sity campus. For several years, they had all they wanted
of life--comfort, health, happiness. Jeff thought that life could
never be more wonderful. All of his former, bitter, cynical views fell
away from him. Hadn't he, with all odds against him, finally won out
and acquired peace and contentment and a purpose in life? What was
wrong with a world in which that could happen?

Then there was the topper. Jefferson McKinney discovered a new drug
which would cure and eventually eliminate a disease that was one of
the world's worst killers, the drug for which thousands of scientists
had been seeking for years.

He was feted and honored, became a national hero. The story of his
life and his discovery temporarily pushed even the doleful forecasts
of an early Third War, the Big War, off the front pages. And Jeff was
humbly proud and grateful that he had paid now the debt he owed to a
society that could make a final victory, like his, possible.

In a zenith of almost holy happiness, he stood one evening on a
lecture platform in a huge auditorium in a great city, before
thousands of worshipping people to make a thank-you speech after being
awarded a world prize for his great scientific discovery.

But in the middle of his talk he broke off suddenly. A flash of
blinding brilliance slashed through the windows. Horror painted his
face. In a whisper, he cried: "No! No! It would make it all so
senseless!" His eyes looked like the eyes of a man with flaming
splinters jammed under his fingernails. His face seemed to pucker, and
grow infantile. Then he screamed: "No! Leave me alone! I _told_ you I
didn't want to come _out here_, to be one of _you_! Damn you, why did
you bring me _out here_? For--for _this_?..."

There were the shards of glass from the great auditorium windows,
floating inward, turning lazily. There were the brick walls crumbling,
tumbling inward, scattering through the air in the same seeming slow
motion. The dust cloud and the sound, the flat blast-sound, came after
that, as the entire building--perhaps the world--disintegrated in the
eye-searing light....

_December 8th, 1952, Two-Thirty A. M._

The flat of a rubber-gloved hand striking flesh made a splatting
noise. A thin, breathless but concentrated crying followed. The doctor
looked down at his charity clinic patient, the woman under the bright
delivery room lights.

"Look at him--fighting like a little demon!" the doctor said. "Seemed
almost as though he