The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun Read Free

tempered by apprehension.
    Back on his bench Julian watched the woman with the brood of seven counting her luggage and her children for the fifth time. The baggage checked but the kids were one short, for she stopped at the sixth finger, looked wildly about and yelled, “Johnny, where are you?” She spotted him with his nose pressed to the window of the candy shop. “Johnny, you come back here at once.”
    Johnny, a grubby boy of eleven, slouched sulkily back to the fold. Julian wondered what it would be like to have that many brothers and sisters. He had none.
    A foreign-looking man, olive skinned, dark, with thick black hair passed by carrying an intriguing and extraordinarily shaped instrument case. Julian could only wonder what was inside it.
    Next his attention was attracted to the man sitting diagonally opposite him beside a fat and perspiring woman. A black flat briefcase obviously belonging to the man was between them and at this point Julian became witness to an international plot going awry. He had naturally no knowledge that the coming incident constituted a fiasco and, of course, no participation in it. The latter was only to come later.
    The name of the man with the briefcase was John Sisson, a full colonel in the United States Army Ordnance temporarily attached to Military Intelligence in liaison with the CIA. He was clad in civilian clothes of lightweight seersucker which could not conceal his soldierly bearing. Tall, his short-cut hair greying, he had the stamp of authority and command. The lines about his eyes and firm mouth did not detract from what appeared to be a pleasant personality. One could not look at him without knowing that he was “somebody”.
    The drama got underway with the loudspeaker bawling, “Attention please. Calling Colonel Sisson. Colonel John Sisson, please. Will Colonel Sisson please come to the Dispatcher’s Office. Repeat. Will Colonel Sisson please come to the Dispatchers Office.”
    The colonel waited until the repeat before he arose and hurried off in the direction where the terminal offices seemed to be. In his rush he forgot his briefcase, which remained on the bench where he had been sitting.
    And now the action speeded up. A man whose false passport proclaimed him as being one Philip Barber, born in Waukegan, Illinois, and whose other equally false papers identified him as a plywood salesman, arose from behind a newspaper from whence he had been watching the colonel. His real name was Nikolas Allon and he was a Russian spy connected with the KGB, a sleeper planted twelve years before in the United States for just this one moment. He was small, unobtrusive, nondescript with the toothbrush moustache of the travelling salesman, the type no one would look at twice, one of the faceless who pass by. He was moving not too quickly, not too slowly in a line towards the vacated bench, when the fat woman noticed the briefcase next to her and looked up at the back of the retreating colonel. She arose, picked it up and hurried after him calling “Mister, hey Mister, you forgot something.” She was already ten feet away in pursuit of the colonel when Nikolas Allon arrived where the colonel had sat. To have picked up the abandoned article saying, “Sorry, I left my briefcase here,” to have walked off with it would have been one thing. To have initiated an incident now by snatching it from the fat woman and running was unthinkable in terms of the entire operation. Nikolas Allon just kept on going.
    Julian watched the fat woman catch up with the colonel and thought, “Haw! Grownups! Oh, boy, if I forgot my school satchel like that.”
    The colonel, checked momentarily by the fat woman’s cries, hesitated, and was lost. Puffing and panting she caught him by the sleeve. “Mister, Mister, you forgot your briefcase.”
    The colonel since he came from Louisiana, turned and accepted it with Southern grace. “Why, thank you, ma’am. That’s mighty thoughtful of you.”
    The fat woman