ccustomed to the handling of steel ingots and the
fabrication of ships than to building with words. But, if I cannot
write history as history is written, perhaps I can write it the way it
is lived, and that must suffice.

This account of certain events must have a title, I am told. I have
used, as you see: "Holocaust." Inadequate!--but what word can tell
even faintly of that reign of terror that engulfed the world, of those
terrible thirty days in America when dread and horror gripped the
nation and the red menace, like a wall of fire, swept downward from
the north? And, at last--the end!

It was given to me to know something of that conflict and of its
ending and of the man who, in that last day, took command of Earth's
events and gave battle to Mars, the God of War himself. It was against
the background of war that he stood out; I must tell it in that way;
and perhaps my own experience will be of interest. Yet it is of the
man I would write more than the war--the most hated man in the whole
world--that strange character, Paul Stravoinski.

You do not even recognize the name. But, if I were to say instead the
one word, "Paul"--ah, now I can see some of you start abruptly in
sudden, wide-eyed attention, while the breath catches in your throats
and the memory of a strange dread clutches your hearts.

'Straki,' we called him at college. He was never "Paul," except to me
alone; there was never the easy familiarity between him and the crowd
at large, whose members were "Bill" and "Dick" and other nicknames
unprintable.

But "Straki" he accepted. "_Bien, mon cher ami_," he told me--he was
as apt to drop into French as Russian or any of a dozen other
languages--"a name--what is it? A label by which we distinguish one
package of goods from a thousand others just like it! I am unlike: for
me one name is as good as another. It is what is here that
counts,"--he tapped his broad forehead that rose high to the tangle of
black hair--"and here,"--and this time he placed one hand above his
heart.

"It is for what I give to the world of my head and my heart that I
must be remembered. And, if I give nothing--then the name, it is less
than nothing."

* * * * *

Dreamer--poet--scientist--there were many Paul Strakis in that one
man. Brilliant in his work--he was majoring in chemistry--he was a
mathematician who was never stopped. I've seen him pause, puzzled by
some phase of a problem that, to me,