The Saint to the Rescue

The water merchant

“I’ll tell you what I think of Foreign Aid,” said the Saint, thoughtfully twisting the newspaper into the semblance of a short rope. “I think that if the Commies had assigned their best brains to inventing a gimmick that’d bleed America like a built-in leak in the economy, they couldn’t have come up with anything cleverer.”

“I don’t know about that,” Howard Mayne said. “But—”

“It saddles the poor squirming US taxpayer with an annual bill of buttons of dollars, for which he gets nothing but jobs for the gaggle of bureaucrats who administer it.”

“Perhaps, but—”

“The more advanced countries simply hate him a bit more, down inside, the way all proud people who are down on their luck react to being charity cases. The more backward ones simply insist more loudly that there must be no strings attached — which means that their bureaucrats want no check on how much of the gravy they can siphon off into their own pockets, while they personally take all the credit for what little trickles through to the populace, which is probably still out throwing rotten eggs at American ambassadors.”

“You’d better not let any Daily Worker correspondent hear you. He’d discover that you were an imperialist, colonialist—”

“I damn well am an imperialist colonialist,” Simon Templar agreed, warming to his subject. “I think the old British Empire, on the whole, was one of the best things this world has ever known. The good old colonialist went out into the wilderness and tamed a lot of unsanitary savages, brought them down out of trees or up out of mud huts, taught them to wash themselves and stop eating their elderly relatives for dinner, and with a few exceptions left them a hell of a lot better off than they would have made themselves in another three centuries, just in exchange for exploiting some natural resources that the benighted heathen didn’t know what to do with anyhow. So all they get for it is a lot of abuse, mostly from characters who wouldn’t know how to spell the word if it wasn’t for the education the wicked imperialists crammed into them. I think it’s an everlasting pity that more Englishmen didn’t have the guts to stand up and trumpet the facts, instead of being hustled into dropping their colonies like naughty boys caught with a fistful of stolen candy — by a lot of bloody-handed Russians, and sanctimonious Americans firmly settled in one of the biggest countries ever swiped from its aborigines.”

“You may be right,” Mayne said placatingly. “But I was talking about a matter of Domestic Aid. Just because I mentioned that there was some phony-sounding Arab in the background shouldn’t get us off on all these tangents.”

With his pleasantly ugly face and competent air, he looked like the very personification of the idealized detective familiar to every television watcher, and the fact that he was not playing such a part every week for a network sponsor was a commentary on the unpredictable hazards of acting as a profession rather than on his personal talent.

Mrs Sophie Yarmouth, his aunt, a determined woman who was also present, chimed in more forcefully, “Howard is right, Mr Templar. You’re only trying to dodge the issue. You set yourself up once as a guardian of society against racketeers and swindlers, so you have a duty to do something about them whenever a case is laid in your lap. Just as you did when you cleared up that affair that I got involved in.”

Because of his friendship with Howard Mayne the Saint had once recouped a ten thousand dollar investment that Mrs Yarmouth had once made with a good bunco artist, as has been recounted elsewhere in these chronicles. When he had phoned Mayne on this subsequent transit through Los Angeles, however, it had only been to invite himself for a sociable drink, with no suspicion that he might be drafted to bring succor to another sucker. But such inflictions were among the occupational overhead of the life he had chosen for himself, and sometimes they had to be accepted.

“Okay,” he said resignedly. “I’ll drop in on your poor relations from Texas on my way through La Jolla. Although trying to save an oil tycoon from being taken for a few grand, even if this proposition he’s interested in is a swindle, strikes me as almost as important a project as sending Foreign Aid to some Persian-Gulf Poobah who’s having trouble meeting the tab for a hundred-girl harem.”

Walt Jobyn, to do him justice even at the expense of flattery, could never have been seriously compared with the lord of a hundred-girl harem. He had quite enough to cope with in the person of his one lawful wedded wife, Felicity, a lady of Amazonian build and an equivalently positive personality, whose affectionate concern for his welfare had an intensity that might have made a strong man quail.

Mr Jobyn was not built on this heroic scale, having been a lean and often hungry cowboy until the barren section on which he was raising a few head of hamburger cattle had found itself in the very center of a circumference of deep holes which had been bored by an exploding contingent of oil-sniffing geologists. The fees he had been able to exact for letting other similar perforations be made in his land had thereafter relieved him of all financial problems other than those of making tax returns and finding ways to invest a residue which was still more than a spouse with unlimited charge accounts could spend.

In spite of these frightful burdens, Mr Jobyn had not changed very much except in such superficial details as having cleaner fingernails and a wardrobe by Neiman-Marcus instead of Levi Strauss, and his reception of the Saint was as heartily hospitable as if he had been home on the range instead of in the lobby of the fanciest hotel in La Jolla, that self-styled jewel of the Southern California coast some ten miles above San Diego.

