The Saint to the Rescue (19 page)

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 in
ventors 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 comfort
ably 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 des
perately 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 un
authorized 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 ex
pectantly, 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 Pharaonic 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 any
thing 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 weath
ered 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 nor
mal 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 mean
while,” 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 wheel
barrow 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 you 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 Amer
ican Wife. But meanwhile I’ll give you a free
preview of the
last chapter. It says:
she’s only the fault of the Great Amer
ican
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.”