A languorous ocean breeze set sail from the Bahama Islands for the coast of Florida.
It crossed the Gulf Stream and came ashore where autumn tourists sprawled on the allegedly golden but actually pale brown sands of Miami Beach. A breath of it, after crossing Miami, following a road lined with fluffy evergreens, swung finally into a stand of much larger trees: mahoganies, tamarinds, poincianas, gumbo limbos and live oaks. These it stirred audibly before it moved over a sun-brilliant lawn, entered the screened window of a dilapidated, two-story frame house and touched bright blond hair on the brow of a pretty, middle-aged woman who sat in a bed. She glanced up with the pleasant thought that the still heat of day was ended. She saw the clock. Three-twenty. She faced the screen, then, and called in a contralto that was penetrating without being harsh, “Charlee-ee!”
Her mind pictured her dark-haired, merry-eyed son, age twelve. The picture did not materialize and she remembered he was going to try to get a newspaper route after school.
She conjured up the brunette glow and giggly adolescence of her younger daughter. “Marian! Marian!”
Again there was no answer and again she remembered. Marian had said she would be delayed. Eleanor, her eldest, wasn’t due until four-thirty because she had a regular lab period that day at the university. Mrs. Yates, invalided eight years before in the accident that had taken her husband’s life, leaned back on her pillows, still smiling, and wished she hadn’t called. For she knew what would happen.
Feet strode on the crushed coral of the driveway. A foot tripped on the threshold of the back door. And a young man appeared, grinning, at the entrance of her downstairs room — a man of less than twenty-five, a tall man and thin, a stooped young man with polelike arms and legs, eyes of a faded blue, unkempt hair the hue of new rope, and a determination of mouth and chin that did not fit his over-all diffidence.
“Duff,” she said apologetically, “I didn’t mean to bring you in from the barn! What in the world were you doing, though? You’ve still got on your good gabardine slacks!”
The young man chuckled, looked down as if to check the statement, started to answer and was obliged to deal with a slight impediment of speech before saying, “Oh! Oh — sure!
Decided not to change. Not doing anything messy — labelling a lot of cans with small hardware in ’em.”
She laughed. “Of course! You said you were going to. I’m so scattered! Well — I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
“Not a bit. Nearly finished. Did you want something? Iced tea, maybe? Eleanor left things ready.”
“Later, perhaps. No, Duff. Don’t want anything. I’d forgotten the kids were going to be late. It’s their afternoon to sweep and dust and scour.”
His grin widened. “I’ll do it. Give me an excuse to put off mowing the lawn till a cooler day. Besides, I’m a talented house cleaner.”
She laughed again. Duff Bogan — Allan Diffenduffer Bogan — had been a boarder at the Yates home for more than a year. The luckiest boarder, she thought, that any invalid woman with three children ever had — though Eleanor couldn’t possibly be called a child any more. “You go back and finish.” Seeing he wouldn’t, she added, “Or at least put on an apron.”
He executed a comic salute and soon she heard a broom working upstairs. Not long after, came a bizarre din from the bathroom, and she lay on her pillows, chuckling.
He was, she thought, such a dear. A graduate student of physics at the University of Miami. He’d come over at the start of the first semester, the year before, when the Yateses had had a vacancy in the two-boarder schedule which augmented their slender finances.
Who’d brought him? One of Eleanor’s numberless admirers. She thought back. It was that fullback, she believed, the one with that absurd nickname — Avalanche, Avalanche Billings.
“We have to have,” she remembered saying to Duff, “somebody who can help around the place, take care of the yard and the station wagon — which is vintage and requires plenty of care. Somebody who can tend the trees and shrubs, won’t mind doing dishes at times, and so on. The rate is low on account of the help I need.”
Duff had regarded her amiably, even warmly, and replied, “Mrs. Yates, I was brought up in the family of an underpaid Indiana preacher. Housework, its simplification and efficient management, became one of my hobbies. I have other hobbies that might prove helpful.”
She had taken him, on trial. After a week, she had come to feel Duff was indispensable. Now, he was like a son — except, of course, where Eleanor was concerned. He was too shy, too self-effacing to be like a brother to Eleanor, which somewhat interfered with his status as “son.” Mrs. Yates sighed. Eleanor didn’t give him much encouragement. Much?
Not any. Which wasn’t surprising in a girl elected Miss Freshman in her first year, the Belle of the Junior Prom, and who now, as a senior, was Queen-elect of the Orange Bowl festivities.
Upstairs in the bathroom, Duff Bogan had gone to work with equipment of his own devising — a “gun” for spraying insecticides and a second “gun” for dusting. First he dampened all porcelain, metal and tile surfaces with a water spray. Then he dusted with a scouring powder. Thereafter, a damp cloth in each hand, he polished furiously — which caused the din Mrs. Yates had heard. In fifteen minutes the bathroom glittered.
Perspiring in the damp warmth of the day, he called down the stairway, “What about Harry’s room?”
“That, too,” she responded. “He never locks it.”
