Latzarel wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think so. His devices are built of nasal irrigators and bundles of twine. They can’t work. It must be Giles himself that motivates them.”
“Take your blinders off, Russel!” William admonished, poking his pipe in Latzarel’s direction. “Assume nothing about the physical universe or you’ve boxed yourself in. I don’t know a thing about these nasal irrigators you keep referring to, but I’m very willing to believe in the magic of a bundle of twine. Have you really ever studied twine, after all?”
“No,” admitted Latzarel, “but …”
“No buts,” said William conclusively. “The bird has flown. And if we sit around here smug, assuming he’ll return for the launching on the twenty-first, our goose is cooked. Who says they’ll launch on the twenty-first anyway? The newspaper, quoting Pinion. What a combination. And the journal, of course. But how do we know it’s entirely accurate? How do we know Pinion and Frosticos won’t gum the whole thing up and launch early?”
“What exactly are you suggesting?” asked Edward. “What choice have we but to wait for his return?”
“We jolly well go after him. That’s what choice we have. What does it cost, a few hundred dollars? Fat lot of buying you’ll do with your money when the world is breaking up like a dirt clod.”
“The money’s not the issue,” said Latzarel, always willing to spend a few dollars for the sake of existence. “But let’s be practical for a minute. …”
William interrupted him by removing and waving his pocket watch. “You’ve got about sixty thousand left to be practical in. Then you’ll be scaling the stars with cave men.”
“Sixty thousand what?“ asked Latzarel, beginning to lose his temper.
“Minutes, man. We haven’t half enough time to be practical. We hate practicality. Practicality didn’t build Pinion’s leviathan. You’ve said as much yourself. Where’s the old sewer rat Latzarel who outfoxed that mob up on Patchen Street? Old one-shoe Latzarel, popping in at the window?”
Latzarel grumbled and slouched in his chair. Edward shrugged and raised his eyebrows. From the kitchen, Jim said, “You’re not going without me this time.”
“There’s a man for you!” cried William. “Damn the filthy torpedoes! They won’t be looking for us in Windermere. We’ll pop over there and snatch him. Basil will come in on our side. They’ve made a fatal error here, that’s what I think, and we’re going to trip them up. It’s that or we sit around here and mope. What do you say?”
“I say I go along,” Jim repeated. “You’ll need me when it comes to talking Gill into all this. He’ll listen to me.”
“He’s right,” said William. “By God if you two won’t come along, Jim and I will do the deed ourselves. It won’t take a week. We’ve already got the family passport. It’s good for seven years, isn’t it?”
“It’s good for nothing, as far as you’re concerned,” said Edward. “You’ll never get out of the airport. This whole thing might be a ruse to flush you out, you know. A set-up.”
“Pah!” cried William, who wasn’t about to be left behind. “It’s been two weeks now. They don’t stake out airports for two weeks looking for a man who bonked someone with a flashlight. And I’ll be entirely safe outside the country. A free man. It’s just the thing, as far as …”
The phone rang, interrupting William’s argument. It was Velma Peach, overwrought. Confused. She’d just that moment had a phone call from Giles. Edward covered the mouthpiece with his hand and told his friends. This was news indeed. He listened for a moment, his face growing more serious. It hadn’t been a long distance call. At least it hadn’t sounded like one. Giles wanted to come home. Everyone, he said, was in terrible danger. He had wanted so desperately to complete his journey. To pierce the hollow Earth, to return to the land of his ancestors — the Promised Land, he’d called it. But doing so, he feared, would burst it like a soap bubble on the winds of space. What, asked Velma Peach, did it all mean? What was the nonsense about ancestors? Her side of the family had come from Lithuania by boat with their money sewed inside their clothes; Basil’s from the Lake District. What promised land?
Edward made half an effort to explain Giles’ reference, careful to euphemize the entire account, but incapable of concentration. Could the phone call, he kept wondering, have come from Windermere? And if not, then what about the postcard? Had Giles hurried home so soon? And where was he now, kept, apparently, against his will? Edward hung up, puzzled.
They smoked a pipe over it for a moment. Then Professor Latzarel, his doubts vindicated in part by this new turn, said, “You’ve been hoaxed. That’s what the case is. Giles isn’t in Windermere. He’s never been. The postcard was a forgery, either to smoke William out of here or to send us all off on a goose chase — run us around pointlessly. We’d have gotten to London and found new evidence and gone racing off in some other direction. It’s slow and easy that we want here; that’s what I think. Sixty thousand minutes isn’t time enough as it is. You were right there. It doesn’t leave us any to waste, does it?” He looked at William triumphantly.
William nodded. The phone call put a new coat of paint on the horse. “I’ve got an idea,” said William, slapping his knee. “We call Basil. Easy as that. Either Giles is at Windermere or he’s not. Perhaps he’s been and gone already. Perhaps he never intended to go. It would be an easy enough thing for men with Pinion’s and Frosticos’ connections to have a forged postcard mailed. Easy as pie.”
It took an hour to get through to Basil Peach, and William, for the length of their discussion, fancied he heard voices in the background, lost among general noise, scratching along, now fading, now growing in volume until Basil’s voice began to sound almost as distant as it was. Once, in the midst of a discussion of strange local events, the ghostly insinuating voice disappeared utterly for the space of five seconds, then burst in with the words, “a two-penny head!” so loudly that William dropped the phone. It made no sense to him, and struck him as being all the more suggestive as a result — particularly as Basil couldn’t hear a bit of it.
Basil was unaccountably disturbed. There was a feeling, he said, in the air. An electricity. A desperation. Over the past week dead animals had bubbled up out of Lake Windermere, rising to the surface like released balloons and floating ashore in the willows below the hall. Basil spent his days collecting them. There were enough rumors afoot regarding the manor — rumors that hearkened back hundreds of years — without adding to them a boatload of decayed beasts.
“Beasts?” asked William. “From the lake? Do you mean fish?”
“No,” said Basil. “Animals. An odd tailless monkey with webbed feet and paws, and a thing that looked like an armadillo but without the pointed snout. Then, yesterday afternoon, a rush of little creatures — some sort of scaled hedgehog — beached themselves, all drowned.” Basil had a basket of them. He hadn’t any idea what to do with them. Burn them? The stink would attract the attention of everyone within miles. He was throwing quicklime on them until he could bury them. But in the future, years hence, they’d be dug up and would confirm Lord-knew-what sorts of local suspicions. And on top of it all, who should drop in but Ashbless with an utterly cockeyed scheme.
“Ashbless!” cried William. And to his suddenly alert companions he said, “There’s your postcard! What did he want? No, let me guess. He had a proposal for you. He wanted you to take him to the center of the Earth. He didn’t know how, but he was certain you could. Am I right?”