The Digging Leviathan (36 page)

He was tiring out. There was no profit in flattening begonias. It wouldn’t accomplish a thing. He was suddenly at a loss. Things hadn’t gone at all well. Edward had been right all along and there was no denying it. But he had the rosewood box. That’s what frightened Yamoto so. You could see it in his eyes—a desperation. He needed that box. William hopped across into his own yard. “I’ll be back!” he cried, although it sounded weak to him. Not the note of severity the situation required. He nipped into the maze shed and over the fence, grabbing his backpack and canteen and slamming the miner’s helmet onto his head. Five minutes later he was climbing down iron rungs into the sewer, unpursued.

* * *

By the time Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel drove up in the flatbed with the diving bell perched weirdly on its bronze feet, the police had come and gone twice. They’d questioned Jim. He’d been at school and knew nothing. There was evidence, they insisted, that William Hastings had broken into the empty house behind, that he’d been living there for days. Jim hadn’t heard anything about it. His father, he had been sure, was in northern California, living among the redwoods. The police weren’t interested. They’d found hamburger wrappers in the Koontz house, and a counter boy at Pete’s Blue Chip had recognized a photo of William Hastings. They’d done some neat detective work, to be sure.

But William Hastings was gone—into the sewers, likely. He thought of himself, they said, as some sort of Swamp Fox, a Robin Hood, suffering under the delusion that he fought a cloudy and nebulous world threat.

An article in the
Times
the following morning referred to the incident in humorous tones, capitalizing on William’s adventures and on his associations with Russel Latzarel, the diving bell pilot, who also sought the center of the Earth. John Pinion’s recent fiasco was mentioned. They’d received a letter from Hastings, written very coherently and elegantly on blank endpapers torn from an old book. The strange missive, detailing a plot to explode the world, had been rolled into a little cylinder and shoved up through a manhole cover directly in front of the
Times
office. Subsequent searches of the sewer by police yielded nothing. Hastings had wisped away like smoke.

There were accusations in the letter against a prominent local psychiatrist, talk of great subterranean lakes sailed by opium smugglers in Chinese junks. Mermen lived in the dark waters in homes made of ancient sunken sloops and galleons, all of which, in some imponderable way, were linked to the submarine boneyard recently discovered by abalone fishermen, to the sighting of an elasmosaurus by Professor Russel Latzarel in an oceanic trench off Palos Verdes, and to a mysterious flying submarine seen from the tip of Catalina Island. The
Times
was cheering for Hastings. He was, after all, harmless. What had he done beyond ruining a half dozen begonias in a neighbor’s flowerbed? And as for slugging a man with a heavy flashlight—Hastings had included with the letter a photocopied order for a pull-frontal lobotomy to be accomplished in the
very sanitarium he’d fled from weeks past. His doctor, lately and coincidentally implicated in the John Pinion sewer imbroglio, was being sought for questioning.

Edward’s first thought was to lament the letter. But as he read the article through a second time, his attitude slowly changed. William, it was clear, had gone a long way toward turning himself into something of a local hero. It had been a shrewd step. Admittedly he’d never be taken seriously again, but then even without the letter he was on the edge of that particular fate.

And who was to say that it wasn’t publicity Frosticos feared most? Han Koi certainly couldn’t afford it. Perhaps Yamoto
was
in league with the doctor. Edward had coolly agreed to paying for repairs to his equipment and to the restoring of Mrs. Pembly’s begonias. There was nothing to be gained in expanding the feud. Far better to deflate it. But the Pemblys were putting the house up for sale and moving away. They’d had enough of William’s shenanigans. And Edward was no better. As far as she could see they were all peas in a pod.

In the end Edward determined to take William at his word, for bettor or for worse. His brother-in-law had, after all, become in some ways the most strangely coherent of the lot of them. And when all was said and done, if he’d been pressed, Edward couldn’t have begun to explain where those randomly appearing dog droppings
were
coming from. If it turned out that Giles Peach had equipped a neighborhood dog with anti-gravity, it would hardly have surprised him.

