Mr Quigg had taken the wallet and was thumbing shakily through it.
“Your money’s all there, Mr Quigg,” Simon assured him. “I couldn’t help seeing it, of course, when I looked inside to find out who it belonged to. You’re lucky it didn’t fall in the river.”
“Or am I lucky that you’re such an honest man? If you’d kept it, I could never have proved that it didn’t fall in the river.”
“Why didn’t I think of that first?”
The little man fingered out a corner of one of the bills.
“Would you be offended if I—”
“A psychologist like you should know that,” Simon told him reprovingly. “Or do you only know about fish?”
Mr Quigg pushed the bill back and put the wallet away in his pocket.
“Well, at least you won’t refuse a drink?”
“Now you’re talking.”
Mr Quigg went into the tiny kitchen and produced a bottle of Peter Dawson.
“Is this all right?”
“My favorite,” said the Saint, who had followed him in. “Mind if I put this minnow down in your sink while I’m here?”
“Please, make yourself at home, Mr—”
“Tombs.”
“That’s a nice trout, Mr Tombs. Much better than mine. I’m really happy you caught it. Especially happy, now.”
Simon accepted the glass he was handed, lifted it to eye level in a gesture of salute to his host, and said with a smile, “Maybe there’s something to this business about living right, after all.”
“That’s nothing to laugh about,” said the little man earnestly. “If there’s any justice in this world, a truly honest man ought to be specially favored by the gods. There aren’t enough of them so’s it would make a great upset in the ordinary laws of chance. Believe me, sir, I feel quite privileged to have met one like yourself.”
In the Saint’s soul was burgeoning a sensation of bliss almost too ecstatic to be borne. To have encountered a gambit of such classic if corny purity on a New York sidewalk, and to have helped it to develop in some tawdry Broadway bar would have been only a mechanically enjoyable routine. To meet it beside the Rogue River and continue it in a fishing camp cottage gave it the same spice of the miraculous that would have been experienced by a shipwrecked gourmet on discovering that the vessel stranded on the island with him had been laden to the Plimsoll line with a cargo of the finest canned and bottled delicacies that France could export. It gave him a dizzy feeling of being the spoiled pet of a whole brigade of guardian angels to an extent that Mr Quigg’s interpretation did not even begin to justify. But according to the protocol which he had once himself enunciated, he was categorically prohibited from leaping up and down and uttering shrill cries of jubilation. The most he could permit himself at this point was to wriggle modestly. “Oh, hell,” he said, exerting some effort not to ham it into Aw, heck. “Don’t let’s go overboard about this.”
“But I mean it,” said Mr Quigg. “If I only had a friend that I knew was absolutely honest, it’d make all the difference in the world to my life.”
“What sort of highbinders do you have in your circle, Ollie?”
“Just ordinary people. They wouldn’t dream of cheating you out a dollar, but if they had a chance to chisel a few thousands without the slightest risk of getting in trouble I wouldn’t expect them to die before they’d do it.”
Mr Quigg put down his glass and picked up a knife, but it was quickly apparent that the only butchery he intended was to be performed on his fish, which were laid out on a newspaper on the draining board.
“Will you excuse me if I finish this job?” he said, and continued with the cleaning which Simon’s knock had obviously interrupted. He was quick and neat at it. “It’s a crime not to eat trout absolutely fresh.” He pursed his lips in a final survey of his dressed-out catch. “Mmm — this is more than I can eat tonight. I’ve such a small appetite. I think I’ll preserve a couple of them.”
The unorthodox word, combined with the startling contradiction of what he had said only three sentences before, should have been enough to hold anyone’s attention on what he proceeded to do, which proved to be rewardingly extraordinary.
Perched on one of the kitchen chairs was an aluminum coffer which at first sight could have been taken for some kind of portable icebox, roughly cubical in shape and measuring about two feet on any side, until you noticed that it was plugged in to an electric outlet and had a row of dials and switches along a lower panel which suggested a television set with no screen. Then when Mr Quigg opened a door in one side it looked more like an oven. He slipped two trout into a self-sealing plastic bag, and put the bag in the box, and twiddled switches and dials.
Whereupon the cabinet ceased to resemble anything Simon had ever seen except a prop from a Hollywood science-fiction movie. A thin high-pitched humming came from it, and its interior glowed with a weird fluorescence. Violet ribbons of energy like cold, crawling streaks of lightning bridged the inside and writhed up and down between its walls like tortured disembodied snakes. And on the central griddle where Mr Quigg had placed it, the transparent plastic package was bathed in a soft rosy light that seemed to emanate from the trout themselves.
Simon Templar had seen a fine assortment of Contraptions in his time, from transmuters that made gold and diamonds out of a handful of common chemicals, to machines that printed perfect replicas of British banknotes or United States greenbacks as fast as you could turn a handle, but never before had he seen a gizmo that gizzed with such original and soul-satisfying pyrotechnical effects.
“What is that?” he demanded, and did not have to fake a fragment of his yokel’s entrancement.
“It’s my Preservator,” said Mr Quigg matter-of-factly. “I invented it. I couldn’t explain it to you very easily, unless you happen to be very well up on electronics and radiation theory. And then I’d be afraid of telling you too much, perhaps. But it preserves anything you treat with it by total sterilization, without chemicals or refrigeration.” He flicked another switch, the slow fireworks died down, and he withdrew the plastic envelope, from which the pink luminosity had already faded. “You could keep this for months now, anywhere, even in the tropics, and when you opened it those fish would be just as fresh as they are now.”
“No fooling — you’ve tried it?”
“Well, not in the tropics. But here’s something I’ve been keeping just to see how long it would last.” Mr Quigg took from a cupboard another transparent bag in which was sealed a small lettuce cut in half. “This has been down to Los Angeles a couple of times through the San Joaquin Valley, and it was with me in Sacramento for a week, and they were all plenty hot, and it’s never been in a fridge since I treated it. If you didn’t know, wouldn’t you say it could’ve been picked yesterday? But I preserved it last April. Yes, on the eighteenth. Look, you see that strip off the top of a newspaper, with the date on? I sealed that in with it so’s I couldn’t forget.”
Simon could not be so ungracious as to point out that anyone who had thoughtfully hoarded a number of old newspapers could have just as easily sealed a dateline of fifty years ago in with a lettuce packaged yesterday. Instead, he regarded the Contraption again with renewed awe.
“Where could I get one of these?” he asked.
“You couldn’t. It isn’t on the market. As a matter of fact, it isn’t even patented. It probably never will be.”
“But good Lord, man, you’re going to do something about it, aren’t you? Why, an invention like this must be worth a fortune!”
“Yes, I know,” said the inventor sadly. “All the food growers and packers, the trucking firms, the markets... even all the fishing camps like this could use it; it wouldn’t cost as much as a deep freeze, and they could preserve everything their guests caught, and people could take fish and game home wherever they lived without having to bother about keeping it iced... But it wouldn’t do me any good.”