The Saint Steps In

1

A change of expression flickered over her face, that started with a half smile and ended with half a frown; but under the half-frown her brown eyes were level and steady.

"Now are you giving me what you thought I was asking for, or do you mean that?"

"Think it out for yourself," he said patiently. "Somebody was interested enough to make your father a present of two explosions and a fire — according to what you told me. Somebody followed you long enough to know you'd been trying to see Imberline. Somebody thought it was worth while calling you and making a phony appointment, and then sending you a threatening note to see how easily you'd scare off. Somebody even thought it was worth while trying another note on me, after they'd seen us talking."

"You don't know how it got into your pocket?"

"No more than you know how yours fell into your lap. But I was bumped into rather heavily on two occasions, so it was on one of those occasions that the note was planted. The face of Walter Devan and the tall man who had been in Imberline's entourage passed through the Saint's memory. "Anyway, since you didn't scare, there was an ambush waiting for you on the way. If you'd taken a cab it doubtless would have been run off the road."

She was neither frightened nor foolish now. She simply watched his face estimatingly.

"What do you think they meant to do?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they were just told to rough you up a bit to discourage you. Maybe it was to be a straight kidnaping. Maybe they thought you could be used to keep your father quiet. Or maybe they thought you might be able to tell them his process if they persuaded you enough. By the way, could you?"

She nodded.

"It's very simple, once you know it; and I've been helping Father in his laboratory ever since he started working on it again."

"Then you don't need to ask me questions about what they might have had in mind."

She glanced at her drink.

"It's silly, isn't it? I hadn't thought of it that way."

"You'd better start thinking now. In times like these, anybody who can pour a lot of sawdust, old shoelaces, tomato ketchup, and hair tonic into a bathtub and make rubber is hotter than tobasco. The only thing I can't understand is why the FBI didn't have you both in a fireproof vault long ago."

"I can answer that," she said wearily. "Have you any idea how many new synthetic rubber inventors are pestering people in Washington every day? Only about a dozen."

"But if your father's reputation is as good as you say it is —"

"All sorts of crackpots have some kind of reputation too. And to the average dollar-a-year man, any scientist is liable to be a bit of a crackpot."

"Well, they can test this stuff of yours, can't they?"

"Yes. But that takes a lot of time and red tape. And it wouldn't necessarily prove anything."

"Why not?"

"The specimen might be any other kind of worked-over or reclaimed rubber."

"Surely it could be detected."

"How?"

"Analyse it."

She laughed a little.

"You're not a chemist. Any organic or semi-organic concoction — like this is — is almost impossible to analyse. How can I explain that? Look, for instance, you could grind up the ashes of a human arm, and analyse them, and find a lot of ingredients, but that wouldn't prove whether you'd started with a man or not. That's putting it very clumsily, I know, but—"

"I get the idea."

He lighted a cigarette and tightened his lips on it. These were ramifications that he hadn't had time to think out. But they made sense within the limits of his knowledge.

He went back to the concrete approach that he understood better.

"Has your father patented his formula?"

"No. That would have meant discussing it with attorneys and petty officials and all kinds of people. And I tell you, it's so simple that if one wrong person knew it, all the wrong people could know it. And after all — we are in the middle of a war."

"He didn't want any commercial protection?"

"I told you that once, and I meant it. He doesn't need money; doesn't want it. Really, we're horribly comfortable. My grandfather bought a gold mine in California for two old mules and a can of corned beef. All Father is trying to do is to give his process to the right people. But he's been soured by his experiences here in Washington, and of course he can't just write a letter or fill out a form, and tell all about it, because then it would be sure to leak out to the wrong people."

"Something seems to have leaked out already," Simon observed.

"Maybe some people have more imagination than others."

"You haven't anyone special in mind?"

She moved her hands helplessly.

"The Nazis?" she suggested. "But I don't know how they'd have heard of it… Or the Japs. Or anyone…"

"Anyone," said the Saint, "is a fair guess. They don't necessarily have to be clanking around with swastikas embroidered on their underwear and sealed orders from the Gestapo up their sleeves. Anyone who isn't as big-hearted as your father, but who believes in him, might be glad to get hold of this recipe — just for the money. Which would make the field a good bet on any mutuel." He smiled and added: "Even including that human also-ran, Mr. Sylvester Angert — the funny little man."

He put down his glass and strolled around the room, his hands in his pockets and his eyes crinkled against the smoke of the cigarette slanted between his lips.

It began to look like a nice little situation. The FBI wouldn't have any jurisdiction unless somebody Higher Up — such as Frank Imberline, perhaps — brought it to Mr. Hoover's attention that the protection of Calvin Gray and his daughter was a matter of national importance. Imberline might do just that, doubtless adding something like: "A stitch in time saves nine." But would he? Would the dollar-a-year man who had been the head of Consolidated Rubber go to any great lengths to protect the life of an inventor of a process which could make synthetic rubber out of old bits of nothing much? Might not Imberline, like too many others in Washington, be looking beyond the end of the war? Walter Devan had said something pat about life preservers, but wasn't it a fact, still, that when the war was over, the old battle might start again; the battle between the old and the war-born new?

Imberline was an unknown quantity, then, which left only the local gendarmerie to appeal to. Simon knew nothing at all about them; but even if they were extremely efficient, he surmised that they were also liable to be very busy. He didn't know for how long they would be likely to detach three able-bodied officers for the sole job of providing a full-time personal bodyguard for Madeline Gray. And in any case, they couldn't stay with her if she left the city.

"Where is your father now?" he asked.

"At home — in Connecticut."

"Where?"

"Near Stamford."

The DC police couldn't do anything about that. And the Stamford cops would be even less likely to have men to spare for an indefinite vigil.

"Maybe you ought to hire some guards from a detective agency," he said. "I gather you could afford it."

She looked him in the eyes.

"Yes. We could afford it."

He had made a reasonable suggestion and she had considered it in the same reasonable way. Even that steady glance of hers didn't accuse him of trying to evade anything. It would have had no right to, anyway, he told himself. It was his own conscience. He didn't owe her anything. He had plenty of other things to think about. There certainly must be some proper legal authority for her to take her troubles to — he just hadn't been able to think what it was. And anyhow, what real basis did he have for deciding that Calvin Gray's invention was practical and important? There were highly trained experts in Government offices who were much more competent to judge such matters than he was.

And just the same he knew that he was still evading, and he felt exasperated with himself.

He asked: "What was your idea when you did see Imberline?"