So William had a copy of the timetable in his wallet. Giles insisted that the schedule was crucial. They’d cast off at the nadir of the low tide, an impressive negative six feet. Squires could just get the tug into position if there wasn’t a swell running. And all reports predicted calm and tranquil seas. Why they needed a low tide, Edward couldn’t at all understand. Giles said it had to do with the effect of pressures on the Hieronymous machine and the Dean-drive system. If they’d wanted to go the other direction—to fly—they’d need a high tide. It was a matter of particle physics and of ray propulsion. Edward took his word for it. They’d launch tomorrow at three o’clock sharp. William would either be there or he wouldn’t. It was simple as that. The time had come.

Edward awoke that night, wondering what it was, exactly, that he’d heard. It had been a banging, a gunshot, perhaps, or a
car’s backfiring. That and the jangling of an abruptly stifled bell. He sat in bed, the sleep draining from his brain, then tiptoed down the hallway. The noise, he was sure, had come from outside, so there was no real need to carry the unsheathed saber that he clutched in his hand, but like William’s flashlight, it gave him a feeling of invulnerability.

A white truck was parked at the curb. A shadowy face peered out of the cab, watching the house. It was John Pinion. Latzarel had been afraid that Pinion would snap—that his unsought trip down the sewer pipe would break him. They’d all, said Latzarel, have to look sharp. Edward flipped on the porch light. The truck rumbled to life, died, was rekindled, and jerked away down the road. Edward turned the light off and went back to bed, wondering what in the world it was that Pinion was up to. If he was looking to sabotage the diving bell, he was sadly out of luck. It was locked in Roycroft Squires’ garage. Professor Latzarel and Giles Peach guarded it, and Edward suspected that if Giles intended the bell to be safe, then the bell would be safe.

The phone rang at eight o’clock in the morning. Edward was lying in bed, thinking about the voyage. He felt as if he were moving, perhaps to a foreign country, a country in which he wouldn’t be able to communicate, where they drove cars on the wrong side of the road or upside down. He was struck with the immense foolhardiness of their scheme. They were entrusting their lives to Giles Peach. There was no denying his powers, but at the same time there was no denying his eccentricity, his peculiar impenetrable surface calm. It seemed to Edward to be a big mistake to take Jim along. They could endanger their own lives if they chose, but not Jim’s. He’d spoken to William about it and William had spoken to Jim. The result of all the speaking was that Jim was going. Giles, after all, got to go. Giles was going with or without them. Well, thought Edward, lying on his back, life was full of risk. For the first two hundred feet they’d be tethered to the
Gerhardi
. If Giles’ devices were in order, they’d cut loose and descend. If they weren’t, Squires would hoist them out. But this last seemed impossible to Edward. He couldn’t envision life beyond that afternoon, not life on the surface anyway. His entire existence had been funneled into the journey.

It was William Ashbless on the telephone. He was jovial—regretted that be hadn’t seen Edward since Catalina. He’d been
morose on the trip, not his usual self. It was a matter of artistic temperament. He’d hiked off into the hills and meditated on pine nuts and berries for a few days.

“We saw you take off in the submarine,” said Edward flatly, stretching the truth a bit. “And we’ve spoken to Basil Peach about your trying to extort favors out of him for the safe return of his son. You’ve sold all of us out one way or another. Go back to bed.”

“I sold no one!” Ashbless called into the phone before Edward had a chance to hang up. “Who was it smuggled the copy of
Analog
into Giles? Who was it put the idea into his head of throwing in with William and you? Who was it revealed the treachery against Reginald Peach? I’m a poet, an artist, and always have been. I understood that William saw more clearly than the rest of them added up, and that’s what I told young Peach. If William hadn’t gone in after him, I would have. Why do you think I wasn’t aboard the leviathan?”

“Because,” said Edward tiredly, “you knew it wouldn’t go anywhere without Giles. You’ve known about Giles’ powers longer than the rest of us. I’d bet on that. You’ve just been waiting to see which of us would get hold of them in the end. Well,
we
have, and there’s no room for passengers.”

“Wait!” shouted Ashbless into the phone as Edward hung up. There was no time to wait. It took a little under an hour to get the last bits of gear together and lock the house up. Once, at around 9:30, Edward was certain he heard the jangling of bells on an ice cream truck, but he could see nothing on the street. Jim was sure, shortly thereafter, that he’d seen a head peering over the back wall. He thought at first that it was his father, but a search minutes later revealed nothing.

