Smith remembered the afternoon. He felt an obligation to a man who had done the right thing. It would work. More and more through the years, he had understood Remo less and less and he had never understood Chiun. But this was the sort of thing they were good at, and now Remo had reported that things were under control. Dr. Ravits was safe.
And to make matters better in the St. Martin sun, he had solved the computer problems forever. He felt good. He rubbed in the suntan cream to protect his pale skin from the sun's intense heat. He could even believe now that he was lucky. He had never believed in luck before, but now he had to say, after so many years of grinding calculation, that yes, he was quite lucky.
Suddenly, someone was tapping him on the shoulder and Smith looked up to see the black bellbottoms of a gendarme. The policeman wore a pistol in a black holster. His blue shirt bore the insignia of the French national police.
"Are you Harold W. Smith?" he asked with a thick accent.
"Yes," said Smith.
"Would you come with me, sir?" the gendarme said. The tone of his voice told Smith nothing but Smith knew that the gendarmes were quite polite because of the island's tourist business. They would rarely ticket a car no matter how it was parked, and they had their own special sort of justice.
Recently, when a tourist's wife had been raped, they brought the suspect to the woman's husband, an American policeman, and left them alone for five minutes. They then deported what remained of the suspect to another island. There was no long, drawnout trial.
Many things were done like that, and that gave CURE exactly what it needed most: a place without a very inquisitive local police force. Justice and law enforcement were rather basic in St. Martin and, since computers never threatened anyone, the organization could be sure to be left alone on a quiet island in a rolling sea.
"May I ask why I must go with you?" Smith said.
"You must accompany me to Marigot," the gendarme said.
Smith reasoned he was being taken to police headquarters since Marigot was the capital of the French half of the island. "May I put on something more than a bathing suit?"
"But of course," said the gendarme.
Ordinarily Smith might have been concerned at this point, but with the computers now safe from any invasions, he actually whistled as he went into the apartment facing the beach. He rented the apartment from the man who supplied the entire island with gasoline, a franchise the man's family had owned for several generations.
Smith wriggled out of his bathing suit while the policeman waited politely outside the apartment. He took a short shower to get rid of the sand, and then put on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. He also took the key to the solution of all the organization's computer programs.
It was the size of an attache case and it held more memory capability than all the computers the Strategic Air Command had secreted in the Rocky Mountains. The truth was that CURE no longer needed its offices at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, just as it no longer needed the offices which were carved out of the coral hills behind the salt flats in Grand Case. All it needed was the briefcase in Smith's hand. For what Smith had finally done was to find one genius who had discovered a source of memory almost as infinite as space.
It went beyond bubble technology. It used the cosmic relationships between stars. The very energy that would attract light now stored the information from throughout the world in a single access disk.
"You see," the computer genius had said, "you don't need to store memory, you only need to access it, to reach it. Well, that means you can use anything to store it if you want, even light refraction. Do you understand?"
"Frankly, no," Smith had said.
"You don't have to. It works," Barry Schweid had said. And it did.
Schweid was twenty-five, lived at home with his mother, and spent eighteen hours a day over a small personal computer which he said he had "juiced up." He didn't really care that much after salary. His mother did, however, and she also worried about him meeting nice girls, eating properly and getting sun. She wouldn't let Barry out of the house unless nice Mr. Smith, his new employer, promised he would get at least two hours of fresh air a day and that Barry would eat at least one good healthy meal a day.
Those promises given, Schweid had come to work for Smith, who sent him to St. Martin, where CURE kept up a big bank of computers that duplicated all the information in the computers at CURE's main headquarters in Folcroft Sanitarium.
"I want you to make our computer files entry-proof," Smith had said.
And Schweid had.
Basically what he had done was to take all CURE's information and devise a new way to make it available through the equipment that fit into the attache case.
"How does that help?" Smith had asked. "Now I've got three sets of files that can be entered instead of two."
"No," Schweid had said. "You don't understand."
"No, I don't."
"Here it is. What this allows us to do is to put a trap net on the other computers, the ones at Folcroft and here."
"What will that do?"
"It will allow us to jigger those other computers so that if anybody breaks into them, in any way, the computers will simply erase themselves. Totally."
"Everything will be gone?"
"Right. Before anybody can steal it. And because you've got the master file in that attache case, you can always refill the main computers at some later date if you want."
The only problem was getting access through the attache-case computer. Schweid was still needed for that because of its intricacy, but he had promised Smith that he would soon deliver a modified access system which would allow Smith to get into the files himself without Schweid's help.
This had brought a rare, unaccustomed smile to Smith's face. The world was working well. He was getting rest in St. Martin, the world's problems seemed to be under control, and he even surprised his own lemony critical nature by not worrying about why the gendarme had come to pick him up.
He picked up the attache case that he had purposely made to look old and beat up, something that might be carrying dirty laundry rather than access to the world's greatest collection of evil secrets.
Harold W. Smith's nature was that he could wear checkered Bermuda shorts and a yellow T-shirt and look perfectly natural carrying an attache case. He always looked as if he should have some sort of briefcase, even when he slept.
Downstairs, the small Citroen police car sat in the dusty alley between the white beachfront homes. The gendarme opened the door for Smith. Unlike American police cars, there was no protective screen between driver and passengers. The only thing that made this bouncy little Citroen a police car was a reflective light on top and a French-national-police label on the side, the symbol of a torch.
As they pulled out into the streets of Grand Case, so narrow that one car had to pull over onto the curb whenever a vehicle came in the opposite direction, the gendarme asked very casually the one question that could send Smith into shock.
"Pardon, sir. Do you know a Barry Schweid?"
"Is he all right?" Smith asked.
"Somewhat," the gendarme said.
"What happened?"
"He gave us your name."
"Yes, I know him. I employ him. I have an import-export business."
"Do you know that he is a dangerous man?"
"Barry?" asked Smith. The boy was as mild as milk. In fact, the only thing a really thorough investigation of Barry's past had revealed was a kindergarten incident where he wet his pants. The boy filed his income taxes on time, once reporting a twenty-dollar bill he had found on the street. He had had five dates in all his life, and on one of those, when the girl had gone into the bedroom to get into something comfortable, Barry had fled, thinking it was a reflection on him and the entire evening. If she were comfortable with him, he reasoned, she ought to have been comfortable in her clothing.
Barry Schweid had been kissed on his twenty-second birthday when friction stopped the spinning motion of a bottle at a party his mother gave for him.
Barry had been seeing a therapist for three years because of his fear of raising his voice. In fact, he had once got to Curacao because he had been afraid to tell the stewardess that he had blundered onto the wrong plane.
"What on earth has he done?" Smith asked.