The Digging Leviathan (2 page)

Uncle Edward caught up with them, carrying the wooden bucket that he called Momus’ glass. The bottom had been carefully sawed out and a round piece of double strength window glass caulked in. When the glass-bottomed bucket was partially submerged in the rippling water of a pool, the land beneath sprang into sharp clarity as if beyond the wall of an aquarium.

Such were the depths of the pools, however, that in some of them there was nothing but shadow below. The reds and blues and greens of the algae faded in the depths, and the pools fell away finally into darkness. It was impossible to say whether a crab scuttling over a bed of sea lettuce was ten feet beneath the surface or twenty, or whether the seeming depth was a trick of refraction and the crab only a foot below them.

Jim broke mussels to bits, smashing them against rocks and dropping pieces of slippery orange flesh into the pool, watching them disappear between the clutching fingers of anemones. Once, just for the slip of an instant, he fancied he saw a great luminous eye peer up at him from a swaying shadow deep below—the eye of a fish who had wandered up out of a deep ocean trench.

Jim had the idea that the pools were somehow prodigiously deep. He had read, in fact, that the entirety of Los Angeles lay on what amounted to a floating bed of rock. A deep enough hole would sooner or later find the ocean. Uncle Edward
insisted that at any particular moment, while you sat in your armchair smoking your pipe and reading your book, a submarine might well be cruising a mile beneath you, its running lights startling schools of giant squid. These tidepools, then, might go anywhere they pleased. That was pretty much the way Jim saw it. And Giles was in no hurry to disagree, as he had in the matter of the cyclops. He had a strange affinity for the ocean, for the idea of ancient, Paleozoic seas and the monsters that crept—and might still creep—across dim ocean floors.

Giles had been born, like his father, with a neat set of vestigial gills along either side of his neck. Coincidentally, the index and middle fingers of each of his hands were partially webbed. Doctors had suggested operating on the baby, but Basil Peach had been dead against it, owing, perhaps, to being the obvious progenitor of the deformities. To alter them would be to admit to them, and in those days Basil Peach would admit no such thing. Jim hadn’t thought much about Gill’s deformities, such as they were, until he met Oscar Pallcheck. He had assumed that any number of people had such ornamentation. Oscar, however, had immediately seen the humor in Giles’ nickname. It still made him laugh; he could stretch a joke out over years. Giles, however, was above it, or seemed to be.

So Jim didn’t expect Giles to refute his theory of bottomless pools. He assumed that if Giles had sported a single eye in the center of his forehead, then he would have been more amenable to the idea of cyclops. Giles borrowed the bucket, lay across a dry expanse of rock, and gazed entranced into the pool, watching for the leviathan.

About then there was a shout from Uncle Edward. Jim hurried across from one rock to another, plunging up to his knees in a tidepool on the way to where his uncle was thrusting his hand and arm into the depths. Jim looked sharply in the pool for some treasure, for a wonderful seashell or a pearl or a Spanish coin. But the surface of the water was rippled with wind and rising tide, and churned by the repeated dunkings of Edward’s arm. Abruptly, his uncle gasped in a deep breath, plunged his head and shoulders into the cold water rand came up holding what at first appeared to be a white murex or a pelican’s foot shell. But on closer examination it wasn’t either one. It was the tiny bleached skeleton of a human hand.

The discovery, although strange and magical enough to Jim, seemed to suggest immense mysteries to Uncle Edward, who slogged off across the reefs through the rising tide, muttering about diving bells. The tide was quickly coming in, and all of them were wet to the waist before they clambered up the steep cliffs to the car. No cyclops peered out at them.

On the return trip Giles Peach was still under the sway of the deep pools, for he took only a half-hearted interest in the little hand. It occurred to Jim, as the Hudson rounded a curve in the Coast Highway and the green ocean disappeared to westward, that it was a pity he hadn’t some sort of tens—some facsimile of the glass-bottomed bucket, of Momus’ glass—to shove up against Giles’ head in order to see what was inside. It wouldn’t at all have surprised him if the view were one of gently waving eel grass and sea lettuce and wandering chitons and limpets.

