"That's right, Birrel. For someplace else, someplace not on Earth."
Garlock spoke up to Connor, interrupting. "You're giving it to him too fast, John. It took us weeks, and yet you haul him in and hit him in the face with the whole picture. More time—"
"I'm running this, and we haven't got more time," Connor said roughly.
Birrel hardly heard them. He felt as though an earthquake had rocked his mind, had shaken up all his preconceived ideas, all the bases of his thinking for a lifetime.
"But," he said slowly to Connor, "a spy from someplace outside, from another world—does that mean danger? A threat, out there?"
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."