Drowned Hopes (40 page)

Myrtle’s own eyes were getting heavier and heavier. She knew she’d have to go to sleep soon. But, watching him, even though his stance and manner and expression never changed, was still repellently fascinating.

Look at him, she thought. What nefarious scheme is he planning over there?

Disguised as a commoner.

Well, not really.

You did not meet her in your true guise.

Wally sat back to digest that thought. Was it accurate? When he’d met Myrtle Jimson he’d told her his true name, and he’d told her the truth about his interest in computers and about where he lived and all of that. He had not, of course, volunteered the information that he knew her father, nor that he was involved with her father in a major …

Robbery? Well, no, actually, this wasn’t a robbery, the robbery had taken place almost twenty–five years ago. There were still illegal elements in the affair, to be sure, such as breaking and entering the reservoir and the fact that the money did still technically belong to some bank or some armored car outfit or some insurance company or
somebody
other than Tom Jimson, but these seemed to Wally technical crimes at the level that caused toaster companies to pay fines in Federal court but no executives to go to prison.

His fingers padded once more over the keys.

I still don’t see why I can’t just go over to the library and just happen to see her again and just say hello.

The princess does not at this time require rescue.

Not to rescue her. Just to say hello. I only saw her once. I want to see her again.

If the princess meets the hero in his true guise before it is time for the rescue, she will reject him, misunderstanding his role.

I don’t think this princess is going to need to be rescued from anything. She works in the library, she lives with her mother, she’s in a small town where everybody knows her and likes her. What is there to rescue her from?

The hero awaits his moment.

But I want to see Myrtle Jimson again.

She must not see you at this time.

(A block away, sleepy eyes closed behind drooping binoculars. Weary feet moved toward bed.)

Why mustn’t she see me?

She will misunderstand, and the story will end in the hero’s defeat.

I’ll risk it.

Remember the specific rule of the game of Real Life.

Of course I remember it. I entered it into you myself.

Nevertheless. It is:
The tape of Real Life plays only once.
There are no corrections or adjustments.
Defeat is irreversible.

I know. I know. I know.

Why any hero would wish to play such a game is incomprehensible.

“It sure is,” Wally muttered aloud, and looked sadly out the window at the sleeping village.

There were dim lights visible way down at the dam. Those were the only landmarks at all worth mentioning. Once the three men in a boat were out a ways from shore, it became roughly possible to distinguish between the grayer flatter surface of the reservoir and the darker and more tangled landscape all around them, but that was it for orientation.

Their first goal was the scene of the second disaster, over by the railroad tracks, which turned out to be extremely difficult to find when no moonlight gleamed off them. “I think it’s here,” Kelp or Dortmunder said, four or five times each, before one of them happened to be right.

When they’d definitely found the railroad line, Doug steered them in close to shore, then reduced the motor to idle while he went smoothly and gracefully over the side, standing in knee–deep water as he felt around with his feet for one of the tracks. Finding it, he stooped to tie to it one end of a long reel of monofilament, a high test fishing line, thin and colorless and strong.

Then they reversed positions, Doug getting into the front of the boat, Kelp moving back to the middle, and Dortmunder going all the way back to the motor, since Doug wanted him to get some practice driving and steering before he was left alone with the boat.

“I’m not sure about this,” Dortmunder said, touching the motor’s handle with gingerly doubt.

“It’s easy,” Doug assured him, and repeated the simple operating instructions one more time, at the end saying, “You just want to be sure to keep it slow, that’s all. So Andy can unreel the monofilament, and so you don’t run into a root or a drifting log or the other shore.”

“I won’t speed,” Dortmunder promised.

Thrummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Dortmunder kept the dam’s lights to his left, moving them forward very slowly indeed, while Kelp dangled his arms out over the water and let the monofilament unreel.

Finding the railroad line on the other side was even harder, since they’d never been over there before and so were operating with neither memory nor light, but after several useless passes back and forth Doug said, “That looks like a cleared spot. Let’s try it.” And he was right.

According to the old maps, the railroad had run along pretty straight through the valley, and so, once Doug had tied the other end of the monofilament to the rail on this side, they had a thin surface line that more or less paralleled the tracks crossing down below.

Now Dortmunder thrummed them even more slowly than earlier back out from shore, Doug guiding them with one hand on the monofilament. “Here, I think,” he said at last, when they were well out in the middle of the reservoir and presumably directly above Putkin’s Corners.

“Right,” Dortmunder said, and turned the handle to
idle.
He was beginning to feel pretty good about his relationship with this motor, in fact. It was small, it was quiet, and it did what he asked it to do. What could be bad?

