Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

Peculiar dame, but handsome. Graduated two years before. Lived with another gal in a bungalow near the campus. Liked older guys, even as a student; very tall and helpfully man-crazy.

The trouble with old Duff, Scotty reflected fondly, was that you had to get to know him to appreciate him. He gave the first impression of an absent-minded Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it took time to find out that he was as human as anybody and far brighter than most.

When the object of such meditations reached the Yates home, his feet were cold both literally and figuratively. He called to Mrs. Yates and then backed away from telling her. He dallied in his room and heard Eleanor come home, and finally went downstairs, where he found the two women together. In a kind of panic, he considered trying to tell Scotty by phone that he couldn’t make it, but, instead, he blurted, “Won’t be here for supper. Sorry, folks.”

Both women stared. It was true that he was occasionally absent, but always after giving long notice.

Eleanor said, rather crossly, “You might have told us!”

“Date,” he answered uncomfortably. “Just made it.”

“A date”—Eleanor was sarcastic—“with some little group, I bet, that does calculus for party games!”

“Dame,” he said coldly. “Who?”

“That would be telling.” He was rather pleased by the half-angry, half-startled look on Eleanor’s face, but mystified by the smile Mrs. Yates gave him behind Eleanor’s back.

Duff dressed. He put on his topcoat. He caught a bus at seven-fifteen. He got out nervously a half block from the Palm Paradise, and walked uneasily toward its glittering, one-story-high electric sign. He went in.

What happened after that, he never clearly understood. Scotty was sitting at a ringside table, under revolving rainbow-hued lights, with two young ladies, one a girl with brown bangs who satisfied every detail of the “cute-college-type” description, and the other a stately, almost regal brunette with black hair, a heavy chignon at the nape of her neck, dazzling dark eyes and a smile, as Duff was introduced, which shocked him by its warmth and intimacy. He sat down, and there were cocktails. Scotty and his girl danced, but the tall brunette expressed herself as delighted not to do so, and she listened to Duff’s words, which flowed with increasing ease — as if every one were a jewel of remarkable brightness.

There was dinner, a very gay meal with a bottle of red wine. There was coffee with brandy in it. There was a floor show. Duff was further startled and pleased when Scotty, in a moment during which their ladies were absent, said, “You know, old-timer, when I called Indigo, she’d heard of you and seen you around, and said she was dying to meet you and already planning how to do it.”

“Wonderful girl,” Duff said. “Why me?”

“She goes for serious types, I guess,” Scotty answered. “Only girl I ever heard of named Indigo.”

“Suits her, though.”

“Deep purple? You bet! Well. Have fun, Archimedes.”

“I’m having a wonderful time.”

He was. The wonderful time continued. There was a long drive in the convertible, windows wound up “against the chill, and Indigo Stacey snuggled close as a further thermal measure. A Miami Beach night club and another floor show. A still longer ride back to Coral Gables — a ride on which Indigo said, “You can start kissing me good night about here, Duff.”

“Here” was some miles from her bungalow.

When the two young ladies had been deposited at their homes, Scotty suggested a nightcap.

And it was in a small bar not far from the campus where Duff, far removed from normal reticence and warmed by the fellowship of Scotty Smythe, shared his problem.

“You know, Duff,” Scotty had said, turning his nightcap highball in his fingers and not tasting it, “I can’t figure you out. On a party, you’re tops. You have fun. At school the work doesn’t seem to bother you — you breeze through it. And yet you act like a man carrying a mountain on his back all the time. Why?”

“Because I happen to be one,” Duff answered. And suddenly, without planning it, he told his story, beginning with the day, which now seemed long ago, when an old hobby had led him to pick the fairly new lock of a closet door.

Excepting for an occasional quiet expletive, Scotty listened to the account without interruption. At its end, his expletives were many and vehement. But they wound up mildly.

“Ye gods,” he murmured. “I’ll say you carry a mountain around. But you’ve got to do something.”

Duff shrugged miserably. “What can I do?”

Scotty drummed on the table, his drink forgotten. “Not much, here. Ellings — and whoever else is involved — that super-jerk you saw, no doubt — will certainly be careful not to act suspiciously for a while. But I bet they are using that truck company to ship the parts!

What I’d do, if I were you, is take that list of customers and go north for the Christmas holidays! I’d look into as many places those trucks serve regularly as I could. Because if you found even one that was a drop—”

“What,” Duff asked disconsolately, “would you use for money?”

Scotty smiled sympathetically and thought a moment. “I was going to fly up home for the holidays,” he said. “Come back after, with the family, as far as Palm Beach. But I could drive. We could. We could stop off at the various cities.”

The Yates family was surprised and disappointed by Duff’s sudden announcement that he was going home for the holidays. It was a very hard thing to do, and he almost hated himself for his decision. Eleanor took the news especially badly. She accused him of deserting. She reminded him that he wouldn’t see her as Orange Bowl Queen. And she burst into tears. But he stuck to his story that he was going to Indiana to visit his family.

Even Indigo Stacey, at whose home he spent an evening playing bridge — the one game in which he was expert — expressed disappointment. She told him that she had developed a “large passion” for him and that the approaching holidays would be the “longest and dullest in years” without him.

He felt, therefore, very much like a fugitive when, carrying a big, beat-up cheap suitcase, he took the bus, ostensibly to the train. Actually, at the station, he was picked up furtively by Scotty Smythe.

In Washington they put up at a second-class hotel, donned old clothes and began “job hunting” at the regular delivery places of the Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company.

These were stores, markets, wholesale houses and other trucking firms. There seemed to be nothing suspicious about any.

“Trouble is,” Scotty said at supper that night, “we don’t know what we’re looking for.

We do know it wouldn’t be anything conspicuous. To locate a receiver of the freight we believe is moving, evidently might take fifty guys a month. And I’ve got to show up at home pretty soon. I got one idea.”

“What?” Duff was leg-weary, insult-weary, discouraged.

“General Baines. Three stars. Friend of my old man. Has something to do with Military Intelligence. Maybe the FBI didn’t see your tale as anything but hallucination. The Army boys might be different.”

“We could try,” Duff agreed.

They tried the next morning. The general was located by phone in his office in the Pentagon Building. He told Scotty that he was “right busy.” He agreed, however, that, since the matter “involved national security;” he could spare a few minutes.

So Duff and Scotty wound their way through the Pentagon labyrinths, found the outer office, waited half an hour, and at length stood face to face with a uniformed, silver-haired, paternal-looking officer who worked in an atmosphere of maps, papers, flags and autographed portraits of great men. He was cordial and quiet.