“I sure am glad to see yuh,” he said, giving Simon a powerful bony handshake, “I’ve read so much about yuh, I feel like I’d knowed yuh ever since I was a boy. And yet yuh don’t look that old.”

“I cheat,” said the Saint. “I take things like vitamins and exercise. And I’m too stupid to worry, which is what makes dignified gray hair and distinguished wrinkles.”

“Yuh look mighty good to me,” Jobyn said. “I wish I was stupid like you. Or Felicity didn’t think she was so smart. I’m hopin’ yuh’ll be able to straighten her out about this investment I’m thinkin’ of makin’. She’s been goin’ on at me so hard, I declare yuh might think I was figurin’ on buyin’ into a bawdyhouse instead of a legitimate business.”

They perched on stools at the bar, and Simon accepted a Peter Dawson. Jobyn tasted a straight shot and told the bartender to leave them the bottle.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “anyone ’ud think I wasn’t bright enough to spot a wooden nickel if it had termites crawlin’ all over it.”

“You sound very sure that this business is legitimate,” Simon said.

“O’ course I’m, sure,” Jobyn said pettishly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be figurin’ on buyin’ into it. Ain’t nobody told yuh nothin’ about it?”

“All I know is that Mrs Yarmouth said you were on the point of being taken for a small fortune by some faker who claims to be able to get fresh water from the sea.”

“That’s the way Sophie would put it. She’s on Felicity’s side, naturally, being as they’re cousins. And if Felicity had her way about it, there wouldn’t be any satellites goin’ around the earth, because she’d’ve called anyone who said he could send a rocket into space a faker, just because nobody ever done it before. You wait till yuh meet Doc Nemford. You’ll see for yuhself he’s a real serious scientific fella.”

Felicity Jobyn, whom Simon met at lunch, had her own version of this.

“The only serious science he knows,” she stated categorically, “is how to part a fool from his money.”

“Now, why do yuh keep sayin’ that, Felicity?” protested the tycoon plaintively. “You’ve seen him yuhself, pumpin’ sea water through this machine of his, an’ it comin’ out sweet as a mountain spring, just as fast as he puts it in.”

“I’ve seen it but I still don’t believe it, like I’ve seen a magician saw a woman in half.”

“It isn’t altogether impossible — this water business, I mean,” Simon ventured. “They already know quite a few ways of doing it. But so far they haven’t been able to make one cheap enough to be commercially attractive.”

“And they aren’t likely to,” Mrs Jobyn said crisply. “It’s against Nature, that’s all.”

If the Saint had been President, he would have appointed her ambassador to Moscow. No mere second-generation disciple of Stalin would have put anything over on her.

“You’re probably right,” he said diplomatically. “But I have met a few crackpot inventors who actually invented something. I’d like to see this trick for myself.”

“You do that,” said Mrs Jobyn, “and then tell Walt how it’s done. Maybe that’ll get some sense into his stubborn head.”

The mother of Mr Nemford, for such reasons as motivate parents, had had him christened with the name of Stanley, but that was a fact which he revealed only to such tiresome officials as insisted on a meticulous filling out of forms. To everyone else, even in his teens, he had never been anything but “Doc” — a cognomen which fitted him like the proverbial glove, and which had pointed the way to an almost predestined career from the first time he had studied himself analytically in a mirror. With the congenital advantages of intense deep-set eyes sandwiched between a bulging forehead and ascetically hollow cheeks leading to a thin artistic jaw, even before he was old enough to vote he had looked more like a doctor of something highly intellectual than most men who had worked for years to earn the title.

The house where he was living in the vicinity of Mission Beach, about six miles south of La Jolla, was perfectly appropriate for an unworldly scientist or a struggling inventor. “Cottage” would have been a determined salesman’s word for it, but “shack” would have been a description more realistic than real estate agents professionally care to be. In those days there was still a considerable colony of such clapboard shanties clustered around the lagoon which the coast road skirted on the west and the main highway to San Diego evaded inland, doomed soon to be mowed down by the inexorable march of building-code suburban progress, but surviving for a little while as one of the last relics of a more picturesque and carefree pre-boom and pre-industrial California which even a man without a gray hair on his head might remember as a dim once-upon-a-time.

From Doc Nemford’s point of view, its greatest asset, far outweighing the drafty windows, antique plumbing, and incredibly shabby furniture, was its private pier, which projected some forty feet out into the lagoon from his narrow frontage on the water. Some much earlier landlord or tenant had created it by pile-driving lengths of three-inch pipe into the bottom of the shallow bay until they stood firm, connecting them with elbows and other threaded lengths of galvanized pipe, and overlaying this framework with a series of occasionally horizontal planks. The resultant structure might not have met any conventional engineering specifications, but it did provide a platform on which a number of reasonably sized and careful people could walk out a little way over the tidal waters of the inlet.

