by Philip Wylie
Eleanor flushed. “He doesn’t know I came here. He wouldn’t come. He was too much afraid he’d merely be starting another wild-goose chase.”
Higgins chuckled. “He should see our files! That’s our commonest form of chase! Well, thanks.”
It wasn’t particularly satisfactory. Mr. Higgins had been polite, but not much worried. He had thanked her. Yet she felt that if she had been Duff, instead of a pretty girl, Mr. Higgins might have delivered a scolding for suspecting fire where there was hardly even smoke. She kept the visit to herself.
In the matter of learning the regular large customers of the Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company, Eleanor was more effective. She had no trouble finding the name of the insurance company that did the underwriting for Miami-Dade. She knew two girls who worked for the firm. She found out where they had lunch. She cut two classes to be at the right drugstore at the proper time. Both girls were flattered to eat lunch with what they called a “celebrity.” When they learned Eleanor had “a friend” who was thinking of using the Miami-Dade concern for shipping, but who was trying to find out exactly where the truck fleet went regularly—so as not to pay special or excessive rates—the girls were amused by Eleanor’s “friend’s” astuteness and readily agreed to supply her with a list of regular drop points.
Two days later Eleanor had the list: firm names, street addresses and cities. “Miami-Dade,” one of the girls had scrawled, “hits all these joints at least once per week.”
Eleanor proudly gave the typewritten pages to Duff that evening.
He was pleased. “Marvelous! Marvelous!”
“Elementary,” she answered, in Sherlock Holmes’ conventional words. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
“What about a movie tonight?” he asked.
Her head shook. “Gotta work tonight. Overtime.”
“Doggone! It’s Saturday. I forgot!” He laughed. “Can’t go, myself. I’ve got a date with your boy friend again.”
“Which boy friend?”
He made a face at her. “Guess, gal.”
“You mean Scotty’s coming? For some more math tutoring?”
Duff chuckled. “Yep. And you know what? I’m getting paid! Three bucks for an hour of the old sines and cosines.” Suddenly he was embarrassed. “Is that all right? I did it for free the first time. He got by his next exam after that. But then he insisted on coughing up. Said he’d pay any other tutor. And he can afford it.”
Eleanor’s eyes were shadowy. She sighed. “Of course, it’s all right, Duff. It’s just too bad, somehow that you have to tutor my—”
He pushed the tip of her nose with his forefinger fraternally, fondly. “Tutor your suitor? Glad to. Three bucks a week comes in right handy.”
She looked away. “And Scotty can sure afford it. Goodness, he’s rich!”
“Pretty nice guy,” Duff nodded. “The dough doesn’t seem to dizzy him any. And he’s a bright lad, besides. It’s only that he and trig aren’t soul mates. Still he’s coming along. I taught him what trig was for. That interested him. Once Scotty got onto the fact that there’s a practical angle, he did real well.”
Eleanor smiled. “He’s a practical sort of boy, Duff, in spite of the gay-blade exterior.”
“Yeah.” Duff felt suddenly very much outside Eleanor—her life, her friends and the places where her life would undoubtedly lead her. “Yeah. He’s nice.”
That was when she kissed him. She kissed him hurriedly, almost in confusion, certainly impulsively, and she missed his cheek, getting his chin instead. But when she did it her eyes were shiny. And she said, “Duff, you’re a love!”
Then she ran out to the barn and drove away. Duff heard Scotty’s car hoot as they passed each other; the pink convertible came crackling up the drive. But during that time Duff stood where he was, beside the front door, even when he heard Scotty Smythe’s feet on the worn porch boards. She kissed me, Duff thought. And he thought, She kissed me because she feels sorry for me. It was the kind of idea that made a man want to kick walls down, even in sandals, such as he had on. Nobody wants to be felt sorry for by a girl. By anyone.
But when Scotty reached the door, Duff had recovered. His smile was hospitable; he took in Scotty’s new, herringbone-Angora sports jacket, and said, “Hello, Pythagoras.”
Scotty replied in the gravest tone, “Good evening, Euclid.”
