Wally’s big wet eyes got bigger and wetter. “Blow up the dam! But that would be terrible! People would get hurt!”

“They’d get worse than hurt,” May said gently. “And that’s why John won’t be a party to it.”

“That’s right,” John said around a mouthful of pound cake.

“I won’t do it either,” Andy announced.

Tom, who’d been putting various desserts into his mouth without opening his lips, now spoke without opening his lips: “Somebody will. Lotta money down there. Tiny?”

“Include me out,” Tiny said.

“But Tom’s right about that,” May told the table. “He’s willing to do it, and some people would be willing to help him.”

“Gee,” Wally said, apparently contemplating previously unguessed—neither by himself nor his computer—depths of human depravity.

“So the question is,” said May, “is there any other way to get in there and get that money? Any way that John could go along with.”

“If that’s the question,” John said, “I got the short answer.”

“Wait a minute, John,” Andy said, and turned to May, saying, “May, I was down there, too, and I’m sorry, but I gotta go along with John. Your basic problem down there is you can’t see anything. It isn’t like regular water.”

“They must clean the hell out of it,” John commented, “before it gets down into our sinks here.”

“What it reminds me of,” Andy said, “is a book I read once.”

John gave him a dubious look. “Are we gonna hear about Child Heist again?”

“That isn’t the only book I ever read,” Andy told him. “I’m a pretty big reader, you know. It’s a habit I picked up on the inside, when I had a lotta leisure time to myself.”

Tom said, “I spent my time on the inside thinking about money.”

“Anyway,” Andy insisted, “about this book. It was a story about the Normandie, the ship that sank at the pier in New York in—”

“I got pictures of that,” John said, “in that Marine Salvage book.”

“Well, this is a different book,” Andy told him. “It isn’t a fact book, it’s the other kind. A story.”

“The Normandie’s a fact,” John maintained. “I’ve got pictures of it.”

“Still and all,” Andy said, “this is a story about the fact of the Normandie. Okay?”

“Okay,” John said. “I just wanted to be sure we understood each other.” And he filled his mouth with more pound cake, stuffing a little mocha butterscotch cashew ice cream in around the edges.

“Well, the story,” Andy said, with a little more edge than necessary, “is about the divers who went down inside the Normandie and tried to fix it up so they could float it again. And I was thinking when I was down in that lake, what we had there was exactly the same as what this guy described in the book.”

John looked at him with flat disbelief. “Down in that lake? You were down in that lake and you were thinking about books?”

“Among other things.”

“I was concentrating on the other things,” John said.

May said, “John, let Andy tell us about this book.”

“Thanks, May,” Andy said. “The only point about the book is, it’s all about the divers going down inside the Normandie and down to the bottom of the Hudson River off Forty-fourth Street, and how they had the same kind of problem we did. It’s very exciting, very dramatic. Make a terrific movie, except of course you couldn’t see anything.”

“Maybe radio,” Tiny suggested.

“Yeah, maybe so,” Andy agreed. “Anyway, what they had, down at the bottom of the Hudson River, was just what we had. Everything’s black and dirty, the water’s full of this thick mud, and if you turn on a flashlight it’s like turning on your car headlights in a thick fog; it just bounces the light back at you.”

“That sounds terrible,” May said.

John pushed food into one cheek in order to be able to say, “I’ve been telling you it was terrible, May. Do you think I give up easy?”

“No, I don’t, John,” May assured him. “That’s why we’re talking this over now.”

“Getting our book reports,” John said.

Tiny said, “Andy? Did this book say what they did about it, how they got around it?”

“I don’t remember,” Andy said. “I just remember they were down in there, inside the Normandie and around under the Normandie, in all this black dirty water.”

“Not while I’m eating,” John said while he was eating.

May said, “Well, it seems to me, one thing we could do is look at this book and see what solution they came up with.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Tiny agreed. “Andy? You still got the book?”

“I don’t think so.”

Wally, wriggling on the yellow pages in his eagerness to be of help, said, “I could find it! I could get us all copies of it!”

May said, “Andy? What was the title?”

“Beats me,” Andy said. “It had ‘Normandie’ in it.”

“Do you know who wrote it?”

Andy shook his head. “I can’t ever remember writers’ names.”

“That’s okay,” Wally said. “I can do it.”

John said, “Not to be a wet blanket, but—”

Andy said, “Meaning, to be a wet blanket.”

John gave him a look. “But,” he repeated, “even if we find out there’s some magic way so you can see through mud, an idea in which I personally have no belief, but even if there is such a thing, some special thing so you can see bright as day through mud, I’m still not goin down in there again. And I’ll tell you why.”

“That’s okay,” Tom said. “Dynamite’s easy.”

“The why is,” John went doggedly on, “tree stumps. Even if you could see down there, that’s what you’d see. Tree stumps. And you can’t tell which is uphill, which is downhill—”

“That’s true,” Andy said. “I noticed that myself. Disorienting, that’s what they call that.”

“I call it a couple of things myself,” John told him. “And that’s why I’m not going down in there. Tree stumps, and you can’t tell up from down, and you can’t walk through that stuff. And even if you could walk through it, which you can’t, you couldn’t drag any heavy casket up through it.”

Wally said, “Maybe it would work better if you took the railroad line.”

Everybody stared at him. Embarrassed at all the sudden attention, Wally’s face grew as red as the raspberries on his spoon which didn’t make him look like a raspberry, but like a hyperactive tomato. John said to him, “Railroad? Wally, there isn’t any train to Putkin’s Corners.”

“Well, no, gee, no,” Wally said, bobbing his tomato head, spilling raspberries off his spoon. “But there’s still the line.”

Andy, looking suddenly very alert, said, “Are you sure about this, Wally?”

“Sure,” Wally told him. “That was part of the information I input when I did the model in the computer. The old DE&W used to go through—”

“DE&W?” asked May and Andy.

“Dudson, Endicott & Western,” Wally explained.

“That’s great, then,” Andy said. “If we could find the old rail bed, there wouldn’t be any tree stumps there, and it would be like a clear path all the way.”

Tiny said, “And you could walk it right down into town. Is that the story, Wally? It went to Putkin’s Corners?”

Tom said, “The railroad station was across the street from the library. Tracks went behind the station, Albany Road went in front.”

“So,” Andy said, “we could walk the rail line right down into town.”

“If,” John said, “we could see, which we can’t. And if I was ever gonna go underwater again, which I won’t. And if we could find the old rail bed, which we can’t.”

“Well, uh,” Wally said hesitantly, “that part would be easy. The tracks are still there.”

Again he got the general stare, and again his reaction was to turn bright red.

This time it was Andy who picked up the ball, saying, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s true, though,” Wally insisted.

Andy said, “Wally, they took out all the buildings they could use. They cut down all the trees. You’re telling me they left the railroad tracks? Hundreds of pounds—no, what am I saying? Thousands of pounds of reusable steel, and they left it there, under the reservoir?”