Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I’m glad we didn’t get the woman with the knife,” Kelp said. “Then I might have been a little scared. Just for a minute.”

  Dortmunder said, “Still and all. Sooner or later, they got to figure it out, every time they push that bell button, somebody starts yelling at them.”

  “But they don’t,” Wally said, “that’s why it’s animal psychology. All they know is, every time they come up here and push the bell button to see if anybody’s home, something happens that makes them all nervous and upset. So it’s conditioning. These people live kind of on the edge of their nerves anyway, so they don’t like things that make them more nervous, so after a while they stop coming up here. It’s what you call association.”

  Unwillingly, Dortmunder got the point. “You mean,” he said, “they associate coming up here with feeling nervous and upset.”

  “That’s right,” Wally said, nodding and grinning and patting his pudgy little fingers in the air.

  Kelp, rubbing his hands together in anticipation, his own recent nervousness and upset completely forgotten, said, “Well, when I come up here, what I feel is great! You been working on the old reservoir problem the last two days, Wally?”

  An odd evasiveness, almost shiftiness, appeared in Wally’s eyes and demeanor. “Kind of,” he said.

  Dortmunder became very alert. Was there a flaw here in the computer wizard? “Andy was telling me,” he said, “you probably had all kinds of ideas to show us by now.”

  “Well, we’re working on it,” Wally assured him, but still with that same indefinable sense of holding something back. “We’re working on it okay,” he said, “but it’s kind of different for us, not our… not the regular kind of stuff we do.”

  Dortmunder frowned at him; somebody else was in on this now? It was becoming a goddamn cast of thousands. “We?” he echoed. “Who’s we?”

  “Oh, the computer,” Wally said, beaming, pleased at the confusion. “We do everything together.”

  “Oh, you do?” Dortmunder smiled amiably. “What’s the computer’s name?” he asked. “Compy? Tinkerbell? Fred?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t name it,” Wally said. “That would be childish.”

  “Well,” Kelp said, “let’s see what you’ve got, Wally.”

  “Oh, sure.” Wally continued to exhibit that strange reluctance; but then he beamed around at them and said, “How about cheese and crackers? I can run—”

  “We just ate, Wally,” Kelp said. Moving toward one of the PC setups scattered around the room, he said, “This is the one, isn’t it?”

  “Well, kind of,” Wally admitted, moving reluctantly after him.

  “So let’s fire it up.”

  “Yeah,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see what the computer thinks.” He was beginning to enjoy himself.

  “You see,” Wally said, squirming a little, “the computer’s used to kind of different inputs. So, you know, some of the solutions it comes up with are pretty wild.”

  “You should see some of the stuff John’s come up with,” Kelp said, laughing. “Don’t worry about it, Wally, let’s just see what you’ve got.”

  Kelp was so absorbed in Wally and the computer that he didn’t even notice Dortmunder glare at him, so Dortmunder had to vocalize it: “Tricky, yes. Wild, no.”

  “Whatever,” Kelp said, dismissing all that, his attention focused totally on Wally as the genius butterball reluctantly settled himself at the PC. His stubby fingers stroked the keyboard, and all at once green lettering began to pour out onto the black screen of the TV from left to right. “He’s selecting the menu now,” Kelp explained to Dortmunder.

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said.

  More greenery on the screen. Kelp nodded and said, “He’s asking it to bring up the catalogue of solutions.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

  On the screen, a new set of green words appeared:

  1) LASER EVAPORATION

  “Well, I don’t think,” Wally stuttered, in obvious confusion, “we don’t have to worry about that one, we can—”

  “Wait a minute, Wally,” Kelp said. “Is that the first of the solutions? Laser evaporation?”

  “Well, yes,” Wally said, “but it’s not a good one, we should go on.”

  Kelp was apparently feeling some confusion, and potential embarrassment as well, since this was, after all, his champ at bat here. “Wally,” he said, “tell me what that means. Laser evaporation.”

