Idly Kerans examined the compa.s.s, swinging the bearing gently in its air-bath and then aligning the pointer and scale. He tried to decide why he had taken it from the armoury. Normally it was installed in one of the motor launches, and its disappearance would soon be reported, probably involve him in the petty humiliation of admitting its theft.
Caging the compa.s.s, he swung it around towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness became focused on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept "South", with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outwards from the bra.s.s bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.
4 - The Causeways of the Sun
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 bra.s.s compa.s.s 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 acc.u.mulating 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 filet 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 siphoned 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sumed that this reflected a shrewd unconscious a.s.sessment 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 ma.s.sive 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 pool was deserted, the previous evening"s gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s from her hands but she steered it away from him. "Leave me alone, 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 billeted 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 gla.s.s 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.
"h.e.l.lo, 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 pool 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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.
Suddenly Macready noticed Kerans at the balcony rail. He spoke to the Colonel, who picked up an electric megaphone and walked forwards across the roof.
"KER-ANS!! DOC-TOR KER-ANS!!".
Giant fragments of the amplified phrases boomed among the rooftops, echoing off the aluminium in-falls set into the sheets of windows. Kerans cupped his ears, trying to distinguish what the Colonel was shouting, but the sounds were lost in the mounting roar of the helicopter. Then Riggs and Macready climbed into the cabin, and the pilot began to semaph.o.r.e at Kerans through the c.o.c.kpit windscreen.
Kerans translated the morse signals, then turned quickly from the rail and began to carry the deck chairs into the lounge.
"They"re going to pick me up here," he told Beatrice as the helicopter rose from its pedestal and lifted diagonally across the lagoon. "You"d better get dressed or out of sight. The slip-stream will strip your towel away like tissue paper. Riggs has got enough to contend with now."
Beatrice helped him furl the awning, and stepped into the lounge as the flickering shadow of the helicopter filled the patio, the downdraught fanning across their shoulders.
"But what"s happened, Robert? Why is Riggs so excited?"
Kerans shielded his head from the engine roar and stared out across the green-ringed lagoons stretching towards the horizon, a sudden spasm of anxiety twisting one corner of his mouth.
"He"s not excited, just worried stiff. Everything is beginning to collapse around him. Lieutenant Hardman has disappeared!"
Like an immense putrescent sore, the jungle lay exposed below the open hatchway of the helicopter. Giant groves of gymnosperms stretched in dense clumps along the rooftops of the submerged buildings, smothering the white rectangular outlines. Here and there an old concrete water tower protruded from the mora.s.s, or the remains of a makeshift jetty still floated beside the hulk of a collapsing office block, overgrown with feathery acacias and flowering tamarisks. Narrow creeks, the canopies overhead turning them into green-lit tunnels, wound away from the larger lagoons, eventually joining the six hundred-yard-wide channels which broadened outwards across the former suburbs of the city. Everywhere the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow discs of fungus covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.
Clamped securely to the cabin handrail by the nylon harness around his waist and shoulders, Kerans gazed down at the unfolding landscape, following the water-ways unwinding from the three central lagoons. Five hundred feet below the shadow of the helicopter raced across the mottled green surface of the water, and he focused his attention on the area immediately around it. An immense profusion of animal life filled the creeks and ca.n.a.ls: water-snakes coiled themselves among the crushed palisades of the water-logged bamboo groves, colonies of bats erupted out of the green tunnels like clouds of exploding soot, iguanas sat motionlessly on the shaded cornices like stone sphinxes. Often, as if disturbed by the noise of the helicopter, a human form seemed to dart and hide among the water-line windows, then revealed itself to be a crocodile snapping at a water-fowl, or one end of a subsiding log dislodged from the buffeted tree-ferns.
Twenty miles away the horizon was still obscured by the early morning mists, huge palls of golden vapour that hung from the sky like diaphanous curtains, but the air over the city was clear and vivid, the exhaust vapour of the helicopter sparkling as it receded in a long undulating signature. As they moved away from the central lagoons in their outward spiral sweep Kerans leaned against the hatchway and watched the glistening display, abandoning his search of the jungle below.
The chances of seeing Hardman from the air were infinitesimal. Unless he had taken refuge in a building near the base he would have been forced to travel along the water-ways, where he had the maximum possible protection from aerial observation under the overhanging fern trees.
In the starboard hatchway Riggs and Macready continued their vigil, pa.s.sing a pair of binoculars to and fro. Without his peaked cap, his thin sandy hair blown forwards over his face, Riggs looked like a ferocious sparrow, his little jaw jutting fiercely at the open air.
