The Digging Leviathan (22 page)

“Who will?” asked Squires, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

“Your ghastly neighbors.”

“My ghastly neighbors have been chasing you up the road?”

“Yes,” said Edward, catching his breath. “For an easily explained reason.”

“St. Ives!” Latzarel shouted, taking a good look at his friend’s face.

“Were you attacked?” asked Squires, hauling Edward into the kitchen. He soaked a tea towel in water and wiped at the cut on Edward’s forehead.

“No, no,” Latzarel assured him. “We were two streets up. Frosticos lives up on Patchen …” But he was interrupted by a pounding on the door. He grabbed Edward by the shoulder and shoved him toward the library, yanking what he thought was a beer out of the refrigerator as he pushed the library door closed. Edward shouted something in a surprised voice, but Latzarel didn’t wait to hear it. He pulled the cap off his drink, poured half of it down the sink, nodded to Squires, and sat down on a chair in the breakfast nook, affecting the attitude of a man who’d been discussing philosophy for an hour or two. Squires opened the front door and stood back, pushing curly black tobacco into his pipe. A man in a t-shirt stood on the porch, looking in suspiciously.

“Did two men run in here?” he asked, giving Squires an appraising look. “A fat man with wild hair and a tall one in a brown coat? One of them might have been hurt.”

Out of the corner of his eye Squires could see Latzarel working away at his hair with a pocket comb. “No, I can’t say that they did. Were they friends of yours?”

“Not very likely,” he said, peering past Squires into the room.

Latzarel appeared from the kitchen, his hair preposterously parted in the center. His coat was gone and his sleeves were rolled up. He waved his bottle cheerfully at the frowning man who stood in the doorway. “I can’t at all decide what to offer you for this first edition of
The Polyglots
. It’s been read pretty thoroughly.”

The statement meant nothing to Squires. In fact, it meant nothing to Latzarel. Only the man on the doorstep supposed it had any meaning, and after getting a good look at Latzarel, even he wasn’t sure. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“It’s none of your business,” said Squires evenly. “Who are
you, and what the devil do you mean, banging on the door at this hour?”

The man looked surprised at being asked such a question. Latzarel smiled at him and took a first, long pull at his bottle, gasping and gagging in spite of himself when the liquid within gurgled across his tongue. He coughed, pretending to have choked. “Who do you
think
I am, my dear fellow?” he asked, taking a quick look at the label on his bottle and finding that he’d stumbled by accident onto one of Dr. Brown’s Cel Rey elixirs instead of beer.

“He believes you’re an escaped fat man, apparently,” said Squires, giving the man a look.

“Now, now,” said the man, shaking his head and holding up a hand. “I accused no one. There’s been a break-in up on Patchen, and a couple of men, as I say, ran in this direction. But I can see they’re not here.”

“Well too bad,” Latzarel said. “Just when you thought you had them corraled. They must be desperate men.” Then to Squires he said, “Maybe we’d better bolt the door. There may be a siege.”

The man stood on the porch for another few moments as if trying to find the words necessary to break off the conversation. A shout from the road, however, and a quick succession of footsteps on the sidewalk made him turn and dash away, shouting something over his shoulder about “rough customers.” Squires shut the door behind him and drew the Venetian blinds tighter over the arched window.

Edward peered out of the library. “Is it safe?”

‘Tolerably,” said Latzarel, “but we’d better lie low for a while until the excitement dies down.”

Edward walked through the door, followed, to Latzarel’s immense surprise, by William Hastings. “What in the devil have you done to your hair?” asked William.”

Latzarel mussed the part out of it. “Nothing,” he said. “Where did you pop up from?”

“A manhole,” said William, smiling at the tale he was about to tell them. The four sat down into chairs around the electric fire.

“So,” said William two hours later, pouring down the last half inch of a bottle of beer, “I’ve done some studying. Made some connections. The physical universe, I’m convinced, is a
far more puzzling place than we’ve given it credit for. Your information about Giles Peach bears me out. Science has taken a good crack at it, and can’t be faulted. But it wears blinders. It’s got to be made to yank them off. It’s time for a literary man to have at it.” William held his beer bottle up like a telescope and peered into it—a habit he unfailingly acquired after his third beer had disappeared. Edward wondered what it was that William saw in there, but had never thought of any way to ask him without sounding as if he thought the practice peculiar.