Simon Templar was one of a small party who did this that afternoon, in the train of Doc Nemford, who was trundling his contrivance in front of him on an ordinary garden wheelbarrow. The other members of the equipage were Walt Jobyn, who had presented the Saint as a possible partner in his investment, and the Arab emissary who had sparked the Saint’s diatribe on the subject of Foreign Aid merely by being mentioned, a Colonel Hamzah.

Hamzah was a short but portly man with crinkly black hair, an enormous nose, and teeth as big as piano ivories, some of which were likewise black. He had said “How do you do?” when he was introduced, and therewith seemed to have exhausted his vocabulary, but to every other remark that was addressed to him, and some that were not, he responded with a vast if non-committal display of his keyboard incisors.

Doc Nemford, however, had welcomed the Saint with an amiable vagueness that went well with his scholarly mien, and revealed no trace of guilt or apprehension. In the Saint’s ruthless system of reasoning, this still left open the possibilities that Nemford was a consummate actor, or that he was one of an increasingly rarer breed of innocents to whom the name of Simon Templar did not immediately evoke “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” as an almost liturgical response. But he had betrayed no reluctance whatever to the proposal that he should give another demonstration of his process.

“Colonel Hamzah had asked me to let him make another quantity test, in any case,” he said. “I’m sure he won’t mind if you watch it.”

Hamzah had presumably acquiesced with one of his dental exposures.

“What principle are you working on?” Simon inquired.

“The elementary principle that water is basically a simple liquid, and anything you put into it you should be able to take out,” Nemford said indulgently. “If the thing was a lump of iron, you’d say that was obvious. Well, a sodium molecule isn’t fundamentally different, it’s only very much smaller.”

“Does that mean it should be as easy as getting the eggs back out of an omelette?” asked the Saint ingenuously.

“That isn’t quite the same,” Nemford replied with unruffled patience. “Nobody has ever claimed to be able to do that. But everyone knows at least one way to get fresh water from the sea. By evaporation, for instance. Of course, that’s much too slow to be efficient on a large scale. There are other ways — ion exchange and so forth — but they’re quite expensive, too, even with atomic power. So I won’t waste time trying to explain them. My method is completely different, anyhow.”

“And what is your method, Doc?”

“It would be quite difficult to explain in layman’s language,” said the inventor pleasantly, “I could throw a lot of long words at you, but unless you’ve studied very advanced physics you really wouldn’t be any the wiser. For the moment, I’d much rather give you the proof of the pudding. Would someone help me to put this on the wheelbarrow?”

The object which Simon helped him to load was shaped roughly like a large aluminum doughnut about three feet in diameter, mounted on edge on a rectangular base of the same length and some four inches thick. Also mounted on one end of the same base was an ordinary one-horsepower electric pump. A few levers, valves, dials, knobs, and nozzles protruded from the doughnut at sundry points. The entire apparatus, in spite of its massive appearance, could not have weighed much more than a hundred pounds.

At the end of the pier, they unloaded it again where several boards had been braced together with an iron plate of more recent vintage than the rest of the structure. Nemford alone jockeyed and jiggled the contraption on this footing until he could anchor it there with four enormous bolts which he had in his pockets, which fitted through holes in the base of his machine down into corresponding threaded holes in the iron floor plate, into which he tightened them with a wrench.

“This thing vibrates quite a bit,” he explained, “and if it wasn’t screwed down it’d shimmy right off the pier.”

He lowered a thick length of hose that trailed from the pump down into the water, and plugged the pump’s electrical connection into the receptacle at the end of a conduit that ran out from the shore. The motor hummed, and after a few seconds water gushed from the output side of the pump, which at that moment was not linked with the mysterious doughnut.

“Would you test it yourself?” Nemford said to the Saint, almost apologetically. “Just so that you won’t have to wonder if it really is salt.”

Simon caught a spoonful in one cupped hand, and wet his lips and tongue with it. He nodded.

“It’s salt.”

Nemford shut off the pump and turned to Hamzah.

“Now, Colonel, those gauges you wanted to try?” The Arab produced them from a cardboard box which he had been toting mysteriously under his arm, and Nemford examined them with detached approval. “Ah, good, I see you already had them adapted for my couplings.”

He helped Hamzah to install the instruments, one in the hose connection which he completed between the pump and the doughnut, the other on what seemed to be the outlet nozzle of the system. Then he plugged the pump in again, and connected another wire from it to the main contrivance.

Once more the pump whirred, and this time the big doughnut also regurgitated, sobbed, shuddered, and settled into some quivering internal activity. Doc Nemford calmly adjusted a stopcock, and twiddled a vernier, and the output spout dribbled, spat, hiccupped, and finally began to squirt a steady stream of clear fluid which splashed over the planking and drained back down into the bay.

Nemford was complacently lighting an old battered pipe. He glanced quizzically up at the Saint over his match.

