The Smuggled Atom Bomb

by Philip Wylie

  “Okay,” Duff said.

  He continued toward his class alone, watching the retreat of the elegantly dressed Mr. Smythe. Duff didn’t need to glance down at his own faded jeans and frayed shirt cuffs to visualize the comparison or to think how odious it would seem to a young lady soon to serve as Orange Bowl Queen.

  He threw off the thought and replaced it with another; in the process, no doubt, merely exchanging hostilities. Professor Slocum could be overconfident about American vigilance. He, Duff Bogan, could have been right about his tests. People—suspicion-proof people like Harry Ellings—could be busy on a project calculated to go far in overthrowing the freedom of the world. Somebody would have to investigate further, even if it was only an overtall, underweight, overworked, badly dressed graduate student named Allan Diffenduffer Bogan.

  “I don’t know what to do, exactly,” Duff said later in the day to Mrs. Yates, who had listened patiently to his story. “I can keep following Harry, of course. If he has a secret date with that big guy again—that darn-near giant—I can try to follow the big man when he leaves cover. I’m a lousy follower, though.” He grinned. “One of my many hobbies wasn’t being a boy detective. Or even trailing animals in the woods. I never did make a good Boy Scout.”

  Mrs. Yates smiled maternally. “I can imagine. Poor Duff.”

  “Oh,” he hurriedly protested the pitying sound. “I had my compensations, remember. Best stamp collection in town. I could send Morse Code, as I taught the kids and Eleanor. Pick locks and do escape tricks. I was the best slingshot marksman in the county.”

  She nodded and sighed. Her eyes rested on him wonderingly. He was twenty-four now, she thought. An age when lots of men had homes, jobs, families. But Duff was a sort of split personality. Half of him was stuck in his childhood and his innumerable boyish interests. The other half, abstract, precocious, was far ahead of most of the college boys brought home by Eleanor.

  “Why don’t you,” she suggested, “go see that Mr. Higgins and tell him about Harry’s meeting? He seemed very shrewd, from the glimpse I had.”

  Duff’s long head shook slowly. “Not me! Not again! Not until and unless I can tell him something that’ll really convince him.”

  “You afraid, Duff? False pride? Or what?”

  His grin reassured her about false pride. “Mrs. Yates, I’m a small-town boy from the Middle West. I hope someday to get a Ph.D. in physics and maybe even to make a small contribution in some branch of the big field of ideas. All I’ll probably ever really do is teach high-school kids about gravity and friction and Ohm’s law. I don’t think the stars wrote me down for a big melodrama like catching spies—or for a hero part, like saving my country.”

  “Yet you said—”

  “Sure. I said! Got more mouth than sense! If what I really suspect is true, it’s so crazy I don’t believe it.”

  Mrs. Yates was a sentimental woman, though not a sentimentalist. During his recital of his hopes she had felt a mist in her eyes and turned her head away. Now, however, she looked back at him sharply.

  “You say you don’t know what to do. Well, you did one thing. You followed Harry and found his walks weren’t entirely innocent moon-gazing. You can go on doing that. If I had legs to walk on, and if I were a man, and if I thought it was useless to talk to the FBI again right now, I’d look over that trucking company where Harry works. Maybe that great, tall man works there, too. Anyway, you could find out what cities the trucks serve. You could perhaps get a line on their customers. If Harry was using trucks to move—what you think—up north, then where the trucks went to would be something to learn.”

  Duff nodded. “That’s not a bad idea!” He lighted a cigarette. “I could maybe apply for a job there. Look the people over. At night when Harry wouldn’t be there to notice me around.”

  It seemed a useful project. Actually, if it had any immediate value, the effort served to give some occupation to Duff at a time when the conflict between his suspicions and his feeling that what he suspected was absurd kept him in a state of nervous anxiety. It also served to show him how inept he was at any sort of investigation.

