Mixed up in anything of that kind.”
“Maybe not too crazy. Look at the facts that have come out of the samples swiped.
The espionage. And no doubt there are plenty of other stories that haven’t come out! That won’t come out — until we get in another war and win it. Until we find a way to disarm the world and make it peaceful. Every government has things like that n locked away. Hushed up. Some forever. It wasn’t.” the craziness that made me think you were mistaken.”
“Then what was it?” he asked morosely.
“Nothing, Duff. I never thought so. But I don’t y really believe Harry is a party to anything — sinister. I still thought there was some sort of hanky-panky. Did you ever consider it backwards?”
“What do you mean — backwards?” Suddenly his mild eyes flew wide open and his cigarette fell from limp fingers. He said, “Holy whirling cyclotrons!” He picked up the cigarette. “You mean, that was a hunk of U235 coming into the U.S.A!”
She nodded. “If it was uranium and if platinum was substituted, it means there’s a mighty ingenious gang, doesn’t it?”
He whistled. Eleanor went on, “They — whoever they might be — would have careful plans to bring in atomic bombs piece by piece. Plans even to substitute something plausible, that resembled the real thing, if they got caught’ up with. And maybe to use innocent people as their agents. Harry could no doubt, for instance, get one of his truck-driver pals to take a box like that, of several, to some city up north.”
Duffs Adam’s apple made a round trip as he gulped. “A lot of the top men in physics have mentioned that very possibility!” He named names familiar in the news since Hiroshima. “They’ve said atom bombs could be brought into harbors in tramp steamers. Or smuggled into the country in sections and assembled in secret and planted — like mines, like infernal machines — to be set off in the centers of cities — perhaps by radio, at some zero hour!”
“That’s what I mean,” she said quietly.
Duff leaned backward and looked cautiously around the corner of the barn toward the Yates house. He leaned back and shook his head. “No. Every time I get on the idea, really think about it, it sounds too unlikely. This place. Us.”
“Wouldn’t a beat-up place like this, nobodies like us, be ideal? Couldn’t things have been in Harry’s room, passing through, for years, without us knowing? Don’t you think you should call the FBI again?”
The cold water his imagination had needed was supplied by that suggestion. He started to speak, stammered, fell silent for a moment and then said, “Heck! The FBI probably thought of that angle ten seconds after they realized what I was talking about!”
“But they didn’t mention it, Duff!”
His smile was faint, rueful. “They have a way of not mentioning all they’re thinking about. Nix, Eleanor, but nix! I am not going to expose myself to another reprimand for taking up their time over nothing.”
Her expression was disappointed, then angry — as if she were going to argue — and finally, unemotional. She knew about arguing with Duff when his mind was made up; it was like trying to talk a hole in a rock.
“At least,” she said, after a while, “we might sort of keep watching Harry — or his room, anyhow. Then, if anything did happen—”
He nodded. “I was thinking that.”
She picked up the carpet beater and turned her back. He saw the “one-quarter profile”
again and heard himself say, “There’s a dandy movie tonight at the Coconut Grove Theater, if you’d like—”
“I’m hay riding with Scotty Smythe,” she answered. “That lamb!” She attacked a carpet Duff had hung for her.
Several evenings later, Harry Ellings, sitting on the front porch as usual, smoking a cigar, listening as usual to the radio, announced he was going to take a moonlight stroll. He announced it loudly through an open window. Upstairs, poring over a textbook, Duff vaguely heard and at first dismissed the words. Harry didn’t go for many strolls, owing to his bad legs, but occasionally he took a preslumber ramble, and this evening, warm, moon-white, was an invitation.
Duff had finished a two-page equation before it occurred to him that a “moonlight stroll” was the sort of thing which he had agreed with Eleanor ought to be watched. He turned his heavy book face down on his desk. He stepped into the dark hall and looked out the window. Through the trees, on the coral-white road, he could see Ellings walking slowly, apparently aimlessly, toward the west. Duff hurried down the back stairs, saying nothing of his departure, and started along the drive. The coral crackled, so he stepped on the grass, reflecting that he was poorly equipped by nature for any act, such as stealthy pursuit, that required a lack of clumsiness.
By walking along the roadside in the shadow of trees, Duff managed, however, to gain enough on Ellings to get him in view. And Duff was surprised — or was he, he asked himself — to find that the star boarder stopped now and again, looked back and seemed to listen, as if he worried over the possibility of pursuit.
The road was crossed by another about a half mile from the house. Harry turned.
After walking some distance, he came to a region where there were no houses at all — an area of pines, palmettos and cabbage palms which was cross-hatched with weedy streets and sidewalks and provided here and there with the ghostly remnants of lampposts. This area, a quarter of a century ago, had been laid out as a real-estate subdivision. Then the boom had burst, and since that time the vegetation of South Florida had worked its way — vegetation aided by storms, heat and the rain. Harry walked with accelerated speed in this moonlit, ruin-like place, following the cracked and broken line of a sidewalk. Duff took off his shoes and stayed behind in the shadows.
Harry was certainly headed somewhere. Beyond the ruined development was a rock pit with a moonlit pond in its bottom, used now as a trash dump. Duff thought Harry might be on his way there, but he stopped short of it. He stood still. His cigar shone brighter, twice.
He turned clear around, looking. Then he whistled.
From the undergrowth almost beside him, a figure rose. Duff thought its rise would never stop — thought it was a shadow, an optical illusion. For the man, who must have been squatting there, was one of the tallest Duff had ever seen — almost a freak, all but a circus giant.
The cigar, perhaps having served its purpose, was stamped out. The two men began to talk. Duff couldn’t hear and did not dare go closer.
When the conference ended, Duff took a short cut home. He reached his room before Harry returned. He was sitting there, appalled by Harry’s companion, and sure now that a direct and dreadful suspicion of the boarder was justified, when he heard voices in the driveway and the slam of a car door, followed by Eleanor’s running feet and her voice,
“Mother! You still up? Guess what? Scotty Smythe, that rich boy in Omega, proposed tome!”
Duff couldn’t miss the thrill in her tone.
TWO
In a classroom on the “old campus” of the University of Miami, four young men were engaged in a discussion of the Uncertainty Principle with Dr. Oliver Slocum, a full professor of mathematics and a large man with twinkling eyes, no hair on his head, and a goatee.
“A common mistake,” said the doctor, “made by many philosophers, has been to assume that the ‘uncertainty’ is neither logical nor empirical, and not even physical, but that it derives from a subjective interposition of the purely human observer, whereas—”
At about “whereas,” Duff Bogan, one of the four graduate students present for the seminar, lost track of the thought. Since he already knew that the interposition of a machine had the same effect as the interposition of a person, and had known it since his mathematically precocious high school days, he missed nothing essential.