“Why no. No, Í didn’t. When did you mail it?”
“A week ago. Those bastards must have opened it.” He slumped against the truck frame and paused for a moment, catching his breath. He nodded to Ashbless and to Latzarel, who was jiggling his dinosaur tooth nervously in his cupped hands, his mind an arcade of spinning gears and flywheels and blinking lights. William’s sudden appearance hadn’t settled any issues.
“Why did they open it?” Edward asked in a tone he hoped would provide an element of rationality while obscuring doubt. It was best to be safe.
William shook his head a bit, as if asking for breathing space. Then very calmly and deliberately he said: “They’re going to destroy the world. Blow it up.”
“Whatever for?” cried Edward, genuinely aghast.
“Because they’re sons of bitches,” said William.
Ashbless handed Edward his newspapers with a barely disguised rolling of his eyes. “Good to see you, old man,” he said to William, nodding. “Keep your pecker up. We won’t let them explode the world. Leastways not until I’ve had a drink. See you all later.” And he touched a finger to his forehead as a parting gesture and strode away down the driveway. His car engine started up and roared off.
“Condescending twit,” muttered William, pulling off his mustache and beard. “I half believe he’s one of them. Hurried away because he didn’t want to be found out.”
William, about then, realized what he was leaning against and caught sight of the diving bell. His face fell. “You’ve gone without me,” he said despondently, as if he had known all along it would come to that.
“The tide,” said Edward weakly. “And it was only a preliminary run. We’ve got evidence that will rock the scientific world.”
Latzarel handed William the tooth and related the elasmosaurus business in detail, coloring it with the wooly mammoth tusk. William squinted and nodded, absently poking the false little pointy beard back onto his chin, then forgetting about it and leaving it dangling sideways while he had a look at the newspaper account of Oscar’s demise. Edward couldn’t keep his eyes off the beard. It was like a crooked picture, and he itched to be at it. “Uh, the beard, William,” he said finally, emboldened by his suspicion that the canted disguise would appear to the casual passerby to be evidence of eccentricity.
“What? Oh, yes,” said William, and he pulled the thing off again, pressing it onto his coat pocket for safekeeping.
“Spekowsky!” shouted Latzarel. “We’ve forgotten Spekowsky.” And he yanked out the science page, finding, almost at once, half a column regarding the voyage of the diving bell. “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the caption read, and there followed an article describing a “preposterous tidepool excursion by Russel Latzarel” that was launched with an eye toward reaching the Earth’s core in a leaky diving bell on the end of a two hundred foot line. Reports of sea serpents and elephants were later attributed to nitrogen narcosis, the article read, and then apologized for having reported on the incident at all, claiming to have done so only out of scientific curiosity and thoroughness.
Latzarel was livid. Edward wasn’t much surprised. “We’ll see!” shouted the professor. “I’ll just use your phone for a moment!”
“Certainly,” said William, assuming that the statement was addressed to him.
But Latzarel returned five minutes later in a doubly bad humor, red enough to explode, cursing science in general as well as the director of the museum of natural history, who had, it seemed, read Spekowsky’s article. He had no faith whatsoever in dinosaur teeth and was indifferent to lands within the Earth—with “scientific quackery,” as he put it. Latzarel could barely speak.
“He’s with them!” cried William, screwing up one eye and glaring at Latzarel through the other.
“I’m half inclined to agree with you,” Latzarel said. He studied his tooth once more and shoved it into his pocket.
“Tomorrow morning then. We’ll get this craft back up to Gaviota. They might be amenable to financing another expedition.” He shook his head grimly, thinking about scientific quackery. Still worked up, he stormed away toward the Land Rover and whirled off in a dust cloud.
William, with a suddenness that astonished his brother-in-law, dropped to his knees behind the truck and scuttled toward the bushes like a crab, smashing his way in among shrimp plants and begonias and heavenly bamboo, then peering out toward the driveway. “I’m not here,” he hissed at Edward.
“Haven’t been for weeks.”
Edward’s puzzlement was quickly gone, for there on the street, moving along slowly and deliberately, was a familiar white van. Edward’s heart sank. He was determined to protect William—at least for the moment. Had Mrs. Pembly seen him? The false mustache wasn’t worth a farthing. It was a beacon, if anything. Edward would tell Frosticos a thing or two. No he wouldn’t. It would give him away, would gain him nothing.
