Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

The footprints weren’t plain, except for one, which he studied. It was the mark of the side of a man’s shoe. The man evidently had fallen on the tarlike stuff. But his leg, curiously enough, had left no print. Duff decided that the man must have turned his ankle to make such a mark.

He wondered if the FBI had investigated the sinkhole. Doubtless they had; probably the footprints and boards were signs of FBI scrutiny, though there were other possibilities.

The little fish in the pool were sought by kids and also by men; they made excellent bait.

Some angler might have set minnow traps there from time to time, using boards to stand on.

Tramps might have found shelter in the half cave. High school boys might have used it as a place for a gang meeting or an initiation. It was hidden and pretty far from the Yates house.

Wet to the waist, he shinnied up the tree again. He hadn’t yet found the watching G-man that Higgins had said would always be near. He finished a search of the hammock without luck, returned to the house, took the capsule from his pocket, washed himself outdoors with a hose, and afterward changed his clothes.

Then he went up to the bus line, rode into the Gables and phoned Higgins from a booth in a drugstore. The G-man didn’t seem much interested in the capsule, but he told Duff to leave it with the druggist to be picked up. Duff went home to help with supper for the kids.

Indigo came for him in her car after dark. When they drove down Flagler Street together, on the way to Miami Beach, the crowds, the lights, the Christmas decorations seemed out of key with his life and his mood and his fatigue.

“It’s beautiful!” Indigo kept pointing to everything. And she said, “I’m so glad you’re back! I was lonesome for you.”

He watched her drive, looked at her sleek, dark desirableness, breathed the perfume she wore and felt sure it was called Damnation or something of the sort.

He grinned. “Glad to be back! I was going kind of stale. I’m tired, besides.”

“For being tired, the extra cocktail is recommended.”

“Probably go straight to my head.”

“The very effect I had in mind.”

Duff laughed. “Why, Indigo? How come?”

Her lucent, dark eyes flashed briefly. “Why? Who can say why? I saw you on the campus one day. And again at a football game one night. I asked people who you were.

Why?” She shrugged as she turned the car. “When you get a certain kind of feeling you shouldn’t ask why.”

They dined and sat afterward in a moonlit patio on the edge of the sea. At midnight they drove back to her house and kissed good night. Duff, for a reason he couldn’t quite name, refused to go in to have a nightcap, and went home by bus because his refusal angered her. They quarreled on the doorstep, and she went in, finally, slamming the door in his face.

During that space of time the capsule left in a drugstore made a journey to the FBI in Miami and thence to a laboratory. About two o’clock in the morning, when Duff was in bed, but unable to sleep, owing to alternate waves of self-approval and self-castigation over his rather alarmed flight from Miss Indigo Stacey, Higgins, who was sound asleep at home, reached from his bed to snatch up a ringing phone.

“Yeah?”

“This is Ed Waite, at the lab. Sorry to wake you.”

“Okay. What?”

“That capsule. Anybody take the stuff?”

“Probably.” The G-man was wide awake, then. “Person that did is dead, if so.”

Higgins evaded the implied question. “What was it?”

“Aconitine. Enough to kill a few horses.”

“How would the person die?”

“Like heart failure,” Ed said. “And you couldn’t find the stuff by autopsy. It combines chemically with substances in the body and disappears.”

“I see. Thanks.” Higgins was about to hang up.

“One other thing, Hig. I don’t think that dose was made in U.S.A.”

“No? Why?”

“Because I never heard of anything like it. Aconitine isn’t used to put animals out of misery — nothing like that. And the capsule wasn’t any kind — chemically speaking—

manufactured here. Different base. The gelatin part, I mean. Another thing: It isn’t a little item anybody would whip up to poison somebody else.”

“No?” Higgins sounded skeptical. “Why?”

“You couldn’t feed it secretly to anybody. Too big. They’d see it or else feel it and not swallow it. And you wouldn’t want to try to bust it over somebody’s soup. Skin’s tough.

It would splash and spurt all around.”

“I see. Well, that’s good work, Ed.”

“Only thing it could be, Hig, I figure, is something I’ve only read about.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, if you were a foreign agent in somebody else’s country, for instance, and you thought you might be nabbed at any point and you wanted to be sure you’d never talk, you’d carry around, something about like that. Taped to you someplace. In a crisis, you could pop it in your mouth, bite, swallow — and quick curtains.”

Higgins said, “Thanks, Ed. Keep it to yourself.”

“Right.”

When Duff wakened, it was after ten. He leaped guiltily out of bed and took a shower. Then he tiptoed downstairs and learned from Mrs. Yates that the precaution hadn’t been wasted: Eleanor was still sleeping.

“A whole bunch of people drove her home last night around three,” she said. “This being Queen is bad for girls, Duff. I thought I’d brought up Eleanor so nothing in the world could turn her head. But with everybody in the city at her feet — with dates every second and things to do and all the clothes and the photographs! I’d hate it if—”

“If what, Mrs. Yates?”

“Oh, if she got glamour-struck. Thought she could get in movies. Anything like that.

Eleanor’s actually serious — and a simple person. A homebody. If she got yearning to be rich and famous and all that, she could make a wrong marriage! Even if she didn’t try Hollywood.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much. She’s level-headed. And I don’t believe it hurts a girl to be Cinderella once in a lifetime. Something to remember.”

“If she doesn’t develop a prince complex! Yes.”

The doorbell rang and Duff answered it.

Higgins was standing there, smiling. “Hi, Bogan.”

Duff opened the screen door. “Come out in the kitchen, will you? I just got up.”

In the kitchen, Mr. Higgins told Duff briefly about the capsule.

“You see,” he concluded, “how we can all go haywire. My men went through his things with the police. Never looked under the bed — which is the first thing an old maid would do. Never looked, I mean, beyond seeing nothing big was there. Thought I’d have a squint, myself.”

Duff bit toast he had made. He shook his head. “Too late. I cleaned the place yesterday. You think, then, that Harry—”

Higgins exhaled slowly. “Knocked himself off. Sure. They do. The heat was on him.

His people”—Higgins cursed softly—”whoever they may be, were probably sore at him because you started uncovering Harry’s business. I think when Harry went to Baltimore he was trying to contact somebody. We had men on him the whole time.”

“You did!”

Higgins’ eyes smiled, but not his lips. “This isn’t any amateur outfit, Bogan! Yes. But he never made a contact — not that our men saw, anyhow. He did consult doctors. He said he was sick — and I guess he was. Sick from fear. The doctors couldn’t treat that. So he came back here and maybe got the word. Or knew his number was up because they didn’t get to him in Baltimore. So he took that thing — and probably coughed the skin of it out as he died.”

“That means,” Duff said gravely, “Harry knew what he was doing the whole time.”