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 

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