After Scotty had paid gay respects to Mrs. Yates and briefly teased the younger children, who were studying, they went up to Duff’s room and settled down to work. Duff possessed the second most important faculty of a true teacher, as well as the first—which is to present new knowledge lucidly. The second is the ability to perceive the mental gaps and blocks in a student—the points at which, for individual reasons, he fails to grasp the subject. Often it is not stupidity, but a particular shape of a special personality or a bad background in previous teaching which causes a student to appear unintelligent. In Scotty’s case it was both; no previous teacher had ever given him the feel, the sense and excitement of mathematics. Under Duff’s tutelage, Scotty’s attitude changed; he learned to appreciate the reasons behind the symbols.
Their hour went quickly and was extended to a second hour. Finally, however, Scotty broke up the session. “Getting late, pal. And we’re already a week ahead of my class. Wouldn’t my old man be startled if I got good marks in trig!”
“You will.”
“Darned if I don’t believe you’re right!” Scotty went down the stairs, looked into Mrs. Yates’ room to say good night, and opened the front door. “Tell Eleanor I couldn’t wait for her. Omega meeting in the a.m. Tell her”—his eyes lighted up—“that any time she wants to shop for jewelry suits me.”
Two red taillights swept down the drive. Duff stayed on the porch. An old moon had risen; it threw shadows across the silver nebula of lawn. An automatic smile on Duff’s long, earnest face slowly faded. He imagined the excitement with which Eleanor might “shop” with Scotty, or some other boy, for a diamond ring. He would have been less than human if he had not also reflected that any diamond he could buy would be almost invisible. Yet no purposeful thought of himself and Eleanor and an engagement ring entered his head.
He sighed into the moonglow and noticed the glint of it on the lily pool he’d built the year before—partly in pursuance of a hobby and partly to embellish the Yates’ lawn, which, at the time of his arrival, had been unkempt.
Years before, in Indiana, Duff had become interested in aquariums. He’d built several of wood and window glass, stocked them from local brooks, and sold a few. In Florida he had soon observed that pools could be dug in the underlying limestone; they needed only a little cement to waterproof them, and frost never heaved the ground. He had also found that tropical fish could be raised outdoors, that some species were native, and that colored water lilies of many varieties could be obtained at no cost when the university was separating its plants. So he had built a pool some twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide, trapped mollies in a nearby canal and bought a pair of wagtails.
Having noticed, some days before, that a new crop of mollies was due—and not feeling in a mood to sleep—Duff now went back to the house, procured a flashlight and walked down to the pond.
Sure enough, half a hundred tiny minnows swam in the open places and among the water plants and hid under the lily pads. Four of his crimson, night-blooming lilies were out, each one as big as a dinner plate. His torch moved about, touching the flowers, penetrating the clear water to search out snails and to follow the upward dive and downward lunge of water beetles. A small branch had dropped on one of the day-blooming lilies, and Duff walked over to a cabbage palm where he kept a dip net for retrieving such objects.
The branch lay among the lily pads at a place where they intermingled—reddish leaves floating alongside green.
The surface was covered densely in an area as big as the top of a dining-room table. But, in dipping out the branch with one arm while with the other hand he aimed the flashligh
t, Duff opened up a space between the pads. It wasn’t a wide gap, but it was wide enough to allow the light beam to penetrate the water to what should have been the bottom of the pond—and wasn’t. A board was revealed.
Duff tossed out the small branch and pulled the lily pads farther apart. He presumed the board had fallen into the pond during the October hurricane, and wondered why it hadn’t floated. He thought it might be a section of one of the boxes in which the lilies were planted, a section come loose, but held under water by a nail.
With the idea of “box” on his mind, Duff gasped audibly. He pushed hard at the leaves. It was not a side of a lily box and it was not a board. Leaning, holding his light closer, he could now see the top, the grain of hardwood, the glimmer of varnish or wax, and a glint of brass screw heads around the sides. Probing again with the net and changing his position, he thought he made out handles at both ends of the box.
