The Digging Leviathan E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 511

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Journey to the center of the Earth... Giles Peach was unique. He was born with a neat set of gills on either side of his neck - and webbed fingers. He enjoyed reading (Edgar Rice Burroughs was his favorite author) and he liked to invent things. First he invented a working model of the Solar System, powered by the motor from an old electric fan. Next he invented a mechanical man whose legs were roped-together tin cans. Finally he began work on the grandest invention of all: a machine that would burrow to the center of the Earth, a digging leviathan. Absurd? Perhaps. But Giles Peach had the power to make his wildest fantasies come true... "A literally wonderful novel." --Tim Powers "Blaylock is an original author grounded in the quintessential classics, yet ready without notice to astonish: not only with what he reveals to us but how." --Philip K. Dick

Leseprobe

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

Copyright © 1984 by James P. BlaylockAll rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger. Cover design by John Berlyne.

Published as an ebook by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD, in 2012.

ISBN: 9781936535637

CONTENTS

Also by James P. Blaylock

Copyright

Dedication

Book One

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Book Two

Prologue

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Book Three

Prologue

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

About the Author

More ebooks from James P. Blaylock

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

“—from the negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God’s universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself. I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man. ‘Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please in frivolous circles.”

—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSONAn Inland Voyage

BOOK I

Home Is the Sailor

Man’s a strange animal, and makes strange use

Of his own nature, and the various arts,

And likes particularly to produce

Some new experiment to show his parts;

This is the age of oddities let loose,

Where different talents find their different marts;

You’d best begin with truth, and when you’ve lost your

Labour, there’s a sure market for imposture.

—LORD BYRONDon Juan

PROLOGUE

IN THE SILVER light of the midnight moon the mangroves looked animate. Twisted roots arched out into brackish water at the mouth of the Rio Jari, stretching away north in tangled profusion toward Surinam where pipid frogs chirped and paddled in slack water. South, not five miles distant, rolled the black silent expanse of the Amazon, nearly forty miles across. The night was warm, and the moon seemed to cover half the sky, bathing yellow mangrove blossoms in watery beams and playing across the mottled bark of an enormous orchid-hung trunk that lay half submerged in the river.

Basil Peach gripped the ragged end of a broken limb, steadied himself, and flung a weighted net into the river. A paraffin lantern burned on shore, but the dirty yellow glow was lost almost at once in the opalescent moonlight.

William Ashbless wrote poetry and watched Peach fish. Peach hadn’t said anything for three hours. Above, on a bit of sandy bank, slept Professor Russel Latzarel and the lepidopterist, Phillip Mays. It was nearing two in the morning. Ashbless would have been asleep himself, but the moonlight was conducive to poetry, and he had suspicions about Basil Peach.

A week past they’d fished the Peewatin River in French Guiana for cichlids, then had come south on a Coastline ferry bound for Belem and Recife. It was slow going. Basil Peach always had one eye on the jungle; it drew him as a fish is drawn to the shadows of a submarine cave. At Macapa he didn’t leave the ship, but lay in his cabin for three days, sweltering in air so humid that it threatened to melt into vapor.

Professor Latzarel hired a boat at Macapa and, to the astonishment of the fisherman who owned it, floated up and down the bank of the Amazon, sounding deep pools with a five-hundred-foot line hung with a lead weight the size of an orange. A week later at the mouth of the Rio Jari, he ran out of line. The weight plummeted down and down into the dark river, yanking out yards of rope until there wasn’t any more beyond the eight or ten inches tied to the peculiar little fiddlehead of his hired coracle. Professor Latzarel cursed himself for not having another five hundred feet—but it was an ambivalent sort of cursing, since he knew, or at least hoped, that a thousand feet wouldn’t have been enough. The pool, he was certain, was bottomless. In the following days he caught seventy-four tetras, each about as long as his thumb. The fish were an unusual luminescent blue—blue tinged with the springtime colors of salmon and pink and violet. Professor Latzarel was entirely satisfied.

But Basil Peach was restive. His fishing was pointless. His long, hairless face was still fleshy white despite the tropical sun. Day and night he wore a visored cap with a transparent green bill about a foot long, with a high-collared shirt, the flaps of the collar turned up to hide his neck and the two rows of crescent-shaped vestigial gills that rose to a point almost behind his ears. Basil Peach was peculiar, Ashbless had to admit. His father and grandfather had been peculiar, too. They could quite easily have been fish themselves, or pale anthropoid amphibians. Basil was certainly more at home in the mangrove swamps and the jungles of the Amazon Basin than in the streets of Los Angeles five thousand miles away.

Peach cast his net again, pulling on a leader line to bring it around through the current. Ashbless scribbled in his notebook and smoked his pipe. He considered titling his sequence of poems Amazon Moon in honor of his old friend Don Blanding. What he wanted more than anything else was a glass of Scotch and a bottle of beer to chase it with. In the corner of his right eye he could see the bottom arc of the moon, enormous in the sky. It seemed to Ashbless that he was sitting in a bowl formed of mangroves, and that the moon was a lid settling down over him. He could see shadows, perhaps of mountains, on its surface, and along the eastern hemisphere flowed what appeared to be winding swerves of an old dusty riverbed across dry plains, a shadow river that would have dwarfed the Amazon. The whole thing was a leering ivory face, an ancient Japanese netsuke that swallowed the stars. Basil Peach was oblivious to it. He stood among waterweeds cocking his head.

There was a tremendous splashing upriver. Peach dropped his seine, and it lay for a moment slack on the water before coming abruptly to life, wriggling and flopping and sweeping down over the submerged log, finally catching on a limb. Upriver the water was alive with silver fire. A million glints of reflected moonlight shone from the churning surface, spreading out across the dark river. Little arcing glimmers appeared and disappeared as if someone were casting out handfuls of blue diamonds. It was teeming with fish, thousands of blue tetras glowing in the phosphorescent light of the impossible moon.

