The Smuggled Atom Bomb

They shook hands. Mr. Higgins pointed to a chair with his pipe stem and said, smiling faintly, “What’s on your mind, Duff?” The younger man stared. “You know—”

“Checked, sure. After your call. Registrar. Got everything from your nickname to your lack of an athletic record. Tell you so you can skip it.”

Duff sat silent, flushing a little. “Well, it begins with where I board. Did you check that?”

Higgins laughed. “Address is all. Shoot!”

Duff was embarrassed about the start of his story, since it involved curiosity and his unethical behavior. So he decided to give weight to his words immediately. “I have found a stolen part of what is plainly an atomic bomb.”

Mr. Higgins did look at him sharply. But that was all. No exclamation. No excitement. “Okay. Start where it starts. Take your time.”

The G-man was a good listener — putting in questions only when the narrative confused him or left a gap.

“I had to wait,” Duff wound up, “until yesterday, to get a good chance to run the tests.

They checked, all right. It was uranium. Uranium 235, I am sure. High neutron emission—”

“You can skip the technical part. That isn’t for me. I’m a lawyer. An accountant. You sure?”

Duff hesitated. The sample had been extremely small. The tests had been difficult.

The apparatus in the physics lab hadn’t worked as well as he could have hoped. “I’m — sure enough,” he finally said, “to come in here.”

“Can you give us some of the stuff to test?”

“That’s another thing. I did have a. trace left when I got through. But — I’m cow-clumsy. When I finished the last test I started doing a dumb-headed dance — I was excited. I batted a bottle of sulphuric off a shelf — had to wash it and the last of my sample down the drain, but quick. The place was fuming up.”

“Too bad.” Mr. Higgins locked his hands behind his head, looked at Duff and thought for a while. “You could be mistaken about your experiment?”

“I don’t believe so. It’s possible.”

“Stick around a few minutes.” Higgins walked from the room. He was gone for quite a while. When he came back, his face was unreadable. He sat in his chair again.

“We’d like a look at that cached stuff, Bogan. I take it there’s always somebody at home. Mrs. Yates.”

“Not always. On sunny Sundays we wheel her to the car and lift her in and take her wheel chair along. Church. Harry Ellings never misses church.”

“Good. You see, we’d also like to look at that thing without anybody knowing. If it does happen to be uranium, we want to know more than just that Ellings has it.”

“Naturally.” Duff felt better. “You’d want him to keep right on doing whatever he may be doing. He’s probably innocent. The Yates family knows him mighty well. He doubtless thinks he’s keeping something for a friend.”

“Could be.”

“And by watching him, you’d be led to some group that’s stealing not just atomic secrets but actual bombs.”

“The trouble is,” Higgins answered slowly, “that, except for a trace stolen during the war, and a bit some character took home for a collection, we’ve never lost any uranium, Bogan. Nothing remotely approaching the quantity that would make the lump you described.”

Duff’s pale blue eyes were surprised. “No! Are they sure? Couldn’t they make a mistake?”

Higgins chuckled without mirth. “Brother, can’t you conceive the guarding and checking and cross-checking that goes into protecting something worth maybe half a hundred thousand bucks a pound? Something that we’ve spent billions to be able to make? They can tell you where every thousandth of an ounce is, every day, every minute!”

Duffs reaction was one of humiliation. “Then I must have pulled a boner at the lab!

Maybe — having got that cockeyed notion — I saw what I wanted to see, in my tests.”

The G-man’s eyes were unsympathetic. “Probably. But you came in here and told us.

We’re used to that. Stories and rumors of A-bomb spies come in here as thick as reports of flying saucers. And we waste our lives on ‘em all. Thanks, however. Provisionally.”

Duff stood. “If you’re going to investigate, I could leave a plan of the house. And some notes on the lock on the box. How to open it, I mean. And my door key.”

Higgins grinned. “Right. Would help.”

The following Sunday when they came home from church, Duff tried to find evidence that the FBI had entered and examined the house. There wasn’t any such evidence.

On Monday, however, Duff was called from a class to talk to a Mr. Higgins who

“insisted,” according to a girl from the front office, “that the call was important and you should be disturbed.”

“In a few days,” Higgins said, when he had identified Duff, “we will call on your friend at your place. Ostensibly, we’ll be checking another matter. Actually, we’ll make ourselves an opportunity to take a look at the matter we’ve discussed. You aren’t to give away the fact that we may have seen it previously. On some pretext, we’ll call you up. We want you to see it again and tell us, if you can, whether it’s what you originally— sampled.”

“Did you see — the matter?” Duff asked breathlessly.