I handled the item. My name is Peter Vanderstuyft. I was twenty-three years old, that autumn of 1952, a newsgatherer for the Amalgamated Broadcasters, attached to the New York City headquarters. The item meant nothing to me. It was the forerunner--the significant, tiny beginning--of the most terrible period of the history of the earth; but I did not know that. I tossed it over to Freddie Smith, who was with me in the office that night. "Father's staff has found a new star--wonderful!" But Freddie's freckled face did not answer my grin. For once his pale blue eyes were solemn. "Professor Vanderstuyft phoned me from Washington awhile ago. It sure seems queer." "What's queer?" I demanded. Then he grinned. "Nope. Your father says you'd sell your soul for a news item. When we've got anything important to tell the world--we'll tell you." "Go wrap up an electric spark," I informed him. He grinned again and went back to studying his interminable blue prints--his "thermodyne principle," as he called it, for a new heat-ray motor. Father was financing him for the patents and working model. Freddie was father's assistant in the Washington Observatory. But he was off duty now in New York arranging for the manufacture of his model. This was in October. I was tremendously busy. A sensational murder case developed, and I was sent out to Indiana to cover it. A woman had presumably murdered her husband and a couple of children, but it looked as though she were going to be acquitted. She was a handsome woman, and a good talker. She was taking full advantage of the new law regarding free speech, and every night from the jail she was broadcasting little talks to the public. * * * * * October passed; and then November, and still I had not been able to get back to New York. Freddie occupied my rooms there, busy with his invention; father was at his post in Washington, and my sister Hulda was in Porto Rico, visiting our friends the Cains. Our plans--father's and mine--were to join the Cains and Hulda in Porto Rico for Christmas. Father was leaving the Washington Observatory to assume charge of the Royal Dutch Astronomical Bureau, which had just completed an observatory in extreme Southern Chile, with the largest telescope in the world soon to be installed there. Freddie Smith was going with him as his assistant; and the A. B. Association had appointed me their representative, to live down there also. None of these plans worked out, however. Christmas approached, and I was still engaged in Indiana with this accursed broadcasting murderess. And father wired me that he was too busy in Washington to leave.