The Digging Leviathan (30 page)

He gave himself a sidewise look in the mirror. He was getting lean. His cheekbones were appearing, and it gave him a dashing air. Rough and ready. He could use some sun, though,
and here he was a prisoner in his own home. How trite. He shook up the can of shaving cream, pressed the nozzle, and with a
ppphhht
of sudsy air, out came nothing at all but some sticky bits of petrified soap. He pitched it into the trash with a wide swing of his arm, overestimating the amount of swinging room the little bathroom allowed him, and cracking his knuckles onto the tile countertop.

He stood still for a moment, blood rushing in his ears, looking around for something to kill, to smash, to beat utterly to bits. He punched the door casing behind him with his elbow, pretending it was the face of someone he loathed; he hadn’t time to put a name on it. But he caught the edge of the casing on the crazy bone behind his elbow, and a shock of numbing pain shot up his arm, leaving it limp. He turned on it fiercely, his mouth working, ready to slam it and kick it.

But almost at once he caught himself. He remembered the fateful struggle with the garden hose, one of those cases in which he’d clearly won the battle but lost the war. Here was a danger signal, a warning. He was convinced that inanimate objects were half sentient. There were certain days, in fact, when they seemed to conspire against him—when chair legs crept out at odd angles to trip him up, when furniture reorganized of its own accord, when pencil leads snapped for the sake of driving him mad, when carpet tacks put themselves in his way, and the height of stairs increased imperceptibly—just enough so that his foot would hook on the nose of the step above and he’d pitch over forward. There was no arguing with it. It had to do with ions, perhaps, with the configuration of rays in the atmosphere.

What was generally unknown was that such objects could be dealt with—
had
to be dealt with. Like unruly servants, they had to be put promptly in their place, or the order of things would collapse. Chaos would reign.

But slamming the door frame wouldn’t accomplish it. He was upset, awash with anger. He’d cool down, move slowly. He turned on the hot water and worked up enough soap lather to shave with, very slowly and methodically, a step at a time, nodding at his razor, at his face, at the bar of soap to demonstrate his control. Shaving was a success. But there was a slit in the side of the toothpaste tube and blue paste squirted through it in a little ridge, smearing out over his finger. Nothing at all came out of the mouth of the tube. He laid it on the tiles and
mashed it with the edge of his hand. Toothpaste shot out like a rubber snake. He picked up his brush, removed a predictable hair which seemed to be tied impossibly into the bristles, scooped up a wad of countertop toothpaste, and, taking his time over it, brushed his teeth one by one. He rinsed the brush, drank half a glass of water, and opened the door of the medicine cabinet into his eyebrow.

For a long moment he couldn’t breathe. His chest was constricted with fury and disbelief. The yawning mouth of the medicine cabinet mimicked his own open mouth, working toward a curse. “God damn!” he shouted, indifferent to the rest of the sleeping house. He slammed the door and chopped at the injured toothpaste tube, grabbing it finally and smashing the thing into a crimped ball. Then he twisted the ends back and forth, heaving and gasping and covering his hands with toothpaste until the tube was torn almost in two, the halves dangling by a little pressed seam at the bottom. He hurled the mined thing into the bathtub.

With a start he noticed that the first gray of daylight shone beneath the bathroom curtain. They’d conspired to rob him of his secrecy. They’d won. There was little satisfaction in having dealt so handily with the toothpaste tube, That was what came of a lack of self-control. The psychologists Were right. He washed the toothpaste from his hands and collected the ruined tube, debating for a moment the merits of pinning it to the wall with a thumbtack. But it would just make Edward roll his eyes. There would be no profit in it. Whatever irrational forces surfaced to animate inanimate things were already retreating. He could sense it. He hurried in to dress, collected a bag frill of food in the kitchen, and slipped out the back door, flinging the twisted remains of the toothpaste tube into the ivy along the rear fence before ducking into the maze shed. He peeked through into the aquarium room, toward the door, standing half open, that led to a little section of yard hidden entirely from view unless one stood within five or six feet of the rear wall. Beyond the door was an old stump, two feet high or so, positioned so that in an instant he could be out the back of the shed, onto the stump, and into the yard of the abandoned house. From there, if he were pursued, it was an easy matter to gain the street and the manhole cover that led to freedom.