“Would you care to try a sip of that water, Mr Templar?”

Simon used his hand again to make the same test as before. The water did not exactly recall a mountain spring, as Walt Jobyn had proclaimed it, being a little too warm for that, and having some slight chemical taint which only a very sensitive palate might have detected, but it indisputably did not taste salt.

“It’s fresh,” he agreed, as dispassionately as he had classified the water first brought up by the pump.

“Well?” clamored his Texan sponsor. “What more d’yuh want?”

At that moment the Saint could not have answered, even if he had been quite sure that he knew.

“I think it’s a great gadget,” he said cautiously.

Colonel Hamzah was not even interested in the salinity or otherwise of the water, having doubtless satisfied himself on that score in previous demonstrations. He was busily peering at his gauges, taking readings from the dials and intermittently consulting a turnip-sized stopwatch, and jotting down figures in a leather-bound notebook.

“You’ve noticed that the output pressure is higher than the input,” Nemford said, looking over his shoulder. “That’s an effect of the cyclic acceleration of the... er... well, let’s call it the separating device. What you should concentrate on is the rate of flow at the output. I think you’ll find it’s just, about as much as a pipe that size will carry — which means that you’re getting fresh water as fast as you can pump.”

Hamzah signified agreement with another beaming octave of dentition, and bent to examine the wire which Nemford had connected from the pump to a terminal which apparently conducted to the innards of the doughnut.

“Yes, you really should have put a meter in the circuit,” Nemford clucked intuitively. “I wish you could take a reading on the exact amount of current it takes to operate the separator. If I tell you, you mightn’t believe me. But you can see that the wire isn’t any heavier than you’d find on an electric toaster, and you can feel that it isn’t overheating. You don’t have to be an electrical engineer for that to tell you that it isn’t carrying much current. In fact, the load is only about six hundred watts. There’s no hidden catch in this process, such as finding that it calls for a dollar’s worth of other electric power for every penny you’d spend on pumping.”

Hamzah nodded appreciatively, and made further notes in his book.

“Well, pardner?” Jobyn prodded, with impatient emphasis. “What d’yuh say?”

Simon took time out to light a cigarette.

It would be erroneous to assume that he regarded all inventors as crackpots or crooks. He had met all kinds, and every student of these chronicles will recall a few whose genuineness had been unquestionable from the start, and a few about whom even the Saint had guessed wrong.

“May I hear what the deal is again?” he said.

“Certainly,” Nemford answered. “I’m asking two hundred thousand dollars cash for all rights. I can live very comfortably on that for the rest of my days, according to my standards, and I don’t want to be bothered with royalty statements and accountants and income tax returns.”

“Do you have a patent on this gizmo?”

“I do not. If I did, the process would be available to anyone who can read, and all I’d have is the chance to spend my money on lawyers to sue anybody who infringed it. I wouldn’t even have that privilege in a lot of countries that don’t even recognize American patents. You don’t patent guided missiles and the latest improvements in radar!”

“But what protection would we have in trying to exploit your process?”

Nemford leaned over and disconnected the pump, and shut off a valve. The motor hummed down the scale to silence, the big doughnut vibrated into stillness, and the water stopped gushing from the outlet. It became much quieter out on the pier, and easier to talk.

“If you want a patent, you can apply for one yourselves. You know that nobody’s ahead of you, or the whole world would have heard of it. But a person who had a few millions to work with, like Mr Jobyn, could do a lot better, in my humble opinion. He could go to any community that desperately needs water, and build a plant at his own expense and sell water to them. He could do this all over the world. And I think he should be able to hire a few technicians who could be trusted with the secret part of the installation, which is really comparatively small. A Government, of course,” Nemford addressed himself impartially to Hamzah, “could count on men with the same security rating as they would trust with military secrets.”

Simon nodded.

“But before all that, what’s to stop some unscrupulous character swiping your machine somehow and opening it up to see what makes it go?”

Nemford smiled faintly.

“Naturally I’ve had to think of that. So I booby-trapped this model with a small charge of explosive inside. If anyone who didn’t know exactly how to go about it tried to open it up, the explosion would destroy the core of the machine and probably injure him quite seriously. A similar device could protect the vital part of a full-sized plant against unauthorized prying.”

Simon gazed broodingly at the remarkable engine with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. It was the kind of thing that any science-fiction writer might have fabricated, yet it was conservative in comparison with some of the marvels which humanity had become used to in the last decade. And he did not have to be convinced that there could be a fortune in it — for somebody.

He was aware that the other three were watching him expectantly, awaiting his verdict with almost embarrassing respect. Walt Jobyn was uninhibitedly fidgeting with the same eagerness that Colonel Hamzah betrayed only with the restless swiveling of his bright black eyes. Doc Nemford’s attention was the most placid of the three, as if he felt completely confident that any eventual decision must be favorable to him, and even a first negative reaction would only be a temporary if tiresome setback.

