The Smuggled Atom Bomb

by Philip Wylie

  Duff looked in. The water, gleaming in the shade, reached back out of sight beneath great, thirsty roots and an overhang of limestone encrusted with fossil shells. Around its rim were faint signs of visitation. Kids came there occasionally—though forbidden by their parents—to catch minnows in traps or just to throw stones for the sake of the splash. The water was too shallow for drowning, but a person could have a nasty fall into it.

  Looking down, Duff remembered the night he’d seen one of the mysterious boxes—if there had ever been “one” among many—in his own homemade lily pool. That thought led to another; the sinkhole reached back out of sight around its rim, and he was wearing old clothes. He could go back to the house for a rope or use a tree. He decided on a tree and found a suitable one nearby, a small palm uprooted by the October blow. He scrambled down it and landed thigh-deep in warm water.

  The bottom was mucky. Overhead was an oval of blue sky. Around him, the sides of the hole curved back and the water glinted in gloom. Sometimes, he recalled, there were alligators in these sinks. He saw none. He walked around the edges, peering into the recess, stirring up mud.

  Presently he came to an area, hidden from above by the overhang, which had been visited by somebody else. Perhaps by several people. And perhaps often. It was a kind of roofed room, open toward the pit; its muddy floor emerged as a soft bank. The bank showed many signs of feet—old markings and some probably not very old. There were flat marks, too, where boards had evidently sunk down into the mucky sediment. One or two boards were visible now, and he located another with his foot, then others. They’d settled beneath the surface of the ooze.

  The footprints weren’t plain, except for one, which he studied. It was the mark of the side of a man’s shoe. The man evidently had fallen on the tarlike stuff. But his leg, curiously enough, had left no print. Duff decided that the man must have turned his ankle to make such a mark.

  He wondered if the FBI had investigated the sinkhole. Doubtless they had; probably the footprints and boards were signs of FBI scrutiny, though there were other possibilities. The little fish in the pool were sought by kids and also by men; they made excellent bait. Some angler might have set minnow traps there from time to time, using boards to stand on. Tramps might have found shelter in the half cave. High-school boys might have used it as a place for a gang meeting or an initiation. It was hidden and pretty far from the Yates house.

  Wet to the waist, he shinnied up the tree again. He hadn’t yet found the watching G-man that Higgins had said would always be near. He finished a search of the hammock without luck, returned to the house, took the capsule from his pocket, washed himself outdoors with a hose, and afterward changed his clothes.

  Then he went up to the bus line, rode into the Gables and phoned Higgins from a booth in a drugstore. The G-man didn’t seem much interested in the capsule, but he told Duff to leave it with the druggist to be picked up. Duff went home to help with supper for the kids.

  Indigo came for him in her car after work. When they drove down Flagler Street together, on the way to Miami Beach; the crowds, the lights, the Christmas decorations seemed out of key with his life and his mood and his fatigue.

  “It’s beautiful!” Indigo kept pointing to everything. And she said, “I’m so glad you’re back! I was lonesome for you.”

  He watched her drive, looked at her sleek, dark desirableness, breathed the perfume she wore and felt sure it was called Damnation or something of the sort.

  He grinned. “Glad to be back! I was going kind of stale. I’m tired, besides.”

  “For being tired, the extra cocktail is recommended.”

  “Probably go straight to my head.”

  “The very effect I had in mind.”

  Duff laughed. “Why, Indigo? How come?”

  Her lucent, dark eyes flashed briefly. “Why? Who can say why? I saw you on the campus one day. And again at a football game one night. I asked people who you were. Why?” She shrugged as she turned the car. “When you get a certain kind of feeling you shouldn’t ask why.”

  They dined and sat afterward in a moonlit patio on the edge of the sea. At midnight they drove back to her house and kissed good night. Duff, for a reason he couldn’t name, refused to go in to have a nightcap, and went home by bus because his refusal angered her. They quarreled on the doorstep, and she went in, finally, slamming the door in his face.

