The Digging Leviathan by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

a miniature painting of the Santa Monica pier in the tip, which you could just make out by aiming the thing into the sun and screwing your eye, so to speak, into a little porthole in the end, then waiting for a moment to sort out palm trees from eyelashes. Mays had a case of the things. He never went into the jungle without a half dozen in his satchel and had given one to Jim at the second meeting of the Newtonians.
    “Ah, Phil,” Uncle Edward cried when the door swung open.
    “Let me introduce you to Mr. Spekowsky and Dr. Lassen.”
    Spekowsky shook his hand with the air of a man suspicious of deviltry while Mays juggled his cardboard box between his free hand and his knee. Dr. Lassen scribbled notes into a little red spiral binder, oblivious to the proffered introduction.
    “We’ve been discussing Professor Latzarel’s discoveries at the South Pole,” said Edward. “Perhaps you can acquaint Mr. Spekowsky here with the strange nature of the tropical fish that the two of you brought back.”
    Mays said he was happy to. He had with him, in fact, not only photographs of the specimen in question, but an actual pickled fish, revolving slowly in a tiny formaldehyde sea held in a sealed glass jar. ‘The preserved fish, about two inches long, was a gray and pale shadow of the fish in the photograph, Latzarel’s Rio Jari tetra.
    “So you’re telling me,” Spekowsky asked after Mays had carried on for a bit, “that specimens of this fish were caught both in the alleged South Pole pool and at the mouth of this South American river?”
    ‘That’s correct. A coincidence which is, on the face of it, impossible.”
    “And this coincidence is supposed to convince me that the Earth is hollow. That wooly mammoths and Neanderthals and such are poking around beneath us at this moment?”
    Giles Peach was transfixed, his eyes big as plates.
    “We didn’t mention Neanderthal men,” said Professor Latzarel in the interest of scientific accuracy. “But, yes, we do consider this fairly substantial evidence.”
    Spekowsky guffawed, but was quite obviously caught up in the game. “Sounds like evidence of continental drift.” He looked once again at the photograph of the fish. It had a splayed tail of iridescent pink that deepened to lavender and pale blue, then back to pink again round its gills. If its fins were clipped off it might quite easily be mistaken for an Easter egg by a far-sighted person.
    “Look,” said William Ashbless, suddenly flaring up and running a huge hand through his white hair, “we’re wasting our time here. What do we care for the press? By God, we’ve seen things at the Pole that
this—this—journalist
can’t imagine. Are we asking the likes of him to authenticate our discoveries with an ill-written article on the last page of the
Times?
Far be it from me to applaud John Pinion, but by God, Pinion is a manof action. He’ll be there before us, gentlemen, mark me. All of this talk is getting us nothing but headaches!”
    Spekowsky, feeling himself slandered, straightened his tie, threw his coat over his shoulder and marched out, laughing dramatically. Edward St. Ives, waving the skeleton hand from the tidepool, carried on vainly about recent discoveries and about their anticipated excursion in the diving bell, but Spekowsky had had enough. The door slammed, the room fell silent, and Jim waited for Professor Latzarel to explode, as he surely would, at William Ashbless.
    “Sometimes,” Latzarel said, breaking the short silence, “I wonder whose side you’re on.”
    “Russ!” cried Ashbless. “We need this Spekowsky like we need a leaky boat.”
    “He was just coming round. We’d have had him. And now, of course, not only is he not for us, he’s against us. I can imagine the article he
will
write.”
    “Speaking of articles,” said Dr. Lassen suddenly, coming up, as it were, out of his reverie. “I have this recent clipping from the Massachusetts
Tribune
that might interest you.” And