The Digging Leviathan (9 page)

Jim peered out of the front window at the street. Mrs. Pembly skulked along on the sidewalk, pretending to inspect a little bed of begonias. She was obviously watching the house. Jim’s blood raced.
Was
she in league with Frosticos, with Pinion? She wandered along the sidewalk and peered down the driveway, oblivious to being spied on. It was the diving bell she was watching. Jim turned to Giles who sat silent as a heap of stones in the green chair, looking dismal.

“Well what about that,” said Jim, affecting a smirk. “That took care of old Pinion nut, didn’t it?”

He intended the remark to carry a tone of bravado, but he, was immediately sorry for it when he saw Giles’ reaction. He shook himself out of his heap, slammed a hand onto the arm of the chair, and tried to speak. “P … p … p … poor Pinion!” he stuttered out. Then he said, “Oscar!” with such a startling hiss that Jim spun around, expecting to see Oscar himself standing behind him. Giles shook his head. His mouth trembled. It seemed to Jim that Gill had something terrible to say, something horrific, something that, finally, couldn’t be uttered. Gill stood up abruptly, walked past Jim without a word, and slammed out the back door. The sight of the diving bell arrested him, however, and in seconds his anger appeared to have evaporated, replaced by scientific curiosity. He stood with his hands in his pockets gaping at the machine. Jim wandered out behind him.

The diving bell itself, borrowed by Professor Latzarel from the Gaviota Oceanographic Laboratory, was round as a ball. It was almost an antique. Hoses led away out of it into great coils, and in a ring around the bell, within the upper one third or so, were a line of portholes riveted shut. There was a hatch at the top, screwed down with what looked like an immense brass valve. The whole thing was etched with corrosion and flaked with blue-green verdigris. It looked to Jim like something out of Jules Verne.

Roycroft Squires fiddled with the air hoses, running down the length of them, inch by inch, looking for leaks, perhaps. He nodded at Jim, paused, and scratched at a little bump on the hose.

“Weak spot?” asked Jim.

“Not really,” said Squires, resuming his inspection. “Just a lump of rubber.” He glanced back up at Jim. “You look pale. Feeling okay?”

Jim wiped sweat off his nose, certain for one impossible moment that Squires had seen through him, had somehow worked out that he and Oscar had just beaten up John Pinion. “I’m fine,” Jim said. “Really. It’s this wind. Makes me feel sticky.”

“It’s positive ions that does it. Make people act crazy. The local Indians used to throw themselves into the sea when the Santa Ana blew.”

“With any luck we’ll do the same,” shouted Latzarel from within the bell. He grinned out at Jim. The inch-thick glass of the porthole blew his face up like a balloon.

“I’ve been thinking of buying a bicycle,” Jim said idly.

Squires took a pull at a half empty bottle of beer. “Mmmm?” he said.

“You know anything about bicycles?”

“Not a bit, actually. I’m not much on bicycles.”

“I could have sworn I saw you ride past not too long ago.” Jim pretended to rub at the brass wall of the diving bell.

“Not on a bicycle you didn’t. I haven’t ridden one in forty years. Treacherous things. The last one I had lost its chain every sixty or eighty feet.”

Jim said he must have been mistaken and let the matter chop. Squires’ assurance hadn’t done anything to solve the riddle.

Giles Peach had scrambled onto the bell and was peering in at Latzarel. “What is the purpose of these hoses?” asked Giles.

“Air and pressure,” said Latzarel. “Red one’s air; black one’s pressure.”

Gill nodded as if he’d known what they were all along, and then he sniffed and scratched his ear, screwing up his face a little with the look of someone at once condescending and a bit amazed at the inadequacy of the devices. “Fairly primitive,” he said—a statement which, under the circumstances, irritated Jim unspeakably.

“It gets the job done,” Latzarel assured him.

Giles squeezed at the air hose. “Wouldn’t an oxygenator be more efficient?” Then without waiting for an answer, he poked his head in to have a look at the controls. “No motivators?”

“None whatsoever.”

“You’re limited, then, by the length of the hoses?”

“That’s correct,” said Latzarel, humming to himself.

“How deep will she go?”

“Two hundred fifty feet, in a pinch. Deep enough to take some soundings. If I’m not mistaken, though, we shouldn’t have to go too deep on this run. The walls of the pool are probably littered with artifacts. I’d stake my reputation on it. John Pinion’s fishing in the wrong hole.” Latzarel laughed, satisfied with the pun.

At the mention of Pinion, Giles looked suddenly saddened. Jim couldn’t fathom it. Pinion was so slimy.

“Speaking of Pinion,” Latzarel continued, “how are you getting along with your device? Your subterranean prospector.”

Giles shrugged.

