Authors: Donald Westlake
“You free this afternoon?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I thought I’d come over, uh, we could talk, uh, about things.”
“Oh, sure!”
“See you in a while.”
“Oh, sure!”
What could it be? Turning off the random–scream alarm, Wally wondered again for the thousandth time what John might want to come here to discuss. It had been so long since he’d heard from John, or from Andy, or from
anybody,
that he’d begun to wonder if maybe they’d gone ahead and finished their adventure without him.
Was that possible? What about the princess, the warlord’s daughter? He had only met the princess once; Myrtle Jimson, Wally could see her now in his mind’s eye, clear as anything, though in his imagination she did seem to be wearing a high lacy headdress and some sort of long gown out of King Arthur’s court. But he had rescued her from no one and nothing, in fact, and there’d been no follow–through at all. His relationships with the warlord and the soldier and the rest were barely into chapter one. Could it all have ended, just like that? Could the entire caravan have moved on, leaving him alone in this oasis?
His doubts had increased with the passage of time, even though the computer had constantly reassured him:
The story cannot end until the hero is satisfied.
Which was all well and good, assuming their postulates were correct.
What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not the hero?
Then there is no story.
Wally had begun to think that perhaps the computer didn’t entirely understand the way reality works, and seismic disturbances of disbelief had just begun to shake his compact little universe, when lo and behold, John
phoned!
Fortunately, computers don’t say, “I told you so.”
The upstairs bell rang, and Wally hurried to open it, surprised to see John by himself out there. Looking around the landing, Wally said, “Isn’t Andy with you?”
“Well, no,” John said. He seemed ill at ease, less sure of himself than usual. “It’s just me,” he said. “Andy doesn’t know about it. I come over to, uh, talk it over with you.”
“Come in, come in,” Wally urged him. “I’ve got cheese and crackers.”
“That’s nice,” John said neutrally, nodding at the plate on the coffee table.
Wally shut the door, gestured John to the comfortable chair, and said, “Would you like a beer?”
“As a matter of fact,” John said, “yes.”
“Gee, you know, I think I would, too,” Wally told him, and hurried to the kitchen to get two cans of beer. When he returned, John was seated in the chair Wally had indicated, gloomily eating cheese and crackers. Wally gave him his beer and sat alertly on the sofa, waiting.
John squinted through his eyebrows in Wally’s direction. For some reason, be seemed to be having trouble looking straight at him. “Well,” he said, “we’re still trying to get that box up out of the reservoir.”
“The treasure,” Wally said.
“Tom really wants that money,” John said.
“Well, sure, I guess he would,” Wally agreed.
“He wants to blow up the dam,” John said.
Wally nodded, considering that. “I guess that would work,” he said. “Only, how does he plan to channel the water?”
“He doesn’t,” John said.
Wally’s wet eyes widened: “But doesn’t he know about the towns? A lot of people live down there! John, we have to tell him about —”
“He knows,” John said.
Wally looked at John’s grim face.
The warlord has no pity.
Wally whispered, “Would Tom really do that?”
“He’d’ve done it already,” John said, “only I talked him into letting me have one more crack at it.”
Suddenly John did look straight at Wally, and in that instant Wally understood just how difficult it had been for John to come here to ask for help. That’s why he’s here, Wally thought, with a sudden thrill. He’s here to ask for help! To ask
me
for help! Wally blinked, his mouth sagging open at his sense of the importance of this moment.
John said, “May moved up there. Dudson Center. See, I quit, I couldn’t do it anymore, so that’s what she did.”
Horrified, Wally said, “Tom wouldn’t blow up the dam with Miss
May
there!”
“Tom would blow up the dam with the Virgin Mary there,” John said.
“Then we have to
get
that treasure!” Wally cried, bouncing around on the sofa in his agitation. “Before he does it!”
“That’s the situation,” John agreed. “And here’s the rest of the situation. Andy and I went down in that reservoir twice, and that’s twice too much. I can’t do it again. Just take my word for it, I can’t. So it has to be something else. There’s gotta be a way to get the money up
out
of there without
me
going down
in
there.”
Wally nodded, trying to think but still overcome by the wonder of it. John came to
me!
“But what?” he asked, caught up in the story.
“I don’t
know,
” John told him, putting his beer can down so he could actually wring his hands. “I thought and I thought and I thought, and I just don’t come up with a thing. I shot my bolt on this one, Wally, there’s nothing left. I’m not finding anything because I can’t get myself even to
think
about that place. And Tom won’t wait much longer.”
“No, I guess not.” Wally felt very solemn at this moment. John leaned toward him. “So here’s the idea.”
“Yes? Yes?” Wally’s damp face gleamed with excitement.
“Our half of the caper,” John explained, “the profit for everybody except Tom, is three hundred fifty grand.”
“That’s a
lot!
”
“Not when you start cutting it up,” John told him. “But it’s still
some,
and those of us in it split it even, all the way down. If we manage, that is, to keep Tom from double–crossing us and getting it all.”
