The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 11

  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 reall
y 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 t
omorrow 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.”