William waved at them pleasantly and loped straight into the water, striking out in a sodden, tired crawl toward the Gerhardi, which appeared and disappeared beyond the swell. He knew they wouldn’t swim for him — he’d become too much the public figure, no longer the head-smashing, begonia-tearing desperado. They’d shout foolish codes over the radio and the harbor patrol would put out of San Pedro. But unless they could dig up another member of the Peach family to pilot them, they’d have a hard time with the pursuit. William bobbed on a swell, treading water. There was Jim in the rowboat ten yards off, five yards. William struggled to haul himself into it, but couldn’t. It was impossible. Jim struck out for the Gerhardi with William in tow. Pince Nez, so miraculously preserved in the sewers, would be a waterlogged wreck. But it had served its purpose. Edward, of course, might despair at the drowning of his sixty-dollar book.
A moment later and William was clambering up the side, boosted from below. He collapsed forward onto the deck, the spinning sun in his eyes. “Let him lie,” said Edward — a harsh thing, it seemed to William. He rolled over and watched the rest of them hurry across to the far side of the deck to grapple with something heaped there. William blinked. It was a great fish. For a moment he was certain it was Reginald Peach, but of course it wasn’t. He rose, slumped, and crawled across on his hands and knees. It was John Pinion.
Edward and Professor Latzarel grabbed the canvas beneath the fish, heaved, and flopped Pinion overboard. William watched him sink, spiraling slowly downward into the deep pool wearing his foolish, shredded ice cream clothing. Pinion twitched and then thrashed almost double as if shaking himself out. He thrashed again, shuddered down the length of him, gave a great kick with his fused legs, and was gone, undulating away into the green depths.
“Let’s go,” shouted Giles, looking out the hatch of the diving bell, indifferent, it seemed, to Pinion’s fate. No one argued. There’d be five of them aboard — a tight fit, surely, but the bell was built for six. They shook Squires’ hand and helped William in, cutting short his shouted reminder to Squires to look after the mice and axolotl. Even before the hatch slid shut, the bell was hoisted above the deck and swinging out over the water. Giles checked the instruments and fiddled with the humming Hieronymous machine. Lights blinked on in a spray of amethyst and emerald and ruby.
William dragged off his backpack and rummaged inside. There was one thing he had to know. He pulled the top from the rosewood box and held the box in front of Giles. “I got this out of Yamoto,” he said, nodding at it. “I’m fairly sure they’re not aspirin. Some sort of opiate, I think — heroin maybe — manufactured by Han Koi, but I need to be sure.”
Giles glanced at the pills as if they were utterly uninteresting, just another irritation. “Of course they are,” he said after a moment. “You’re absolutely correct.” And with that the bell plunged into the water, a storm of green bubbles rising beyond the portholes. The Dean-drive mechanism whirred into life, and a pellet of salt, extracted from the first bit of converted seawater, tumbled out of the Hieronymous machine into a galvanized bucket.
William cheered, thinking suddenly of his origami boat. Giles grinned sheepishly at Jim. Edward and Professor Latzarel shook hands. Five silent minutes later, with an air of absolute confidence, Giles Peach yanked the pair of levers that loosed them utterly from the Gerhardi, and from the dust and muck and turmoil of the surface world. They dropped into the abyss, gaining momentum, tree at last, following the dark wake of John Pinion, all of them bound at last on a strange and watery journey toward the center of the hollow Earth.
Dedication
To Viki
And to Johnny and Danny,
best of all possible sons
and consultants on all matters of scientific import
And, most of all,
To my parents, Daisy and Loren Blaylock
James P. Blaylock (1950 — )
James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded — along with Powers and Jeter — as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.