"Get him to come to the laboratory himself, or send someone who was absolutely reliable. They could watch us make as much rubber as they'd need for their tests, and then they could be sure it was a genuine synthetic."

"But eventually other people would have to be in on it — if it were going to be manufactured in any quantity."

"Father has that all worked out. You could have a dozen different ingredients shipped to the plant and stored in tanks. Three of them would be the vital part of the formula. The other nine would mean nothing. But they'd all be piped down through a mixing room that only one man need go into. The unnecessary ingredients would be destroyed by acids and run down the drain, so that no checkup would be possible. The real formula would be piped from the mixing room direct to the vats. One man could control a whole plant by just working two or three hours a day. I could control one myself. But even if anyone on the outside knew every chemical that was brought in and used, it would take them years to try out every combination and proportion and treatment until they might hit on the right one." -

It was a sound answer. But it had the tinge of being a pat answer, too. As if it had been rehearsed carefully to reply to embarrassing questions.

Or maybe he still had a hangover of his own first skepticism.

He made a decision with characteristic abruptness.

"Suppose," he suggested, "you go to your room. Lock and night-lock the door and don't open it to anyone, except me."

He went to the desk, scrawled a word on a slip of paper, folded it and handed it to her. She looked at it and nodded. He took the paper back and touched a match to it. As the ashes crumbled, they took into nothingness the word he had written, the word he was to say when he called her.

He was taking no chances that Mr. Sylvester Angert's cousin might be looking for his room in the hall outside, complete with a little tube that heard through doors.

"Will you be long?" she asked.

"I hope not. I'll take you to your room, if you don't mind."

"I'd appreciate it."

He escorted her to the elevators, rode up five floors, and saw her safely to her door. He waited until the night latch clicked and then returned to the elevators. He rode to the main lobby and spent a few minutes looking into the dining room. It was virtually deserted — for Washington — and the man he was looking for wasn't there.

Simon left the hotel and bought a taxi driver for the second time that night.

He leaned back on the cracked-leather upholstery and reached for a cigarette.

"Take me to a street that enters into Scott Circle," he directed. "One that hits the circle near the low numbers."

"You got any special number in mind, Chief?"

"Yeah, bud. I got me a number in mind, but just do like I told you, see?"

"Okay, okay. I just wanted to know."

He lit his cigarette, wondering if his tough-guy talk would convince a radio casting director, in a pinch. He decided that it wouldn't. He hadn't used it for quite a while, and he was out of practice. He made a mental note to polish up on it.

The cab drifted to a street corner on the rim of the circle, and the hackman turned.

"How's this, Cap?" he asked.

"This is swell."

He paid off the driver, waited until the cab drove away, and waited a few minutes more to make certain that the cabbie was not too curious. He surveyed the dimned-out houses on the circle and picked out the mansion which he had already visited once this evening.

There was a light in the downstairs hallway and lights in a second-floor room that must be a bedroom. As he watched, Simon saw a bulky shadow pass the drawn shade. The shadow was of proportions that hardly could have belonged to anyone else but Frank Imberline.

The downstairs light went out. The Saint moved along the sidewalk enough to see a tiny window in the back of the house go on. That meant that the colored butler must be going to bed.

Walking in the deep shadows, Simon Templar made his way to the front door of the house that surely must have been built as an ambassadorial dwelling. He worked on the lock for about a minute with an instrument from his pocket, and it ceased to be an obstruction.

"Now," he told himself, "if there's no burglar alarm, and if there's no bolt, we might get to see Comrade Imberline in person."

There was neither alarm nor bolt. Simon let himself noiselessly into the front hall and closed the door gently behind him. A circular staircase wound its way up toward the second floor, and there was no creak of a loose joist as the Saint made his way aloft. A crack of light under a door told him that Frank Imberline was still awake.

Simon pushed open the door and calmly walked into the great man's bedroom.

Imberline was seated at a desk, scanning a sheaf of papers. He was clad in maroon and gold pajamas that made the Saint blink for a moment. As Simon stepped into the room, the rubber tycoon swung his heavy head in his direction and popped his eyes, the unhealthy ruddiness slowly ebbing from his face.

"Who are you?" he croaked.

"Don't be alarmed, Mr. Imberline," said the Saint soothingly. "I'm not a hold-up man, and I'm not an indignant taxpayer proposing to beat you up."

"Then who the devil are you, and what do you want?"

"My name is Simon Templar, and I just wanted to talk to you."

"How did you get in here?"

"I walked in," said the Saint, "through the front door."

"You broke in!"

Simon shook his head.

"I didn't break anything," he said innocently. "I just used one of my little tricks on the lock. Really. I did no damage at all."

Imberline made gargling noises in his throat.

"This is — this is—"

"I know," said the Saint wearily. "I know. I should have applied for an audience through the usual channels, and filled out half a dozen forms in quintuplicate. But after all there is a war going on — to coin a phrase — and it just occurred to me that this might save us waiting a few months to meet each other."

The red came back into Frank Imberline's square face and he seemed to swell within his gorgeous pajamas.

"I'll have you know," he said, in a half-bellow, "that such high-handed tactics as this — these — must be dealt with by the proper authorities I I will not be intimidated, sir, by any high handed—"

"You said that before," Simon reminded him politely. "Well — what in hell do you want?"

"I want to talk to you about a man who has invented a synthetic rubber process. One Calvin Gray."

Imberline drew his heavy brows down over his little eyes. "What about Calvin Gray?" he demanded.

"I'm interested in Mr. Gray's process," said the Saint, "and I'm wondering why the man can't get a hearing with you."

Imberline waved a pudgy hand in a disdainful gesture.

"A nut, Mr. — er — Templar," he said. "A nut, pure and simple. From what I've heard, he claims he can make rubber out of rhubarb, or something. Impossible, of course. I hope you haven't invested any money in his invention, sir."

"A fool and his money are soon parted," Simon said wisely.

"Yes," Imberline grunted. "Quite so. But this outrageous breaking into a man's house — a man's house is his castle, you know — you really have no excuse for that."

The big man got out of the chair by the desk and stalked over to the bureau. He took a fat cigar from the box on the bureau top and rammed it into his mouth. Simon's eyes were watchful. But Imberline's hand did not move toward the handle of any drawer that might have contained a gun. He marched back across the room and slumped down into a deep easy chair.

"Okay," he said over his cigar. "So you broke in here to talk to me about Gray's invention. I could throw you out or have you arrested, but instead I'll listen to what you have to say."