Doug used a short piece of white rope to tie them to the monofilament, then reached out to drop over the side a small iron weight with a ring in it through which one end of a long thin nylon cord had been tied. He kept feeding out the cord until it was no longer being pulled, meaning the weight had hit bottom. Inspecting the amount of cord that was left as he tied it to the rope lashed around the upper edge of the boat, he said, “Hmmm. Closer to sixty feet, I think. You ready, Andy?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been that deep,” Kelp said. It was hard to see what he looked like in the dark, but he sure
sounded
nervous.

“Nothing to it,” Doug assured him, lifting himself up to sit on the rounded doughnut of the boat’s side, facing inward, feet on the bottom of the boat. “Now, Andy, you remember the best way to leave the boat, right?”

“Backward.” Yep; nervous, all right.

“That’s right,” Doug told him, lowered his goggles, put his mouthpiece in place, and toppled backward out of the boat.
Plash.
Gone, without a trace.

Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other, as best they could in the dark. “You can do it, Andy,” Dortmunder said.

“Oh, sure,” Kelp said. “No problem.” Scrambling a bit, hampered by the scuba tank on his back, he pulled himself up to a seated position on the boat’s round rim. “See you, John,” he said, and, forgetting to put the goggles and mouthpiece in place, backward he went over the side.

“It’s really nice to be here,” Bob told them all with his new sweet smile. Looking around the big office inside the dam, he said, “Gee, I remember this place. I really do.”

“Well, sure you do, Bob,” Kenny the boss said, grinning harder than ever, patting him softer than ever. “You were only gone a few weeks.”

Bob nodded, a slow drifting motion very akin to his new smile. “I forgot a lot, you know,” he told them. “A lot of stuff from before. Dr. Panchick says that’s okay, though.”

“Whatever the doctor says,” Kenny said, nodding emphatically.

The other guys all nodded and smiled, too, though not as sweetly as Bob. They all said they agreed with Dr. Panchick, too, that it didn’t matter about all that old stuff Bob had forgotten.

Gee, it was nice to be back with these nice fellas. Bob almost thought about telling them how he’d even forgotten that girl, whatsername, the one he was married to, but how Dr. Panchick had told him he’d definitely start to remember her again pretty soon. That and a lot of other stuff, too. Not the bad stuff, though. Just the good stuff.

Like the girl; whatsername. After all, there she was around the house all the time, looking red–eyed and smiling so hard it seemed sometimes as though the edges of her mouth must have been tied back to her ears. Having her around all the time like that, calling him
Bob
and so on, pretty soon he’d remember her just fine. And then she wouldn’t have to keep going off into other rooms and crying and then coming back with that smile on. Which was anyway a nice smile, even if kind of painful–looking.

Anyway, he was almost about to kind of
mention
that, the lapse of memory that included whatsername, but as he was taking one of his slow deep breaths, the slow deep breaths he took these days before he made any kind of statement at all, just as he was taking that breath, he remembered he wasn’t supposed to talk a lot to other people about his
symptoms.

That’s right. “They needn’t know you’ve forgotten XXXX,” whatever her name was, Dr. Panchick had said just today. Or yesterday. Or sometime. So he didn’t say any of that about whatsername after all, but just smiled and breathed out again, and nobody noticed.

“Well, uh, Bob,” Kenny said, still grinning fitfully, washing his hands, looking around the big open office, “uh, we thought maybe you could, uh, get back into the swing of things by maybe doing some of the filing, getting caught up on some of this paperwork here. Do you think you could do that?”

“All right,” Bob said, and smiled again. He was very happy.

Kenny continued to grin but looked doubtful. Peering at Bob as though this new sweet smile made him hard to see, he said, “You, uh, remember the alphabet, huh?”

“Oh, sure,” Bob said, very relaxed and easy, very happy to be here in this nice place with all these nice fellas. “Everybody knows the alphabet,” he said.

“Sure,” Kenny said. “That’s right.”

Then Bob’s watch went BEEP, and everybody jumped and looked scared. Everybody but Bob, that is. He raised his left arm to show everybody his watch, and smiled from watch to people to watch, saying, “Dr. Panchick gave me this. It reminds me when to take my pill. I have to take my pill now.”

“Then you better, I guess,” Kenny said.

“Oh, sure,” Bob said, and smiled around at all the nice fellas, and went away to the men’s room for water to wash down his nice pill.

