"That idea's been around a long time," I said. "There was a theory——"
"Then there was the matter of the views of Mars," the general went on. "The aerial shots of the 'canals' were regarded as very cleverly done." He turned to Pruffy, who opened his briefcase and handed a couple of photos across.
"This is a scene taken from the film," Smale said. It was an 8x10 color shot, showing a row of mounds drifted with pinkish dust, against a blue-black horizon.
Smale placed another photo beside the first. "This one," he said, "was taken by automatic cameras in the successful Mars probe of last year."
I looked. The second shot was fuzzy, and the color was shifted badly toward the blue, but there was no mistaking the scene. The mounds were drifted a little deeper, and the angle was different, but they were the same mounds.
"In the meantime," Smale bored on relentlessly, "a number of novel products appeared on the market. Chemists and physicists alike were dumfounded at the theoretical base implied by the techniques involved. One of the products—a type of pigment—embodied a completely new concept in crystallography."
"Progress," I said. "Why, when I was a boy——"
"It was an extremely tortuous trail we followed," Smale said. "But we found that all these curious observations making up the 'Martians' file had, in the end, only one factor in common. And that factor, Mr. Legion, was you."