  During that space of time the capsule left in a drugstore made a journey to the FBI in Miami and thence to a laboratory. About two o’clock in the morning, when Duff was in bed, but unable to sleep, owing to alternate waves of self-approval and self-castigation over his rather alarmed flight from Miss Indigo Stacey, Higgins, who was sound asleep at home, reached from his bed to snatch up a ringing phone…

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Ed Waite, at the lab. Sorry to wake you.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “That capsule. Anybody take the stuff?”

  “Probably.” The G-man was wide awake, then.

  “Person that did is dead, if so.”

  Higgins evaded the implied question. “What was it?”

  “Aconitine. Enough to kill a few horses.”

  “How would the person die?”

  “Like heart failure,” Ed said. “And you couldn’t find the stuff by autopsy. It combines chemically with substances in the body and disappears.”

  “I see. Thanks.” Higgins was about to hang up.

  “One other thing, Hig. I don’t think that dose was made in U.S.A.”

  “No? Why?”

  “Because I never heard of anything like it. Aconitine isn’t used to put animals out of misery—nothing like that. And the capsule wasn’t any kind—chemically speaking—manufactured here. Different base. The gelatin part, I mean. Another thing: it isn’t a little item anybody would whip up to poison somebody else.”

  “No?” Higgins sounded skeptical. “Why?”

  “You couldn’t feed it secretly to anybody. Too big. They’d see it or feel it and not swallow it. And you wouldn’t want to try to bust it over somebody’s soup. Skin’s tough. It would splash and spurt all around.”

  “I see. Well, that’s good work, Ed.”

  “Only thing it could be, Hig, I figure, is something I’ve only read about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, if you were a foreign agent in somebody else’s country, for instance and you thought you might be nabbed at any point and you wanted to be sure you’d never talk, you’d carry around something about like that. Taped to you someplace. In a crisis, you could pop it in your mouth, bite, swallow—and quick curtains.”

  Higgins said, “Thanks, Ed. Keep it to yourself.”

  “Right.”

  When Duff wakened, it was after ten. He leaped guiltily out of bed and took a shower. Then he tiptoed downstairs and learned from Mrs. Yates that the precaution hadn’t been wasted: Eleanor was still sleeping.

  “A whole bunch of people drove her home last night around three,” she said. “This being Queen is bad for girls, Duff. I thought I’d brought up Eleanor so nothing in the world could turn her head. But with everybody in the city at her feet—with dates every second and things to do and all the clothes and the photographs! I’d hate it if—”

  “If what, Mrs. Yates?”

  “Oh, if she got glamour-struck. Thought she could get in movies. Anything like that. Eleanor’s actually serious—and a simple person. A homebody. If she got yearning to be rich and famous and all that, she could make a wrong marriage! Even if she didn’t try Hollywood.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much. She’s levelheaded. And I don’t believe it hurts a girl to be Cinderella once in a lifetime. Something to remember.”

  “If she doesn’t develop a prince complex! Yes.”

  The doorbell rang and Duff answered it.

  Higgins was standing there, smiling. “Hi, Bogan.”

  Duff opened the screen door. “Come out in the kitchen, will you? I just got up.”


  In the kitchen, Mr. Higgins told Duff briefly about the capsule.

  “You see,” he concluded, “how we can all go haywire. My men went through his things with the police. Never looked under the bed—which is the first thing an old maid would do. Never looked, I mean, beyond seeing nothing big was there. Thought I’d have a squint, myself.”

  Duff bit toast he had made. He shook his head. “Too late. I cleaned the place yesterday. You think, then, that Harry—”

  Higgins exhaled slowly. “Knocked himself off. Sure. They do. The heat was on him. His people”—Higgins cursed softly—“whoever they may be, were probably sore at him because you started uncovering Harry’s business. I think when Harry went to Baltimore fie was trying to contact somebody. We had men on him the whole time.”

  “You did!”

  Higgins’ eyes smiled, but not his lips. “This isn’t any amateur outfit, Bogan! Yes. But he never made a contact—not that our men saw, anyhow. He did consult doctors. He said he was sick—and I guess he was. Sick from fear. The doctors couldn’t treat that. So he came back here and maybe got the word. Or knew his number was up because they didn’t get to him in Baltimore. So he took that thing—and probably coughed the skin of it out as he died.”

