Лесли Чартерис - The Saint

An enthusiastic student couldn’t contain himself.

“Isn’t that when they immersed palladium and platinum electrodes in deuterium?”

“Yes, exactly,” confirmed Dr. Russell. “When positively charged deuterons in seawater are attracted to a palladium cathode, they cram together — millions of them, inside the cathode, clustering with no place to go until... they fuse, creating energy in the form of helium. Lightning in a bottle.”

Simon Templar had little or no interest in cramming deuterons. Emma, however, was a different matter.

Another student spoke up.

“Various laboratories around the world have tried to duplicate the process, but with generally negative results. If the experiments can’t be replicated, how do we know it works?”

“We don’t,” admitted Emma. “Not yet. But Einstein knew relativity to be true long before he could prove it. He saw the vision of it — saw its truth. Some of us feel that way about cold fusion because it’s there in nature. The raw natural power, waiting to be harnessed. More energy in one cubic mile of seawater than in all the known oil reserves on earth.”

Templar was enthralled, and not with the subject matter.

“And when we finally ignite that cold fusion fire — imagine!” Emma’s mounting enthusiasm was contagious. “You could drive your car fifty-five million miles on one gallon of heavy water. It would be the end of pollution. Healing for the wounded earth.”

She turned to the blackboard.

“Here, let me demonstrate why others have been so unsuccessful in the past.”

As Emma Russell began expository drawings, the bald man in the back slipped out the door.

Outside, Simon Templar laughed aloud at his own foolishness. He seldom made embarrassing mistakes, but he readily acknowledged this one. A minor consolation was knowledge that Oxford’s history was replete with people who had acted foolishly. Among them was famed poet Percy Shelley, expelled in 1811 for publishing The Necessity of Atheism.

While Templar did not share Russell’s near religious zeal for cold fusion, he did share her dedication to thorough investigation. He returned to his car, slipped on a pair of coveralls, and searched out Emma Russell’s personal office.

“I’m Tony Hubbins from Tech Support,” said the working-class Brit to Russell’s distracted collegiate assistant, Trish, as he walked through the doorway, “named after the patron saint of quality footwear.”

“Good,” she replied without looking up. “You know where I can find shoes on sale?”

He walked directly over to the office computer and stared at it as if he could see into its inner workings.

“This baby has a short in the motherboard, I hear.”

The assistant checked her fingernails for any new chips from excessive keyboarding.

“It was working an hour ago — I used it myself.”

Templar began disconnecting the tower drive.

“Dr. Russell ’erself called,” he explained as he lifted the tower and started for the door. “You’ll have it back by the weekend.”

“Take your time.” The assistant yawned. “There’s nothing on it ’cept the first chapter of her book on exotic piscapology.”

“Erotic who?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fish.”

“Oh.”

The patron saint of quality footwear put one foot in front of the other, exited the office, and took the tower with him to a nearby Oxfordshire inn, where a rented room awaited him.

Trish was absolutely right — there was nothing on the hard drive concerning cold fusion, but plenty about fish.

Tony Hubbins promptly returned the tower, offering Trish his assurances that everything now worked perfectly.

Later the same day Templar easily and illegally entered Emma Russell’s mid-Victorian faculty-row apartment. His intentions were less than honorable, and even he felt a slight twinge of regret that even $3 million could not completely buy off.

Before a man can steal, he must lie — lie to himself that what he is doing is justified. At this stage of his lawless career, Simon Templar was a master of justification.

If Tretiak wanted cold fusion to reheat Russia for his own political ends, at least there would be heat. Didn’t Dr. Russell want her theories validated, the world benefited? An easy justification, indeed. If he said these things to himself often enough, he could almost see himself as the patron saint of energy.

Browsing her apartment, he noticed books, plants, and candles were everywhere. There were Post-it notes plastered on the walls, and even a few on the ceiling.

He pressed the Playback button on her answering machine.

“You have no new messages,” said the machine in a fair approximation of human intonation.

“She may be cute, but she’s obviously not popular,” murmured Simon as he picked up a postcard from the Shelley monument.

He moved to the crowded bookcase and thumbed through her extensive, eclectic collection. Scientific journals shared space with compendiums of poetry and a few literary surprises. The Tao of Physics rested against The Promulgation of Universal Peace, while The Purpose of Physical Reality was crowned by a worn, first-edition copy of The Hidden Words of Baha’u’llah.

He picked it up, opened to a random page, and read aloud softly. “ ‘The best beloved of all things in my sight is justice.’ ”

A small tingle crept up from the base of his spine, and he did his best to ignore it. He replaced the book, then continued on to the bathroom, bedroom, and sitting room.

In the latter a huge fish tank filled with exotic multicolored fish dominated a corner. It was attached to a glass vessel identical to the lab apparatus Emma used when explaining cold fusion to the students. It buzzed quietly and appeared to be the tank’s only source of energy.

Simon stopped his investigations to admire the beauty of Emma’s exotic fish.

“I could watch you guys all day,” asserted Templar honestly.

He moved into the kitchen where he found an improvised lab spilling liquid into the sink. Dr. Russell had adapted every kitchen implement to another task: weight scales, the garlic press, and the percolator had all been pressed into service to manufacture little brown granules which stood in a peculiar pile. The pile continued to grow because it was continually added to, drop by drop, from the spout of a teakettle.

Whatever it was, it was most unusual.

Templar walked to her desk and powered up her laptop computer. There was a bottle of Inderol lying by the keyboard.

Prepared to break her password code, Simon was astonished to discover that she didn’t have one.

“No password? Emma, you are bold, refreshing, and a first-class nut.”

He entered a few basic commands, and the backlit screen soon filled with equations, equations, and still more equations, interspersed with snippets of art and poetry.

He slipped in a computer disk and began backing up her hard drive. While files were transferring, he noticed receipts from the Trout Inn on her desk. Opening a drawer, Templar discovered her journal. Two photographs from the Shelley monument fell out, and he carefully replaced them before shamelessly reading her most personal thoughts.

Stop and talk to Shelley every day. How can I love a man called Percy Bysshe?

Templar turned the page.

Isn’t there someone who can consume me like that? Oh, Lord. I am single, alone, and lovely... lonely... lowly?

Simon replaced the journal, his clever mind analyzing Russell data as if preparing to crack a safe.

Next to her bed was a photo of a young Emma with a tall man, obviously her father. He wore long hair and a cardigan sweater. Templar could almost inhale the fragrance of musk- or herb-based cologne.