"And do you know why scientists make stupid mistakes, and why they change their stories ever so often? Because they're fools too, and thieves into the bargain. Like you, Wiggy."
"I must do it," Dr. Weigand muttered. "Yes, I think certainly. It is the only way."
"Scientists are always starting myths," Fortenay gabbled, never dreaming of what went on behind the doctor's bifocals. "Take the legend of Atlantis, for instance."
The soft sheen of undersea light, like a patina of moonbeams filtered through deepest jade, was lost on him. The deep-water cold of Bartlett Deep that crept through the quartz shell of the bathysphere troubled him not at all.
"When a hairy old Greek named Plato wrote a book about Atlantis, everybody believed him because he was a scientist," Fortenay went on. (He pronounced it Platto.) "And now you pop up with a story about an undersea artifact—you might as well have come right out and called it a building—and what you're really trying to do is to start another crazy myth about a drowned civilization right here in our own backyard. That's the way these lies start."
He might have enlarged further upon his topic if Dr. Weigand had not stood up suddenly, like Samson in the temple, and yanked an innocent-seeming lever that disconnected the bathysphere from its overhead cable and let it drop like a stone toward the bottom of Bartlett Deep.
"Perhaps we start a little myth of our own, you and I," Dr. Weigand said as the telephone wires ripped loose. "Perhaps our friends up there will say to the newspapers that a sea monster came up and ate us, nicht wahr?"
Fortenay, of course, sprang upon the burly old oceanographer in a frenzy, and of course accomplished nothing.
Dr. Weigand took him by the shoulders and replaced him in his leather seat.
"We can neither of us do anything now," the good doctor said. "Sit, Mr. Fortenay, and tell me more about how you do not believe in myths."