"Oh ... I'd say I enjoy almost anything I get involved in." Barney,
still smiling, felt a touch of wariness. He'd been expecting questions
from McAllen, but not quite this kind.
"Mainly making money, eh? Well," McAllen conceded, "that's not a bad
hobby. Practical, too. I ... whup! Just a moment."
The tip of the slender rod in his left hand dipped slightly, and sixty
feet out beyond the end of the old dock a green and white bobber began
twitching about. Then the bobber suddenly disappeared. McAllen lifted
the rod tip a foot or two with a smooth, swift motion, and paused.
"Hooked!" he announced, looking almost childishly pleased.
The fish on the far end of the line didn't seem to put up much of a
struggle, but the old man reeled it in slowly and carefully, giving
out line from time to time, then taking it back. He seemed completely
absorbed. Not until the fish had been worked close to the dock was
there a brief minor commotion near the surface. Then McAllen was down
on one knee, holding the rod high with one hand, reaching out for his
catch with the other. Barney had a glimpse of an unimpressive green
and silver disk, reddish froggy eyes. "_Very_ nice crappie!" McAllen
informed him with a broad smile. "Now--" He placed the rod on the
dock, reached down with his other hand. The fish's tail slapped the
water; it turned sideways, was gone.
"Lost it!" Barney commented, surprised.
"Huh?" McAllen looked around. "Well, no, young man--I _turned_ him
loose. He wasn't hooked bad. Crappies have delicate lips, but I use a
barbless hook. Gives them better than a fighting chance." He stood up
with the rod, dusting the knees of his baggy slacks. "Get all the
eating fish I want anyway," he added.
"You really enjoy that sport, don't you?" Barney said curiously.
* * * * *
McAllen advised him with the seriousness of the true devotee to try it
some time. "It gets to you. It can get to be a way of living. I've
been fishing since I was knee-high. Three years ago I figured I'd
become good enough to write a book on the subject. I got more
arguments over that book--sounder arguments too, I'd say--than about
any paper I've published in physics." He looked at Barney a moment,
still seriously, and went on. "I told you wetting a line would calm me
down after that upset you gave me. Well, it has--fishing is as good a
form of therapy as I know about. Now I've been doing some thinking.
I'd be interested ... well, I'd like to talk some more about the Tube
with you, Mr. Chard. And perhaps about other things too."
"Very gratifying to hear that, doctor," Barney said gravely. "I did
regret having to upset you, you know."
McAllen shrugged. "No harm done. It's given me some ideas. We'll talk
right here." He indicated the weather-beaten little cabin on the bank
behind Barney. "I'm not entirely sure about the California place.
That's one reason I suggested this trip."
"You feel your houseman there mightn't be entirely reliable?"
"Fredericks unreliable? Heavens no! He knows about the Tube, of
course, but Fredericks _expects_ me to invent things. It wouldn't
occur to him to talk to an outsider. He's been with me for almost
forty years."
"He was," remarked Barney, "listening in on the early part of our
conversation today."
"Well, he'll do that," McAllen agreed. "He's very curious about anyone
who comes to see me. But otherwise ... no, it's just that in these
days of sophisticated listening devices one shouldn't ever feel too
sure of not being overheard."
"True enough." Barney glanced up at the cabin. "What makes you so
sure of it here, doctor?"
"No reason why anyone would go to the trouble," McAllen said. "The
property isn't in my name. And the nearest neighbor lives across the
lake. I never come here except by the Tube so I don't attract any
attention."
He led the way along the dock. Barney Chard followed, eyes
reflectively on the back of McAllen's sunburned neck and the wisps of
unclipped white hair sticking out beneath his beaked fishing cap.
Barney had learned to estimate accurately the capacity for physical
violence in people he dealt with. He would have offered long odds that
neither Dr. McAllen nor Fredericks, the elderly colored man of all
work, had the capacity. But Barney's right hand, slid idly into the
pocket of his well-tailored coat, was resting on a twenty-five caliber
revolver. This was, after all, a very unusual situation. The human
factors in themselves were predictable. Human factors were Barney's
specialty. But here they were involved with something unknown--the
McAllen Tube.