He noticed Kerans gazing up at the sky and shouted: "Seen him yet, Doctor? Don"t dawdle now, the secret of a successful sweep is one hundred percent cover, one hundred percent concentration."
Accepting the rebuke, Kerans scanned the tilting disc of the jungle again, the tall towers of the central lagoon pivoting around the hatchway. Hardman"s disappearance had been discovered by a sick-bay orderly at 8 o"clock that morning, but his bed was cold and he had almost certainly left the previous evening, probably soon after the final ward-roll at 9-30. None of the smaller scows. .h.i.tched to the jetty rail had gone, but Hardman could easily have lashed together a couple of the empty fuel drums stored in a pile by the C-Deck hold and lowered them noiselessly into the water. However crude, such a craft would paddle smoothly and carry him ten miles away by day-break, somewhere on the perimeter of a search area of some seventy-five square miles, every acre of which was honeycombed by derelict buildings.
Unable to see Bodkin before being winched aboard the helicopter, Kerans could only speculate about Hardman"s motives for leaving the base, and whether these were part of a grander design maturing slowly in the Lieutenant"s mind or merely a sudden meaningless reaction to the news that they were leaving the lagoons for the north. Kerans" initial excitement had evaporated, and he felt a curious sense of relief, as if one of the opposing lines of force that encircled him had been removed by Hardman"s disappearance and the tension and impotence contained in the system suddenly released. If anything, however, the task of remaining behind would now be even more difficult.
Unshackling his harness, Riggs stood up with a gesture of exasperation and handed the binoculars to one of the two soldiers squatting on the floor at the rear of the cabin.
"Open searches are a waste of time over this type of terrain," he shouted at Kerans. "We"ll go down somewhere and have a careful look at the map, you can have a shot at reading Hardman"s psychology."
They were about ten miles north-west of the central lagoons, the towers almost obscured in the mists along the horizon. Five miles away, directly between them and the base, was one of the two motor launches, cruising down an open channel, its white wake fading across the gla.s.s sheet of the water. Blocked by the urban concentration to the south, less silt had penetrated into the area, and the vegetation was lighter, more expanses of unbroken water between the princ.i.p.al lines of buildings. Altogether the zone below them was empty and uncongested, and Kerans felt convinced, though for no rational reason, that Hardman would not be found in the north-west sector.
Riggs climbed up into the c.o.c.kpit and a moment later the speed and inclination of the helicopter altered. They began to make a shallow dive, swinging down to within a hundred feet of the water, glided in and out of the wide ca.n.a.ls looking for a convenient rooftop on which to perch. Finally they picked out the humped back of a half-submerged cinema and let down slowly onto the square firm roof of the neo-a.s.syrian portico.
For a few minutes they steadied their legs, gazing out over the expanses of blue water. The nearest structure was an isolated department store two hundred yards away, and the open vistas reminded Kerans of Herodotus" description of the landscape in Egypt at floodtime, with its rampart cities like the islands of the Aegean Sea.
Riggs opened his map wallet and spread the polythene print across the cabin floor. Resting his elbows on the edge of the hatchway, he put his finger on their present landing stage.
"Well, Sergeant," he told Daley, "we seem to be half-way back to Byrd. Apart from wearing out the engine we haven"t achieved much."
Daley nodded, his small serious face hidden inside the fiber-gla.s.s helmet. "Sir, I think our only chance is to carry out low-level inspections over a few selected runs. There"s just a hope we might see something-a raft or an oil patch."
"Agreed. But the problem is-" here Riggs drummed on the map with his baton "-where? Hardman is very probably no more than two or three miles from the base. What"s your guess, Doctor?"
Kerans shrugged. "I don"t really know what Hardman"s motives are, Colonel. Latterly he"d been in Bodkin"s charge. It may be..."
His voice began to trail off, and Daley cut in with another suggestion, distracting Riggs" attention. For the next five minutes the Colonel, Daley and Macready argued about possible routes Hardman had taken, marking only the wider water-ways as if Hardman were navigating a pocket battleship. Kerans looked around at the water eddying slowly past the cinema. A few branches and dumps of weed drifted along on the northward current, the bright sunlight masking the molten mirror of the surface. The water drummed against the portico beneath his feet, beating slowly against his mind, and setting up a widening circle of interference patterns as if crossing it at an opposite direction to its own course of flow. He watched a succession of wavelets lapping at the sloping roof, wishing that he could leave the Colonel and walk straight down into the water, dissolve himself and the ever-present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical calm, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea.
Suddenly he realised without any shadow of doubt where Hardman was to be found.