"Very kind of you," Simon murmured. "A soft answer turneth away stuff."

"What is it you want to know?" Imberline asked bluntly. "I'm a busy man, and every minute counts."

"While time and tide wait for no man."

"Get to the point. Why are you here?"

Simon placed a cigarette between his lips and snapped his lighter. He was aware of Imberline's gimlet eyes watching his every movement. He exhaled a long plume of smoke and sat on the end of the bed.

"Have you ever seen Gray's product?" he asked.

"Once — or maybe twice."

"And what was your opinion?"

If it were possible for the hulking shoulders of Frank Imberline to shrug, they would have.

"It's something that could be synthetic — and it's something that could be made-over rubber, cleverly disguised."

"You investigated it thoroughly, I suppose?"

"I had my staff investigate it. Their report was bad. That man Gray pestered me for weeks, trying to get to see me, and finally gave up. I hear his daughter is in town now, still trying to waste my time."

"You haven't made an appointment with her?"

"Certainly not. There are only so many hours in the day—"

"And so many days in the week—"

"Young man," said Mr. Imberline magisterially, "I am a public servant. I have the most humble respect for the trust which has been placed in me, and my daily responsibility is to make sure that not one hour — not one minute — of my time shall be frittered away on things from which the Community cannot benefit."

"You couldn't by any chance have made an appointment with her for tonight and forgotten it?" Simon asked, unawed by that resounding statement.

Imberline drew his chins together.

"Certainly not! I never forget an appointment. Punctuality is the politeness of princes—"

"You really ought to have seen her. She's quite something to look at."

There seemed to be a flicker of interest in the close-set eyes. Suddenly, the middle-aged lecher was there for Simon to see. The big man grinned nauseatingly.

"A nice dish, eh?"

"A very nice dish. But to get back to Gray's invention — you haven't seen it demonstrated yourself, I take it?"

Imberline shook his head.

"No. I'm a busy man. I can't be running all over the country to view the brainstorm of every crackpot. I looked at his sample and I told my staff to investigate it. That's all I could do. Even you might understand that."

Simon stared at him thoughtfully through a couple of clouds of smoke. He was beginning to get an odd feeling about this interview which fitted with nothing that he had expected. Frank Imberline was as pompous and phony as a bullfrog with a megaphone; his thinking appeared to be done in resonant clichés, and he uttered them all the time as if he were addressing a large rally in a public square. And yet from the beginning his reaction to Simon's presence had been one of righteous indignation and not fear. It was true that the Saint hadn't waved a knife under his nose or made any threatening noises. But the Saint had also calmly admitted a technical act of burglary, which there was no denying anyhow; and any normal citizen would have regarded such an intruder as at least a potentially dangerous screwball. Well, possibly Imberline was one of those men who are too obtuse to be subject to ordinary fear. But in that case, why hadn't he simply rung or called for help and had the Saint arrested?

Because he was more profoundly afraid that the Saint had something else up his sleeve? Or for some other reason?

Imberline was returning his scrutiny just as shrewdly. He took the cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end. "You tell me that Miss — er — Gray is a very attractive young woman," he said.

"She is."

"Young man, I'm going to ask you a question."

"Shoot."

"Is there any romantic reason for this interest of yours?"

The Saint shook his head.

"None at all."

"Have you invested any money in this so-called invention?"

"No."

Imberline struck a match and put it to the cigar.

"Well, then," he said in a gust of smoke, "what the hell are you here for?"

"That's a fair question," said the Saint. "I have some quaint reasons of my own for believing that this invention may have more in it than you think. If that's true, I'm as interested as any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If there's any fake about it, I'm still interested — from another angle. And from that angle, I'd be even more interested if the invention was really good and there was a powerful and well-organized campaign of skullduggery going on to prevent anything being done about it."

"Why?"

"I've told you my name. But perhaps you'd know me better if I said — the Saint."

Imberline's cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no change of color in the florid face. No — Frank Imberline, with or without a guilty conscience, wasn't panicked by shadows. He stared back at the Saint, without blinking, puffing smoke out of the side of his mouth in intermittent clouds.

"You're a crook," he said.

"If you'd care to put that in writing," said the Saint calmly, "I shall be very glad to sue you for libel. There isn't a single legal charge that can be brought against me — other than this little matter of breaking and entering tonight."

The other made a short impatient gesture.

"Oh, I'm sure you've been clever. And I've read some of that stuff about your Robin Hood motives. But your methods, sir, are not those which have been set up by our democratic constitution. The end does not justify the means. No individual has the right to take the law into his own hands. The maintenance of our institutions and our way of life, sir, rests upon the subordination of private prejudice to the authorised process of our courts."

He gave the pronouncement a fine oratorical rotundity, paused as if to allow the acclamation of an unseen audience to subside, and said abruptly: "However. Your suggestion that, my Department could be influenced by anything but the best interests of the country is insulting and intolerable. I'm going to prove to you that you're talking a lot of crap."

"Good."

"You bring this Miss Gray to see me, and I'll prove to you that she has a chance to present her case if she's got one."

Simon could hardly believe his ears,

"Do you mean that?"

"What the hell are you talking about, do I mean it? Of course I mean it! I'm not condoning your behavior, but I do know how to put a stop to the sort of rumor you're starting."

"When? Tomorrow?"

"No. I'm leaving first thing in the morning for New York and Akron on Government business. But as soon as I get back. In a couple of days. Keep in touch with my office."

The Saint went on looking at him with a sense of deepening bafflement that had the question marks pounding through his head like triphammers. His blue eyes were cool and inscrutable, but behind the mask of his face that strange perplexity went on. If this was a stall to get him out of there and keep him quiet for a couple of days, perhaps while further shenanigans were concocted, it was still a perfect stall. There was still no way of exposing it except by waiting. Imberline had taken the wind out of his sails. But if it wasn't a stall… Simon found his head aching with the new incongruities that he would have to untangle if it wasn't a stall.

"Now get the hell out of here," Imberline said defiantly.

There was nothing else to do.

Simon stood up, crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, and hoped that his nonchalant impassivity had enough suggestion of postponed menace and loaded sleeves to conceal the completely impotent confusion of his mind. For perhaps the first time in his life he felt that he hadn't a single answer in him.

"Thank you," he said, and left the room like that.

He let himself out of the front door, and crossed the lawn diagonally towards the street, moving through the dark patches cast by the thick spruce trees with the silence that was as natural to him as breathing.

