The Saint to the Rescue (18 page)

“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 dis
ciple 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 some
thing. 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 predes
tined 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 preboom and preindustrial
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, con
necting
them with elbows and other threaded lengths of gal
vanized pipe, and
overlaying this framework with a series
of occasionally
horizontal planks. The resultant structure
might not have met any
conventional engineering specifica
tions, 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 wheelbar
row. 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 noncommittal 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 possi
bilities 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
re
sponse. 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 sim
ple 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 omelet?” asked the Saint ingenuously.

“That isn’t quite the same,”
Nemford replied with unruf
fled 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 lan
guage,” said the inventor pleasantly. “I could
throw a lot
of long words at you, but unless you’ve studied very ad
vanced
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 wheel
barrow?”

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
noz
zles 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 ex
amined 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 dough
nut also regurgitated, sobbed, and settled into some
quivering internal activity. Doc Nemford calmly adjusted a stop
cock, and
twiddled a vernier; and the output spout dribbled,
spat, hiccuped, 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 be
fore. 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 clas
sified 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 intermit
tently consulting a turnip-sized
stop-watch, 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 read
ing 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 pump
ing.”