By eleven the four of them were piloting the flatbed truck along the Pasadena Freeway. Roycroft Squires followed along behind in his little Austin Healey, which neither flew nor drove at light speed, thanks to his cheerfully refusing Giles’ offer to customize it. He’d been tempted, but in the end he couldn’t think of anywhere he had to go that quickly.

Edward watched the side mirrors for the sign of a pursuing truck. As far as he could tell there was none. He kept his suspicions from Giles, not knowing exactly how Giles would react to the mention of John Pinion. Most of all, Edward wanted to avoid Giles’ turning the Pasadena Freeway into a tidepool. The less oddball activity they involved themselves in,
the better, especially when they were a bare four hours away from the launch. And besides, there was no sign of John Pinion. It had quite likely, thought Edward, been his imagination.

But almost as soon as he’d convinced himself, they crossed under Pasadena Avenue and Edward glimpsed a white panel truck just pulling onto the freeway behind them. In a moment it was out of sight in traffic. Edward didn’t know whether to speed up and lose it, or to slow down and identify it. So he did neither, but simply drove on apace, catching sight of it again as they crossed Lomita Boulevard into Wilmington.

Latzarel, he was fairly sure, had become aware of his apprehension, for he watched the mirror incessantly, and once, just before the Harbor Freeway ended at the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island, Latzarel gave him a questioning look, raising his eyebrows. Edward shrugged. Giles sat impassive, lost in himself. Jim read a copy of
Savage Pellucidar
, toning up for the journey. When they hauled the bell up to the dock alongside Squires’ tug, there was no sign of a white truck.

Living in the sewers wasn’t all it might he. William’s fascination with himself as a phantom Robin Hood evaporated as it became clear that, at least for the moment, no one was chasing him. No one, for all he knew, cared a bit about him. It was unlikely that they’d launched a manhunt as a result of his treading on Mrs. Pembly’s begonias. And it was fearsomely dark in the sewers. The light afforded by occasional street drains didn’t illuminate the underground tunnels for more than a few murky feet. With his headlamp and flashlight off, he was enclosed by such utter darkness that he felt as if he were walled up—in a coffin, perhaps, or had met the fate of an Edgar Allan Poe villain, bricked into a cellar. The idea of spending the night and most of the next day in the darkness, listening to the scuffling of rats, imagining the slow dragging swish of an impossible serpent, began to weigh on him.

He followed the map of Pince Nez, trudging up Colorado and into the foothills toward uncharted streets that he knew to be under construction. Not two miles from home he discovered a manhole cover in an undeveloped cul de sac—nothing around but weedy vacant lots stickered with little surveying stakes. He pushed up out of the manhole, caught a bus on Colorado to downtown Los Angeles, and spent the declining afternoon at Olvera Street eating enchiladas and writing a letter to the
Times
on pages ripped from the log of Pince Nez.

But he was jumpy. Every policeman was a threat. Idle looks of passersby were filled with manufactured suspicion. He found himself refusing a table near a window and insisting on
one against a wall by a rear exit, remembering advice from a gangster movie he’d seen involving a hoodlum gunned down through a restaurant window from a passing car. He spent half an hour searching for a manhole in the area, and found one finally across from Union Station, too far away from his beer and enchiladas to do him any good in a crisis. In the end, however, there was no crisis, and he slipped into the sewer around four-thirty, making his way to the
Times
building to deliver his letter—his apologia—to the fingers of fate.

He certainly couldn’t simply barge in and declare himself to be William Hastings, so he shoved the rolled letter through a manhole cover and fled, surfacing again late in the evening to buy flashlight batteries and a sleeping bag, toying with the idea of spending the night in the woods—such as they were—that covered one of the little unused triangular acres at the confusion of interchanges involving the Santa Ana, Santa Monica, Pomona, and Long Beach freeways.

But the plan fell through when he was hailed by a slow-moving squad car on Spring Street and was forced to go to ground once again in the sewers, not knowing whether he’d been recognized or whether the police had simply been suspicious of his miner’s helmet and sleeping bag.