At 8:45 PM Mannie Zoller stood outside the doorway of the beer hall.   Like so many others nearby, he was dressed in the clothes of a vagabond.   Like so many others nearby, his garments were torn and tattered; his shoes scruffy and unmatched, his baggy trousers tied with a length of cord.   Like so many others nearby, he reeked of cheap liquor and wore a thick, neck-to-shin length burlap overcoat to keep out the biting cold.   But Mannie was not like any of the others near the beer hall.   For the others were not highly paid nuclear physicists, employed at NASA’s jet-propulsion laboratories.   And the others were not about to commit cold-blooded murder!

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In May 1981 Richard Nixon took office as President of the United States of America, for the first time.   Nixon would go on to become the first American president to hold office for four consecutive terms (after a special constitutional amendment was introduced to allow him to remain past the normal maximum two terms), finally retiring gracefully in late 1996.

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Mannie Zoller worked long into the night, locked away behind the cast-iron door, that locked Mannie into his workshop (”The bomb shelter” as his neighbours had Christened the solid concrete structure, which Mannie had built in his small back yard: its four windowless, metre-thick walls were embedded with switchboards and power points, the ceiling lined with four-bar fluorescent lights) and locked the world out.

Mannie didn’t care that his neighbours thought him a bit strange and avoided him.   Mannie was used to seclusion.   His mother, Ruth, had died at Auschwitz in September 1945 (he had never known his father) and Mannie had been alone ever since.   And he had been forced to work long hours before, often right through the night, behind locked doors in a clothing factory in Berlin, as a child in the early 1940s.

Now Mannie lived in America, and worked at NASA as a nuclear physicist.   A post he had held for twenty-three years, since March 1976, after obtaining the necessary degrees at night school, over nearly ten years, while working as a janitor at the University of California by day.