The Disappearing Dwarf Read Free Page A

one of the floating rubber cheeses, looking at it as if mystified. As Jonathan watched, one of the trout swam off into the shadows and then came back with two of his friends who, along with the rest of the trout, hovered about, eyeballing the false cheese. The Professor walked over to sec what it was that so captivated Jonathan.
    These trout seem to be studying Talbot’s rubber cheese,’ Jonathan said. ‘I wonder if their concern is scientific or philosophic’
    ‘Almost certainly philosophic,’ the Professor replied. They’re coming to conclusions about the nature of such a beast as would dangle lumps of rubber beneath a dock.’
    ‘They can only conclude, then,’ Jonathan said, ‘that we’re a race of lunatics. They’ll score our significance in terms of dangling rubber cheese. Perhaps we should drop a book down on a string, or dangle some symbol of technology like a compass or a marble or a bar of soap.’
    ‘That would just make matters worse. They’d wonder why we worked up such marvels, then dumped them into the water.’
    About then, from the green depths of the river, a school of long, rubbery river squid came undulating along, scattering the trout in a half dozen directions. They had great round protruding eyes and a dozen tentacles that trailed along behind. They paused momentarily near the surface, took a look about, then disappeared into the depths, leaving Talbot’s rubber cheese dangling forlornly there in the current.
    There must be a whole world of stuff going on down there that we don’t know anything about,’ Jonathan observed. ‘It would be strange to live in that sort of green and shifting light. Too many shadows for my taste.’
    ‘I’m not sure I agree.’ The Professor walked back across to the raft. ‘I’m at work on a set of plans for a device much like Escargot’s. A subsurface boat. Imagine what you’d see.’
    The two of them idled along for another half hour, then cast off and angled out into mid-river. Two men in slouch hats, smoking pipes and trailing fishing lines, spun past in a canoe. They disappeared around a distant swerve of the shore. Jonathan watched Twombly Town grow smaller, and he saw, finally, before he too rounded that bend, young Talbot, tuba and all, coming along down the path toward the wharves in order to check his lines. Talbot waved at them from afar, and as the raft swirled away out of sight of the village, one echoing mournful note from the mouth of Talbot’s tuba reached them, a sad and distant farewell.
    Jonathan was immediately homesick in the warm silence of the morning, not as cheerful and full of expectations as he had hoped to be. The Professor broke the silence by banging the coffee pot about and by clattering together pots of butter and jam. When he cut into a loaf of fresh bread, the smell of coffee and bread seemed to Jonathan to be the smell of life itself. Never one to fly in the face of anything as significant as life, he ripped into a big hunk of bread smeared over with apple butter. Then he tossed back a cup of coffee, the combination of coffee and bread effectively scattering the morose mood he seemed to have slipped into. He decided, in fact, to throw out a line of his own and catch a couple of those trout who had been making mock of Talbot’s rubber cheese. By the end of breakfast, Twombly Town might as well have been about a thousand miles behind them, and it seemed to Jonathan as if the future held great undefinable promise.
    Along the banks of the river, everything was green and moving. Beavers and water rats brushed through the willows and splashed in the shallows past egrets and herons that stalked along on spindle legs with an eye toward fish. Some miles below town they passed the first of the great stands of oak that ran together finally into deep forests. It seemed to Jonathan that the oaks were at once beautiful and ominous and that they held ageless mythical secrets. He had been told as a boy that on Halloween evening oak