“Get that perpetual motion engine of yours working yet?” Latzarel winked through the porthole at Jim.

“I believe so,” said Giles. “I needed a part that I couldn’t find. But just this afternoon I saw one in a junk store up on Colorado.” He paused for a moment then said; “Oscar Pall-check thought it was a nasal irrigator.” He’d meant the remark as a comment on Oscar’s stupidity and coarseness, Jim was sure of that, but Gill turned immediately red, embarrassed at his own coarseness in simply having said it.

Professor Latzarel chuckled. “A nasal irrigator, eh? And you need this for your machine?” He laughed out loud.

“Well it wasn’t, really. It was a relay attached to a vapor box, but Oscar …”

“Vapor!” said Latzarel, punching at a brass toggle switch on the control panel. “A vapo
rizer
, you mean. Your friend was right. It
was
a nasal irrigator.” Then Latzarel straightened up, held the index finger of his right hand in the air, and uttered profoundly, “A nose is a nose, is a nose, is a nose,” and then blew his own so monumentally into a checked handkerchief that the diving bell rang with the blast. Latzarel laughed hugely, beside himself. He shoved up through the hatch and repeated the gag for Edward’s benefit, telling him that if William were there, with his literature background and all, it would break him up.

It didn’t seem to break Gill up much at all. In fact he shook his head sadly and fell silent, staring toward the distant mountains outlined against a blue, late afternoon sky, the dying wind blowing his lank blond hair up out of his face. Five minutes
later he had slipped away unseen without uttering another word. Jim had the illogical feeling that Professor Latzarel would do well to be less cavalier with Giles, who didn’t half understand humor. The idea of Oscar’s nasal irrigator being part of a perpetual motion engine was foolish enough, but
Gill
wasn’t foolish—crazy, perhaps, but not foolish. And there was the matter of Hasbro’s car, a phenomenon that Uncle Edward had written off as a figment. He’d been concerned, there was no doubting that, but his concern had the same worried look about it that surfaced when William Hastings made one of his intermittent visits home.

“Can you beat this?” cried Uncle Edward on Saturday morning, nearly choking on his coffee. Jim looked up from his bock:
The Abominations of Fu Manchu
. His mother had never allowed turn to read at the table, but Uncle Edward hadn’t any objections. Edward slapped his newspaper with the back of his hand. “John Pinion was accosted and beaten by a gang of toughs not three blocks from here Thursday afternoon! Hospitalized!”

Jim laid his book on the table and swallowed some milk. “Hurt bad?”

“No, more’s the pity,” said Uncle Edward, shaking his head. “Knocked the wind out of him, apparently. A bystander rushed him down to Glendale General but they let him go an hour later. Apparently he didn’t know his assailants.” Uncle Edward paused and raised his coffee cup, his eyes darting back and forth across the column. Jim sighed deeply and picked up
Fu Manchu.

“Ha!” cried Edward. “Listen to this! No wonder he didn’t know his assailants! He was dressed as an ice cream vendor. And he had a tricked-up panel truck with a bell and speaker that played ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep.’ That’s who it is! By God!” Edward dropped the paper and lunged at the phone, dialing Professor Latzarel’s number. “Listen,” he said into the phone.

“Don’t talk, listen. Do you recall my mentioning an ice cream truck that hung about on the road? Yes. Well, you won’t believe this. Pinion’s up to some deviltry, and you can lay to it.”

And he read Latzarel the article from one end to the other. Witnesses, apparently, had seen Pinion attempting to lure three boys into his ice cream truck, performing some sort of song
and dance for their amusement. But the boys wouldn’t have any of it, and one, a hulking fellow in a tiny red t-shirt, punched Pinion in the abdomen. The three youths fled west on Hubbard Street.

“They suspect Pinion of being a pervert! Can you imagine?” Edward paused, listened, and nodded grimly. “More than meets the eye. That’s just what I was saying to myself. Something’s up.” Then he looked across at Jim who was hiding behind his open book, the cover of which depicted a bearded Fu. Manchu, a pink mushroom, and a plump, alien-looking scorpion all caught up in a sort of wind devil. “I’ll call you back,” said Edward. ‘To heck with it; I’ll see you in an hour at the docks.”

Uncle Edward cleared his throat meaningfully. Jim looked up, knowing what was coming. “Doesn’t Oscar wear a red t-shirt?”

“Yes, mostly.”

“Didn’t he have one on Thursday afternoon?”

“I guess.”

Edward nodded. “Care to tell me about it? This may be important. It
has
to be. What’s Pinion up to? That’s what I want to know. He wasn’t trying to lure you into his truck, was he?”

