‘That’s rather why we’ve come,” said William. He looked at Jim, and Jim nodded. “I think there’s a problem with your plan to use anti-matter. I understand the need to dispose of dirt and debris, but what in the world are you going to do with the energy? Have you read P. A.M. Dirac?”
“Yes.”
‘Then you know the danger of shuffling matter And antimatter together as if they were playing cards. There’s a theory I favor that postulates an entire anti-matter universe at the far end of our own — all the anti-matter particles that came out of the big bang. There’s a mirror-image Earth there. All of us, battling the same demons. But we’ve got our clothes on inside out. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” said Giles, “but …”
“But that’s where they must be,” said William. “There can be no other explanation. Anti-stars, anti-planets, anti-hamburgers, anti-Pinions.” William grinned at Giles. “But you can’t just stir it up in a soup along with matter. You suspect that, don’t you? Your father does. We’ve spoken to him. He sees trouble — a cataclysm. Creatures from Pellucidar are beginning to flee. Are you aware of that? And the communist Chinese have reported desperate anxieties in laboratory pigs. They blame it on CIA weather manipulation, but I think it’s something else.”
“I don’t anticipate a problem any longer,” said Giles. “I obviously couldn’t put the anti-matter into a container, since the container itself would be converted. But there’s such a thing as a magnetic bottle …”
“Yes,” said William, “I’ve read about it.”
“So I built one. I found a bag full of magnets from old cars — it was in the same junk store we were in the day of the wind,” he said, looking at Jim. “I built a polarity reversal bottle.” Giles poked around in a desk drawer for a moment, hauling out a line drawing of something that looked like a rectilinear amphora. Equations peppered the drawing along with arrows and spirals and little, hastily drawn graphs.
William inspected it. It might work. There were parts of it that he couldn’t fathom, equations that meant nothing at all to him. He supposed that Squires could make them out. But Squires wasn’t there. He was a half mile above them in his house on Rexroth Road. And if the three of them weren’t headed in that general direction fairly quickly themselves, there would quite likely be trouble. William was determined not to leave without Giles. But if they had to, if staying too long meant giving Jim up to Frosticos or Han Koi, then they’d flee instead. They’d all rest easier, though, knowing that Giles’ magnetic bottle would do the trick.
It would be a dirty shame if Pinion beat them to the center of the Earth, but their pride could take the blow. It was the blow to the Earth that concerned them. And if Giles had that threat ironed out. … There was something in William that didn’t trust the whole idea of the magnetic bottle. It was sound scientifically. He was sure of that. But there was something else. Instinct? That was it. Civilization theory. Pigs couldn’t be argued with. They had a nose for impending doom. And the dream — the death of Giles Peach. What of that? He didn’t require accuracy of dreams, but it had had an unmistakably premonitory ring to it that sounded in the same key of fear that had inhabited the voice of Basil Peach.
“It won’t work,” said William, grasping at straws.
Giles was silent. He sensed it too.
There was a noise from outside, like the scrape of something along the bulwark. Silence followed. Jim looked out through a crack in the slats of the shutters. Nothing moved. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Giles. “Come on.”
Giles sat staring.
“Powers is having a sale. Burroughs’ novels are twenty-five cents each with every fifth one free.”
“Really?” asked William.
‘That’s right. It just started today. I saw the ad in the window of the store.”
“Martian books?” Giles asked, visibly brightening.
“Heaps. He just bought a collection from somewhere, that’s what he said. They were still in boxes. There’s no telling what all he had.”
Giles looked around himself furtively. “Will you sign this?” he asked William, hauling out the Analog.
“Of course.” William beamed at him. “I don’t have a pen, though.” He tapped his pants pockets. “You and I could accomplish a bit, you know.”
Giles turned red, embarrassed at the praise, and handed across a pen.
“What we need for the diving bell is an oxygenator-propulsion combination. I’ve got some ideas, actually, having to do with a Hieronymous machine. Are you familiar with it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Giles.’ ‘I saw a picture of one in an old issue of Astounding, a Psionic Machine-Type 1.I always wanted to build one.”
“Well, here’s your chance. And another thing — absolute gyro. For stabilization. Do you have any ideas there?”
“Easy,” said Giles. “I’ve already built something like that for the digger. We can do it this afternoon, but we’ve got to get to the Sprouse Reitz on Colorado before they close. That’s where I buy most of my parts.” He checked his watch.
“After Powers’,” said William, smiling.
There was another noise, nearer the shutters now. William motioned Jim into a corner, crept across, and slowly opened one shutter. Darkness met him across the dirty glass. He rubbed circuitously on it with the side of his hand, cleaning a little oval and squinting through it, deciphering the gloom. His heart raced strangely, as if in certain knowledge that something lurked out in the hypnotic darkness — something his eyes couldn’t yet perceive.
Then, in a slice of a moment that seemed to William to resemble the staccato, stroboscope unreeling of an ancient motion picture, there materialized before him a white, smiling face, swerving into sudden clarity beyond the window, leering in. A hand rose beside it. Fingers wiggled in satiric greeting like four fleshy little worms, reminding him of the unholy appendages on the strange fish of Han Koi. The face belonged to a satisfied Hilario Frosticos.
William was frozen in terror, gasping for short breaths, utterly unable to summon up any of the courage he’d possessed not fifteen minutes earlier. A scream gagged him, then ripped from his throat, a single shriek, cut off into a gurgle as he staggered back into the cabin, smashing across the books on the floor and past a terrified Giles Peach to collapse in a heap.
Jim, reacting only to the instinctive terror of a sudden face at a dark window, hurled a book at it, catching the grinning, self-satisfied doctor full in the face. There was a curse of rage followed by silence. Giles sat stone-faced. Staring. William didn’t move. It seemed unlikely to Jim that the two of them were waiting for anything. They were simply swallowed up by fear.
Jim pushed at the desk, shoving it across the door, then heaved at a stack of bookcases, sweeping books out of them onto the floor until he could lever the top case onto the desk. The second followed. He shoved books back into them for weight, conscious as he did so of an omnipresent heaviness in the air. He labored for breath, watching the window out of the corner of his eye for the sign of meddling. He felt wet all over. Not clammy from the muggy air of the cavern, but wet, as if he’d just crawled out of the sea or as if the air around him were itself congealing into seawater. The last of the bookcases rested on the desk. Jim picked up a handful of books, dropping half of them, realizing that since he’d been at it, no one had made any effort to get past his barrier, and hearing at the same time the click and snap of a door opening behind him — a panel in the carved rosewood of the wall. Dr. Frosticos bent through it, smiling malignly. In his hand was a syringe.