"Fair," said Coburn. "Any phone calls this morning?" he asked.
"Not this morning," she said politely.
She reached in a desk drawer. She brought out paper. She put it in the typewriter and began to type.
Coburn felt very queer. Then he saw something else. There was a fly in the office—a large, green-bodied fly of metallic lustre. The inhabitants of Salonika said with morbid pride that it was a specialty of the town, with the most painful of all known fly stings. And Helena abhorred flies.
It landed on the bare skin of her neck. She did not notice. It stayed there. Ordinarily she would have jumped up, exclaiming angrily in Greek, and then she would have pursued the fly vengefully with a folded newspaper until she killed it. But now she ignored it.
Hallen came in, stamping. Coburn closed the door behind him. He felt queer at the pit of his stomach. For Helena to let a fly stay on her neck suggested that her skin was ... somehow not like its usual self.
"What happened to those Bulgarians?" demanded Hallen.
Coburn told him precisely what he'd seen when he arrived in Náousa after an eight-mile hike through mountains. Then he went back and told Hallen precisely what he'd seen up on the cliffside.
"His cameras were some sort of weapon. He played it on the marching column, it took effect and they went to sleep," he finished. "I took them away from him and brought them down, but—"
He told about the contents of the camera cases being turned to a gritty, sooty powder. Then he added: "Dillon set them to destroy themselves. You understand. He's not a man. He's a creature from some planet other than Earth, passing for a human being. He's an Invader from space."