But the van wasn’t stopping. It pulled up to the curb at the Peach house. Edward climbed onto the truck bed and crouched behind the hull of the bell, looking out over the hatchcover.
“They’re not coming here,” he whispered, although he didn’t, strictly speaking, have to, since Frosticos was stepping out of the van along with a white-suited attendant—an Oriental, Edward noticed—a half block away. For one wild moment Edward was certain the attendant was Yamoto, the ex-gardener. But it couldn’t be. This man was too short by far. He’d let himself get carried away. He’d have to watch that. But what in God’s name was Frosticos doing at the Peach house? That certainly wasn’t a matter of paranoia. There was a scrabbling in the bushes behind him as William worked his way down toward the front yard to get a view of the street.
Something dreadfully strange was afoot. William could sense it. He only half understood Edward’s whispered assurances. In fact, his brother-in-law’s whispering sounded to him like so much static lost in a sea of sudden afternoon emptiness. He scraped between a shrimp plant and the wall of the house, breaking off brittle stalks dangling with salmon-colored, vaguely fishy blooms. A dead, curved branch yanked his falser beard from his coat pocket, snapping up and waggling there with the little triangular goatee perched atop it like a toupee on a stick. William watched it bob momentarily, then edged his way along until he could peer out past a stand of orange and green bamboo.
There was an abrupt change of atmosphere. Clouds, unseen in the heavens overhead, passed across the face of the sun, throwing the street into sudden shadow. The breeze fell. Nothing stirred. He heard nothing at all but the dry crackle of leaves and twigs beneath him and the distant droning of a fly. But he felt as if he could hear a voice in the dead air—as if he were breathing the voice, or rather as if his breathing were part of a vast and rhythmic breathing, the ebbing and flowing of an unimagined tide on a sea that was one great sibilant whispering, the combined stirrings of countless tiny voices murmuring together. He strained to hear them, to fathom it, but it was ink, like the ocean at midnight, a vast and watery dark.
The black asphalt street undulated as if it were a river coming to slow life. Dark swirls rippled in its surface. Something lurked below, just brushing up toward shadowed daylight. What was it? William wasn’t sure, but he knew it was there. Leviathan. Dr. Frosticos’ van sat like a white whale atop the river of asphalt, floating there, staring down toward him, watching. What was it waiting for? What were they all waiting for? The street was a river flowing into the east, and below it waited beasts—unidentifiable beasts, nosing up out of subterranean caverns. It seemed to William that the river ran through him, and there trickled into his mind unbidden the words: “Let those curse it who curse the day, who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning.”
He felt the ground heave beneath him, and he clutched at a stalk of bamboo, snapping it off at a joint. In his hand was a tendril of kelp, limp and wet. He dropped it, fighting for breath. All round him were waterweeds, waving
in the currents of a submarine garden: delicate fans of blue-green and purple algae, undulating clumps of eel grass, brown kelp fronds among which grazed limpets and chitons. Crabs scuttled past. Violet tube worms and hydra flowered from the walls of the house.
William was suffocating, drowning. He clutched at the base of a sea fan, tearing it away from its holdfast, the lacy organism disintegrating into pink dust that glinted in the watery rays of the sun and drifted in a cloud, dispersing on the current. William thrashed and kicked, smashing his hand against the house, sweeping brittle sea life adrift. Then, as if in a dream, it occurred to him that he could breathe if he wanted to—that unlike a foolish rat who hadn’t sense enough to exhale a lungful of water, he was entirely capable of it. He relaxed, floating, clutching at seaweed, breathing altogether easily. His exhalations rose above him toward some distant surface, slow wobbling bubbles.
The whole thing struck him as strange, especially the bubbles. And almost as soon as he considered them, they began to burst in little crystal explosions, shattering the sea life around him. Moon snails and blennies, anemones and hermit crabs, periwinkles and starfish—all of them popped out of existence in a rush, and William, loosed from his hold, rose through the water toward sunlight. He blinked awake on the couch in the living room. Edward stood over him, smoking a furious pipe.