He settled to it, taking time to light his pipe and put a pot of coffee on his hotplate. He chewed at yesterday’s glazed
doughnut between pipes, letting his coffee grow cold, obsessed with the findings of T. G. Hieronymous, inventor of the Hieronymous machine, laughed into obscurity by the short-sighted. But the stone that the builder refused, thought William, squinting at the page, will be the cornerstone. There was truth in that observation. The machine made sense—and good sense, too—if one forgot preconceptions. Look at the phrenologists, considered a sort of joke by modern psychology and physiology for close to a hundred years, then vindicated in one monumental swoop by the investigations of Jones and Busacca into the life of the so-called “Bay Area Lump Man.” But this was, admittedly, complex. He grappled with it for three hours, trying to link, at least theoretically, the Hieronymous machine to the principle of Dean-drive.

He sketched a diagram of a modified Hieronymous box, a metal disc on top and a circuit inside. The box, Hieronymous had insisted, would work if there were simply the
picture
of a circuit inside. It was a matter of projection, after all, not of electricity. A person would rub the disc, round and round, sensing from the resistance of the surface the state of his health. But T. G. Hieronymous hadn’t gone far enough. He was a purist, it seemed to William, a scientist of the chart and caliper variety, undeniably accurate but perhaps short on imagination, on a sense of the mystical. A mandala is what the box wanted, a copper mandala, perhaps, something that would approximate the symbolic perpetual motion of an Indian prayer wheel.

If such a device could be built and could be harnessed to a Dean-drive system, turning the rotary motion into forward motion, it could propel their craft—the diving bell. It would pull energy out of the ether. In fact, there was no reason at all to suppose it wouldn’t be capable of separating oxygen out of seawater, serving as a self-propelled oxygenator and converting hydrogen atoms to fuel—a perpetual motion engine with a double function. William could see it in his mind. It was entirely feasible. If only he had Giles Peach to consult! If Edward hadn’t lost Ashbless in the sewer … but he had.

The whole thing would make a compelling short story, miles more substantial than the relativity story, at least in terms of its scientific basis. It was a sure-fire sale. A starship would be propelled by such a device, perhaps mounted externally to take complete advantage of the sun’s rays. An astronaut, ancient
and bearded from eons of light speed travel, would lean out to rob the disc, throwing impossible sparks, propelling his ship through uncharted galaxies. There was no reason that the thing couldn’t be fitted with some sort of ratchet tongue and be made to speak, to moan out, over and over, some pressing question into the void. William could picture it. The illustration would be a blend of mysticism and science—the soaring ship, hurtling toward a pin wheel of stars, and the Hieronymous machine whirling on its rotor, itself a miniature replica of the distant nebula. And God Himself—why not?—leaning out of a cloud with a cupped hand to His mouth, shouting out an answer to the proffered question.

William snatched himself back to his sketch. There would be time enough for literature if the Earth held together in the coming weeks. It was the device that was consequential, not art. He looked at the mice, active in the cages before him, and at the bunch who had moved in with the axolotl. Only one wore a shred of clothing. But that was William’s fault, after all. They couldn’t be expected to have understood civility over-night. He’d have to keep after them.

How small, he wondered, could such a machine be built? If one applied Giles’ anti-gravity ideas to the Hieronymous machine, it might be entirely possible to equip, say, a mouse with such a device and obtain interesting results. Such was the nature of science—one thing led to another in an endless chain; links would break only to be forged anew by some intrepid pioneer, stamping in tin shoes toward the rising sun.

The door opened and Jim wandered in.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” asked William, looking at his watch.

“It’s Saturday.”

His father nodded. “Oh, so it is. Where’s Edward, still asleep?”

“No,” Jim replied, “he’s gone off to Gaviota with Professor Latzarel to work on the diving bell.”

“A waste of time. An utter waste of time without Giles. Your friend, I’m afraid, is crucial.”

Jim nodded. There was no denying that. Uncle Edward had been on the verge of remembering something vital ever since he’d chased down the ice cream truck. But nothing had surfaced.

