watched him go. He headed for the Guggenheim out of habit but found himself instead wandering aimlessly through Central Park.
Let's see. He could sneak into the planning office and burn the station blueprints. No, that wouldn't do. They were bound to have plenty of copies. Charlie had to fill out three copies of a form himself just to requisition a box of paper clips.
He could sneak into the station site and try to sabotage the construction machinery. That would delay things for awhile. Except he didn't think he knew enough about the machinery to successfully bust any of it. He'd never been very mechanically inclined. In fact, he'd failed handicrafts miserably in high school. Everything he had tried to make had turned out to be a napkin holder.
How about using the site to stage a rally for the admission of Nationalist China to the UN? That was always sure to draw a noisy, rambunctious crowd. They might even sabotage the construction gear themselves! He knew a friend who was faintly associated with the John Birch Society who might . . . no, that wouldn't work. Rightist radicals would hardly be the group to get to try to halt construction of anything.
Besides, they were all only temporary. Delaying tactics. Also, he could go to jail for any one of them. A prospect that enthralled him even less than missing his regular Sunday call to his mother in Greenville.
Dinnertime rolled around, and he still hadn't thought of anything. He was reminded of the real world by the smell of incinerating frozen veal cordon bleu. The delicately carbonized odor permeated his tiny living room.
The unappetizing result in his stove was not calculated to improve his humor, already bumping along at a seasonally low ebb.
What he did was most unusual. For Charlie it was unique. He dug down, deep, deep into the bowels of his cupboards, past countless cans of Mr. Planter's peanuts, down past an immaculate cocktail shaker, never used since its purchase three years ago, down past things better left unmentioned, until he found a hair of the dog.
Never more than a social drinker-mostly at official company functions-Charlie thought a few sips might sharpen his thoughts. It seemed to work for old Agent X-14 regularly every Friday evening on channel 3. So he sipped delicately and carefully. For variety, he alternated bottles. They were friendly dogs, indeed. Warm and cuddly, like a Maltese. Shortly thereafter they were rather more like a couple of playful Saint Bernards. And very shortly thereafter he was in no condition to aspire to any analogies at all.
Actually, he hadn't intended to get drunk. It was, however, an inescapable by-product of his drinking. He ran out of sippables in what seemed indecently short order.
He threw on his raincoat-it wasn't raining, but you never knew, he thought belligerently-and headed in search of more follicles of the pooch. It was sheer good fortune he didn't start for the pound.
On the way he had the fortune and misfortune to encounter Miss Overshade in the hallway. Miss Overshade occupied the apartment across the hall from Charlie, on the good side of the building. She was a local personality of some note, being the weather lady on the early news on channel 8. She had at one time been voted Miss Continental Shelf by the Port of New York Authority and currently held the title Miss High-Pressure Area from the New York Council of Meteorologists.
In point of fact she actually was constructed rather along the lines of an especially aesthetic gathering of cumulus clouds. She noticed Charlie, sort of.
'Good evening, Mister . . . uh, Mister . . .'
'Dimsdale,' mumbled Charlie. 'Dimsdale.'
'Oh, yes! How are you, Mister Dimsdale?' Without pausing to learn if he was on the brink of a horrible death, she vanished into her apartment. That voice was calculated to bring on the monsoon. For all she cares, he thought, I might as well be a . . . a gnome.
He hurried down the stairs, insulting the elevator.
At seven sharp Charlie was perusing the soluble delights of an aged and not-so-venerable establishment known as Big Swack's Bar. Currently, he existed in a state of blissful inebriation that followed a thin path betwixt nirvana and hell. For the nonce, nirvana prevailed.
Charlie had a thought, grappled with it. It was brought on by something Van Groot had said. He looked at it hard, piercingly, turning it over in his mind and searching for cracks. It squirmed, trying to get away. He was careful, because he'd seen other things tonight that hadn't been at all real. This thought, however, was.
He left so fast, he forgot to collect the change from his last drink. An occasion that so astonished the proprietor, 'Big Swack'-whose real name was Hochmeister-that he talked of nothing else for days afterward.
'Jonson, Jonson! Bill Jonson!' Charlie hammered unmelodically on the door.
Bill Jonson was a sandy-haired, rather sandy-faced young geologist who occasionally shared with Charlie a pallid sandwich in the equally pallid Subway Authority cafeteria. He did not need minutes to observe that his friend was not his usual bland self.
'Charlie? What the hell's the matter with you?'
Now, Charlie was somewhat coherent because on the way up to his friend's abode he'd had enough sense to ingest three Sober-ups. These were chased downstream consecutively by water, half a Pepsi, and an orange drink of sufficient sweetness to destroy any self-respecting molar inside a month. As a result, his mind cleared at the expense of his stomach, which was starting to cloud over.
'Listen, Bill! Can you take a . . . a sounding, a reading, a . . . you know. To determine if there's something special in the ground? Like a big hollow place?'
'I suspect a big hollow place, and it's not in the ground. Come back tomorrow maybe, Charlie, huh? I've got company, you know?' He sort of tried a half grin, half blink. It made him look like a man suffering an attack of the galloping gripes.
'Bill, you've got to take this sounding! You can take one? I've heard you mention it before. Pay attend-hic!- man! This is important! Think of the telephone company!'
'I'd rather not. I got my bill two days ago. Now, be a good chap, Charlie, and run along. It can wait till Monday. And I have got company.'
Charlie was desperate. 'Just answer me. Can you take a sounding?'
'You mean test the substrata, like I do for the Subway Authority?'
'Yeah! That!' Charlie danced around excitedly. This did not inspire Bill to look on his friend with favor.
'You've got to take one for me!'
'A reading? You're drunk!'
'Certainly not!'
'Then why are you leaning to the left like that?'
'I've always been a liberal. Listen, you know the new station they're planning to build for the extended Bronx-Manhattan line? The one at Sixth and 16th?'
'I've heard about it. That's more your department than mine, you know.'
'Indirectly. You've got to come down and take a reading there. Now, tonight. I . . . I've reason to suspect that the ground there is unstable.'
'You are crazy. There's no real unstable ground in Manhattan unless you count some of the bars in the Village. It's practically solid granite. Do you have any idea what time it is, anyway?' He looked pointedly at his watch. 'My God, it's nearly eight-thirty!'
This unsubtle hint did not have the intended effect on Charlie.
'My God,' he echoed, looking in the general vicinity of his own timepiece, 'it is nearly eight-thirty! We've got to hurry! We've only got till twelve!'
'I'm beginning to think you've got even less than that,' said Bill.
'Who does?' came a mellifluous voice from behind the door.
'Who's that?' Charlie asked, trying to peer over his friend's shoulder.
'The television. Now look, go on home and I'll do whatever you ask. Monday, huh? Please?'
'Nonsense, Bill,' said the voice. The door opened wider. A young lady in rather tight slacks and sweater came into view behind Bill. 'Why don't you invite your friend in? Charlie, wasn't it?'
'Still is,' said Charlie.
'I can't think of a single reason,' said Bill in a tone that would have sufficed to tan leather. He opened the door with great reluctance, and Charlie slipped inside.