A moaning filled the air as if the very atmosphere were being stretched by the pull of tides, and countless fish rose in a cloud of iridescence over the jungle, whirling into the moon as it fell back through the heavens. Silver stars blinked on around it, seeming for all the world to be the fish themselves, and the river was silent and dark except for the furtive splashing of the thing in the net.

When Ashbless left off watching the moon and picked up his pen, Basil Peach was twenty yards upriver, sloshing through shallows, bound, perhaps, for the moon himself. Ashbless watched him disappear, waited for an hour, then fell asleep in the sultry night, waking in the morning when the sun peeped up over the mangroves. Peach had not returned.

A splashing in the river reminded Ashbless of the fish in the net. He and Mays pulled it in and rolled it onto the shore grasses. To Latzarel’s wild surprise, it was a marine coelacanth, black and scaly and dying in the sun, some night creature having ripped into its underbelly in the early morning. Latzarel dissected the fish, bottling its organs, convinced, predictably, that it wasn’t a member of the living genus Latimeria. In its stomach he found shell and tentacle fragments of a straight-chambered cephalopod, possibly a late Devonian squid.

Basil Peach never returned. Four months later Latzarel received a postcard mailed from Lake Windermere in central England.

1

HOT WINDS HAD blown down out of the Santa Ana Canyon for three days, charging the air with static electricity and the smell of the desert. The Hollywood Hills and San Gabriel Mountains were full of fire. It seemed likely that before the first of November the entirety of the Los Angeles basin would be burned to cinder. Plumes of black smoke clouded the horizon, and fine black ash and soot drizzled like dead rain when the winds fell and left off blowing the smoke away to the northwest. The evening hills flickered with patches of orange flame, and the night air was full of sirens screaming away up the boulevard. Serious reporters chattered from the car radio, mouthing suspicions of arson. But to Jim Hastings, who rode along in his Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp bound for the ocean, speculations about arson seemed immaterial. He was fairly sure that even if all arsonists suddenly disappeared from the earth, the scrub-covered foothills, feeling the sweep of hot autumn winds, would set themselves ablaze in the tradition of Mr. Krook of the rag and bottle shop.

There was a stupendous low tide, a negative eight feet. The rock reefs along the shores of the Palos Verdes Peninsula were exposed two hundred yards seaward at three o’clock in the afternoon. Onshore breezes that had sprung up in late morning kept the skies above the shoreline clear as rainwater. The sun shone on little wavelets in sharp glints, and from the top of the cliffs Jim Hastings and his best friend Giles Peach could see Catalina Island floating mythically. It seemed as if every bit of chaparral and gnarled oak on the distant island were visible and that the Santa Barbara Channel had, mysteriously, awakened to find itself a part of the Aegean Sea. The two scrambled down a steep dirt trail to the beach, leaving the unloading of the old Hudson to Jim’s uncle, Edward St. Ives. Jim, a romantic, claimed to have heard that wild peccary and cyclops lived in caves in the cliffs and wandered out onto the beaches on deserted winter days. Gill, a pragmatist, said he supposed that was a lie.

The two of them wandered from one long shelf of rock to another, finding successively larger tidepools that contained successively stranger fish. Tiny octopi and violet nudibranchs hovered in the shadows of eel grass and blue-green algae. Little schools of silver opaleye perch darted across the expanse of larger pools, and in one, guarded by two lumpy-looking orange parents, hovered ten thousand baby garibaldi, shining like blue fire when they darted out of the shadows of rocks and into the sunlight.

Uncle Edward caught up with them, carrying the wooden bucket that he called Momus’ glass. The bottom had been carefully sawed out and a round piece of double strength window glass caulked in. When the glass-bottomed bucket was partially submerged in the rippling water of a pool, the land beneath sprang into sharp clarity as if beyond the wall of an aquarium.

Such were the depths of the pools, however, that in some of them there was nothing but shadow below. The reds and blues and greens of the algae faded in the depths, and the pools fell away finally into darkness. It was impossible to say whether a crab scuttling over a bed of sea lettuce was ten feet beneath the surface or twenty, or whether the seeming depth was a trick of refraction and the crab only a foot below them.

Jim broke mussels to bits, smashing them against rocks and dropping pieces of slippery orange flesh into the pool, watching them disappear between the clutching fingers of anemones. Once, just for the slip of an instant, he fancied he saw a great luminous eye peer up at him from a swaying shadow deep below—the eye of a fish who had wandered up out of a deep ocean trench.

Jim had the idea that the pools were somehow prodigiously deep. He had read, in fact, that the entirety of Los Angeles lay on what amounted to a floating bed of rock. A deep enough hole would sooner or later find the ocean. Uncle Edward insisted that at any particular moment, while you sat in your armchair smoking your pipe and reading your book, a submarine might well be cruising a mile beneath you, its running lights startling schools of giant squid. These tidepools, then, might go anywhere they pleased. That was pretty much the way Jim saw it. And Giles was in no hurry to disagree, as he had in the matter of the cyclops. He had a strange affinity for the ocean, for the idea of ancient, Paleozoic seas and the monsters that crept—and might still creep—across dim ocean floors.

Giles had been born, like his father, with a neat set of vestigial gills along either side of his neck. Coincidentally, the index and middle fingers of each of his hands were partially webbed. Doctors had suggested operating on the baby, but Basil Peach had been dead against it, owing, perhaps, to being the obvious progenitor of the deformities. To alter them would be to admit to them, and in those days Basil Peach would admit no such thing. Jim hadn’t thought much about Gill’s deformities, such as they were, until he met Oscar Pallcheck. He had assumed that any number of people had such ornamentation. Oscar, however, had immediately seen the humor in Giles’ nickname. It still made him laugh; he could stretch a joke out over years. Giles, however, was above it, or seemed to be.

