Four other men stood in the room, all were armed, none seemed surprised to see him. The man at the desk wore a neat suit; the others were in uniform.
Harley leant on the door-jamb and sobbed. He could find no words to say.
“It has taken you four years to get out of there,” the thin man said. He had a thin voice.
“Come and look at this,” he said, indicating the screen before him. With an effort, Harley complied; his legs worked like rickety crutches.
On the screen, clear and real, was Calvin’s bedroom. The outer wall gaped, and through it two uniformed men were dragging a strange creature, a wiry, mechanical-looking being that had once been called Calvin.
“Calvin was a Nititian,” Harley observed dully. He was conscious of a sort of stupid surprise at his own observation.
The thin man nodded approvingly.
“Enemy infiltrations constituted quite a threat,” he said. “Nowhere on Earth was safe from them: they can kill a man, dispose of him and turn into exact replicas of him. Makes things difficult…. We lost a lot of state secrets that way. But Nititian ships have to land here to disembark the Non-Men and to pick them up again after their work is done. That is the weak link in their chain.
“We intercepted one such ship-load and bagged them singly after they had assumed humanoid form. We subjected them to artificial amnesia and put small groups of them into different environments for study. This is the Army Institute for Investigation of Non-Men, by the way. We’ve learnt a lot … quite enough to combat the menace…. Your group, of course, was one such.”
Harley asked in a gritty voice: “Why did you put me in with them?”
The thin man rattled a ruler between his teeth before answering.
“Each group has to have a human observer in their very midst, despite all the scanning devices that watch from outside. You see, a Nititian uses a deal of energy maintaining a human form; once in that shape, he is kept in it by self-hypnosis which only breaks down in times of stress, the amount of stress bearable varying from one individual to another. A human on the spot can sense such stresses…. It’s a tiring job for him; we get doubles always to work day on, day off -”
“But I’ve always been there -”
“Of your group,” the thin man cut in, “the human was Jagger, or two men alternating as Jagger. You caught one of them going off duty.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Harley shouted. “You’re trying to say that I -”
He choked on the words. They were no longer pronounceable. He felt his outer form flowing away like sand as from the other side of the desk revolver barrels were levelled at him.
“Your stress level is remarkably high,” continued the thin man, turning his gaze away from the spectacle. “But where you fail is where you all fail. Like Earth’s insects which imitate vegetables, your cleverness cripples you. You can only be carbon copies. Because Jagger did nothing in the house, all the rest of you instinctively followed suit. You didn’t get bored – you didn’t even try to make passes at Dapple – as personable a Non-man as I ever saw. Even the model spaceship jerked no appreciable reaction out of you.”
Brushing his suit down, he rose before the skeletal being which now cowered in a corner.
“The inhumanity inside will always give you away,” he said evenly. “However human you are outside.”