The espionage. And no doubt there are plenty of other stories that haven’t come out! That won’t come out — until we get in another war and win it. Until we find a way to disarm the world and make it peaceful. Every government has things like that n locked away. Hushed up. Some forever. It wasn’t.” the craziness that made me think you were mistaken.”
“Then what was it?” he asked morosely.
“Nothing, Duff. I never thought so. But I don’t y really believe Harry is a party to anything — sinister. I still thought there was some sort of hanky-panky. Did you ever consider it backwards?”
“What do you mean — backwards?” Suddenly his mild eyes flew wide open and his cigarette fell from limp fingers. He said, “Holy whirling cyclotrons!” He picked up the cigarette. “You mean, that was a hunk of U235 coming into the U.S.A!”
She nodded. “If it was uranium and if platinum was substituted, it means there’s a mighty ingenious gang, doesn’t it?”
He whistled. Eleanor went on, “They — whoever they might be — would have careful plans to bring in atomic bombs piece by piece. Plans even to substitute something plausible, that resembled the real thing, if they got caught’ up with. And maybe to use innocent people as their agents. Harry could no doubt, for instance, get one of his truck-driver pals to take a box like that, of several, to some city up north.”
Duffs Adam’s apple made a round trip as he gulped. “A lot of the top men in physics have mentioned that very possibility!” He named names familiar in the news since Hiroshima. “They’ve said atom bombs could be brought into harbors in tramp steamers. Or smuggled into the country in sections and assembled in secret and planted — like mines, like infernal machines — to be set off in the centers of cities — perhaps by radio, at some zero hour!”
“That’s what I mean,” she said quietly.
Duff leaned backward and looked cautiously around the corner of the barn toward the Yates house. He leaned back and shook his head. “No. Every time I get on the idea, really think about it, it sounds too unlikely. This place. Us.”
“Wouldn’t a beat-up place like this, nobodies like us, be ideal? Couldn’t things have been in Harry’s room, passing through, for years, without us knowing? Don’t you think you should call the FBI again?”