“Seen?” asked Edward in mock surprise. “Nothing. I hauled you out of the bushes. To be absolutely truthful, you seem to have suffered some sort of collapse. It was touch and go there for a moment. Put the fear right into me.”
“Something put the fear right into you, all right, but it wasn’t any fit of mine. Did you see what I saw?”
“No,” said Edward.
“How do you know? You haven’t any idea what in the devil I saw. I remember more than you suppose. Do you recall your squid tentacle at the Newtonians? Of course you do. You suppose I was too occupied with that false gardener to remember your mentioning it. But that’s not my way. Did you see more tentacles today? Is that it?”
“Of a sort,” said Edward, attempting to tamp his pipe with his finger. He jerked his hand back and shouted with surprise and pain, looking accusingly at his finger. “It seemed to me for a moment, since you press me, that the landscape had become …” His voice trailed off.
“Aquatic,” William said.
‘That’s right. In a nut. I don’t understand it at all.”
“Neither do I.” William fumbled in his pocket for his own tobacco pouch. “I’ll just have a dab of port with this pipe. Join me?”
“Please,” said Edward.
“I’m beginning to see things clearly,” said William when both of them had settled into their chairs and were sipping at their port. Edward grimaced inwardly, as he did whenever William made such pronouncements. This time it was a halfhearted grimace, however, a grimace tempered by his own remembrance of Frosticos’ van, admittedly glimpsed through the distorting arc of one of the porthole windows after Edward had climbed into the diving bell so as to spy more securely on the doctor. It had, for an imponderable second, seemed to him to be a great fish, or the ghost of a great fish, lazing on the surface of a dark sea. He hadn’t been able to shake the vision out of his eyes. And for a long moment he was certain that the diving bell was settling into the blackness of a great oceanic trench, sounding toward unfathomable depths. But the hallucination passed, and there was William, tossing himself through the shrimp plants, hashing up bamboo, flailing against the wall of the house.
“You know I’ve an interest in physics,” said William, breaking into Edward’s reverie.
“What?” said Edward, startled. “Oh, quite. The fat man in the rocket and all. Did you write the story yet?”
“Yes, in fact I did. I sent it off to Analog. It’s just their meat, I believe. But that’s immaterial. What I’m talking about here isn’t fiction.” William shook his head in quick little jerks to emphasize his point. He peered into the bowl of his pipe, then jabbed the stem in Edward’s direction. “This leviathan. I don’t like it. Not a bit. I’m half convinced it will be the end of everything. Can you imagine the pressures built up within the interior of the Earth?”
Edward widened his eyes appropriately, but admitted to himself that he couldn’t. “Pressures? How about the polar openings?”
“What polar openings? Have you seen them? Has Pinion? For my money the polar openings are suboceanic, like your tidepool. No, sir. There’s pressure enough in there to blow this planet to kingdom come. I’m certain of it.” He tamped for a bit at his pipe, then inspected the sediment on the bottom of his glass. “I had a very strange dream not a week back. A dream, I say. Not like what happened this afternoon. That was no dream. I’m sure of it now. But as I say, a week ago I had an odd one. Giles Peach figured in it, as did his machine — his mechanical mole. It burrowed into the Earth — I haven’t any idea who drove it; it wasn’t Peach — somewhere in the desert. Near Palm Springs, I believe it was. Any number of people on hand. It was like a circus. Banners waving, trumpets blowing — like the grand opening of the Tower of Babel. That’s how it struck me. Giles Peach stood on a sort of platform above the hole, watching his device eat its way into the Earth, straight down toward the hollow core. He had the most amazing suit on. A clatch of dignitaries, mostly fat ones, clustered around him waving ribbons and clamoring to make speeches. But the lot of them fell silent when the mole approached its destination.
“The Earth heaved and there was a distant muffled explosion somewhere far below. Giles Peach peeked over the railing, staring into the open shaft. He dropped a stone the size of an egg into it like a boy might drop a rock into a well to judge its depth. A blast of wind whooshed out, carrying on it the very stone Giles had let fall, and the stone struck him in the forehead ….”
“It did?” asked Edward incredulously. “You dreamed this?”
“Yes,” William uttered, half put out at the interruption. “But that’s the least of it. There followed on the wind, on this vast exhalation of pressure, a rush of extinct beasts — mastodons, stegasauri, triceratops — that rained down onto the desert floor as if they’d come back to the surface to claim a lost land.”
“What happened to Peach?” asked Edward.
“Dead as a mackerel,” said William. “It was the stone that did it. What do you think?”
“I suppose the stone could have killed him,” said Edward, pondering. “If it hit him hard enough, anyway.”
“Not that. What do you think about the dream. I’m certain it’s prophetic.”
Edward blinked at him. “Undeniably. At least it seems so to me. I’m not much on prophecy, of course. But this has that sort of ring to it. There’s no getting round it. Yes.” He fiddled with his port glass, spilling a purple dollop down his shirt front. “Damn it,” he cried, jumping up. The damage was done, however, so he sat back down. “Sounds like the core of a fairly substantial story to me, eh? A hollow Earth story.”!
‘This is no story. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve been convinced that Peach is the key here. Ashbless is convinced too. You mark my words. And then that dream. It haunts me. I’d have written it off, but here comes Frosticos, messing about at the Peach house. What was he up to? We must know.”
“I intend to find out. I’ll drop in on Velma Peach tomorrow morning. If nothing else, I’m going to warn her against Frosticos. He’s up to no good.” Edward was struck immediately by the peculiarity of his last statement, by the certainty that some time in the future, the near future, Frosticos would set out to i round up William. He’d do something about it this time. He wondered idly at William’s several escapes, at Frosticos’ am-I bivalent attitude toward them. It was a confusing business and it grew more curious by the day.
“I’ll just pop into the study and write some of this down,” I said William, standing up. “Perhaps you’re right about the short story. There’s too much in the dream not to use it.”
Edward agreed with him, deciding as he did so that he was ravenously hungry and would waste no time in lighting the barbecue. But he sat in his chair, lost in thought, for a half hour or so before finally getting up to have a go at dinner. He determined to talk to Velma Peach. He had to know what had gone wrong with Giles.
Chapter 9
It was nearly two in the afternoon when Edward and Professor Latzarel returned from Gaviota. William was busy in the maze _ shed, working with renewed vigor — with a freshened sense of the importance of his mission. The problem with science, he hadn’t any doubt, was its lack of imagination. It chased rats back and forth with a pair of calipers — shoved hoses down their mouths and filled their lungs with water. Science hadn’t any patience. Domesticity, that was the answer. The act of domestication is the act of civilizing. If he were to write a thesis he’d call it “Civilization Theory.” It would supplant Darwin. All beasts lean toward civility. Evolutionary development edged in that direction. Man pursued it. Dogs and cats sought it out. Even rats preferred life in the neighborhood to life in the wild. There was a great truth in it — one he intended to reveal. He yanked the sleeve of a little doll’s vest over the tiny arm of a mouse. The beast gave it an approving look, sniffing at it. Trousers would be difficult — impossible, perhaps, without alterations. Custom tailoring was necessary to do the job right. But the vest, for openers at least, would accomplish a great deal. William whistled a tune. He hadn’t been so happy in months. There was nothing like a man’s work.