“Who?”
“I told you more’n I meant to. Get outta my way.” Fred looked at the old geezer. “You’ve piqued my interest,” he said. “Tell me more.”
“Outta my way, boyl I killed a man over a can of lye hominy once!”
Fred reached in his jacket. He came out with a pistol with a muzzle that looked like a drainpipe.
“It crashed last night,” said the old man, eyes wild. “Woke me up. Lit up the whole sky. I looked for it all day today, figured the woods would be crawlin’ with Air Corps people and state troopers, but nobody came.”
“Found it just before dark tonight. Tore all hell up, it did. Knocked the wings completely off the thing when it crashed. All these weird-dressed people all scattered around. Women too.” He lowered his head a minute, shame on his face. “Anyway, they was all dead. Must have been a jet plane, didn’t find no propellers or nothing. And this here atomic bomb was just lying there in the wreck. I figured the Air Corps would ay real good to get it back. Friend of mine found a weather balloon once and they gave him a dollar and a quarter. I figure this is about a million times as important as that!”
Fred laughed. “A buck twenty-five, huh? I’ll give you ten dollars for it.”
“I can get a million!”
Fred pulled the hammer back on the revolver. “Fifty,” said the old man.
“Twenty.”
“It ain’t fair. But I’ll take it.”
“What are you going to do with that?” asked Ed. “Take it to Dr. Tod,” said Fred. “He’ll know what to do with it. He’s the scientific type.”
“What if it is an A-bomb?”
“Well, I don’t think A-bombs have spray nozzles on them. And the old man was right. The woods would have been crawling with Air Force people if they’d lost an atomic bomb.”
“Hell, only five of them have ever been exploded. They can’t have more than a dozen, and you better believe they know where every one of them is, all the time.”
“Well, it ain’t a mine,” said Ed. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t care. If it’s worth money, Doctor Tod’ll split with us. He’s a square guy.”
“For a crook,” said Ed.
They laughed and laughed, and the thing rattled around in the back of the dump truck.
The MPs brought the red-haired man into his office and introduced them.
“Please have a seat, Doctor,” said A. E. He lit his pipe. The man seemed ill at ease, as he should have been after two days of questioning by Army Intelligence.
“They have told me what happened at White Sands, and that you won’t talk to anyone but me,” said A. E. “I understand they used sodium pentathol on you, and that it had no effect?”
“It made me drunk,” said the man, whose hair in this light seemed orange and yellow.
“But you didn’t talk?”
“I said things, but not what they wanted to hear.”
“Very unusual.”
“Blood chemistry.”
A. E. sighed. He looked out the window of the Princeton office. “Very well, then. I will listen to your story. I am not saying I will believe it, but I will listen.”
“All right,” said the man, taking a deep breath. “Here goes. “
He began to talk, slowly at first, forming his words carefully, gaining confidence as he spoke. As he began to talk faster, his accent crept back in, one A. E. could not ace, something like a Fiji Islander who had learned English from a Swede. A. E. refilled his pipe twice, then left it unlit after filling it the third time. He sat slightly forward, occasionally nodding, his gray hair an aureole in the afternoon light.
The man finished.
A. E. remembered his pipe, found a match, lit it. He put his hands behind his head. There was a small hole in his sweater near the left elbow.
“They’ll never believe any of that,” he said.
“I don’t care, as long as they do something!” said the man. “As long as I get it back.”
A. E. looked at him. “If they did believe you, the implications of all this would overshadow the reason you’re here. The fact that you are here, if you follow my meaning.”
“Well, what can we do? If my ship were still operable, I’d be looking myself. I did the next best thing-landed somewhere that would be sure to attract attention, asked to speak to you. Perhaps other scientists, research institutes…”
A. E. laughed. “Forgive me. You don’t realize how things are done here. We will need the military. We will have the military and the government whether we want them or not, so we might as well have them on the best possible terms, ours, from the first. The problem is that we have to think of something that is plausible to them, yet will still mobilize them in the search.”
“I’ll talk to the Army people about you, then make some calls to friends of mine. We have just finished a large global war, and many things had a way of escaping notice, or being lost in the shuffle. Perhaps we can work something from there.”
“The only thing is, we had better do all this from a phone booth. The MPs will be along, so I will have to talk quietly. Tell me,” he said, picking up his hat from the corner of a cluttered bookcase, “do you like ice cream?”
“Lactose and sugar solids congealed in a mixture kept just below the freezing point?” asked the man.
“I assure you,” said A. E., “it is better than it sounds, and quite refreshing.” Arm in arm, they went out the office door.
Jetboy patted the scarred side of his plane. He stood in Hangar 23. Linc came out of his office, wiping his hands on a greasy rag.
“Hey, how’d it go?” he asked.
“Great. They want the book of memoirs. Going to be their big Spring book, if I get it in on time, or so they say.”
“You still bound and determined to sell the plane?” asked the mechanic. “Sure hate to see her go.”
“Well, that part of my life’s over. I feel like if I never fly again, even as an airline passenger, it’ll be too soon.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Jetboy looked at the plane.
“Tell you what. Put on the high-altitude wing extensions and the drop tanks. It looks bigger and shinier that way. Somebody from a museum will probably buy it, is what I figure-I’m offering it to museums first. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take out ads in the papers. We’ll take the guns out later, if some private citizen buys it. Check everything to see it’s tight. Shouldn’t have shaken much on the hop from San Fr an, and they did a pretty good overhaul at Hickam Field. Whatever you think it needs.”
“Sure thing.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow, unless something can’t wait.”