That had been six months ago. Three more test rockets had been fired successfully before the urgent report came through from Alaskan Observation Post No. 4. A rocket was coming across the Pole. The strange rocket was tracked and escorted by atomic armed fighters all the way to the Rocket Testing Station where it cut its own motors and gently landed. In the center of a division of atomic-armed infantry the captain, the doctor, and everyone else, waited impatiently. There was an air of uneasiness. "You're sure it's not ours?" Captain Baird asked. The doctor laughed. "Identical, yes, but three times the size of ours." "Perhaps one of the Asian ones?" "No, it's our design, but too large, much too large." Professor Schultz put their thoughts into words. "Looks like someone copied ours. Someone, somewhere. It's hard to imagine, but true nevertheless." They waited two weeks. Nothing happened. Then a radiation-shielded team went in to examine the rocket. Two more weeks and the strange rocket was dismantled and spread over the field of the testing station. The rocket was dismantled and the station had begun to talk to itself in whispers and look at the sky. Captain Baird stood now at the window and looked out at the dismantled rocket. He looked but his mind was not on the parts of the rocket he could see from the window. "The materials, they're not ours?" the captain asked. "Unknown here," the doctor said. The captain nodded. "Those were our instruments?" "Yes." The doctor still held the whiskey bottle in a tight grip. "They sent them back," the captain said. * * * * * The doctor crashed the bottle hard against the desk top. "Ask it, Captain, for God's sake!!" The captain turned to face the doctor directly. "It was a man, a full grown man." The doctor sighed as if letting the pent-up steam of his heart escape. "Yes, it is a man. It breathes, it eats, it has all the attributes of a man. But it is not of our planet." "Its speech ..." the captain began. "That isn't speech, Captain," the doctor broke in, breaking in sharply, "It's only sound." The doctor stopped; he examined the label of his bottle of whiskey very carefully. A good brand of whiskey. "He seems quite happy in the storeroom. You know, Captain, what puzzled me at first? He can't read. He can't read anything, not even the instruments in that ship. In fact he shows no interest in his rocket at all." The captain sat down now. He sat at the desk and faced the doctor. "At least _they_ had the courage to send a man, not a mouse. Doctor, a man." The doctor stared at the captain, his hand squeezing and unsqueezing on the whiskey bottle. "A man who can't read his own instruments?" The doctor laughed. "Perhaps you too have failed to see the point? Like that stupid general who sits out there waiting for the men from somewhere to invade?" "Don't you think it's a possibility?"