The Digging Leviathan (5 page)

William slumped back into the green armchair, sweating and pale. Squires was overcome. Professor Latzarel, surprised at seeing William there in the first place, was dumbfounded.

“A masterpiece!” said Ashbless, white-haired and wild and leaning against the mantel, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“I haven’t written it yet,” said William. “But when I can get the damned keys of my typewriter cleaned out, I’m going to start in. What do you think, Roy? Will it hold up? The science is sound; I’m certain of that, and it will be a long necessary collision of art and natural law. You’ve read C.P. Snow’s
Two Cultures?”

“No,” Squires put in. “But I’ve just finished Bertrand Russell’s book on relativity theory. I’ll recommend it to you ….”

But he hadn’t a chance to finish before William slammed his hand onto the arm of the chair enthusiastically and leaped up to open a fresh bottle of port. In celebration, he said. He’d try the story on
Analog
, who would, he insisted, appreciate the scientific accuracy. And off he dashed to the pantry for a corkscrew.

Roycroft Squires looked up at Edward St. Ives, who
shrugged. “I’m certain,” said Squires, “that William is years ahead of his time.”

Ashbless said there was little doubt of it, and Squires glanced at Edward again and winked. Ashbless was lost in thought.

“See here,” said Professor Latzarel after clearing his throat monumentally. “All this literary talk is very fine, but the Newtonians are a scientific discussion group, and I for one am anxious for Mr. Ashbless to give us the account of the polar expedition for the benefit of Mr. Spekowsky here from the
Times
and Dr. Orville Lassen from the
Journal of Amphibiana
.” Two men, one in glasses and a string tie—Mr. Spekowsky, apparently a reporter—and another in an enormous orange sweater and khaki pants—Dr. Lassen from the University. Both men nodded. Spekowsky, frowning, said, “I believe that the gentleman who has just left knew little about physics. Mass, if I’m not very much mistaken …” William Ashbless interrupted him saying, “No, but he knows about the mysteries. Everything he says is accurate. The world doesn’t care about your watery little definitions.” Spekowsky fell silent. William wandered back in, just then, filling glasses with newly opened port and giving Jim and Giles, who sat respectfully and silently in the corner on a pair of kitchen chairs, a little liqueur glass each, half full of the purple wine.

“I’m given to understand,” said Spekowsky in a voice full of doubt, “that you gentlemen made something of a discovery some years ago which is suddenly newsworthy. I can’t at all follow it.”

Ashbless snorted contemptuously.

Conversation settled. William collapsed into his green chair, still lost in the fever of inspiration, and puffed steadily on his pipe. Ashbless, who was the only one among them beside Latzarel who had been at the pole, swirled the liquid in his glass in a tight little circle, watching it race around the inside. Edward understood that he was summoning his powers of memory and art in order to give string-tied Spekowsky his money’s worth.

“Peach was there,” Ashbless said as a sort of cryptic preface. “I’m not sure any of you know what that means yet. You will though.” Then his eye wandered past Giles, who had sunk into his corner in a drowsy reverie. It was impossible to say that he’d even heard the poet’s peculiar reference to his father. Ashbless frowned and continued:

‘This was in 1954, mind you. Ten years ago. The Pinion expedition to the South Pole. The frozen cave bear chipped out of a wall of ice six hundred miles below Tierra del Fuego by Pinion’s bearers made something of a sensation. It’s in a refrigerated vault beneath the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles. Any of us can have a look at it. It’s fairly unremarkable except for its original location. Pinion’s bode,
Hole in the Ground
, and the entire revised hollow Earth theory trade on the discoveries of Admiral Byrd at the Pole and on the cave bear—circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Pinion is remarkably adept at passing off others’ discoveries as his own. He’s one of those self-important people who are always dredging up evidence to demonstrate their own cleverness.”

Ashbless rummaged in his coat pocket and hauled out a yellowed newspaper clipping from the
Times
. “Road to the Center of the Earth?” the heading read, “Cave Bear at South Pole.” The article reported other peculiarities found by the Pinion/Latzarel party: clumps of leafy twigs, a pale orange tulip suspended in a shard of ice, the tip of a stone spear imbedded in the frozen flesh of a prehistoric bird.

Ashbless cast the clipping onto the tabletop with a gesture of
contempt, not stooping to pick it up when it slid across onto the floor. William picked it up and carried it across to Spekowsky who himself dropped the clipping onto the top of a smoking stand, not bothering to look at it.

