Читать книгу The Drowned World - J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester, Robert MacFarlane - Страница 8

BERTHING THE CATAMARAN against the landing stage, Kerans shipped the outboard and then made his way up the gangway into the base. As he let himself through the screen hatch he looked back over his shoulder across the lagoon, and caught a brief glimpse through the heat waves of Beatrice standing at her balcony rail. When he waved, however, she characteristically turned away without responding.

“One of her moody days, Doctor?” Sergeant Macready stepped from the guard cubicle, a trace of humour relaxing his beak-like face. “She’s a strange one, all right.”

Kerans shrugged. “These tough bachelor girls, you know, Sergeant. If you’re not careful they frighten the wits out of you. I’ve been trying to persuade her to pack up and come with us. With a little luck I think she will.”

Macready peered shrewdly at the distant roof of the apartment house. “I’m glad to hear you say so, Doctor,” he ventured noncommittally, but Kerans was unable to decide if his scepticism was directed at Beatrice or himself.

Whether or not they finally stayed behind, Kerans had resolved to maintain the pretence that they were leaving—every spare minute of the next three days would be needed to consolidate their supplies and steal whatever extra equipment they required from the base stores. Kerans had still not made up his mind—once away from Beatrice his indecision returned (ruefully he wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse him, Pandora with her killing mouth and witch’s box of desires and frustrations, unpredictably opening and shutting the lid)—but rather than stumble about in a state of tortured uncertainty, which Riggs and Bodkin would soon diagnose, he decided to postpone a final reckoning until the last moment possible. Much as he loathed the base, he knew that the sight of it actually sailing off would act as a wonderful catalyst for emotions of fear and panic, and any more abstract motives for staying behind would soon be abandoned. A year earlier, he had been accidentally marooned on a small key while taking an unscheduled geomagnetic reading, the departure siren muffled by his headphones as he crouched over his instruments in an old basement bunker. When he emerged ten minutes later and found the base six hundred yards away across a widening interval of flat water he had felt like a child parted forever from its mother, barely managed to control his panic in time to fire a warning shell from his flare pistol.

“Dr. Bodkin asked me to call you as soon as you arrived, sir. Lieutenant Hardman hasn’t been too happy this morning.”

Kerans nodded, glancing up and down the empty deck. He had taken lunch with Beatrice, knowing that the base was deserted in the afternoons. Half the crew were away with either Riggs or the helicopter, the rest asleep in their bunks, and he had hoped to carry out a private tour of the stores and armoury. Now unluckily, Macready, the Colonel’s ever-alert watch-dog, was hanging about at his heels, ready to escort him up the companion-way to the sick-bay on B-Deck.

Kerans studiously examined a pair of Anopheles mosquitoes which had slipped through the wire hatch behind him. “They’re still getting in,” he pointed out to Macready. “What’s happened to the double screening you were supposed to be putting up?”

Swatting at the mosquitoes with his forage cap, Macready looked around uncertainly. A secondary layer of screening around the wire mesh enclosing the base had long been one of Colonel Riggs’ pet projects. At times he would tell Macready to detail a squad to carry out the work, but as this involved sitting on a wooden trestle in the open sunlight in the centre of a cloud of mosquitoes only a few token sections around Riggs’ cabin had been completed. Now that they were moving northward the utility of the project had faded, but Macready’s Presbyterian conscience, once roused, refused to let him rest.

“I’ll get the men on to it this evening, Doctor,” he assured Kerans, pulling a ball-pen and note-book from his hip pocket.

“No hurry, Sergeant, but if you’ve nothing better to do. I know the Colonel’s very keen.” Kerans left him squinting along the metal louvres and walked off down the deck. As soon as he was out of sight he stepped through the first doorway.

C-Deck, the lowest of the three decks comprising the base, contained the crew’s quarters and galley. Two or three men lay about among their tropical gear in the cabins, but the recreation-room was empty, a radio playing to itself by the table-tennis tournament board in the corner. Kerans paused, listening to the strident rhythms of the guitar music, overlayed by the distant blare of the helicopter circling over the next lagoon, then made his way down the central stair-well which led to the armoury and workshops housed in the pontoon.

Three-quarters of the hull was occupied by the 2,000-h.p. diesels which powered the twin screws, and by the oil and aviation fuel tanks, and the workshops had been temporarily transferred during the final aerial sweeps to two vacant offices on A-Deck, beside the officers’ quarters, so that the mechanics could service the helicopter with the maximum speed.

The armoury was closed when Kerans entered, a single light burning in the technical corporal’s glass-walled booth. Kerans gazed around the heavy wooden benches and cabinets lined with carbines and submachine-guns. Steel rods through the trigger guards locked the weapons into their cases, and he idly touched the heavy stocks, doubting whether he could handle any of the weapons even if he stole one. In a drawer at the testing station was a Colt .45 and fifty rounds issued to him three years earlier. Once a year he made an official return on the ammunition discharged—in his case none—and exchanged the unused shells for a fresh issue, but he had never tried to fire the pistol.

On his way out he scanned the dark green ammunition boxes stacked around the wall below the cabinets, all of them double-padlocked. He was passing the booth when the light through the door illuminated the dusty labels on a row of metal cartons below one of the work benches.

‘Hy-Dyne.’ On an impulse Kerans stopped, pushed his fingers through the wire cage and brushed the dust off a label, tracing the formula with his fingers. ‘Cyclo-trimethylene-trinitramine: Gas discharge speed—8,000 metres/second.’

Speculating on the possible uses of the explosive—it would be a brilliant tour de force to sink one of the office buildings into the exit creek after Riggs had left, blocking any attempt to return—he leaned his elbows on the bench, playing absent-mindedly with a 4-inch-diameter brass compass that had been left for repair. The calibrated annulus was loose and had been rotated a full 180 degrees, the point emphasised with a chalked cross.

Still thinking about the explosive, and the possibility of stealing detonators and fuse-wire, Kerans rubbed away the blunt chalk marks and then lifted the compass and weighed it in his hand. Leaving the armoury, he began to climb the stairway, uncaging the compass and letting the pointer dance and float. A sailor walked past along C-Deck, and Kerans quickly slipped the compass into his jacket pocket.

Suddenly, as he visualised himself throwing his weight on to 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.

“Look 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 low 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 only 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 basket-ball 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 notebooks 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 temperatures of the lagoon, and the air-conditioner normally kept the room at an even 70 degrees. 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 co-operate 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 twelve-hour 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.

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 notebook. Bodkin began to clear his throat 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 three 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 self-awareness 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 reassert 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 hawser 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 thousandth time. As they neared the testing station the helicopter roared in overhead and alighted, its impact tilting the base and dipping the hawser 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 four 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 curtain-walling 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 semicircle of fading programme 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 loops 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—why the electric heater and alarm clocks?”

Bodkin slid the gramophone record into a rack of miniature discs on 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 programme 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 period.”

“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 Lamarckism 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, palls 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 déjà 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.”

Feeling the brass compass which weighed down his pocket, Kerans said: “So you’re frightened that the increased temperature and radiation are alerting similar IRM’s in our own minds?”

“Not in our minds, Robert. These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories—from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.

“The further down the CNS you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and Triassic Eras.”

Bodkin moved back to his desk, and ran his hand over the rack of records. Listening distantly to Bodkin’s quiet, unhurried voice, Kerans toyed with the notion that the row of parallel black discs was a model of a neurophonic spinal column. He remembered the faint drumming emitted by the record-player in Hardman’s cabin, and its strange undertones. Perhaps the conceit was closer to the truth than he imagined?