  “That means,” Duff said gravely, “Harry knew what he was doing the whole time.”

  Again the G-man swore. “It means that, whatever the hell they are trying to do! By now, I’d give a leg to know. A life, I guess! I’ll take a fast gander at the room, even though you did clean it up.”

  Duff nodded. “Okay. Incidentally, I tried to find your agents around here yesterday. They must have been taking a day off.”

  Higgins stared. Then he laughed. “You thought you could deliver the capsule to my men, hunh? They were here, just the same, son. As I said they’d be.”

  “But there wasn’t a soul! Except some colored road workers!” Duff, seeing the G-man’s look, broke off and blushed. “Oh!” He joined ruefully in Higgins’ chuckle. “I did find one thing, though. There’s a sinkhole”—he pointed out the window—“beyond the banyan and those gumbo-limbo trees.”

  Higgins said he’d have it looked over. Perhaps it had been; Duff couldn’t tell from the G-man’s response. Higgins went upstairs and returned to the kitchen shortly. He said to Duff, who was eating a home-grown banana and drinking coffee, “Brother, you sure would make some girl a wonderful wife! When you clean, you clean!”

  Duff walked down the drive with him. “Thought you didn’t want any people to know you were still interested in this place?”

  Higgins nodded. “I checked with my road crew before this call. If anybody peculiar had showed up, I’d have got a signal and you’d have had to sneak me out.”

  “There’s another item. Harry’s funeral. That’s tomorrow. Since we know now what Harry was, perhaps the family—”

  The G-man shook his head. “No. They’re going?”

  “They intend to. Even Eleanor plans to cut some of her schedule.”

  “Lovely girl,” Higgins said absently. “No, Bogan. Things have to keep seeming normal around here. We’ll have a man at the services, of course. There won’t be many people. Some of his old letter-carrier pals. A few from the garage. Some of the cronies he used to fish and spot-cast with. You and the kids and the missus, you go. Don’t tell ’em Harry was a spy.”

  The word, even then, shocked Duff. “A funny person to be one.”

  Higgins said grimly, “That’s the worst thing about it! About those—those—Hell! No word for ’em. They reach the insides of patient, peaceful, law-abiding guys like Ellings! Rot out their hearts! And yet leave their outside just like always. You see some good-humored, industrious chap. Courteous, helpful, loves kids, sticks around home. Maybe, long ago, he was slighted or hurt or made to feel inferior. Something—something that switched him over to that crooked, rotten, enemy line! So he goes overboard. He keeps on looking like a good citizen. But in his head, night and day, he’s scheming to kill or enslave every man and woman and kid in the country! You know, Bogan, it’s the ability to do that to people that frightens me more than all the war and defeat and national uproar and trouble put together. It gets me!” He tried for a better phrase. “I hate it!”

  Duff said, almost whispered, “Yeah. Me too.”

  Higgins doubled his fist, stared at it, unclenched it. “Shooting it out with gangs. That was easy! Tagging tax violators. That’s just work! But finding out that people who do things you’ve been led to admire are just rotten, low, filthy enemies! Traitors! It makes a man sick! It scares a man!” He nodded curtly and walked away toward the road.

  Duff went over to the campus that afternoon. He had left some notes in a laboratory locker, he explained to Mrs. Yates. He had decided to go over them during the holidays and to finish a thesis on certain aspects of electromagnetic fields and radiant particles. He smiled when she answered him by making a funny face; she didn’t know what he meant.

  Even to himself, Duff did not quite admit, until he walked up to the bungalow, that he was really going to Coral Gables to try to call on Indigo. He felt ashamed of running away from her. He also felt more than a little intrigued by her avowed passion for him; it was an unprecedented experience and Duff, after all, was a young man. He had always liked girls, but he’d never really had a girl of his own. Any other young man, undergraduate or graduate student, or any young instructor, for that matter, would almost surely have accepted Indigo’s passion with enthusiasm; even with a certain smugness. The fact that he was wary of her made Duff wonder if, perhaps, when the right girl came along, he wouldn’t know how to behave. In that case, he’d wind up a bachelor.

