The Smuggled Atom Bomb

Higgins said grimly, “That’s the worst thing about it! About those — those — Hell! No word for ‘em. They reach the insides of patient, peaceful, law-abiding guys like Ellings! Rot out their hearts! And yet leave their outside just like always. You see some good-humored, industrious chap. Courteous, helpful, loves kids, sticks around home. Maybe, long ago, he was slighted or hurt or made to feel inferior. Something — something that switched him over to that crooked, rotten, enemy line! So he goes overboard. He keeps on looking like a good citizen. But in his head, night and day, he’s scheming to kill or enslave every man and woman and kid in the country! You know, Bogan, it’s the ability to do that to people that frightens me more than all the war and defeat and national uproar and trouble put together. It gets me!” He tried for a better phrase. “I hate it!”

Duff said, almost whispered, “Yeah. Me too.”

Higgins doubled his fist, stared at it unclenched it. “Shooting it out with gangs. That was easy! Tagging tax violaters. That’s just work! But finding out that people who do things you’ve been led to admire are just rotten, low, filthy enemies! Traitors! It makes a man sick!

It scares a man!” He nodded curtly and walked away toward the road.

Duff went over to the campus that afternoon. He had left some notes in a laboratory locker, he explained to Mrs. Yates. He had decided to go over them during the holidays and to finish a thesis on certain aspects of electromagnetic fields and radiant particles. He smiled when she answered him by making a funny face; she didn’t know what he meant.

Even to himself, Duff did not quite admit, until he walked up to the bungalow, that he was really going to Coral Gables to try to call on Indigo. He felt ashamed of running away from her. He also felt more than a little intrigued by her avowed passion for him; it was an unprecedented experience and Duff, after all, was a young man. He had always liked girls, but he’d never really had a girl of his own. Any other young man, undergraduate or graduate student, or any young instructor, for that matter, would almost surely have accepted Indigo’s passion with enthusiasm; even with a certain smugness. The fact that he was wary of her made Duff wonder if, perhaps, when the right girl came along, he wouldn’t know how to behave. In that case, he’d wind up a bachelor.

On account of such sensations and speculations, it seemed very necessary to Duff to make amends for refusing her offer, on the evening before, of a nightcap — a possible euphemism for something more personal and disturbing than alcohol, which had scared him away.

There was a car parked in front of Indigo’s pretty, modernistic bungalow. Her own car was in the garage and the sedan of the girl with whom she lived was not there. Duff shied at the fact of a caller and then decided that it might be better, diplomatically, to see her first in the presence of others. So he stepped up to the front door and dropped the chrome knocker. Nobody answered. That surprised him because he had heard voices inside. He knocked again, loudly, but there was no response.

So she did have a visitor, but she didn’t want to be disturbed. Duff reflected gloomily that a girl like Indigo could easily find a thousand admirers and doubtless would brush one off in a hurry for behaving as he had. He walked slowly away. Great swain, I am, he thought.

Casanova and Don Juan rolled into one. He reminded himself never to tell anybody of his behavior and its swift rebuff.

He spent two desultory hours in the lab and went back to the Yates house with a crowd of bus riders who held a general discussion on the prospects of a University of Miami victory in the Orange Bowl game. It was only days away. And thank the Lord for that, he thought. Perhaps afterward Eleanor would return to normal.

It was dark when he reached home. Dark — and Mrs. Yates was fretting. “I wish this business was over, Duff. It’s nearly six. And Eleanor’s due at a banquet at seven. And she has to change, but she’s not home yet. I know it’s not her fault that she gets delayed—”

Charles was setting the table. Marian was cooking. Duff inspected the contents of pots and pans on the oil stove and told Marian — making her happy by doing so — that the guy who won her would have not a good cook, but a real chef.

He took his notes upstairs, looked through them and straightened up the room. He heard Charles calling numbers, asking for his sister and getting unsatisfactory replies, for he kept dialing. Duff lay down on his bed and read a chapter on nuclear engineering.

He was interrupted by the boy’s voice, coming worriedly up the stairway, “Hey!

Duff! Eleanor never did get to the Fashion Parade today! I just found out!”