CHAPTER III
They came at ten minutes before midnight.
Birrel had been sitting in this cell for some twenty hours. The cell was deep in a jail in downtown Manhattan. It was a solitary cell, for a solitary and important prisoner.
He had a different face now, a dead man's face. The clothing he wore had belonged to that man. He could speak that man's language, to a certain extent. He was not Ross Birrel, he was a man from Someplace-else.
"What's my name, on that other world?" Birrel wondered. "I'm impersonating somebody and don't know who, or what, he was—"
Except that the man he impersonated had been a spy. Secret agent of an unguessable, distant world, ferreting out Earth's defense secrets.
A wave of cold disbelief swept Birrel. It was still too fantastic, too incredible. The scientists were wrong about that body, they must be wrong. Connor was wrong.
But Connor remained grimly convinced. Before his men took Birrel to the prison, he had said,
"They've lost an agent, those people from outside. A valuable man with valuable information. They'll contact you, somehow when our newspaper story appears."