Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

Wally looked mournfully at the words on the screen. “Well, it just means what it says,” he answered. “Evaporation, Andy, you know? Evaporating water.”

Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I think I get it. This computer wants to get at the box by getting rid of the water. Same as Tom. Only the computer wants to evaporate it.”

“Well,” Wally said, hunched protectively over his keyboard, “this was just the first thought it had.”

“Take a laser,” Dortmunder went on, enjoying himself more and more, “take a very big laser and burn off all the water in the reservoir.”

“Wally,” Kelp said. “Let’s take a look at solution number two, okay?”

“Well, there were still problems,” Wally said. Turning to Dortmunder, he explained, “You see, John, the computer doesn’t actually live in the same world we do.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “It doesn’t?”

“No. It lives in the world we tell it about. It only knows what we tell it.”

“Oh, I know about that,” Dortmunder said, nodding, looking over at Kelp, saying, “That’s that word you were using the other day, right? What was that?”

“Guy-go,” Kelp said, looking wary.

“That was it,” Dortmunder agreed. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Well, sure,” Wally said, his defensiveness more plain than ever. “But actually, you know, sometimes garbage in isn’t garbage, depending on what you want the computer for . You tell the computer something, and sometimes it isn’t garbage, and then other times maybe it is.”

Over Wally’s head, Dortmunder gave Kelp a superior look. Kelp caught it, shook his head, and said, “Come on, Wally, let’s see solution number two.”

So Wally’s sausage fingers did their dance over the keyboard, and a new set of green words ribboned across the middle of the black screen:

2) SPACESHIP FROM ZOG

There was an uncomfortable silence. Dortmunder tried his absolute best to catch Kelp’s eye, but Kelp would have none of it. “Zog,” Dortmunder said.

Wally cleared his throat with a sound like a chipmunk gargling. Blinking at the words on the screen, he said, “You see, there’s this story—”

“ Don’t explain,” Kelp said. He put a hand on Wally’s shoulder, part protectively, part warningly. “Wally, okay? Don’t explain.”

But Wally couldn’t help himself: “The computer thinks it’s real.”

“You know,” Dortmunder said, feeling that unfamiliar ache in his cheeks that probably meant he was grinning, “I’m kind of looking forward to solution number three.”

Wally did the gargling chipmunk again. “Well,” he said, “there’s kind of a solution two-A first.”

Kelp, sounding fatalistic, said, “Wally? You mean, something that goes along with the spaceship?”

“Well, yeah,” Wally agreed, nodding that round brilliant silly head. “But,” he added, with a forced hopefulness, “it could have an application maybe, kind of, with some of the other solutions.”

“Fling it at us, Wally,” Kelp said. Even his cheekbones were refusing to look at Dortmunder.

So Wally did his keyboard dance again, and SPACESHIP FROM ZOG was swept away into oblivion, replaced by:

2A) MAGNET

“Magnet,” Kelp said.

Wally swung around in his swivel chair, facing away from the computer for the first time, looking up eagerly at Kelp, saying, “But it isn’t wrong, Andy! Okay, the first idea was, the spaceship finds the treasure. Or whatever finds the treasure. But then the magnet attaches to it, and you pull it up out of the water.”

“Wally,” Kelp said gently, “what we figure, roughly figuring, the treasure weighs somewhere between four hundred and six hundred pounds. That’s gotta be a pretty big magnet you’re talking about.”

“Well, sure,” Wally said. “That’s what we thought.”

“You get it the same place you got the spaceship,” Dortmunder told Kelp.

Wally swiveled around to look up at Dortmunder, his expression earnest, moist eyes straining to be understood. “It doesn’t have to be a spaceship, John,” he said. “Like, a submarine, you know, a submarine’s just like a spaceship.”

“Well, that’s true,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Or a boat,” Wally said. “Once you find the treasure, you know exactly where it is, you can lower the magnet, pull the treasure up.”

“Yeah, but, you know,” Dortmunder said, more gently than he’d intended (it wasn’t easy to be hard-edged or sardonic when gazing down into that round guileless face), “you know, uh, Wally, part of the problem here is, we don’t want anybody to see us. You put a boat, a big boat with a big magnet, out on the reservoir, they’re just gonna see you, Wally. I mean, they really are.”

“Not at night,” Wally pointed out. “You could do it at night. And,” he said more eagerly, getting into the swing of it, “it doesn’t matter about it being dark, because it’s going to be dark down at the bottom of the reservoir anyway.”

“And that’s also true,” Dortmunder agreed. He looked over Wally’s soft head at Kelp’s grimacing face. Kelp seemed to be undergoing various emotional upheavals over there. “We’ll do it at night,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, benignly.

“Wally,” Kelp said, desperation showing around the edges, “show us solution number three, Wally. Please?”

“Okay,” Wally said, eager to be of help. Turning right back to his computer, he tickled the keyboard once more, and away went 2A) MAGNET. In its place appeared:

3) PING-PONG BALLS

Kelp sighed audibly. “Oh, Wally,” he said.

“Well, wait a minute,” Dortmunder told him. “That’s not a bad one.”

Kelp stared at him. “It isn’t?”

“No, it isn’t. I get the idea of that one,” Dortmunder said, and explained, “That’s like one of the things in that book I brought back from the library, that Marine Salvage book. Of course, I only read a little of the book on the subway coming home, before Andy said let’s go see what you have on all this.”

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.”