So Jim didn’t expect Giles to refute his theory of bottomless pools. He assumed that if Giles had sported a single eye in the center of his forehead, then he would have been more amenable to the idea of cyclops. Giles borrowed the bucket, lay across a dry expanse of rock, and gazed entranced into the pool, watching for the leviathan.

About then there was a shout from Uncle Edward. Jim hurried across from one rock to another, plunging up to his knees in a tidepool on the way to where his uncle was thrusting his hand and arm into the depths. Jim looked sharply in the pool for some treasure, for a wonderful seashell or a pearl or a Spanish coin. But the surface of the water was rippled with wind and rising tide, and churned by the repeated dunkings of Edward’s arm. Abruptly, his uncle gasped in a deep breath, plunged his head and shoulders into the cold water rand came up holding what at first appeared to be a white murex or a pelican’s foot shell. But on closer examination it wasn’t either one. It was the tiny bleached skeleton of a human hand.

The discovery, although strange and magical enough to Jim, seemed to suggest immense mysteries to Uncle Edward, who slogged off across the reefs through the rising tide, muttering about diving bells. The tide was quickly coming in, and all of them were wet to the waist before they clambered up the steep cliffs to the car. No cyclops peered out at them.

On the return trip Giles Peach was still under the sway of the deep pools, for he took only a half-hearted interest in the little hand. It occurred to Jim, as the Hudson rounded a curve in the Coast Highway and the green ocean disappeared to westward, that it was a pity he hadn’t some sort of lens—some facsimile of the glass-bottomed bucket, of Momus’ glass—to shove up against Giles’ head in order to see what was inside. It wouldn’t at all have surprised him if the view were one of gently waving eel grass and sea lettuce and wandering chitons and limpets.

It was about then that Giles Peach was put in the way of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn’t interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar-shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to that part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp. And beyond that, he loved the idea of owning great quantities of things. He wasn’t in the habit of reading the books, since the texts so rarely made good on the promise of the illustrations. Once a month or so, after a particularly satisfactory trip to Acres of Books, he’d drag out the lot of his paperback Burroughs novels, lining up Tarzan books here and Martian books there and Pellucidar books somewhere else. The Roy Krenkel covers were the most amazing, with their startling slashes and dabs of impressionist color and their distant spired cities half in ruin and shadow beneath a purple sky.

“Look at this machine, Jim,” Uncle Edward would say, pointing at the weird, suspended apparatus operated by the Mastermind of Mars. There on the cover was a bluish-purple complex of metallic globes and rotors and suspended silver wires, and the goggle-eyed Mastermind waving an impossible syringe over the supine body of an orange-robed maiden.

“What do you suppose he does with this?” Uncle Edward would ask.

“Does he grow turnips?” Jim would ask.

After which Uncle Edward, pretending to take a really close look at it, would reply, “Why I believe he does. It’s a turnip transformer. That’s exactly what it is.”

So one Saturday when Burroughs was spread across the living room, Giles Peach wandered in and fell away into the covers of those books as he’d fallen into the depths of the tidepools. The illustrations were windows into alternate worlds, and he quickly saw a way to boost himself over the sill and clamber through. He fingered this volume and that, amazed at mastodons and sunlit jungle depths, and he traced with his finger the smoky line of cloud drift beyond the domes of the city of Opar.

“Why, look at this machine,” Uncle Edward cried, winking at Jim and pointing once again to the globular device. “What do you suppose he does with this?”

Jim was too well schooled in the game by then not to ask, “Does he grow turnips?” in a sincere enough tone to snatch Giles back into the living room.

“I doubt that he grows turnips,” said Giles, who had no humor in him. “At least he doesn’t grow them with this machine.” He peered at the cover, inspecting the ridiculous device, determining what manner of thing it was.

“Oh?” said Uncle Edward. “It looks altogether like a turnip transmutator. The sort that the Irish use to turn potatoes into other sorts of root crops.”

Giles gave him a look, a sort of pitying, condescending look, and pointed toward the recumbent maiden. “Do you mean to say they’re going to turn this woman into a turnip?” he asked, coming to the conclusion that the book quite possibly wasn’t the scientific treasure he had supposed it to be. “I’d say it has something to do with a dental drill,” Giles said, pointing toward what appeared to be a syringe. “This doctor is about to drill a hole in her skull and perform some sort of electronic lesion.”

“Giles!” cried Uncle Edward, surprised. “Where did you hear such a thing as that?”

“I read about it,” said Giles calmly, as if reading about lesions performed with dental drills and electricity was a common enough thing among fifteen-year-olds in the city of Eagle Rock. “There was a man,” continued Gill, “who could make rats dance by lesioning part of their brain—some little gland, I think.”

“Was there?” asked Edward, who favored the idea of dancing rats. “You like to read this stuff, do you, Giles?”

“Very much, sir. I’m studying to be a scientist, an inventor.”

“Well good for you, lad. That’s just the thing, science.” Uncle Edward picked up a handful of books and slid them in along the shelves. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Giles inspected the cover of At the Earth’s Core, the flower-hung jungle and the scantily clad pair of women astride blue dinosaurs in a sunlit clearing. He carefully opened the volume and thumbed past four pages until he arrived at the first chapter and read aloud two absolutely fateful sentences. “Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life to the perfection of a mechanical, subterranean prospector.” He shut the book, looked hard at the cover again, and wandered out through the front door and down the street without saying another word. Giles didn’t mean to be impolite. He was simply lost in Perry’s invention—in the whole idea of inventions. Years later Edward St. Ives would say, on more than one occasion, to watch out for people who fancy inventions but who can see nothing in the notion of turnip transmogrifiers; they aren’t half frivolous enough and will cause trouble. In fact, the mechanical mole—the digging leviathan—was conceived that afternoon and was born in the following months.

