I believe he thought we were taking him for a ride."

"All right, Paley," said Connor brusquely. "Sit down. Birrel. Sorry to haul you out here but this is important. Will you take that moronic stare off your face and
sit down
?"

Birrel sat, swallowing hard. This he hadn't expected.

He had been in the OSS more than a year, and he'd never even got within shouting distance of John Connor, the most famous of its directing brains. And now, eleven years later, to meet him this way in a masked factory that was an office—

Birrel said, weakly, "Then this
is
a government agency?"

"It is," said Connor. "The most secret one of all. We don't give out interviews, and have addresses, like the CIA and FBI." He nodded toward the gray-faced man. "You'll understand why I sent Paley for you this way, why I couldn't write or phone you."

"But I thought you'd retired, after the war!" Birrel said. "The newspapers—"

John Connor said disgustedly, "The hell and all of an OSS man you must have been, if you believe everything you read in newspapers."

Birrel thought he understood now. One of the secret counter-espionage agencies by which America defended itself—so secret that probably few government-officials even knew about it. But—

Connor's rough voice answered his thought. "We need a man, Birrel. For a job. And it must be a man we can trust absolutely. That's why we looked through the OSS files—and found you."

"Oh, now, listen," protested Birrel, rising. "My service was years ago, I've got a profession, and this isn't war-time now. You can find better agents than me—"

Connor said brutally, "I could find five hundred agents better than you. I'd rather have anyone of them than you. Unfortunately, you've got something they haven't."

"What?"

"The right face, Birrel."

Birrel didn't get it, he didn't get it at all. But Connor gave him no time to think. He demanded,

"You'd help us if you thought it might mean life or death to your country, wouldn't you?"

Birrel knew he was about to be trapped, but there was only one way you could answer that. "Sure, but—"

Connor cut him off. "Fine. Now I'm going to show you someone, Birrel. Come along."

They went out of the office, and down a long corridor and then down a flight of concrete steps. Connor said nothing on the way, and neither did Paley.

The cement-walled basement corridor below was chilly. Lights glowed in its ceiling. In front of a closed steel door stood an alert young man with a submachine-gun cradled in his arm.

Connor nodded to him and said, "All right." He produced a key from his pocket and unlocked the door.

Not until they were inside the room, and the door locked behind them, did either Connor or Paley say another word.

Birrel's glance darted around. The room, an ice-cold concrete cubicle, had nothing in it at all but a hospital table on which lay a long something covered by a sheet. From it came a strongly chemical smell.

He felt a wave of relief. So that was why he had been brought here with all the hush-hush—to identify a dead someone? It was the only possible explanation—

"Six weeks ago," Connor was saying, "near one of our most secret atomic depots, a prowler was challenged. He tried to escape. He was shot and instantly killed."

He said then, "All right, Paley. Uncover him."

Paley went to the table. He took hold of the white sheet. His hand trembled a little, and there were sudden beads of sweat on his forehead despite the freezing cold of the room. He looked as though he did not want at all to carry out the order.

Connor's harsh breathing was loud. Birrel wondered why they were so affected. Surely not by the sight of a dead man—they, even more than he, had seen plenty of dead men in the war years.

The sheet was pulled halfway back. A naked man lay on the table, his dark eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

He was fairly young, black-haired, with faintly swarthy skin and a blocky, undistinguished face. He looked vaguely familiar....

With a shock, Birrel realized that the dead man looked not unlike himself. Not a twin-like resemblance, but still, a strong resemblance.

He looked up quickly to Connor. He was amazed by the expression in Connor's heavy face. The lines in it had deepened. His half-narrowed eyes stared almost hauntedly at the dead man.

Paley had moved back from the table, and there was a strain in his gray face as he looked across the body at them.

"He was a spy," Connor said. "There's no doubt about that at all. And a very skillful one, to get into that guarded area."

Birrel asked, "From what country?"

Connor looked at him. He said, "From no country. You see, we ran a post-mortem on him, and—"

He stopped. He looked as though he didn't want to say what he was going to say, as though he had to force himself against a whole lifetime's beliefs and thinking, to say this thing.

"He wasn't an Earth man at all. He was from somewhere else. Some other world."