“I can see that it must,” said Edward quickly, fearing that William would sidetrack himself into scientific meditations, “but what does it say about directing an anti-gravity mechanism at someone’s lungs?”
“Oh, yes,” said William, peering once again at the page and reading. “‘It’s possible that a simple ray would be suitable to levitate a body if carefully directed, and I could throw Oscar Fat-face into the La Brea Tar Pits which is where he crawled out of anyway. I’m going to fix him first, though. He’ll be a sorry, ugly toad.’”
“That settles it!” cried Edward.
“How?” asked Latzarel.
“All of it! Everything’s true. Every fragment of it. And it might be our salvation as easily as our doom.”
“Of course it might,” William assented, standing up and striding back and forth across the kitchen floor. He opened the refrigerator door and looked inside, poking behind old half heads of lettuce and the remains of loaves of bread until he found a jar of kosher pickles. “Pinion’s a fool. My money on it, He’s got a mechanical mole that might as well be a park bench.” He paused for a moment thinking, and thrust the open pickle jar in the direction of the table. Latzarel waved him away, grimacing at the idea of an early morning pickle. William shoved two fingers into the jar and yanked out another, munching away at the thing heartily, then holding it aloft as a sort of indicator. “If we can find Giles,” he said, “and spirit him out of their reach, then Pinion and Frosticos may as well take a crosstown bus.”
“A tin wagon,” put in Edward.
“A motorized footstool,” said William, smiling at his brother-in-law.
Jim sat through the pickle conversation idly turning the pages of the journal, reading discoveries and inventions: of perpetual motion engines built of ball bearings and spools and empty oatmeal cartons; of anti-matter devices built of mirrors and old vacuum sweepers; of light-speed velocity boosters built of old lampshades, a glass bowl full of pink-tinted water, and a moon garden of charcoal clinkers and bluing. Toward the end of the volume, following a grisly account of the propulsion of Oscar Pallcheck, Jim found a long, hastily written entry. He interrupted his uncle’s musings about Giles’ possible improvement of the diving bell and read: “‘The voyage will be undertaken on March 21, the day of the vernal equinox, and will angle toward the equator at first, slowly righting itself until it achieves essential verticality somewhere under the southwest desert. Eighteen hours will suffice for the journey. The end of it is lost to me in fog. It’s possible that the fog veils Eden like Dr. Pinion says. But I can hear the far off sound of vast explosions and earthquakes, which might as easily be the roaring of the subterranean rivers through the polar openings. Either way, it doesn’t make much difference.’”
“What doesn’t?” asked Latzarel. “I wish he weren’t so damned weird! He sounds like a science fiction writer, for God’s sake.”
“He’s referring to the cataclysm,” said William. “Edward, you remember my dream? The death of Giles Peach in the desert? A rain of dinosaurs? Everything blowing to bits?”
Edward nodded. As much as he hated to admit it, he remembered the account of William’s dream very well. “I’m beginning to fear,” he said at last, poking at broken toast with the end of a fork, “that Giles is responsible for a great deal. Certainly for all the unaccountable phenomena. Maybe even for the merman …”
“Maybe,” said William, interrupting, “for the hollow Earth itself. It’s possible, you know. It could well be a product of Basil and Giles both. If we take a good look at the psychology of this thing. …”
“Oh come on,” cried Latzarel, pushed to the edge. “I haven’t been pursuing figments. I won’t have that. You’re both making a mountain out of a molehill here.”
“I’m afraid,” said William darkly, “that in this business there’s little possibility of exaggeration. “I’m beginning to be convinced that Giles’ meddling is going to crack the earth open like a melon unless we step in. Giles had better not be aboard that digger on the twenty-first.”
“Back to square one,” said Latzarel, referring to the search for Giles Peach. “Where do we look next?”
William shrugged. Edward poured himself a last cup of toffee and looked out of the kitchen window. A battered pickup truck rattled into view on the street, pulling up to the curb and scraping along until it came to a rest in front of the house. In the back was a lawnmower, an edger, and an assortment of brooms, rakes, clippers, gunny sacks, and shovels. It was Yamoto, the gardener, come round to attend to the Pembly lawn. Edward’s heart sank like a brick.
The threatened destruction of the Earth paled, as William, alert to the creaking drop and bang of Yamoto’s tailgate, lost interest in his pickle jar and hurried into the front room.
He crouched in front of the window, partially hidden by the drape, and peered out at the gardener. There could be little doubt as to his purpose, his motive. He didn’t care a rap about mowing lawns. He wore a pair of voluminous white trousers and a white cloth cap, both of which had been standard issue at the sanitarium several years past. William was almost sure of it. Why else would he wear such ridiculous clothes? He pretended to fiddle with his equipment: dumping gas into the mower, removing the spark plug from the edger and rubbing at it with a little piece of emery paper. William wasn’t fooled. He guessed Yamoto’s apprehension, saw the little glances of unease he cast around, feigning interest in hedges, in crabgrass, in sprinklerheads, but all the time watching, waiting, sniffing the air.
Clouds seemed to be gathering again. The street, which hadn’t been dry for an hour, was cast into sudden shadow. Distant thunder, faint and thin, almost like the tittering of laughter, blew along the street on the wind. William could just hear it through the cold window glass pressed against his ear. The sound of Edward and Professor Latzarel talking in the kitchen fell away into the murk, and every brittle clink and clank of Yamoto’s activity among the machines stood out clearly like a leafless tree on a barren winter hilltop.
The gardener yanked on the rope starter, animating the mower, and set off across the lawn, throwing the heavy grass into a steel catcher. He was within an ace of disappearing from view, of vanishing beyond the curve of a hibiscus, when he turned his head sharply, as if having heard something — the scraping of William’s fingernails along the sill, the tapping of his wedding ring against the glass, or the faint rhythmic exhalations of his breathing. Then he was gone.
“I say,” said Edward, materializing suddenly behind William, “there’s no need to bother with him now. He can’t hurt us, can he? Not as long as you stay out of sight. They’ve probably sent him around to smoke you out.”
“Of course they have. There’s not a bit of doubt.” William fell abruptly silent, staring out past the drape, ducking back in alarm when Yamoto sped into view, sailing at the rear of his flying mower as if hurrying to finish before the rain began afresh. William knew it was a ruse. Mowing the lawn wasn’t the issue. It had never been the issue. They were afraid of him, of his power. They locked him up in a prison masquerading as a hospital, hired burly guards to watch him, filled him with drugs to keep him docile, and he walked out under their noses. He slipped into the sewers and vanished, puffo, like a magician’s coin, reappearing where he chose, in the doctor’s very cellar, blinking away again in an instant, befuddling a host of pursuers.