When They Come from Space Read Free Page A

to Washington to drum up some more business..."
    I turned around and stared at him, incredulous. Far down in the glacial ice blue of his eyes I thought I detected the faintest possible gleam of affection.
    "You'd better watch that, Henry,” I advised professionally, and was astonished to find my throat was tight. “You might turn into a human being if you're not careful."
    He stood up and came around the desk. He held out his hand. It was a momentous occasion. In all the years, I couldn't remember ever having shaken hands with him before. Although once, at a séance, he'd let me take hold of his hand—the time I established that he had extrasensory powers. Looking back, now, I wonder if he had some premonition, even then, that I wouldn't be back. I hadn't. Even with all my experience in dealing with the military, I was still thinking it was a little error I could clear up with a few words of explanation once I got to the right person.
    It took me an hour to set up the routines of my department to cover my absence for the next couple of days. I had a good assistant who could step in, although I hoped not too perfectly, and with Sara's help...
    It took me the next hour to rush over to my bachelor's apartment to throw some overnight things into a bag. And fight off the usual temptation to overload it by reminding myself that there surely must be stores in Washington, just as here.
    Another precious hour to get over to the airport. Two more of pulling strings and fighting clerical red tape to get a seat on one of the planes which usually left half empty anyway. The airlines were still running to suit the convenience of the clerks rather than the customers. Once in the air, something less than an hour to fly the three thousand miles across the continent, but more than another hour to get from the Washington airport to the Pentagon building.
    That left me thirty-seven hours to find the right department, which was shaving it pretty fine.
    Even Space Navy; after another long hassle of my trying to tell them I wasn't Dr. Kennedy, and their stubbornly maintaining that I was; and the still-longer procedures of signing me in and clearing me for low-level security; weren't sure they ought to let me in on the secret of how to find Dr. Frederick Kibbie.
    But they were damned sure they would court-martial me if I didn't find him. Something was, indeed, going on.
* * * *
    Security prevents me from Revealing the Word of how to find the Department of Extraterrestrial Life Research in the Pentagon. Not that the top hierarchy of Russia doesn't know where it is down to the square inch, but John Q. Public, who pays the bills, mustn't be told.
    And there are reasons.
    Take away the trappings of security regulations, and our special qualifications to meet them, and what have we got left to mark us as superior to the common herd? It's a status symbol, pure and simple, and the gradations from Confidential on up to Q.S. have nothing whatever to do with enemy spies—they merely mark the status relationship of the elect within the select. And, after this passage of events I am about to relate, since I am now one of the, THE, Q.S., and have the awesome weight of knowing things that even—well, I mustn't reveal who isn't allowed to know what I know—I guess that makes me pretty hot. Sometimes even Sara (yes, I had to send for her) begins to show signs of going Government in her attitude toward me.
    But once inside the department door, it was pretty much the same as any other suite of offices. There was first an anteroom where a narrow-eyed and suspicious young man examined the sheaf of credentials Space Navy Personnel had prepared for me while running me through their dehydrated equivalent of six weeks in boot camp. Reluctantly, he passed me on to the next anteroom, where a secretary's secretary confirmed that I had an appointment. In the next room the Secretary, himself, pretended he'd never heard of me, and we had it all to go through again. Of