Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the room ... "now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ..." the noise of mixed applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering through the rooms of the cabin.

"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!"

My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses. There was nothing wrong with the radio. "Mike. What did you do to it?"

"I wish I knew," I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button again.

Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.

I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the "Fate" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.

"You'd better let it alone!" Andy said shakily.

The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice came sleepily from the alcove.

"Going to read all night, Mike?"

"If I feel like it," I said tersely and began walking up and down again.

"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!" Andy exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. "Sorry, Andy."

Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit suicide—but I hadn't.

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