conversation.

Senator Kerotski only listened to a small part of the phone discussion. He knew most of the story.

In the past eight months, six anonymous letters had been received by various companies. As Taggert had once put it, in quotes, "We seem to have an Abudah chest containing a patent Hag who comes out and prophesies disasters, with spring complete."

The Big Bend Power Reactor, near Marfa, Texas, had been warned that their stellarator would blow. The letter was dismissed as "crackpot," and no precautions were taken. The explosion killed nine men and cut off the power in the area for three hours, causing other accidents due to lack of power.

The merchant submarine Bandar-log, plying her way between Ceylon and Japan, had ignored the warning sent to her owners and had never been heard from again.

In the Republic of Yemen, an oil refinery caught fire and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property in spite of the anonymous letter that had foretold the disaster.

The Prince Charles Dam in Central Africa had broken and thousands had drowned because those in charge had relegated a warning letter to the cylindrical file.

A mine cave-in in Canada had extinguished three lives because a similar letter had been ignored.

By the time the fifth letter had been received, the S.M.M.R. had received the information and had begun its investigation. As an ex officio organ of the United States Government, it had ways and means of getting hold of the originals of the letters which had been received by the responsible persons in each of the disasters. All had been sent by the same man; all had been typed on the same machine; all had been mailed in New York.

When the sixth warning had come to the offices of Caribbean Trans-Air, the S.M.M.R., working through the FBI, had persuaded the company's officials to take the regularly scheduled aircraft off the run and substitute another while the regular ship was carefully inspected. But it was the replacement ship that came to pieces in midair.

The anonymous predictor, whoever he was, was a man of no mean ability.

Then letter number seven had been received by the United States Department of Space. It predicted that a meteor would smash into America's Moonbase One, completely destroying it.

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