Oh, well. Time to go to work. Dortmunder got to his feet, putting one foot on the soggy seat as he turned, holding the flashlight with his left hand as he picked up the pole from the back with his right. Beside him, Kelp, moving more easily without this useless steering wheel in his way, was doing the same thing.
Kelp elaborately mimed, with his entire body, a counting cadence: One, two, three; ready, set, go. On the first two, they positioned their poles, more or less even with the rear tires, pressing down into the gravel roadbed. On three, they pushed, and the Hornet moved forward, but only as long as they kept pushing.
One, two, three; forward.
One, two, three; forward.
One, two, three; forward.
One, two, three; up.
One— Up?
Dortmunder and Kelp stared at each other in wild surprise, goggle-eyed inside their goggles. Shakily, Dortmunder aimed the flashlight over the Hornet’s side, down at the ground, which was farther away.
Jesus Christ! Now what?
Only the front tires still touched the tracks. As the rear of the Hornet swayed gently back and forth, still lifting slowly, tilting them forward, Dortmunder and Kelp turned this way and that, bewildered, losing the poles, bumping into each other. The Hornet, off balance, tilted ever more forward and now leftward as well, the right front tire lifting off the rail as delicately as a mastodon’s foot.
The Ping-Pong balls! They’d misunderstood the buoying capacity of two large trash bags full of Ping-Pong balls, that’s what had happened. Trapped in the trunk of the Hornet, now that they’d reached the increased pressure of this depth, they were lifting the rear of the car.
And if Dortmunder and Kelp tried to keep poling them deeper, closer to Putkin’s Corners, despite the Ping-Pong balls? No way. But what could they do instead? Gotta think. Gotta think! Gotta have a minute to think!
Dortmunder made frantic pushing gestures at Kelp: Sit down! Sit down, you’re rocking the car! Kelp, not sure what Dortmunder wanted of him, moved this way and that, stumbled forward, blundered into Dortmunder, and grabbed the steering wheel beside Dortmunder’s elbow to regain his balance.
Now all the weight was on the Hornet’s left side, and suddenly the car flipped right over, catching the two of them within itself like a clam rake snagging a couple of clams. Both their flashlights went tumbling away into the murk.
BCD! That’s all Dortmunder could think when he found himself in the dark again, underwater and lost again, enclosed inside the Hornet. Scrabbling all over himself, he found the right button, managed to lift his left arm up into the area around the steering column, jammed the button down hard, and the BCD filled right up with air, just as it was supposed to, increasing his buoyancy wondrously, pressing him ever more firmly against the Hornet’s upside-down front seat, increasing the Hornet’s buoyancy as well, moving the whole mass slowly and ponderously upward, through the black water.
So many stars. If you looked very closely, you could see them reflected in the calm black surface of the reservoir, as though this small man-made bowl of water on the planet Earth contained within itself the entire universe.
Gee! Bob thought, I’m coming up with so many insights! I’ll have to write all of this down on paper when I get back to my desk in-the dam so I’ll be able to talk about it all with Manfred, next time we—
Something broke the still surface. Out a ways, off to the right, near where the bubbles had been. Something… something hard to make out.
Bob stood up straighter, taking a step away from his car, squinting toward that unknown object emerging out of the reservoir. Not a sea serpent, he told himself jokingly; he knew all about that sort of thing now, knew the deep wellsprings of self-discontent that had led him to that particular error. This would simply be some sort of fish, that’s all, surfacing briefly; probably the same one that had caused the bubbles a little while ago.
But, no. Not a fish. Still not a sea serpent, but not a fish either. Starlight glinted mutedly on metal. A machine of some sort. Round constructions on top, a wider metal surface below, angling away, downward into the water. Hard to see details in the dark, but certainly metal, certainly a machine.
A submarine? In the reservoir? Ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly—
And then, with a sudden leap of the heart, Bob knew. A spaceship! A flying saucer! A spaceship from the stars, from the stars! Visiting Earth secretly, by night, hiding here in the reservoir, taking its measurements or doing whatever it was doing, now rising up out of the water, going back, back to the stars. To the stars!
Bob ran forward, arms upraised in supplication. “Take me with you!” he screamed, and tripped over a root, and crashed flat onto the ground at the edge of the water, knocking himself cold.
“Now, if you want to get to South Jersey in the afternoon,” Stan said, “the Verrazano and the Outerbridge Crossing are still your best bet. It’s just it’s a little tricky getting across Staten Island. What you do, when you—”
“I had to bury a soldier on Staten Island once,” Tiny reminisced, leaning on the winch.
Tom, hunkered down on his heels beside the tracks like a refugee taking five, said, “Because he was dead, I suppose.”
“Not when we started,” Tiny said. “See, what we—”
Stan, looking out at the reservoir, said, “What’s that?”
They all looked. Tom slowly rose, with a great creaking and cracking of joints, and said, “Tires.”
“The Hornet,” Tiny said. “Upside-down.”
“Floating,” said Stan.
Tiny said, “I don’t think it’s supposed to do that.”
Stan said, “Where do you figure John and Andy are?”
“In the reservoir,” Tom said.
Tiny said, “I think I oughta winch it in.”
Stan said, “Did you hear somebody shout?”
They all listened. Absolute silence. The rear wheels and axle and a bit of the trunk and rear fenders of the Hornet bobbed in the gloom.
Tiny said, “I still think I oughta winch it in.”
“I’ll help,” Stan volunteered.
Tiny turned the winch handle rapidly at first, taking up a lot of slack, while the car sat out there like a newly discovered island; then the rope tautened, the winching got harder, and the Hornet wallowed reluctantly shoreward.
The car was still several yards offshore, but in water only perhaps five feet deep, when a sudden thrashing and spouting took place on its left side, and Dortmunder and Kelp appeared, apparently fighting each other to the death, struggling, clawing, swinging great haymaker lefts and rights. But, no; what they were really trying to do was untangle from each other, separate all the hoses and equipment and feet.
Kelp at last went flying ass over teakettle, and Dortmunder turned in a great swooping circle, found the shore, and came wading balefully forward, flinging things in his wake: face mask, mouthpiece, tank, BCD. Emerging from the water too wild-eyed for anybody to dare speak to, he unzipped the wetsuit, sat on a rail to remove the boots and peel off the legs of the wetsuit, stood in nothing but his underpants to heave the boots and wetsuit into the reservoir (just missing Kelp, who was still struggling and floundering and falling and scrambling shoreward), and turned to march away, between the tracks.
“Oo! Oo! Oo!”
He stopped, growling in his throat, grinding his teeth, and turned about to march back to the reservoir. “Oo! Oo! Oo!” Wading into the cold water, he felt around in it for the boots, found them, carried them back to shore—“Oo! Oo!”—sat down again on the rail, pulled the boots on, stood in nothing but his underpants and boots, and this time did go marching away down the railroad line.