The Drowned World - Ballard James Graham - Страница 8

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.

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.