Pat Frank - Mr. Adam

Dinnertime went by. Tex Root and Marge and Jane devoured chicken sandwiches and drank milk, but I wasn’t feeling hungry. Midnight was getting no further away, and I was having visions. Very shortly I would be the most unpopular man in the world. I was the man on the spot. There wasn’t anything that could save me. There was no evading it. I kept telling myself that during a crisis like this a man’s viewpoint becomes distorted, and everything appears worse than it actually is. Then Danny Williams called from the White House and I discovered that things can actually be as bad as they seem.

“The President,” Danny said, “is having a conniption fit. I don’t blame him. Why weren’t we notified?”

“I thought somebody in the office would tell him,” I apologized. It didn’t sound right. I knew, and Danny knew, that no one in N.R.P. would want to be a bearer of black news.

“We didn’t know a damned thing about it until the War Department called.”

“Oh, do they know about it?”

“Certainly they know about it. Everyone in Washington knew about it, except the President. He wants your scalp, but I told him to wait. I hear the FBI has given you a midnight deadline.”

“That’s right, and it doesn’t look good.”

“Well, if he’s not back by midnight the War Department is going to take over. They’re drawing up an executive order now. This is serious, Steve.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry, Steve, but that’s the way it has to be.”

I said okay, and hung up. I felt tired. “We’re all washed up,” I told Marge. “Your husband is in disgrace. You might as well start packing.”

“Says who?” she asked, trying to sound insouciant.

“Says the President of the United States.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “Oh, I’m so sorry for you, Steve. What’ll they do to you?”

“Officially, nothing. Unofficially, I don’t even want to guess. When you consider what the American public did to a baseball player who failed to touch second base, and a football player who once ran the wrong way, I can’t even imagine what they’ll do to me.”

Gableman called again, to say that Fay Sumner Knott was behaving like a bride whose husband was out with another woman on the first night of the wedding. “I just want to tell you,” he said, “that I’m cleaning out my desk and moving. I don’t want to have any part of what is going to happen.”

At ten o’clock Tex Root called the FBI. His Special Agents hadn’t developed even a likely lead. After Kathy Riddell arrived in Washington four days before, she had simply dropped into a void, just as Homer Adam had vanished when he walked into the carefully manicured woods of Rock Creek Park. “Why wait?” I suggested. “Why not blow off the lid now? She probably picked him up in a car, and the longer we wait to broadcast the news, the further away they’ll be.”

Tex Root picked up a magazine. “No,” he decided. “I said twelve and we’ll wait until twelve. Anyway, the local police can’t do much in the dark.”

“The local police?”

“Yes. They’ll have to search the park, and drag the creek. That’s normal procedure.”

“You mean, you think he might be—murdered?”

Root looked up from his magazine. “Well, that’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

Jane began to cry. She had been sitting in her chair, very quietly, and at first she tried to hide her tears, but then the sounds escaped her, and finally she could no longer hold back the steady sobs that shook her body like a great, unseen hand. Marge put an arm around her, and got her into a bedroom. Marge came back and said she hoped they wouldn’t need a doctor, but unless Jane calmed down in a few minutes we’d have to call one. “What’s the trouble with her?” Root asked.

“She doesn’t like Kathy Riddell. She’s afraid of her. She thinks she’s a bad woman. And Jane is very fond of Homer.”

“I don’t think Kathy is so bad,” I said. I knew when I said it that it was a final and a very weak defense against the fears that had been trying to burst into my consciousness. I remembered, again, how she had looked at the airport, and how I had been chilled by that glimpse of fanaticism. “Tex,” I said finally, “would you think I was crazy if I suggested that perhaps Kathy Riddell planned to do away with Homer Adam? Would you think I was crazy if I suggested that this isn’t as simple as Homer getting disgusted, and running off with her because he believes he loves her? I mean, in view of your report on her patriotism and loyalty?”

“What are you getting at?” he asked.

“Well suppose—now just suppose—that there was a group of scientists who wanted to murder not Homer Adam, but civilization? Suppose the Mississippi explosion wasn’t an accident at all. Suppose it was planned, and Homer’s escape upset the plan. So to carry out their plans completely, they have to block A.I., and that means doing away with Homer.”

“That’s horrible!” said Marge. “It makes my spine crawl. I’m frightened.”

The lines seemed to deepen in Tex Root’s thin face. “I can imagine one crazy nuclear physicist,” he said, “but not a whole bunch of them. As a class, they are about the sanest people I know. And remember that I worked on Manhattan Project security, and I know them pretty well.”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”

“Besides, Kathy Riddell lost her fiancé when Mississippi blew up.”

“Sure, forget I ever mentioned it. I guess my thinking is pretty wild.”

“No, I’m not going to forget it,” Tex Root said. “This is a very peculiar world, and the most peculiar thing in it is the human mind. Now if Kathy Riddell was involved in any such plot, she wouldn’t be the brains behind it, now would she? She was a pretty small cog in the development of fission, no more important than Jane Zitter is to N.R.P. But she would be a useful tool for a particular job.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Her equipment for seduction is probably unrivalled.”

“All right. Now we’re getting somewhere. Who would be her bosses?” Root ticked them off on his fingers as he named them. “Logically, there’s her father, Professor Ruppe from the University of Chicago. There are Canby and Welles, in Berkeley. She worked with both of them. And of course there’s the old master, Felix Pell, in New York.”

“He’s the one I don’t like,” I said. “To me he looks like a movie villain.”

Tex Root laughed. “So to you he looks like a villain! Why, he’s one of the sweetest old men I ever met in my life! And two generations of graduates at Columbia will tell you the same thing. He’s a leader in practically every civilized movement that comes out of New York City, he’s contributed most of his income to charities—I think he even gave away his Nobel prize money—and besides he’s got five children and I don’t know how many grandchildren.”

“Still he looks like a villain.”

Root moved out of his chair and picked up the phone at my elbow. “We’ll give it a check,” he said. “We’ll soon know.” He put in calls for Professor Ruppe, in Chicago, and Dr. Pell, in New York. He got through to Chicago almost instantly. There was a good deal of talking, but not with Professor Ruppe, and he put down the telephone and said, “Ruppe isn’t in. He’s in Washington. He can be reached through the Carnegie Institute. Well, that’s interesting, but that’s all.”

Then the New York call went through, and Root talked, politely, for a few moments, and asked questions. When he finished he put the telephone down gently, almost reverently, as if it were a delicate and noble instrument. “I can’t believe it,” he said, in a soft voice that retained just a touch of drawl. “I can hardly believe it! Why old Dr. Pell is in Washington, too. He’s staying at the home of Peter Pflaum. Pflaum runs Carnegie’s cyclotron.”