THE SINISTER INVASION
By Alexander Blade
Birrel rebelled at the idea of becoming a
cosmic counter-spy. But he was the one Earthman
whom a quirk of nature had fitted for the job....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
June 1957
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_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."
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.