  The Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company consisted of a half-dozen large buildings in a light-industry section of the city on its northwest fringe. The buildings were low and very large. Some were warehouses, and these were provided with huge doors and long loading platforms; one was the repair garage in which Harry Ellings worked by day; in another, idle trucks of the company fleet were merely parked; the smallest building contained the business offices of the concern, which operated around the clock. At night there was a loneliness about the place in spite of the occasional arrival or departure of a huge trailer truck or of a smaller vehicle bringing merchandise from the South Florida area for reshipment.

  Duff studied the scene. Colored loading crews worked here and there under flaring lights. A watchman made his rounds occasionally, throwing the round fingers of a flashlight at the vast blanks of closed doors. Across the wide and intermittently rumbling street was a diner which boasted, with painted, illuminated signs, that TRUCK DRIVERS EAT HERE and WE NEVER CLOSE.

  Duff walked around the establishment twice and then entered the front office, where a half-dozen men worked at desks, smoked, roamed about with invoices in their hands and marked crates and cases and bundles.

  “What do you want?” one of the men yelled at him from a desk.

  Duff grinned. “Looking for work.”

  “What kind?”

  “Any.”

  “We haven’t got any kind. Just three kinds right now. Driving trucks—and you gotta be expert. Timekeeper. And paper work.”

  “No experience on those big rigs.”

  “You work a night shift?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then come around in the daytime. That’s when they hire the night force and the day force.” The man seemed to think it was pretty funny that they hired the night shift in the daytime, so he laughed.

  Duff laughed. “This company go to all cities?”

  The man rocked his chair back. “You looking for work? Or transportation?”

  “Work.”

  “Florida’s full of guys that came down and couldn’t find a job and want a free ride somewhere else.”

  Duff stood in front of a railing that crossed the wide, dingy room. “Look. Suppose I could bring a friend’s business here? Would that help me get a job?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt none. What kind of business?”

  Duff invented a business. “Making a modernistic line of furniture out of bamboo. Getting popular up North. He ships by rail right now.”

  “Fool to, I’d say.”

  “He’s got a pretty good deal. Still, if your trucks go to all the big cities—regularly, I mean—”

  “New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo, regularly. And points between. And unscheduled trips about once a month to ten-fifteen more cities. Would that suit your friend?”

  “Sounds good,” Duff said, and left.

  He went over to the diner. Four big-shouldered truck drivers leaned on the counter drinking coffee, dunking doughnuts, listening to radio dance music. Duff ordered the same. The men were alert, fresh—waiting, obviously, for trucks to be loaded and their runs to begin. By morning they wouldn’t be so tidy, so cleanly shaven, and they’d look tired.

  “Miami-Dade a good company to work for?”

  They looked at Duff closely. “Why?” one asked.

  “Going to apply for a job.”

  The men shrugged. “Good as any.”

  “Where do they truck to, mainly?”

  “All over,” one man said, “this side of the Mississippi River.”

  “Some guy,” Duff said, “that I ran across in an eating joint told me Miami-Dade was a place where a guy could settle down to a life job. Good management.”

  “It’s all right,” one of the drivers answered.

  “This guy,” Duff
went on, “didn’t give me his name, but you might know him.” He looked at them and they waited. “Because he was the biggest guy I ever saw. Maybe near seven feet tall, and broad. A powerhouse.”

  Heads shook. “Never saw no giants around the joint… You, Bizzmo?”

  “Nope.”

  Duff paid and went out into the night to begin a long walk to the nearest bus stop.

  When, on the following afternoon, Eleanor took up the attempt to persuade Duff to see the FBI, he told her of his efforts. It was her afternoon to iron and his day to air and turn the mattresses. So their talk was conducted at intervals when he passed through the kitchen with his loads and while she continued to press clothes she had washed, with Marian’s help, on the day before. It made for a rather incoherent discussion.

  “In other words,” she finally summed up, “either you don’t think much of my idea or else you’re too stuck-up to take a chance on annoying the G-men?”

  He had three sun-warm pillows in each hand. He flung them up the back stairway. “I need something more before I bother the FBI.”

