He was tiring out. There was no profit in flattening begonias. It wouldn’t accomplish a thing. He was suddenly at a loss. Things hadn’t gone at all well. Edward had been right all along and there was no denying it. But he had the rosewood box. That’s what frightened Yamoto so. You could see it in his eyes — a desperation. He needed that box. William hopped across into his own yard. “I’ll be back!” he cried, although it sounded weak to him. Not the note of severity the situation required. He nipped into the maze shed and over the fence, grabbing his backpack and canteen and slamming the miner’s helmet onto his head. Five minutes later he was climbing down iron rungs into the sewer, unpursued.
By the time Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel drove up in the flatbed with the diving bell perched weirdly on its bronze feet, the police had come and gone twice. They’d questioned Jim. He’d been at school and knew nothing. There was evidence, they insisted, that William Hastings had broken into the empty house behind, that he’d been living there for days. Jim hadn’t heard anything about it. His father, he had been sure, was in northern California, living among the redwoods. The police weren’t interested. They’d found hamburger wrappers in the Koontz house, and a counter boy at Pete’s Blue Chip had recognized a photo of William Hastings. They’d done some neat detective work, to be sure.
But William Hastings was gone — into the sewers, likely. He thought of himself, they said, as some sort of Swamp Fox, a Robin Hood, suffering under the delusion that he fought a cloudy and nebulous world threat.
An article in the Times the following morning referred to the incident in humorous tones, capitalizing on William’s adventures and on his associations with Russel Latzarel, the diving bell pilot, who also sought the center of the Earth. John Pinion’s recent fiasco was mentioned. They’d received a letter from Hastings, written very coherently and elegantly on blank endpapers torn from an old book. The strange missive, detailing a plot to explode the world, had been rolled into a little cylinder and shoved up through a manhole cover directly in front of the Times office. Subsequent searches of the sewer by police yielded nothing. Hastings had wisped away like smoke.
There were accusations in the letter against a prominent local psychiatrist, talk of great subterranean lakes sailed by opium smugglers in Chinese junks. Mermen lived in the dark waters in homes made of ancient sunken sloops and galleons, all of which, in some imponderable way, were linked to the submarine boneyard recently discovered by abalone fishermen, to the sighting of an elasmosaurus by Professor Russel Latzarel in an oceanic trench off Palos Verdes, and to a mysterious flying submarine seen from the tip of Catalina Island. The Times was cheering for Hastings. He was, after all, harmless. What had he done beyond ruining a half dozen begonias in a neighbor’s flowerbed? And as for slugging a man with a heavy flashlight — Hastings had included with the letter a photocopied order for a pull-frontal lobotomy to be accomplished in the very sanitarium he’d fled from weeks past. His doctor, lately and coincidentally implicated in the John Pinion sewer imbroglio, was being sought for questioning.
Edward’s first thought was to lament the letter. But as he read the article through a second time, his attitude slowly changed. William, it was clear, had gone a long way toward turning himself into something of a local hero. It had been a shrewd step. Admittedly he’d never be taken seriously again, but then even without the letter he was on the edge of that particular fate.
And who was to say that it wasn’t publicity Frosticos feared most? Han Koi certainly couldn’t afford it. Perhaps Yamoto was in league with the doctor. Edward had coolly agreed to paying for repairs to his equipment and to the restoring of Mrs. Pembly’s begonias. There was nothing to be gained in expanding the feud. Far better to deflate it. But the Pemblys were putting the house up for sale and moving away. They’d had enough of William’s shenanigans. And Edward was no better. As far as she could see they were all peas in a pod.
In the end Edward determined to take William at his word, for bettor or for worse. His brother-in-law had, after all, become in some ways the most strangely coherent of the lot of them. And when all was said and done, if he’d been pressed, Edward couldn’t have begun to explain where those randomly appearing dog droppings were coming from. If it turned out that Giles Peach had equipped a neighborhood dog with anti-gravity, it would hardly have surprised him.
So William had a copy of the timetable in his wallet. Giles insisted that the schedule was crucial. They’d cast off at the nadir of the low tide, an impressive negative six feet. Squires could just get the tug into position if there wasn’t a swell running. And all reports predicted calm and tranquil seas. Why they needed a low tide, Edward couldn’t at all understand. Giles said it had to do with the effect of pressures on the Hieronymous machine and the Dean-drive system. If they’d wanted to go the other direction — to fly — they’d need a high tide. It was a matter of particle physics and of ray propulsion. Edward took his word for it. They’d launch tomorrow at three o’clock sharp. William would either be there or he wouldn’t. It was simple as that. The time had come.
Edward awoke that night, wondering what it was, exactly, that he’d heard. It had been a banging, a gunshot, perhaps, or a car’s backfiring. That and the jangling of an abruptly stifled bell. He sat in bed, the sleep draining from his brain, then tiptoed down the hallway. The noise, he was sure, had come from outside, so there was no real need to carry the unsheathed saber that he clutched in his hand, but like William’s flashlight, it gave him a feeling of invulnerability.
A white truck was parked at the curb. A shadowy face peered out of the cab, watching the house. It was John Pinion. Latzarel had been afraid that Pinion would snap — that his unsought trip down the sewer pipe would break him. They’d all, said Latzarel, have to look sharp. Edward flipped on the porch light. The truck rumbled to life, died, was rekindled, and jerked away down the road. Edward turned the light off and went back to bed, wondering what in the world it was that Pinion was up to. If he was looking to sabotage the diving bell, he was sadly out of luck. It was locked in Roycroft Squires’ garage. Professor Latzarel and Giles Peach guarded it, and Edward suspected that if Giles intended the bell to be safe, then the bell would be safe.
The phone rang at eight o’clock in the morning. Edward was lying in bed, thinking about the voyage. He felt as if he were moving, perhaps to a foreign country, a country in which he wouldn’t be able to communicate, where they drove cars on the wrong side of the road or upside down. He was struck with the immense foolhardiness of their scheme. They were entrusting their lives to Giles Peach. There was no denying his powers, but at the same time there was no denying his eccentricity, his peculiar impenetrable surface calm. It seemed to Edward to be a big mistake to take Jim along. They could endanger their own lives if they chose, but not Jim’s. He’d spoken to William about it and William had spoken to Jim. The result of all the speaking was that Jim was going. Giles, after all, got to go. Giles was going with or without them. Well, thought Edward, lying on his back, life was full of risk. For the first two hundred feet they’d be tethered to the Gerhardi. If Giles’ devices were in order, they’d cut loose and descend. If they weren’t, Squires would hoist them out. But this last seemed impossible to Edward. He couldn’t envision life beyond that afternoon, not life on the surface anyway. His entire existence had been funneled into the journey.