Those thoughts had taken seconds only. He leaned the net against a tree and walked along the east side of the house. Harry’s lights were on. After a moment, he saw Harry as he passed the window — Harry in pajamas.
Duff went back quietly to the pool. The thing to do, he reflected, was to wade in, get the box and hide it somewhere else. Or, better, put it in it in the station wagon as soon as Eleanor returned from work and drive straight to the FBI. This one, Duff thought, would probably contain uranium — pure uranium — shaped for a certain use.
Duff sat down on the grassy edge of his pool. He took off his shoes and socks. He was excited, exultant, and also afraid. He did not know just what he feared, just why he was afraid. Then, abruptly, he did know. It was the disturbance of a leaf behind him or the tiny sound of a pine needle snapping underfoot. A very near sound, too near to give him time to escape or even to whirl around for attack. For he was sitting and there was something, somebody, in the dark right behind him.
For a second or two he was unable to think at all. Then, when he thought he heard the whisper of a swung weapon of some kind, he tried to lunge as far forward as he could. Fear was a sickness in him as he plunged, and fear was his final recollection. There was a ringing sound, a bursting in his head that he sensed at the instant and never afterward remembered…
In the house, Harry turned out his light and went to his window. He looked at the moonglow. From the sinkhole west of the house came a murmurous croaking of bullfrogs. At last he walked to his bed and lay down to sleep.
Mrs. Yates, weary and warm under her reading light, pulled toward herself the pivoted bedside table that Duff had built. With a pencil, she wrote a goodnight note to her daughter. She pinned the note to her wheel chair and gave it a push which rolled it through the door and into the living room where Eleanor would see it.
Marian Yates slept peacefully; damp curls of her dark hair overspread her pillow.
Charles Yates, having finished the last installment of The Queen of the Planet Brandri, tossed Fabulous Science Magazine onto the floor and switched out his light. There was silence, deep and tropical.
After a while, car headlights swept into the Yates’ driveway. Eleanor parked in the barn, came in by the back door, read her mother’s note, smiled a little, and switched out the living-room light. The porch was in the shadow, but moonlight poured on the lawn. She stepped out to look at it and saw, as her eyes accommodated themselves, that one of the big branches torn off by the hurricane and stuck in the trees had come loose and fallen into the lily pool. She also saw something that glinted beside the water. Even so, she would have gone to bed; she was very tired. But, as she turned, she heard a sound. A low, bubbling mutter. A horrible sound. She rushed for the flashlight, but it was not in its place. She knew instantly that what she had seen glinting on the lawn was the light.
“Duff,” she whispered frantically, and she ran out the front door.