Suddenly, as he visualised himself throwing his weight onto the handles of a plunger box and catapulting Riggs, the base and the testing station into the next lagoon, he stopped and steadied himself against the rail. Smiling ruefully at the absurdity of the fantasy, he wondered why he had indulged it.
Then he noticed the heavy cylinder of the compass dragging at his jacket. For a moment he peered down at it thoughtfully.
"Watch out, Kerans," he murmured to himself. "You're living on two levels."
Five minutes later, when he entered the sick-bay on B-Deck, he found more urgent problems facing him.
Three men were being treated for heat ulcers in the dispensary, but the main twelve-bed ward was empty. Kerans nodded to the corporal issuing penicillin band-aids and walked through to the small single ward on the starboard side of the deck.
The door was closed, but as he turned the handle he could hear the restless heaving motion of the cot, followed by a fractious muttering from the patient and Dr. Bodkin's equable but firm reply. For a few moments the latter continued to speak in a iow even monologue, punctuated by a few shrugging protests and concluded by an interval of tired silence.
Lieutenant Hardman, the senior pilot of the helicopter (now being flown by his co-pilot, Sergeant Daley) was the oniy other commissioned member of the survey unit, and until the last three months had served as Riggs' deputy and chief executive officer. A burly, intelligent but somewhat phlegmatic man of about 30, he had quietly kept himself apart from the other members of the unit. something of an amateur naturalist, he made his own descriptive notes of the changing flora and fauna, employing a taxonomic system of his own devising. In one of his few unguarded moments he had shown the notebooks to Kerans, then abruptly withdrawn into himself when Kerans tactfully pointed out that the classifications were confused.
For the first two years Hardman had been the perfect buffer between Riggs and Kerans. The rest of the crew took their cue from the Lieutenant, and this had the advantage, from Kerans' point of view, that the group never developed that sense of happy cohesion a more extravert second-in-command might have instilled, and which would have soon made life unbearable. The loose fragmentary relationships aboard the base, where a replacement was accepted as a fully paid up member of the crew within five minutes and no-one cared whether he had been there two days or two years, was largely a reflection of Hardman's temperament. When he organised a basketball match or a regatta out on the lagoon there was no self-conscious boisterousness, but a laconic indifference to whether anyone took part or not.
Recently, however, the more sombre elements in Hardman's personality had begun to predominate. Two months earlier he complained to Kerans of intermittent insomnia—often, from Beatrice Dahl's apartment, Kerans would watch him long after midnight standing in the moonlight beside the helicopter on the roof of the base, looking out across the silent lagoon—and then took advantage of an attack of malaria to excuse himself from flying duty. Confined to his cabin for up to a week on end, he steadily retreated into his private world, going through his old note-books and running his fingers, like a blind man reading Braille, across the glass display cases with their few mounted butterflies and giant moths.
The malaise had not been difficult to diagnose. Kerans recognised the same symptoms he had seen in himself, an accelerated entry Into his own 'zone of transit', and left the Lieutenant alone, asking Bodkin to call in periodically.
Curiously, however, Bodkin had taken a more serious view of Hardman's illness.
Pushing back the door, Kerans stepped quietly into the darkened room, pausing in the corner by the ventilator shaft as Bodkin raised a monitory hand towards him. The blinds over the windows were drawn, and to Kerans' surprise the air-conditioning unit had been switched off. The air pumped in through the ventilator was never more than twenty degrees below the ambient temperature of the lagoon, and the air-conditioner normally kept the room at an even 70 degrees. But Bodkin had not only switched this off but plugged a small electric fire into the shaver socket over the hand basin mirror. Kerans remembered him building the fire in the laboratory at the testing station, fitting a dented paraboloid mirror around the single filament. Little more than a couple of watts in strength, the fire seemed to emit an immense heat, blazing out into the small room like a furnace mouth, and within a few seconds Kerans felt the sweat gathering around his neck. Bodkin, sitting on the metal bedside chair with his back to the fire, was still wearing his white cotton jacket, stained by two wide patches of sweat that touched between his shoulder blades, and in the dim red light Kerans could see the moisture beading off his head like drops of white-hot lead.
