Higgins said, “Yeah. A little impure. Commercial stuff. Also, he did buy at least some of it a long while back. Years. We checked that. He did make the box in spare time at his garage. It looks, Bogan, as if you’d been fooled. After all, you got that brainstorm about it being part of an A-bomb before you ran the tests. Not after. Could have conditioned your reading of the tests. Must have. We’ve checked Harry Ellings through his whole life.
Checked his friends and family. Nothing whatever on the record. No convictions. No arrests.
No association with subversive groups or people. Just a stolid, hard-working bachelor who’s a churchgoer and not a bad bridge player. If a segment of a bomb had been stolen, I’d say this business might somehow be connected. None has.”
Duff rode uncomfortably. Finally he said, “Would a segment of the uranium heart of a bomb look like that?”
Higgins glanced at him, grinned, gazed at the road again. “Do you suppose they’d tell even us that? What they did hint at — not say — was that we were goons down at this office to even rise to any reported ‘uranium.’ Suggested we should know the bombs were plutonium now. There’s a difference, apparently. Wouldn’t know what it is.”
“Different elements,” Duff said absently. “Like iron and nickel. The Hiroshima bomb was uranium. The Nagasaki one was plutonium. I suppose that is what they use now.”
“The last loose end,” Higgins answered, turning back toward the Yates house, “was your identification. Since you aren’t sure about that, the whole picture falls completely apart.
You find the kitty of a gold-standard crank. So you pop off, having bomb jitters, like everyone. But you weren’t smart to run your own tests. You should have given us the sample, since you suspected it was something a lot different from platinum.”
“It wasn’t platinum,” Duff said earnestly, but not quite certainly.
“Maybe it was hamburger.” Higgins stopped to let out an abashed Duff. “Next time you run across any espionage, keep it to yourself. We got trouble enough at the bureau with real agents of foreign powers!”