"Ballard, J G - The Drowned World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballard J G)
Kerans leaned over the rail, looking down through the dark water at the small cinema theatre twenty feet below the surface, its flat roof luckily uncluttered by elevator-heads or fire escapes. Waving to Bodkin on the deck above, he stepped in through the laboratory and made his way past the specimen tanks and sinks to the companionway leading down to the float.
Only one stop-cock had been built into the base of the float, but as he turned the handwheel a powerful jet of cold foaming water gushed up around his legs. By the time he returned to the lower deck, to make a final check of the laboratory, water was already spilling ankle-deep through the scuppers, sluicing among the sinks and benches. He quickly released the marmoset from its fume cupboard and pushed the bushy-tailed mammal through one of the windows. The station went down like an elevator, and he waded waistdeep to the companionway and climbed up to the next deck where Bodkin was exultantly watching the windows of the adjacent office blocks rise into the air.
They settled about three feet below deck level, on a flat keel with a convenient access point by the starboard bridge. Dimly below they could hear trapped air bubbling from the retorts and glassware in the laboratory, and a frothy stain spread across the water from a submerged window by one of the reagent benches.
Kerans watched the indigo bubbles fade and dissolve, thinking of the huge semi-circle of programme charts sinking below the water as he left the laboratory, a perfect, almost vaudevillian comment on the biophysical mechanisms they sought to describe, and which perhaps symbolised the uncertainties that lay ahead now that he and Bodkin had committed themselves to remaining behind. They were now entering the _aqua incognita_, with only a few ruleof-thumb principles to guide them.
From the typewriter in his cabin Kerans took a sheet of paper, pinned it firmly to the door of the galley. Bodkin appended his signature to the message, and the two men went out on to the deck again and lowered Kerans' catamaran into the water.
Paddling slowly, the outboard shipped, they glided off across the black water, soon disappearing among the dark blue shadows along the edge of the lagoon.
As the down-draught from its blades fanned furiously across the swimming pool, tearing at the striped awning of the patio, the helicopter circled deafeningly over the penthouse, plunging and diving as it searched for a landing point. Kerans smiled to himself as he watched it through the plastic vanes over the lounge windows, confident that the tottering pile of kerosene drums he and Bodkin had pyramided over the roof would safely deter the pilot. One or two of the drums toppled down on to the patio and splashed into the pool, and the helicopter veered away and then came in more slowly, hovering steadily.
The pilot, Sergeant Daley, swung the fuselage around so that the hatch door faced the lounge windows, and the hatless figure of Riggs appeared in the doorway, two of the soldiers holding on to him as he bellowed into an electric megaphone.
Beatrice DahI ran across to Kerans from her observation post at the far end of the lounge, cupping her ears from the din.
"Robert, he's trying to talk to us!"
Kerans nodded, the Colonel's voice completely lost in the engine roar. Riggs finished and the helicopter leaned backwards and soared away across the lagoon, taking the noise and vibration with it.
Kerans put his arm around Beatrice's shoulders, the bare oiled skin smooth under his fingers. 'Well, I think we have a pretty good idea what he was saying."
They went out on to the patio, waving up to Bodkin who had appeared from the elevator-house and was straightening the drums. Below them, on the opposite side of the lagoon, the upper deck and bridge of the scuttled testing station protruded from the water, a flotsam of hundreds of pieces of old note-paper eddying away from it. Standing by the rail, Kerans pointed to the yellow hull of the base moored by the Ritz in the furthest of the three central lagoons.
After a futile attempt to re-float the station, Riggs had set off at noon as planned, sending the cutter over to the apartment house where he assumed the two biologists were hiding. Finding the elevator out of order, his men had refused the alternative of a twenty-storey climb up the stairway--already a few iguanas had made their homes on the lower landings--so Riggs had finally tried to reach them with the helicopter. Balked there, he was now crashing the Ritz.