William, vaguely surprised to find his trousers dry, sat up. He ran his hands through his hair. “What time is it? How long have I been out?”
“It’s four, You’ve been out about a quarter of an hour. Frosticos is gone. I’m certain he didn’t take Giles with him.”
“I’ve had the most amazing dream,” said William. “I believe it was prophetic.” He held up his hand as if anticipating an argument from Edward, who wasn’t much on prophecy or mysticism of any sort. But Edward, apparently, wasn’t in an arguing mood. ‘This digging machine. What does Giles Peach call it?”
“The Digging Leviathan, if I’m not mistaken. It does somewhat resemble a crocodile. But the whole thing’s a lark as far as I can see. Pinion seems to set some store in it, but the whole idea is an impossibility from first to last: perpetual motion, anti-matter, anti-gravity. It’s a fabrication. Utter lunacy. On Pinion’s part that is. Giles can’t be blamed; he’s only a lad. But Pinion’s gone round the bend. Latzarel thinks so too.”
William eyed his brother-in-law. “You look grim,” he said. “What have you seen?”
“Seen?” asked Edward in mock surprise. “Nothing. I hauled you out of the bushes. To be absolutely truthful, you seem to have suffered some sort of collapse. It was touch and go there for a moment. Put the fear right into me.”
“Something put the fear right into you, all right, but it wasn’t any fit of mine. Did you see what I saw?”
“No,” said Edward.
“How do you know? You haven’t any idea what in the devil I saw. I remember more than you suppose. Do you recall your squid tentacle at the Newtonians? Of course you do. You suppose I was too occupied with that false gardener to remember your mentioning it. But that’s not my way. Did you see more tentacles today? Is that it?”
“Of a sort,” said Edward, attempting to tamp his pipe with his finger. He jerked his hand back and shouted with surprise and pain, looking accusingly at his finger. “It seemed to me for a moment, since you press me, that the landscape had become …” His voice trailed off.
“Aquatic,” William said.
‘That’s right. In a nut. I don’t understand it at all.”
“Neither do I.” William fumbled in his pocket for his own tobacco pouch. “I’ll just have a dab of port with this pipe. Join me?”
“Please,” said Edward.
“I’m beginning to see things clearly,” said William when both of them had settled into their chairs and were sipping at their port. Edward grimaced inwardly, as he did whenever William made such pronouncements. This time it was a halfhearted grimace, however, a grimace tempered by his own remembrance of Frosticos’ van, admittedly glimpsed through the distorting arc of one of the porthole windows after Edward had climbed into the diving bell so as to spy more securely on the doctor. It had, for an imponderable second, seemed to him to be a great fish, or the ghost of a great fish, lazing on the surface of a dark sea. He hadn’t been able to shake the vision out of his eyes. And for a long moment he was certain that the diving bell was settling into the blackness of a great oceanic trench, sounding toward unfathomable depths. But the hallucination passed, and there was William, tossing himself through the shrimp plants, hashing up bamboo, flailing against the wall of the house.
“You know I’ve an interest in physics,” said William, breaking into Edward’s reverie.
“What?” said Edward, startled. “Oh, quite. The fat man in the rocket and all. Did you write the story yet?”
“Yes, in fact I did. I sent it off to Analog. It’s just their meat, I believe. But that’s immaterial. What I’m talking about here isn’t fiction.” William shook his head in quick little jerks to emphasize his point. He peered into the bowl of his pipe, then jabbed the stem in Edward’s direction. “This leviathan. I don’t like it. Not a bit. I’m half convinced it will be the end of everything. Can you imagine the pressures built up within the interior of the Earth?”
Edward widened his eyes appropriately, but admitted to himself that he couldn’t. “Pressures? How about the polar openings?”
“What polar openings? Have you seen them? Has Pinion? For my money the polar openings are suboceanic, like your tidepool. No, sir. There’s pressure enough in there to blow this planet to kingdom come. I’m certain of it.” He tamped for a bit at his pipe, then inspected the sediment on the bottom of his glass. “I had a very strange dream not a week back. A dream, I say. Not like what happened this afternoon. That was no dream. I’m sure of it now. But as I say, a week ago I had an odd one. Giles Peach figured in it, as did his machine—his mechanical mole. It burrowed into the Earth—I haven’t any idea who drove it; it wasn’t Peach—somewhere in the desert. Near Palm Springs, I believe it was. Any number of people on hand. It was like a circus. Banners waving, trumpets blowing—like the grand opening of the Tower of Babel. That’s how it struck me. Giles Peach stood on a sort of platform above the hole, watching his device eat its way into the Earth, straight down toward the hollow core. He had the most amazing suit on. A clatch of dignitaries, mostly fat ones, clustered around him waving ribbons and clamoring to make speeches. But the lot of them fell silent when the mole approached its destination.
“The Earth heaved and there was a distant muffled explosion somewhere far below. Giles Peach peeked over the railing, staring into the open shaft. He dropped a stone the size of an egg into it like a boy might drop a rock into a well to judge its depth. A blast of wind whooshed out, carrying on it the very stone Giles had let fall, and the stone struck him in the forehead ….”
“It did?” asked Edward incredulously. “You dreamed this?”
“Yes,” William uttered, half put out at the interruption. “But that’s the least of it. There followed on the wind, on this vast exhalation of pressure, a rush of extinct beasts—mastodons, stegasauri, triceratops—that rained down onto the desert floor as if they’d come back to the surface to claim a lost land.”
“What happened to Peach?” asked Edward.
“Dead as a mackerel,” said William. “It was the stone that did it. What do you think?”
“I suppose the stone could have killed him,” said Edward, pondering. “If it hit him hard enough, anyway.”
“Not that. What do you think about the dream. I’m certain it’s prophetic.”
Edward blinked at him. “Undeniably. At least it seems so to me. I’m not much on prophecy, of course. But this has that sort of ring to it. There’s no getting round it. Yes.” He fiddled with his port glass, spilling a purple dollop down his shirt front. “Damn it,” he cried, jumping up. The damage was done, however, so he sat back down. “Sounds like the core of a fairly substantial story to m
e, eh? A hollow Earth story.”!
‘This is no story. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve been convinced that Peach is the key here. Ashbless is convinced too. You mark my words. And then that dream. It haunts me. I’d have written it off, but here comes Frosticos, messing about at the Peach house. What was he up to? We must know.”
“I intend to find out. I’ll drop in on Velma Peach tomorrow morning. If nothing else, I’m going to warn her against Frosticos. He’s up to no good.” Edward was struck immediately by the peculiarity of his last statement, by the certainty that some time in the future, the near future, Frosticos would set out to i round up William. He’d do something about it this time. He wondered idly at William’s several escapes, at Frosticos’ am-I bivalent attitude toward them. It was a confusing business and it grew more curious by the day.
“I’ll just pop into the study and write some of this down,” I said William, standing up. “Perhaps you’re right about the short story. There’s too much in the dream not to use it.”
Edward agreed with him, deciding as he did so that he was ravenously hungry and would waste no time in lighting the barbecue. But he sat in his chair, lost in thought, for a half hour or so before finally getting up to have a go at dinner. He determined to talk to Velma Peach. He had to know what had gone wrong with Giles.
Chapter 9
It was nearly two in the afternoon when Edward and Professor Latzarel returned from Gaviota. William was busy in the maze _ shed, working with renewed vigor—with a freshened sense of the importance of his mission. The problem with science, he hadn’t any doubt, was its lack of imagination. It chased rats back and forth with a pair of calipers—shoved hoses down their mouths and filled their lungs with water. Science hadn’t any patience. Domesticity, that was the answer. The act of domestication is the act of civilizing. If he were to write a thesis he’d call it “Civilization Theory.” It would supplant Darwin. All beasts lean toward civility. Evolutionary development edged in that direction. Man pursued it. Dogs and cats sought it out. Even rats preferred life in the neighborhood to life in the wild. There was a great truth in it—one he intended to reveal. He yanked the sleeve of a little doll’s vest over the tiny arm of a mouse. The beast gave it an approving look, sniffing at it. Trousers would be difficult—impossible, perhaps, without alterations. Custom tailoring was necessary to do the job right. But the vest, for openers at least, would accomplish a great deal. William whistled a tune. He hadn’t been so happy in months. There was nothing like a man’s work.
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