Simon straightened up a little and looked at him.

“I think you’ve got a potential gold mine here, Doc,” he said. “Or maybe I should call it something almost as good as an oil well—”

“Yiihoo!” uttered Mr Jobyn, or some similar sound. “That’s my pardner. I can’t wait till I hear yuh tell Felicity. But first we gotta get this deal sewed up...”

He groped at his pockets, shuffling his feet in a small dance of exasperation at the minor obstructions he encountered.

Colonel Hamzah’s dark bullfrog eyes had already veiled over with Pharaohic inscrutability, and he had turned away to occupy himself ostentatiously with removing the gauges that he had coupled into Nemford’s miraculous plumbing.

“I’ll write yuh a check,” Jobyn said, flourishing the book that he finally found. “Ten per cent on account, just to seal the bargain. You see your lawyer fust thing tomorrow an’ have him draw up somethin’ that says you sold me all rights in this here doohickey. An’ tell him to make it short an’ straight so even I can understand it. If I have to get another lawyer to translate it, I don’t want it.”

“I don’t need your deposit,” Nemford said awkwardly. “I’ll take your word that you mean business. And I can put down a sale of all rights myself in a few lines. I sympathize with your point of view about that — if it’s a straightforward deal, there’s no need for twenty pages of hedging. But...”

“But what, man?”

Nemford’s embarrassment had become so acute that he seemed to wish he had starved before he ever offered his discovery for sale.

“Well... when we wind this up, I’ll turn over this model to you, without the booby trap, and all my specifications and blueprints. Now, if you changed your mind an hour later, and decided to stop payment on your check for the full price, you’d still have everything of mine, and you could have had my drawings copied a hundred times, and all I could do would be to sue you... Of course I’m not suggesting that you would, but you could. After all, I don’t really know anything about you, except that you’re supposed to own a lot of oil wells. Do you understand?”

Walt Jobyn stared at him for a moment, with his weathered face taking on a slight tinge of beetroot, and then he let out an equine squeal of laughter and slapped the inventor resoundingly on the back.

“Well, fan mah britches,” he chortled. “You’re as right as yuh can be, Doc, an’ yuh had the guts to come straight out with it. I like that. Okay, then, you tell me how yuh think we should do it.”

“I’d be scared to death to have all that money in cash,” Nemford said. “But cashier’s checks are just about as final, aren’t they? I mean, you can’t stop them or take them back. You could give me five of them, say, for forty thousand each, so that I could put them in different banks as I’d probably want to. But as soon as you gave them to me, I’d hand everything over.”

“If that’ll make yuh happy, Doc, that’s the way it’ll be.” Jobyn frowned. “But it’ll be the day after tomorrow at the soonest before I can get those checks from my bank in Texas, unless I charter a private plane to fetch ’em.”

“That’s all right, Mr Jobyn,” Nemford said, with his normal composure coming back again. “Whenever they get here, you can give me a call and come over and we’ll make the exchange.”

“Provided somebody hasn’t stolen those blueprints meanwhile,” Simon put in. “Or are they booby-trapped, too?”

Nemford shook his head.

“I don’t think they need to be. They’re in a safe deposit box at my bank.”

“I won’t even ask yuh which bank, Doc,” Jobyn said jovially, “in case yuh think I might put Mr Templar here up to bustin’ into it.”

The joke did not seem to make any special impression on his audience.

“That’s fine, then,” Nemford said with an air of sober relief, and picked up his wrench to attack the bolts that secured his model. “Now if you won’t mind helping me get this back to the house...”

They assisted him to load his machine back on the wheelbarrow and cart it back to the shore, and there Jobyn held out his hand.

“We made a deal. Doc,” he said heartily. “I’ll be talkin’ to yuh soon with them checks in mah hand. An’ when yuh feel like takin’ a trip somewhere, you should come to Texas an’ see mah oil wells.”

He offered the same hand to Hamzah.

“Too bad yuh lost out, Colonel,” he said generously. “You should’ve made up your mind quicker — yuh could easily, not havin’ to listen to a back-seat-drivin’ wife, like me. Even if yuh got a dozen of ’em, you fellas got enough sense to keep ’em locked up in a harem. But better luck next time, anyhow.”

The Arabian delegate accepted the hand gingerly, and winced at the shake, but managed a toothily courteous grimace.

“Y’know, pardner,” Jobyn observed as they drove away, “Felicity’s goin’ to be spittin’ like a scalded bobcat when she hears this water-makin’ invention is as genuine as I been tellin’ her all along. She’ll like to tear your hair out for backin’ me up.”

“I can imagine that,” said the Saint. “So since she isn’t my wife, I’d just as soon pass up that exhilarating privilege, if it’s all the same to you.”

