"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!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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