He closed his eyes for a moment, and there was the face writhing like a mass of ghostly worms, whirling into sharp clarity. He yanked his eyes open almost at once. There’d be little sleep tonight. He’d take the chance of sneaking home after midnight — better to take the chance of being caught among friends than to spend the night in an empty house.
He dozed off and dreamed that he was rubbing a circle of clarity into the dirty glass of a window. There was something beyond, something in the night — white and deadly, grinning humorlessly in at him. He shuddered awake, lurching to his knees, swearing to himself that he’d been an idiot, a monkey-witted pickle-head to have given poor Latzarel such a fright in Frosticos’ basement. He had no idea. It was karma; that’s what it was. The circle would remain unbroken, as the song put it. Japanese carpenters left a visible error in their cabinetry to humble themselves, to scuttle conceit. But the joints and workings of William’s life were riddled with unintended error, with outright bungling, and it hadn’t done a bit to pare away conceit. Conceit had swum in laughing, nodding and shouting and making an ass of him. It made him something worse, but he couldn’t think of a word for it. Jim hadn’t blamed him, and that was the worst of it, in a way. The better people were, the harder it was to measure up, the more important it was not to go to bits. He hadn’t wanted to fold up like a paper doll. That wasn’t at all what he had in mind. He’d spend the night in the abandoned house, sleep or no sleep. He had his book, his pipe, half a bottle of brandy — what was it Laurence Sterne had said on the subject? — “and we know not what it is to fear death.” William had always admired that line. He wished he could have written it. But pipe and brandy aside, there were other things to fear besides death. For this night, though, the brandy would have to be the first defense. He hoped and feared at once that he’d have another chance to prove himself. For the moment, he’d start in on the dark house. He shut his eyes and watched the webby lines spin and twirl.
Reporters were skeptical on the television two days later. The whole idea was ludicrous, straight out of a science fiction novel — and not a novel with pretensions either, but a dimestore thriller, a pulp, with ray guns and dinosaurs on the moon. There was a shot of The Digging Leviathan, the mechanical mole, tethered behind John Pinion’s ranch house. It was elevated on a sort of trestle affair, with its nose facing downward, aimed into the Earth. It was self-propelling, Pinion explained to an inquisitive reporter. The last few feet would be the most touchy. Once its nose pushed through into the hollow core of the Earth, its propulsion would cease. They could only hope that its momentum would carry them forward far enough to get the hatch open.
Pinion looked nervous and kept smoothing down his hair. It struck Edward suddenly that he wasn’t really an evil sort, not at all. He was simply a man possessed. He was a zealot, and so was near-sighted and given to extremes. Edward almost pitied him. He was certain that Pinion’s reputation was about to be flung down and danced on. What the mole would do without Giles Peach at the helm was impossible to predict. It might simply sit there and refuse to work. Its engines might well be nonsense — conglomerations of the same sorts of dimestore trash and castaway debris that Giles and William had been puttering with in the maze shed.
What was peculiar was the fanfare. Spekowsky was some-how at least partly responsible; that much was clear. He poked around the machine along with another reporter, asking poor Pinion impossible questions about anti-gravity, questions that Pinion was utterly unable to field. He waved them aside as inconsequential. Wait, he said, until the launching. He was prepared to stake his reputation, his life. This wasn’t some sort of steam shovel. They were undertaking a journey of some eight hundred miles. Perhaps more. Following in the footsteps of Admiral Byrd, in the tradition of Christopher Columbus, who set out in spite of the flat Earth.
Edward hurried out to the maze shed where William and Giles tinkered with their Dean-drive mechanism. They’d attached it to the axolotl, still dressed in water-soaked trousers. When Edward bent in through the door William was just setting it off. There was the spinning of a tiny crank, the sigh of a stream of fine bubbles bursting on the surface of the water-filled maze. The axolotl shot forward, careering down the little avenue and smashing into the wall in a befuddled heap long before it occurred to him to begin to negotiate the turn. William fished him out and plucked the mechanism off his neck. He looked up at Edward and nodded at his device. Giles tinkered with a piece of sheet copper at the workbench.
“We’ve about got it,” said William. “The oxygenator threw us for a bit, but Giles has come up with a device with a chlorophyll and helium back-up system. It’s a little bulky, and if we have to use it we’ll talk like elves, but it should work. He’s piecing it together now.”
Edward looked across at the unit on the bench. Giles was dumping green powder into a funnel which emptied into a copper box. A canister of helium was linked to the box by a coiled tube. God knew why. Edward felt like a child. Physics and chemistry were not his provinces. All he could think of was that the tin funnel might have been Tom Terrific’s hat. He’d always had an inexplicable fondness for cartoons.
“They’re about to launch,” he said.
William put the axolotl back into its aquarium and dried his hands. Giles cared nothing for the launching of the leviathan. It was the diving bell that possessed him now. The digger would have to look after itself.
Edward followed his brother-in-law into the house. “I don’t believe Ashbless is on hand,” he said, clumping up the back steps.
“Hah!” cried William. “Of course he’s not. He’s no fool. I’m certain he thought he had Giles pegged that afternoon when Velma Peach came round to tell us he’d disappeared. Ashbless! He’s full of hunches. But he hasn’t half enough science in him for accuracy. He’s just moving by instinct. Giles tells me it was Ashbless that brought him the Analog. You mark my words. If the launching fails, we’ll hear from the poet. And soon, too.”
William turned up the sound on the set. John Pinion was crawling into the hatch, waving foolishly at the live action cameras. Then, not even acknowledging the existence of the cameras or reporters, Hilario Frosticos appeared out of the hangar, strode across the lawn, and clambered in, slamming the hatchcover after him. Reporters backed away and the machine hummed into life, shuddering there on its supports. The rotating teeth in its nose worked back and forth, and a monumental humming arose as it slid down into the Earth in a whirlwind of dust.
“It’s going, by God!” cried Edward.
William crouched in front of the television, unbelieving. The machine sank into the soft earth, sliding in a foot, then six feet, then its entire length, disappearing from view, pushing a mound of dirt out after it into an immense mole hill. Reporters, chattering in surprise that equaled Edward’s, rushed to the hole waving cameras. The leviathan sank deeper, threatening to disappear entirely from sight.
There was an awful tearing sound, such a breaking and banging and crashing that for one wild moment William was convinced the cataclysm was upon them. Then all was abruptly still. Reporters and cameramen rushed everywhere. William and Edward crouched before the television, inches away. Jim stood behind them. Professor Latzarel slammed in through the door without so much as a knock, gibbering about listening to the news on the radio, but he was waved to silence.