“Not at all,” said the Saint agreeably.
It would have been almost a psychological impossibility for anyone with a shred of human curiosity to have torn himself away without waiting to see that last shot.
Alice opened her capacious purse and took from it a soft leather pouch with a drawstring. From the pouch she took a package wrapped in tissue, about the size of an orange. The Professor fussed around helping her to unwrap it, until the contents was revealed on a nest of loosened paper.
It actually was a frog. A rather slender, long-bodied frog. Or to be more accurate, a carving or moulding of a frog, very simply but excellently done. And the most startling thing was that it looked as if it might have been made of pure gold.
“Could you come a little closer,” said the Professor, “and get a good picture of the frog, perhaps with just our faces looking at it?”
Simon moved on obligingly, while they held the frog up on its wrapping between them, and clicked the shutter again.
“Hold it a moment,” he said, unslinging his Leica. “I’d like to get one for myself, for a souvenir.”
They held still briefly while he took the picture again, and then quickly helped each other to re-wrap the figurine.
“We’re very, very grateful,” said the Professor, with unsophisticated earnestness.
“We took Mr Tombs away from a nice cool drink,” Alice said. “I think we ought to get him another.”
“Of course — how stupid of me! Won’t you let us do that, Mr Tombs?”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Simon replied, with a beatifically disarming smile which made it seem unthinkable that he could actually have meant it.
They went back into the cool dimness of the bar, and a round of Panamanian punches was ordered. After which there was a kind of conversational hiatus, as if in spite of his sincerity and good intentions the Professor’s social gifts had been exhausted by the providing of refreshment. He seemed to withdraw into an unworldly introspection, and his daughter only seemed to be able to look at him devotedly and rather anxiously, as if she knew what was on his mind and would have liked to help him with it but did not know how to.
It was obviously up to the Saint to break this awkward pause, and it would have taken a positive effort to refuse the handiest and most natural gambit.
“That frog of yours,” he remarked. “That’s quite an unusual piece.”
“It is,” said the Professor, coming a few miles closer in interstellar space.
“Not that it’s any of my business, but it almost looked as if it was made of gold.”
“It is.”
“Pappy,” Alice said gently, “aren’t you being a little rude? I can see why Mr Tombs would be curious. After all, we made him take our pictures with it.”
“Yes, so we did. Pray accept my apologies, Mr Tombs,” said the Professor contritely. “I was only afraid of boring you. You couldn’t really care about our scientific troubles.”
“Never mind our scientific troubles,” Alice said. “Tell him the interesting part.”
Mr Nestor pursed his lips.
“Well,” he ventured diffidently, “did you ever hear of Atelopus zeteki?”
“Do you catch it on a rod and line,” Simon asked, “or from going barefoot in hotel bathrooms?”
“It’s the Golden Frog of Panama,” Alice explained.
The Professor dredged an inner pocket of his sagging seersucker and came out with an ancient and shabby wallet of portfolio dimensions. He fumbled, blinking nervously, through an assortment of beat-up snapshots, newspaper clippings, old envelopes, and tattered palimpsests on all kinds of paper, which bulked it to the thickness of a light novel, and extracted a documentary relic which on being gingerly unfolded proved to be a page from an old issue of Life. It carried a single photograph in full colour which centred on a large tropical leaf on which was crouched a long-bodied frog that was almost entirely a bright yellow from nose to toe.
“That’s the Golden Frog,” said the Professor. “It’s one of Nature’s oddities, which could only have evolved in the tropical rain forest around here. A beautiful creature, isn’t it? You’ll notice that that one has a certain mottling of black on it. Some of them have polka dots. The ones that are all gold are quite rare. But it’s such a fragile product of its environment that just a few minutes’ exposure to ordinary sunlight are enough to kill it!”
He was simply paraphrasing, quite accurately, the caption under the picture, but he had a way of doing it so authoritatively that he made it sound more as if the caption was quoting him. Letting the dupe handle and read that indisputably genuine page of Life at the same time was a trick that invariably clinched the acceptance of his own scientific standing, and even more subtly it extended an aura of veracity over the fable that he had to pyramid on that one fact.
“That’s very interesting,” said the Saint respectfully. “Did you discover it?”
“Oh, no. It was discovered by a former colleague of mine, Dr Zetek. That’s why it carries his name. What I discovered was the frog that you saw — what we might call Atelopus nestori.”
Professor Nestor chuckled coyly over his scholarly little joke.
“Of course, our golden frog was modelled from the real one,” Alice said.
“You can easily see how it would happen,” said the Professor. “Long before Dr Zetek or any of us came here, the real golden frog was naturally known to the aborigines. And it was the sort of phenomenon which could hardly help striking the imagination of a primitive and superstitious people. The transformation of a tadpole into a frog of any kind is almost like seeing a miracle of evolution take place under your very eyes. Then think how still more awed they must have been when they saw that some tadpoles apparently no different from the others turned into frogs that seemed to be made out of the same precious metal that they would find in rare nuggets among the gravel of their river beds. Add to that the peculiarity that these frogs were so delicate that if captured, no matter how gently they were handled, they would die for no reason that a savage could understand — and to anyone who knows anything about primitive psychology, you have all the necessary ingredients for the origination of a religious cult.”
“You mean your golden frog is a museum piece?”
“Well, at least five hundred years old. Perhaps a great deal more. The only other one that I had ever seen — before I came here — was brought to me when I was lecturing on pre-Columbian artefacts at Michigan State University, by a tourist who picked it up on the San Blas Islands. He wanted to know if it had any antique value apart from the metal in it. Of course, I recognized at once that it was not San Blas workmanship, but he could tell me no more about its history. Naturally it hadn’t occurred to him to ask the Indian who sold it to him how he had come by it. I could only tell, from certain technical indications, that it was very old, perhaps even contemporary with the Mayan culture. I tried to buy it, but the owner was much too wealthy: the cash value meant nothing to him, but he wanted it as a souvenir, and an antique to boast about as well if he could have obtained an official pedigree for it.”
“But you don’t give up so easily, do you, Pappy?” said Alice adoringly.
“I must say, I went on thinking about it. And then, quite by chance, I happened to hear of Dr Zetek’s golden frogs. One glance at a picture was enough to show me that they must have been the model for the little metal frog that I had been shown. After that, to a scientific mind with my special background, the other deductions were almost elementary. Some prehistoric culture in Panama must have made a fetish of the golden frog and used images of it in their rites... But I must be boring you.”