Jobyn seemed to wilt slightly in the mid-act of igniting a celebratory cigar of sufficient caliber to have defended the Alamo,

“But I was countin’ on you to—”

“Why should either of us ask for trouble? Is there any law in Texas that everything has to be done in your joint names? Does she add up your bank statement every month? Does it take both your signatures to write a check?”

“No, but—”

“I’ll bet that when you were courting, Walt, you thought she’d be a right cute little filly to rope and tie. But not so long after she had your name on a marriage license, you found she’d grown into a bucking bronco — and she was riding you!”

“How did yuh know that?”

“One day I’m going to write a book about the Great American Wife. But meanwhile I’ll give you a free preview of the last chapter. It says: she’s only the fault of the Great American Husband. He gave up too easily. I suppose it’s too late for him to go back to the good healthy custom of belting her in the mouth any time she opens it out of turn. But if she wants to make out she’s so much smarter than he is, on strictly intellectual terms, then he’s got a right to outsmart her if he can.”

Mr Jobyn squinted up at him sidelong.

“What yuh gettin’ at, Mr Templar?”

“You said it yourself to Hamzah. However many wives he’s got, he keeps ’em locked up and he doesn’t tell them about his business. Now, you could hardly start a harem with Felicity, but she’s only one, and you should be able to handle her. Go back and tell her you still think Nemford has a gold mine, and I said it looked good, too, but in deference to her great wisdom you decided not to invest in it. This makes her love you to death, but inside, she wonders—”

“But—”

“Then you go right ahead with what you already decided. And after it’s made you a few millions, the next time she’s getting really ornery, you can say: ‘Now I come to think of it, sweetheart, I forgot to tell you how much I made out of the last time I didn’t take your advice.’ And you sock her with the figures, for the first time... On the other hand, until this deal does pay off, and even if by sheer bad luck it never does, you’ll never have to squirm while she tells you what a dope you were.”

The immediate representative of the second biggest of the United States mulled this shamelessly pragmatic proposition under an intensely corrugated brow for several seconds, and came up jubilantly slapping his thigh.

“Goll dang it,” he said exuberantly, “I think yuh got the answer I was lookin’ for. An’ I ain’t the man to forget it. How much do you figure to invest in this here process?”

“Not much more than I already have,” said the Saint. “With taxes the way they are, I can’t afford to be a millionaire, and I can’t take a profit from giving matrimonial advice without losing my amateur standing. But someday if I get desperate I may stop at one of your wells with a bucket.”

He dropped Jobyn at the hotel in La Jolla, and firmly declined to stay for dinner or even for a drink, claiming that he was already overdue at the home of the friends he had been on his way to visit in San Diego.

“If you’re going to play it the way I suggested, you shouldn’t need any moral support when you talk to Felicity. Not at this stage, anyway,” he said. “But I’ll give you the phone number where I’m staying, and you can call me any time you have qualms.”

For his host he had a slightly different story, merely to avert the tedium of more complicated explanations.

“I have to see a fellow at Mission Beach about a small business deal that a pal of mine asked me to check on,” he said with careful casualness, as they were finishing dinner. “D’you mind if I run over there and join you at the Yacht Club later? It shouldn’t take me an hour, at the very worst.”

He had memorized the location of Doc Nemford’s shack so accurately that he did not need to drive within a hundred yards of it. He parked his car an inconspicuous block away, and strolled down an alley with a chipped and faded signboards at the entrance that offered “Boats & Bait.”

Simon had seen the boats from Nemford’s jetty, and had been less than excited as a nautical connoisseur. At close quarters they looked even less picturesque and more unseaworthy, but he was not planning an extended cruise. There were no oars or other conventional means of propulsion in sight, the livery operator having no doubt thoughtfully secured them inside the padlocked shed from which he did his business, but the Saint did not have to search far for a discarded four-foot piece of board that would serve as an adequate paddle for the voyage he had in mind.

He quietly nursed the least leaky skiff he could select along the shore line to Nemford’s property, and let it drift up to the pier and even under it.

There was only a half-moon that night, and the sky was murky, but Simon had a pencil flashlight to help him in the dark corners, though he used it with the most furtive discretion. He verified certain structural possibilities that had intrigued him, and then hitched the painter to one of the pilings and swung himself nimbly up on to the decking.

There was a glow of light behind the ground-floor curtains of Nemford’s cottage, and the Saint moved like a drifting shadow towards an open window until the murmur of voices inside resolved itself into distinct words and equally clear identifications of the speakers.

The first to emerge into this unconscious clarity was Nemford himself, who was saying, “You’re asking me to go back on my word to Mr Jobyn. I know we haven’t signed anything yet, but we shook hands on a deal.”

Simon could not see into the room from any angle, but the accent and context of the next speech made visual confirmation supererogatory.

“I appreciate your problem, Doctor, and I am prepared to compensate you for your embarrassment. I have spoken by telephone to Cairo, and I am authorized to pay you fifty thousand dollars more to change your mind about this bargain with Mr Jobyn. I am sure that if he changed his mind, he would not be bound by the handshake.”

