ON JANUARY 20, 1946, THE PHILADELPHIA Record published a story titled “Stranger Than Fiction,” by the reporter Alfred M. Klein. It described a secret research laboratory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard that had been staffed by three science fiction writers, Heinlein, de Camp, and “Azimov,” who had been asked to build “some of these superweapons and atom-powered spaceships you’ve been creating on paper.”