Wally nodded. “He’d do that, wouldn’t he?”
“Nothing else would even occur to him,” John said. “Okay. The way it stands now, there’s four of us in it: Me, Andy Kelp, Tiny Bulcher, and a driver named Stan Murch that you don’t know.” John cleared his throat, hesitated, seemed on the point of flight, then blurted forward, saying, “You come up with the way, Wally, you’re a partner.”
“A partner? Me?”
“You,” John agreed. “That makes it seventy grand for each of us, including you.”
“Wow!”
“But you gotta come up with something,” John told him. “
One
of us has gotta come up with something, and I just don’t think it’s gonna be me. Not anymore.”
Wally, excitement bubbling in him like chocolate fudge just on the boil, jumped to his feet, saying, “Let’s see what the computer has to say!”
John looked displeased. “Do we have to?”
“The computer is very smart, John,” Wally said. “Let’s just see.”
So John shrugged, and they both went over to have a chat with the computer, Wally in his usual swivel chair, John standing beside him.
“First,” Wally said, “let’s bring up the model we did of the valley, with the reservoir in, and ask the computer to show us different ways to blow up the dam. Maybe in one of them, the water could be channeled down the valley away from all the towns and things.”
“I don’t see it,” John said.
“Let’s just find out.” Wally sent his little fat fingers flying over the keys, and up on the screen came a side view of the valley, heavy with rich blue, trailing away to green dotted with brown and black; the brown and black dots were towns.
John touched the screen over one of the brown dots. “That’s where May is.”
“Now we’ll see,” Wally said, and proceeded to drown Miss May and a lot of other people seven times in a row. Every single time, the blue area would at first tremble, and then it would spread and suddenly swell, obliterating every last one of the black and brown dots.
After the seventh time, John said, “No more, Wally, no more. I can’t take it.”
“You’re right,” Wally agreed. “There just isn’t any safe way to send all that water downstream. Not all at once.”
“That’s the way dynamite works, though,” John pointed out. “All at once.”
“Let me explain the situation to the computer once more,” Wally said, “and see if it comes up with anything new.”
“Just so we don’t have any more of that killer blue.”
So Wally asked his question, and after a brief pause the computer responded with its green–lettered series of suggestions, crawling slowly up the screen. Wally and John watched, neither saying a word until it was finished, and then John said, quietly, “This computer really has a thing for Zog, doesn’t it?”
Wally cleared his throat. “I don’t have the heart to tell it Zog isn’t real,” he admitted.
“Wally,” John said, “I don’t know that I’m getting anywhere here. I thought I’d come over and talk to a person, but I’m here talking to a machine that thinks a planet called Zog is a real place.”
“You’re right,” Wally said, abruptly ashamed of himself. He felt now as though he’d been using the computer for a crutch, that he was hiding behind it. John had come here for help, and Wally had run straight to his computer. That’s not the way to treat people, Wally told himself, and he reached out to hit the power button, shutting the computer down. Then, standing, turning, he said, “I’m sorry, John, that’s just a bad habit. I
always
talk things over with the computer. I don’t know why.”
“Yeah, I always talk things over with May,” John told him, “but there comes a time when you got to make your own decision.”
“I’m going to,” Wally said. The excitement he felt now was different from before, more tremulous and frightening. He was going to be on his own! In the
real world!
“Let’s talk it over some more, John,” he said, “just the two of us. Not the computer at all.”
“Good.”
So they sat around the cheese and crackers, ignoring them, and John told him about the way he and Andy had learned how to do underwater things from a fellow on Long Island, and how they’d tried once to walk into the reservoir and once to drive in, and how the reservoir almost drowned them both times, and all about the turbidity and the flotation power of Ping–Pong balls, and after about twenty minutes Wally said, “Gee, John, why don’t you ask that guy on Long Island?”
John blinked. “Ask him what?”
“He’s a professional diver, John,” Wally said. “And you told me you went to him because he already does some things that aren’t absolutely legal.”
John shrugged. “So?”
“So I realize,” Wally said, “that would mean there were six of us to share the money now, instead of five, but that would still be about sixty thousand dollars each, and —”
“Wait a minute wait a minute,” John said, rearing back. “Bring
Doug
aboard, you mean.”
“Is that his name? Yes, sure, bring Doug aboard. Wouldn’t
he
know how to go down into the reservoir and get the box?”
John looked at Wally without speaking for quite a long time. Then he sat back, shook his head, and said, “You know why
I
didn’t think of that?”
“Well, no,” Wally admitted.
“Because,” John said, “whatever it is I’m doing, I’m used to it
I’m
the one does it. I figure out how and I do it. I get people to help, but that’s
help,
that isn’t to do it
instead
of me.”
Wally wasn’t sure he understood. “Do you mean,” he asked carefully, “it would be like against your principles or something to have somebody else do things instead of you?”