The Digging Leviathan Read Online Free PDF

existence of the unlikely machine in the first place, would see the distant shiver of its decay through the shimmering desert heat and would call it a mirage, not noticing the receding back of the pith-helmeted Professor Latzarel carrying a butterfly net, disappearing beyond a clump of Joshua trees. Jim would have given anything to own such a car.
    Professor Latzarel, in fact, must have been packed for an outing, for there, strapped to the enormous rear bumper, was a quiver of old ghost-town picks and shovels, and one of those canvas water bags that perpetually leak and yet are never empty. Inside were a half dozen topographic maps and what must have been a mile of hemp cordage.
    Latzarel himself was a fierce, weedy-looking man who took everything very seriously and who couldn’t be bothered to comb his hair. His coat complemented his car. He rushed past Jim, nodding obliquely, then caught sight of Giles Peach. He stopped and shook Giles’ hand, fabricating something to say. He clearly couldn’t keep his eyes off Giles’ gills, which were almost hidden by a turtleneck sweater. “Have you seen Dr. Pinion?” he asked suddenly, raising one eyebrow. Gill replied that he had, just yesterday.
    “Ah,” replied Latzarel, nodding his head. “Did he have anything interesting to say?”
    “No, sir. He wanted to know about the digging machine.”
    “Ah,” said Latzarel again. “That would be the subterranean prospector? Edward has told me a good bit about it. I’d like to have a look at it myself, if I might.”
    Giles didn’t reply. He half nodded, but showed no enthusiasm, a strange thing for Giles, who was normally full of his inventions. Jim could see that Professor Latzarel was disappointed, but that he hesitated to be obviously so. The three of them clumped up the steps and into the house, which by then was full of talk and tobacco smoke and glasses of port. Jim was relieved to see his father talking animatedly to Roycroft Squires. He half feared, as he always did, that just beyond theveil of the present some eccentricity lay waiting. That his father might at any moment slide off the thin edge of sanity, and that his uncle would dash for the telephone and a van would come screaming down the road. Oscar Pallcheck liked to call them the “white coat boys” and laughed at the idea of gigantic butterfly nets and shepherd’s crooks. Jim generally laughed along guiltily. But now that his father was home, he couldn’t see the joke. He couldn’t, in fact, develop any considered opinions about his father at all. His thoughts were limited by a misty wall beyond which his mind wouldn’t venture. He had determined that the same wall existed within the mind of his father, that they were products of the same foggy uncertainty. He wondered how often his father traveled back to the day Jim’s mother died in the autumn hills above Los Angeles.
    They had gone picnicking in Griffith Park—Jim, his father and mother. Uncle Edward had elected to stay home and, as he put it, whack about in the garage. It was his mother’s idea that they pack a picnic lunch, hike around in the hills—green from early rains—and then catch the late afternoon program at the planetarium.
    They found a grassy knoll beneath a clump of nearly leafless oaks and ate sandwiches. Jim’s mother talked about the kitchen curtains and about the attention Uncle Edward had been paying to Velma Peach, Giles’ mother. Jim could remember the conversation almost word for word, even though at the time he was indifferent to kitchen curtains and couldn’t at all see why anyone would develop an interest in Velma Peach, or in anybody’s mother, for that matter. Now, two years later, the faded kitchen curtains were tangled in his memory with his mother’s face, one of them calling up the other without fail.
    After lunch he and his father trudged around through the chaparral and up this and that little trail, filling a paper bag with useable refuse. They hadn’t any