Great,
black, tall shrieking streamer heads:

AMERICA HAS ATOMIC DEFENSE!

I scanned the two columns of stumbling enthusiastic prose that trailed
over on to Page Two. Stein came over and leaned over my shoulder and
breathed on my ear as we read. He hadn't seen the sheet, either. It
ran something like this:

America, it was learned today, has at last an absolute
defense, not only to the atomic bomb, but to every gun,
every airplane, every engine, every weapon capable of being
used by man. Neither admitted nor denied at this early date
by even the highest government officials, it was learned by
our staff late last night that America's latest step
forward....

Column after column of stuff like that. When the reporter got through
burbling, he did have a few facts that were accurate. He did say it
was my doing that set off the last atomic bomb test; he did say that I
was apparently invulnerable to violence powered by electrical or
internal combustion engines; he did say what I could do, and what I
had done, and how often. He didn't say who I was, or what I looked
like, or where I'd come from, or what I did or didn't know.

Sprinkled through the story--and I followed it back to Page 32 and the
pictures rehashed of the traffic jam in Detroit--were references to T.
Sylvester Colquhoun, the boy who dumped the original plate of beans.
He attested this and swore to that. Whoever he was, wherever he got
his information, he--there was his picture on Page 32, big as life and
twice as obnoxious; Mr. Whom and the van Dyke.

Guiltily I handed the paper over to Stein, who turned back to the
front page and started again from the beginning. I tried to carry
things off in the nonchalant manner, but I couldn't. I had to watch
the Old Man light a cigarette with fumbling fingers, take a few
snorting puffs, and crush it viciously under his heel. Miller and his
temper.

Whom--or T. Sylvester Colquhoun--had, quite obviously, a grudge
against the short left that had given him his concussion. According to
the _Sentinel_, he had babbled a bit when he was released from the
hospital, and an alert newshawk had trailed him to his home and
bluffed him into spilling the whole story. He had sense enough, at
that late stage of the game, to keep my name out of it, if he ever
knew it. The reporter had gone to his editor with the story, who had
laughed incredulously at first, and then checked Kellner at the
laborat