(“Doped to the
eyes!
” a fella named Steve said, and a fella named Chuck said, “You could sell those pills on the street down in New York City and
retire,
” and Kenny the boss said, “Now, leave him alone, guys. Remember, it’s up to us to help Bob get his head out of his ass,” and all the fellas said, “Oh, yeah, sure, naturally, of course, you got it.”)

Oh, boy. Feeling the water rush upward into his nose as his body rushed downward toward the bottom of the reservoir, Kelp stuck his left arm straight up, pressed the button, and filled the BCD. Immediately he stopped sinking, started soaring instead, and suddenly broke through into air.

But where? Anonymous reservoir in the dark. Dortmunder and the boat were nowhere to be seen. I am not going to get lost, Kelp told himself sternly. Ignoring the tiny voice telling him he was already lost, he emptied the water from the goggles, put them on, reassured himself the headlamp was in the right place, released
some
of the air from the BCD, and floated down through the black water like a discarded love letter.

During the descent, he switched on the headlamp and kept turning his face this way and that, hoping either to see Doug’s light or show Doug his own. But when his flippered feet finally found the bottom, he still had seen nothing, and in fact he couldn’t even see what he was standing on until he bent almost double. Then, through the brown water, he saw he was on a flat pebbly surface covered with hairy slime. Yuck.

Still, when he straightened again and stomped both feet around, flippers flapping, he could tell he was on something solid, and not even very muddy. A road? Wouldn’t that be good luck!

Kelp walked back and forth, noticing the evenness of this surface, noticing how little he was increasing the turbidity by his movements, and wondering if he were actually on a street in the town. And if so, where was the curb? Where was the side of the road so he could get some sense of where he was and where he should go?

Treading slowly, having to lift each knee unnaturally high because of the drag of the flippers on his feet, Kelp walked in ever–widening circles, looking for the side of the road or whatever this was. A parking lot? It could take him an
hour
to find the edge of a parking lot.

Wall. Low brick wall, about knee height. Kelp bent down, resting his hands on its slimy surface, and tried to see what the bottom was like on the other side before stepping over.

At first, he just couldn’t see a thing. Brown water drifting and floating, but then also the bricks. Row after row of brick, on down out of sight.

What the heck? Kelp leaned lower, one arm still clutching the wall, most of his body over its edge now as he aimed the headlamp down, trying to see, following the lines of brick wall down, down … to some sort of dark rectangular opening, several feet below.

So hard to see through this murk, everything so distorted and deceptive, if Kelp didn’t know better he’d think this brick wall went right on down and down, and that black rectangle there was …

… a window.

AAA!! Flailing back across the wall, flinging himself to the safety of the roof —
the roof!
— Kelp overshot and drifted upward, turning slowly, absolutely helpless for just an instant, but then floating back down to the roof again and standing there,
gasping
through the mouthpiece, staring around, trying to think what he could possibly do next.

I’m on a
roof!
What miserable luck. I don’t even know how tall this building is. How am I going to get down off —

Wait a second. I
floated
down here. The roof was
under
me. What do I care how tall this building is?

Moving now with long penguinlike hops, like astronauts on the moon, Kelp made his way back to the edge of the roof, added just a teeny bit more air to his BCD, and floated off into space, actually putting his arms out to the sides like a kid playing airplane.

Superman! The feeling of exhilaration was suddenly so intense that Kelp laughed out loud into his mouthpiece. Kicking his legs, waving his arms, ducking his head downward, he made a complete forward roll in the middle of the water, beside the roof, heels over head. Leveling out afterward, he looked around, the headlamp beam flashing this way and that, and stared out through his goggles like a kid in a playground looking for somebody to ride the seesaw with.

This was so much
fun!
All the practice sessions, both times descending into the reservoir with Dortmunder, and neither of them had ever known how much fun this was. Oh, if only John knew it was like this, Kelp thought, he’d change his mind completely. Even John would. Even John.

Kelp cavorted beside the brick building for maybe five minutes before remembering Doug and the buried money and the job he was down here to perform. Okay; time to quit playing hookey and get to work.

With more control over his movements every second, Kelp swam back to the brick wall of the building, and made his way down its face, learning it was three stories high and that he was probably on the side of it, since there was nothing here but windows; no doors.

Choosing arbitrarily to go to the right, he kicked steadily and easily, the fins doing all the work of moving him along as he made his way to the corner, then turned left and discovered he’d guessed right: this was the front of the building, with gunk–covered slate steps leading up to a big blank opening where an elaborate doorway must once have stood. And above that opening was a broad stone lintel with words carved into it. Moving very close, putting the headlamp directly on the scum–filled letters, Kelp read: