“No, I guess not.” Wally felt very solemn at this moment. John leaned toward him. “So here’s the idea.”
“Yes? Yes?” Wally’s damp face gleamed with excitement.
“Our half of the caper,” John explained, “the profit for everybody except Tom, is three hundred fifty grand.”
“That’s a lot!”
“Not when you start cutting it up,” John told him. “But it’s still some, and those of us in it split it even, all the way down. If we manage, that is, to keep Tom from double-crossing us and getting it all.”
Wally nodded. “He’d do that, wouldn’t he?”
“Nothing else would even occur to him,” John said. “Okay. The way it stands now, there’s four of us in it: Me, Andy Kelp, Tiny Bulcher, and a driver named Stan Murch that you don’t know.” John cleared his throat, hesitated, seemed on the point of flight, then blurted forward, saying, “You come up with the way, Wally, you’re a partner.”
“A partner? Me?”
“You,” John agreed. “That makes it seventy grand for each of us, including you.”
“Wow!”
“But you gotta come up with something,” John told him. “One of us has gotta come up with something, and I just don’t think it’s gonna be me. Not anymore.”
Wally, excitement bubbling in him like chocolate fudge just on the boil, jumped to his feet, saying, “Let’s see what the computer has to say!”
John looked displeased. “Do we have to?”
“The computer is very smart, John,” Wally said. “Let’s just see.”
So John shrugged, and they both went over to have a chat with the computer, Wally in his usual swivel chair, John standing beside him.
“First,” Wally said, “let’s bring up the model we did of the valley, with the reservoir in, and ask the computer to show us different ways to blow up the dam. Maybe in one of them, the water could be channeled down the valley away from all the towns and things.”
“I don’t see it,” John said.
“Let’s just find out.” Wally sent his little fat fingers flying over the keys, and up on the screen came a side view of the valley, heavy with rich blue, trailing away to green dotted with brown and black; the brown and black dots were towns.
John touched the screen over one of the brown dots. “That’s where May is.”
“Now we’ll see,” Wally said, and proceeded to drown Miss May and a lot of other people seven times in a row. Every single time, the blue area would at first tremble, and then it would spread and suddenly swell, obliterating every last one of the black and brown dots.
After the seventh time, John said, “No more, Wally, no more. I can’t take it.”
“You’re right,” Wally agreed. “There just isn’t any safe way to send all that water downstream. Not all at once.”
“That’s the way dynamite works, though,” John pointed out. “All at once.”
“Let me explain the situation to the computer once more,” Wally said, “and see if it comes up with anything new.”
“Just so we don’t have any more of that killer blue.”
So Wally asked his question, and after a brief pause the computer responded with its green-lettered series of suggestions, crawling slowly up the screen. Wally and John watched, neither saying a word until it was finished, and then John said, quietly, “This computer really has a thing for Zog, doesn’t it?”
Wally cleared his throat. “I don’t have the heart to tell it Zog isn’t real,” he admitted.
“Wally,” John said, “I don’t know that I’m getting anywhere here. I thought I’d come over and talk to a person, but I’m here talking to a machine that thinks a planet called Zog is a real place.”
“You’re right,” Wally said, abruptly ashamed of himself. He felt now as though he’d been using the computer for a crutch, that he was hiding behind it. John had come here for help, and Wally had run straight to his computer. That’s not the way to treat people, Wally told himself, and he reached out to hit the power button, shutting the computer down. Then, standing, turning, he said, “I’m sorry, John, that’s just a bad habit. I always talk things over with the computer. I don’t know why.”
“Yeah, I always talk things over with May,” John told him, “but there comes a time when you got to make your own decision.”
“I’m going to,” Wally said. The excitement he felt now was different from before, more tremulous and frightening. He was going to be on his own! In the real world! “Let’s talk it over some more, John,” he said, “just the two of us. Not the computer at all.”
“Good.”
So they sat around the cheese and crackers, ignoring them, and John told him about the way he and Andy had learned how to do underwater things from a fellow on Long Island, and how they’d tried once to walk into the reservoir and once to drive in, and how the reservoir almost drowned them both times, and all about the turbidity and the flotation power of Ping-Pong balls, and after about twenty minutes Wally said, “Gee, John, why don’t you ask that guy on Long Island?”
John blinked. “Ask him what?”
“He’s a professional diver, John,” Wally said. “And you told me you went to him because he already does some things that aren’t absolutely legal.”
John shrugged. “So?”
“So I realize,” Wally said, “that would mean there were six of us to share the money now, instead of five, but that would still be about sixty thousand dollars each, and—”
“Wait a minute wait a minute,” John said, rearing back. “Bring Doug aboard, you mean.”
“Is that his name? Yes, sure, bring Doug aboard. Wouldn’t he know how to go down into the reservoir and get the box?”
John looked at Wally without speaking for quite a long time. Then he sat back, shook his head, and said, “You know why I didn’t think of that?”
“Well, no,” Wally admitted.
“Because,” John said, “whatever it is I’m doing, I’m used to it I’m the one does it. I figure out how and I do it. I get people to help, but that’s help, that isn’t to do it instead of me.”
Wally wasn’t sure he understood. “Do you mean,” he asked carefully, “it would be like against your principles or something to have somebody else do things instead of you?”
“No, I don’t mean that,” John said. “I’m simply trying to explain to you why I’m as stupid as I am.”
“Oh,” Wally said.
“Why I could never think about anybody going down into that goddamn water except me,” John went on, “and I knew damn well it wasn’t about to be me, not again, so that’s why I was stymied.”
“I see,” Wally said.
“But you took one look,” John told him, “once you got out from behind that machine of yours, you took one look at what I couldn’t see at all, and you said it’s obvious. And it is.”
Wally wasn’t sure exactly how far he was supposed to go in agreement with John’s self-insults, so he made a quick defensive move, shoving cheese and cracker in his mouth so he wouldn’t be able to do anything but nod and say, “Mm. Mm.”
Which was apparently enough. John sat back, his whole body a study in looseness and relief. Pointing over at the computer, he said, “Sell that thing, Wally. You don’t need it.”