Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 20

The first day of December, a Tuesday, was bitterly cold, all the more depressing because winter would not officially start for three more weeks. I felt chilled through after my short walk from the Illinois Central depot at 53rd Street to the Hyde Park police station.

“Can’t you crank up the heat in this place?” I asked Sgt. Mark Waldron.

“Now, Snap, you’ve lived through many a Chicago winter, as have I. And I cannot believe you haven’t built up some tolerance over all that spell.”

“Some things you never get used to, Mark.”

He smiled. “I suppose not. Your paper and all the others certainly have been giving this part of town a lot of ink lately, not that I’m surprised.”

“Well, how often do two professors get killed, and in such a short span? How’s your boss taking it?” I nodded in the direction of Lieutenant Grady’s office. Waldron shrugged. “Pretty much the way you’d expect. He’s feeling some of the heat, of course, but most of it is being directed at Headquarters.”

“I’ll say. I was just in Fahey’s office, and he is not what I would term a happy fellow.”

“If you think our good Fergus is feelin’ the heat, think what it must be like for the Commissioner in his office up in City Hall. To say nothing of the Mayor himself, our stalwart Mr. Kelly.”

“Yeah, they’re all taking a pounding from the press. And from the Crime Commission. And it appears that no less than J. Edgar Hoover has also developed an interest in the case.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That so? Who’d have thought that our little corner of the world would become so important?”

I spent the rest of the morning phoning the other precincts on the South Side in search of news, and the pickings were pretty slim.

The Gresham station had hauled in a guy accused of bilking little old ladies by claiming to be a termite inspector. He was charging them five bucks to check out their floor joists to see if the little fellows were gnawing at them. The Englewood precinct nailed a prostitute who was working a corner adjoining the local high school. Apparently, some of the students were spending their lunch money on something other than lunch.

I called both of these pieces in to the city desk, then broke for lunch. “This joint is still ten degrees too cold,” I said to Waldron as I headed out the door to the University Tavern.

I placed my hamburger order with Chester, and had been seated at the bar for about five minutes when the natty Edward Rickman came in.

“I was hoping to find you here,” he said, settling in next to me.

“Most days that’s a pretty good bet. What’s new with you?”

“Well, there’s some rumblings,” he said as Chester put a cup of coffee in front of him.

“Like what.”

“I was in my office this morning — actually, it’s more of a cubicle, with walls that don’t quite reach the ceiling. And I heard a conversation some distance away that wasn’t meant for my ears, I’m sure.”

“Go on.”

“I recognized only one of the voices for sure, a colleague in the department named Foster, who I think is working at least part of the time in the Met Lab. Somebody else, I have no idea who it was, had come into his area, which is three cubicles away from me, and said ‘Tomorrow’s the day.’”

“What else?”

“That’s all — just ‘tomorrow’s the day, 6:00 p.m.’”

“What do you think it means?”

“That whatever they’ve been working on in secret is about to crystallize.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Neither do I, totally,” Rickman said, “but I think it’s got something to do with developing a nuclear reaction, which is frightening. I know the time, but what I don’t know is the place.”

I drank coffee and set the cup down, looking at the row of liquor bottles on the back bar. “I think I may know,” I told him.

He looked surprised. “Really?”

“Stagg Field.”

“What! There are some squash courts down underneath the stands, but I don’t think they’re being used anymore. The place is deserted.”

“Exactly. Sounds like an ideal location for something secret.”

“You’re just guessing.”

“Not entirely. I walked over there yesterday because of something Bergman had said. The place is being guarded by soldiers. I tried without success to talk one of them into letting me inside, and while I was there, three men showed badges and were allowed to go through the gates and on in. One of them was Enrico Fermi.”

“I’ll be damned!”

“I’d give odds that whatever’s going to happen tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. is going to happen somewhere inside that old heap of a stadium.”

“You’re really something,” Rickman said to me in a voice tinged with admiration. “I’ve been around this collection of Gothic buildings for years, know a lot of people, know where quite a few bodies are buried and where some of the skeletons are, and you’ve only been around here — what? — a few weeks, and you already know more than I do.”

“Just about this one thing,” I told him, “and I’m not one-hundred-percent positive about that.”

“What are you going to do?” Rickman asked as Chester refilled his cup.

I threw up my hands. “What can I do? Tell the police? It doesn’t sound like anything illegal is going on. Tell my newspaper? Hah! If there is a weapon being developed, they’re sure as hell not going to print anything about it and reveal some sort of military secret in the process. We got into enough trouble over that Japanese code business, even if we were cleared by the government after an investigation. The Colonel may not be overly fond of F.D.R. and his administration, but he is above all a loyal American.”

Rickman stared straight ahead, resting his chin on his hands. “I don’t think I want to be anywhere near this campus tomorrow night,” he said soberly.

I had my own idea about that.

Wednesday was about as dull as Tuesday as far as my beat was concerned, and the time seemed to drag.

“Seems like you’re looking at your watch every ten minutes,” Waldron observed after I’d phoned an item to the city desk about a bookie joint raid on South Halsted. “Got yourself a hot date tonight?”

“Not exactly,” I said, grinning. “I’m not quite sure what to call it.”