William felt it too, as if the two of them shared some hidden
knowledge having to do with the disappearance of Ashbless into the sewer. William thought about their recent foray to kidnap Giles. He could see the bulky end of Russel Latzarel shoving out through the manhole into daylight and could hear the momentary clamor of surprised children. He could picture the look on Edward’s face as he pushed past the carpet into the cellar with the circular pool, and the rush to climb out again as the mob howled after them—to climb down three iron rings set in concrete directly opposite three others below
the second trapdoor
. William sat stock still for a moment, not daring to think, waiting to see if the sudden certainty that possessed him would evaporate. But it didn’t. That’s what Edward strove to remember—the second door in the wall of the pipe which they’d forgotten in their haste to escape. That explained the disappearance of Ashbless. Of course it did. And unless William was a complete codfish, it explained much more than that.

The tunnel led downward, spiraling into silent darkness. The light of their miner’s helmets shone out ahead, bathing the walls in a sickly yellow glow. William carried the big flashlight he’d liberated from the sanitarium, and he flipped it on from time to time to better illuminate the murky trail. An iron handrail affixed to the rock wall ran along beside them for several hundred yards, then disappeared, only to reappear farther on, rusted into a web of flaky brown metal.

It was impossible to say how deep they’d gone. In the dark silence it seemed to William that they’d been trudging along for hours. The tunnel opened out abruptly into a grotto, vast enough so that even the powerful flashlight was too feeble to illuminate the opposite side. The path narrowed, dropping off on their left into the abyss until they picked their way along what had become stone stairs, cut out of a steep rock ledge. Below could be heard the unmistakable sound of water—not of a rushing river, an underground current, but the lapping of shallow water on the stones of a beach.

William edged his way along the stairs. In his dreams he’d often found himself in just such a position—grappling to steady himself on a steep incline, starting to slide, suddenly losing all sense of balance, pitching forward and hurtling off into a chasm. Thinking about it made him sweat. Only the presence of Jim coming along behind steadied him. In his dreams he was invariably alone.

There was a foggy, musty odor in the air, the smell of stagnant seawater, of rotting kelp, of the subterranean sea of H. Frank Pince Nez. A sudden splash in the dark recesses below flattened William against the wall. “Turn off the lights,” he hissed to Jim, and without a further word all was suddenly dark. They stood still, barely breathing, and listened for anything at all.

Faintly, William could just make out the muted splash of dipping oars and the creaking of leather-banded oars in their locks. The sound grew less faint. There was the clack of wood against wood, the scrape of wood against rock, and a low curse. The prow of a little rowboat appeared magically from behind a vast, rocky outcropping that had been, until then, indistinguishable from the common darkness.

Arching out over the water was a slender bamboo pole, dangling on the end of which was a lantern that bobbed over the water and cast a light that flickered and rolled on the oily surface. A single person in a hat and coat rowed along. His destination was evident.

William was half surprised to see that it wasn’t as dark as he had supposed. Off in the distance—it was impossible to say how far—was a diffuse glow like the light of countless fireflies, quite possibly the lanterns of the sewer dwellers themselves. He and Jim hurried in dark silence down the last hundred yards of stairs as the rower in the boat disappeared behind another rock wall. The sound of his dipping oars, however, was clearly audible. In a moment the boat would slide out of the darkness, close enough so that the lamplight would illuminate the little crescent of sandy shoreline on which Jim and William found themselves.

William clicked on his flashlight for a tenth of a second, illuminating the sheer wall of dark granite that rose above them and a heap of fallen boulders that tumbled across the edge of the beach and into the water. Just as the first ripple of lantern light betrayed the arrival of the rowboat, both of them crept in behind the rocks and crouched there, watching to see who it was who was shipping the oars, humming to himself.

The boat slid into foil view, its bow scrunching up onto the sand. The lantern danced on its fragile mount, casting wild undulations of light up and down the rock walls, now illuminating the face of the cloaked rower, then throwing him into shadow. He turned half around, vanished, and was washed
in full light once more. It was William Ashbless, out rowing on the subterranean sea.