The Smuggled Atom Bomb

by Philip Wylie

  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 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 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, or several, to some city up north.”

  Duff’s 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 pre-slumber 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 that 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 b
roken 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 to me!”

  Duff couldn’t miss the thrill in her tone.

  II

  In a classroom on the “old campus” of the University of Miami, four young men were engaged in a discussion of the Uncertainty Principle with Dr. Oliver Slocum, a full professor of mathematics and a large man with twinkling eyes, no hair on his head, and a goatee.

  “A common mistake,” said the doctor, “made by many philosophers, has been to assume that the ‘uncertainty’ is neither logical nor empirical, and not even physical, but that it derives from a subjective interposition of the purely human observer, whereas—”

  At about “whereas,” Duff Bogan, one of the four graduate students present for the seminar, lost track of the thought. Since he already knew that the interposition of a machine had the same effect as the interposition of a person, and had known it since his mathematically precocious high-school days, he missed nothing essential.

  Duff looked out the windows. He watched a huge truckload of dead branches proceed down the street past several pretty houses. He reflected that there were still hurricane-detached branches hanging serely in the Yates trees. His mind passed to greater worries.

  There was the matter of the proposal of marriage to Eleanor Yates by Scotty Smythe, of the New York-Bar Harbor-Palm Beach Smythes. Duff had nothing against Smythe. He was a good-looking, intelligent, witty young man. Eleanor deserved the best. Plainly, she liked Smythe. The question was: Did Smythe represent the best? A lightweight, Duff felt. No character. Too smooth. Too social. Too much given to girl-chasing. It was Duff’s belief, during the reverie, that he was thinking in abstract, detached and big-brotherly terms. Any suggestion that jealousy motivated him would have been met by a haughty, almost amused stare of his china-blue eyes.

  By coincidence, yet not surprisingly—since Doctor Slocum greatly enjoyed discussing his part in the work of the Manhattan District; within the limits of secrecy, of course—Duff’s wandering attention came back abruptly to a relevant speech: “Some of our early calculations on the subsidiary effects of nuclear reactions to bomb-released particles were rendered difficult by—”

  Duff listened, hoping to be able to frame a question that might start a new line of discussion which would not advance the class in any way, but which might help him with another worry. Luckily for Duff, when the professor finished a sentence as long and as neatly balanced as a complex equation, Iron-Brain Bates, the grind of the group, took an ideal tack.

  “Doctor,” he said, “to deviate for a moment. How many bombs do you think Russia has?”

  The mathematician frowned momentarily, as if he were not to be budged from the path of instruction. Then he grinned. “If our present political misadventuring continues, we will probably find out how many in the most pragmatic fashion. They will be dropped on us!”

  The four graduate students laughed. Duff said, “Let’s hope most of them will miss.” And he went on idly, “Of course, any nation that had only a few atomic bombs could easily smuggle them into this country and distribute them at ideal sites, to be exploded at the time chosen by that nation.”

  “Easier said than done!”

  “Why?” Duff asked. “Look at prohibition. Hundreds of tons of stuff brought across every border every week. Florida, here, was a center for it. Million bays, channels, waterways, lagoons, empty wastes of Everglades—”

  “An atom bomb, Mr. Bogan, is pretty big. Very heavy.”

  “It could be built in small pieces. Imported, so to speak, in sections.”

  Hank Garvey, who intended to be a math teacher, said, “There’s radioactivity. How do you smuggle radioactive stuff?”

  The professor scowled at Hank. “You really ought to know, Mr. Garvey, that neither plutonium nor the disintegrative isotope of uranium is radioactive enough to be detected readily. Oppenheimer pointed out that you’d need a screwdriver to find a bomb on a ship—have to open every case aboard. Until you assemble a critical mass—enough of the stuff in one spot to set up a chain reaction—your plutonium or uranium would be comparatively easy to handle.”

  “Then,” said Duff, “what’s to hinder a nation from mining our cities?”

  “Unpleasant notion,” the professor smiled. “Mr. Bogan, you have always inclined toward the fantastic.”

