loor? Hm-m-m?" Reluctantly, the chairman restored order and
motioned Titus to continue. "It is true that the President has been
persuaded to not commit the United States to any further military
adventures until we have given a plan of mine some little time to take
effect. Gentlemen, we have in operation a secret weapon that, if all
goes well, will make any future military undertakings unnecessary and
bring about the destruction of our enemies." At the mention of "secret
weapon," the entire General Staff, excepting Fyfe, creaked forward in
their seats with eager interest. "The secret weapon is an
eighteen-year-old boy named Dolliver Wims, recently commissioned a
lieutenant in the Army and now in Russian hands."

An avalanche of derisive remarks concerning his sanity roared down on
Titus but he ignored them and continued. "Wims came to work for us last
spring and nothing in his manner or appearance indicated that he was in
any way unusual. However, he had hardly been with us a month before
complaints from my staff started flooding my office. Our accident rate
soared skyward and all staff fingers pointed at Wims. I investigated and
discovered that in spite of the accusations Wims was never _directly_
involved in these mishaps. He was present when they occurred, yes, but
he never pushed or bumped anyone or dropped anything or even fingered
anything he wasn't supposed to and yet in the face of this fact, almost
everyone, including my most dispassionate researchers, invariably blamed
Wims. Finding this extremely odd, I kept the boy on and under various
subterfuges I probed, tested and observed him without his knowledge.

"Then one day I became annoyed with him; without just cause I must
admit, merely because I was not getting any positive results; and I
handled him rather roughly. Within seconds I sliced open a finger. My
irritation mounted and later I went to shove him rudely aside and down I
went, giving my head a nasty crack on the edge of a lab bench. I felt
wonderful as I sat in pain on the floor, sopping the blood out of my
eyes. With the blow an idea had come to me and I felt I at last knew
what Wims was and the factor that triggered his dangerous potential. For
weeks afterward, under carefully controlled conditions, I was as nasty
to him as I dared be. It took my most delicate judgment to avoid fatal
injury but I managed to document the world's first known _accident prone
inducer_. I call him Homo Causacadere, the fal