On the following afternoon the bell sat once again on its flatbed truck on the driveway. William Ashbless and Edward St. Ives watched Professor Latzarel tinker with it.
“Nitrogen narcosis,” said Edward after a long silence. “Or maybe oxygen poisoning, or exhaust in the air line.”
“It had to be something like that.” Ashbless ran a broad hand through his lank white hair. “I thought you’d gone haywire at first. All that business about squids. I thought it was one of Russel’s jokes.”
‘This was no joke,” Latzarel assured him, whacking away at the ruined foot of the bell with a lead hammer. “Hand me those pliers. The needlenose.”
Edward left off polishing the salt off the ports and handed the pliers across.
“Look at this!” cried Latzarel after a moment of prodding with the pliers. “Haywire is it? Nitrogen narcosis! Rapture of the bleeding deep! Call Spekowsky! Call the museum!” And amid his shouting he shoved out from under the bell, gripping in his pliers a white triangle that looked to Edward at first to be a chip of plastic.
“What do you make of that?” he asked triumphantly. And he held aloft a faintly curved, almost conical tooth, sheared off at a length of nearly two inches. “It was jammed into a crack behind the foot. I almost missed it. Rapture of the stinking deep!”
“Shark’s tooth?” Ashbless offered skeptically.
Latzarel gave him a dramatically tired and pitying look. “I don’t know anything about King Lear,” he said. “But I’ll take your word for it. I do know about that damned monster. Both of us saw it. It was no hallucination. This came from the mouth of a giant plesiosaur, and you can take my word for it. Damn!” he shouted, slamming his free hand against the hull of the bell.
“I wish to God we could have gone back after that tusk.”
Edward nodded, examining the piece of tooth. “We need a better craft. We’ll never get to where we’re bound in this. You don’t suppose that Giles Peach is onto something with all his talk about oxygenators and pressure regulators?”
“And anti-gravity? And perpetual motion? Giles Peach reads too many science fiction novels.” Latzarel shook his head. “No, I think we’ve got to get this tooth to the right people. We’ll outfit an expedition. A newer diving bell, a bathyscaphe. We’ll need funding, but this ought to do the trick.” He tossed the tooth into the air, flipping it like a coin and letting it drop back into his open palm.
Edward started to say something, but hadn’t gotten anything out when the whump of a newspaper hitting the driveway sounded behind him, and the newspaper itself skidded into his foot. He and Latzarel grabbed for it at the same moment, both of them anticipating a possible article by Spekowsky. Their attention, however, was arrested at the bottom of the front page. Oscar Pallcheck’s body had been hauled out of the La Brea tar pits.
What it was doing there, no one could say. It had sunk in particularly viscous tar, and if it weren’t for the single shoe lying atop the black ooze — a shoe that turned out to have a foot in it — the body would quite likely have remained entombed, sunk to some Mesozoic layer in the well of tar until future excavation uncovered it. It appeared at first as if he’d been the victim of some peculiar disease — his skin, particularly the skin on his head and neck, was scaled; he was almost entirely hairless, and his eyelids were oddly transparent. His incongruous resting place, however, argued foul play, unless he’d thrown himself in — an unlikely thing altogether. An autopsy revealed little. Some sort of investigation was in the offing. It had been discovered that Oscar was one of the three boys accosted by John Pinion in the parking lot of the van and storage yard a few days earlier. Pinion, a renowned polar explorer and anthropologist, had been questioned regarding the tar pit incident and released on his own recognizance.
“Pinion is it!” gasped Edward. “What do you make of it?”
“Nothing,” said Latzarel.
Ashbless snatched the dangling Times out of Edward’s hand and reread the article, squinting shrewdly. “I don’t believe Pinion has the first thing to do with this. He’s entirely innocent. I’ll bet on it. The truth here is a devil of a lot stranger than it appears.”
“It always is,” came a voice from behind them, and William Hastings, haggard and hunted and wearing an inconceivable mustache and Van Dyke beard, bent out of the shadows of the bushes at the corner of the back yard.
Chapter 8
“Did you get my letter?” William asked Edward, not stopping to shake hands first.
“Why no. No, Í didn’t. When did you mail it?”
“A week ago. Those bastards must have opened it.” He slumped against the truck frame and paused for a moment, catching his breath. He nodded to Ashbless and to Latzarel, who was jiggling his dinosaur tooth nervously in his cupped hands, his mind an arcade of spinning gears and flywheels and blinking lights. William’s sudden appearance hadn’t settled any issues.
“Why did they open it?” Edward asked in a tone he hoped would provide an element of rationality while obscuring doubt. It was best to be safe.
William shook his head a bit, as if asking for breathing space. Then very calmly and deliberately he said: “They’re going to destroy the world. Blow it up.”
“Whatever for?” cried Edward, genuinely aghast.
“Because they’re sons of bitches,” said William.
Ashbless handed Edward his newspapers with a barely disguised rolling of his eyes. “Good to see you, old man,” he said to William, nodding. “Keep your pecker up. We won’t let them explode the world. Leastways not until I’ve had a drink. See you all later.” And he touched a finger to his forehead as a parting gesture and strode away down the driveway. His car engine started up and roared off.
“Condescending twit,” muttered William, pulling off his mustache and beard. “I half believe he’s one of them. Hurried away because he didn’t want to be found out.”
William, about then, realized what he was leaning against and caught sight of the diving bell. His face fell. “You’ve gone without me,” he said despondently, as if he had known all along it would come to that.
“The tide,” said Edward weakly. “And it was only a preliminary run. We’ve got evidence that will rock the scientific world.”
Latzarel handed William the tooth and related the elasmosaurus business in detail, coloring it with the wooly mammoth tusk. William squinted and nodded, absently poking the false little pointy beard back onto his chin, then forgetting about it and leaving it dangling sideways while he had a look at the newspaper account of Oscar’s demise. Edward couldn’t keep his eyes off the beard. It was like a crooked picture, and he itched to be at it. “Uh, the beard, William,” he said finally, emboldened by his suspicion that the canted disguise would appear to the casual passerby to be evidence of eccentricity.
“What? Oh, yes,” said William, and he pulled the thing off again, pressing it onto his coat pocket for safekeeping.
“Spekowsky!” shouted Latzarel. “We’ve forgotten Spekowsky.” And he yanked out the science page, finding, almost at once, half a column regarding the voyage of the diving bell. “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the caption read, and there followed an article describing a “preposterous tidepool excursion by Russel Latzarel” that was launched with an eye toward reaching the Earth’s core in a leaky diving bell on the end of a two hundred foot line. Reports of sea serpents and elephants were later attributed to nitrogen narcosis, the article read, and then apologized for having reported on the incident at all, claiming to have done so only out of scientific curiosity and thoroughness.