The Smuggled Atom Bomb

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.

Duff looked out the windows. He watched a huge truckload of dead branches proceed down the street past several pretty houses. He reflected that there were still hurricane-detached branches hanging serenely in the Yates trees. His mind passed to greater worries.

There was the matter of the proposal of marriage to Eleanor Yates by Scotty Smythe, of the New York-Bar Harbor-Palm Beach Smythes. Duff had nothing against Smythe. He was a good-looking, intelligent, witty young man. Eleanor deserved the best. Plainly, she liked Smythe. The question was: Did Smythe represent the best? A lightweight, Duff felt. No character. Too smooth. Too social. Too much given to girl-chasing. It was Duff’s belief, during the reverie, that he was thinking in abstract, detached and big-brotherly terms. Any suggestion that jealousy motivated him would have been met by a haughty, almost amused stare of his china-blue eyes.

By coincidence, yet not surprisingly — since Doctor Slocum greatly enjoyed discussing his part in the work of the Manhattan District; within the limits of secrecy, of course — Duff’s wandering attention came back abruptly to a relevant speech: “Some of our early calculations on the subsidiary effects of nuclear reactions to bomb-released particles were rendered difficult by—”

Duff listened, hoping to be able to frame a question that might start a new line of discussion which would not advance the class in any way, but which might help him with another worry. Luckily for Duff, when the professor finished a sentence as long and as neatly balanced as a complex equation, Iron-Brain Bates, the grind of the group, took an ideal tack.

“Doctor,” he said, “to deviate for a moment. How many bombs do you think Russia has?”

The mathematician frowned momentarily, as if he were not to be budged from the path of instruction. Then he grinned. “If our present political misadventuring continues, we will probably find out how many in the most pragmatic fashion. They will be dropped on us!”

The four graduate students laughed. Duff said, “Let’s hope most of them will miss.”

And he went on idly, “Of course, any nation that had only a few atomic bombs could easily smuggle them into this country and distribute them at ideal sites, to be exploded at the time chosen by that nation.”

“Easier said then done!”

“Why?” Duff asked. “Look at prohibition. Hundreds of tons of stuff brought across every border every week. Florida, here, was a center for it. Million bays, channels, waterways, lagoons, empty wastes of Everglades—”

“An atom bomb, Mr. Bogan, is pretty big. Very heavy.”

“It could be built in small pieces. Imported, so to speak, in sections.”

Hank Garvey, who intended to be a math teacher, said, “There’s radioactivity. How do you smuggle radioactive stuff?”

The professor scowled at Hank. “You really ought to know, Mr. Garvey, that neither plutonium nor the disintegrative isotope of uranium is radioactive enough to be detected readily. Oppenheimer pointed out that you’d need a screwdriver to find a bomb on a ship—

have to open every case aboard. Until you assemble a critical mass— enough of the stuff in one spot to set up a chain reaction — your plutonium or uranium would be comparatively easy to handle.”