Hardman lay slumped back on one elbow, his broad chest and shoulders filling the backrest, big hands holding the leads of a pair of headphones clasped to his ears. His narrow, large-jawed face was pointed towards Kerans, but his eyes were fixed on the electric fire. Projected by the parabolic bowl, a circular disc of intense red light three feet in diameter covered the wall of the cabin, Hardman's head at its centre, like an enormous glowing halo.
A faint scratching noise came from a portable record player on the floor at Bodkin's feet, a single three-inch disc spinning on its turntable. Generated mechanically by the pick-up head, the almost imperceptible sounds of a deep slow drumming reached Kerans, lost as the record ended and Bodkin switched off the player. Quickly he jotted something down on a desk-pad, then turned off the electric fire and put on the bedside lamp.
Shaking his head slowly, Hardman pulled off the headphones and handed them to Bodkin.
"This is a waste of time, Doctor. These records are insane, you can put any interpretation you like on them." He settled his heavy limbs uncomfortably in the narrow cot. Despite the heat, there was little sweat on his face and bare chest, and he watched the fading embers of the electric fire as if reluctant to see them vanish.
Bodkin stood up and put the record player on his chair, wrapping the headphones around the case. "Perhaps that's the point, Lieutenant—a sort of aural Rorshach. I think the last record was the most evocative, don't you agree?"
Hardman shrugged with studied vagueness, evidently reluctant to cooperate with Bodkin and concede even the smallest point. But despite this Kerans felt that he had been glad to take part in the experiment, using it for his own purposes.
"Maybe," Hardman said grudgingly. "But I'm afraid it didn't suggest a concrete image."
Bodkin smiled, aware of Hardman's resistance but prepared for the moment to give in to him. "Don't apologise, Lieutenant; believe me, that was our most valuable session so far." He waved to Kerans. "Come in, Robert, I'm sorry it's so warm—Lieutenant Hardman and I have been conducting a small experiment together. I'll tell you about it when we go back to the station. Now—" he pointed to a contraption on the bedside table which appeared to be two alarm clocks clipped back to back, crude metal extensions from the hands interlocking like the legs of two grappling spiders "—keep this thing running as long as you can, it shouldn't be too difficult, all you have to do is re-set both alarms after each twelvehour cycle. They'll wake you once every ten minutes, just enough time for you to get sufficient rest before you slide off the pre-conscious shelf into deep sleep. With luck there'll be no more dreams."
Hardman smiled sceptically, glancing up briefly at Kerans. "I think you're being over-optimistic, Doctor. What you really mean is that I won't be aware of them." He picked up a well-thumbed green file, his botanical diary, and began to turn the pages mechanically. "Sometimes I think I have the dreams continuously, every minute of the day. Perhaps we all do."
His tone was relaxed and unhurried, despite the fatigue which had drained the skin around his eyes and mouth, making his long Jaw seem even more lantern-like. Kerans realised that the malaise, Whatever its source, had barely touched the central core of the man's ego. The element of tough self-sufficiency in Hardman was as strong as ever, if anything stronger, like a steel blade springing against a fencing post and revealing its sinews.
&nbs
p; Bodkin dabbed at his face with a yellow silk handkerchief, watching Hardman thoughtfully. His grimy cotton jacket and haphazard attire, coupled with his puffy, quinine-tinted skin, misleadingly made him look like a seedy quack, masking a sharp and unresting intelligence. "Perhaps you're right, Lieutenant. In fact, some people used to maintain that consciousness is nothing more than a special category of the cytoplasmic coma, that the capacities of the central nervous system are as fully developed and extended by the dream, life as they are during what we call the waking state. But we have to adopt an empirical approach, try whatever remedy we can. Don't you agree, Kerans?"
