A man can’t be pushed that far, thought William.
“Discretion is the better part of valor,” said a tiny, irritating voice.
“Discretion! Don’t talk to me about discretion. And I hate cliché. Look at that! He’s jarred my angel wing! Those green stalks can’t take that kind of abuse. The butcher!”
William raged around the room. The tiny Edward vanished. And just as well for him. This was an affair of honor. The white glove had been cast long ago, and it was time for William to pluck it up and slap Yamoto silly with it. The old lady too. Their villainy had reached new heights the past night.
But William was shrewd. He thought of his lesson with the toothpaste tube. Slow and easy, that was his way now. Yamoto would be at it for an hour at least. There was time for preparation. He routed out an old backpack and hauled it into the kitchen, shoving in a package of saltines. A can of peaches followed along with a can opener. He found part of a bag of Oreo cookies in the cupboard and put that in, then added a half dozen little cardboard cartons of raisins, an apple, and a piece of salami.
He dug out a one-quart canteen and filled it with water, found a flashlight—not quite the bone crusher he was used to, but heavy enough in his hand to lend him a certain contempt for the casual villain—and finally the third of the army-navy store miner’s helmets. It belonged to Russel Latzarel, but he would understand. He wouldn’t need it aboard the diving bell anyway. William set the stuffed backpack, the canteen, and the miner’s helmet by the back door. Then, considering, he fetched the copy of Pince Nez, a compass, and one of the little penlights he’d gotten from Phillip Mays. He stuffed the lot of it into his pack, slipped out through the maze shed, and dumped them over the fence into the back yard of the vacant Koontz house. He might, after all, be moving quickly.
The preparations gave him a sense of urgency. Ready for anything, that’s how they’d find him. He’d tackle Yamoto now. He could hear the roar of his mower. It would be best not to simply charge out and confront the wily gardener. That had been his mistake the last time, when he’d been defeated by a garden hose. There must be a way to vindicate himself now, not only in his own eyes, but in the eyes of the law. It could easily come to that. It was odds-on that it would. And if it did, some link between Yamoto and Frosticos would go a long way toward justifying his own actions, his escapes from the sanitarium. Paranoia, after all, ceases to be paranoia in the light of revealed evidence. Edward would agree with him there.
William slipped out onto the front porch, flattening himself against the wall of the house that enclosed the end of the porch. He peeked around the corner of it. Yamoto chased his mower across the lawn. He jerked around in a tight little turn and headed back. William ducked away, waiting. As soon as Yamoto reversed direction again, William was off, scampering across the lawn toward the pickup truck. He was safely hidden by the fender when Yamoto reversed again, and in the next instant he was clambering into the cab, as quietly as he could, throwing himself fiat on his back atop the seat.
He breathed hoarsely, out of fear rather than exertion, and ran his hand along under the seat. There were nothing but springs. He had no idea what he hoped to discover. A walkie-talkie? A gun? A medical bag? His hand closed on a book. He hauled it out It was written in Oriental characters. William couldn’t tell which end was which. He tossed it to the floor in disgust. ‘Then why can’t he talk like a man,” he muttered, quoting Huckleberry Finn, and popped open the glove box. An avalanche of debris cascaded out onto the floor. He shoved his hand in and swept out the rest: cigarettes, hard candy, street-maps, napkins, little plastic containers of mustard and ketchup, a fountain pen, another book, nuts and bolts. Nothing, though, that really sewed the case up. Nothing damning, as the lawyer would say. Nothing but a little wooden box, carved, it seemed, out of rosewood—in the figure of a goldfish, bent in the middle like the yin half of a yin and yang. William popped the top off. There were pills inside, Bayer aspirin, from the look of them. William touched his tongue to one. It was bitter.
Of course they would look like aspirin. In an organization of the magnitude of Han Koi’s it would be a simple enough business to press morphine and heroin into false aspirin tablets. And the goldfish—a dead giveaway. It would mean nothing, of course, to the casual observer. But to William, to someone with knowledge of the arcana, the machinations of the world by the clever Han Koi. … William shoved it into his pocket.