It was about then that Giles Peach was put in the way of the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Edward St. Ives was a collector of books, especially of fantasy and science fiction, the older and tawdrier the better. Plots and cover illustrations that smacked of authenticity didn’t interest him. It was sea monsters; cigar-shaped, crenelated rockets; and unmistakable flying saucers that attracted him. There was something in the appearance of such things that appealed to that part of him that appreciated the old Hudson Wasp. And beyond that, he loved the idea of owning great quantities of things. He wasn’t in the habit of reading the books, since the texts so rarely made good on the promise of the illustrations. Once a month or so, after a particularly satisfactory trip to Acres of Books, he’d drag out the lot of his paperback Burroughs novels, lining up Tarzan books here and Martian books there and Pellucidar books somewhere else. The Roy Krenkel covers were the most amazing, with their startling slashes and dabs of impressionist color and their distant spired cities half in ruin and shadow beneath a purple sky.

“Look at this machine, Jim,” Uncle Edward would say, pointing at the weird, suspended apparatus operated by the Mastermind of Mars. There on the cover was a bluish-purple complex of metallic globes and rotors and suspended silver wires, and the goggle-eyed Mastermind waving an impossible syringe over the supine body of an orange-robed maiden.

“What do you suppose he does with this?” Uncle Edward would ask.

“Does he grow turnips?” Jim would ask.

After which Uncle Edward, pretending to take a really close look at it, would reply, “Why I believe he does. It’s a turnip transformer. That’s exactly what it is.”

So one Saturday when Burroughs was spread across the living room, Giles Peach wandered in and fell away into the covers of those books as he’d fallen into the depths of the tidepools. The illustrations were windows into alternate worlds, and he quickly saw a way to boost himself over the sill and clamber through. He fingered this volume and that, amazed at mastodons and sunlit jungle depths, and he traced with his finger the smoky line of cloud drift beyond the domes of the city of Opar.

“Why, look at this machine,” Uncle Edward cried, winking at Jim and pointing once again to the globular device. “What do you suppose he does with this?”

Jim was too well schooled in the game by then not to ask, “Does he grow turnips?” in a sincere enough tone to snatch Giles back into the living room.

“I doubt that he grows turnips,” said Giles, who had no humor in him. “At least he doesn’t grow them with this machine.” He peered at the cover, inspecting the ridiculous device, determining what manner of thing it was.

“Oh?” said Uncle Edward. “It looks altogether like a turnip transmutator. The sort that the Irish use to turn potatoes into other sorts of root crops.”

Giles gave him a look, a sort of pitying, condescending look, and pointed toward the recumbent maiden. “Do you mean to say they’re going to turn this woman into a turnip?” he asked, coming to the conclusion that the book quite possibly wasn’t the scientific treasure he had supposed it to be. “I’d say it has something to do with a dental drill,” Giles said, pointing toward what appeared to be a syringe. “This doctor is about to drill a hole in her skull and perform some sort of electronic lesion.”

“Giles!” cried Uncle Edward, surprised. “Where did you hear such a thing as that?”

“I read about it,” said Giles calmly, as if reading about lesions performed with dental drills and electricity was a common enough thing among fifteen-year-olds in the city of Eagle Rock. “There was a man,” continued Gill, “who could make
rats dance by lesioning part of their brain—some little gland, I think.”

“Was there?” asked Edward, who favored the idea of dancing rats. “You like to read this stuff, do you, Giles?”

“Very much, sir. I’m studying to be a scientist, an inventor.”

“Well good for you, lad. That’s just the thing, science.” Uncle Edward picked up a handful of books and slid them in along the shelves. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Giles inspected the cover of
At the Earth’s Core
, the flower-hung jungle and the scantily clad pair of women astride blue dinosaurs in a sunlit clearing. He carefully opened the volume and thumbed past four pages until he arrived at the first chapter and read aloud two absolutely fateful sentences. “Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life to the perfection of a mechanical, subterranean prospector.” He shut the book, looked hard at the cover again, and wandered out through the front door and down the street without saying another word. Giles didn’t mean to be impolite. He was simply lost in Perry’s invention—in the whole idea of inventions. Years later Edward St. Ives would say, on more than one occasion, to watch out for people who fancy inventions but who can see nothing in the notion of turnip transmogrifiers; they aren’t half frivolous enough and will cause trouble. In fact, the mechanical mole—the digging leviathan—was conceived that afternoon and was born in the following months.

