Saint Steps In by Leslie Charteris Page A

a
glass bowl, lighted a burner under
it, and began to blend it with various fluids. She looked as prosaic and efficient and at home as a
seasoned cook mixing pancakes.
    The Saint hitched one hip on to another bench and watched.
    It was no use his trying to look wise and intelligent about it. He had more than the average background of ordinary chemistry,
as he had of a hundred other unlikely subjects, but things went on in this production line that were utterly
out of his depth. He saw fluids moving through tubes, and coils and bubbling
in flasks, changing color and condensing and precipitat ing, and finally flowing into asmall peculiar encased engine that looked as if it might house some kind of
turbine, from which came a low
smooth hum and a sense of dull heat. At the other end of this engine
projected along narrow troughed belt running
over an external pulley; and over this belt began to creep a ribbon of
the same shiny pale translucent orange-tinted stuff that she had shown him in
the dining room of the Shore- ham. She tore
off the strip when there was about a couple of feet of it, and gave it
to him; and he felt it between his fingers and
stretched it as he had done before. It was still warm, and smelled a little like wet leather and scorched
wool.
    “It seems like
a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it looks a lit tle more complicated than the bathtub proposition
you were talking about.”
    She was methodically stopping the machinery and turning off burners.
    “Not
really,” she said. “In terms of a big industrial plant, it’s almost so simple that a village plumber could put
it together.”
    “But even a simple plant on a large scale costs a lot of money. Does your father want the WPB
to go into production on their own, or is he rich enough to start off by himself?”
    “We aren’t
quite as rich as that. But if the Government went into it they’d give us a loan, and it wouldn’t be any problem to raise the private capital. In fact, we’d probably
have to hire guards to keep the investors away.” She smiled at him
wanly. “It’s too bad I didn’t meet you before, isn’t it? You could have
come in on the ground floor and made a fortune.”
    “I can just see myself at any board meeting,” he said.
    Then
they were really looking at each other again, and the fear was back in her eyes and he was afraid to laugh at it any more.
    “What
do you think has happened?” she asked; and he straightened up and trod on the butt of his
cigarette.
    “Let’s go back to the house,” he said roughly.
    They
went out, putting out the lights and closing the door after them.
    As they went through the tall arched tunnel of leaves again her hand slid into the crook of his
elbow, and he pressed it a little against
his side from sympathy, but he was still thinking coldly and from quite a distance. He said: “Did you lock the door?”       
    “I don’t have the key.”
    “When we got to the house, how did you let yourself in?”      
    “ Ijust
went in. The door wasn’t locked.”
    “Isn’t it ever locked?”          
    “Hardly
ever. Daddy can’t be bothered with keys—he’s al ways losing them. Besides why should we lock up? We
haven’t anything worth stealing,
and who’d be prowling around here?”
    “You said
things had happened to the laboratory before.”
    “Yes,
but it’s got so many windows that anybody could break in if they really wanted to.”
    “So
anybody could have walked in on your father at any time tonight.”
    “Yes.”
    There wasn’t any more to say. They went back into the house, and into the comfortable living-room with the cold pipe in
the ashtray, and passed the time. He
strummed the piano, and parodied a
song or two very quietly, and she sat in one chair after another and watched him. And all the time he
knew that there wasn’t anything to
do. Or to say, at that moment.
    It got to be later.
    He took their bags upstairs, and put hers in her room and chose