Since the thing at the bottom stood only two miles in height, it followed by simple subtraction that three miles of dark and watery distance must remain between the cameras of the observer and their target. The only possible inference was that Dr. Weigand had built the bathysphere for the sole purpose of titillating popular interest and so justifying a request for additional funds for his project.
"It gets your name in the papers," Fortenay said with caustic irony. "And makes it easier to bilk the taxpayers next time. And if you're forced to admit it's only another volcanic chunk then your project will still be in the black, won't it?"
The unexpected attack, to tap Fortenay's gift for simile again, knocked the oceanographer for a devastating loop. His reasoning had been much as Fortenay guessed, though the difficulty of maintaining a truly important scientific project without government aid had seemed more than enough to justify the trifling subterfuge.
The doctor saw his mistake now, and while the bathysphere sank lower and lower into the darkening water he sought frantically for a loophole of escape from the disaster he foresaw in tomorrow's newspapers.
He might have saved himself the effort. Fortenay had already headlined his report, and his only interest now was in the sport of baiting his victim....
The exposure of fakes, quacks, mountebanks and myths, Fortenay declared, was his specialty. He offered copious proof.
"There was that pig-tailed brat in Arkansas," Fortenay said, "who claimed she could levitate pianos and start fires by crossing her eyes. The local papers had half the country believing it until I went down and bluffed her into a test demonstration with arc lights and a TV hookup. Maybe you caught that show—the act was a gyp, and I showed the world. You never heard from her again, did you?"
Dr. Weigand recalled the incident, and thought with some commiseration that the nervous breakdown which followed the neurotic child's exposure to Fortenay's baying attack might have been responsible for the loss of any poltergeist power.
"And those three jokers in Ohio," enumerated Fortenay, "who claimed they found a dead flying-saucer pilot. I bought it from them and proved it was only a carnival baboon dipped in laundry blueing. I got those jerks three years for fraud."
And here am I, thought Dr. Weigand, an honest man and a respected scientist, about to suffer a punishment even more terrible at the hands of this trumpeting little ferret because I have sought to keep my project alive. He will shout my little indiscretion from his journalistic housetop and my reputation and my job will go like fog before the wind. I will be discredited and my Anna will hang her head before the neighbors and my little Karen and Wilhelmina, who know nothing of it, will be jeered in the schoolyard....