He was just emerging from the deepest gloom when he stumbled over somebody who had been taken unawares by his catlike approach. The man he had bumped into straightened, squeaked, and vanished like a startled rabbit. But although he disappeared in the time it might take eyelash to meet eyelash in a slow blink, the Saint knew who he was. It was the funny little man, Sylvester Angert…

2

Simon Templar walked back to the Shoreham, conscious always of the movement of shadows about him. He knew he was wide open for a pot shot, but he had the idea that nobody wanted to kill him — yet. They might kill Madeline Gray, and her father, but not before they got the formula from one of the two. He himself was a recent nuisance, not yet thoroughly estimated; and the forces that were working against the Grays would hardly want to complicate their problem with a police investigation until they were convinced that there was no alternative.

He was a trifle optimistic in this prognosis, as it was soon to be demonstrated.

Madeline Gray opened her door when he gave the password he had written down, and he almost laughed at the solemn roundness of her eyes.

"I'm not a returning ghost," he said. "Come back downstairs and I'll buy you another drink."

They walked down to his floor, and he waited until she was curled up on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and a Peter Dawson in her hand.

Then he said, without preface: "I've just been to see Imberline."

Her mouth opened and stayed open in an unfinished gasp of amazement and incredulity, and he had time to light a cigarette before she got it working again.

"H-h-how?"

"I burgled his house and walked in on him. Rather illegal, I suppose, but it suddenly seemed like such an easy way to cut out a lot of red tape and heel-cooling." The Saint grinned a little now in reminiscent enjoyment of his own simplifying impudence; and then without a change of that expression he added bluntly: "He says your father is a crackpot phony."

His eyes fastened on hers, and he saw resentment and anger harden the bewilderment out of her face.

"I told you Mr. Imberline has never seen a demonstration of Father's process. He doesn't dare, because of what our invention might do to the natural rubber business after the war."

"He says he told his staff to investigate it."

"His staff!" she snorted. "His stooges! Or maybe just some other men with their own axes to grind. Father met them, and wouldn't talk to them after they demanded to see the formula before they'd see a demonstration. I told you he isn't the most tactful person in the world. He suspected Imberline's men from the first, and he made no bones about throwing them out of the laboratory when they came up to Stamford."

"On the other hand, Imberline promised to give you a hearing himself if I brought you to see him."

She couldn't be stunned with the same incredulity again, but it was as if she had been jarred again behind the eyes.

"He told you that?"

"Yes. In a couple of days. As soon as he gets back from a trip that he has to rush off on tomorrow."

She breathed quickly a couple of times, so that he could hear it, in a sort of jerky and frantic way.

"Do you think he meant it?"

"He may have. He didn't have to say that. He could have screamed bloody murder, thundered about the police, or told me to go to hell. But he didn't even try."

She put her glass down on the low table in front of her and rubbed her hands shakily together as if they felt clammy. Her lips trembled, and the voice that came through them had a tremor in it to match.

"I–I don't know what to say. You've been so wonderful — you've done so much — made everything seem so easy. I feel so stupid. I–I don't know whether I ought to kiss you, or burst into tears, or what. I don't know how to believe it."

He nodded.

"That," he said flatly, "is my problem."

"What did you do to persuade him?"

"Very little. It was too easy."

"Well, why do you think he did it?"

"I wish I knew." The Saint scowled at his cigarette. "He may have been scared of the trouble I might stir up — but he didn't look scared of anything. He may have been afraid that I really had something on him. He may be a very clever and a very cunning guy, and he may have been just getting himself elbow room to hit back with a real brick in his glove. He may be on somebody's payroll, and he may have to go back to his boss for orders when he's in a jam. He may just have a sort of caliph complex, and get a shot in his ego from making what he thinks is a grand eccentric gesture — something to make an anecdote out of and show what a big-minded down-to-earth democrat he is. All of that's possible. And none of it seems enough, somehow… So I muddle and brood around, and I still come back to one other thing."

"What's that?"

He said: "How much of this persecution of you and your father is real? How much of that is crackpot, how much is imagination — and how much is fake?"

The new disbelief in her eyes was sharp with hurt.

"After all this — are you still thinking that?"

He gazed at her detachedly, trying to persuade himself that he could make the same decision that he would have made if she had been fat and fifty with buck teeth and a wart on her nose.

Then he stopped looking at her. He was not so hot at being detached. He strolled over to the window and gazed out at the panorama of distant lights beyond the grounds and the Park…

Ping!

The glass in front of him grew an instantaneous spider-web around a neat round hole, and the plunk of the bullet lodging itself in the wall paster somewhere above and behind him came at about the same moment.

He was probably already in motion when he heard it, for his impressions seemed to catch up with it quite a little while later. And by that time he was spun around with his back to the wall between the two windows, temporarily safe from any more careless exposure, and looking at Madeline Gray's white face with a quite incorrigible silent laughter in his eyes.

"By God," he said, "even the Washington mosquitoes have war fever. They must be training to be dive bombers."

She looked up at the opposite wall, near the ceiling, where his glance had also gone to search for the scar of the shot. After a second or two she found her voice somewhere.

"Somebody shot at you," she said, and sounded as if she knew it was the only possible foolish thing to say.

"That would be another theory," he admitted.

"But where from?"

"From the grounds, or the Park. They had the window spotted, of course. I'm afraid I'm getting careless in my old age."

He reached sideways cautiously for the edge of the shade, and pulled it all the way down. Then he did the same thing for the other window. After that he felt free to move again.

"Won't you catch them, or — or something?"

He laughed.

"I'm not Superman, darling. By the time I got downstairs they could be blocks away. I should have known better — I was warned once, at least." Then his face was sober again. "But I guess the ungodly are still answering for you. If all this is fooling, it's certainly an awful complicated game."

She met his eyes with a visible tumult of thoughts that couldn't form into words.

Then, in the silence, the telephone rang.

Simon crossed to it and picked it up.

"This is Miss Brown of the Associated Press," it said. "I heard that you were in town, and I wondered if you'd be terribly angry if I asked you for a short interview."

It was a light and engaging and unusually arresting voice, but Simon Templar had met specialised voices before.

"I don't know what you could interview me about," he said. "I'm thirty-five years old, I think J. Edgar Hoover is wonderful, I believe that drinking is here to stay, I want everyone to buy War Bonds, and I am allergic to vitamins. Beyond that, I haven't anything to say to the world."

