Free Saint Steps In by Leslie Charteris Page A

haste hadn’t ground too much life out
of the machinery.
    The pilot who was
to take the ship back, who hadn’t asked a single question all the way because
he had been taught not to, said: “Good luck.” Simon grinned and shook
hands, and led Madeline Gray to the taxi
that he had phoned to meet them.
    As they turned east towards Stamford he was still consider ing the timetable. They could be at
Calvin Gray’s house in twenty minutes.
Making about an hour and thirty-five minutes altogether. Only a few minutes
longer than one of the regular airlines would
have taken to make New York, even if there had been a plane leaving at the same
time. Furthermore, he had left no loophole for the Ungodly to sabotage
the trip, or to interfere with him in any way before he got to his destination. They couldn’t have intercepted him at any
point, because they couldn’t have discovered his route before it was too
late.
    As
for any other connections that the Ungodly could have used, It would have taken an hour to drive from New York to Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast
train—ignoring such delays as phone
calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in,
or the traveling to and from railroad stations and the inconsiderate tendency
of railroads not to have trains
waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like taxis off a rank.
    He
had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they were flying.
    “If anything has happened to Daddy,” she said now,
“there were people there already.”
    “Then
whatever happened has happened already,” he said, “and nobody on earth could have caught up with
it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn’t
have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town
Police, but what could we have told them?
So the telephone doesn’t answer. They’d have said
the same as I said. By the time we’d gotten through all the arguing and
rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got
started. If they ever got started.”
    “Maybe I’m just imagining too much,” she said.
    He didn’t know.
He could just as easily have been imagining too
much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his own mind
straight.
    He
said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk aloud: “The trouble it that we
don’t even know who the Un godly are, or what they’re working towards … Suppose they were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth
a fortune. They’d want to get the
formula—just for dough. All right. They might kidnap you, so that they
could threaten your father with all kinds of
frightful things that might happen to you
if he didn’t give them the secret. They might kidnap him, and try to torture it out of him.”
    He felt her flesh tighten beside him.
    “But there have also been these accidents you told me about.
Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It’s a nice exciting word. But where would it get them—in the end?”
    She said: “If they were spies ——”
    “If they were spies,” he said, “they wouldn’t be blowing
up a laboratory. They might
break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn’t destroy it, because
they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to kidnap you or your father to squeeze a
formula out of you with
horsewhips and hot Irons—they’d have tried it long before this. You wouldn’t have been hard to snatch.”
    “Well,” she said, “they could just be saboteurs. They
warned me not to try and see Mr.
Imberline. They might just want to stop us getting anywhere.”
    “Then
both of you would have been crated and under grass by this time,” he said coldbloodedly.
“Killing is a lot easier than kidnaping, and when you get into the class
of political and philosophical killers
you are talking about a bunch of babies who never went to Sunday School. That’s the whole thing that stops