K-17 removed a copy of Atomic Science Stories from the newsstand and went up to his hotel room. He sat down to read it.
He had been attracted by the picture of the space ship on the cover, because it reminded him very much of the one in which he had come to Earth from Rigel IV. And then, when he looked closer at it, he discovered that the four-tentacled purple creatures in the ship looked not a little like his fellow Rigelians.
This made him homesick, and so, in direct defiance of the orders he had received from his superiors, he pulled down the shades and turned off the gadget that set up the hypnotic field around him. Once more he was four-tentacled and purple, instead of two-armed and pink, and it felt good.
He began to read through the stories. The first of them concerned an invader from another planet who was on Earth disguised as a man.
Good Vog! K-17 thought to himself. They're on to us.
He looked over the story again. They had some of the details wrong, of course, such as saying that the Rigelians—whom they called the Capellans, for some strange reason—had mouths like octopi, whereas actually they had no mouths at all. But on the whole it was a circumstantial and convincing account of the capture of a Rigelian spy.
The story had taken place in Philadelphia. That meant they had M-22. This was serious. He picked up his magneto-oscillophone and called the home base on the other side of the moon.
"This is K-17," he reported. "I have just read in a Terran publication details of the capture of M-22."
"Impossible!" the voice snorted in his auditory nerve. "We have been receiving regular reports from M-22."
"They must have replaced him with a human spy," K-17 mused.