So Duff entered the quarters of the other boarder, Harry Ellings. A light dust mopping only was needed there. For Harry, who had been with the Yateses ever since the father’s death, made his own bed and kept his own premises picked up. It wasn’t, Duff thought, much of a home for a fifty-year-old bachelor like Harry. A living-sitting room in somebody else’s house — a day bed and a desk, a shelf of books, bridge lamps, old chair, a worn rug, a radio, a few photographs, a calendar hung on the knob of the closet door. That was Harry’s residence.
He had a job as a mechanic with a trucking concern; before that he’d been a letter carrier. He had quit during his early years with the Yateses because of varicose veins, and had gone to school to learn his present trade.
Church on Sundays, a Friday bridge game, his Wednesday evenings practicing casting, a lot of porch sitting and radio listening, occasional fishing trips, few visitors, little mail — that summed up all Duff knew of the other boarder.
Maybe, from Harry’s viewpoint, it was a good life, whole and satisfying. The thought depressed Duff. He finished dusting, helped himself to one of Harry’s cigarettes and stared out at the sunshine, wondering, as young men do, what he would do when his degree had been awarded and the uncertain world said wordlessly, “Okay, Bogan; beat me if you can!”
He picked up the mop and noticed then, behind the calendar that hung from the knob, a lock on the closet door, a lock newer than the hardware of the Yates house, which he constantly repaired and replaced.
If he had not observed the lock, it is possible, although unlikely, that Duff Bogan’s life might have been relatively speaking, as colorless as his estimate of Harry Ellings’. But Duff did notice the lock and wonder about it, and nothing was ever the same for him afterward.
Wondering about locks was not, in Duffs case, an idle exercise in bafflement. Early in life he had been discarded by his schoolmates as a possible pitcher, fielder, end or basketball center. Competitive sports revealed him as something of an Ichabod Crane and, since his middle name was Diffenduffer, after his mother’s father, he had been called Duffer from the age of ten. He was Duff only to the kindly Yateses. But though a duffer at games and sports, he excelled in hobbies. Among them was a know-how concerning locks.
At eleven, Duff had sent ten cents for a booklet called The Boy Locksmith. Finding that people were either charmed by or aghast at his proficiency with skeleton keys, he had advanced to more elaborate literature on the subject. Before he reached high-school age he was much in demand where keys were lost or where trunks, barns, cabinets and the like refused to open. In high school, while other boys mowed lawns for extra change, Duff had repaired luggage and started cars that lacked keys.
To look at Harry Ellings’ lock-fitted closet door, then, was to know how to get the door open rather quickly. Since it was unthinkable that the drab, good-natured star boarder had anything important or secret locked away, Duff felt no curiosity. But it would be fun, he thought, to open the door, set something alien in the closet — and wait for results.
Grinning, Duff ran down the back stairs, came back with selected tools, and took steps three at a time while Mrs. Yates gripped the binding of her magazine tightly — sometimes, when he rushed that way, Duff fell.
His hands, however, were not clumsy. They worked rapidly over the lock and soon the door swung open. Inside, Harry’s suits hung neatly. On the shelf were suitcases, old and dusty. On the floor was a cubical hatbox of cardboard. Duff procured a metal wastebasket and set it on top of the hatbox.
He thought his joke would be more noticeable if he put the hatbox on the basket.
Only he couldn’t lift the hatbox. He took another hold and tried again. The cardboard threatened to tear, but the box didn’t budge. So Duff untied the tape and raised the lid. Inside, was a hardwood box, well made, waxed, with an inset handle and a lock of a kind Duff had never before seen. He stared at this and then tipped over the box and its hatbox disguise—
which could be done only with effort. The whole thing weighed about a hundred pounds.
He went downstairs then and interrupted Mrs. Yates’ reading. “The doggonedest thing,” he said — and told her. “What could he have — what could anybody have? — in a fifteen-inch box, weighing that much? Gold?”
“Harry?” She chuckled. “Heavens! I know what Harry does with every cent! Better put it back Duff.”
He went upstairs. It was about four-thirty. Harry wouldn’t be home for more than an hour. Duff had opened the closet without curiosity; the box and its peculiar lock left him with no feeling but curiosity. He struggled with his conscience — and tried certain tools. When the lock clicked, he found it hard to raise the lid because of its weight. The underside was metal-lined. Lead. Whatever was in the box was packed in cotton. He raised the cotton and saw a very odd object of grayish-silver metal, machined and polished. It looked like a segment of a big egg, saw-toothed on one face, as a cog or gear would be. When he hefted it, he judged it weighed about five pounds. Maybe more.
He tried, as a graduate student of physics and a man with mechanical hobbies, to imagine what the object was. He couldn’t, at first. When, presently, he had a single idea, he pushed it from his mind: too crazy. Nevertheless, after some very worried thought, he went downstairs again.
“Sweeping the kids’ rooms,” he called untruthfully to Mrs. Yates. “Bring you your iced tea before long.”
He worked fast after that. With fine emery paper he removed a trace of the metal; with scouring powder he polished away the scratches made by the emery. He wore gloves and took extreme care. Having obtained a microscopic sample, he restored everything to the exact state in which he had found it. He left the cigarette in Harry’s ashtray after thought which told him Harry could easily notice his room had been dusted that day.