"Thank God he's left," Beatrice said fervently. "For some reason be really got on my nerves."
"You made that pretty plain. I'm surprised he didn't take a pot shot at you."
"But, darling, he was insufferable. All that stiff upper lip stuff and dressing for dinner in the jungle--a total lack of adaptability."
"Riggs was all right," Kerans remarked quietly. "He'll probably get by." Now that Riggs had gone he was aware of how dependent he had been on the Colonel's buoyancy and good humour. Without him the morale of the unit would have disintegrated in an instant. It remained to be seen whether Kerans could imbue his own little trio with the same degree of confidence and sense of purpose. Certainly it was up to him to be the leader; Bodkin was too old, Beatrice too self-immersed.
Kerans glanced at the thermo-alarm he wore next to his wristwatch. It was after 3-30, but the temperature was still a hundred and ten degrees, the sun beating against his skin like a fist. They joined Bodkin and went into the lounge.
Resuming the action conference interrupted by the helicopter, Kerans said: "You've got about a thousand gallons left in the roof tank, Bea, enough for three months--or let's say two as we can expect it to get a lot hotter--and I recommend you to close down the rest of the apartment and move into here. You're on the north side of the patio so the elevator-house will protect you from the heavy rains when they come in on the southerly storms. Ten to one the shutters and air-seals along the bedroom walls will be breached. What about food, Alan? How long will the stocks in the deep freeze last?"
Bodkin pulled a distasteful face. 'Well, as most of the lambs' tongues in aspic have been eaten they now consist chiefly of bully beef, so you could say 'indefinitely'. However, if you're actually planning to eat the stuff--six months. But I'd prefer iguana."
"No doubt the iguana would prefer us. All right then, that seems pretty fair. Alan will be over in the station until the level rises, and I'll be holding out at the Ritz. Anything else?"
Beatrice wandered away around the sofa towards the bar. "Yes, darling. Shut up. You're beginning to sound like Riggs. The military manner doesn't suit you."
Beatrice had sat down in the sofa with her back to him, and shrewdly Kerans guessed that the present unity of the group would not be long maintained. Beatrice was right; the military manner did not suit him, his personality was too passive and introverted, too self-centred. More important, though, they were entering a new zone, where the usual obligations and allegiances ceased to operate. Now that they had made their decision the bonds between them had already begun to fade, and it was not simply for reasons of convenience that they would live apart. Much as he needed Beatrice Dahl, her personality intruded upon the absolute freedom he required for himself. By and large, each of them would have to pursue his or her own pathway through the time jungles, mark their own points of no return. Although they might see one another occasionally, around the lagoons or at the testing station, their only true meeting ground would be in their dreams.
CHAPTER 7
Carnival of Alligators
Split by an immense roar, the early morning silence over the lagoon shattered abruptly, and a tremendous blare of noise battered past the windows of the hotel suite. With an effort Kerans pulled his reluctant body from his bed and stumbled across the books scattered on the floor. He kicked back the mesh door on to the balcony in time to see a huge white-hulled hydroplane speed by around the lagoon, its two long stepped planes cleaving perfect slices of glittering spray. As the heavy wash slapped against the wall of the hotel, breaking up the colonies of water spiders and disturbing the bats nesting among the rotting logs, he caught a glimpse of a tall, broad-shouldered man in the cockpit, wearing a white helmet and jerkin, standing upright at the controls.
He drove the hydroplane with an easy nonchalant swagger, accelerating the two powerful propellor turbines mounted in front of him as the craft hit the broad swells across the lagoon, so that it plunged and dived like a power-boat wrestling through giant rollers, throwing up gales of rainbowing spray. The man rolled with the surging motion of the craft, his long legs supple and relaxed, like a charioteer completely in command of a spirited team.
Hidden by the calamites which now spilled across the balcony--the effort of cutting them back had long seemed pointless--Kerans watched him unobserved. As the craft sped by on its second circuit, Kerans had a glimpse of a rakish profile, bright eyes and teeth, an expression of exhilarated conquest.
