The Digging Leviathan had gone amok, slanting off its course and through the concrete wall of a sewer. Its indestructible mandibles were ruined — a mass of twisted metal, growling and whirring and spinning in random spurts, round and round like the crank of an old car. Somehow, within moments, a camera crew with blazing lamps had found its way into the sewer. The whole voyage was a debacle, a ruin. The leviathan was wedged into the concrete pipe. John Pinion climbed out of the hatch, his hand over his face. He appeared to be weeping. Frosticos followed, disappearing in the tumult.
Two helmeted policemen accosted Pinion, who shook them off with a curse. Beyond, half in the shadows, stood William Ashbless, watching. Sunshine streamed in suddenly from the hole above as a shower of dirt cascaded in, widening the opening. Firemen grappling with an enormous hose peered through, but there was no threat of fire. Pinion waved his fist at them, frightened, apparently, that they’d hose down his machine. He was shouting something, contorting his face. A reporter waved a microphone at him and tried to pick up the words. It was Spekowsky.
“How-do you feel after this tragedy?” asked Spekowsky nearly shoving the mike into Pinion’s mouth.
“What!” shouted Pinion, turning on him. “Get that filthy device out of my face! Get back, I tell you!” And he took a swipe at the reporter, who ducked neatly back, thrusting out his microphone once again.
“What went wrong, Mr. Pinion?” he shouted. Then he shook his head sadly at the camera, as if commiserating with Pinion over the fate of his enterprise.
“You … bastard!” cried the stupefied Pinion, springing at him. The two policemen subdued him, escorting him stooped and sobbing down the sewer. He broke away after about ten feet, turning to survey his wrecked machine, gesturing at it, mouthing something, perhaps asking it why it had betrayed him. Then he seemed to perk up and look around, as if for the first time noting the absence of his copilot, Hilario Frosticos. He said something to the police, who shrugged, gesturing down the sewer toward where a cylinder of light shone in through an open manhole.
A hole had been torn in the side of the digger, and the engine was a wreck of odd parts, exposed to the prying eyes of the camera. Spekowsky spoke into the microphone, motioning toward the digger, reminding the audience of Pinion’s claims to have invented unimaginable engines — anti-matter, perpetual motion.
“Hello, what’s this?” he said, obviously enjoying himself at the expense of Pinion and his device. “Who could imagine that such an engine could propel a machine through the Earth?” Then he stopped and grinned, as if suddenly remembering that the engine hadn’t propelled the machine anyplace but into a sewer. He poked at a flat, coiled spring, obviously a remnant of an old, cheap clock. It was attached by a complication of paper clips to a basketball bladder, and a length of copper wire from which dangled an obvious price tag. Spekowsky turned the tag over and a camera zoomed in. “Sprouse Reitz,” the tag read, “29¢.”
“Huh?” said Spekowsky just as the cameras retreated. William Ashbless, his long white hair around his shoulders, was edging in to have a look just as the segment winked out into a commercial for toilet cleaners depicting a man in a rowboat adrift on a toilet bowl sea.
“Poor John Pinion,” said William, feeling that Pinion had been betrayed, and that his betrayal was largely William’s fault — all William’s fault, for that matter. Two days earlier Pinion was leagues ahead of them — on his way to becoming the greatest explorer since Brendan the Navigator. And now here he was, a weeping ruin, a laughingstock. Reporters who’d been drinking beer all afternoon downtown were dancing on his dreams, yammering, dissecting his craft for the off chance they’d find material for new jokes. William could see the headline: “Mechanical Mole Clogs Sewer!” Pinion had shot his bolt after William had unfeathered it. Poor devil.
William grinned at the thought. Too bad about Pinion, as slimy as he was. But Frosticos, that was a different story. How had he been allowed to slip away unnoticed? Why hadn’t he been harried by reporters — asked to explain the workings of the marvelous vehicle? And Ashbless hadn’t even been aboard. What, he wondered, did the old man have up his sleeve? William was fairly sure they’d hear from him shortly. Well, Ashbless could whistle into the wind.
The lightweights. They bit off more than they could chew when they messed with William Hastings. He’d slid in again and whipped the rug out from under them. And now they were cooked geese. Even if they could hoist the leviathan out of the sewer, without Giles it wasn’t worth scrap. He wondered suddenly what Giles was up to. Here he was wasting time. Giles had been right not to watch the news. It was nothing but a circus. Pinion was a clown, capering and grimacing.
Giles worked silently and quickly, like a surgeon. No movements were wasted or arbitrary. The heap of debris on the counter was slowly diminishing, and a large Hieronymous Machine attached to a modified Dean-drive mechanism was taking rapid shape. They’d be in the water in a matter of days.
“Well, it was a failure,” said William to the back of Giles’ head.
Giles nodded, poking with a screwdriver at a recess in the box.
“I can’t quite figure why it went haywire. Either that or I can’t figure why it worked at all. One or the other.”
“It still had some bugs in it,” said Giles indifferently. “And he wouldn’t have known how to pilot it.”
“Needs a special pilot does it?”
“Yes, sort of. You have to have a feel for the mechanism. It’s simple, actually, if you understand it. It’s a question of emanations, of rays. You’ve read the Martian books?’
“Certainly,” said William. “Quite a bit in there about rays, as I recall.”
“Yes, there was. We don’t know half as much about them as they do on Barsoom, of course, but I was reading an article about the Russians. They’re quite advanced. All this talk about nuclear war is just nonsense — that’s what the word from the inside is. They’ve got a madness ray that’s impervious to the horizon. They’ll just aim it right through the Earth at Los Angeles, and — pow! — we’ll be drooling in the street.” Giles stopped abruptly, surprised at himself for having carried on so. He looked furtively at William, embarrassed, perhaps, at having spoken so flippantly about lunacy.
William smiled at him. The boy was a genius, and an eccentric. There was no denying it. He rummaged in the mouse cage and hauled out Alexis and Mary, two of his favorite mice. He suspended a pair of identical doll dresses in front of them, enticing the coy pair. They seemed to respond with interest, having fallen wider the spell of civilization. William helped them into the finery, then shunted them up the avenue into a dry section of maze where they went sniffing along inquisitively, looking for a treat. They were the mainstay of his experiments — the bedrock. The axolotl seemed to be drawn to their obvious gentility. William had high hopes that they’d be similarly affected by the amphibian and would undertake at the very least some of its attraction to water.
But if he could — if Giles could — perfect the mechanism in miniature, he could leap across ten million years of creeping evolution in one fell swoop. The mice could be amphibianized through technology. There was an interesting irony there, thought William, if you looked at it from the right direction.
A car door slammed out front. William was off like a rocket, through the aquarium shed, onto his stump, and over the fence. He closed the rear door of the Koontz house behind him and locked it. There was no one in the street. The manhole cover sat unwatched in the quiet street. There was no telling who had driven up. If they’d come a half hour earlier, they’d have caught him out, watching Pinion’s decline on the television. He hadn’t even heard the arrival of Latzarel’s car, noisy as it was. Such was fate. It was dealing him the high cards. He squinted through the window at the back door of his house. The door flung open and the two policemen burst out, heading straight for the trashcan. The fools. They must be supremely tired of chasing phantoms. Frosticos had made phone calls. He was mortified by defeat.