  Wally looked mournfully at the words on the screen. “Well, it just means what it says,” he answered. “Evaporation, Andy, you know? Evaporating water.”

  Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I think I get it. This computer wants to get at the box by getting rid of the water. Same as Tom. Only the computer wants to evaporate it.”

  “Well,” Wally said, hunched protectively over his keyboard, “this was just the first thought it had.”

  “Take a laser,” Dortmunder went on, enjoying himself more and more, “take a very big laser and burn off all the water in the reservoir.”

  “Wally,” Kelp said. “Let’s take a look at solution number two, okay?”

  “Well, there were still problems,” Wally said. Turning to Dortmunder, he explained, “You see, John, the computer doesn’t actually live in the same world we do.”

  Dortmunder looked at him. “It doesn’t?”

  “No. It lives in the world we tell it about. It only knows what we tell it.”

  “Oh, I know about that,” Dortmunder said, nodding, looking over at Kelp, saying, “That’s that word you were using the other day, right? What was that?”

  “Guy-go,” Kelp said, looking wary.

  “That was it,” Dortmunder agreed. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

  “Well, sure,” Wally said, his defensiveness more plain than ever. “But actually, you know, sometimes garbage in isn’t garbage, depending on what you want the computer for. You tell the computer something, and sometimes it isn’t garbage, and then other times maybe it is.”

  Over Wally’s head, Dortmunder gave Kelp a superior look. Kelp caught it, shook his head, and said, “Come on, Wally, let’s see solution number two.”

  So Wally’s sausage fingers did their dance over the keyboard, and a new set of green words ribboned across the middle of the black screen:

  2) SPACESHIP FROM ZOG

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Dortmunder tried his absolute best to catch Kelp’s eye, but Kelp would have none of it. “Zog,” Dortmunder said.

  Wally cleared his throat with a sound like a chipmunk gargling. Blinking at the words on the screen, he said, “You see, there’s this story—”

  “Don’t explain,” Kelp said. He put a hand on Wally’s shoulder, part protectively, part warningly. “Wally, okay? Don’t explain.”

  But Wally couldn’t help himself: “The computer thinks it’s real.”

  “You know,” Dortmunder said, feeling that unfamiliar ache in his cheeks that probably meant he was grinning, “I’m kind of looking forward to solution number three.”

  Wally did the gargling chipmunk again. “Well,” he said, “there’s kind of a solution two-A first.”

  Kelp, sounding fatalistic, said, “Wally? You mean, something that goes along with the spaceship?”

  “Well, yeah,” Wally agreed, nodding that round brilliant silly head. “But,” he added, with a forced hopefulness, “it could have an application maybe, kind of, with some of the other solutions.”

  “Fling it at us, Wally,” Kelp said. Even his cheekbones were refusing to look at Dortmunder.

  So Wally did his keyboard dance again, and SPACESHIP FROM ZOG was swept away into oblivion, replaced by:

  2A) MAGNET

  “Magnet,” Kelp said.

  Wally swung around in his swivel chair, facing away from the computer for the first time, looking up eagerly at Kelp, saying, “But it isn’t wrong, Andy! Okay, the first idea was, the spaceship finds the treasure. Or whatever finds the treasure. But then the magnet attaches t
o it, and you pull it up out of the water.”

  “Wally,” Kelp said gently, “what we figure, roughly figuring, the treasure weighs somewhere between four hundred and six hundred pounds. That’s gotta be a pretty big magnet you’re talking about.”

  “Well, sure,” Wally said. “That’s what we thought.”

  “You get it the same place you got the spaceship,” Dortmunder told Kelp.

  Wally swiveled around to look up at Dortmunder, his expression earnest, moist eyes straining to be understood. “It doesn’t have to be a spaceship, John,” he said. “Like, a submarine, you know, a submarine’s just like a spaceship.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Dortmunder admitted.

  “Or a boat,” Wally said. “Once you find the treasure, you know exactly where it is, you can lower the magnet, pull the treasure up.”

