Read Ebook: The Sinister Invasion by Hamilton Edmond Rognan Lloyd Illustrator

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Ebook has 723 lines and 24839 words, and 15 pages

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--

"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."

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.

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

"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.

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--"

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?"

"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."

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