When it was a question of his personal safety, Barney Chard preferred
to take no chances at all.
From the top of the worn wooden steps leading up to the cabin, he
glanced back at the lake. It occurred to him there should have been at
least a suggestion of unreality about that placid body of water, and
the sun low and red in the west beyond it. Not that he felt anything
of the kind. But less than an hour ago they had been sitting in
McAllen's home in Southern California, and beyond the olive-green
window shades it had been bright daylight.
"But I can't ... I really can't imagine," Dr. McAllen had just
finished bumbling, his round face a study of controlled dismay on the
other side of the desk, "whatever could have brought you to these ...
these extraordinary conclusions, young man."
Barney had smiled reassuringly, leaning back in his chair. "Well,
indirectly, sir, as the pictures indicate, we might say it was your
interest in fishing. You see, I happened to notice you on Mallorca
last month...."
* * * * *
By itself, the chance encounter on the island had seemed only
moderately interesting. Barney was sitting behind the wheel of an
ancient automobile, near a private home in which a business
negotiation of some consequence was being conducted. The business
under discussion happened to be Barney's, but it would have been
inexpedient for him to attend the meeting in person. Waiting for his
associates to wind up the matter, he was passing time by studying an
old man who was fishing from a small boat offshore, a hundred yards or
so below the road. After a while the old fellow brought the boat in,
appeared a few minutes later along the empty lane carrying his tackle
and an apparently empty gunny sack, and trudged unheedingly past the
automobile and its occupant. As he went by, Barney had a sudden sense
of recognition. Then, in a flash, his mind jumped back twelve years.
Dr. Oliver B. McAllen. Twelve years ago the name had been an important
one in McAllen's field; then it was not so much forgotten as
deliberately buried. Working under government contract at one of the
big universities, McAllen had been suddenly and quietly retired.
Barney, who had a financial interest in one of the contracts, had made
inquiries; he was likely to be out of money if McAllen had been taken
from the job. Eventually he was informed, in strict confidence, that
Dr. McAllen had flipped. Under the delusion of having made a discovery
of tremendous importance, he had persuaded the authorities to arrange
a demonstration. When the demonstration ended in complete failure,
McAllen angrily accused some of his most eminent colleagues of having
sabotaged his invention, and withdrew from the university. To protect
a once great scientist's name, the matter was being hushed up.
So Mallorca was where the addled old physicist had elected to end his
days--not a bad choice either, Barney had thought, gazing after the
retreating figure. Pleasant island in a beautiful sea--he remembered
having heard about McAllen's passion for angling.
A day later, the Mallorca business profitably concluded, Barney flew
back to Los Angeles. That evening he entertained a pair of tanned and
shapely ladies whose idea of high fun was to drink all night and go
deep-sea fishing at dawn. Barney shuddered inwardly at the latter
notion, but promised to see the sporting characters to the Sweetwater
Beach Municipal Pier in time to catch a party boat, and did so. One of
the girls, he noticed not without satisfaction--he had become a little
tired of the two before morning--appeared to turn a delicate green as
she settled herself into the gently swaying half-day boat beside the
wharf. Barney waved them an amiable farewell and was about to go when
he noticed a plump old man sitting in the stern of the boat among
other anglers, rigging up his tackle. Barney checked sharply, and
blinked. He was looking at Oliver B. McAllen again.
It was almost a minute before he felt sure of it this time. Not that
it was impossible for McAllen to be sitting in that boat, but it did
seem extremely unlikely. McAllen didn't look in the least like a man
who could afford nowadays to commute by air between the Mediterranean
and California. And Barney felt something else trouble him obscurely
as he stared down at the old scientist; a notion of some kind was
stirring about in the back corridors of his mind, but refused to be
drawn to view just then.
