“Trophy?”
“Sure,” Eleanor said. “You know. Golfers get silver golf balls. Anglers get gold-plated fish. Probably Harry won the Never-Missed-a-Working-Day-in-Five-Years prize at his company. Being a mechanic, it was probably a cogwheel, only silver or something.”
“Oh.” Duff thought about that. “It wasn’t silver. It wasn’t a cog. It wasn’t engraved.”
“Then,” she said, snatching at a pea that popped out of its pod and rolled, “what was it?”
“It barely might be — uranium.”
She was about to answer derisively. His seriousness sank in. “What?”
“The only thing I could imagine it looked like was a carefully machined part of something which, with other parts like it, would fit together to make a sphere. A sphere weighing maybe twenty pounds, more or less. It might have been any of a half dozen metals or a thousand alloys. Still, there’s only one thing I know of, made of parts which fit perfectly into what is probably a sphere around that size. The pieces that come together to’ form a critical mass and go off with a hell of a bang.”
“You mean an atomic bomb?”
“Maybe it’s only a mock-up. A model, I mean. That’s why I took a sample. To test and see what the metal is. I could be wrong, but I think Harry, whether he knows it or not, either has a piece of the heart of an A-bomb up there or else a metal model of one.”
Eleanor began to laugh. “Harry — a spy?” When he didn’t join her laughter, she looked at him for a long moment. “You think somebody’s stealing more of our A-bomb secrets and Harry’s being used to keep the thing — until time to move it on out of the country?