The Drowned World - Ballard James Graham. Страница 11

The next day, for reasons Kerans was to understand fully only much later, Lieutenant Hardman disappeared.

After a night of deep, dreamless sleep Kerans rose early and had breakfasted by seven o'clock. He then spent an hour on the balcony, sitting back in one of the beach chairs in a pair of white latex shorts, the sunlight expanding across the dark water bathing his lean ebony body. Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber. The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth's magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence.

Pausing by the desk to run his fingers over the brass compass gleaming in the darkness of the suite, Kerans went into the bedroom and changed into his khaki drill uniform, a minimal concession to Riggs' preparations for departure. The Italian sportswear was now hardly de rigeur, and it would only rouse the Colonel's suspicions if he were seen sauntering about in a pastel-coloured ensemble with a Ritz hallmark Although he accepted the possibility that he would remain behind, Kerans found himself reluctant to take any systematic precautions. Apart from his fuel and food supplies, for which he had been dependent during the previous six months on Colonel Riggs' largesse, he had also needed an endless succession of minor spares and replacements, from a new watchface to a complete rewiring of the lighting system in the suite. Once the base and its workshop had left he would soon find himself saddled with an accumulating series of petty annoyances, and with no accommodating technical sergeant to remove them.

For the convenience of the stores staff, and to save himself unnecessary journeys to and from the base, Kerans had stockpiled a month's forward supplies of canned food in the suite. Most of this consisted of condensed milk and luncheon meat, virtually inedible unless supplemented by the delicacies stored away in Beatrice's deep freeze. It was this capacious locker, with its reserves of pate du fois grois and fillet mignon, which Kerans counted upon to keep them going, but at the most there was a bare three months' stock. After that they would have to live off the land, switch their menu to wood soup and steak iguana.

Fuel raised more serious problems. The reserve tanks of diesel oil at the Ritz held little more than 500 gallons, sufficient to operate the cooling system for at most a couple of months. By closing down the bedroom and dressing room and moving into the lounge, and by raising the ambient temperature to ninety degrees, he would with luck double its life, but once the supplies were exhausted the chances of supplementing them were negligible. Every reserve tank and cache in the gutted buildings around the lagoons had long since been syphoned dry by the waves of refugees moving northward during the past thirty years in their power boats and cabin cruisers. The tank on the catamaran outboard motor carried three gallons, enough for thirty miles, or a return trip a day for a month between the Ritz and Beatrice's lagoon.

For some reason, however, this inverted Crusoeism-the deliberate marooning of himself without the assistance of a gear-laden carrack wrecked on a convenient reef-raised few anxieties in Kerans' mind. As he let himself out of the suite he left the thermostat at its usual eighty degree setting, despite the fuel the generator would waste, reluctant to make even a nominal concession to the hazards facing him after Riggs' departure. At first he assumed that this reflected a shrewd unconscious assessment that his good sense would prevail, but as he started the outboard and drove the catamaran through the cool oily swells towards the creek into the next lagoon he realised that this indifference marked the special nature of the decision to remain behind. To use the symbolic language of Bodkin's schema, he would then be abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs and entering the world of total, neuronic time, where the massive intervals of the geological time-scale calibrated his existence. Here a million years was the shortest working unit, and problems of food and clothing became as irrelevant as they would have been to a Buddhist contemplative lotus-squatting before an empty rice-bowl under the protective canopy of the million-headed cobra of eternity.

Entering the third lagoon, an oar raised to fend off the ten-foot-long blades of a giant horse-tail dipping its leaves into the mouth of the creek, he noticed without emotion that a party of men under Sergeant Macready had hoisted the anchors of the testing station and were towing it slowly towards the base. As the gap between the two closed, like curtains drawing together after the end of a play, Kerans stood in the stern of the catamaran under the dripping umbrella of leaves, a watcher in the wings whose contribution to the drama, however small, had now completely ended.

In order not to attract attention by restarting the engine, he pushed out into the sunlight, the giant leaves sinking to their hilts in the green jelly of the water, and paddled slowly around the perimeter of the lagoon to Beatrice's apartment block. Intermittently the roar of the helicopter dinned across the water as it carried out its tarmac check, and the swells from the testing station drummed against the prows of the catamaran and drove on through the open windows on his right, slapping around the internal walls. Beatrice's power cruiser creaked painfully at its moorings. The engine room had flooded and the stern was awash under the weight of the two big Chrysler engines. Sooner or later one of the thermal storms would catch the craft and anchor it forever fifty feet down in one of the submerged streets.

