Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

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.