Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

Marian, who had gone into the stair hall, now called, “She certainly is getting absent-minded! She didn’t even take along the hat that goes with the new brown rig!” Marian came, then, carrying a hat the color of Eleanor’s eyes, with canary-yellow trimming.

It was not until then that Duff became alarmed. But alarm, when it appeared, was instant and formidable. She wouldn’t go without the hat. She was orderly. She was responsible. She had a good memory. And lately, she’d been almost vain; so much attention would have made anybody conscious of beauty. It was hard to imagine that Eleanor would barge away when somebody arrived to pick her up — without a hat that, obviously, was a main part of a planned costume for a very important social event.

As he felt ice inside himself, Duff instantly dissembled. “Maybe Scotty knows about it.”

He went to the phone and dialed. He got Scotty’s roommate and, presently, Scotty himself.

“Hi, you phony Sherlock!” Scotty said.

Duff frowned at the greeting and then realized that, as far as Scotty knew, his idea about the boxes had been mistaken and their trip to New York a blunder. He grinned tensely and asked about Eleanor.

“No,” young Smythe answered. “I didn’t see the Queen depart. I had a little colloquy with her around three, and I blew. I left her among the Yates trees and shrubs.”

Duff thanked him. He tried two members of the Orange Bowl Committee without success. He phoned the people who were sponsoring the banquet and asked if they had heard anything from Eleanor. They hadn’t. The family tried some of Eleanor’s closest girl friends.

Nobody knew anything about her.

“We’re probably going bats for nothing,” Duff said. “After all, she was terribly balled up with dates. Let’s eat.”

Eight o’clock.

No sign of Eleanor. Duff called a number Higgins had given him, and a sharp voice said, “Rolfe, here.”

“My name is Allan Bogan. I live at the Yates house—”

“Right. Where you calling from?”

“There.”

“Better use another phone.”

“No. The thing is, Eleanor Yates has disappeared. I mean, she was due home over two hours ago — been missing since around four.”

“Right. We’ll check.”

Duff hung up, wild-eyed.

“Who was that? The police?”

Duff nodded. “Sort of.”

Mrs. Yates began to cry a little.

Duff nervously walked out on the porch. If they had seized her — if they had taken her away — who were “they”? Why had they done any such thing? Where had they taken her?

There could be a reason. Weeks before, unsatisfied by his effort to convince the FBI that something was happening, she had gone to see Higgins without telling him. Since his return from New York, Duff hadn’t exchanged confidences with Eleanor or anyone else.

Higgins had forbidden that. It was possible that Eleanor had found out something so final, so telling, that she’d been— What?

“They” wouldn’t mind killing a girl. “They,” perhaps, were working to kill millions of people. You couldn’t even think, rationally, of what “they” might be planning.

Duff paced back and forth on the porch. It was a warm evening, but not so warm as to explain the sweat that burst on his brow, soaked his shirt. Only fear could explain that.

Four night-blooming-jasmine bushes which Duff had raised from cuttings blossomed along the edge of the veranda. Their perfume, so heady that some people cannot bear it, saturated the darkness and drifted downwind, exotic and sweet. When Duff noticed it, his attention came only in the form of a memory, a memory that Eleanor was very fond of jasmine. He tried to tell himself it was insane to imagine that, simply because she was missing, Eleanor had been kidnapped and perhaps killed by people whose very existence was shadowy.

He paced the porch, wondering what else might have happened to her, what less-horrifying thing. She had last been seen in the big yard, by Scotty and her mother, over near the banyan. He stood at the porch rail and looked at the black arcades beneath the trunks of the great tree. Had somebody been concealed there?

Suddenly, as if he had been told, Duff realized what had happened: Eleanor hadn’t previously known anything that had made her freedom on her existence a danger to “them.”

What had happened was that she had heard something from the lawn, down near the banyan.

He raced through the house, startling Mrs. Yates and the two children. “Be right back! Ten — fifteen minutes!”

He picked up the flashlight. In the barn, he shouldered a ladder.

Charles yelled, “Need me?”

“No, Charley! Stay with your mother.”

It was hard work moving through the jungle with the ladder. Time and again it hooked over trees and fouled up on boughs or vines so that he had to use his light, stop and maneuver. When, finally, he reached the sinkhole, he was panting heavily. He stood there, afraid to swing the beam of the electric torch. He shut his jaws and aimed the light down and around the edges. He didn’t see what he feared he would: a body. A girl’s body in a brown dress.

The ladder splashed in the water. It was, he noticed, abnormally muddy. Plenty of time to settle since he had roiled it. In the water, he plunged for balance as his feet settled uncertainly. His torch circled the recesses. All he saw was water, rock and innumerable roots.

A big moth flew through the light beam. He pushed forward under the rocky roof of the edge.

There were fresh tracks. He was sure of that. He was surer still when he could no longer find the one print that had held his attention, the mark of the side of a shoe on a foot that seemed legless. “They” had been in the pit that afternoon, taking the boxes away. But how had they kept from being seen?

Eleanor, because she had gone over to the banyan, must have heard a sound in the woods and gone to look. In daylight he could probably find the marks of her heels. She had gone to look. And that was that.

Where was she now? Alive? A prisoner? He groaned and only the walls answered sepulchrally. His flashlight fell sharply on the stones and threw sharp shadows. The recess was deeper than he’d thought. He waded back. It seemed to turn at a projecting wall.

Following the turn, Duff found a new feature of the sinkhole. An arch of limestone, shoulder-high, spanned some ten feet of water. He leaned and shone his light along its surface. The tunnel, half air and half water, led into the distance in a meandering line as far as he could see.

Some hundreds of yards away in. that direction was the overgrown real-estate development where Harry Ellings had had his furtive rendezvous with the gigantic man. And beyond those cracked sidewalks, cabbage palms and broken lampposts was the old rock pit, now used as a dump.

Sinkholes, if they held water, were sometimes connected, underground, with others.

This one could communicate with the water in the rock pit. In that case, the value of the Yates land to anyone wishing to store desperate cargo was self-evident. Such cargo could be unloaded at night in the old quarry and dragged through this tunnel to the place where he stood. It could then be buried in the soft ooze. And no one watching the house or its surrounding grove of jungle trees would see a sign of coming and going. Duff peered again.

Surely the boxes went out here that afternoon. Perhaps Eleanor also—

He started into the opening and changed his mind. The tunnel might go to the quarry.

It might be a blind pocket. It might have a hundred forks and turns; he could get lost underground. It was not sensible, not even sane, to explore alone. Taking gasps of air, he yelled “Eleanor!” repeatedly. Nothing came back but echoes.