Latzarel looked at him vacantly and shook his head.
“The strangest part of all is that William knew. All along he knew. But what in God’s name is the purpose of the song and dance business involving William’s escapes and retrievals? What gain is there?”
“Infiltration,” said Latzarel. “That has to be it. Stage William’s escapes. Phony up a lot of suggestive threats. Promote paranoia. Steam open his mail. Hint that he’s being served poisoned food. Hire that Japanese gardener to follow him around, to appear in unlikely places. William develops the fear that he’s central to some vast plot — that his life and sanity are at stake. So he flees, thereby committing a crime of sorts that will more solidly bring about his permanent confinement. And when they recover him, days later, they drain him of all the information he’s gotten out of us, out of fraternizing with the enemy, as it were. He’s their link to us.”
Edward nodded and scowled darkly.
Jim, scared witless by the new machinations, especially since they surfaced at such a strange, late hour of a night full of flying submarines and levitated mermen, saw in Latzarel’s explanation the hope that his father was as sane as the rest of them. He wondered fitfully just how sane that was. In fact, when he considered it, almost no one he knew could qualify as entirely sane if it came to a contest. All of them seemed to be chasing down — or being chased by — some sort of lunatic notion. What, he asked himself, did that suggest? What if all of them had crossed the borderland? To what extent were they manipulated by Giles Peach, and to what extent were they products of Giles Peach? It was a disturbing question. In fact, it seemed impossible that the tenuous threads that bound the world together — the opposing forces of the tides, polar magnetism, the cosmic dance, whatever it was that preserved order — wouldn’t stand the strain of such unrelieved peculiarity. Supposed order would lose its credibility in a rush. Things would fall apart.
“I can see a problem,” said Edward.
“Hah!” snorted Latzarel.
“Listen to this. If you’re right about this business of infiltration. If William, somehow, has been the most perceptive of us all while being the most — how shall I put it? — accessible, then he’s quite likely in trouble. Now that Pinion and Frosticos have Giles’ cooperation, they don’t need us. We’re minor leaguers, messing about with our diving bell. Pinion will have his digging machine operable when we’re still arguing with the museum about dinosaur teeth. Frosticos won’t need any infiltration then, will he? My money says that William won’t reappear. He’s in trouble or I’m an idiot. Giles Peach was the wild card, and he was dealt to Pinion. William’s a discard now.”
Latzarel frowned and poked at the fire with a stick until the end blazed. He swirled it in the air, making little orange figure eights against the night. “We’re in it too deeply, that’s what I say. Our mistake was to put faith in the Marquis of Queensbury, but there’s too much at stake for that now. I say we get Giles back. Kidnap him if we have to. How in the world did Pinion appeal to him? Of all the slimy …”
“He promised to take him to the center of the Earth, apparently,” said Edward, nodding at Jim, who told the story of the overheard conversation.
“Take him to the center of the Earth!” shouted Latzarel. “Giles Peach needs Pinion like he needs a third foot. It sounds to me as if he could ride there on a shoebox.”
“Giles, if I’m not mistaken, believes in his own inventions,” said Edward, lighting his pipe. “He understands that Pinion has the resources to finance an elaborate machine. He has faith in the substance of the machine, in his understanding of science. If he knew he was making it all up, there’s no telling what he would do.”
Latzarel blinked in surprise. “How much of it do you suppose he is making up?”
Edward shrugged.
“How do you know he’s making up any of it?” asked Jim.
Edward shrugged again. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t understand the first thing about it. But I still say that William is in as much trouble as he always insisted he was in. And I agree about getting Giles back. We’ve got to do it for the sake of the boy. Pinion and Frosticos are as crooked as corkscrews, and they’ve lured him away from his poor mother. We owe Giles a debt and we owe William another.”
“And Squires is two days away,” said Jim practically, thinking of the debt he owed his father.
In the end there was nothing to do but wait. Hiking the length of the island to radio Squires wouldn’t hasten his arrival by enough to make it worth the effort. So they spent the next day waiting for the time to pass, pretending to search for mermen, while understanding that a raftload of mermen would be insufficient to propel them a quarter mile closer to the center of the Earth. Nor would a grant from the museum or from the oceanographic institute. They could go nowhere in their diving bell. Certain knowledge of the existence of the interior world wasn’t worth a fig. The future lay in Giles Peach. Ashbless had known as much.
Chapter 12
A week later a letter arrived from William, who had been hard at work on scientific pursuits. Accompanying several pages of ornate, theoretical discussion that Edward could make little sense of were a dozen line drawings of mechanical apparatus, all of which had something to do with gravity; which, William insisted, was “all wrong.” How gravity could be all wrong Edward couldn’t fathom, but there was some indication that William’s concern was with gravity at the Earth’s hollow core. Gravity, insisted William, was a matter of waves, spiral waves that closely resembled the whorl of seeds in a sunflower. They had an eddying effect on a body, a whirlpool attraction not unlike the little twister that sucks water down a drain.
Maintaining his faith in the sensibilities of “animalia,” as he put it, he had run up drawings for the construction of a device he referred to as a “squid sensor,” involving the construction of aluminum cylinders for the purpose of maintaining sea beasts — squids and octopods in general — at temperatures low enough to diminish their sensitivity to physical stimuli — including, William insisted, gravity. Edward could make nothing of it. It was unclear in the end whether the squids were the sensing mechanism or whether they themselves were the objects of the sensing. And what was Edward to do with it? Build such a device? The plans were monumental. Great technical skill would be required. And smack in the center of a complex of ovals and rectangles and wavy lines — meant, apparently, either as wires or as gravity waves or, it was just barely conceivable, as both — were printed in mirror writing the words:
“Find the Sewer Dwellers of Los Angeles — Captain H. Frank Pince Nez.” There was no further discussion of it.
Edward was puzzled. Final instructions suggested that, in a pinch, Edward must send the plans on to Cal Tech, to a certain Professor Fairfax whose knowledge of the magic of gravity was unsurpassed, and who would have access, through his association with the oceanarium, to the ungodly number of squid it would take to develop the apparatus.
Edward made a photocopy and mailed the packet that same afternoon. Then he summoned Professor Latzarel, who had no knowledge whatsoever of sewer dwellers. “Do you suppose,” asked Latzarel, “that he’s making a reference to those stupendous crocodiles and blind pigs that supposedly inhabit the sewers?”
“I guess it’s possible,” said Edward doubtfully. “Why would he do such a thing?”
“Perhaps he’s convinced that they have something to do with his device. His squid sensor. They might, you know. His instructions don’t absolutely exclude them.”