“What can’t be shoved into a museum vault,” Ashbless continued, “was discovered by myself, Professor Latzarel, and Basil Peach while Pinion and his party were chasing down the rumored sighting by Indians of a live wooly mammoth some fifty miles to the east—a practical joke, I don’t doubt. We camped for the space of four nights on an ice field above a tiny warm water lake, steaming deep in a natural depression in the ice—a hot spring, believe it or not, on the Ellsworth Highland. There was a network of caverns and caves running off through the ice below us, little of which we had time to explore. One branch, however, which we followed, opened after some four hundred feet onto a little rocky bay on the shore of a subterranean lake. It was the only access. The walls of the tunnel were lit somehow, perhaps by sunlight glowing through the transparent ice above. And trapped within the ice, hundreds of feet beneath the surface, were the fossil remains of ancient beasts. We could just make out the ivory curve of what must have been an enormous ribcage—the skeleton of a mastodon—encased in clear ice a half mile away. And above the tunnel, just below the point where it led out onto the shore of the lake, were the wing and head of a perfectly preserved pterodactyl in frozen flight, peering down out of the blue crystal, the other half of him, like the dark side of the moon, lost forever in a swirl of opaque white.

“Pinion never saw a bit of this, mind you. The whole network of tunnels collapsed in an earthquake days before he and his fools returned from their goose chase with some faked up plaster-of-Paris casts of footprints.”

Spekowsky gave Lassen a meaningful look. Ashbless didn’t hesitate.

“Two of our party—Fuegan Indians—vanished one evening as they fished in the waters of that pool. Basil Peach was in the caves at the time and was surprised by a third Indian tearing up the tunnel screaming and gibbering about monsters—a great reptilian head that had lurched up out of the lake and swallowed his companions. Peach himself swore that beneath the ice of the tunnel floor he saw the flippered shadow of some great saurian, some Mesozoic amphibian, humping up toward
the surface, then disappearing again into the shadowed depths, as if the ice tunnels ran along above a vast subterranean sea of which the little lake was only the tip. Nothing remained of the Fuegans but a smear of blood and one of their hats made of llama fur that floated on the surface of the water.

‘The following evening, Professor Latzarel and Basil Peach themselves witnessed the surfacing of a vast marine turtle, a beast the size of an automobile. It too slid away into the depths of the Earth.”

“Hocus pocus!” shouted Spekowsky, unable to contain himself any longer. His companion, however, was perched on the edge of his chair, his mouth open. Ashbless shrugged. The door opened and Phillip Mays, the aurelian, hunched in, weighted down with a cardboard carton full of liquor. A clove cigarette sputtered in his mouth.

Jim was relieved to see him. He was always relieved to see him if only because Mays seemed so predictable. The edge of impending doom and insanity which sharpened his dealings with everyone else, even his father—particularly his father—was absent in Mays. And at the same time he was undeniably eccentric, a trait which Jim held in high esteem. Mays was always off on adventures, although he didn’t at all look like the adventurous type, squinty as he was and with an overslept look about him. He was off to the Amazon after a rumored violet moth the size of a small bird one month, then scaling the Himalayas the next, scouring little clumps of high altitude tundra for tiny belemnite butterflies that could mimic in miniature perfection their resting place: a wild lilac, a granite slab on a hillside, a blade of grass, a human face. His house reeked of camphor, and on the wall of his study, pinned with an epee to green plaster, was a butterfly the size of a heron, netted in Colombia by Indians and worshipped before being traded to Mays for a five-dollar gold piece, a cigarette lighter, and a penlight with a miniature painting of the Santa Monica pier in the tip, which you could just make out by aiming the thing into the sun and screwing your eye, so to speak, into a little porthole in the end, then waiting for a moment to sort out palm trees from eyelashes. Mays had a case of the things. He never went into the jungle without a half dozen in his satchel and had given one to Jim at the second meeting of the Newtonians.

“Ah, Phil,” Uncle Edward cried when the door swung open.

“Let me introduce you to Mr. Spekowsky and Dr. Lassen.”

Spekowsky shook his hand with the air of a man suspicious of deviltry while Mays juggled his cardboard box between his free hand and his knee. Dr. Lassen scribbled notes into a little red spiral binder, oblivious to the proffered introduction.

“We’ve been discussing Professor Latzarel’s discoveries at the South Pole,” said Edward. “Perhaps you can acquaint Mr. Spekowsky here with the strange nature of the tropical fish that the two of you brought back.”

