been a physicist in the Bureau of Standards when a monstrous atom-pile started up—seemingly of itself—in the Great Smoky Mountains. Murfree alone had realized the nature of the phenomenon and set out to track it down. In tracking it, he'd come upon Bud Gregory, who had an incredible facility for making things that the physicists of the world could not yet imagine, not without knowledge of physical laws they expected or hoped to learn in a hundred years or so.

Bud Gregory was unwittingly responsible for the atomic pile, and Murfree got him to stop it.[1] But Bud fled, afterward, in terror of sheriffs—and work. He was almost illiterate and utterly without ambition, but he had an intuitive knowledge of how to make things that nobody else could understand.

Murfree, now, had a device which was the stock-in-trade of Ocean Products, Inc. He didn't understand it. He didn't hope to. It was beyond him—as far beyond him as, say, the mental processes of a mathematical prodigy who extracts fourth-power roots in his head. But he did know that despite Bud Gregory's violent aversion to work of any sort, he was the only man on earth who could cope with the sort of menace the seven new moons of Earth constituted. So he'd flown across the continent to beg, persuade, or bully Bud into action.

Bud was drawing ten dollars a day from Murfree for doing nothing, right now. It was the height of his earthly ambition to sit in the sun, drink beer, eat hog-meat, not bother anybody and have nobody bother him, and not have to worry about work. So Murfree had some faint hope of influencing him.

Right now he thought he saw an opening in the woods to the left. He could not be sure, but he stopped the car and got out to see. The radiance of his car's headlights in the mist enabled him to be certain. It was the beginning of a no-longer-used trail into the second-growth, not merely a gap in the young trees. There were no recent automobile-tracks, but Bud no longer had a car.

Bud once had one, bought for twenty-five dollars and which he'd impossibly caused to bring his family across the continent. His son Tom had wrecked it some months past. Evidently, he hadn't found another sufficiently dilapidated to suit him.

Murfree turned to go back to his car. Then he heard a plaintive noise overhead. Instinctive cold chills ran down his back. A child's voice came from mid-air over his head.

"Mistuh! We're lost!"

Murfree froze. There was a slight scuffling 

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