“And speaking of literary matters,” William continued, “I’ve landed the relativity story.”

“That would be the swelling man in the rocket?” asked Squires, putting a match to his pipe.

“That’s right. They sent me an appreciative letter—carried on a bit, in fact.”

“Who did?” asked Squires.

“Analog
,” said William.

Squires dropped his pipe onto his chair at that revelation, a wad of flaming tobacco rolling out and sliding down between his leg and the chair arm. He leaped up, swatting at it, and managed to knock it onto the rug and then onto the tile hearth. He went into the kitchen and returned with a tray of fresh beer. “Let’s drink to the relativity story” he said, passing the beers around. And William, smiling broadly, assented. In the roseate glow of the beer, things seemed to be going well indeed for him. The muddy splashes on his trousers and the torn sleeve of his coat had already become souvenirs. He’d given the bastards the slip for well and good. But they hadn’t heard the last of William Hastings, not by a long sea mile. He grinned at the thought of coming battles.

“Roy,” he said suddenly, looking up at his friend who was tamping new tobacco into a fresh pipe, “I’ve been reading up on relativity again—light cones to be more specific. What do you know about them?”

Squires hesitated for a moment, wondering, perhaps, at the futility of the conversation that was almost certainly forthcoming. “The term light cone,” he said evenly, “has to do with the charting of the three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time on a cubical graph, the vertical axis being a person’s position in time, the horizontal being his movement in space. …”

“But as I understand it,” interrupted William, hunching
forward in his chair in mounting excitement, “the cone itself is a product of a sphere of light expanding roundabout it like a vast, evenly inflating balloon. I mean to say that all of us are at the center of an infinitely expanding series of photon circles, rushing at light speed through the stars—ripples on the otherwise placid lake of the universe. Auras, if you will. Halos, if you look at it from another angle—an angle most of us have ignored. Up until now, that is. It’s profitable to turn to mythology once again.” He peered at Squires, squinting through one eye. Squires nodded broadly.

“Man, then, if I understand light cones aright, is the omphalos of an expanding photon halo—an almost infinite succession of such halos which, when charted, form a cyclone of emanations, whirling into the stars.”

“I can’t argue with that,” said Squires, giving Latzarel a look. Latzarel said quickly that he couldn’t argue with it either.

“Our lives, gentlemen, are summed up in spatial and temporal terms by the light cones on the highway—symbols of man’s trials, of his voyage through space and time.”

“By the which?” asked Latzarel. “You’ve thrown me there with that last bit about the highway.”

“Those red cones. The clown caps with lamps inside that they use to cordon off lanes on a highway. Inverted light cones is what they are, figuratively speaking. Concrete representations of our earthbound existence, of our literally being bound to the earth in the infinite eyes of those fleeing halos of light.” William paused and thought about it for a moment. He picked up a pen and a scrap of paper and jotted quick notes, lost for the moment in his musings. He paused, grinned, scribbled a bit more, and sat back, wholly pleased with himself. “Can you find fault with it?” he asked, looking up.

“Not with anything I can put my finger on,” said Squires, shaking his head. “It has all the earmarks of your work.”

“Thank you,” said William, understanding that last to be a compliment. He worked his hands together like a spider on a mirror, squinting shrewdly, then left off his puzzling and took a congratulatory swig of beer. “Let a literary man loose on science,” he said triumphantly, “and you’ll go somewhere.”

“There’s truth to that,” Squires assented. “I sense the ripplings of a short story here.”

William nodded. “It’s almost written itself, hasn’t it? Muck up a character or two to flesh it out with, and …” William
made a squiggly flourish with his hand to illustrate what would come of mucking up a character or two.

After a short pause, Edward said, “So what do we do about Peach?”

“You’re certain it’s him?” asked William.

“I saw him face-on when he turned toward the window. It was him—the spitting image of his father, too.”

“Then get a warrant,” said William. “There’s probable cause to believe Giles was kidnapped. Either that or he’s ran away. And if he’s ran away and Frosticos is harboring him, then a crime’s been committed just the same.”

“How do we persuade the D.A. to write out a warrant, tell him we were out doing a bit of peeping torn work in the neighborhood and happened to see Giles splashing in a pool in the basement of Frosticos’ house?” Edward shook his head. “And how do we account for the smashed window? Looks like an attempted burglary or something.”

“We don’t mention any of it,” said William. “We work up a letter. Type it. Forge Giles’ signature. One that swears he’s being kepi there against his will—that the doctor is practicing vivisection, is going to cut him up. What do you think they’ll find when they go down into the cellar? Nothing but evidence to confirm their suspicions. And so what if Giles contradicts the lot of it? All signs will point to his being manipulated. And him only fifteen to boot. It’s foolproof. Velma Peach will back us up all the way.”

Latzarel nodded slowly. “It might work,” he said to Edward.

“Tomorrow it might work,” Edward said tiredly. “Right now it’s almost two in the morning. Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later, after walking back to Rusty’s Cantina, Edward, William, and Professor Latzarel drove north on Western Avenue, slumped silently in their seats. William was the first to speak. “Actually,” he said, rubbing his hand through his hair, “it probably won’t work at all. For my money they’ve already flown. Dirty shame you had to smash out the window.”

Edward nodded. There was truth to that. If be hadn’t slipped and broken the window, Frosticos would be none the wiser. They could have waited until the moment was ripe and gone in after Giles—hauled him out of there. They’d have had the support of Velma Peach. But by now Frosticos would be on his guard. William was right. They’d probably already flown.

“Well,” said Latzarel, thumping his hand down onto the seat of the car, “I’m for wading in. The authorities can’t be depended upon here. They’ll poke around, ask questions. And what will they hear? That Giles Peach is a merman? That we’re bound for the Earth’s core? That Frosticos and Pinion were sighted off Catalina Island in a flying submarine? It’s all preposterous. Nuts. They’ll laugh us down. No one with a bit of sense would find that credible, unless, of course, they’d had the right son of scientific training. No, gentlemen, what I’m suggesting here is that we go into the breach.”

“In what way?” asked Edward, skeptical of going into the breach and of wading in. Latzarel was always making him wade in.

“We go in after him. We haven’t any idea whether they’ve routed Giles out of there or not. Why should they have? They’re not afraid of us. They don’t even know that it was you and I who were messing around the house tonight. And where would they take Giles? To Pinion’s? That’s too obvious. There’d be no profit in it. I say we use the charts of Pince Nez. Take a tip from the French Resistance. Wage our escapade from the sewers.”

“Pince Nez!” cried William, sitting up. “You’ve found the book then?”

“We found the captain,” Edward said darkly. “Frosticos got to him right after we did. Or so we think.” Edward repeated their conversation with Pince Nez, supplying as much of the dialogue as he could, hoping that with his unique insight William could make some sense out of the captain’s cryptic comments, about Ignatz de Winter and the immortality of carp.

But William just shook his head. “You got the book though?”

Edward nodded. “Yes. It cost me sixty bucks and cost Pince Nez his life.”

“So we’ve got to use it!” Latzarel said. “We’ve got to go in after him. We’ll snatch him out of there, slip into the nearest manhole and have him home in half an hour.”

There was silence in the car. Edward hesitated at the desperation of it. Breaking Frosticos’ window seemed reckless enough; Latzarel’s own logic argued against such rash action. What would they tell the authorities when they were caught, when the bullets were flying, when they were asked why
they’d found it necessary to break into the home of a doctor of such high repute? Edward couldn’t generate any enthusiasm.

In the light of his own recent victory, however, William was a different case. “We’ll move quickly,” he said, warming to Latzarel’s plan. “Tomorrow. Even if they’ve got plans to fish him out of there, they won’t move so fast as that. They’ll assume I’ll head home and smash up your plans. You’ll have your hands full with me. And anyway, they won’t half believe we’re a desperate enough bunch to mount such an attack as that. That was their mistake in the sanitarium. They thought I was weak. Demented. Milquetoast. They supposed they’d broken my spirit. The scum. But I was too many for them. A man has to strike, by God, and damn the consequences!”

William leaned forward, caught up in the spirit of the thing. “Now I might not amount to such a lot myself, but I gave them the slip, didn’t I? I walked into Frosticos’ office barefoot and rifled the desk, fingered his books, and slipped out scot free. And if that wasn’t enough, I slid out under their noses and disappeared beneath the street, and led them all on a chase through the sewers. Think what we can do together! All of us. Who are they with their foolish plots? One old sod who chases after boys in an ice cream truck and a white devil megalomaniac intent on blowing us all to kingdom come. If we can’t take them apart, then we’re a sad case. And that’s my opinion.