  “Yeah, but, you know,” Dortmunder said, more gently than he’d intended (it wasn’t easy to be hard-edged or sardonic when gazing down into that round guileless face), “you know, uh, Wally, part of the problem here is, we don’t want anybody to see us. You put a boat, a big boat with a big magnet, out on the reservoir, they’re just gonna see you, Wally. I mean, they really are.”

  “Not at night,” Wally pointed out. “You could do it at night. And,” he said more eagerly, getting into the swing of it, “it doesn’t matter about it being dark, because it’s going to be dark down at the bottom of the reservoir anyway.”

  “And that’s also true,” Dortmunder agreed. He looked over Wally’s soft head at Kelp’s grimacing face. Kelp seemed to be undergoing various emotional upheavals over there. “We’ll do it at night,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, benignly.

  “Wally,” Kelp said, desperation showing around the edges, “show us solution number three, Wally. Please?”

  “Okay,” Wally said, eager to be of help. Turning right back to his computer, he tickled the keyboard once more, and away went 2A) MAGNET. In its place appeared:

  3) PING-PONG BALLS

  Kelp sighed audibly. “Oh, Wally,” he said.

  “Well, wait a minute,” Dortmunder told him. “That’s not a bad one.”

  Kelp stared at him. “It isn’t?”

  “No, it isn’t. I get the idea of that one,” Dortmunder said, and explained, “That’s like one of the things in that book I brought back from the library, that Marine Salvage book. Of course, I only read a little of the book on the subway coming home, before Andy said let’s go see what you have on all this.”

  Kelp said, “John? Ping-Pong balls are in the book?”

  “Not exactly,” Dortmunder admitted. “But it led me to the same kind of thought. There’s sunken ships where to get them up they fill them with polyurethane foam or polystyrene granules, and it’s really just plastic bubbles of air taking the place of all the water inside the ship—”

  “That’s right!” Wally said. He was so excited at the idea of actual brain-to-brain contact with another human being at this level that he positively bounced in his chair. “And what is a Ping-Pong ball?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s just a ball of air, isn’t it? Enclosed in a thin, almost weightless skin of plastic!”

  “It’s a way to get a lot of air down to the ship in a hurry without a lot of trouble,” Dortmunder went on, explaining it all to Kelp. “So I was thinking, maybe you could fire them down through a length of hose.”

  Kelp stared at his old friend. “John? This is your kind of solution?”

  “Well, no, because the problem is,” Dortmunder said, and looked down at Wally’s gently perspiring face, “the problem is, Wally, this isn’t a ship. It’s a closed box, and if we open it to put the Ping-Pong balls in, we’re gonna get water in there and spoil all the, uh, treasure.”

  “Well, that’s solution three-A,” Wally said, and his fingers played a riff on the keyboard, and now the screen said:

  3A) PLASTIC BAG

  “Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. “That makes sense. We’re down there, somehow, probably in our spaceship, and we find this six-hundred-pound box and we dig it up, probably with our giant magnet, and then we put it in our giant plastic bag, and then we fill that with Ping-Pong balls, and it just floats right to the surface. Easy.”

  “Well, kind of,” Wally said, his feet shuffling around among the casters of his swivel chair. “There’s still some bugs to be ironed out.”

  “Some bugs,” Dortmunder echoed.

  “Wally,” Kelp said desperately, “show us solution number four.”

  “Well, Andy, there isn’t one,” Wally said, swiveling slowly in Kelp’s direction.

  Kelp looked aghast. “There isn’t one?”

  “Not yet,” Wally amended. “But we’re working on it. We’re not finished yet.”

  “That’s okay,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it. This has been a very educational experience.”

  Kelp looked warily at Dortmunder to see if he was trying to be sardonic. “Educational?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said. “It clears up my thinking a lot, between tricky and simple. I know which way I’m going now.” Patting Wally’s soft shoulder—it felt like patting a mozzarella cheese—Dortmunder said, “You’ve been a great help, Wally. Just like Andy said.”

  FIFTEEN

  “ Walk in?” Kelp demanded.