He then hid the emery-paper sample in the barn, washed his hands repeatedly and did a quick sweeping job on Charles’ and Marian’s rooms. He was making iced tea in the kitchen when Eleanor drove up in the family station wagon.
“Let me do that,” she said. “You’ve spilled on the drainboard and got ice on the floor!” She put a load of books on the table and turned her back to him. “Unbutton.”
Duff smiled and undid little buttons between her shoulder blades where she couldn’t reach easily. The dress was one of two cotton prints she’d found at a sale — yellow like her curly hair, light brown like her topaz eyes. She hurried from the room, called to her mother, and was soon back in the kitchen wearing an old dress and moccasins, instead of her high-heeled shoes.
A match struck; the burners of the kerosene stove slowly took fire. “I wish we had gas or electricity! Kerosene’s so slow!”
She bent over a bin Duff had made from lumber scraps, and came up with an armful of potatoes. “Peel!” She emptied out a sack of green peas and started shelling. “What’s new?”
“We had a burglar.”
Her eyes glowed. “No! I bet he didn’t steal anything! I bet, if he really looked the place over, and if he was a nice burglar, he left something for us when he went out! Five dollars, maybe, on the hall table!”
“I was the burglar.”
“Oh!” Her eyes looked up and laughed. “What’d you rob? The kids’ banks?”
“Harry’s room. His closet. The locked closet.”
“Harry hasn’t got a locked anything! That poor, sweet guy is the world’s openest book!”
Duff rinsed a white-peeled potato, cut it up, started another. “I’d have agreed, two hours ago. He’s still probably innocent. Just keeping something that some pal asked him to put under lock and key.”
“What are you talking about, Duff Bogan?”
He told her. “First, you see, it was going to be a gag. Then I got curious. The lock on that box was a new one to me. And then, the gadget inside—”
“Sounds like some sort of trophy.”
“Trophy?”
“Sure,” Eleanor said. “You know. Golfers get silver golf balls. Anglers get gold-plated fish. Probably Harry won the Never-Missed-a-Working-Day-in-Five-Years prize at his company. Being a mechanic, it was probably a cogwheel, only silver or something.”
“Oh.” Duff thought about that. “It wasn’t silver. It wasn’t a cog. It wasn’t engraved.”
“Then,” she said, snatching at a pea that popped out of its pod and rolled, “what was it?”
“It barely might be — uranium.”
She was about to answer derisively. His seriousness sank in. “What?”
“The only thing I could imagine it looked like was a carefully machined part of something which, with other parts like it, would fit together to make a sphere. A sphere weighing maybe twenty pounds, more or less. It might have been any of a half dozen metals or a thousand alloys. Still, there’s only one thing I know of, made of parts which fit perfectly into what is probably a sphere around that size. The pieces that come together to’ form a critical mass and go off with a hell of a bang.”
“You mean an atomic bomb?”
“Maybe it’s only a mock-up. A model, I mean. That’s why I took a sample. To test and see what the metal is. I could be wrong, but I think Harry, whether he knows it or not, either has a piece of the heart of an A-bomb up there or else a metal model of one.”
Eleanor began to laugh. “Harry — a spy?” When he didn’t join her laughter, she looked at him for a long moment. “You think somebody’s stealing more of our A-bomb secrets and Harry’s being used to keep the thing — until time to move it on out of the country?
Let’s ask Harry where he got the box!”
Duff wished for a moment he hadn’t told Eleanor anything. “Ye gods!” he answered.
“Not really! I just — have to know what the metal was, now that I’ve seen the gadget.
Chances are a million to one my idea is totally nuts. But if it did happen to be that millionth chance, then asking Harry anything would be a terrible blunder!”
“You’re right about that,” she said contritely. Then, hearing a car in the drive, she murmured, “There Harry is now. Go clean up, and I’ll finish supper. At the least, get that repulsive apron off. You look like a cross between Mother Hubbard and the Scarecrow in the Oz books!”
His smile was sheepish. “Okay.”
Before he left the kitchen she asked hastily and in a low tone, “Can you tell, from such a tiny sample?”
“I’m no microchemist. But I should be able to, yes.”
“I hope you’re crazy,” she said earnestly.
Duff’s room was not much different from Harry’s save that it was less neat and contained more books. In order to save time, he had availed himself of an old-fashioned pitcher and wash bowl which he’d found in the attic. He began shaving while Harry took his daily shower. Charles Yates came whizzing home, bike siren loud, his voice shrill as he shouted through his mother’s window, “I got the old paper route!”
Duff grinned, grinned again when Marian, panting after running three blocks from the bus stop, dramatically announced she would be Titania in the play. He felt at home with the Yateses; there had been a troop of young Bogans.
Gazing into the mirror, still wearing the apron over his work-stained T-shirt, Duff thought about Eleanor’s description of his looks. Mother Hubbard and the Oz-book Scarecrow. His grin faded somewhat, but a glimmer remained. He certainly was on the bean-pole side. No girl like Eleanor would ever think of any guy like himself in romantic terms.