  “What’s fantastic about it? If you were a nation with only a few dozen atom bombs, and if you intended to attack, wouldn’t you be smart to plant all the bombs you could exactly where they’d wreck the most vital industries or kill the most people, rather than risk them in bombers that might be shot down or might miss the targets?”

  “There, gentlemen, we have an example of the very sort of pseudo-logic I discussed a week ago yesterday!” Professor Slocum’s delight brought chagrin to Duff even before he went on. “Any nation with a few atomic bombs, only a few, would like to plant them in any enemy nation. True, gentlemen. Such bombs could be fabricated in sections, assembled later, armed and made ready for firing. They could be triggered for detonation by radio. The borders of the United States are comparatively unguarded; large objects and quantities of objects have been smuggled into this nation. So far, we see nothing to limit or to prevent the reality of Mr. Bogan’s shocking implication that one cold winter night or one day—one busy working day—atomic bombs might be exploded without warning in a dozen cities or more. It is logical—to a point. To what point, gentlemen?”

  Duff’s three seminar mates contemplated the problem. They seemed unable to find in it any major syllogistic flaw.

  Professor Slocum chuckled. “What defenses have we?”

  “Well,” said Iron-Brain, “there’s the FBI—”

  “Correct! The Federal Bureau of Investigation! Also a little-discussed but active body known as Central Intelligence. Also the various branches of Military Intelligence. The Immigration men. The Treasury men. Finally, an alert police force, sheriffs and the like. In other words, an invisible net protects our people. Many nets, I ought to say. A hole in one layer is matched by a fresh fine mesh behind the hole. In addition, in the camp of any enemy, in their secret societies, their so-called undergrounds, their cells and so on, this nation has undercover agents. Malevolent plotters are marked men. It would be impossible to set up an organization large enough to bring in, assemble, rig and conceal atomic bombs.”

  Down the hall a bell rang.

  Two of the four students looked gratefully at Duff. He had succeeded in side-tracking old Slocum on his favorite theme for long enough to use up the period. Professor Slocum hastily assigned a double day’s work for the next seminar and, smiling and nodding, skittered down the rather dim hall.

  Duff walked into the sunshine feeling neither warmed nor illuminated. Logic was well enough. There was also such a thing as complacency. The world had been complacent about the Kaiser, about Hitler, Mussolini and H
irohito. A lot of the world had been wrecked owing to such complacency. Possibly old bald-headed Slocum was on the beam. But possibly there was a radioactive beam in the making, right in Miami.

  As Duff walked toward his next class he gazed rather doubtfully down the palm-lined, flower-bright streets of Coral Gables. Far in the distance he could see the tops of buildings in the center of Miami—white towers above the flat green land. He tried to imagine a sudden and unexpected brilliance flaring down there, hurting the eyes, setting ten thousand fires, launching a terrible spray of gamma rays and sending forth a steely wall of blast across the city.

  Somebody clapped his back. “Shut your mouth, Bogan!” Flies’ll enter!”

  He grinned weakly. “Hi, Scotty.”

  “Must have been some dream!”

  Duff nodded and walked along with young Smythe, who continued, “What dazed you, baby?”

  “Just—fantasy. I’d been to a seminar in quantum math. Old Slocum got talking about atom bombs. I was imagining one going off in Miami.”

  He expected Scotty to laugh. But the somewhat younger man merely shook his head. “That old goat will never forget his dear old Manhattan District days!”

  “You know him?”

  “Slightly—in a painful way. He’s head of the department where I keep flunking. Trig this year. Duff,” it was said earnestly, “do you think there is any way for the feeble-minded—meaning me—to ever catch onto the mere meaning of trigonometry?”

  “Why’re you studying it?”

  “Had to have the credit. In science. To graduate.”

  “Why don’t you come and talk about it to me? I bet I could straighten you out. Trig’s a cinch. Trouble is, they teach it hard.”

  “Brother! You have poured the tea! Would you run over the topic with me some night? I’d appreciate it!”

  “Glad to.”

  “What about day after tomorrow? It’s one of Eleanor’s working nights, so I won’t be distracted. Be able to concentrate. At least till she comes home.”