“Well, may you enjoy yourself whatever it is,” he said, turning to answer his phone.

At five o’clock, I left the Hyde Park precinct and strolled over to the University Tavern to have a beer. I needed one, and just one, to settle my nerves. Chester apparently had the night off, and an older woman with hair tinged with gray poured me a draught. Most of the stools were empty and she was in a chatty mood, so I became her target.

“Business is slow so far tonight,” she said, passing a rag over the surface of the bar. “Maybe people’s beginning their Christmas shopping already. Think so?”

“Could be,” I allowed. “I won’t begin thinking about that for at least another week or so.”

“Me too. Anyway, I ain’t got that many presents to buy. Husband’s dead, daughter in Colorado has just the one kid, my little granddaughter, and that’s about it. How ’bout you?”

“Pretty much the same. No wife, teen-aged son.”

“No girlfriend?”

“No,” I said. “Although there’s someone whom I’m getting interested in.”

“Well, if you want her to be interested in you as well, you might consider getting her at least a small gift,” she said with a chuckle. “It can’t hurt, now, can it?”

“You make a good point,” I told her, as I ordered another beer.

It was past 5:30 when I left the U.T. and headed west on 57th Street. The grandstands on the east and west sides of Stagg Field loomed, darker even than the dark skies. But for the moment, it was the lower south end-zone bleachers that interested me. I had noticed on my previous visit that there was a gap in a fence where those end-zone seats almost joined up with the towering east stands. I had a flashlight, but my eyes had adjusted to the darkness well enough that I didn’t need to turn it on, not that I would have anyway.

The surface of the old field was uneven and overrun with weeds. Moving toward the west stands, I gingerly picked my way across the broad expanse where the likes of Walter Eckersall and Jay Berwanger once had romped in front of thousands of cheering Maroon fans and where Red Grange had starred for the visiting University of Illinois team.

Halfway up the stands, a series of openings led to tunnels that slanted down toward street level. I knew these well, having ushered several times at one of them near the south end of the stadium. It was to that opening that I went, stepping carefully up the tiers where seats had once been. The opening had been boarded up, but not securely. With some pulling and prying, I was able to pull the plywood board loose, thankfully making almost no noise in the process. I stepped into the darkened tunnel, and was forced to use my flashlight.

The ramp sloped down to a catwalk, and apart from the darkness and lack of humanity, the gray underbelly of the stadium was much as I had remembered it from those festive fall afternoons more than two decades ago. I was glad to have worn soft-soled shoes as I made my way silently along the concrete. I stopped and listened for sounds. Nothing.

Walking farther north under the stands, I played the flashlight back and forth on the catwalk ahead of me. Then I heard something. Conversation? I moved ahead, switching off the light as my eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness.

Yes, it was voices, and they were getting gradually clearer as I moved ahead. Then I saw a sliver of soft amber light slanting across the concrete hallway several yards ahead of me.

The light was coming through a window-like hole about three feet square in the brick wall. I stopped short of it and edged forward slowly. Keeping back from the opening so that I was in the shadows, I looked down into a room that was about two stories high. My opening was at ceiling level, giving me an excellent vantage point.

Slightly below me was a balcony on which about forty people clustered, only one of them a woman. They apparently had been there for some time and were talking quietly among themselves. They all had their backs to me and were looking down onto the floor of the shadowy room, which was about ten feet below them.

The object of their attention was a bulky square column of wooden timbers and what looked like black bricks, which nearly reached the ceiling. The column was enclosed on three sides by a sort of fabric shroud. At the east end of the balcony, four men gathered around what appeared to be a control panel. One of them I recognized as Enrico Fermi.

There was only one man on the floor of the room. “All right, George,” Fermi called down to him. “Pull it out another foot.” The one called George pulled a rod out of the bulky column. “This is going to do it,” Fermi said to the man next to him. “Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace will climb and continue to climb. It will not level off.”

Fermi turned away then and started fiddling with a slide rule. After about a minute, he closed it and turned to the onlookers with a smile. “The reaction is self-sustaining,” he announced in a quiet but firm tone.

Everyone then grew silent for what seemed like a half hour as Fermi and the others around him watched the controls. Twice I was able to stifle a cough, and my feet were complaining about my having to stand for so long. “Okay, that’s it,” Fermi said. Soon all those on the balcony were talking and smiling, and then they broke into spontaneous but respectful applause.

One man stepped forward from the little crowd and held out a bottle of Chianti to Fermi. “For you, sir,” he said in an accented voice.

“For all of us,” Fermi replied, beaming. Quickly, paper cups materialized and the Italian was pouring small portions of the wine into each of them. There was no toast, but when Fermi held up his cup, they all drank to what one man termed “a truly momentous day.”

It was obvious that whatever I had witnessed was a success, and that the experiment was over. People began to leave the balcony, talking in excited tones to one another. I walked silently back the way I had entered. My eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, so I had no need of the flashlight.

I picked my way carefully down through the grandstands to the field and headed back southeast. Just as I was about to step through the opening between the east and south stands and onto the 57th Street sidewalk, I saw a movement to my left, but by the time I turned in that direction, it was too late.