  “Wasn’t seeing Harry meet that big man enough?”

  “It’ll have to be enough,” he answered, “if it turns out to be all I can get.”

  “What in the world did you think you’d find at Miami-Dade that you couldn’t find out just by idly asking Harry?”

  He laughed—at himself. “Dunno. Whether there was a big guy working there, for one thing. Wasn’t.”

  “Which means practically nothing.”

  “I know. Then I thought maybe I could find out the main, regular customers. Crazy idea, that one. You can’t just walk into a firm and say, ‘Who do you do business with?’ and be handed a list.”

  “Harry’d tell you that too.”

  “Sure. And wonder why the deuce I asked. He’s probably wondered already why the G-men were interested enough in his locked closet to ask him to open it and why that box intrigued them enough to make him open that. In fact, if what we think is going on is real, and if by any chance Harry knows what it is, which I doubt, then Harry is plenty worried by what has already happened. Worried enough, anyhow, so he’d never again have anything in that box in his closet except his precious platinum. I wonder how much it’s worth?”

  “Probably two or three thousand dollars,” she said. “Awful funny way to keep your life savings.”

  He nodded. “Certainly is! Hard to melt. Hard to make that ingot of it. Be like Harry, in a way, though.”

  Eleanor licked her finger and absently tested her iron. “If you really want to know where that company hauls its stuff, I could find out.”

  “You could? How?”

  She resumed ironing, spreading out one of Charles’ shirts on the board. “Well, I naturally know quite a lot of girls who work downtown—secretaries, file clerks like me, and so on. And the stuff they ship—”

  “Cargo.”

  “The cargo is no doubt insured. It would be easy to learn what company insures it. Not hard to find who files for them. Possible to meet that girl or one of the girls. And you might—I might—get the dope from her.”

  “Would you?”

  Her eyes rested on him. “Try? Sure, Duff! Why not? I’m more worried than you seem to be. I think your experiments were right. I think my idea that the stuff is being brought into this country is true. I’m scared!”

  What reply Duff might have made was prevented by a distant roar, a whispering gush. It was a familiar South Florida effect: the approach of rain. Duff’s arms and legs made wide, loose-jointed motions as he flung himself from the kitchen chair to the back door and out into the yard. A moment later a mattress thudded on the kitchen floor, then another and a third.

  When the squall dinned on the shingle roof of the old house, Duff returned. “Narrow squeak,” he said.

  Harry came in behind him. They hadn’t heard his car in the rain.

  The next few days were uneventful for Duff—classes, laboratory work, hard study at home and, of course, more domestic duties than he could perform adequately. In Florida, grass grows all year around and must be mowed and trimmed unrelentingly; shrubs and vines and trees also need frequent trimming. In Florida, the blazing sun and salty air make painting as constant a requirement as on shipboard. In Florida, too, fish breed year-round, a fact which was to lead Duff to a new and painful experience. For some time, however, life went on in its usual pattern.

  Harry Ellings even volunteered one day to help Duff. “Son,” he said, “I generally wake around six. Leave the clippers out and I’ll get after those hibiscus bushes.”

  “That’d be a help.”

  The older man shook his head sympathetically. “Having money is a wonderful thing. Not having it means day and night slaving. Work, work, work! Dunno how those Yateses keep their spirits so high sometimes. Look at that girl! Orange Bowl Queen, come Christmas! Going to college on a scholarship, she is. Has to get good marks to earn her tuition. Runs home to wash and iron and cook. Drives downtown three nights a week to earn a measly few bucks. Then goes dancing on her free nights, or posing for pictures, or fitting a costume, or attending some college party or meeting! The young sure have energy!”

  Duff nodded. “She sure has, anyhow.”

  Harry Ellings went on, “Got it from her mother. Look at Sarah Yates. Lies there day and night—can’t move her legs. So what? Does she gripe and whine? No. Knits. Sews. Makes all the clothes the kids wear. By golly, son, that’s pluck!”

  “Yeah.”

