too, and if you could, maybe there were others—lots of others—enough so we might get together and work out some way of proving to the world—”

The brown man’s fingers were moving. In silence he pushed a photograph across the mahogany. Lyman picked it up unsteadily.

“Moonlight?” he asked after a moment. It was a landscape under a deep, dark sky with white clouds in it. Trees stood white and lacy against the darkness. The grass was white as if with moonlight, and the shadows blurry.

“No, not moonlight,” the brown man said. “Infra-red. I’m strictly an amateur, but lately I’ve been experimenting with infra-red film. And I got some very odd results.”

Lyman stared at the film.

“You see, I live near—” The brown man’s finger tapped a certain quite common object that appeared in the photograph. “—and something funny keeps showing up now and then against it. But only with infra-red film. Now I know chlorophyll reflects so much infra-red light that grass and leaves photograph white. The sky comes out black, like this. There are tricks to using this kind of film. Photograph a tree against a cloud, and you can’t tell them apart in the print. But you can photograph through a haze and pick out distant objects the ordinary film wouldn’t catch. And sometimes, when you focus on something like this—” He tapped the image of the very common object again, “you get a very odd image on the film. Like that. A man with three eyes.”

Lyman held the print up to the light. In silence he took the other one from the bar and studied it. When he laid them down he was smiling.

“You know,” Lyman said in a conversational whisper, “a professor of astrophysics at one of the more important universities had a very interesting little item in the Times the other Sunday. Name of Spitzer, I think. He said that, if there were life on Mars, and if Martians had ever visited earth, there’d be no way to prove it. Nobody would believe the few men who saw them. Not, he said, unless the Martians happened to be photographed....”

Lyman looked at the brown man thoughtfully.

“Well,” he said, “it’s happened. You’ve photographed them.”

The brown man nodded. He took up the prints and returned them to his watch-case. “I thought so, too. Only until tonight I couldn’t be sure. I’d never seen one—fully—as you have. It isn’t so much a matter 

 Prev. P 11/13 next