ory. Kellner had clammed up, and when the now suspicious editor
had tried to check Colquhoun's tale personally, Colquhoun had
vanished. A snooping neighbor had noted the license of the car that
had taken him away. The Highway Department--the editor must have
moved fast and decisively--showed the license plate as issued to a man
the editor knew personally as a special agent of the Kansas City
Branch of the FBI.

Then hell began to pop. Repeated long-distance calls to Washington ran
him up against a stone wall. The answers he got convinced him that
there was something to Colquhoun's wild tale, something weird and yet
something that had a germ of truth. (Half of this, understand, was in
the _Sentinel_. The other half I picked up later on, adding two and
two.) As he was sitting mulling things over it was his turn to get a
call from Washington. The State Department was on the line; Morgan,
the Under Secretary.

Morgan fairly yelled at him. "Where did you get that information?
What's the idea?" and so on. That clinched it for the editor. Then it
was he knew.

Morgan made his mistake there. He began to threaten, and the editor
hit the ceiling. Hit it hard, because he stretched things a little. He
stretched it more than just a little.

He said, "Furthermore, that's on the street right now--this is a
newspaper, not a morgue!"

It wasn't on the street, the editor knew. Perhaps he wanted to throw a
scare into Morgan, perhaps--But Morgan!

Morgan gasped, "Oh, my God!" and hung up with a bang.

The editor flipped a mental coin. His circulation was not what it
should be, the boss had been riding him lately, his job might be where
a beat would tilt the balance up or down. The national safety that
Morgan had shouted about--well, if we had the perfect weapon and the
perfect defense, what was there to fear? And this _was_ a newspaper,
not a morgue! They replated, and the first extras hit the street to
wake up half the city. The wire services had the story and extras were
rolling throughout the country, or the world, about the time I was
watching the sun over Lake Ste. Clair.

Neither the State Department nor the FBI were on their toes that day.
Instead of denying everything, or instead of laughing heartily at the
pipedream of an editor trying to sell an extra edition or two, whoever
was pulling the strings behind the scenes demanded flatly that all
wire services kill and disregard all references to Colquhoun. No one
ever made