She was already Orange Bowl Queen. Why, if she just wanted to, she could be in the movies!
Perhaps she’d do something like that when she graduated — to compensate for being so poor, for endless cooking, washing, mending, cleaning and bargain hunting. And for the constant care of her mother.
In his small and rather dappled mirror, Duff saw that his eyes were shiny. “Nuts,” he said, and attacked his face with such energy that he cut himself.
Dinner was early. Eleanor had to leave at seven. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from eight to eleven, she did filing in the offices of the Florida Electric Company.
It was a job she’d got through a friend of her mother’s, which netted a welcome eighteen dollars and ten cents a week.
Duff wheeled Mrs. Yates up to the table. The Yates youngsters, both dark-haired and dark-eyed, like their father, were so excited over their respective successes that Harry Ellings didn’t notice the special looks directed toward him by Eleanor and Duff.
After dinner, after Eleanor had driven away in a station wagon as weatherbeaten as the house, Duff went to his room and made plans. He’d want one of the chemistry labs on a day when it wasn’t full of freshmen doing Chemistry 101-A. He could do the physics all right — that was in his de-department. He’d need advice about the microanalysis…
It took a week. But one week later — with shaky hands, because he had never done anything of the sort — he looked in the beat-up phone book beside a drugstore booth for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dialed and closed the door.
A man answered. “I’d like to talk to somebody,” Duff said, “about making an appointment.”
“Just a minute.” It was quite a long minute. Duff got ready another nickel.
“Yes? Hello? Higgins speaking.”
“Oh,” Duff said. “Well — look, sir. My name is Allan D. Bogan. I’m a graduate student at the university. I want to talk to somebody down there. I’ve run across something odd.”
A slight pause. “Could you give me any idea of the nature of what you’ve encountered? We’re pretty busy here—”
“I–I—I know that. Over the phone—” Duff hesitated. “Suppose I told you that I’m a graduate student in physics. The science that led to the atomic bomb—”
Mr. Higgins’ voice, businesslike to begin with, cut him off sharply, “Would three-fifteen this afternoon do?”
“P-p-perfectly.”
“Ask for me. Higgins. Slater Higgins.”
The office of the FBI looked like any office. No fancy equipment visible, no gun racks, no alarm or communication devices. And Mr. Slater Higgins, in his own small cubicle, with its swivel chair and desk, its one large window, looked like any junior executive.
They shook hands. Mr. Higgins pointed to a chair with his pipe stem and said, smiling faintly, “What’s on your mind, Duff?” The younger man stared. “You know—”
“Checked, sure. After your call. Registrar. Got everything from your nickname to your lack of an athletic record. Tell you so you can skip it.”
Duff sat silent, flushing a little. “Well, it begins with where I board. Did you check that?”
Higgins laughed. “Address is all. Shoot!”
Duff was embarrassed about the start of his story, since it involved curiosity and his unethical behavior. So he decided to give weight to his words immediately. “I have found a stolen part of what is plainly an atomic bomb.”
Mr. Higgins did look at him sharply. But that was all. No exclamation. No excitement. “Okay. Start where it starts. Take your time.”
The G-man was a good listener — putting in questions only when the narrative confused him or left a gap.
“I had to wait,” Duff wound up, “until yesterday, to get a good chance to run the tests.
They checked, all right. It was uranium. Uranium 235, I am sure. High neutron emission—”
“You can skip the technical part. That isn’t for me. I’m a lawyer. An accountant. You sure?”
Duff hesitated. The sample had been extremely small. The tests had been difficult.
The apparatus in the physics lab hadn’t worked as well as he could have hoped. “I’m — sure enough,” he finally said, “to come in here.”
“Can you give us some of the stuff to test?”
“That’s another thing. I did have a. trace left when I got through. But — I’m cow-clumsy. When I finished the last test I started doing a dumb-headed dance — I was excited. I batted a bottle of sulphuric off a shelf — had to wash it and the last of my sample down the drain, but quick. The place was fuming up.”
“Too bad.” Mr. Higgins locked his hands behind his head, looked at Duff and thought for a while. “You could be mistaken about your experiment?”
“I don’t believe so. It’s possible.”
“Stick around a few minutes.” Higgins walked from the room. He was gone for quite a while. When he came back, his face was unreadable. He sat in his chair again.
“We’d like a look at that cached stuff, Bogan. I take it there’s always somebody at home. Mrs. Yates.”
“Not always. On sunny Sundays we wheel her to the car and lift her in and take her wheel chair along. Church. Harry Ellings never misses church.”
“Good. You see, we’d also like to look at that thing without anybody knowing. If it does happen to be uranium, we want to know more than just that Ellings has it.”
“Naturally.” Duff felt better. “You’d want him to keep right on doing whatever he may be doing. He’s probably innocent. The Yates family knows him mighty well. He doubtless thinks he’s keeping something for a friend.”
“Could be.”
“And by watching him, you’d be led to some group that’s stealing not just atomic secrets but actual bombs.”
