Free Pale Betrayer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

with the night before, Bauer was accustomed to dealing with the non-scientific mind. The chairman of any university department, Marks knew, was primarily a liaison officer between ivory tower and market place. It was a pleasure to watch him dislodge the fixed concept of a man like Fitzgerald that nuclear physics was necessarily a highly secretive, war-oriented science.
    “Actually,” Bauer said, indicating the film box, “the findings of such experiment have been published for some time. Dr. Bradley and our people were looking to what we might call a byproduct in the film. We don’t know of course whether it will tell us anything we didn’t already know until we compare it with what we do know. Dr. Bradley obviously thought it might. Otherwise he and his colleagues would not have been so anxious to study the film last night. Some of the notes he had made”—Bauer indicated the handwritten papers—“suggest his high expectations.”
    “The film is intact now?” Marks asked.
    “I should think so,” Bauer said. “I shouldn’t suppose it to have been tampered with at all. It would mean nothing except to a person interested in the Pi-meson.”
    “And there can’t be many of them in the world,” Fitzgerald remarked dryly.
    The others laughed, including Bauer.
    “Let’s have another look at the container,” one of the federal men said.
    Redmond handed him the box, roughly one by one and a half by four inches. When he was through examining it inside and out, he passed it and its contents on. Marks observed the customs’ stamp overlapping the label on which Bradley’s name had been written in block letters. Inside were a half-dozen film strips of four frames each. The film was protected by coarse tissue paper. The box itself was much like that in which Marks kept color slides.
    Anderson spoke last: “The customs’ seal was broken, I understand, but Bradley himself might have broken it, or more likely the thieves, to see that they weren’t missing anything. Customs cleared the film on the spot, duplicates of it having entered the country at Boston, and Washington, D.C., as well as via another New York flight, a set on its way to San Francisco. Both the box and the film are identical with those received at the National Laboratory. We had them flown up this morning for comparison.”
    Anderson smiled, and Marks thought he was one of those characters who promoted men on the basis of how early they got up in the morning. He had the glow of the cold shower about him.
    “I want to say that the Bureau’s full facilities are at your disposal, gentlemen,” Anderson concluded. “We shall expect you to inform us of any development you feel might concern the national security. I myself am available for consultation at any hour of the day or night. But at the present stage of your investigation, I see no reason for us to enter the case.”
    More than forty detectives were assigned to the case, most of them to the hard, gritty work of door-to-door inquiry, of trying to track the victim from the moment he stepped out of his own house. The first pay-off came early: Bradley, walking alone, had stopped briefly to exchange a few words with the sexton of St. John’s Church who was closing the gate for the night. The time was nine thirty: the sexton was sure since he was performing his last chore of the day and was understandably punctual about it. He had known Bradley to have been in Greece and their exchange ran something like: “How was Greece, Professor?” To which Bradley replied: “Hot and noisy. I felt right at home.”
    The sexton “was pretty sure” Professor Bradley had continued on toward the University.
    Marks noted the name of the interrogating officer, Tom Reid, and laid the report aside. The conversation of Bradley with the sexton was certainly not that of a man aware of immediate jeopardy. Marks studied a city street map. Reaching St. John’s, Bradley had passed by three blocks the street on which Anne