“Not me, that’s for sure. I think he was after Giles ….” And with that, Jim related the whole incident—how he’d tried to call Oscar off, and how Pinion had seemed ready to kidnap Gill, and how Oscar, seeing Pinion go for Giles, had punched him one and the lot of them had run for it, knowing things would go hard for them, having assaulted a polar explorer and all. Already waist deep in his story, Jim went on to describe Pinion’s earlier conversation with Gill and the argument with Velma Peach. He stopped short of any mention of the flying bicycle, assuming that the story would throw a cloud of implausibility and doubt over the entire confession—perhaps deepen the suspicions that had been awakened in Uncle Edward by Jim’s recounting of the Hasbro’s Metropolitan incident.

Edward listened intently, but admitted, finally, to being every bit as confused as he had been before. That Pinion was planning some phenomenon there could be no doubt. But why he had such evident interest in Giles, beyond his scientific curiosity at Giles’ abnormalities, was a mystery. He was still pondering and speculating as they drove out the Harbor Freeway an hour later toward San Pedro.

Except for the rhythmic heaving of the ground swell, the ocean was still. Six-inch wind waves lapped against the shore at low tide, and the faint remnants of the Santa Ana winds—little, willowy offshore breezes—mussed Jim’s hair, from time to time as he munched black licorice on the foredeck of the
Gerhardi
Roycroft Squires’ old fishing boat. The boat itself was of peculiar shape—vastly wider in the bow than in the stern, and Jim, understanding nothing of boats, could make little of the strange shape, although it appealed to him: It seemed to be a nautical cousin of his uncle’s Hudson Wasp. The cabin had a sort of humped and globular look to it which reminded him of the sweep of a tiny, almost round Airstream trailer. The boat seemed to have been built by someone with a lively imagination, and it was an altogether fitting companion to the diving bell perched in the stern.

In the sunlight glowing off the surface of the sea, the hull of the bell sparkled like an immense jewel—a running together of sapphire and emerald and gold. Rays of reflected light played off the polished glass ports, regularly bathing the lone watcher on the shore in bright sweeps of luminescence as the
Gerhardi
rose and sank on the swell.

William Ashbless sat on the beach. He shaded his eyes against the glare and tinkered with a little ship-to-shore radio seemingly charged with static. The voice of Professor Latzarel popped in and out: “Testing, testing, testing …” a half a dozen times at odd intervals. Then he counted a bit for good measure, never getting much past four. Latzarel was
apparently happy with the results, however, for it occurred to him to tell a joke by way of further testing the apparatus. Ashbless had a contempt for jokes of all types, especially Latzarel’s. “It seems,” said Professor Latzarel launching out in one of the six standard introductory clauses, “there was an ape who ordered a beer in a pub off Pier Street in Long Beach. The ape handed the bartender a ten … “A burst of static flooded out of the radio. Ashbless cranked away at the volume dial, cutting both the static and Latzarel’s voice which was buried in it. Ashbless could just hear what sounded like “tub ubba hill,” but of course couldn’t be. The radio
screed
loudly, then fell silent. A burst of laughter leapt out. Ashbless cursed. He’d missed the punchline of Latzarel’s stupid damn joke, apparently. But then it became evident that he hadn’t. It had been anticipatory laughter instead.

“So the bartender, see, thinks to himself, ‘What do apes know about money?’” Unable to contain himself, Latzarel giggled into the radio, which abruptly went dead. Ashbless slammed a hand onto the top of his set. There was a static-laden pause of twenty or thirty seconds before Latzaiel’s voice poked in: ‘Testing,” he said. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Ashbless croaked into the machine. “What about the filthy ape?”

“Right,” said Latzarel, giggling. “I’ve got to ask Edward something about the punchline.” The radio fell silent.

Ashbless poked at a switch, twisted a dial, and whistled into the receiver, hoping to irritate Latzarel. He watched Roycroft Squires, who stood on the port bow idly smoking his pipe, gazing out to sea. Twenty miles out beyond the swaying
Gerhardi
rose the shadowy cliffs of Santa Catalina island, shrouded in sea mist. As the boat listed to starboard, Squires, puffing on his pipe, disappeared behind the bulk of the rising cabin while the southern tip of the distant island seemed to rise skyward behind him. Then as the boat rolled down the backside of the swell, Squires puffed himself up from beyond the cabin, little clouds of tobacco smoke rising over his head, and the tip of the island vanishing momentarily, then rising again almost hypnotically some few seconds later as Squires descended once again beyond the cabin. Ashbless was almost lulled to sleep in the warm air, suddenly free of radio noise and silent but for the cry of a wheeling gull. He could easily have convinced himself that the rocking boat, the puffing Squires,
and the misty cliffs of the transmarine island were parts of a cyclical, fabulous machine laboring to an unheard rhythm carried on the late morning breeze.