He switched out his light. He let the lily pads float together, covering a hiding place that wasn’t as ideal as Harry’s closet, since, from time to time, Duff cleaned out excess algae in the pond and scrubbed its sides, wading hip-deep. But it was a good-enough hiding place now, because he performed those chores at long intervals and had finished them just after the blow in October.
Those thoughts had taken seconds only. He leaned the net against a tree and walked along the east side of the house. Harry’s lights were on. After a moment, he saw Harry as he passed the window—Harry in pajamas.
Duff went back quietly to the pool. The thing to do, he reflected, was to wade in, get the box and hide it somewhere else. Or, better, put it in the station wagon as soon as Eleanor returned from work and drive straight to the FBI. This one, Duff thought, would probably contain uranium—pure uranium—shaped for a certain use.
Duff sat down on the grassy edge of his pool. He took off his shoes and socks. He was excited, exultant, and also afraid. He did not know just what he feared, just why he was afraid. Then, abruptly, he did know. It was the disturbance of a leaf behind him or the tiny sound of a pine needle snapping underfoot. A very near sound, too near to give him time to escape or even to whirl around for attack. For he was sitting and there was something, somebody, in the dark right behind him.
For a second or two he was unable to think at all. Then, when he thought he heard the whisper of a swung weapon of some kind, he tried to lunge as far forward as he could. Fear was a sickness in him as he plunged, and fear was his final recollection. There was a ringing sound, a bursting in his head that he sensed at the instant and never afterward remembered…
In the house, Harry turned out his light and went to his window. He looked at the moonglow. From the sinkhole west of the house came a murmurous croaking of bullfrogs. At last he walked to his bed and lay down to sleep.
Mrs. Yates, weary and warm under her reading light, pulled toward herself the pivoted bedside table that Duff had built. With a pencil, she wrote a good-night note to her daughter. She pinned the note to her wheel chair and gave it a push that rolled it through the door and into the living room where Eleanor would see it.
Marian Yates slept peacefully; damp curls of her dark hair overspread her pillow. Charles Yates, having finished the last installment of The Queen of the Planet Brandri, tossed Fabulous Science Magazine onto the floor and switched out his light. There was silence, deep and tropical.
After a while, car headlights swept into the Yates’ driveway. Eleanor parked in the barn, came in by the back door, read her mother’s note, smiled a little, and switched out the living-room light. The porch was in the shadow, but moonlight poured on the lawn. She stepped out to look at it and saw, as her eyes accommodated themselves, that one of the big branches torn off by the hurricane and stuck in the trees had come loose and fallen into the lily pool. She also saw something that glinted beside the water. Even so, she would have gone to bed; she was very tired. But, as she turned, she heard a sound. A low, bubbling mutter. A horrible sound. She rushed for the flashlight, but it was not in its place. She knew instantly that what she had seen glinting on the lawn was the light.
“Duff,” she whispered frantically, and she ran out the front door.
She picked up the light. Worked the switch. Aimed at the mass of dead leaves, twigs and thigh-thick branch in the pond. With flinching nerves she saw that the water was stained red. And then she saw Duff—Duff’s head. The scalp was open. His eyes were shut. He didn’t seem conscious. But his hands, on the pond edge, were grasping feebly and he had his mouth out of water. He was trying to say something.
“Duff!” she cried.
He muttered.
“Duff! I’ll get help! Can you hang on?”
His blood-streaked face looked up. His eyes showed now as slits. His teeth bared. His lips worked. “Scream,” he finally enunciated. “And look behind you.”
She swung around—and saw no one. But she screamed.
III
Emery Mcintosh, chief of the Miami office of the FBI, listened to Higgins without interrupting. He was a medium-sized man of about fifty with a bald spot on the top of his head, nattily dressed in tropical-worsted suit, silk socks, black, highly polished shoes and a white shirt with a stiff collar. When he did speak, there was little in his accent to suggest his Scotch descent. But the ways and even the looks of his ancestors might have been read into the crisp mustache which matched his sandy hair, the blue glint of his eyes, the extraordinary firmness of his mouth and the deep, rather melancholy timbre of his voice. Mcintosh looked, Higgins reflected, like a Presbyterian deacon dressed for taking up a Sunday collection—which he was and had been about to do when the younger agent had telephoned.
