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little man.”
    He
put down his glass and strolled around the room, his hands in his pockets and his eyes crinkled against the smoke of the
cigarette slanted between his lips.
    It
began to look like a nice little situation. The FBI wouldn’t have any jurisdiction unless somebody
Higher Up—such as Frank
Imberline, perhaps—brought it to Mr. Hoover’s atten tion that the protection of Calvin Gray and his
daughter was a matter of national
importance. Imberline might do just that, doubtless adding something like: “A stitch in
time saves nine.” But would he?
Would the dollar-a-year man who had been the head
of Consolidated Rubber go to any great lengths to protect the life of an
inventor of a process which could make synthetic rubber out of old bits of nothing much? Might not Imberline, like
too many others in Washington, be looking beyond the end of the war? Walter Devan had said something pat
about life preservers, but wasn’t it
a fact, still, that when the war was over, the old battle might start again; the battle between the old and the war-born new?
    Imberline
was an unknown quantity, then, which left only the local gendarmerie to appeal to. Simon knew nothing
at all about them; but even if
they were extremely efficient, he sur mised that they were also liable to be very busy. He didn’t know for how long they would be likely to
detach three able- bodied officers for the
sole job of providing a full-time personal bodyguard for Madeline Gray. And in any case, they couldn’t stay
with her if she left the city.
    “Where is
your father now?” he asked.
    “At home—in Connecticut.”
    “Where?”
    “Near Stamford.”
    The
DC police couldn’t do anything about that. And the Stamford cops would be even less likely to have men to
spare for an indefinite vigil.
    “Maybe
you ought to hire some guards from a detective agency,” he said. “I gather you could
afford it.”
    She looked him in
the eyes.
    “Yes. We could afford it.”
    He had made areasonable
suggestion and she had considered it in the
same reasonable way. Even that steady glance of hers didn’t accuse him of trying to evade anything. It
would have had no right to, anyway,
he told himself. It was his own con science.
He didn’t owe her anything. He had plenty of other things to think about. There certainly must be
some proper legal authority for her
to take her troubles to—he just hadn’t been
able to think what it was. And anyhow, what real basis did he have for deciding
that Calvin Gray’s invention was practical
and important? There were highly trained ex perts in Government offices who were much more competent to judge such matters than he was.
    And
just the same he knew that he was still evading, and he felt exasperated with himself.
    He
asked: “What was your idea when you did see Imberline ?”
    “Get him to come to the laboratory himself, or send some one who was absolutely reliable. They could watch us make
as much rubber as they’d need for their
tests, and then they could be sure it
was a genuine synthetic.”
    “But eventually other people would have to be in on it—if it were going to be manufactured in any
quantity.”
    “Father has that all worked out. You could have a dozen different ingredients shipped to the
plant and stored in tanks. Three
of them would be the vital part of the formula. The other nine would mean nothing. But they’d all be piped
down through a mixing room that
only one man need go into. The unnecessary ingredients would be destroyed by acids and run down the
drain, so that no checkup would be possible. The real formula would be piped from the mixing room direct to
the vats. One man could
control a whole plant by just working two or three hours a day. I could control one myself. But
even if anyone on the outside knew
every chemical that was brought in and used, it
would take them years to try out every combina tion and proportion and treatment until they might hit on the right one.” -
    It
was a sound