  On account of such sensations and speculations, it seemed very necessary to Duff to make amends for refusing her offer, on the evening before, of a nightcap—a possible euphemism for something more personal and disturbing than alcohol, which had scared him away.

  There was a car parked in front of Indigo’s pretty, modernistic bungalow. Her own car was in the garage and the sedan of the girl with whom she lived was not there. Duff shied at the fact of a caller and then decided that it might be better, diplomatically, to see her first in the presence of others. So he stepped up to the front door and dropped the chrome knocker. Nobody answered. That surprised him because he had heard voices inside. He knocked again, loudly, but there was no response.

  So she did have a visitor, but she didn’t want to be disturbed. Duff reflected gloomily that a girl like Indigo could easily find a thousand admirers and doubtless would brush one off in a hurry for behaving as he had. He walked slowly away. Great swain, I am, he thought. Casanova and Don Juan rolled into one. He reminded himself never to tell anybody of his behavior and its swift rebuff.

  He spent two desultory hours in the lab and went back to the Yates house with a crowd of bus riders who held a general discussion on the prospects of a University of Miami victory in the Orange Bowl game. It was only days away. And thank the Lord for that, he thought. Perhaps afterward Eleanor would return to normal.

  It was dark when he reached home. Dark—and Mrs. Yates was fretting. “I wish this business was over, Duff. It’s nearly six. And Eleanor’s due at a banquet at seven. And she has to change, but she’s not home yet. I know it’s not her fault that she gets delayed—”

  Charles was setting the table. Marian was cooking. Duff inspected the contents of pots and pans on the oil stove and told Marian—making her happy by doing so—that the guy who won her would have not a good cook, but a real chef.

  He took his notes upstairs, looked through them and straightened up the room. He heard Charles calling numbers, asking for his sister and getting unsatisfactory replies, for he kept dialing. Duff lay down on his bed and read a chapter on nuclear engineering.

  He was interrupted by the boy’s voice, coming worriedly up the stairway, “Hey! Duff! Eleanor never did get to the Fashion Parade today! I just found out!”

  He closed the book, tossed it on his table and clattered dow
nstairs. Mrs. Yates had wheeled herself into the living room. Her anxiety had visibly increased. “Charley just reached someone who was there, Duff. They waited for Eleanor till half past four. They tried to call here, but the line was busy all the time. No wonder. The calls that came in. So they went ahead without her.”

  Duff said, “Probably got her dates mixed. Wouldn’t be surprising! She had some shenanigan at Fort Lauderdale for tomorrow. Bet she went there by mistake. Probably come in, any minute.”

  “It isn’t like her,” Mrs. Yates insisted.

  Duff grinned rather soberly. “She isn’t herself, these days.”

  “She wandered off with somebody,” Mrs. Yates went on. “I didn’t see who. I’d wheeled into the kitchen to block a sweater, and she’d changed to that gorgeous brown dress she was to wear at the Fashion Parade today. She didn’t take the car and I don’t know who was to call for her. Scotty came by and they talked a while, and then he drove away and I had a glimpse of her standing out by the banyan. After that, somebody must have picked her up.”

  Marian, who had gone into the stair hall, now called, “She certainly is getting absent-minded! She didn’t even take along the hat that goes with the new brown rig!” Marian came, then, carrying a hat the color of Eleanor’s eyes, with canary-yellow trimming.

  It was not until then that Duff became alarmed. But alarm, when it appeared, was instant and formidable. She wouldn’t go without the hat. She was orderly. She was responsible. She had a good memory. And lately, she’d been almost vain; so much attention would have made anybody conscious of beauty. It was hard to imagine that Eleanor would barge away when somebody arrived to pick her up—without a hat that, obviously, was a main part of a planned costume for a very important social event.

  As he felt ice inside himself, Duff instantly dissembled. “Maybe Scotty knows about it.”