* * * * *
He grew aware of what it was while he watched the party boat head out
to sea a few minutes later, smiled at what seemed an impossibly
fanciful concoction of his unconscious, and started towards the pier's
parking lot. But when he had reached his car, climbed in, turned on
the ignition, and lit a cigarette, the notion was still with him and
Barney was no longer smiling. Fanciful it was, extremely so.
Impossible, in the strict sense, it was not. The longer he played it
around, the more he began to wonder whether his notion mightn't hold
water after all. If there was anything to it, he had run into one of
the biggest deals in history.
Later Barney realized he would still have let the matter drop there if
it hadn't been for other things, having nothing to do with Dr.
McAllen. He was between operations at present. His time wasn't
occupied. Furthermore he'd been aware lately that ordinary operations
had begun to feel flat. The kick of putting over a deal, even on some
other hard, bright character of his own class, unaccountably was
fading. Barney Chard was somewhat frightened because the operator game
was the only one he'd ever found interesting; the other role of
well-heeled playboy wasn't much more than a manner of killing time. At
thirty-seven he was realizing he was bored with life. He didn't like
the prospect.
Now here was something which might again provide him with some genuine
excitement. It could be simply his imagination working overtime, but
it wasn't going to do any harm to find out. Mind humming with pleased
though still highly skeptical speculations, Barney went back to the
boat station and inquired when the party boat was due to return.
He was waiting for it, well out of sight, as it came chugging up to
the wharf some hours later. He had never had anything to do directly
with Dr. McAllen, so the old man wouldn't recognize him. But he didn't
want to be spotted by his two amazons who might feel refreshed enough
by now to be ready for another tour of the town.
He needn't have worried. The ladies barely made it to the top of the
stairs; they phoned for a cab and were presently whisked away. Dr.
McAllen meanwhile also had made a telephone call, and settled down not
far from Barney to wait. A small gray car, five or six years old but
of polished and well-tended appearance, trundled presently up the
pier, came into the turnaround at the boat station, and stopped. A
thin old Negro, with hair as white as the doctor's, held the door open
for McAllen. The car moved unhurriedly off with them.
The automobile's license number produced Dr. McAllen's California
address for Barney a short while later. The physicist lived in
Sweetwater Beach, fifteen minutes' drive from the pier, in an old
Spanish-type house back in the hills. The chauffeur's name was John
Emanuel Fredericks; he had been working for McAllen for an unknown
length of time. No one else lived there.
Barney didn't bother with further details about the Sweetwater Beach
establishment at the moment. The agencies he usually employed to dig
up background information were reasonably trustworthy, but he wanted
to attract no more attention than was necessary to his interest in Dr.
McAllen.
That evening he took a plane to New York.
* * * * *
Physicist Frank Elby was a few years older than Barney, an
acquaintance since their university days. Elby was ambitious, capable,
slightly dishonest; on occasion he provided Barney with contraband
information for which he was generously paid.
Over lunch Barney broached a business matter which would be
financially rewarding to both of them, and should not burden Elby's
conscience unduly. Elby reflected, and agreed. The talk became more
general. Presently Barney remarked, "Ran into an old acquaintance of
ours the other day. Remember Dr. McAllen?"
"Oliver B. McAllen? Naturally. Haven't heard about him in years.
What's he doing?"
Barney said he had only seen the old man, hadn't spoken to him. But he
was sure it was McAllen.
"Where was this?" Elby asked.
"Sweetwater Beach. Small town down the Coast."
Elby nodded. "It must have been McAllen. That's where he had his
home."
"He was looking hale and hearty. They didn't actually institutionalize
him at the time of his retirement, did they?"
"Oh, no. No reason for it. Except on the one subject of that cockeyed
invention of his, he behaved perfectly normally. Besides he would have
hired a lawyer and fought any such move. He had plenty of money. And
nobody wanted publicity. McAllen was a pretty likable old boy."
"The university never considered taking him back?"