But Ed Bronson's mind leaped to the foregone conclusion with simple reasoning. Earth One, Earth Two--and Earth Three, where the third possibility had taken place at Alamogordo, on July sixteenth, 1945. This was where the bomb had fizzled--and where, because of that, all forms of atomic research went on without regulation. Not one world, not two worlds, _but three_! Well, there was a perfect way to check this. Bronson knew where the library was, had used it often. It might still be there, for the one in Earth One had been erected in--ah--he did not recall the date but it was something like MDCCCLXXXVI. He turned the corner and walked down the proper street and, after turning the second corner, Bronson saw it--in the same address and in the same building. He wasted no time in finding the newspaper files. * * * * * July sixteenth, 1945, was uninformative. Bronson wondered what the same paper printed in his own world said on that date but guessed that this paper, a morning daily, might have been composed and on the press at the time of the affair--if it had not been already printed. Of security angles for the era he studied, Bronson knew only the mention made in history and tales spun by his father and cronies, who had lived and worked at that time. So Bronson accepted the fact that security might well have suppressed in both worlds--or even all three--any traces of the Alamogordo Experiment for some time to come. He turned to the following day, July seventeen, 1945, and found nothing. On the eighteenth, Bronson saw nothing truly informative but there was an item printed as recorded from Radio Tokyo in which it was claimed that the United States had asked for representatives of the Japanese Government to come to America under a flag of truce. This was construed to mean that the United States was considering surrender. Nothing was visible for several issues after that. Then a vast headline--PEACE--shouted across the page and on page two of the paper, was a brief explanation that the representatives had returned to Japan. A columnist was demanding an answer to what and why the mystery. Another account from Radio Tokyo mentioned that, in a spirit of humanity, Japan had surrendered rather than loose upon the entire world a weapon so terrible as the representatives had been shown. Bronson nodded vaguely. The trail was getting intelligible. He at least knew nothing of this latter fact. He thumbed his way through the paper to the date of the Hiroshima Bomb and found nothing worthy of mention. Nagasaki was not mentioned a week or so later and Bronson, none too clear of his dates, covered days before and after his approximation just to be certain. He pored through the paper and found many references to the Manhattan Project, including one full newspaper, on the general lines of what he recalled of the Smyth Report.