If it had been the only thing Giles Peach had invented and built, the very idea of it would seem preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. Giles and Jim had been engaged for some years in building mechanical devices. On occasions Oscar Pall-check gave them a hand, illustrating, more often than not, the defects in their methods. In Giles’ garage was an oak barrel full of mechanical junk they had managed to collect: old electric motors, ruined clocks, nuts and bolts and bits of copper wire, a sprung umbrella, radio tubes, bottle caps and bicycle parts, a little leather bag full of droplets of solder. The two had pieced together a wonderful gadget around an old fan motor. The machine hadn’t any purpose, really, beyond gadgetry. They intended at first to make a spinning model of the solar system. So they attached straightened bits of wire of varying lengths to support the nine planets, which, when the motor was switched on, spun very quickly around the sun in tight little circles until it threw itself to bits.

Gill then rigged a belt and gear mechanism from wide rubber bands, wooden spools, and pieces of an old mechanical clock, extending the device so that it could contain any number of solar systems, all cranking roundabout at the same time. On the strength of his knowledge of astronomy, he determined that such a plethora of simultaneously whirring planets would be as unscientific as a turnip transmutator, and so set out to find a way to operate little white Christmas tree pin lights strung between the wires. He wanted to make a model of the Andromeda nebula, to suspend it from the rafters of the garage, and to shut off all the lights, close the doors, and watch it whirl there in space. The nebula, however, blew a succession of fuses when he plugged it in, managing to get underway for one mysterious, kaleidoscopic moment before blinking into darkness.

When the nebula failed, scientific pretense failed with it. They removed the stars and replaced them with all manner of things, notably the heads of several rubber apes and a collection of little plastic Japanese gods—gaudily painted objects with overhanging bellies and pendulous ears. They tore the base from a coin bank shaped like a globe and affixed the painted sphere to a long coathanger that thrust out from amid the various gods and ape heads. Finally, along the bent arm of another piece of wire Giles strapped a toothy little stuffed crocodile with a broken-off tail. It was a sorry-looking, bug-infested creature, but when the whirring Earth machine shot into life and the globe went spinning away among the ape heads pursued on its course by the open-mouthed crocodile, it seemed to the two of them to be a grand sight. Gill pointed out that it was archetypal, that the crocodile was leviathan and would someday consume the earth.

The two worked the device for an hour with great success until Oscar Pallcheck happened by and had a good laugh over the machine at the expense of the crocodile. Giles and Jim, of course, were obliged to laugh along and to admit that it would improve the thing greatly to shove one of the ape heads into the crocodile’s mouth so that the ape peered out at the continent of Africa. The experiment degenerated from there, and before he went his peculiar way that evening, Oscar found a baseball bat and whacked the globe as it wobbled past into the wall of Gill’s garage, crashing the side in and putting an end to the whirling earth machine.

That same fan motor, along with two others, became, in the Saturday afternoons following, a mechanical man. The thing’s legs were stacks of roped tin cans that flopped and jerked when the current was switched on. The mechanical man suffered more evolutionary changes than had the whirring earth machine and was declining just about as rapidly until, as a lark, Oscar Pallcheck dropped the creature out of the foliage of a Chinese elm on the parkway and into the path of Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp.

Giles became convinced as a result that inventions without purpose were doomed by physical law to degeneration in a manner analogous to the decline of human beings who hadn’t any aim or resolve. He singled out Oscar Pallcheck as a case in point.

What all of that inventing was leading up to, none of them knew. John Pinion, the polar explorer, had an inkling, and he encouraged Giles’ gadgeting, going so far as to buy him occasional tools and parts, and talking seriously about the diameter of the Earth. That turn left Jim behind. He didn’t care much for serious inventions, and didn’t half believe that Gill’s growing mechanical mole would dig at all, much less into the center of the Earth.

The one opportunity that he had to see the mole did nothing to change his mind. Jim and Uncle Edward had stopped at John Pinion’s ranch in the foothills of Eagle Rock at the request of Gill’s mother, to summon her son home. And there had sat the mole—the Digging Leviathan, as Uncle Edward liked to call it—twenty odd feet of riveted steel perched on a trestle built of railroad ties. All in all it was a sort of art deco wonder of crenelations and fins and thick ripply glass, as if it had been designed by a pulp magazine artist years before the dawn of the space age which would iron flat the wrinkles of imagination and wonder.

Jim was transfixed. Edward St. Ives was contemptuous. Pinion was a posturing fool, or so he pointed out as the Hudson roared away down Colorado Boulevard that afternoon, an oblivious Giles slouching quietly in the back seat. Pinion was developing the mole in the spirit of spite, not science. He wasn’t intent so much on getting to the Earth’s core as on getting there ahead of Russel Latzarel and Edward St. Ives. Jim nodded sagely and agreed with his uncle.

Gill continued to work away on bits and pieces of the machine, dabbling continually with it at his cluttered and ill-lit workbench in his own garage. He would disappear for hours at a time, tinkering with bits of mechanical debris, with gears and sprockets, wire and springs, machine screws and chunks of lucite rod. Once, when Gill abandoned him, Jim had an opportunity to take a quick glance at the journal that Gill kept hidden under his bed.

Everything went into the journal. It was wonderfully long. Gill egotistically called it the “Last History” and had been at it for years. It filled boxes. Jim didn’t have a chance to browse through more than six or eight pages, but what he read was unsettling, although it was difficult to say just why. There was something peculiar in it, as if what he was reading was linked somehow to the ebb and flow of time and space, and as if it was more than a casual diary, more than symbols scrawled on a page. Jim could sense straight off something waiting just under the surface, like the indistinct shadows that slide below rolling ocean swells—shadows cast, perhaps, by clouds, or then again by the silent passing of a great dark fish, navigating through the gray and shifting waters. Something was lurking among the words in Gill’s journal, swimming below them and around them but never quite surfacing. And once he started to think about it, it didn’t matter at all what it was—the shadows of cloud drift or of deep water monsters—it couldn’t be entirely ignored or forgotten.