"I'd only take a few minutes, really, and you wouldn't have to answer any questions you didn't like."

"Suppose you call me tomorrow and I'll see what I'm doing," he suggested, giving himself a mental memorandum to see that his telephone was cut off.

"Why, are you in bed already?"

The Saint's brows climbed fractionally and drew down again.

"When I was a girl that would have been called a rather personal question," he said.

"I'm downstairs in the lobby now," she said. "Why couldn't we get it over tonight? I promise you can throw me out as soon as you've had enough."

And that was when the last of the Saint's hesitations winked out like a row of punctured bubbles, so that he wondered how he could ever have wasted time on them.

For girl reporters in real life do not come as far as the lobby of their victim's hotel before they ask for an interview. Nor do they press for ordinary interviews in the middle of the night. Nor do they use a sexy voice and a faintly suggestive turn of phrase to wheedle their way into the presence of a reluctant subject.

The sublime certainty of his intuition crescendoed around him with the symphonic grandeur of a happy orchestra. The decision had been taken out of his hands. He could resist temptation just so long, but there was a limit to how much he could be pushed. The note he had found in his pocket had been bad enough. The encounter with the aspiring kidnapers had been worse. The episodes of Mr. Angert and Mr. Imberline had been a bonus of aggravation. To be potted at in his own window by a sniper was almost gross provocation, even if he was broad-minded enough to admit that it was his own fault for providing the target. But this — this was positively and finally going too far.

"Okay," he said in a resigned tone. "Come on up."

He put the telephone back in its cradle as gently as a mother laying down her first-born, and turned back to the girl with a smile.

"Go to your room again, Madeline," he said; and for the first time that evening the full gay carelessness of a Saintly lilt was alive and laughing in his voice. "Get your things packed. We're going to Connecticut tonight."

Her eyes were bewildered.

"But I have to see Mr. Imberline."

"I'll get you back here as soon as we've arranged a genuine appointment. But that won't be tomorrow. Meanwhile, I can't be in two places at once. And maybe your father needs looking after too." He grinned. "Don't bother about those private detectives. I'm sold — if you'll still buy me."

She laughed a little through uncertain lips.

"Are you very expensive?

"Not if you buy your Peter Dawson wholesale. Now run along. And the same password applies. I'll be after you as soon as I'm through with this."

He had her arm and he was taking her to the door.

"What was that telephone call?" she asked. "And how do you know you're going to be all right?"

"That's what I'm going to find out," he said. "I won't be any help to you hiding in a cellar. But I'm firmly convinced that I was not destined to die In Washington. Not this week, anyhow… I'll see you soon, darling."

She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at him; and then, suddenly and very quickly, she kissed him.

Then she was gone.

Simon went into the bedroom, opened a suitcase, and took out an automatic already nested in a spring holster. He slipped his arms through the harness, shrugged it into comfort, and went back into the living room and put his coat on again. It seemed like a slightly melodramatic routine; but the only reason why Simon Templar had lived long enough to become a legend before he was also a name on a tombstone was that he had never been coy about taking slightly melodramatic precautions. And in the complex and sinful world where he had spent most of his life, there were no guarantees that when an alluring feminine voice invited itself in on the telephone there would be an alluring feminine person on the doorstep when the doorbell next rang.

He just had time to light another cigarette and freshen his drink before that potential crisis was with him.

He opened the door with his left hand and swung it wide, standing well aside as he did so. But it was only a girl who matched the telephone voice who came in.

He risked one arm to reach across the opening and draw the door shut behind her, and he quietly set the safety lock as he did so.

After that, without the slightest relaxing of his vigilance, and still with that steady pressure of ghostly bullets creeping over his flesh, he followed her into the living-room and surveyed her again in a little more detail. She was tall, and built with the kind of curvacious ripeness in which there is hardly a margin of a pound between perfection and excess. So far she was still within the precarious safety of that narrow margin, so that her figure was a startling excitement to observe. Her face was classically beautiful in a flawless peach-skinned way. She had natural blonde hair and rather light blue eyes that gave her expression a kind of passionate vagueness.

"All right, darling," said the Saint. "I'm in a hurry too, so we'll make it easy. Who sent you and what am I supposed to fall for?"

3

Her face was blank and innocent.

"I don't quite understand. I was just told to get an interview—"

"Let's save a lot of time," said the Saint patiently. "I know that you aren't from the AP, and probably your name isn't Brown either — but that's a minor detail. You can put on any act you like and talk from here to breakfast, but you'll never get anywhere. So let's start from here."

She regarded him quite calmly.

"You have very direct methods, haven't you?"

"Don't you think they cut the hell out of the overhead?"

She glanced placidly around the room, and observed the potable supplies on the side table. He was aware that she didn't miss the half-empty glass that Madeline Gray had left, either.

"I suppose you wouldn't like to offer me a drink."

Without answering, he poured a highball and handed it to her.

"And a cigarette?"

He gave her one and lighted it.

"Now," he remarked, "you've had plenty of time to work on your story, so it ought to be good."

She laughed.

"Since you're so clever — you ought to be able to tell me."

"Very likely I can." He lighted another cigarette for himself. "You are either an Axis agent, a private crook, or a mildly enterprising nitwit. You may have fancier names for it, but it comes to the same thing. Once upon a time I'd have laid odds on the third possibility, but just recently I've gotten a bit skeptical."

"You make it sound awfully interesting. So what am I here for — as an Axis agent or a private crook?"

"That's a little more difficult. But I can think of the possibilities. You either came here to eliminate me — with or without outside cooperation — or to get information of one kind or another. Of course, there are gentle angles on both of those bright ideas, as well as the rough and noisy ones. We could stay up all night playing permutations and combinations. I was just curious to know what your script was."

"And if I don't tell you?"

"We'll just have to play it out," he said tiredly. "Go on. Shoot. Give me the opening line."

She tilted her head back, showing teeth as regular as a necklace of pearls.

"I think you're beautiful," she said.

"Thank you."

"You talk just like I imagined you would."

"That must be a great relief."

"You sound wildly exciting."

"Good."

"But I'm afraid I'm going to be a great disappointment."

"Are you?"

"I'm afraid I'm only a mildly enterprising nitwit."

He went on looking at her dispassionately.

"I adore you," she said.

"I adore me too," he said. "Tell me about you."

She tasted her drink.

"My name's Andrea Quennel."

