It was William Ashbless on the telephone. He was jovial — regretted that be hadn’t seen Edward since Catalina. He’d been morose on the trip, not his usual self. It was a matter of artistic temperament. He’d hiked off into the hills and meditated on pine nuts and berries for a few days.
“We saw you take off in the submarine,” said Edward flatly, stretching the truth a bit. “And we’ve spoken to Basil Peach about your trying to extort favors out of him for the safe return of his son. You’ve sold all of us out one way or another. Go back to bed.”
“I sold no one!” Ashbless called into the phone before Edward had a chance to hang up. “Who was it smuggled the copy of Analog into Giles? Who was it put the idea into his head of throwing in with William and you? Who was it revealed the treachery against Reginald Peach? I’m a poet, an artist, and always have been. I understood that William saw more clearly than the rest of them added up, and that’s what I told young Peach. If William hadn’t gone in after him, I would have. Why do you think I wasn’t aboard the leviathan?”
“Because,” said Edward tiredly, “you knew it wouldn’t go anywhere without Giles. You’ve known about Giles’ powers longer than the rest of us. I’d bet on that. You’ve just been waiting to see which of us would get hold of them in the end. Well, we have, and there’s no room for passengers.”
“Wait!” shouted Ashbless into the phone as Edward hung up. There was no time to wait. It took a little under an hour to get the last bits of gear together and lock the house up. Once, at around 9:30, Edward was certain he heard the jangling of bells on an ice cream truck, but he could see nothing on the street. Jim was sure, shortly thereafter, that he’d seen a head peering over the back wall. He thought at first that it was his father, but a search minutes later revealed nothing.
By eleven the four of them were piloting the flatbed truck along the Pasadena Freeway. Roycroft Squires followed along behind in his little Austin Healey, which neither flew nor drove at light speed, thanks to his cheerfully refusing Giles’ offer to customize it. He’d been tempted, but in the end he couldn’t think of anywhere he had to go that quickly.
Edward watched the side mirrors for the sign of a pursuing truck. As far as he could tell there was none. He kept his suspicions from Giles, not knowing exactly how Giles would react to the mention of John Pinion. Most of all, Edward wanted to avoid Giles’ turning the Pasadena Freeway into a tidepool. The less oddball activity they involved themselves in, the better, especially when they were a bare four hours away from the launch. And besides, there was no sign of John Pinion. It had quite likely, thought Edward, been his imagination.
But almost as soon as he’d convinced himself, they crossed under Pasadena Avenue and Edward glimpsed a white panel truck just pulling onto the freeway behind them. In a moment it was out of sight in traffic. Edward didn’t know whether to speed up and lose it, or to slow down and identify it. So he did neither, but simply drove on apace, catching sight of it again as they crossed Lomita Boulevard into Wilmington.
Latzarel, he was fairly sure, had become aware of his apprehension, for he watched the mirror incessantly, and once, just before the Harbor Freeway ended at the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island, Latzarel gave him a questioning look, raising his eyebrows. Edward shrugged. Giles sat impassive, lost in himself. Jim read a copy of Savage Pellucidar, toning up for the journey. When they hauled the bell up to the dock alongside Squires’ tug, there was no sign of a white truck.
Chapter 22
Living in the sewers wasn’t all it might he. William’s fascination with himself as a phantom Robin Hood evaporated as it became clear that, at least for the moment, no one was chasing him. No one, for all he knew, cared a bit about him. It was unlikely that they’d launched a manhunt as a result of his treading on Mrs. Pembly’s begonias. And it was fearsomely dark in the sewers. The light afforded by occasional street drains didn’t illuminate the underground tunnels for more than a few murky feet. With his headlamp and flashlight off, he was enclosed by such utter darkness that he felt as if he were walled up — in a coffin, perhaps, or had met the fate of an Edgar Allan Poe villain, bricked into a cellar. The idea of spending the night and most of the next day in the darkness, listening to the scuffling of rats, imagining the slow dragging swish of an impossible serpent, began to weigh on him.
He followed the map of Pince Nez, trudging up Colorado and into the foothills toward uncharted streets that he knew to be under construction. Not two miles from home he discovered a manhole cover in an undeveloped cul de sac — nothing around but weedy vacant lots stickered with little surveying stakes. He pushed up out of the manhole, caught a bus on Colorado to downtown Los Angeles, and spent the declining afternoon at Olvera Street eating enchiladas and writing a letter to the Times on pages ripped from the log of Pince Nez.
But he was jumpy. Every policeman was a threat. Idle looks of passersby were filled with manufactured suspicion. He found himself refusing a table near a window and insisting on one against a wall by a rear exit, remembering advice from a gangster movie he’d seen involving a hoodlum gunned down through a restaurant window from a passing car. He spent half an hour searching for a manhole in the area, and found one finally across from Union Station, too far away from his beer and enchiladas to do him any good in a crisis. In the end, however, there was no crisis, and he slipped into the sewer around four-thirty, making his way to the Times building to deliver his letter — his apologia — to the fingers of fate.
He certainly couldn’t simply barge in and declare himself to be William Hastings, so he shoved the rolled letter through a manhole cover and fled, surfacing again late in the evening to buy flashlight batteries and a sleeping bag, toying with the idea of spending the night in the woods — such as they were — that covered one of the little unused triangular acres at the confusion of interchanges involving the Santa Ana, Santa Monica, Pomona, and Long Beach freeways.
But the plan fell through when he was hailed by a slow-moving squad car on Spring Street and was forced to go to ground once again in the sewers, not knowing whether he’d been recognized or whether the police had simply been suspicious of his miner’s helmet and sleeping bag.
A half hour later he was in a cab driving south down La Brea. He had to get closer to the coast. He hadn’t enough money in his wallet for a trip all the way to the peninsula, so he watched the meter fly, the cab motoring through Inglewood, Lennox, and Hawthorne — closer and closer to freedom.
Then he caught the driver’s eye in the rear view mirror. It was furtive, suspicious. “I’ll just get off at Rosecrans,” said William, gathering his gear.
“I thought you said Palos Verdes,” the driver put in, irritated.
“No,” said William. “I’ve changed my mind. This is fine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the driver.
Something was wrong, and dangerously so. The driver was an agent of someone — Frosticos, the police. They’d gotten to him. He was leading William into their clutches. The traffic signal at Rosecrans was green, fifty yards away. The cab accelerated. The light switched to yellow. The driver sped along, then slowed as he approached the next intersection.
“Palos Verdes it is, then,” said William. “I was just a bit nervous about money. The tip and all.”
“Don’t worry,” said the driver again. “We’re in business to make friends, not money.”