Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

At eleven, Duff had sent ten cents for a booklet called The Boy Locksmith. Finding that people were either charmed by or aghast at his proficiency with skeleton keys, he had advanced to more elaborate literature on the subject. Before he reached high-school age he was much in demand where keys were lost or where trunks, barns, cabinets and the like refused to open. In high school, while other boys mowed lawns for extra change, Duff had repaired luggage and started cars that lacked keys.

To look at Harry Ellings’ lock-fitted closet door, then, was to know how to get the door open rather quickly. Since it was unthinkable that the drab, good-natured star boarder had anything important or secret locked away, Duff felt no curiosity. But it would be fun, he thought, to open the door, set something alien in the closet — and wait for results.

Grinning, Duff ran down the back stairs, came back with selected tools, and took steps three at a time while Mrs. Yates gripped the binding of her magazine tightly — sometimes, when he rushed that way, Duff fell.

His hands, however, were not clumsy. They worked rapidly over the lock and soon the door swung open. Inside, Harry’s suits hung neatly. On the shelf were suitcases, old and dusty. On the floor was a cubical hatbox of cardboard. Duff procured a metal wastebasket and set it on top of the hatbox.

He thought his joke would be more noticeable if he put the hatbox on the basket.

Only he couldn’t lift the hatbox. He took another hold and tried again. The cardboard threatened to tear, but the box didn’t budge. So Duff untied the tape and raised the lid. Inside, was a hardwood box, well made, waxed, with an inset handle and a lock of a kind Duff had never before seen. He stared at this and then tipped over the box and its hatbox disguise—

which could be done only with effort. The whole thing weighed about a hundred pounds.

He went downstairs then and interrupted Mrs. Yates’ reading. “The doggonedest thing,” he said — and told her. “What could he have — what could anybody have? — in a fifteen-inch box, weighing that much? Gold?”

“Harry?” She chuckled. “Heavens! I know what Harry does with every cent! Better put it back Duff.”

He went upstairs. It was about four-thirty. Harry wouldn’t be home for more than an hour. Duff had opened the closet without curiosity; the box and its peculiar lock left him with no feeling but curiosity. He struggled with his conscience — and tried certain tools. When the lock clicked, he found it hard to raise the lid because of its weight. The underside was metal-lined. Lead. Whatever was in the box was packed in cotton. He raised the cotton and saw a very odd object of grayish-silver metal, machined and polished. It looked like a segment of a big egg, saw-toothed on one face, as a cog or gear would be. When he hefted it, he judged it weighed about five pounds. Maybe more.

He tried, as a graduate student of physics and a man with mechanical hobbies, to imagine what the object was. He couldn’t, at first. When, presently, he had a single idea, he pushed it from his mind: too crazy. Nevertheless, after some very worried thought, he went downstairs again.

“Sweeping the kids’ rooms,” he called untruthfully to Mrs. Yates. “Bring you your iced tea before long.”

He worked fast after that. With fine emery paper he removed a trace of the metal; with scouring powder he polished away the scratches made by the emery. He wore gloves and took extreme care. Having obtained a microscopic sample, he restored everything to the exact state in which he had found it. He left the cigarette in Harry’s ashtray after thought which told him Harry could easily notice his room had been dusted that day.

He then hid the emery-paper sample in the barn, washed his hands repeatedly and did a quick sweeping job on Charles’ and Marian’s rooms. He was making iced tea in the kitchen when Eleanor drove up in the family station wagon.

“Let me do that,” she said. “You’ve spilled on the drainboard and got ice on the floor!” She put a load of books on the table and turned her back to him. “Unbutton.”

Duff smiled and undid little buttons between her shoulder blades where she couldn’t reach easily. The dress was one of two cotton prints she’d found at a sale — yellow like her curly hair, light brown like her topaz eyes. She hurried from the room, called to her mother, and was soon back in the kitchen wearing an old dress and moccasins, instead of her high-heeled shoes.

A match struck; the burners of the kerosene stove slowly took fire. “I wish we had gas or electricity! Kerosene’s so slow!”

She bent over a bin Duff had made from lumber scraps, and came up with an armful of potatoes. “Peel!” She emptied out a sack of green peas and started shelling. “What’s new?”

“We had a burglar.”

Her eyes glowed. “No! I bet he didn’t steal anything! I bet, if he really looked the place over, and if he was a nice burglar, he left something for us when he went out! Five dollars, maybe, on the hall table!”

“I was the burglar.”

“Oh!” Her eyes looked up and laughed. “What’d you rob? The kids’ banks?”

“Harry’s room. His closet. The locked closet.”

“Harry hasn’t got a locked anything! That poor, sweet guy is the world’s openest book!”

Duff rinsed a white-peeled potato, cut it up, started another. “I’d have agreed, two hours ago. He’s still probably innocent. Just keeping something that some pal asked him to put under lock and key.”

“What are you talking about, Duff Bogan?”

He told her. “First, you see, it was going to be a gag. Then I got curious. The lock on that box was a new one to me. And then, the gadget inside—”

“Sounds like some sort of trophy.”

“Trophy?”

“Sure,” Eleanor said. “You know. Golfers get silver golf balls. Anglers get gold-plated fish. Probably Harry won the Never-Missed-a-Working-Day-in-Five-Years prize at his company. Being a mechanic, it was probably a cogwheel, only silver or something.”

“Oh.” Duff thought about that. “It wasn’t silver. It wasn’t a cog. It wasn’t engraved.”

“Then,” she said, snatching at a pea that popped out of its pod and rolled, “what was it?”

“It barely might be — uranium.”

She was about to answer derisively. His seriousness sank in. “What?”

“The only thing I could imagine it looked like was a carefully machined part of something which, with other parts like it, would fit together to make a sphere. A sphere weighing maybe twenty pounds, more or less. It might have been any of a half dozen metals or a thousand alloys. Still, there’s only one thing I know of, made of parts which fit perfectly into what is probably a sphere around that size. The pieces that come together to’ form a critical mass and go off with a hell of a bang.”

“You mean an atomic bomb?”

“Maybe it’s only a mock-up. A model, I mean. That’s why I took a sample. To test and see what the metal is. I could be wrong, but I think Harry, whether he knows it or not, either has a piece of the heart of an A-bomb up there or else a metal model of one.”

Eleanor began to laugh. “Harry — a spy?” When he didn’t join her laughter, she looked at him for a long moment. “You think somebody’s stealing more of our A-bomb secrets and Harry’s being used to keep the thing — until time to move it on out of the country?

Let’s ask Harry where he got the box!”

Duff wished for a moment he hadn’t told Eleanor anything. “Ye gods!” he answered.

“Not really! I just — have to know what the metal was, now that I’ve seen the gadget.

Chances are a million to one my idea is totally nuts. But if it did happen to be that millionth chance, then asking Harry anything would be a terrible blunder!”