Kerans nodded. The temperature in the cabin had begun to fall, and he felt himself breathing more freely. "A change of climate will probably help as well." There was a dull clatter outside as one of the metal scows being hauled up in its davits clanged against the hull. He added: "The atmosphere in these lagoons is pretty enervating. Three days from now when we leave I think we'll all show a marked improvement."
He assumed that Hardman had been told of their imminent departure, but the Lieutenant looked up at him sharply, lowering. his note-book Bodkin began to clear his throat noisily and abruptly started talking about the danger of draughts from the ventilator. For a few seconds Kerans and Hardman watched each other steadily, and then the Lieutenant nodded briefly to himself and resumed his reading, carefully noting the time from the bedside clocks.
Angry with himself, Kerans went over to the window, his back turned to the others. He realised that he had told Hardman deliberately, unconsciously hoping to elicit precisely this response, and knowing full well why Bodkin had withheld the news. Without the shadow of a doubt he had warned Hardman, telling him that whatever tasks he had to carry out, whatever internal perspectives to bring to a common focus, this should be completed within 3 days.
Kerans looked down irritably at the alarm device on the table, resenting his diminishing control over his own motives. First the meaningless theft of the compass, and now this act of gratuitous sabotage. However varied his faults, in the past he had always believed them to be redressed by one outstanding virtue—a complete and objective awareness of the motives behind his actions. If he was sometimes prone to undue delays this was a result, not of irresolution, but of a reluctance to act at all where complete selfawareness was impossible—his affair with Beatrice Dahl, tilted by so many conflicting passions, from day to day walked a narrow tightrope of a thousand restraints and cautions.
In a belated attempt to re-assert himself, he said to Hardman: "Don't forget the clock, Lieutenant. If I were you I'd set the alarm so that it rings continuously."
Leaving the sick-bay, they made their way down to the jetty and climbed into Kerans' catamaran. Too tired to start the motor, Kerans slowly pulled them along the overhead hawzer stretched between the base and the testing station. Bodkin sat in the bows, the record player held between his knees like a briefcase, blinking in the bright sunlight that spangled the broken surface of the sluggish green water. His plump face, topped by an untidy grey thatch, seemed preoccupied and wistful, scanning the surrounding ring of half-submerged buildings like a weary ship's chandler being rowed around a harbour for the - very first time. As they neared the testing station the helicopter roared in overhead and alighted, its impact tilting the base and dipping the hawzer into the water, then tautening it and cascading a brief shower across their shoulders. Bodkin cursed under his breath, but they were dry within a few seconds. Although it was well after o'clock, the sun filled the sky, turning it into an enormous blow-torch and forcing them to lower their eyes to the water-line. Now and then, in the glass curtainwalling of the surrounding buildings, they would see countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing facetted eyes of gigantic insects.
A two-storey drum some fifty feet in diameter, the testing station had a dead weight of twenty tons. The lower deck contained the laboratory, the upper the two biologists' quarters and the chartroom and offices. A small bridge traversed the roof, and housed the temperature and humidity registers, rainfall gauge and radiation counters. Clumps of dried air-weed and red kelp were encrusted across the bitumened plates of the pontoon, shrivelled and burnt by the sun before they could reach the railing around the laboratory, while a dense refuse-filled mass of sargassum and spirogyra cushioned their impact as they reached the narrow jetty, oozing and subsiding like an immense soggy raft.
They entered the cool darkness of the laboratory and sat down at their desks below the semi-circle of fading program schedules which reached to the ceiling behind the dais, looking down over the clutter of benches and fume cupboards like a dusty mural. The schedules on the left, dating from their first year of work, were packed with detailed entries and minutely labelled arrow sprays, but those on the right thinned out progressively, until a few pencilled scrawls in giant longhand ioops sealed off all but one or two of the ecological corridors. Many of the cardboard screens had sprung off their drawing pins, and hung forwards into the air like the peeling hull-plates of a derelict ship, moored against its terminal pier and covered with gnomic and meaningless graffiti.
