Then, on the far side of Washington, D.C., several miles from the laboratory of Dr. Wolstadt, it struck the head of a human being. * * * * * Philip Merriwether was a nobody. He made thirty-five dollars a week at a very dull job and lived in a cheap rooming house that had been built around 1880 and not remodeled since. He was still wearing a suit he had bought in 1947, and on his thin, five-foot-four frame, it looked even older. His education had stopped at the sixth grade, and he had almost flunked out of that. He had a mousy face, stringy hair, and a dull look in his eyes. In other words, he was just about as nobody as a human being can get without being an absolute bum. It wasn't that Phil Merriwether was really stupid; he was simply afflicted with an incredibly bad memory. He could forget more in five minutes than he could learn in five years. Oh, he could remember commonplace things easily enough--his name, where he lived, things like that. He could read and write tolerably well, although his spelling was intolerable. He could add and subtract with fair ease, but, having forgotten most of the multiplication table, he found "higher mathematics," such as long division, almost impossible to do without hours of laborious thinking. In a way, his poor memory was economically useful. Phil loved to read mystery stories, and, having collected a total of fifty-seven paperback editions of the better detective novels, he found that there was no necessity of buying more, because he could re-read the old ones. By the time he got around to them again, he had forgotten the plot and the identity of the murderer. Naturally, he never tried to solve any of them; he could never remember the clues. In routine work, Phil Merriwether was fairly efficient. If he did something every day, he could remember it overnight, and could do it again the next day. But his superiors soon found out that it was almost disastrous to give him a vacation, because he had a tendency to forget what he was supposed to do when he came back to work. That is, if he remembered to show up for work. In spite of all that, Phil was a nice sort of fellow. He was likable, in a dull sort of way, and got along with most of his fellow workers. He couldn't tell funny stories, of course, nor play a decent game of cards, but he was an excellent conversationalist because, no matter what was said to him, he could never think of an argument against it. He was a good listener because he hadn't anything to say.