He hadn’t made it through a half dozen pages before the garage door slammed and Gill tramped into the house, plaiting a bundle of thin copper wire. Jim had hastily shoved the journal back under the bed, and pretended to be reading a copy of Savage Pellucidar. He made the mistake some weeks later of mentioning the journal to Oscar Pallcheck, who promptly stole it.

2

WHEN WILLIAM HASTINGS climbed over the wall into his own back yard, it occurred to him that one of his shoes was gone—probably lost among ivy roots. He teetered across the copings, struggling to hoist himself over, popping loose one of the buttons along the front of his coat and cursing under his breath. Absolute quiet was worth a fortune. Silence and speed, that was what he needed, but his arms didn’t seem to have quite the strength in them that they’d once had. It was a loss of elasticity, probably due to slow poisoning over the last two years.

He peered over his shoulder at the tree-shadowed patch of Stickley Avenue visible beyond the edge of the the empty house behind. There was no sign of pursuit, but he knew they were coming, or at least that Frosticos was. Vigilance was necessary here. It was worth twenty dollars a minute, fifty. Off to the right the Pembly house squatted in a weedy yard. He was sure, just for the instant it took for his button to pop off onto the lawn, that he was being watched from the Pembly window. The old lady, no doubt, observing him. He heaved himself up, thrashed wildly to steady himself, and toppled over onto the lawn and onto his back like a bug.

His heart raced. He lay there breathing. Had he shouted? He wiggled his toes and fingers to see if the spine had gone—snapped like a twig. But it hadn’t. When Edward St. Ives glanced up from his book and looked through the window, there was William, his brother-in-law, creeping across the lawn on his hands and knees. Edward threw the window open. “William,” he cried. “Fancy your being here!”

William waved his hand as if smashing invisible newspapers into a box, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, widening his eyes and shaking his head. A moment later he was in through the back door, an ivy-bedecked figure in a tattered coat, groping for a kitchen chair. Edward smoked his pipe.

“Come home, have you?” asked Edward. “Bit of a holiday?”

“That’s right.” William poked at the curtains across the little window of the back door, convinced, it seemed, that at any moment someone, or perhaps some thing—an enormous copper head or a grinning baby’s face, round as a child’s wading pool—would peer up over the fence, tracking him by way of lost buttons and abandoned shoes. No such things appeared.

Edward had been puffing like an engine on his pipe, and the tobacco glowed red beneath a cloud of whirling smoke. William was declining, he decided. It wasn’t just the flayed coat or the absent shoe. He had a pale, veined look about him and three inches or so too much hair that shot out over his ears in sparse tufts. And there was something else—a squint, the rigid line of his mouth—that hinted at conspiracies and betrayals. He seemed to sense something foreboding in the paint that peeled in little curled flakes off the eaves of the silent Pembly house next door, and in the deepening shadow of a half-leafless elm that stretched twisted limbs over the fence, dropping autumn leaves onto the lawn in the afternoon breeze. William watched, barely breathing, waiting, half understanding the hieroglyphic cawing of a pair of black crows in a distant walnut tree, who—he could see it even at that distance—were watching him, emissaries, perhaps, of Doctor Hilario Frosticos.

The silence of falling evening was full of suggestion, an enormous, descending pane of flattening glass. “What do you hear from Peach?” William asked abruptly, startling Edward who had been eyeing the phone.

“Nothing, actually. Got a card from Windermere a month ago. Two months.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing that signified.”

William let go the curtain and opened a cupboard door, pulling out a bottle of port. “Everything signifies,” he said. “I got a letter last week. Something’s afoot. I’m fairly sure it had been read—steamed open and then glued shut again with library paste. I could taste it.”

Edward nodded. Humoring him would accomplish little.

Silence was safest. Edward decided against calling the sanitarium. He could do that whenever he wished. And William had deteriorated. It couldn’t do him any harm to stay at home for a bit.

When Jim Hastings arrived home from school late that evening, he found his uncle and father slumped in armchairs in the living room. A collection of magazines, Scientific American and the Journal of Amphibian Evolution, lay scattered across the coffee table and onto the floor, and the little skeletal hand from the tidepool sat before his father atop a hardbound copy of Amazon Moon and an old devastated volume of Blake’s collected poetry. William Hastings was lost in speculations.

The following morning there was a fog off the ocean, swirling in across the dewy grass of the yard, dripping from the limbs of the elm. William stood at the window, idly rubbing his forehead and thinking of rivers of fog, of subterranean rivers, of rivers that fell away into the center of the Earth, into inland seas alive with the brief black flash of fins and the undulating bulk of toothed whales. The fog cleared just for an instant and William pressed his face almost into the window. “Edward!” he shouted.

“What is it?” St. Ives hurried into the room, rubbing his hands dry on a tea towel.

“Look at that.”

For a moment there was nothing but mist. Then the fog thinned and William pointed at the lawn beneath the overhanging elm. “What do you make of it?’

“I’d say a dog has found his way into our back yard,” said Edward skeptically. “I must have left the gate unlatched.”

William dashed from the room. The back door slammed, then slammed again, and, with his eyes lit like lamps, he dashed back in again. “The gate’s latched. Damn all gates. This isn’t a case of an open gate. This is what I’ve been telling you about.”

“Ah,” said Edward, afraid that it had come to that.

“The Pemblys, I’m certain of it, are playing their hand here. This abomination has their filthy fingerprints all over it.”

“It appears to me,” Edward said, mistaking his meaning, “that the stuff is globbed in what might be called its original resting place. I’m certain we shouldn’t accuse the Pemblys here. In fact, I’m not at all sure what you’re suggesting.”