If it had been the only thing Giles Peach had invented and built, the very idea of it would seem preposterous. But of course it wasn’t. Giles and Jim had been engaged for some years in building mechanical devices. On occasions Oscar Pall-check gave them a hand, illustrating, more often than not, the defects in their methods. In Giles’ garage was an oak barrel full of mechanical junk they had managed to collect: old electric motors, ruined clocks, nuts and bolts and bits of copper wire, a sprung umbrella, radio tubes, bottle caps and bicycle parts, a little leather bag full of droplets of solder. The two had pieced together a wonderful gadget around an old fan motor. The machine hadn’t any purpose, really, beyond gadgetry. They intended at first to make a spinning model of the solar system. So they attached straightened bits of wire of varying lengths to
support the nine planets, which, when the motor was switched on, spun very quickly around the sun in tight little circles until it threw itself to bits.

Gill then rigged a belt and gear mechanism from wide rubber bands, wooden spools, and pieces of an old mechanical clock, extending the device so that it could contain any number of solar systems, all cranking roundabout at the same time. On the strength of his knowledge of astronomy, he determined that such a plethora of simultaneously whirring planets would be as unscientific as a turnip transmutator, and so set out to find a way to operate little white Christmas tree pin lights strung between the wires. He wanted to make a model of the Andromeda nebula, to suspend it from the rafters of the garage, and to shut off all the lights, close the doors, and watch it whirl there in space. The nebula, however, blew a succession of fuses when he plugged it in, managing to get underway for one mysterious, kaleidoscopic moment before blinking into darkness.

When the nebula failed, scientific pretense failed with it. They removed the stars and replaced them with all manner of things, notably the heads of several rubber apes and a collection of little plastic Japanese gods—gaudily painted objects with overhanging bellies and pendulous ears. They tore the base from a coin bank shaped like a globe and affixed the painted sphere to a long coathanger that thrust out from amid the various gods and ape heads. Finally, along the bent arm of another piece of wire Giles strapped a toothy little stuffed crocodile with a broken-off tail. It was a sorry-looking, bug-infested creature, but when the whirring Earth machine shot into life and the globe went spinning away among the ape heads pursued on its course by the open-mouthed crocodile, it seemed to the two of them to be a grand sight. Gill pointed out that it was archetypal, that the crocodile was leviathan and would someday consume the earth.

The two worked the device for an hour with great success until Oscar Pallcheck happened by and had a good laugh over the machine at the expense of the crocodile. Giles and Jim, of course, were obliged to laugh along and to admit that it would improve the thing greatly to shove one of the ape heads into the crocodile’s mouth so that the ape peered out at the continent of Africa. The experiment degenerated from there, and before he went his peculiar way that evening, Oscar found a baseball bat
and whacked the globe as it wobbled past into the wall or Gill’s garage, crashing the side in and putting an end to the whirling earth machine.

That same fan motor, along with two others, became, in the Saturday afternoons following, a mechanical man. The thing’s legs were stacks of roped tin cans that flopped and jerked when the current was switched on. The mechanical man suffered more evolutionary changes than had the whirring earth machine and was declining just about as rapidly until, as a lark, Oscar Pallcheck dropped the creature out of the foliage of a Chinese elm on the parkway and into the path of Uncle Edward’s Hudson Wasp.

Giles became convinced as a result that inventions without purpose were doomed by physical law to degeneration in a manner analogous to the decline of human beings who hadn’t any aim or resolve. He singled out Oscar Pallcheck as a case in point.

What all of that inventing was leading up to, none of them knew. John Pinion, the polar explorer, had an inkling, and he encouraged Giles’ gadgeting, going so far as to buy him occasional tools and parts, and talking seriously about the diameter of the Earth. That turn left Jim behind. He didn’t care much for serious inventions, and didn’t half believe that Gill’s growing mechanical mole would dig at all, much less into the center of the Earth.

The one opportunity that he had to see the mole did nothing to change his mind. Jim and Uncle Edward had stopped at John Pinion’s ranch in the foothills of Eagle Rock at the request of Gill’s mother, to summon her son home. And there had sat the mole—the Digging Leviathan, as Uncle Edward liked to call it—twenty odd feet of riveted steel perched on a trestle built of railroad ties. All in all it was a sort of art deco wonder of crenelations and fins and thick ripply glass, as if it had been designed by a pulp magazine artist years before the dawn of the space age which would iron flat the wrinkles of imagination and wonder.