He raised himself onto his elbows and looked back over his shoulder at the house. Yamoto cut on, oblivious. William laughed. Damn it! he thought to himself. If only he’d brought a potato to jam into Yamoto’s exhaust pipe. He’d wait in the bushes, watching. Yamoto would try to start the truck. Nothing would happen. He’d crawl down out of the cab, scratching his head, and open the hood. The engine would tell him nothing. It would leer at him. Puzzled, he’d creep around, peering under the truck, wiggling things, chattering. Mrs. Pembly would come out with her arms folded and commiserate. Both, of course, would harbor suspicions, fears. They’d look around in vain. Was William Hastings about? Had he been coming and going like a ghost in the night? Had it been he who had destroyed the plan to penetrate the Earth?
Mrs. Pembly would shake her head. Yamoto would crouch on his hands and knees at the rear of the truck, staring in horror at the business end of a potato stuffed up his exhaust pipe, thwarting the flow of necessary vapors, stopping utterly the workings of the engine. He’d poke at it. Mrs. Pembly would marvel, perplexed, asking him why on Earth? Then both would stop. There’d be a rustling in the bushes behind them. William Hastings would step out, smiling, wearing a suit and tie. He’d bow, inquire after the health of the dog. Suggest modifications in the sling and harness affair in the tree. They’d be dumbstruck, Yamoto holding the potato like a fool, Mrs. Pembly falling back at the sight of him. “Aspirin?” he’d ask, holding out the incriminating box. Yamoto would pale.
William giggled, thinking about it. If he hurried, he might still have time to pull it off. He stared at the fabric stretched across the ceiling of the cab. There seemed to be a million little holes in it, all in uniform lines. It was just possible, though, that they weren’t holes, that they were little dots painted on.
“Aspirin?” asked William aloud, canting his head and widening his eyes.
An unimaginable scream jammed him against the seat—a short, violent scream like the scream of a man in mortal terror. William sprang up, slamming his head into the ceiling. Yamoto, his mouth working, stared in at him through the open window, gibbering, looking as if he’d seen his own corpse in a bush.
“Hah!” shouted William after his initial surprise. He waved the rosewood goldfish at him. “So this is your game? Heroin, morphine? What is it? What do you know of Han Koi?”
Yamoto stumbled backward, waving his open palms before him in a sort of ritualistic dance. William reached for the dashboard to steady himself, found Yamoto’s book, and pitched it out the window. He could think of nothing else to do with it. The same was true for the debris on the floor. William picked up a handful and tossed it out onto the lawn, furious. They’d see who it was they’d run afoul of. He pushed open the door and shoveled the rest into the gutter. Mrs. Pembly was on the porch. If she had any sense, she’d stay there.
Yamoto ran toward his tools. So it was that way. He’d been spooked by William’s knowledge of the pills in the box. This wasn’t ten-cent bets on baseball games anymore. Yamoto was desperate. William climbed out of the cab and into the bed of the truck. He tripped over a bamboo rake. The bastard. He cursed at it, stomping the little bent fingers of the thing. He picked it and sailed it into the bushes like a spear. Yamoto waved his hoe menacingly. William laughed aloud, dumping a gunnysack full of grass clippings out onto the road and rolling a power edger out after it down the lowered tailgate, the red and yellow machine clanging to the street on its side and lying there dead. William shouted at it. Then he shouted at Yamoto, who, he could see, was keeping his distance. He leaped off the truck onto the parkway,
stumbled, and clambered to his feet again before Yamoto had a chance to be on him with the hoe.
He advanced toward the porch. Yamoto was a gibbering wreck. It was Mrs. Pembly who now most desperately required comeuppance. “Do you think,” shouted William, waving his arm, “that I know nothing of your little game with the dog?”
Mrs. Pembly shot into the house like a rocket, slamming the door. She reappeared at the window. William made a hash of one of her begonias while Yamoto protested loudly and incoherently. William stomped another. “Keep your filthy dog off my lawn!” he shouted. The speeches he’d rehearsed in past weeks were taking flight in the face of his rage. He yanked a third begonia out by the roots, tore it to bits, and flung it at Yamoto, then stomped another into scrap.
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 cou
ldn’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.
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