“The trouble is,” Higgins answered slowly, “that, except for a trace stolen during the war, and a bit some character took home for a collection, we’ve never lost any uranium, Bogan. Nothing remotely approaching the quantity that would make the lump you described.”
Duff’s pale blue eyes were surprised. “No! Are they sure? Couldn’t they make a mistake?”
Higgins chuckled without mirth. “Brother, can’t you conceive the guarding and checking and cross-checking that goes into protecting something worth maybe half a hundred thousand bucks a pound? Something that we’ve spent billions to be able to make? They can tell you where every thousandth of an ounce is, every day, every minute!”
Duffs reaction was one of humiliation. “Then I must have pulled a boner at the lab!
Maybe — having got that cockeyed notion — I saw what I wanted to see, in my tests.”
The G-man’s eyes were unsympathetic. “Probably. But you came in here and told us.
We’re used to that. Stories and rumors of A-bomb spies come in here as thick as reports of flying saucers. And we waste our lives on ’em all. Thanks, however. Provisionally.”
Duff stood. “If you’re going to investigate, I could leave a plan of the house. And some notes on the lock on the box. How to open it, I mean. And my door key.”
Higgins grinned. “Right. Would help.”
The following Sunday when they came home from church, Duff tried to find evidence that the FBI had entered and examined the house. There wasn’t any such evidence.
On Monday, however, Duff was called from a class to talk to a Mr. Higgins who
“insisted,” according to a girl from the front office, “that the call was important and you should be disturbed.”
“In a few days,” Higgins said, when he had identified Duff, “we will call on your friend at your place. Ostensibly, we’ll be checking another matter. Actually, we’ll make ourselves an opportunity to take a look at the matter we’ve discussed. You aren’t to give away the fact that we may have seen it previously. On some pretext, we’ll call you up. We want you to see it again and tell us, if you can, whether it’s what you originally— sampled.”
“Did you see — the matter?” Duff asked breathlessly.
“Yeah. And don’t act astonished when you learn what it is!” Mr. Higgins hesitated.
“You might tip off the rest of the family, since you’ve discussed it with them.”
It was curt, perfunctory, unsatisfying. He told Eleanor and her mother exactly what he had done, precisely what he had been advised to do. A few more days passed. There was no change in the behavior of Harry Ellings. The graying, inconspicuous boarder played bridge with his postman pals, went out to practice with his casting rod on an illuminated target range, did his work, and said nothing unusual until the end of the week.
Then, one night during supper, he changed the subject, which was a popular and interminable one: the kidding of Eleanor about her various dates by her younger brother and sister, who were particularly diverted by the salmon-pink convertible of a Mr. Prescott Smythe, of Omega fraternity.
“Don’t be surprised,” Harry interrupted abruptly, “if the Gestapo calls on me.”
Duff felt the beginning of a start, and repressed it. He wondered quickly, too, if any man who had reason to fear the FBI would refer to the bureau in so insulting a term. It was evidence that Harry had no reason for worry.
Mrs. Yates was saying, “Gestapo?”
Eleanor said calmly, “He means the FBI. You been kidnapping people, or something, Harry?”
The star boarder grinned and then frowned. “Everybody at the plant”—it was his word for the trucking company that employed him—“is being processed. Supposed to keep it to themselves. But you know how fellows talk.”
“Processed?” The term was unfamiliar to Mrs. Yates.
Harry stirred his coffee. “Checked. Questioned. There’s been some fancy counterfeiting going on. A few guys on the lam. Unlawful flight, the Gestapo men call it.
And they’re looking for counterfeiting plates that have eased out of the state they were used in. A big trucking company, like Miami-Dade, is always being suspected of doing something against the law.”
In the person of Mr. Higgins and an assistant, the “Gestapo” called that night.
Although he had a chance to wink or mutter a word when Duff answered the doorbell, Higgins behaved as if Duff were a stranger. He asked for Mr. Harry Ellings and was conducted upstairs. Charles Yates said loudly as the two men climbed, “Real G-men! Golly!
Maybe I’ll be one!”
Nearly an hour passed. Eleanor and Duff washed and dried the dishes. Marian and Charles pretended to do homework and actually discussed the visit of the FBI, speculating horrendously on its possible causes.
Then Higgins came to the head of the stairs. “Oh, Miss Yates?” When Eleanor appeared, he added, “You are Miss Yates? Will you come up a moment?” And that other young boarder, too, if he will.”
They went up. The box was open, in the middle of the room. Harry was sitting in his easy chair, looking angry. Higgins pointed to the object in the box. “Either of you ever seen that before?”
They had been instructed. They looked at the object. Duff squatted down by the box and scrutinized the curious piece of machined metal.
“No,” he said positively.
Eleanor shook her bright head. “Not even the box!”
“I told you!” Harry said crossly. “I brought it in when they were on a picnic. Ye gods!
Government snoops! Government snoops! I’m well within my rights—”
“What is it?” Duff asked.
Higgins smiled tightly and looked at Harry.
Harry raised his eyes to Duff and shrugged. “It’s my life savings, that’s what it is!
