The Nameless Something

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BUD GREGORY was something there isn't any word for. He bet on a dirt-track automobile race in the State of Colorado, and won twelve dollars. Simultaneously, a certain European Power made a very polite apology to the Icelandic Government for the falling of a rocket-projectile near Reykjavik. In so doing, it advertised publicly that it had long-range guided missiles capable of flights of over two thousand miles.

Next day, Bud Gregory bet on a second dirt-track race and won six dollars more. At very nearly the same instant, Izvestia published a bellicose article which practically called for war on the United States—UNO or no UNO—and a middle European nation offered a calculated, uncalled-for insult to its United States ambassador. The day after, Bud Gregory sat in the bar of a motor-tourist camp and drank beer contentedly all day long.

Two days later still, on a mountain highway in the Rockies, the driver of a sixteen-wheel Diesel truck came booming to a sharp curve which had a cliff on one side and a four-hundred-foot drop on the other.

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