Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

He left the pit and raced toward the house. As he rounded the banyan tree he heard a distant siren.

Mrs. Yates saw him enter and paled. “You’re wet!”

“I’m all right. I was looking in that rock pit in the woods. Nothing. Don’t worry so, mother!”

He changed to dry clothes as rapidly as he could. When he came down, Higgins, with two men in business suits whom he’d never seen and two cops, had just come in. Duff jerked his head at the FBI man and they went to the kitchen, where he told Higgins about the sinkhole.

The men, soaking wet, yelling in the low, rocky passages, found a route to the quarry.

They found ample signs that men had used it — often and for a long time. They found evidence that vehicles had driven up to the quarry at a point different from the one used by dump trucks. But no trace of Eleanor.

Near midnight Higgins sat with Duff in the kitchen. Both were muddy to the waist.

But Higgins had been on the telephone for twenty minutes. He gulped coffee now and wiped a sticky forehead with a sodden handkerchief.

“Nothing!” he said to Duff. “No lead! Nothing new on the whole proposition. What we’ve got to do is go over it.”

“Go over it!” Duff groaned. “What do you think I’ve been doing since it started?”

Higgins ignored that. “I’ve got every man we have looking into everything they can think of! Mac — my chief — will be here soon. Reports will come in here. Now! Let’s go back to that day when you went upstairs to clean the rooms and you noticed Ellings’ closet was locked and you decided to pick the lock. You talk. I’ll ask questions. Start in!”

Duff stared at the other man, wondering if this was a useful effort or merely a kindly attempt to keep his mind from the final happening. It didn’t matter. Either way, it was better than just being silent and frantic.

Higgins and he covered every detail. McIntosh came and stayed a while, talked on the phone, issued orders, tried to comfort Mrs. Yates and Marian and Charles, and left.

Higgins and Duff talked on, without effect. Sometime after three in the morning, Higgins stopped alternately sitting and pacing. “Bogan,” he said, “I know you can’t sleep.

But I’ve got to. For me, it’s a job.”

“I understand that.”

“So I’m starting home. If you hit on anything else, let me know. If we can think of another thing for you to do, we’ll call you. This is rugged.”

Marian was asleep in a chair in the living room. Charles was asleep on the cot in his mother’s room. And Mrs. Yates didn’t say a word when he looked in. He went upstairs. After a while he lay down. Through his mind rushed the events he had just so painstakingly discussed with the FBI man. Little by little, in the dark, they ran less swiftly. And after a time, Duff sat up, rubbing his hair, putting his feet on the floor. He had told himself, with a different mental tone, that no feverish attempt such as he was making could accomplish a thing. He reminded himself that he was a scientist, capable of concentration, attention, analysis.

“What I ought to do, he thought, is take it like mathematics. Check back. Look for discrepancies. Things not included. Things not explained. Mistakes. Also, I should extrapolate. Imagine. He felt more detached, less frantic.

There were several elements not satisfactorily accounted for. Little things. Why, for example, had the warehouse in New York been empty? And what had there been about it that had impressed him as meaningful, but that he had never called to consciousness? He had the answer to that, abruptly. The floor of that vast building had glittered faintly with the mica-like brilliance of such broken stone as is excavated in Manhattan. He’d thought of it as coming in from the streets on truck wheels. Actually, it could have come from excavating in the building. And they wouldn’t have wanted things stored there if they had wanted to dig.

Before this instant, Duff realized, he had conceived of an assembled A-bomb as something in a huge case or a truck above ground. Why not bury it? The warehouse wasn’t far from Wall Street. An A-bomb going off there, even underground, would destroy the financial heart of New York City, of America.

That was one thing. He could tell Higgins to have them tear up the floor of the place.

Then, perhaps, they’d get tangible — and terrifying— evidence. That idea, a fresh idea, one in which he had confidence, excited him; his mind raced anew. But he saw the error of that. He had to think, not feel.

The second idea he evolved had to do with Harry Ellings’ history. It was odd, in a way. He’d been a letter carrier. Developed varicosis — he had said. He limped a little and complained of leg pains. True. That could have been put on. Why? Because, Duff reasoned, a bad leg might have been a first step in training for a new job. If Harry had belonged for years to a secret underground, the organization might have wanted him to be in a trucking company, where freight could be forwarded secretly.

It would be easier, Duff thought, and a great deal safer, to retrain an established underground member than to try to persuade some unknown mechanic to turn to treason. So, perhaps, Harry had feigned the bad leg, learned to be a mechanic and moved into Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company as part of a plan. That way Harry could retain his mask of ordinariness. The idea was strengthened, if not corroborated, by the existence of the quarry, the sinkhole and the connecting tunnel, and by Harry’s meeting with the huge man near the quarry.

That pattern, while logical, seemed not to lead any further toward Eleanor. It took Duff more than an hour — an hour of slow, relaxed new thought. He had been turning over in his mind all he knew about the man seven feet tall. He had actually seen the man twice: one evening in New York, one night with Harry Ellings. The FBI also had reports on the man.

Two different agents, on two different nights, had seen the man enter a place. But not come out. They’d lost him, both nights.

Why nights? Did he come out only at night, because of his great stature, as Higgins evidently believed? Or could it be that there was something about his immense size which wouldn’t look natural in daylight? Could size be a kind of truck? Itself a ruse? The figure, menacing, looming, weird, had obviously perturbed even the sanguine G-men. Was that intentional?

Could a man, Duff asked himself, who was, say, Duff’s own height — two and a half inches over six feet — add the balance? Special shoes, such as many very short men wore to increase their apparent height, would help. He might wear a wig, to, that increased the size of his head. But the man had been taller even than that, Duff thought. Stilts would do it — little stilts.

Duff remembered the print in the mud. A shoe, laced over a wooden form from which a steel bar rose to a second shoe, would do it. The steel bar wouldn’t have to be very long, either. Nine or ten inches. And if a man so equipped fell over, as he might in a mucky place, the side of his shoe would be printed in the mud, and there would be no ankle for ten inches above it, but only a steel rod which mightn’t touch the mud at all. Then there would be left exactly such a print as Duff had seen in the mudbank.

The possible meaning of that, in turn, was clear. He and the FBI had been searching for a giant. But the man they wanted, actually, was perhaps no taller than Duff. Size, and especially vast size, is the most conspicuous of all human characteristics. If a veritable giant was seen entering a building and then even a dozen merely tall men came out, no one would connect the first man with the others.

Almost, then, Duff phoned Higgins. But Higgins was sleeping, and Higgins needed sleep. In a couple more hours he would telephone the G-man. Meanwhile, he would go on thinking, There might be still more that could be dredged up and made to mean something other than what he had supposed, until then.