When he stepped out of the elevator the patio around the swimming pooi was deserted, the previous evening's glasses still on the tray between the reclining chairs. Already the sunlight was beginning to fill the pool, illuminating the yellow sea-horses and blue tridents that patterned its floor. A few bats hung in the shadows below the gutter over Beatrice's bedroom window, but they flew off as Kerans sat down, like vampiric spirits fleeing the rising day.

Through the blinds Kerans caught a glimpse of Beatrice moving about quietly, and five minutes later she walked into the lounge, a black towel in a single twist around her midriff. She was partly hidden in the dim light at the far end of the room, and seemed tired and withdrawn, greeting him with a half-hearted wave. Leaning one elbow against the bar, she made a drink for herself, stared blankly at one of the Delvaux and returned to her bedroom.

When she failed to reappear Kerans went in search of her. As he pushed back the glass doors the hot air trapped inside the lounge hit his face like fumes vented from a crowded galley. Several times within the past month the generator had failed to respond immediately to the thermostat, and the temperature was well into the nineties, probably responsible for Beatrice's lethargy and ennui.

She was sitting on the bed when Kerans entered, the tumbler of whiskey resting on her smooth knees. The thick hot air in the room reminded Kerans of Hardman's cabin during the experiment Bodkin had conducted on the pilot. He went to the thermostat on the bedside table and jerked the tab down from seventy to sixty degrees.

"It's broken down again," Beatrice told him matter-of-factly. "The engine kept stopping."

Kerans tried to take the glass from her hands but she steered it away from him. "Leave me aloie, Robert," she said in a tired voice. "I know I'm a loose, drunken woman but I spent last night in the Martian jungles and I don't want to be lectured."

Kerans scrutinised her closely, smiling to himself in a mixture of affection and despair. "I'll see if I can repair the motor. This bedroom smells as if you've had an entire penal battalion billetted with you. Take a shower, Bea, and try to pull yourself together. Riggs is leaving tomorrow, we'll need our wits about us. What are these nightmares you're having?"

Beatrice shrugged. "Jungle dreams, Robert," she murmured ambiguously. "I'm learning my ABC's again. Last night was the delta jungles." She gave him a bleak smile, then added with a touch of malicious humour: "Don't look so stern, you'll be dreaming them too, soon."

"I hope not." Kerans watched distastefully as she raised the glass to her lips. "And pour that drink away. Scotch breakfasts may be an old Highland custom but they're murder on the liver."

Beatrice waved him away. "I know. Alcohol kills slowly, but I'm in no hurry. Go away, Robert."

Kerans gave up and turned on his heel. He took the stairway from the kitchen into the store-room below, found a torch and the tool-set, and began to work on the generator.

Half an hour later, when he emerged onto the patio, Beatrice had apparently recovered completely from her torpor and was intently painting her nails with a bottle of blue varnish.

"Hello, Robert, are you in a better mood now?"

Kerans sat down on the tiled floor, wiping the last traces of grease off his hands. Crisply he punched the firm swell of her calf, then fended away the revenging heel at his head. "I've cured the generator, with luck you won't have any more trouble. It's rather amusing, the timing device on the two-stroke starting engine had gone wrong, it was actually running backwards."

He was about to explain the irony of the joke at full length when a loud-hailer blared from the lagoon below. The sounds of sudden excited activity had sprung up from the base; engines whined and accelerated, davits shrilled as the two reserve motor launches were lowered into the water, there was a medley of voices shouting and feet racing down gangways.

Kerans rose and hurried around the pooi to the rail. "Don't tell me they're leaving today-? Riggs is clever enough to try that in the hope of catching us unprepared."

Beatrice at his side, the towel clasped to her breasts, they looked down at the base. Every member of the unit appeared to have been mobilised, and the cutter and the two launches surged and jockeyed around the landing jetty. The drooping rotors of the helicopter were circling slowly, Riggs and Macready about to embark. The other men were lined up on the jetty, waiting their turn to climb into the three craft. Even Bodkin had been roused from his bunk, and was standing bare-chested on the bridge of the testing station, shouting up at Riggs.