‘They’ve thrown their dog over the fence to defecate on our lawn; that’s what I’m suggesting. There’s more to this than you know, Edward. I’ve given it a good deal of thought. I’ve thought of nothing else, if you want to know the truth, and I see patterns here. We will be as vigilant and deceptive as they are.

“Ah,” said Uncle Edward.

“We’ll start by trimming the top of that big hibiscus along the fence there. You see, if it were a foot or so shorter, I could stand here like so, against the line of the drape, and see quite neatly into their living room. They’d take me for a pole lamp. Absolutely innocent. I’m going to catch them at their little plots. Don’t mistake me here.”

For once Edward didn’t know whether to humor or reason with him. He made it a general rule to agree overwhelmingly with zealots, who, he was sure, all suffered varying degrees of lunacy. There was no profit in open discussion. He edged up along the drapes to have a peek himself. “What, exactly,” he asked William, “are they up to? They’re awfully good at it, aren’t they?”

“Good at it?” William snorted with quick laughter. “Not half as good as I am. I’ll teach the lot of them. You surprise me, Edward.”

William, apparently satisfied with his plan for trimming the hibiscus, sat down in a green, vastly overstuffed chair, and sipped his coffee, peering thoughtfully into the unlit grate. He looked up suddenly at his brother-in-law. “Do you mean to say that even with the skeleton hand and Professor Latzarel’s fish you don’t see the shape of things? And Peach’s letters from Windermere? What dark secrets …” He stopped and squinted over his coffee, groping around on the table for his pipe. “Do you recall,” he asked, “that second meeting of the Blake Society? The night when that idiot from the university lectured at us about fish imagery in Romantic literature. What was his name? Something preposterous. An obvious lie. Spanner, was it? Ashbless went mad that night. Remember?”

“Well,” Edward replied, “there was some debate. But he hardly went mad. And the gentleman’s name was Benner, Steerforth Benner. But he wasn’t the one who delivered the lecture. It was Brendan Doyle who spoke. Benner wasn’t any older than Giles and Jim.”

“Doyle was it? Cocky little twit. Expert on Romantic poets! Expert on any number of things I don’t doubt. I half suspect it was him who left that memento under the elm.” William gestured broadly at the back yard.

“He was windy,” Edward said, shrugging. “But he wasn’t all that bad. I rather liked him.”

William gave him a look that seemed to imply that in certain matters, Edward was a child. “Ashbless went for him that night, though. Blew his top. Told him he’d tweak his nose, do you remember? Just because of some historical discrepancy. Ashbless is the peculiar one. Believe anything you like about this Doyle, about the filthy Pemblys for that matter, but watch Ashbless. That’s my advice to you.” And William poked his pipestem in Edward’s direction as a gesture of finality.

“I’ve suspected Ashbless since I met him,” William continued, settling comfortably into his machinations. “Anyone who would purposely assume the name of a dead poet, just to add some sham value to his own scribbling, isn’t to be trusted. Not an inch. I won’t insist he’s not good. He’s certainly the best of the Cahuenga poets. But he’s fishy as a chowder. He reminds me of the King in Huckleberry Finn. I keep expecting him to take his hat off and announce, ‘I am the late dauphin.’”

Edward was heating up and about to set in to defend Ashbless when William leaped up and darted across to his post by the drapes. Beyond the fence, Mrs. Pembly, her hair in curlers and dressed in a half-wit’s idea of an Oriental robe, poked among the weeds of her back yard. A big, scabrous Doberman Pinscher trailed along behind her. “She’s up to something,” said William. “For my money she throws that beast over the wall after dark to defecate on our lawn. There’s villainy afoot here.”

Mrs. Pembly paused for a moment, peering up into the branches of the elm. “I’ve got it!” cried William, waving his left hand meaningfully. “It’s a simple business. Did they think they could fool me?”

Edward could see that things were going awry. “What have you got?” he asked.

“A block and tackle. They hoist that damned beast over the wall with a block and tackle, wait for him to commit his disgusting crimes, then jerk him back again like some sort of filthy marionette.”

Before Edward could respond, William was through the back door. He hauled out a shovel from the tool shed, scooped up the offending debris, and sent it soaring across the top of the fence into the Pembly weeds. Mrs. Pembly flattened herself against the garage wall, clasping the lapels of her nightgown together with both hands when she saw who it was that threatened her. She seemed unable to speak.

“Here are your cudgels!” cried William, flinging the spade to the ground triumphantly, and assuming, of course, that Mrs. Pembly had fully understood the transaction. He dusted his hands theatrically, turned, and strode into the house where Edward scratched his head, waiting for the storm to break. But nothing happened. William was apparently victorious. In the course of the morning he trimmed the obscuring hibiscus and spent a solid two hours arranging the drapes and the living room furniture in such a way that, when he stood at the window, a casual observer would take him for a floor lamp. He even went so far as to make Edward stroll back and forth across the rear yard with an air of affected nonchalance while he stood on one leg like a flamingo and perched a broad, conical, bamboo shade on his head in the fashion of a pole lamp or a coolie. Edward had known it would be bad from the moment he saw William creeping across the yard on all fours, but that it would escalate so quickly and thoroughly was a frightening surprise. What was of immediate necessity was to involve his poor brother in intellectual pursuits, to get his mind off imagined threats. There was Jim to think of. It was hard enough on him that his father had gone round the bend. He should be shielded from obvious lunacy. Somehow he’d have to talk William into removing the bottle caps he had clipped to his shirt with their own cork washers. That sort of thing was painful, to be sure. “There’s a meeting of the Society tomorrow night,” he said to William after the lampshade incident.

“The Blake Society?”

“The Newtonians,” said Edward. “Right here. Some of your old Mends will be here.”

“Squires?”

