Marshall Zebatinsky, a Polish-American nuclear physicist, feels his career has stalled.
The story ends by revealing that the entire sequence was orchestrated by two powerful aliens making a bet on whether they could prevent a nuclear war on Earth with a single, tiny change. Real-Life Inspiration
Security agencies find the name change suspicious, suspecting he is trying to hide his background.
While investigating him, they discover he has a distant cousin in the Soviet Union who is also a physicist.