It went through him like a chemical reaction, a sudden congealing and enveloping stillness. In an almost unreal detachment he observed her left hand. It wore no rings. He crossed over to her, and calmly took the purse from her lap and opened it. He found a compact with her initials on it, and didn't search any further.

"Satisfied?" she asked.

"You must be Hobart Quennel's daughter," he said.

"That's right. We came in just as Mr. Devan was driving off after he'd dropped you. He told us about your little excitement this evening. He hadn't thought anything about your name, but being a romantic soul of course I had to wonder at once if it was you. So I inquired at the desk, and it was."

She looked very pleased with herself, and very comfortable.

"That still doesn't tell me why you had to see me this way," he said.

"I wanted to meet you. Because I've been crazy about you for years."

"Why did you try to pretend to be a reporter?"

She shrugged.

"You said it yourself, didn't you? I'm a mildly enterprising nitwit. So I don't want everyone to know what a nitwit I am. I suppose I could have made Mr. Devan call you up on some excuse and met you that way, but I try to let him think I'm halfway sane, because after all he does work for my father. And if I'd call you up and said I was dying to meet you I was sure you'd just send the house detective after me. So I thought I was being rather clever." Her face became quite empty and listless. "I guess I wasn't. I'm sorry."

Her vague light eyes studied him for a moment longer; and then she stood up.

"Anyway, I did get to meet you, just the same, so I think it was worth it… I'll get out of your way now."

He watched her. The curious inward immobility that had seized him when she told him her name had dissolved completely, but imperceptibly, so that he hadn't even noticed the change. But his brain was fluid and alive again now, as if all the cells in it were working like coordinated individuals, like bees in a hive.

He said: "Sit down, Andrea, and finish your drink."

She sat down, with a surprised expression, as if someone had pushed her. The Saint smiled.

"After all, you were enterprising," he murmured, "so I'll forgive you. Besides, it's just occurred to me that you might be able to do something for me one of these days."

Her eyes opened.

"Could I? I'd do anything… But you're just kidding me. Nothing so marvelous as that could ever happen!"

"Don't be too sure."

"Do you often do that? — I mean, get perfect strangers to help you do things?"

"Not often. But sometimes. And anyway, perhaps by that time we won't be such strangers."

"I hope not," she said softly; and then she blinked. "This isn't happening to me," she said.

He laughed.

"What do you do — work for Quenco too?"

"Oh, no. I'm much too stupid. I just do nothing. I'm a very useless person, really. What would you want me to do for you?"

"I'll tell you when the time comes."

"I hope it'll be something exciting."

"It might be."

She leaned forward a little, watching him eagerly.

"Tell me — why did you think I might be an Axis agent? Were you expecting one?"

"It wasn't impossible," he said carefully.

"Are you working on some Secret Service job? And those men you had the fight with tonight… No, wait." She frowned, thinking. Somehow, although she said she was stupid, she managed to look quite intelligent, thinking. "Mr. Devan only thought of a hold-up. But he knew this girl you rescued — Madeline Gray. You see, I've got a memory like a parrot. Her father has an invention. Synthetic rubber. So the Gestapo or whatever it is want to get hold of it. So they think if they can kidnap his daughter they can make him tell. But you're looking after her, so they don't get away with it. So you think they'll be sending somebody to get rid of you. How's that?"

He blew a meticulously rounded smoke-ring.

"It's not bad."

"Is it right?"

"I can't answer for all of it. Madeline Gray, yes. Father makes synthetic rubber, yes. Try to kidnap daughter, yes. But who and why — that's something to make up our minds about slowly."

"Is that why you asked if I was an Axis agent or a private crook?" she said shrewdly.

The shift of his lips and eyebrows was cheerfully noncommittal.

"Wonderful weather we've been having," he said.

"But you were looking after her."

"I am looking after her," he said, without a trace of emphasis on the change of tense.

She pouted humorously.

"All right. I mustn't ask questions." She finished her drink, and gazed into the empty glass. "Couldn't we go somewhere and dance?" she said abruptly.

"No." He came up off the chairback that he had been propping himself on. "I'm sorry, but I've got to pack a couple of things. And then I'll be traveling."

She stood up.

"You mean you're leaving Washington?"

"Yes."

"Then how are we going to get to know each other better?"

"How does anyone find you?"

"You can call Daddy's office in New York. His secretary always knows where we are — he talks to her every day. I'll talk to her myself and ask her to tell you."

"Then it ought to be easy."

She hesitated.

"But where are you going?"

He thought it over before he answered. "I'm going to see Calvin Gray, and I'm taking Madeline with me. I told you I was looking after them. I'd love to go dancing with you, Andrea, but this is business."

"Where does he live?"

"Near Stamford, Connecticut."

"We've got a place at Westport," she said lingeringly.

"Then we might run into each other some time," he smiled.

He took her to the door, and after she had gone he came back and poured himself another drink before he went to the telephone. He had to call three or four numbers before he located the man he wanted.

"Hullo, Ham," he said. "Simon. Sorry to interrupt you, but I'm going solo for a few days. I want a private plane to go to the nearest field to Stamford. Organize it for me, will you? I'll be at the airport in an hour."

"You don't want much, do you?"

"Only one of those little things that you handle so beautifully, comrade… Oh, and one other thing."

"I suppose you'd like Eleanor to come down and see you off."

"Get me some dossiers. Anything and everything you can dig up — including dirt. Airmail them to me at General Delivery, Stamford. Get the names. Calvin Gray, research chemist. A guy named Walter Devan, who works for Quenco." Simon lighted a cigarette. "Also Hobart Quennel himself, and his daughter Andrea."

He hung up, and sat for several moments, drawing steadily at his cigarette and watching the smoke drift away from his lips.

Then he went into the bedroom and started packing his bag, humming gently to himself as he moved about. He was traveling very light, and there wasn't much to do. He had practically finished when the telephone rang again, and he picked it up.

"Washington Ping-Pong and Priority Club," he said.

"This is Madeline Gray," she said. "Are you still tied up?"

"No."

"Can you come up to see me, or shall I come down?"

He didn't need to be as sensitive as he was to feel the unnatural restraint in her voice.

"Is something going on," he asked quietly, "or can't you talk now? Just say Yes or No."

"Oh, yes, I can talk. There's nobody here. I suppose I'm just silly. But…" The pause was quite long. Then she went on, and her voice was still cold and level and sensible. "I've been trying to phone my father and let him know we're coming. But they say there's no answer."

Simon relaxed on the bed and flipped cigarette ash on the carpet.

