Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

There was quiet elation and relief in Higgins’ voice. “Meaning, we are taking over?”

McIntosh frowned harder and then smiled. “If it weren’t Sunday, I believe I’d swear.

Of course, we’re taking over! However, we won’t accomplish anything unless all and sundry really believe we’ve missed our cues by deciding the injury was an accident, the box a myth.

You can see that?”

“Sure. The Yates place is hot. It will be as long as we’re interested. Or the cops.

Anybody. Maybe it always will be, from now on, and maybe — if Ellings was merely being used — we have only one hope: finding out who used him. But there’s one difficulty about telling Bogan and the Yates family that we don’t feel anything was going on around there.

It’s Bogan himself. He really believes what he reported. I believe it. And if we give him the brush, he’s undoubtedly going to push right on with—”

“His hobby of danger?” McIntosh smiled bleakly. “I suppose he is. But — still just being hypothetical — if there is such an outfit as you take on faith, will they be badly alarmed by a physics student’s attempt to catch up with them? I think not.”

“They near killed him.”

The bureau head was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “See here, Hig. If this operation is real, maybe several million people might get killed all of a sudden. Good Americans. Risking the life of one or two or even a family isn’t important. If it’s not real — which is my opinion— there’s no risk.”

Higgins gestured as if to protect that logic. Then he said, “Yeah.”

McIntosh consulted his watch again. “You go back to the hospital. Tell Bogan that we did have a watch on the place ever since he started bringing tales to us. Tell him no stranger or anybody else was even near the hammock trees that night. Tell him we’re calling off our men. Let him feel we’re sick and tired of a lot of to-do that pans out as nothing. Give him the notion that his accident, and his ‘theory’ that it was something different, is the last straw.

He’s already sore at us for apparently doing little. If you say we did a job of watching he knew nothing about, and are quitting now because this time we know he was mistaken — well, it’ll leave him high and dry.”

“Sure will,” Higgins said. “And I hate to do it to him. He’s a nice guy, Mac. Got brains. Sense of humor. Guts.”

“Can you think of a better way to handle it?” McIntosh rose and set his Panama carefully on his head. “If I hurry, I can just about hit the middle of the sermon. My wife’ll be annoyed.” He put his arm over Higgins’ shoulder and propelled him toward the single elevator in service on that Sunday morning. “You haven’t really got this thing focused yet, Hig. Remember what I said. If it’s all a pipe dream, no harm done. If it’s not, we have to run the risk of one man being in danger in order to have any chance at all, ourselves, of stopping something”—as the elevator came, he hesitated—“that we’d gladly sacrifice every man in the bureau to stop.”

Higgins, with whose words, felt the full impact of his chief’s fear. He walked around the building and got in his car and started toward the hospital again. He could tell Bogan that a man under great strain often mistranslates what he sees and hears, and Duff Bogan had certainly been under strain.

Thinking about it alone in bed, after Higgins had gone, Duff agreed that Higgins might be right. After all, they had watched the house. They had acted, when he’d assumed they were ignoring his story. It could have been a lily box, bright insect eggs, a falling branch. Or could it? In his mind’s eye, going over and over the scene, he could see the slots in the screw heads. Insect eggs didn’t have slots. He could tell them that. But they wouldn’t believe it. He could hardly believe it himself. Maybe it wasn’t true. The FBI didn’t believe it, and the FBI wasn’t dumb, so why should he?

With the last shreds of consciousness — of consciousness free of head-splitting pain — Duff answered himself: It was real and awful and growing worse because nobody would do anything about it. So he would have to do what he could, as soon as he was able to leave the hospital. He’d have to work alone.

It was only afterward, long afterward, that Duff could collate and define the moods and incidents that followed. At the time they seemed unrelated and inexplicable.

His head mended rapidly. The doctors were pleased. Duff explained to them with simulated hauteur that physicists had tough brains. He missed Thanksgiving at the Yates home, but not the meal, as Eleanor borrowed from a restaurant a portable foodwarmer and brought turkey with trimmings to the hospital. Three days later he was released, bandaged, but whole again.

Immediately upon his return he noticed a difference in the temper of the household.

Mrs. Yates seemed nervous and worried. The two younger children were cross and strained.

And Harry Ellings had been suffering from what he described as “attacks”; he stayed away from work twice. Eleanor showed the change most sharply if more subtly.

She was, if anything, lovelier than ever and seemed more aware of her attractiveness.

Miami’s best beauty parlors had vied for a chance to give her wavy, tawny hair its prettiest cut; they had taught her new uses of make-up. Stores in Miami and Miami Beach had supplied her, for the first time in her life, with a luxurious wardrobe. These gifts were, of course, donated for publicity — the traditional due of a Bowl Queen.

She was edgy, Duff thought. No doubt she was overtired. The mere fact that he had lain for a week in the hospital had meant a large addition to her work. And now that Charley Yates spent every afternoon carrying newspapers, she was short another helper. Her own job, the demands made on a Queen-elect and the burden of housework were more than enough for any girl. But, in addition to that, she had arranged several dates with other young men than Scotty: Avalanche Billings, the fullback, for one; and Tony Bradley, a Miami businessman, for another.

She seemed glad to have Duff back at home one minute, and the next, annoyed at everything. “Christmas is coming,” she kept saying, “and we’re so broke and there’s so much to do.”

When he tried to reassure her, she turned away.

Finally, they quarreled over the subject of most quarrels: practically nothing. He had worked late in the laboratory on a difficult problem. When he reached home, Eleanor was in the kitchen, and he went immediately to help.

She said petulantly, “Where in heaven’s name have you been?”

“Over on the campus. Working.”

“Fine thing! I needed you here! The pipe’s plugged under the sink!” She picked up a pan of hot vegetables and drained them over a larger vessel. “See?”

“I’ll fix it right after dinner.”

“You’ll have to or wash dishes in the yard! The kids are going to the movies tonight.”

She lifted the lid on a skillet of sizzling meat. He noticed that she was wearing no apron and hadn’t changed from a particularly pretty dress — gray and scarlet — in her new wardrobe. Her mood communicated to him.

“You’ll get spattered,” he said. “Let me turn the chops. You’ve no apron on.”

“You set the table,” she said. “It isn’t yet… I don’t know why Marian’s late!”

“But that meat’s spitting all over the place.”

She muttered something that sounded like, “Mind your own business,” seized a fork, and immediately was splashed so that the fresh dress was turned into something for the dry cleaner.

She said, “Damn!”

“I told you so.”

She whirled from the stove. “You tell me nothing, Duffer Bogan! All the aprons were dirty and I was too darn tired to change!”