  They were at that moment strolling through Paragon Sporting Goods, on Broadway and 18th Street, heading for the underwater department up on the second floor. “That’s the simplest way I can think of,” Dortmunder answered, as they trotted up the wide steps. “And, after that little song and dance from your pal and his computer—”

  “Wally was a great disappointment to me,” Kelp said. “I must admit it. But still, the original model he did was something terrific.”

  They reached the second floor and turned right. “Wally’s a great model maker,” Dortmunder agreed. “But when it comes to plans, just like I was telling you from the beginning, I don’t need help from machines.”

  “Sure you don’t, John,” Kelp said. “But just to walk in? Are you sure?”

  “What could be simpler?” Dortmunder asked him. “We put on underwater stuff so we can breathe down there. We get a flashlight and a shovel and a long rope, and we go to the edge of the reservoir and we walk in. We walk downhill until we come to the town, and we find the library, and we dig up the box, and we tie the rope to it. Then we walk back uphill, right along the rope, and when we come out on dry land we pick up the other end of the rope and we pull. Simple.”

  “I don’t know, John,” Kelp said. “Walking down fifty feet under water never struck me as exactly simple.”

  “It’s simpler than spaceships from Zog,” Dortmunder said, and stopped. “Here we are.”

  There they were. For reasons best known to management, the underwater equipment at Paragon is upstairs; top floor, off to the right of the wide staircase. When Dortmunder and Kelp walked into this section and stopped and just stood there, looking around, they did not at first glance seem as though they belonged here. At second glance, they definitely didn’t belong, not in this department, not in this store, probably not even on this block. One was tall, stoop-shouldered, pessimistic, walking with a shuffling nonathletic jail-yard gait, while the other was shorter, narrower, looking like the sort of bird that became extinct because it wouldn’t ever learn to fly.

  The flightless bird said, “So what are we looking for?”

  “Help,” said the pessimist, and turned around to see a healthy young woman approaching with many questions evident on her face.

  The one she chose to begin with was, “Looking for anything in particular, gentlemen?”

  “Yeah,” Dortmunder told her. “We wanna go underwater.”

  She studied them with doubt. “You do?”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Why not?”

  “No reason,” she said, with a too-bright smile. “Have you gentlemen ever done any diving before?”


  “Diving?” Dortmunder echoed.

  “You are talking about diving, aren’t you?” the girl asked.

  “Going underwater,” Dortmunder repeated, and even made a little parting-the-waves gesture to make things clearer: putting the backs of his hands together, then sweeping them out to the sides.

  “In the ocean,” the girl said dubiously.

  “Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “In a kind of lake. But still, you know, under. In it.”

  “Freshwater diving,” the girl said, smiling with pleasure that they were communicating after all.

  “Walking,” Kelp said. Sticking his oar in, as it were.

  So much for communication. Looking helplessly at Kelp, the girl said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’re not gonna jump in it,” Kelp explained. “Not diving, walking. We’re gonna walk in it.”

  “Oh,” she said, and smiled with great healthy delight, saying, “That makes no difference, not with the equipment.” Turning slightly, to include Dortmunder in her smile, she said, “I take it you gentlemen haven’t gone in for diving before.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” Dortmunder told her.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Where are you taking your instruction?”

  “Instruction?” Kelp said, but Dortmunder talked over him, saying, “At the lake.”

  “And what equipment will you be needing?”

  “Everything,” Dortmunder said.

  That surprised her again. “Everything? Won’t you be able to rent anything at all from the pro?”

  “No, it don’t work that way at this particular lake,” Dortmunder said. “Anyway, right now we’re just looking to see what we’ll need, what kinda equipment and all.”

  “Tanks and air and all that,” Kelp added, and pointed toward a number of scuba tanks displayed on the wall behind the glass counter full of regulators and goggles and waterproof flashlights.

  The girl lost her smile for good. Frowning from Dortmunder to Kelp and back, she said, “I’m not sure what you gentlemen are up to, but it isn’t diving.”