"Maybe he's gone to a movie, or he's out with the boys analysing alcohol in one of the local saloons."

"He never goes out in the evening. He hates it. Besides, he knew I was going to phone tonight. I was going to talk to him as soon as I'd seen Imberline. Nothing on earth would have dragged him out until he knew about that. Or do you think you've scared me too much?"

The Saint lay back and stared at the ceiling, feeling cold needles tiptoeing up his spine and gathering In spectral conclave on the nape of his neck.

4

Simon Templar checked his watch mechanically as the Beechcraft sat down on the runway at Armonk airport. One hour and fifteen minutes from Washington was good traveling, even with a useful tail wind, and he hoped that his haste hadn't ground too much life out of the machinery.

The pilot who was to take the ship back, who hadn't asked a single question all the way because he had been taught not to, said: "Good luck." Simon grinned and shook hands, and led Madeline Gray to the taxi that he had phoned to meet them.

As they turned east towards Stamford he was still considering the timetable. They could be at Calvin Gray's house in twenty minutes. Making about an hour and thirty-five minutes altogether. Only a few minutes longer than one of the regular airlines would have taken to make New York, even if there had been a plane leaving at the same time. Furthermore, he had left no loophole for the Ungodly to sabotage the trip, or to interfere with him in any way before he got to his destination. They couldn't have intercepted him at any point, because they couldn't have discovered his route before it was too late.

As for any other connections that the Ungodly could have used, It would have taken an hour to drive from New York to Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast train — ignoring such delays as phone calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in, or the traveling to and from railroad stations and the inconsiderate tendency of railroads not to have trains waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like taxis off a rank.

He had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they were flying.

"If anything has happened to Daddy," she said now, "there were people there already."

"Then whatever happened has happened already," he said, "and nobody on earth could have caught up with it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn't have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town Police, but what could we have told them? So the telephone doesn't answer. They'd have said the same as I said. By the time we'd gotten through all the arguing and rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got started. If they ever got started."

"Maybe I'm just imagining too much," she said.

He didn't know. He could just as easily have been imagining too much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his own mind straight.

He said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk aloud: "The trouble it that we don't even know who the Ungodly are, or what they're working towards… Suppose they were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth a fortune. They'd want to get the formula — just for dough. All right. They might kidnap you, so that they could threaten your father with all kinds of frightful things that might happen to you if he didn't give them the secret. They might kidnap him, and try to torture it out of him."

He felt her flesh tighten beside him.

"But there have also been these accidents you told me about. Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It's a nice exciting word. But where would it get them — in the end?"

She said: "If they were spies—"

"If they were spies," he said, "they wouldn't be blowing up a laboratory. They might break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn't destroy it, because they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to kidnap you or your father to squeeze a formula out of you with horsewhips and hot Irons — they'd have tried it long before this. You wouldn't have been hard to snatch."

"Well," she said, "they could just be saboteurs. They warned me not to try and see Mr. Imberline. They might just want to stop us getting anywhere."

"Then both of you would have been crated and under grass by this time," he said coldbloodedly. "Killing is a lot easier than kidnaping, and when you get into the class of political and philosophical killers you are talking about a bunch of babies who never went to Sunday School. That's the whole thing that stops me. What goes with this pulling of punches — this bush league milquetoast skullduggery?"

He went on nagging his mind with that proposition while the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched off again to the right up a meandering lane that brought them to a stone gateway and through that up a short trim drive to the front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house. He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green shingled roofs and gables as the taxi's headlights swept over them, and he saw that there were lights behind some of the curtains. For a moment her hand was on his arm, and he put his own hand over it, but neither of them said anything.

She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver, and he carried their bags up the path of light to the hall and joined her there.

She called: "Daddy!"

They could hear the taxi's wheels crunching out off the gravel, and the hum of its engine fading down the lane, leaving them alone together in the stillness.

"Daddy," she called.

She went through an open door into the living-room, and he put the bags down and followed her. The room was empty, with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.

She went out again quickly.

He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers on the chairs, a pleasant compromise between interior decorating and masculine comfort. There were no signs of violence or disorder, but there were rumples in various cushions where they had been sat on since the room was last done over. There was a pipe in one of the ashtrays by the fireplace: he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.

A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and heard the familiar tone of a clear line. Just to make sure, he dialed a number at random, and heard the ringing at the other end, and then the click of the connection, and a gruffly sleepy male voice that said "Yes?"

"This is Joe," said the Saint momentously. "You'd better start thinking fast. Your wife has discovered everything."

He hung up, and turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.

"The phone is working," he said casually. "There's nothing wrong with the line."

"Come with me," she said.

He took her arm and crossed the hall with her. They looked into the dining room, sedate and barren like any dining room between meals. They went on into the kitchen. It was clean and spotless, inhabited only by a ticking clock on a shelf.

"I've been here," she said.

"Would he have had dinner?"

"I couldn't tell."

"What about servants?"

"We haven't had anyone living in for a couple of weeks, and we weren't going to do anything about it until I got back from Washington. Daddy couldn't have been bothered with interviewing them and breaking them in. I got him a girl who used to work for us, who got married and lives quite close by. She could have got him his dinner and cleaned up and gone home."

After that there was a study lined with ponderous and well-worn books, and featuring a couple of filing cabinets and a big desk littered with papers as the principal movable furniture. It was fairly messy, in a healthy haphazard way.

Simon went to one of the filing cabinets, and pulled open a drawer at random. The folders looked regular enough, to anyone who hadn't lived with the system.

He turned from there to glance over the desk. He only saw a disarray of letters, circulars, cryptic memoranda, abstruse pamphlets, and assorted manuscript.

"How does it look to you?" he asked.

"About the same as usual."

"You must have lived with some of this stuff. Does any of it look wrong?"

She skimmed through the filing drawer that he had opened, and turned over some of the papers on the desk. After that she still looked blank and helpless.

"I couldn't possibly say. He's so hopelessly untidy when he isn't being fanatically neat."

Simon stared at the desk. He didn't know Calvin Gray's habits, or anything about his work and interests. He knew that it was perfectly possible to search files and papers without leaving a room looking as if a cyclone had gone through it.

Anyway, what would anyone have been searching for? Nobody would have been expected to keep a precious secret formula in an open filing cabinet, or sandwiched between tax demands and seed catalogs on top of a desk… And still he had that exasperating feeling of underlying discord, of some factor that didn't explain itself or didn't connect, as if he was trying to force everything into one or two wrong theories, when there was still a right theory that would have accommodated everything, only he had been too blind to see it yet.

"Let's see everything," he said shortly.

They went upstairs and saw bedrooms. Madeline Gray's room. Calvin Gray's room. A couple of guest rooms. Bathrooms. Everything looked ordinary and orderly. It was a nice well-kept house.

"So he isn't here," said the Saint. "There's no blood and no smashed windows and no dead bodies in any of the closets. He went out and left the lights on. Why shouldn't he go out and leave the lights on?"

He didn't know whether he was trying to console her or whether he wag arguing with himself. He knew damn well that it was perfectly simple to kidnap a man without wrecking his house. You just walked in on him and stuck a gun in his ribs and said "Come for a walk, pal," and nine times out of ten that was all the commotion there was going to be.

"There's still the laboratory," she said in a small voice; and he caught at that for the moment's reprieve.

"Why didn't you show me that before?"

She took him out of the house, and they walked by a winding path through tall slender trees whose delicate upper branches lost themselves in the darkness beyond the glow of his pencil flashlight.

The laboratory had been invisible from the house and the driveway, and they came on it suddenly in a shadowy clearing — a long white modernistic building with a faint glow from inside outlining the Venetian windows. She led him to the door, and they went into a tiny hall. A door that stood ajar on one side disclosed tiled walls and a washbasin and shower.

Beyond the little hall, the laboratory was a long sanitary barn with a single lamp burning overhead and striking bright gleams from glass tubes and retorts and long shelves of neatly labeled bottles and porcelain-topped benches and stranger pieces of less describable apparatus. But nothing was broken, and everything seemed reasonably in order. Only there was no one there.

"Does this look all right too?" he asked.

"Yes."

He surveyed the details as meaninglessly as any other layman would have surveyed a chemical laboratory. If you were going to produce any brilliant observation in a setting like that, you had to be a master chemist too. And he wasn't. He wondered if any detective really ever knew everything, so that he could immediately start finding incongruities in any kind of technical setup, like super sleuths always could in stories.

"You could make rubber here?" he said.

"Of course."

There must have been more doubt in his face than he meant to have there, or else he just looked blank because he was thinking along other lines, or else she also wanted to keep her mind busy along other lines.

"I could show you now," she said.

It didn't seem important, but it was another escape.

"Show me," he said.

She went and fetched bottles from the shelves. Some of them were unlabeled. She measured things in beakers and test tubes. She carried mixtures to a table where an elaborate train of processing gear was already set up. She poured a quantity of sawdust from an old coffee can into a glass bowl, lighted a burner under it, and began to blend it with various fluids. She looked as prosaic and efficient and at home as a seasoned cook mixing pancakes.

The Saint hitched one hip on to another bench and watched.

It was no use his trying to look wise and intelligent about it. He had more than the average background of ordinary chemistry, as he had of a hundred other unlikely subjects, but things went on in this production line that were utterly out of his depth. He saw fluids moving through tubes, and coils and bubbling in flasks, changing color and condensing and precipitating, and finally flowing into a small peculiar encased engine that looked as if it might house some kind of turbine, from which came a low smooth hum and a sense of dull heat. At the other end of this engine projected a long narrow troughed belt running over an external pulley; and over this belt began to creep a ribbon of the same shiny pale translucent orange-tinted stuff that she had shown him in the dining room of the Shore-ham. She tore off the strip when there was about a couple of feet of it, and gave it to him; and he felt it between his fingers and stretched it as he had done before. It was still warm, and smelled a little like wet leather and scorched wool.

"It seems like a wonderful thing," he said. "But it looks a little more complicated than the bathtub proposition you were talking about."

She was methodically stopping the machinery and turning off burners.

"Not really," she said. "In terms of a big industrial plant, it's almost so simple that a village plumber could put it together."

"But even a simple plant on a large scale costs a lot of money. Does your father want the WPB to go into production on their own, or is he rich enough to start off by himself?"

"We aren't quite as rich as that. But if the Government went into it they'd give us a loan, and it wouldn't be any problem to raise the private capital. In fact, we'd probably have to hire guards to keep the investors away." She smiled at him wanly. "It's too bad I didn't meet you before, isn't it? You could have come in on the ground floor and made a fortune."

"I can just see myself at any board meeting," he said.

Then they were really looking at each other again, and the fear was back in her eyes and he was afraid to laugh at it any more.

"What do you think has happened?" she asked; and he straightened up and trod on the butt of his cigarette.

"Let's go back to the house," he said roughly.

They went out, putting out the lights and closing the door after them.

As they went through the tall arched tunnel of leaves again her hand slid into the crook of his elbow, and he pressed it a little against his side from sympathy, but he was still thinking coldly and from quite a distance. He said: "Did you lock the door?"

"I don't have the key."

"When we got to the house, how did you let yourself in?"

"I just went in. The door wasn't locked."

"Isn't it ever locked?"

"Hardly ever. Daddy can't be bothered with keys — he's always losing them. Besides why should we lock up? We haven't anything worth stealing, and who'd be prowling around here?"

"You said things had happened to the laboratory before."

"Yes, but it's got so many windows that anybody could break in if they really wanted to."

"So anybody could have walked in on your father at any time tonight."

"Yes."

There wasn't any more to say. They went back into the house, and into the comfortable living-room with the cold pipe in the ashtray, and passed the time. He strummed the piano, and parodied a song or two very quietly, and she sat in one chair after another and watched him. And all the time he knew that there wasn't anything to do. Or to say, at that moment.

It got to be later.

He took their bags upstairs, and put hers in her room and chose himself a guest room opposite, with a door directly facing hers across the corridor. He opened his own bag before he came down again and fixed drinks for both of them. Into her drink he put a couple of drops from a phial that he brought down with him.

Very quickly the hot bright strain went out of her eyes, and she began yawning. In a little while she was fast asleep. He carried her upstairs and put her in her bed, and then he went across to his own room and took off most of his clothes and lay down on the bed with his automatic tucked under the edge of the mattress close to his right hand, and switched off the lights. He didn't think it was at all likely that the Ungodly could get around to organising another routine so soon, but he always preferred to overrate the opposition rather than underrate them. He was awake for a long time; and when he finally let himself sink into a light doze the first pallor of dawn was creeping into the room, and he knew that he had been wrong about the bush-league skullduggery and that Calvin Gray was not coming home unless somebody fetched him.