“And the lad’s coming along all right?” Mcintosh finally asked.
Higgins nodded. “Hardly a lad. Twenty-four.”
“But still in college,” the G-man sighed. “That keeps ’em young. One minute they can act like wise old professors. The next, fall apart like adolescents.”
Higgins’ grin was quick. “Well, Bogan is different. And he’s all right. They had him in a hospital soon after midnight. Eleven stitches.”
“Any tree bark in the wound?”
“Several bits, the surgeon said.”
“I see.”
“I’m not sure you do,” Higgins answered stubbornly. “The poor guy was clunked more than once. He could have been black-jacked. And then that limb could have been hauled down from the tree. And after that he could have been pounded a couple with it. I think they thought he was dead.”
“If there was a human agent—any ‘they’ at all! A big ‘if.’”
Higgins shrugged in a swift, shadowy way. “All right. I couldn’t find tracks on the lawn or in the shrubbery. Hasn’t rained lately, so why should I? Nobody in the family heard or saw anybody. He must have made a big splash, going in, but the house is fairly distant. Ellings’ room’s on the other side. The mother and the girl were asleep. The boy’s room is on the back.”
“Ground wet around the pool? That box—if it existed—would have come out dripping.”
“The ground was wet, all right. But it would have been soaked by the splash of the man and the limb anyhow. There might once have been an impress of the box on the grass—it would have been heavy. But the police were there first and they had it fairly well trampled.”
Mcintosh sank lower in his swivel chair. “Tree?”
“I gave it a going-over. You could see where the limb had been jammed. Rubbed the bark of a sound branch. You could see that it hadn’t been attached by much. A few slivers of wood and bark. It weighed around a hundred and fifty pounds. It could, so far as signs show, simply have come loose while he crouched there, and dropped on him and conked him, turned as it hit the pool, and swatted him again. It could, for all I can surely prove.”
Mcintosh looked at his watch. On its chain was a Phi Beta Kappa key. “You say the lilies were in wooden boxes. Could one of them have changed position so he mistook it, at night, in a flashlight beam, for what he imagined wa
s related to his other—discovery?”
“How can anybody answer that except Bogan himself? He said he saw the box plainly. Said he saw brass screw heads. No screws in his lily boxes. And it’s hardly anything he’d dream up. Besides, the lily boxes have no tops. They’re filled with compost, and that’s covered with white sand.”
“One might turn turtle.”
“Yes. Except that it would haul under water a conspicuous bouquet of lily pads and buds and flowers.”
“You believe there was a box and Bogan got slugged and the box was taken away while he was unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe”—Mcintosh took time to make himself say it—“that there was uranium in the box?”
“Or some other part of an A-bomb.”
“I don’t.”
Higgins started to say something argumentative, changed his mind, and smiled. “I don’t blame you.”
“Not one tangible piece of evidence! Bogan once had what he called a sample, a few particles he filed off, and he claims he analyzed them—which is difficult even for a specialist, and he wasn’t that. But he lost what was left of his sample before we could work on it. Ellings did have a hunk of platinum on hand, and that’s peculiar, but it’s not uranium. Ellings met a man we’re supposed to believe was seven feet tall. Phooey! Ellings doubtless met a man. He may even be busy with some deal—a little smuggling or the passing of stolen goods. But do you realize what you’re saying when you talk about A-bombs?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt it. You’re saying, man, that whole cities are being prepared for slaughter without warning! And you’re saying this is being done by people we have no whisper of, line on, word about—not a notion of, a smell, scent, track, trail or even hunch about!”
“Exactly.”
“Frankly, I think that’s impossible.”
“You can’t say it’s impossible, Mac.”
The Scotsman shrugged. “Very well. As unlikely as flying saucers. Put it that way. On the other hand, grant, for a second, it’s true. What then?”