Since way back when Roosevelt threw us off the gold standard and I had to turn in the gold I kept. I bought platinum. Finally made one piece of it. Harder to swipe. Made that box, in the end, and melted down old pieces of solder to wall it in lead. Too heavy now for any housebreaker to snitch. Then I got bad legs and had to have a lot of medical care. An operation. After that, a year in machinist’s school — with board, room and tuition to pay! So I began cutting out wedges of the stuff and selling it. That’s what’s left! It’s perfectly legal to own it and I’ll be damned if I see what right the G-men have to make me haul it out and explain it. My secret — the only one I ever had — and no harm in it.”
Duff looked at Higgins. Higgins said, “Ellings isn’t kidding. He has a right to stash platinum away, and I did snoop. No search warrant — just noticed he kept his closet locked and asked for a look. We’re hunting some of the best counterfeit plates ever made — and that box was heavy… I hope you’ll accept our apology, Ellings.”
“How much good would it do me, if I refused?” the boarder asked tartly.
And that was that. Higgins and his companion left quickly with no further word.
Duff was on his way home from the campus the next afternoon when Higgins overtook him in a sedan and picked him up. He started driving in a direction tangential to the Yates place.
He said, “All right! Was it the same dingus?”
Duff had asked himself a thousand times. “I don’t believe it was. It was brighter, shinier, I think. And the machining on the first one was more precise, as I remember it. Of course, I was hurrying then. There were saw marks in this casting. Was it platinum?”
Higgins said, “Yeah. A little impure. Commercial stuff. Also, he did buy at least some of it a long while back. Years. We checked that. He did make the box in spare time at his garage. It looks, Bogan, as if you’d been fooled. After all, you got that brainstorm about it being part of an A-bomb before you ran the tests. Not after. Could have conditioned your reading of the tests. Must have. We’ve checked Harry Ellings through his whole life.
Checked his friends and family. Nothing whatever on the record. No convictions. No arrests.
No association with subversive groups or people. Just a stolid, hard-working bachelor who’s a churchgoer and not a bad bridge player. If a segment of a bomb had been stolen, I’d say this business might somehow be connected. None has.”
Duff rode uncomfortably. Finally he said, “Would a segment of the uranium heart of a bomb look like that?”
Higgins glanced at him, grinned, gazed at the road again. “Do you suppose they’d tell even us that? What they did hint at — not say — was that we were goons down at this office to even rise to any reported ‘uranium.’ Suggested we should know the bombs were plutonium now. There’s a difference, apparently. Wouldn’t know what it is.”
“Different elements,” Duff said absently. “Like iron and nickel. The Hiroshima bomb was uranium. The Nagasaki one was plutonium. I suppose that is what they use now.”
“The last loose end,” Higgins answered, turning back toward the Yates house, “was your identification. Since you aren’t sure about that, the whole picture falls completely apart.
You find the kitty of a gold-standard crank. So you pop off, having bomb jitters, like everyone. But you weren’t smart to run your own tests. You should have given us the sample, since you suspected it was something a lot different from platinum.”
“It wasn’t platinum,” Duff said earnestly, but not quite certainly.
“Maybe it was hamburger.” Higgins stopped to let out an abashed Duff. “Next time you run across any espionage, keep it to yourself. We got trouble enough at the bureau with real agents of foreign powers!”
“Cute college types,” said Prescott Smythe, gazing at one through the porch screens of the Omega house, “are a dime a dozen!”
A brother at his side examined the girl, from auburn hair to flat-heeled green sandals.
“Make it two bits. Everything’s high these days.”
“That one,” said another brother, “is named Althena Bailey.” Faces turned and the brother went on, “A transfer. From ‘Johjah.’ She is interested in collecting. She’d like to collect an Omega fraternity pin. Otherwise she is not interested. Any further questions?”
A man with a crew-cut, freckles, a gold football, said, “Why is it so many women who want to act unsteady have to go steady first?”
“Ask Heartbreak Smythe! He’s gone steady with more unsteady dames than an assistant director of B pictures!”
Prescott Smythe, or Scotty, ignored the reference. He rose. He crossed the porch to a large concrete urn in which was growing a huge vine with dark green, lacily slit leaves. He peered intently at the vine.
“There is nothing for breaking hearts,” said a thin brother, “like a convertible. That’s what the word means. It converts ’em.”
Scotty Smythe finally spoke. “You know,” he said in elegant tones, “when I stole this vine it was hardly two feet tall. I’ve had to swipe four pots for it, through the years. In graduated sizes. Now, look at it! Magnificent foliage. A monstera deliciosa, the botany boys tell me. Should bear fruit. Edible fruit. Never had so much as a cucumber on it!”
The brothers ignored the countermeasure. “Sad thing about Smythe,” said the football player. “Stealing flowerpots. Now he’s trying to swipe the Orange Bowl. The Queen, anyhow. As soon as a man recognizes a cutest college type, he’s through.”
Scotty grinned. “Okay! So, okay! I got it bad.”
