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 

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