“Why, look at this machine,” Uncle Edward cried, winking at Jim and pointing once again to the globular device. “What do you suppose he does with this?”
Jim was too well schooled in the game by then not to ask, “Does he grow turnips?” in a sincere enough tone to snatch Giles back into the living room.
“I doubt that he grows turnips,” said Giles, who had no humor in him. “At least he doesn’t grow them with this machine.” He peered at the cover, inspecting the ridiculous device, determining what manner of thing it was.
“Oh?” said Uncle Edward. “It looks altogether like a turnip transmutator. The sort that the Irish use to turn potatoes into other sorts of root crops.”
Giles gave him a look, a sort of pitying, condescending look, and pointed toward the recumbent maiden. “Do you mean to say they’re going to turn this woman into a turnip?” he asked, coming to the conclusion that the book quite possibly wasn’t the scientific treasure he had supposed it to be. “I’d say it has something to do with a dental drill,” Giles said, pointing toward what appeared to be a syringe. “This doctor is about to drill a hole in her skull and perform some sort of electronic lesion.”
“Giles!” cried Uncle Edward, surprised. “Where did you hear such a thing as that?”
“I read about it,” said Giles calmly, as if reading about lesions performed with dental drills and electricity was a common enough thing among fifteen-year-olds in the city of Eagle Rock. “There was a man,” continued Gill, “who could make rats dance by lesioning part of their brain — some little gland, I think.”
“Was there?” asked Edward, who favored the idea of dancing rats. “You like to read this stuff, do you, Giles?”
“Very much, sir. I’m studying to be a scientist, an inventor.”
“Well good for you, lad. That’s just the thing, science.” Uncle Edward picked up a handful of books and slid them in along the shelves. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Giles inspected the cover of At the Earth’s Core, the flower-hung jungle and the scantily clad pair of women astride blue dinosaurs in a sunlit clearing. He carefully opened the volume and thumbed past four pages until he arrived at the first chapter and read aloud two absolutely fateful sentences. “Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life to the perfection of a mechanical, subterranean prospector.” He shut the book, looked hard at the cover again, and wandered out through the front door and down the street without saying another word. Giles didn’t mean to be impolite. He was simply lost in Perry’s invention — in the whole idea of inventions. Years later Edward St. Ives would say, on more than one occasion, to watch out for people who fancy inventions but who can see nothing in the notion of turnip transmogrifiers; they aren’t half frivolous enough and will cause trouble. In fact, the mechanical mole — the digging leviathan — was conceived that afternoon and was born in the following months.
If it had been the only thing Giles Peach had invented and built, the very idea of it would seem preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. Giles and Jim had been engaged for some years in building mechanical devices. On occasions Oscar Pall-check gave them a hand, illustrating, more often than not, the defects in their methods. In Giles’ garage was an oak barrel full of mechanical junk they had managed to collect: old electric motors, ruined clocks, nuts and bolts and bits of copper wire, a sprung umbrella, radio tubes, bottle caps and bicycle parts, a little leather bag full of droplets of solder. The two had pieced together a wonderful gadget around an old fan motor. The machine hadn’t any purpose, really, beyond gadgetry. They intended at first to make a spinning model of the solar system. So they attached straightened bits of wire of varying lengths to support the nine planets, which, when the motor was switched on, spun very quickly around the sun in tight little circles until it threw itself to bits.
Gill then rigged a belt and gear mechanism from wide rubber bands, wooden spools, and pieces of an old mechanical clock, extending the device so that it could contain any number of solar systems, all cranking roundabout at the same time. On the strength of his knowledge of astronomy, he determined that such a plethora of simultaneously whirring planets would be as unscientific as a turnip transmutator, and so set out to find a way to operate little white Christmas tree pin lights strung between the wires. He wanted to make a model of the Andromeda nebula, to suspend it from the rafters of the garage, and to shut off all the lights, close the doors, and watch it whirl there in space. The nebula, however, blew a succession of fuses when he plugged it in, managing to get underway for one mysterious, kaleidoscopic moment before blinking into darkness.
When the nebula failed, scientific pretense failed with it. They removed the stars and replaced them with all manner of things, notably the heads of several rubber apes and a collection of little plastic Japanese gods — gaudily painted objects with overhanging bellies and pendulous ears. They tore the base from a coin bank shaped like a globe and affixed the painted sphere to a long coathanger that thrust out from amid the various gods and ape heads. Finally, along the bent arm of another piece of wire Giles strapped a toothy little stuffed crocodile with a broken-off tail. It was a sorry-looking, bug-infested creature, but when the whirring Earth machine shot into life and the globe went spinning away among the ape heads pursued on its course by the open-mouthed crocodile, it seemed to the two of them to be a grand sight. Gill pointed out that it was archetypal, that the crocodile was leviathan and would someday consume the earth.
The two worked the device for an hour with great success until Oscar Pallcheck happened by and had a good laugh over the machine at the expense of the crocodile. Giles and Jim, of course, were obliged to laugh along and to admit that it would improve the thing greatly to shove one of the ape heads into the crocodile’s mouth so that the ape peered out at the continent of Africa. The experiment degenerated from there, and before he went his peculiar way that evening, Oscar found a baseball bat and whacked the globe as it wobbled past into the wall or Gill’s garage, crashing the side in and putting an end to the whirling earth machine.
That same fan motor, along with two others, became, in the Saturday afternoons following, a mechanical man. The thing’s legs were stacks of roped tin cans that flopped and jerked when the current was switched on. The mechanical man suffered more evolutionary changes than had the whirring earth machine and was declining just about as rapidly until, as a lark, Oscar Pallcheck dropped the creature out of the foliage of a Chinese elm on the parkway and into the path of Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp.
Giles became convinced as a result that inventions without purpose were doomed by physical law to degeneration in a manner analogous to the decline of human beings who hadn’t any aim or resolve. He singled out Oscar Pallcheck as a case in point.
What all of that inventing was leading up to, none of them knew. John Pinion, the polar explorer, had an inkling, and he encouraged Giles’ gadgeting, going so far as to buy him occasional tools and parts, and talking seriously about the diameter of the Earth. That turn left Jim behind. He didn’t care much for serious inventions, and didn’t half believe that Gill’s growing mechanical mole would dig at all, much less into the center of the Earth.