“What will your family say?” the thin brother asked in a somber tone. “Imagine the scene. You take la Yates to Manhattan, ride up in a marble elevator to your familial penthouse, whip out your golden latchkey, open the door and say, ‘Mother, here’s the girl I’m going to marry! This po’ cracker chile.’ Your mother can see the babe is a looker who would bring a blush of envy to the proud features — all’ the proud features — of Kim Novak.
And has topaz eyes, besides. But your mother isn’t fooled by mere externals. Not like you, Smythe! Raising a jewel-encrusted lorgnette, she frigidly asks the girl, ‘Where are your Junior League papers? Even your first papers?’”
“Where does Eleanor’s family come from?” a brother asked. “Anybody know?”
“Olean,” said Scotty.
“I thought olean was something you spread on bread.”
Scotty smirked. “Look, you jealous weevils! Olean is a town in New York State. It has history, paved streets, electric lights — and Eleanor Yates’ birthplace!”
“We are worrying ourselves unduly,” said a plump, shrewd-eyed brother who had apparently been reading a magazine. “I know, out of what we lawyers call our own knowledge, that she necked with Avalanche Billings last week. Kissed him, anyhow. I also know she gets orchids from a guy in the Miami Junior Chamber of Commerce. He raises ’em in his yard — which shows a good business head. And there are eight thousand other guys!”
The main object of the ribbing, evidently accustomed to it, again discussed his vine.
“They graft things on trees down here,” Scotty murmured. “Maybe a graft could be managed.
If it won’t bear its own fruit, perhaps a few limes would do. A mango or two, now and then.
Even a bunch of broccoli.” He turned. “Listen, oafs! What you see in these nice gray eyes is pure loathing! My sister belongs to the Junior League, true. Mother’s farsighted and sometimes uses a lorgnette — I guess the first time most of you swamp Willies ever saw one was when she came to the Open House last year. I say, phooey to you gentlemen and I say faugh! I am going on a hayride tonight with Eleanor, so if anybody wants to borrow my car—”
He was overwhelmed by the onslaught.
Duff Bogan was standing in the Yates back yard, studying the sky. Several broken limbs needed to be removed from the live oaks, but that meant borrowing an extension ladder from a distant neighbor, and Eleanor had the car. Tree pruning, except near the house, was hopeless anyhow. There were broken branches all through the jungle. A whole tree had fallen across the water-filled sinkhole in the woods west of the house. He examined passing clouds.
There was no prospect of showers that he could discern. He decided to begin a long-postponed operation: painting the sun-faded house. With the stepladder he could reach nearly half of it. He started, some while later, on the east wall. He heard but did not see Eleanor drive in.
But presently, from the back yard, a sharp whacking commenced. A cloud of dust eddied around the house and settled grittily on the fresh paint. He came down the ladder.
Barelegged, in shorts and a blouse, with an old silk scarf around her hair, Eleanor was beating rugs. She stood with her back to him, and Duff, as often, admired the line of her chin, eye and forehead. She had high cheekbones and rather deep-set, slightly slanted eyes so his view, which he thought of as a one-quarter profile, gave a special outline of the anatomy of her beauty. The act of beating rugs in such a costume exhibited her body at its muscular best.
He watched her for quite a while before he said, “Hey!”
She turned. “Oh, hello!” Gold tendrils had escaped the scarf and curled like shavings on a damp brow.
“One of us has got to quit — or at least move. I started painting the house a while back.”
“Duff! I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”
He grinned. “Would you mind if I transferred your carpets to the line behind the barn?”
Once there, she asked abruptly, “Duff, has anything happened?”
He shook his head. “Everything’s stopped happening. I saw Higgins a while ago. The FBI checked Harry’s story about platinum. So I guess I made one really sour bunch of mistakes.” He told her the situation.
She dropped the carpet beater. “Only — you don’t believe you did. Do you?”
“No.”
Her look was thoughtful, measuring. “But you aren’t absolutely positive?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been chivvied around so much that I don’t know. The tests I ran seem okay, on review. I thought that hunk of platinum didn’t look exactly like the thing I sandpapered the first time. After all, though, it would be crazy. Us. Harry. A house like this.
Mixed up in anything of that kind.”
“Maybe not too crazy. Look at the facts that have come out of the samples swiped.
The espionage. And no doubt there are plenty of other stories that haven’t come out! That won’t come out — until we get in another war and win it. Until we find a way to disarm the world and make it peaceful. Every government has things like that n locked away. Hushed up. Some forever. It wasn’t.” the craziness that made me think you were mistaken.”
“Then what was it?” he asked morosely.
“Nothing, Duff. I never thought so. But I don’t y really believe Harry is a party to anything — sinister. I still thought there was some sort of hanky-panky. Did you ever consider it backwards?”
“What do you mean — backwards?” Suddenly his mild eyes flew wide open and his cigarette fell from limp fingers. He said, “Holy whirling cyclotrons!” He picked up the cigarette. “You mean, that was a hunk of U235 coming into the U.S.A!”
She nodded. “If it was uranium and if platinum was substituted, it means there’s a mighty ingenious gang, doesn’t it?”