The silver studs of a cartridge belt flashed around his waist, and when he reached the far side of the lagoon there was a series of short explosions. Signal shells burst over the water into ragged red umbrellas, the fragments spitting down across the shore.
In a final lunge of energy, its engines screaming, the hydroplane swerved out of the lagoon and gunned away down the canal to the next lagoon, its wash thrashing at the foliage. Kerans gripped the balcony rail, watching the disturbed restless water of the lagoon trying to re-settle itself, the giant cryptograms and scale trees along the shore tossed and flurried by the still surging air. A thin pall of red vapour drifted away to the north, fading with the diminishing sounds of the hydroplane. The violent irruption of noise and energy, and the arrival of this strange white-suited figure, momentarily disconcerted Kerans, jerking him roughly from his lassitude and torpor.
In the six weeks since Riggs' departure he had lived almost alone in his penthouse suite at the hotel, immersing himself more and more deeply in the silent world of the surrounding jungle. The continued increase in temperature--the thermo-alarm on the balcony now registered a noon high of one hundred and thirty degrees--and the enervating humidity made it almost impossible to leave the hotel after ten o'clock in the morning; the lagoons and the jungle were filled with fire until four o'clock, by then he was usually too tired to do anything but return to bed.
All day he sat by the shuttered windows of the suite, listening from the shadows to the shifting movement of the mesh cage, as it expanded and contracted in the heat. Already many of the buildings around the lagoon had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation; huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs.
Beyond the lagoon the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate in enormous glittering banks, here and there over-topping the shoreline, like the immense tippings of some distant gold-mine. The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards into warm pellucid depths where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon, each of which, as Bodkin had said, seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish.
He longed for this descent through archaeopsychic time to reach its conclusion, repressing the knowledge that when it did the external world around him would have become alien and unbearable.
Sometimes he restlessly made a few entries in his botanical diary about the new plant forms, and during the first weeks called several times on Dr. Bodkin and Beatrice Dahl. But both were increasingly preoccupied with their own descents through total time. Bodkin bad become lost in his private reverie, punting aimlessly around the narrow creeks in search for the submerged world of his childhood. Once Kerans came across him resting on an oar in the stern of his small metal scow and gazing vacantly at the unyielding buildings around him. He had stared straight through Kerans, failing to acknowledge his call.
However, with Beatrice, despite their superficial estrangement, there was an intact underlying union, a tacit awareness of their symbolic roles.
More signal shells burst over the distal lagoon, containing the station and Beatrice's apartment house, and Kerans shielded his eyes as the bright fire-balls studded the sky. A few seconds later, several miles away among the silt banks to the south, there was a series of answering bursts, faint puffs that soon dispersed.
So the stranger driving the hydroplane was not alone. At the prospect of this imminent invasion Kerans pulled himself together. The distance separating the answering signals was wide enough to indicate that there was more than one group, and that the hydroplane was merely a scout vehicle.
Sealing the mesh door behind him, he stepped back into the suite, pulling his jacket off the chair. Out of habit he went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, absently feeling the week-old stubble on his face. The hair was white as pearl, and with his ebony tan and introspective eyes gave him the appearance of a refined beachcomber. A bucket-full of dingy water had leaked in from the wrecked still on the roof, and he scooped some out and splashed his face, a token toilet performed, as far as he could see, solely out of habit.
Using the metal-tipped boathook to drive away two small iguanas idling on the jetty, he slid the catamaran into the water and cast off, the little outboard carrying him steadily through the sluggish swells. Huge clumps of algae stirred below the craft, and stick-beetle and water spider raced around its prows. It was a few minutes after seven o'clock, and the temperature was only eighty degrees, comparatively cool and pleasant, the air free of the enormous clouds of mosquito which would later be roused from their nests by the heat.
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