Kelp said, “John? Ping-Pong balls are in the book?”

“Not exactly,” Dortmunder admitted. “But it led me to the same kind of thought. There’s sunken ships where to get them up they fill them with polyurethane foam or polystyrene granules, and it’s really just plastic bubbles of air taking the place of all the water inside the ship—”

“That’s right!” Wally said. He was so excited at the idea of actual brain-to-brain contact with another human being at this level that he positively bounced in his chair. “And what is a Ping-Pong ball?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s just a ball of air, isn’t it? Enclosed in a thin, almost weightless skin of plastic!”

“It’s a way to get a lot of air down to the ship in a hurry without a lot of trouble,” Dortmunder went on, explaining it all to Kelp. “So I was thinking, maybe you could fire them down through a length of hose.”

Kelp stared at his old friend. “John? This is your kind of solution?”

“Well, no, because the problem is,” Dortmunder said, and looked down at Wally’s gently perspiring face, “the problem is, Wally, this isn’t a ship. It’s a closed box, and if we open it to put the Ping-Pong balls in, we’re gonna get water in there and spoil all the, uh, treasure.”

“Well, that’s solution three-A,” Wally said, and his fingers played a riff on the keyboard, and now the screen said:

3A) PLASTIC BAG

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. “That makes sense. We’re down there, somehow, probably in our spaceship, and we find this six-hundred-pound box and we dig it up, probably with our giant magnet, and then we put it in our giant plastic bag, and then we fill that with Ping-Pong balls, and it just floats right to the surface. Easy.”

“Well, kind of,” Wally said, his feet shuffling around among the casters of his swivel chair. “There’s still some bugs to be ironed out.”

“Some bugs,” Dortmunder echoed.

“Wally,” Kelp said desperately, “show us solution number four.”

“Well, Andy, there isn’t one,” Wally said, swiveling slowly in Kelp’s direction.

Kelp looked aghast. “There isn’t one?”

“Not yet,” Wally amended. “But we’re working on it. We’re not finished yet.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it. This has been a very educational experience.”

Kelp looked warily at Dortmunder to see if he was trying to be sardonic. “Educational?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said. “It clears up my thinking a lot, between tricky and simple. I know which way I’m going now.” Patting Wally’s soft shoulder—it felt like patting a mozzarella cheese—Dortmunder said, “You’ve been a great help, Wally. Just like Andy said.”

FIFTEEN

“Walk in?” Kelp demanded.

They were at that moment strolling through Paragon Sporting Goods, on Broadway and 18th Street, heading for the underwater department up on the second floor. “That’s the simplest way I can think of,” Dortmunder answered, as they trotted up the wide steps. “And, after that little song and dance from your pal and his computer—”

“Wally was a great disappointment to me,” Kelp said. “I must admit it. But still, the original model he did was something terrific.”

They reached the second floor and turned right. “Wally’s a great model maker,” Dortmunder agreed. “But when it comes to plans, just like I was telling you from the beginning, I don’t need help from machines.”

“Sure you don’t, John,” Kelp said. “But just to walk in? Are you sure?”

“What could be simpler?” Dortmunder asked him. “We put on underwater stuff so we can breathe down there. We get a flashlight and a shovel and a long rope, and we go to the edge of the reservoir and we walk in. We walk downhill until we come to the town, and we find the library, and we dig up the box, and we tie the rope to it. Then we walk back uphill, right along the rope, and when we come out on dry land we pick up the other end of the rope and we pull. Simple.”

“I don’t know, John,” Kelp said. “Walking down fifty feet under water never struck me as exactly simple.”

“It’s simpler than spaceships from Zog,” Dortmunder said, and stopped. “Here we are.”

There they were. For reasons best known to management, the underwater equipment at Paragon is upstairs; top floor, off to the right of the wide staircase. When Dortmunder and Kelp walked into this section and stopped and just stood there, looking around, they did not at first glance seem as though they belonged here. At second glance, they definitely didn’t belong, not in this department, not in this store, probably not even on this block. One was tall, stoop-shouldered, pessimistic, walking with a shuffling nonathletic jail-yard gait, while the other was shorter, narrower, looking like the sort of bird that became extinct because it wouldn’t ever learn to fly.

The flightless bird said, “So what are we looking for?”

“Help,” said the pessimist, and turned around to see a healthy young woman approaching with many questions evident on her face.

The one she chose to begin with was, “Looking for anything in particular, gentlemen?”

“Yeah,” Dortmunder told her. “We wanna go underwater.”

She studied them with doubt. “You do?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Why not?”

“No reason,” she said, with a too-bright smile. “Have you gentlemen ever done any diving before?”

“Diving?” Dortmunder echoed.

“You are talking about diving, aren’t you?” the girl asked.

“Going underwater,” Dortmunder repeated, and even made a little parting-the-waves gesture to make things clearer: putting the backs of his hands together, then sweeping them out to the sides.

“In the ocean,” the girl said dubiously.

“Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “In a kind of lake. But still, you know, under. In it.”

“Freshwater diving,” the girl said, smiling with pleasure that they were communicating after all.

“Walking,” Kelp said. Sticking his oar in, as it were.

So much for communication. Looking helplessly at Kelp, the girl said, “I beg your pardon?”

“We’re not gonna jump in it,” Kelp explained. “Not diving, walking. We’re gonna walk in it.”

“Oh,” she said, and smiled with great healthy delight, saying, “That makes no difference, not with the equipment.” Turning slightly, to include Dortmunder in her smile, she said, “I take it you gentlemen haven’t gone in for diving before.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Dortmunder told her.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Where are you taking your instruction?”

“Instruction?” Kelp said, but Dortmunder talked over him, saying, “At the lake.”

“And what equipment will you be needing?”

“Everything,” Dortmunder said.

That surprised her again. “Everything? Won’t you be able to rent anything at all from the pro?”

“No, it don’t work that way at this particular lake,” Dortmunder said. “Anyway, right now we’re just looking to see what we’ll need, what kinda equipment and all.”

“Tanks and air and all that,” Kelp added, and pointed toward a number of scuba tanks displayed on the wall behind the glass counter full of regulators and goggles and waterproof flashlights.

The girl lost her smile for good. Frowning from Dortmunder to Kelp and back, she said, “I’m not sure what you gentlemen are up to, but it isn’t diving.”

Dortmunder gave her an offended look. “Yeah, we are,” he said. “Why would we want the stuff?”

“All right,” she said crisply, either giving him the benefit of the doubt or choosing brisk explanation as the quickest way to get rid of these noncustomers. “Clearly,” she said, “you don’t know anything about the world of diving.”

“We’re just starting out,” Dortmunder reminded her. “I told you that, remember?”

“You can’t do it without an instructor,” she said, “and it’s pretty clear you don’t have an instructor.”