“But suppose, then, he wanted to offer me more?”

“If you accept my price, you need not be here to listen to him. Perhaps it would be wiser if you were not, in case he is only angry. But I cannot haggle as in a bazaar. I was talking to you first, I remind you, and I deserved the right to make the first bid. But since I made the second, it is also the last for me. A quarter of a million dollars, Doctor. The extra money will almost pay your tax on the transaction.”

There was a pause.

“But when would you expect to pay me, Colonel? You remember, I had to tell Mr Jobyn that I only had his word for his oil wells. I hate to say this sort of thing, but after all, how do I know that your Government will back you up? And meanwhile, if I alienate Mr Jobyn—”

“My Embassy is being ordered tonight to let me have the money. As soon as the bank is open in Washington tomorrow morning, they can send it to me. Because of the time difference, it can arrive here as soon as the banks open in San Diego. Tell me which bank you keep your papers in, and I’ll have it sent there. We meet, I give you the money, you give me the blueprints. It is so simple.”

“What about the model?”

“Aha. We take it with us to the bank, in a taxi. The taxi waits. When we have finished, I take the taxi to the airport. My Government would not pay so much money to compete with Mr Jobyn, it means very much to our prestige to have your invention exclusively. Of course you would not think of giving him the model with some more blueprints — you are an honorable man — but I am ordered to bring it with me, and my suggestion is most practical.”

The craftily candid exposure of teeth that must have accompanied this could be heard in the voice.

“Would you be leaving at once?”

“Yes, you will have to face Mr Jobyn alone. If you decide to wait for him. But I am afraid your Government might take his part if they knew I was taking away something they might officially lend to us for political considerations. I expect to be highly commended if I make that impossible. So, I would prefer to be out of your country before anyone complains.”

Another pause.

Simon could picture Doc Nemford chewing on his pipe, his tall taut brow furrowed with earnest deliberation.

At last: “All right, Colonel. I’ll have to accept. I just want you to realize that I’m not being influenced by the price you’re offering. The reason is, I’m ashamed of having almost let you down. As you had to remind me, you were the first customer. But with Mr Jobyn throwing his oil wells at me, and that chap he brought with him today—”

“Who was he?”

“One of the world’s greatest experts in this field, though you’d never guess it to look at him. But when he said my invention looked good, I knew I’d never be able to stop Mr Jobyn elbowing you out of the way.”

“Do not feel too unhappy about him,” Hamzah said magnanimously. “He still can throw his oil wells somewhere else. Now, let us set a time. I will call for you at ten o’clock. By then, I shall have made a box in which your model can be packed, and you will have removed the explosive. With your permission, I will take the measurements...”

Simon had no need to hear any more. He retreated as softly as he had approached, lowered himself into the dinghy, and paddled it silently back to where he had borrowed it.

He was at the Yacht Club within the hour he had allotted for the detour, and wholeheartedly enjoyed the rest of an unimportant evening without thinking it necessary to say any more about his brief digression. Nor did he feel obliged to spoil Walt Jobyn’s evening by phoning him that night.

Even after a large late breakfast the next morning he was not overpowered by any urge to make the call, but took a much livelier interest in the fact that it looked like a perfect day to go sailing, as had been tentatively proposed before they went to bed.

“I’m afraid I’ll hold you up a bit, though,” he said. “I’ve got to drop by and see this merchant I visited last night again. Some papers I have to see were at his bank, and he’s getting them out this morning. I can’t put it off, because one of the characters involved is catching a plane east around midday. Could we meet at the club for an early lunch and blast off right afterwards?”

It may be interesting for some future analyst to note that for a man of such complicated activities the Saint seldom found himself constrained to lie. He could nearly always phrase the literal truth in such a way that the listener received the exact impression that the Saint wanted him to have. It was a technique which eliminated all the hazardous overhead of keeping conflicting stories straight and mutually harmonious, while at the same time adding a certain private spice to what might otherwise have been mere routine dialogue.

In this case, it also won the Saint a sufficient margin of unquestioned time, during which he could drive peacefully back to Mission Beach, with no unseemly desperate eye glued to the clock and mileometer, and arrive within sight of the front entrance of Doc Nemford’s shack, near the same parking spot that he had found before, at a moment intelligently calculated to succeed the Nemford-Hamzah safari to the bank, but also to precede the predictable return of Nemford alone.

Thus when Doc Nemford walked back into his own temporary home, a little before noon, he found a lean bronze-faced man comfortably extended between the best chair in the living room and the handiest table-top on which a pair of very long legs could conveniently park their extremities.

“Come on in, Doc,” Simon encouraged him hospitably. “I hope you don’t mind me making myself at home.”

“No, why not?” Nemford said with pardonable vagueness. “If I’d known you were coming — but I wasn’t expecting Mr. Jobyn till tomorrow—”

“Let’s both save a little time,” Simon suggested soothingly. “I’ll put my cards on the table, and you do the same, and we’ll work out the score like well-brought-up scientists. I was still trying to make up my mind whether you knew who I was, right up until I heard you give Hamzah the clincher last night. Well, as one of the world’s greatest experts in this field, though you’d never guess it to look at me, I’d like to give you an award as the best player of a busted flush that I’ve sat in with in a long elegy of these games. Once the chips began to fly, you squeezed your hand to the last pip.”

Doc Nemford fumbled out his pipe and pouch and began the restorative mechanisms of stoking one from the other.

“What else could I do?” he said. “You kept me guessing yourself — right up until now, I was trying to decide whether I’d fooled you.”

“You weren’t so far from it, chum. You had a nice explanation of why the fresh water came out of your gadget with more pressure than you were pumping the sea water in — but if you ever do it again, it’d be better to put a pressure reducer in the circuit and not have to explain anything. Sometimes these city water systems carry an awful head of steam... You don’t have anything like that to worry about with the electric consumption, even if someone like Hamzah did hook a meter into the line: I’m sure the vibrator inside your model doesn’t draw a lot of extra juice... And even the valve that you open and shut when you’re demonstrating doesn’t give away the gimmick — in fact, it’s a good piece of business.”

“Then what actually did make you suspicious?”

“First off, only my own low dishonest mind. If I’d stood and watched the Red Sea open for the Israelites, the first thing I’d’ve wondered about was how it might have been faked. Now, the way that pier of yours is built is probably a perfectly common method of construction, but to me it suggested plumbing. And that gave me the idea that in a tubular tangle of that kind, nobody else might notice a couple of extra pipes — one of ’em joined into a piling to take the pumped-up bay water back where it came from, and the other running back to shore to connect with your house supply. Then I tried to figure out how a crook could switch the flow—”

“And how could he?”

“With a base plate set in the dock, to which he would bolt the base of his ingenious gizmo, using outsize bolts that he took from his pocket and put back there, and which were the only incidental equipment that nobody got a good look at. Bolts which I’m certain are hollow, with outlets in the right places, so that when you screw them down they become the most miraculous part of your invention. One of ’em side-tracks the salt water you’re pumping up, and the other takes in the fresh water which is one of the civic amenities for which you are privileged to pay taxes on this dump.”

“And on this imaginative basis alone—”

“No, I’m not supernatural. I didn’t have any more to start with than interesting doubt. But before I carried it to the bitter end — which included a rather minute study of the pipe connections underneath your pier last night — I’d convinced myself with a rather more arbitrary test.”

“And what was that?” Nemford inquired, with the intensest unfeigned interest.

“I’d tasted your manufactured fresh water,” said the Saint. “I happen to have rather sensitive taste buds, which I have raised on a diet of the best vintage wines. They aren’t so familiar with water, unless it was splashing down a mountain trout stream. But they can still recognize the tang of chlorine in a city supply.”

Nemford sucked at his pipe, holding a match steadily over the bowl.

“You deserve all the things I’ve heard about you,” he said. “But why didn’t you say any of this yesterday?”

“I was interested to see how the scenario would work out. If you won’t think I’m being patronizing, I’d call it a kind of nostalgia. I admired a lot of touches in your technique. You handled the financial angles brilliantly — just the right pressure where it would do the most good. And I know you’ll do well with those traveler’s checks you were talking about — you can cash them abroad in so many places where they don’t ask questions.”

Doc Nemford made a deprecating gesture.

“I’m trying to make a living, like the rest of us, Saint.”

“And I’m not greedy. I told Jobyn I thought you had a good deal, because I figured that would bring Hamzah back with a higher bid, and so I’d be keeping Jobyn out of trouble. But at the same time it was a help to you, and my dear old grandmother taught me never to take part in a swindle unless I made something out of it for myself.”

Doc Nemford nodded philosophically.

“How much do you want?”

“I’ll settle for fifty thousand dollars, which I earned for you anyhow, so you shouldn’t begrudge it. And you can write Jobyn a letter and tell him you’re sorry to renege on the deal but you couldn’t resist that extra dough — and see that you’ve left town before he receives it.”

Nemford took from his wallet a small sheaf of cashier’s checks, selected one, and indorsed it on the back to the order of Simon Templar.

“You’re a lot fairer than I thought you’d be,” he said. “In fact, I didn’t think you’d let me get away with anything if you were wise to me.”

“Frankly, if the victim had been almost anyone else, I wouldn’t, Doc. But now for the rest of my life I can dream of the expression on Nasser’s face, when Hamzah arrives with his trophies and they find out what they’ve bought. I shall feel that I’ve personally done something about Foreign Aid,” said the Saint.