The cabin was small and cozy and smelled of pine and cedar and fish. I sat on one of the bunks and pawed through a suit-case while Fred moved around and lighted kerosene lamps and played boy scout with the fire place. I found what I was looking for and then discovered a glass on the window sill. I wiped it out, thinking all the time about detective stories where the private eye took his straight--in a dirty glass. Fred didn't approve of drinking on fishing trips and his plump face showed it. "You look scared, Charley." "I am." "Something to do with going into the woods back there?" "That's right. A lot to do with it." He sat on the bunk opposite me and concentrated on tamping tobacco into his pipe. "You wouldn't care to tell me about it, would you?" "Sure, I'll tell you," I said. "I'll tell anybody. I'll tell the whole world." I tilted the glass to my lips and let the liquid burn its way down. "It started with a damned good friend of mine named Kelley." And I told Fred the same story that Kelley had told me. And I told him what I had discovered back in the woods. Fred laughed. "You're taking it too seriously, Charley. If you did some research on it, I'd bet you ten to one that you'd find a natural cause for everything." "I've done some research," I said tightly. "Only I didn't know that I was doing it at the time." I felt a little reluctant to talk. This wasn't the sort of setting where you talked about an invasion from another world. The door of the cabin was open and I could smell the lake and the night air and the nearby pines. It made it seem so damned unreal. "What kind of research?" "Nothing intentional--just stuff I picked up every day." The level in the bottle went down another half an inch. "They're running a regular commuter service, Fred. They're bringing them in by the thousands. By the hundreds of thousands. And all within the last few years." He seemed interested. "Why do you say the last few years?" I shivered. "The number of sightings of strange lights in the sky that have been made, for one thing. And population statistics for another. Our birthrate has been declining for some time. But in recent years the population has shot way up. More than it should." "It's the veterans. Starting new families." "Yeah? How many vets do you know with a lot of kids?" "Anything else?" Fred asked softly. "It's the perfect time for it," I mumbled. "World's all mixed up, everything is in a state of flux. They could land and how could you tell? DP's come into the country every day. That's one reason why we never notice." "And you can't tell the aliens from human beings, can you?" "No, you can't." I paused and wiped away the sweat from my forehead. "They're perfect copies. There's no way of finding them out. The man in the store could have been one. The driver was--and I couldn't have guessed." I laughed. "You could be one, too, for that matter."