Mays said he was happy to. He had with him, in fact, not only photographs of the specimen in question, but an actual pickled fish, revolving slowly in a tiny formaldehyde sea held in a sealed glass jar. ‘The preserved fish, about two inches long, was a gray and pale shadow of the fish in the photograph, Latzarel’s Rio Jari tetra.

“So you’re telling me,” Spekowsky asked after Mays had carried on for a bit, “that specimens of this fish were caught both in the alleged South Pole pool and at the mouth of this South American river?”

‘That’s correct. A coincidence which is, on the face of it, impossible.”

“And this coincidence is supposed to convince me that the Earth is hollow. That wooly mammoths and Neanderthals and such are poking around beneath us at this moment?”

Giles Peach was transfixed, his eyes big as plates.

“We didn’t mention Neanderthal men,” said Professor Latzarel in the interest of scientific accuracy. “But, yes, we do consider this fairly substantial evidence.”

Spekowsky guffawed, but was quite obviously caught up in the game. “Sounds like evidence of continental drift.” He looked once again at the photograph of the fish. It had a splayed tail of iridescent pink that deepened to lavender and pale blue, then back to pink again round its gills. If its fins were clipped off it might quite easily be mistaken for an Easter egg by a far-sighted person.

“Look,” said William Ashbless, suddenly flaring up and running a huge hand through his white hair, “we’re wasting our time here. What do we care for the press? By God, we’ve seen things at the Pole that
this—this—journalist
can’t imagine. Are we asking the likes of him to authenticate our discoveries with an ill-written article on the last page of the
Times?
Far be it from me to applaud John Pinion, but by God, Pinion is a man
of action. He’ll be there before us, gentlemen, mark me. All of this talk is getting us nothing but headaches!”

Spekowsky, feeling himself slandered, straightened his tie, threw his coat over his shoulder and marched out, laughing dramatically. Edward St. Ives, waving the skeleton hand from the tidepool, carried on vainly about recent discoveries and about their anticipated excursion in the diving bell, but Spekowsky had had enough. The door slammed, the room fell silent, and Jim waited for Professor Latzarel to explode, as he surely would, at William Ashbless.

“Sometimes,” Latzarel said, breaking the short silence, “I wonder whose side you’re on.”

“Russ!” cried Ashbless. “We need this Spekowsky like we need a leaky boat.”

“He was just coming round. We’d have had him. And now, of course, not only is he not for us, he’s against us. I can imagine the article he
will
write.”

“Speaking of articles,” said Dr. Lassen suddenly, coming up, as it were, out of his reverie. “I have this recent clipping from the Massachusetts
Tribune
that might interest you.” And he produced a square of cardboard with an L-shaped clipping glued to it. “Giant Squid Found on Massachusetts Shore!” shouted the caption. The article, some two hundred fifty words long, described the monster thus: “The giant squid, not unlike the one battled by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s classic, was forty-four feet long and had to be carried from the beach on a flatcar.” The creature had been dissected by scientists at Woods Hole, and in its stomach, along with the ancient, rotted figurehead from a long-ruined sailing ship, and a pair of brass pliers encased in verdigris and closed around a tooth, was the half-digested neck and torso of a human being. At least they thought it was a human being. They couldn’t be sure; digestive fluids had ruined it, and there was one strange, unaccountable confusion: the thing in the squid’s stomach appeared to have been gilled—amphibious. The article didn’t call it a merman, but the implication was obvious. The squid and its inhabitant were bound for Boston for further study.

Jim heard his uncle read the story through a growing mist, as if he were falling asleep with his eyes open. Giles Peach sat next to him, not apparently listening, but staring, his mouth half open, out the dark window at the branch of a low bush that
thrashed against the glass in the wind. It seemed to Jim suddenly that for the past moments he’d been drifting, or perhaps sinking, into a watery sleep. And off in the periphery of his vision, where he could just see them, as if they were creeping up out of a dream, were waving tendrils of kelp floating lazily in the sunlit depths of a submarine grotto. The light was diminishing and the room falling into shadow. His uncle’s voice, droning on about the enormous squid and its merman, slipped I through obscurity toward silence, as if Jim were on the edge of I sleep, sailing across the threshold of dreams. Giles Peach sat still and silent, the line of gills along his neck undulating softly I and rhythmically. A seaweed curtain closed around Jim, a I green and lacy wonder of kelp snails and starfish and dark dens in rock reefs from which shone the luminous eyes of waiting fish.