Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I would have liked to think so. It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs, and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in the report that I'd been struck by lightning. It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast--faster than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered _before_ I woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But the _kind_ and _type_ of scars on my body didn't ring true. Electricity--even freak lightning--doesn't make that kind of burns. And my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people. But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't think I was crazy; he thought _he_ was. I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me. "I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But--" his jaw grew stubborn, "the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to have something for the record."