He whistled. Eleanor went on, “They — whoever they might be — would have careful plans to bring in atomic bombs piece by piece. Plans even to substitute something plausible, that resembled the real thing, if they got caught’ up with. And maybe to use innocent people as their agents. Harry could no doubt, for instance, get one of his truck-driver pals to take a box like that, of several, to some city up north.”
Duffs Adam’s apple made a round trip as he gulped. “A lot of the top men in physics have mentioned that very possibility!” He named names familiar in the news since Hiroshima. “They’ve said atom bombs could be brought into harbors in tramp steamers. Or smuggled into the country in sections and assembled in secret and planted — like mines, like infernal machines — to be set off in the centers of cities — perhaps by radio, at some zero hour!”
“That’s what I mean,” she said quietly.
Duff leaned backward and looked cautiously around the corner of the barn toward the Yates house. He leaned back and shook his head. “No. Every time I get on the idea, really think about it, it sounds too unlikely. This place. Us.”
“Wouldn’t a beat-up place like this, nobodies like us, be ideal? Couldn’t things have been in Harry’s room, passing through, for years, without us knowing? Don’t you think you should call the FBI again?”
The cold water his imagination had needed was supplied by that suggestion. He started to speak, stammered, fell silent for a moment and then said, “Heck! The FBI probably thought of that angle ten seconds after they realized what I was talking about!”
“But they didn’t mention it, Duff!”
His smile was faint, rueful. “They have a way of not mentioning all they’re thinking about. Nix, Eleanor, but nix! I am not going to expose myself to another reprimand for taking up their time over nothing.”
Her expression was disappointed, then angry — as if she were going to argue — and finally, unemotional. She knew about arguing with Duff when his mind was made up; it was like trying to talk a hole in a rock.
“At least,” she said, after a while, “we might sort of keep watching Harry — or his room, anyhow. Then, if anything did happen—”
He nodded. “I was thinking that.”
She picked up the carpet beater and turned her back. He saw the “one-quarter profile”
again and heard himself say, “There’s a dandy movie tonight at the Coconut Grove Theater, if you’d like—”
“I’m hay riding with Scotty Smythe,” she answered. “That lamb!” She attacked a carpet Duff had hung for her.
Several evenings later, Harry Ellings, sitting on the front porch as usual, smoking a cigar, listening as usual to the radio, announced he was going to take a moonlight stroll. He announced it loudly through an open window. Upstairs, poring over a textbook, Duff vaguely heard and at first dismissed the words. Harry didn’t go for many strolls, owing to his bad legs, but occasionally he took a preslumber ramble, and this evening, warm, moon-white, was an invitation.
Duff had finished a two-page equation before it occurred to him that a “moonlight stroll” was the sort of thing which he had agreed with Eleanor ought to be watched. He turned his heavy book face down on his desk. He stepped into the dark hall and looked out the window. Through the trees, on the coral-white road, he could see Ellings walking slowly, apparently aimlessly, toward the west. Duff hurried down the back stairs, saying nothing of his departure, and started along the drive. The coral crackled, so he stepped on the grass, reflecting that he was poorly equipped by nature for any act, such as stealthy pursuit, that required a lack of clumsiness.
By walking along the roadside in the shadow of trees, Duff managed, however, to gain enough on Ellings to get him in view. And Duff was surprised — or was he, he asked himself — to find that the star boarder stopped now and again, looked back and seemed to listen, as if he worried over the possibility of pursuit.
The road was crossed by another about a half mile from the house. Harry turned.
After walking some distance, he came to a region where there were no houses at all — an area of pines, palmettos and cabbage palms which was cross-hatched with weedy streets and sidewalks and provided here and there with the ghostly remnants of lampposts. This area, a quarter of a century ago, had been laid out as a real-estate subdivision. Then the boom had burst, and since that time the vegetation of South Florida had worked its way — vegetation aided by storms, heat and the rain. Harry walked with accelerated speed in this moonlit, ruin-like place, following the cracked and broken line of a sidewalk. Duff took off his shoes and stayed behind in the shadows.
Harry was certainly headed somewhere. Beyond the ruined development was a rock pit with a moonlit pond in its bottom, used now as a trash dump. Duff thought Harry might be on his way there, but he stopped short of it. He stood still. His cigar shone brighter, twice.
He turned clear around, looking. Then he whistled.
From the undergrowth almost beside him, a figure rose. Duff thought its rise would never stop — thought it was a shadow, an optical illusion. For the man, who must have been squatting there, was one of the tallest Duff had ever seen — almost a freak, all but a circus giant.
The cigar, perhaps having served its purpose, was stamped out. The two men began to talk. Duff couldn’t hear and did not dare go closer.
When the conference ended, Duff took a short cut home. He reached his room before Harry returned. He was sitting there, appalled by Harry’s companion, and sure now that a direct and dreadful suspicion of the boarder was justified, when he heard voices in the driveway and the slam of a car door, followed by Eleanor’s running feet and her voice,
“Mother! You still up? Guess what? Scotty Smythe, that rich boy in Omega, proposed tome!”
Duff couldn’t miss the thrill in her tone.