“Yes indeed. He’s working on modifications for the diving bell—something he calls an absolute gyro. It’s a steadying mechanism, I believe, although I’m not much of an engineer myself. Latzarel is planning a voyage into the pool off Palos Verdes sometime next month.”

“Good old Squires,” William said. “I’ve got some ideas I’d like to try out on him. I’ve been reading Einstein, and have a plot for a first-rate story. Hard science, too. Rock hard. That’s why I think Squires is the man to try it on.” William scratched the end of his nose. “Is the maze room intact?”

“Of course,” said Edward.

“Then I’ll just put in a few hours.” William shoved fresh tobacco into his pipe, lit it, and stood up puffing. “Mice all dead?”

“No,” said Edward. “I’ve got a new lot. All white. Absolutely innocent. And there’s three that just gave birth.”

“Grand!” cried William, elated. “I’m going to put some of the litter in with that big bufo morinus. If we keep him full of horsemeat maybe he’ll leave them alone long enough for them to imprint. We’ll be halfway home then.”

‘The bufo died two months ago. But there’s an axolotl as big as a rabbit out there that will work just as well.”

William nodded, caught up in the spirit of science. ‘That will do nicely,” he said. “Very nicely. External gills too. Very pretty items. How is Giles Peach these days, by the way?”

“Amazing. He’s onto something big, I think. John Pinion has an eye on him.”

But Edward was sorry he’d said it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “Pinion!” William gasped. “Pinion can keep his filthy hands off Giles Peach! Peach is ours!”

“Of course,” said Edward. “Of course. I’ve said as much. Damn Pinion.” And finally William, wearing a leather apron, went out the back door, muttering to himself. He got about halfway to the maze shed, stopped, turned, shoved back in, and shouted something incoherent into the kitchen. All Edward could make out were the words “Pinion” and “travesty,” but he let the matter slide and didn’t ask for clarification.

3

THE NEWTONIAN SOCIETY met every month, more often if an excuse could be found. Two years back it had been called the Blake Society and had met to discuss literary matters. William Hastings, at the time, hadn’t yet turned the corner; he was merely an eccentric professor of Romantic literature at Eagle Rock University who possessed an amazing library and who had, one Sunday afternoon, run out of shelf space in the living room, and so had pressed the refrigerator into use, shoving a copy of Herodotus and The White Oaks of Jalna, for some inexplicable reason, in among jars of salad peppers and pickle relish.

The Newtonian Society was formed after William Hastings’ disappearance into what Oscar Pallcheck cheerfully referred to as “the hatch.” Literature was abandoned for science—specifically for the investigation of Professor Latzarel’s theories. On the Saturday evening following William Hastings’ surprise arrival, then, Giles Peach and his friend Jim hurried down the sidewalk toward Jim’s home, anxious to attend the meeting and especially to hear Latzarel’s opinions on the little tidepool hand.

Professor Latzarel’s vehicle—Jim couldn’t think of a better word for it—ground to a halt at the curb just as the two of them drew up to the house. It was an old Land Rover station wagon, a tremendous square thing that appeared from almost every angle to be built entirely of wood—wood covered in a coat of gray dust like the sarcophagus of an Egyptian pharaoh that had sat in the desert for a dozen centuries until, perhaps by osmosis, the wood itself had begun to metamorphose into dust. A day would come, Jim was certain of it, when the machine, wheezing along one of the interlacing highways of the southwest desert, would complete the transmutation and crumble into a quick heap to be blown across the sands by a wind devil spawned by the sudden cessation of motion. The driver of a pursuing automobile, not quite believing in the existence of the unlikely machine in the first place, would see the distant shiver of its decay through the shimmering desert heat and would call it a mirage, not noticing the receding back of the pith-helmeted Professor Latzarel carrying a butterfly net, disappearing beyond a clump of Joshua trees. Jim would have given anything to own such a car.

Professor Latzarel, in fact, must have been packed for an outing, for there, strapped to the enormous rear bumper, was a quiver of old ghost-town picks and shovels, and one of those canvas water bags that perpetually leak and yet are never empty. Inside were a half dozen topographic maps and what must have been a mile of hemp cordage.

Latzarel himself was a fierce, weedy-looking man who took everything very seriously and who couldn’t be bothered to comb his hair. His coat complemented his car. He rushed past Jim, nodding obliquely, then caught sight of Giles Peach. He stopped and shook Giles’ hand, fabricating something to say. He clearly couldn’t keep his eyes off Giles’ gills, which were almost hidden by a turtleneck sweater. “Have you seen Dr. Pinion?” he asked suddenly, raising one eyebrow. Gill replied that he had, just yesterday.

“Ah,” replied Latzarel, nodding his head. “Did he have anything interesting to say?”

“No, sir. He wanted to know about the digging machine.”

“Ah,” said Latzarel again. “That would be the subterranean prospector? Edward has told me a good bit about it. I’d like to have a look at it myself, if I might.”

Giles didn’t reply. He half nodded, but showed no enthusiasm, a strange thing for Giles, who was normally full of his inventions. Jim could see that Professor Latzarel was disappointed, but that he hesitated to be obviously so. The three of them clumped up the steps and into the house, which by then was full of talk and tobacco smoke and glasses of port. Jim was relieved to see his father talking animatedly to Roycroft Squires. He half feared, as he always did, that just beyond the veil of the present some eccentricity lay waiting. That his father might at any moment slide off the thin edge of sanity, and that his uncle would dash for the telephone and a van would come screaming down the road. Oscar Pallcheck liked to call them the “white coat boys” and laughed at the idea of gigantic butterfly nets and shepherd’s crooks. Jim generally laughed along guiltily. But now that his father was home, he couldn’t see the joke. He couldn’t, in fact, develop any considered opinions about his father at all. His thoughts were limited by a misty wall beyond which his mind wouldn’t venture. He had determined that the same wall existed within the mind of his father, that they were products of the same foggy uncertainty. He wondered how often his father traveled back to the day Jim’s mother died in the autumn hills above Los Angeles.

