The Smuggled Atom Bomb

“Maybe they destroyed themselves that way. Maybe they thought they — and it — would be captured. Maybe an accident. They could have got too many cases of uranium too close together — a last one, dropped down through a hatch. That might have done it.”

For perhaps an hour they watched the cloud rise, change shape in the strong winds aloft, and start to dissipate.

“Somebody else,” Duff had said, “should have seen it. Though there are darn few ships in these parts, I imagine.” His eyes moved from the distant, separating clouds to the beach; they followed its curve to the Bahama Banks, a glittering, empty infinitude of shallow sea. “Anyhow, it’ll show up on plenty of instruments and a slew of people will be down here, looking, pretty soon.”

Eleanor said, “Was it close enough to — to hurt us?”

He stared at her, then smiled, and found a lump coming in his throat. “Lord,” he murmured, “why didn’t you ask that before? No. Too far away. The radiation here couldn’t have amounted to anything.”

The girl smiled back. “Glad I had a physicist along to tell me.”

The first half of the Orange Bowl game ended in the usual pandemonium. Teams trotted from the field and were replaced by bands in red uniforms, in blue, in green, in gold and in the white of the University of Miami. Thousands of colored balloons rose in the sky.

The combined bands began to play. Floats moved sedately from the corners of the stadium and paraded around the field. One of these — an immense replica of an orange — proceeded to the center of the field and opened magically. The Orange Bowl Queen stood inside it, and girls on the floats, pretty girls in bathing suits, began to throw real oranges to the crowd. The governors of three states marched forward with what the program called “a retinue of beauty” to crown the queen.

Standing in her robes, smiling, waving, Eleanor felt happy. She was very tired, but everything would soon be over.

In the Yates box, Duff grinned at the yelling of Marian and the shrill whistling of Charles. He handed a pair of borrowed field glasses to Mrs. Yates, who faced her wheel chair to see every detail of the coronation.

Duff gazed at Eleanor, standing straight and lovely, as he mused on the recent, dramatic past. They had been discovered on the island by a Coast Guard plane which flew in to investigate. A second plane had taken them back to Miami, where they had landed secretly. Eleanor had given out the story that she had suffered a “loss of memory” due to “exhaustion and an accidental fall” and spent two nights with “a friend in Fort Lauderdale.”

Nothing about kidnaping, about enemy agents, about a mushroom cloud rising where a boat had vanished. That would not become public, Duff reflected, until it was all over.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see the grinning face of Scotty Smythe.

“Duff, old boy, can you come over to our box for a few minutes? Dad and mother are there.

And a couple of other people who want to see you.”

Out on the sunlit field the coronation ended. Eleanor’s float led a circling parade to the jubilant blaring of bands. Duff followed Scotty along an aisle of the jam-packed stadium.

He greeted the Smythe family happily, and found himself, to his surprise, shaking hands with General Baines, and then with a physicist he had always wanted to meet, a Doctor Adamas who was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission.

The general presently murmured to Duff,” Adamas and I actually came down to see you.”

“Me!”

“We both are flying back to Washington as soon as possible after this dandy game. If you could spare us a few minutes now, for a stroll outside—”

It was there, between the stadium walls and the parked cars, that Duff got the shock of his life. He walked along slowly with the general and the scientist.

The soldier did most of the talking. “No use, Bogan, of my telling you what the country owes you. We’ve dug out that bomb in New York. One in Philadelphia. Two in Washington. Soon have them all. The Stacey woman talked.”

“I should have figured her out sooner,” Duff said, with a self-depreciatory shake of his head. “And the country owes Scotty Symthe far more than me. After all, if he hadn’t driven over to the Yateses’ to help me, and if he hadn’t come in when nobody answered his knock, he’d never have found my note or phoned Higgins where I’d gone, and why. The search for the yacht wouldn’t have started.” Duff shuddered slightly. “They’d have got away with the whole thing!”

“There is nothing tangible we can do for young Smythe,” the general replied, grinning at the disclaimer. “His father, my good friend, is amply endowed with worldly goods. In fact, Bogan, the father thinks your influence has made a serious man out of a rather featherbrained boy.”

“Scotty was always a man,” Duff answered defensively. “He just liked to look frivolous.”

“The point is,” Adamas said dryly, “you’ve done a very great, very brave and very brilliant service to your country, and one for which there cannot be, at this time, any public reward whatever.”