  “So leave the shears out. I’ll pitch in, mornings. Money! Doggone! A person could use a barrel of gold!”

  Duff didn’t reply. He merely thought, for the thousandth time, that a simple, gentle, goodhearted, mousy guy like Ellings could never be associated with anything un-American. Anything dangerous, deadly, murderous. It didn’t make sense.

  Harry continued to talk, which was unusual. He gave a self-deprecating laugh and said, “Nearest I ever got to any money was that melted-down platinum. Guess it was kind of dumb.”

  He hadn’t mentioned the cache before, except to grunt impolite syllables concerning its discovery by the G-men.

  Duff felt himself stiffen internally. But he said, “Man has a right—”

  “Oh, sure. Person like me gets crazy ideas, though. I sure did hate it when the country went off the gold standard. Figured I’d stay on a standard of some sort with my savings. Seems foolish now. I sold that metal and put the money in the bank.” As he spoke, he took a small deposit book from a hip pocket. “All I got to show now is this here ink balance. Hope we don’t get worse inflation.”

  From then on, Harry put in an hour or so at gardening every morning. Duff was grateful.

  The days that were humdrum for him were filled with excitements for Eleanor Yates. Not the least of these was associated with her queenship and consisted of parade plans, the selection of maids of honor, newspaper interviews and appearances at lunches and other public affairs. Another source of excitement was the fond courtship paid to her by the amusing, cheerful Scotty Smythe in his salmon-pink convertible. He seemed to regard her tentative replies to his now-frequent proposals as proof of an arbitrary state of mind which would change in the long run. And he appeared to be unimpressed by the large numbers of other young males in the university and in the city who pursued her.

  Some further part of her complicated life was made anxious, if not precisely exciting, by a decision to take into her own hands the matter of Duff’s refusal to make any further immediate contact with the FBI. She had thought over the situation and decided it was her duty to do something, whether Duff felt that way or not. So she phoned the bureau, asked for Mr. Higgins and made an appointment.

  The G-man welcomed the girl in his office one evening after dinner and before she was due at work. He told her that the newspaper photographs—even the colored ones—didn’t do her justice. He asked her what was on her mind and she made the suggestion that had so startled Duff. “Did it ever occur to you that if nobody h
as stolen any of our bombs, somebody could be bringing parts into the country?”

  She could see instantly that the idea had not occurred to the G-man. And he, realizing she could discern his surprise, made no effort to camouflage it. “No. Not to me, anyhow. Mcintosh may have thought of it.”

  “Mcintosh?”

  “Head of this office.” He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “Interesting—highly unpleasant idea.”

  “There’s this.” She told him about the night Harry Ellings had gone for a stroll, about Duff’s secret pursuit and about the furtive meeting with the man seven feet tall.

  He doodled while she talked. “That’s odd,” he said. “But, again, we’ve got everybody who might be involved in any such a thing pretty well tagged. And there’s no superman in the bunch. I know that. It’s my business to know.”

  “Harry Ellings isn’t tagged.”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it possible, somehow, that there could be a whole group you aren’t onto?”

  His eyes flickered. “Hardly. I won’t say it couldn’t be. We’ve had one or two nasty surprises along that line. Like some of the scientists the high-ups cleared, who turned out later to be plain spies.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  He pondered again. “Look here, Miss Yates. I’ll talk to Mac. We did a pretty good work-up on your boarder. There are a thousand reasons why a man could meet a pal in an empty lot at night. Some legal, some not, but none necessarily what you’re thinking about. I doubt, for instance, if the kind of organization you imagine would ever use a guy so big he’d be identified half a mile away. Ever think of that?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “No.”

  “Your other boarder, Bogan, probably never did either.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, I’ll talk to Mac. We may see Bogan again. We may want to talk to you again. There’s a lot we might do. Of course, if anything else should come up—anything of the sort that young Bogan’s waiting for—inform us at once. And don’t let anybody else know you’ve noticed any such happening. You or Bogan.”