EDDIE BY FRANK RILEY _It's no surprise that the top brass was in a complete swivet; Eddie knew answers to questions that weren't even asked. What's more_, nothing _was a secret with him around!_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] _Philip Duncan, the St. Louis attorney and former FBI agent, who wrote the definitive "History of Espionage", observes that in all the records dealing with spies and counterspies there is no more significant case than that of Dr. John O'Hara Smith, an electronics research engineer. Duncan maintains that Dr. Smith, whose rather quixotic name is real and not assumed, contributed more to the advancement of espionage and counter-espionage methods than any one person in history._ _For a period of more than a year, the case of Dr. John O'Hara Smith was known to only a few security and defense officials. The first public reference to it came on November 22, 1956, when an assistant to Secretary of Defense Wilson obliquely commented on it in testimony before the House Military Affairs Committee. Subsequently, more details were leaked to several Washington correspondents, and then vigorously denied. A brief account of the matter appeared on an inside page of the New York Times, but aroused no general interest._ _As a matter of fact, so little is known about the entire case that several of the people who were in on its early phases are still not sure whether Dr. John O'Hara Smith is alive or dead, or whether he was a spy or counterspy._ _However, on the basis of information now declassified, plus two highly technical papers presented to the Institute of Research Engineers, anyone sufficiently interested can reconstruct most of the case._ * * * * * It began at approximately 7:15 P.M., August 11, 1955, when Dr. John O'Hara Smith returned with a bag of groceries to his house trailer in the Mira Mar Trailer Park, overlooking a long blue reach of the Pacific Ocean, some twelve miles south of Los Angeles. He put the groceries on the drainboard beside his spotless two-burner butane stove, carefully flicked away a speck of dust and then stepped eagerly toward the rear of his trailer, where an intricate assembly of tubes and wires occupied what normally would have been the dining area. Dr. Smith flipped on a switch, and then received what he later called, in his precise, pedantic way, a split-second premonition of danger. The Go-NoGo panel light flashed and went out; the transistor looked grey instead of red; the wires to the binary-coded digitizer were crossed; the extra module in the basic assembly had not been there that morning....