In the end, it was the unwanted attention that did me in. I was doing research in several areas, trying to figure out the best way to share my discovery, when Fate threw me a loop.

You think it's easy to break the news of a discovery like this to the world? What would you do? Submit a paper for publication in Nature or Scientific American and watch your world fall apart while the peer-review process plodded along and the whole world came clamoring to your doorstep? Try to get a patent on the new idea, only to have every huckster on Earth come to you with shady proposals to buy the manufacturing rights and screw their competition? Publish the idea on the Internet, only to have some tin-pot dictator from a banana republic send his goons to kidnap you for his private research staff? Believe me, bub -- if this sort of thing ever happens to you, it will not take you too long to realize you've got a tiger by the tail. Hanging on might not be all that appealing, but God help you if you let go.

Anyway, I was wrestling with all these options when the storm came. I had taken a break from pacing back and forth in the basement to come upstairs and pour a cup of coffee when I happened to look out the window and see the clouds whirling about; sheer dumb luck on my part, but I saw the wind shifting direction and got worried. A minute later, after checking the clouds and looking around outside, I knew we were in deep trouble. Without really thinking too much about it, I ran downstairs and set up the device to generate a hundred-foot bubble. I threw the switch just as I heard a deep thrumming sound echo down the stairs, and then Gagarin and I sat quietly in the basement as the tornado howled past overhead.

When the noise died down, I went upstairs. I looked out the windows in amazement at the devastation; apparently, the tornado had barreled straight through my neighborhood. Debris was everywhere; boards and pink insulation were scattered all over the place, and the homes of my neighbors were shattered wrecks. I ran out the front door and made it halfway into the street before I ran headlong into the bubble.

The sudden impact knocked the wind out of me, and I found myself sprawled on the asphalt, shaking my head and wondering why the air before me had suddenly turned to stone. When I cleared my head, I remembered the device in my basement; I ran downstairs and switched it off, then shot back out of the house to see if any of my neighbors were buried in the rubble. I helped clear the debris covering the entrance to Jim's basement when I heard him digging at the pile from underneath, and soon I grasped his hand and pulled him out into the open. He slapped the dust from his clothes, looked around at the devastation, and then asked the question that sealed my fate.

"How come YOUR house wasn't hit?"

I froze in my tracks, turned, and looked back. There, right in the middle of the tornado's track, my house stood. Completely unscathed. Not a shingle missing, not a limb broken on the tree in the front yard, not a blade of grass out of place.

I mumbled some inane remark about freak winds and blind luck, but when I turned back to face Jim, I saw the look in his eyes. He knew that something strange had happened, and I knew I was in deep, deep trouble.

The news crews arrived before dark.

I had retired to the basement, knowing that my instinctive action to save Gagarin and myself had set in motion a chain of events that would doubtless have serious consequences. I tried to come up with a way out of the mess I was in, but I had no time to think. I debated destroying the device, trying to concoct some story that would satisfy the curiosity of the people converging on the disaster scene, but I knew no story would turn away the curious and I could not bring myself to destroy the device. The knowledge was there, in my brain, and I knew that destroying the device would not solve the problem.

I might have gotten away from the situation, had it not been for the videotape shot by the news crew in the helicopter. Freakish things happen in tornadoes all the time, and I was hoping to just lie low and let the media storm blow over, but the chopper's camera showed the whole world my secret. Over and over, they played the tape on the news -- overhead shots of a tornado track five hundred feet wide through a residential neighborhood, oddly punctuated by a perfect circle of completely undisturbed lawn with a completely untouched house in the middle. It was pretty obvious; even small children were asking their parents, "Daddy, what made that circle around the green house that kept the tornado away?"

I was doomed, and I knew it.

I ignored the doorbell and the people knocking, and shortly afterwards I unplugged the telephone. It certainly did not take the news crews long to track me down; so much for my unlisted telephone number. Even in the basement, I could hear the shouting outside; the news hounds figured I was inside, so they abandoned the doorbell and the polite knocks in favor of screaming questions and challenges at the top of their voices. They sounded to me like baying hounds, eager for the scent of prey. I turned up the stereo and listened to music for a while.

After a few hours, I got bored, switched off the stereo, and turned on the TV. That was a mistake.

In the six hours after the tornado, all the local news outfits had had time to field 'live remote' crews in my neighborhood. After those worthies had done their bit, the spin doctors and tape editors back at the station had their turn. By the time I tuned in, my little enigma had grown so large that it had its own customized graphics and 'media command posts' on four channels. Whatever notions I had entertained about my privacy were quickly laid to rest as I watched my life history flash across the screen.

I sat there and watched, oddly detached as I listened to thirty different 'experts' analyze the events of the day. To me, the most disturbing part of the whole deal was the implicit assumption that I was somehow evil because no one could explain the bubble. I realize that we all share a human tendency to desire order and rational explanations for puzzling phenomena, but the media seemed to take it as a personal insult when they were faced with something inexplicable. Rather than marveling at something new and unexpected, they spent their time making dark speculations about what I had 'done to create this mystery' and 'what secrets lurked in my soul.' I was eerily reminded of the Salem witch trials.

When the police showed up, I got really worried. The news reports had taken a rather alarming tone of late, and I began to be concerned for my own safety. Gagarin took all this in stride, naturally, but I was a bit more upset.

"POLICE! OPEN UP!"

I nearly fell out of my chair in fright. The officer upstairs sounded pretty serious. I glared at Garagin as if to blame him for the whole sorry mess, but he ignored me steadfastly. I went upstairs.

I opened the door and smiled weakly at the officer standing there, and he caught himself just as he was about to deliver another bellow at the front door. Before he could speak, I hatched a desparate plan and bellowed in his face.

"GET THESE PEOPLE BACK! IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN! GET THESE PEOPLE AWAY FROM THE HOUSE!"

Before he could react, I slammed the door in his face and dashed back downstairs. I watched his reaction on the television; he shot across the yard and conferred with his fellow officers. After dozens of frantic radio calls, the police started screaming at the crowd, shooing them away from the house. When I saw that everyone was at a safe distance, I reactivated the device and regenerated the bubble.