Idly tracing a large compass dial with his finger in the dust on the desk-top, Kerans waited for Bodkin to provide some explanation for his curious experiments with Hardman. But Bodkin settled himself comfortably behind the muddle of box-files and catalogue trays on his desk, then opened the record player and removed the disc from the table, spinning it reflectively between his hands.
Kerans began: "I'm sorry I let slip that we were leaving in three days' time. I hadn't realised you'd kept that from Hardman."
Bodkin shrugged, dismissing this as of little importance. "It's a complex situation, Robert. Having gone a few steps towards unravelling it I didn't want to introduce another slip knot."
"But why not tell him?" Kerans pressed, hoping obliquely to absolve himself of his slight feeling of guilt. "Surely the prospect of leaving might well jolt him out of his lethargy?"
Bodkin lowered his glasses to the end of his nose and regarded Kerans quizzically. "It doesn't seem to have had that effect on you, Robert. Unless I'm very much mistaken you look rather un-jolted. Why should Hardman's reactions be any different?"
Kerans smiled. "Touché, Alan. I don't want to interfere, having more or less dropped Hardman into your lap, but what exactly are you and he playing about with—the electric heater and alarm clocks?"
Bodkin slid the gramophone record into a rack of miniature discs the shelf behind him. He looked up at Kerans and for a few moments watched him with the mild but penetrating gaze with which he had observed Hardman, and Kerans realised that their relationship, until now that of colleagues confiding completely in each other, had become closer to that of observer and subject. After a pause Bodkin glanced away at the program charts, and Kerans chuckled involuntarily. To himself he said: Damn the old boy, he's got me up there now with the algae and nautiloids, next he'll be playing his records at me.
Bodkin stood up and pointed to the three rows of laboratory benches, crowded with vivaria and specimen jars, pages from notebooks pinned to the fume hoods above them.
"Tell me, Robert, if you had to sum up the last three years' work in a single conclusion, how would you set about it?"
Kerans hesitated, then gestured off-handedly. "It wouldn't be too difficult." He saw that Bodkin expected a serious answer, and composed his thoughts. 'Well, one could simply say that in response to the rises in temperature, humidity and radiation levels the flora and fauna of this planet are beginning to assume once again the forms they displayed the last time such conditions were present—roughly speaking, the Triassic."
"Correct." Bodkin strolled off among the benches. "During the last three years, Robert, you and I have examined something like five thousand species in the animal kingdom, seen literally tens of thousands of new plant varieties. Everywhere the same pattern has unfolded, countless mutations completely transforming the organisms to adapt them for survival in
the new environment. Everywhere there's been the same avalanche backwards into the past—so much so that the few complex organisms which have managed to retain a foothold unchanged on the slope look distinctly anomalous—a handful of amphibians, the birds, and Man. It's a curious thing that although we've carefully catalogued the backward journeys of so many plants and animals, we've ignored the most important creature on this planet."
Kerans laughed. "I'll willingly take a small bow there, Alan. But what are you suggesting—that Homo sapiens is about to transform himself into Cro-Magnon and Java Man, and ultimately into Sinanthropus? Unlikely, surely. Wouldn't that merely be Lamarkism in reverse?"
"Agreed. I'm not suggesting that." Bodkin leaned against one of the benches, feeding a handful of peanuts to a small marmoset caged in a converted fume cupboard. "Though obviously after two or three hundred million years Homo sapiens might well die out and our little cousin here become the highest form of life on the planet. However, a biological process isn't completely reversible." He pulled the silk handkerchief out of his pocket and flicked it at the marmoset, which flinched away tremulously. "If we return to the jungle we'll dress for dinner."
He went over to a window and gazed out through the mesh screen, the overhang of the deck above shutting out all but a narrow band of the intense sunlight. Steeped in the vast heat, the lagoon lay motionlessly, pails of steam humped over the water like elephantine spectres.
"But I'm really thinking of something else. Is it only the external' landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of deja vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well. However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field-rat's inherited image of the hawk's silhouette is the classic example—even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or the equally surprising—in view of their comparative rarity—hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet's dominant life form."
The Drowned World Page 4