They had gone picnicking in Griffith Park—Jim, his father and mother. Uncle Edward had elected to stay home and, as he put it, whack about in the garage. It was his mother’s idea that they pack a picnic lunch, hike around in the hills—green from early rains—and then catch the late afternoon program at the planetarium.

They found a grassy knoll beneath a clump of nearly leafless oaks and ate sandwiches. Jim’s mother talked about the kitchen curtains and about the attention Uncle Edward had been paying to Velma Peach, Giles’ mother. Jim could remember the conversation almost word for word, even though at the time he was indifferent to kitchen curtains and couldn’t at all see why anyone would develop an interest in Velma Peach, or in anybody’s mother, for that matter. Now, two years later, the faded kitchen curtains were tangled in his memory with his mother’s face, one of them calling up the other without fail.

After lunch he and his father trudged around through the chaparral and up this and that little trail, filling a paper bag with useable refuse. They hadn’t any notion of cleaning the place up, but were looking for treasures—for odds and ends of mechanical debris to add to the bucket in Gill’s garage. Nine-tenths of the collection that afternoon consisted of bottle caps of the sort lined with little cork washers that could be pried out and used for remarkable purposes. It was possible, for instance, to clamp a bottle cap to a shirt by separating the washer from the cap, then reinserting it with a layer of shirt in between. On that Saturday in the park William Hastings went wild for the idea, and by the time both of them had had enough treasure hunting each sported fifteen or twenty bottle cap insignias like campaigners at a political convention in support of soft drinks.

Jim’s mother would roll her eyes in feigned uncertainty, as if both of them might belong in a padded room for getting up to such tricks. She would agree after their continued insistence to wear one herself, at least until they arrived at the planetarium.

So Jim and his father, their collecting at an end, set out merrily down the trail toward where Jim’s mother, having complained of an unidentifiable ache, was resting and reading her book—Balzac, Jim recalled, which she read in French. The two came bursting up, emblazoned with bottle caps, and found her asleep. At least Jim supposed she was asleep. He set out to make a racket—whistling, shouting to his father who wasn’t ten feet behind, and commenting aloud about the outstanding collection in the sack. He rummaged in it and found the skeleton of a bladeless clasp knife, the bone shell of the handle having broken away from one rusty side.

For some reason his father never made the mistake of assuming her to be asleep. Perhaps it was the position in which she lay. The next half hour seemed to Jim a sort of numb stage play in which his father, for ten grim minutes, worked to revive her, then sat beside her for another twenty, staring blankly into the twisted branches of the leafless oak against which Jim stood.

Finally two rangers summoned from the Park Service by passing hikers carried his mother on a stretcher to-a waiting ambulance and away to Metropolitan Hospital where she was pronounced dead. Jim and his father were met there by Uncle Edward. Jim could picture every dreary, white and chromium moment of the two or three hours he spent at the hospital. Two years later they seemed to mean nothing at all to him, to be completely removed from any memories of his mother. He knew little of the workings of the human heart, and it was inexplicable that hers should have stopped like a clock that had wound down. When the three of them drove silently and wearily home that night, Jim and his father were still dotted with bottle caps. His uncle hadn’t enough sense of humor left in him to ask about them. Jim could see, two years later at the meeting of the Newtonians, that his father still wore two of the caps affixed to his shirt—a White Rock cream soda and a Nehi Orange. He wished guiltily and sadly that his father would button his coat.

But William Hastings was for once oblivious to that fateful afternoon in the park—something that had pursued him through the two years since—and was carrying on about a story he intended to write. Roycroft Squires nodded and squinted and messed with his pipe, shoving a big wad of curly black tobacco into the enormous bowl carved into the head of an armadillo, and tamped it down first with his thumb and then with the business end of a sixteen-penny nail.

“As I understand it,” said William, puffing on his own pipe, “relativity is a fairly simple business. But I have an angle on it that will knock you out.”

Squires nodded, ready to be knocked out.

“Now, as an object approaches the speed of light,” said William, hunching forward and poking his pipestem in Squires’ direction, “its mass increases proportionately, which is to say it simply gets bigger and bigger. Swells like a balloon, if you follow. And that’s what restricts one from traveling at light speed—there isn’t enough universe to hold us.”

Squires began to say something, to protest, perhaps, but hadn’t gotten two words out when William, swept away in a deluge of science and art, broke in on him with another revelation. “And as we approach light speed, mind you, we fall into what the physicists call a straight line loop. Everything in the end, you see, is circular—the passing of the seasons, the four ages of man, the transmutation of base metals into gold, the cycle of evolution, time and space. It’s all one; you’ve read Fibinocci’s discussion of the whorl of seeds in a sunflower and the circular spray of stars in revolving nebulae?”

The question was rhetorical. William didn’t wait for an answer. “Parallel lines,” he continued, “meet in space. A straight line leading out into the infinite catches its own tail like a mythological oceanic serpent. The mistake, you see, made by men of science, is to remain blind to certain mysteries, certain connections. They suppose that a forest glade illuminated by sunlight is the same forest glade at midnight, lit by moonbeams. You and I know they’re wrong.”

Squires could see his point. He nodded.

‘The rays of the moon, you see, are alive with reflected emanations that are absent in the light of day. All of this, I’m telling you, is of vast importance. In my story an astronaut launches out in his ship, bound for Alpha Centauri. He settles back, watching the approaching stars through a great circular convex window as if he sees the universe in globe, and the stars, as the poem has it, are herring fish. Or rather as if he himself is in a fishbowl and the stars and planets whirling in space are eyes watching him as he hurtles among them. His craft accelerates toward light speed. He swells, moderately at first, then preposterously. His ship becomes bulbous, voluminous. He’s a grinning moon man, a cloud being, but of course he’s