He waited for Daley to finish. "... I knew Lieutenant Hardman, sir, flew nearly five thousand hours with him, he"s obviously had a brain-storm. He wanted to get back to Byrd, must have decided he couldn"t wait any longer, not even two days. He"ll have headed north, be resting somewhere along these open channels out of the city."
Riggs nodded doubtfully, apparently unconvinced but prepared to accept the Sergeant"s advice in default of any other.
"Well, you may be right. I suppose it"s worth trying. What do you think, Kerans?"
Kerans shook his head. "Colonel, it"s a complete waste of time searching the areas north of the city. Hardman wouldn"t have come up here, it"s too open and isolated. I don"t know whether he"s on foot or paddling a raft, but he certainly isn"t going north-Byrd is the last place on Earth he wants to return to. There"s only one direction in which Hardman is heading-south." Kerans pointed to the nexus of channels which flowed into the central lagoons, tributaries of a single huge water-way three miles south of the city, its pa.s.sage indented and diverted by the giant silt banks. "Hardman will be somewhere along there. It probably took him all night to reach the main channel, and I should guess that he"s resting in one of the small inlets before he moves on tonight."
He broke off and Riggs stared hard at the map, peaked cap pulled down over his eyes in a gesture of concentration.
"But why south?" Daley protested. "Once he leaves the channel there"s nothing but solid jungle and open sea. The temperature is going up all the time-he"ll fry."
Riggs looked up at Kerans. "Sergeant Daley has a point, Doctor. Why should Hardman choose to travel south?"
Looking out across the water again, Kerans replied in a flat voice: "Colonel, there isn"t any other direction."
Riggs hesitated, then glanced at Macready, who had stepped back from the group and was standing beside Kerans, his tall stooped figure silhouetted like a gaunt crow against the water. Almost imperceptibly he nodded to Riggs, answering the unspoken question. Even Daley put a foot up on the c.o.c.kpit entry step, accepting the logic of Kerans" argument and the shared understanding of Hardman"s motives once Kerans had made them explicit.
Three minutes later the helicopter was speeding off at full manifold pressure towards the lagoons in the south.
As Kerans had prophesied, they found Hardman among the silt flats.
Descending to three hundred feet above the water, they began to rake up and down the distal five-mile length of the main channel. The huge banks of silt lifted above the surface like the backs of yellow sperm whales. Wherever the hydrodynamic contours of the channel gave the silt banks any degree of permanence, the surrounding jungle spilled from the rooftops and rooted itself in the damp loam, matting the whole mora.s.s into an immovable structure. From the hatchway Kerans scrutinised the narrow beaches under the outer edge of the fern trees, watching for the tell-tale signs of a camouflaged raft or make-shift hut.
After twenty minutes, however, and a dozen careful sweeps of the channel, Riggs turned from the hatchway with a rueful shake of his head.
"You"re probably right, Robert, but it"s a hopeless job. Hardman"s no fool, if he wants to hide from us we"ll never find him. Even if he were leaning out of a window and waving, ten to one we wouldn"t see him."
Kerans murmured in reply, watching the surface below. Each of the tracking runs was about a hundred yards to the starboard of the previous one, and for the last three runs he had been watching the semi-circular crescent of what appeared to be a large apartment block standing in the angle between the channel and the southern bank of a small creek which ran off into the surrounding jungle. The upper eight or nine storeys of the block stood above the water, enclosing a low mound of muddy-brown silt. The surface streamed with water draining away from a collection of shallow pools covering it. Two hours earlier the bank had been a sheet of wet mud, but by ten o"clock, as the helicopter flew over, the mud was beginning to dry and grow firm. To Kerans, shielding his eyes from the reflected sunlight, its smooth surface appeared to be scored by two faint parallel lines, about six feet apart, that led across to the jutting roof of an almost submerged balcony. As they swept overhead he tried to see under the concrete slab, but its mouth was choked with refuse and rotting logs.
He touched Riggs" arm and pointed to the tracks, so immersed in tracing their winding progress to the balcony that he almost failed to notice the equally distinct pattern of imprints emerging in the drying surface between the lines, s.p.a.ced some four feet apart, unmistakably the footsteps of a tall powerful man hauling a heavy load.
As the noise of the helicopter"s engine faded out on the roof above them, Riggs and Macready bent down and inspected the crude catamaran hidden behind a screen of bocage under the balcony. Fashioned from two drop tanks lashed to either end of a metal bed-frame, its twin grey hulls were still streaked with silt. Clumps of mud from Hardman"s feet crossed the room opening onto the balcony and disappeared through the suite into the adjacent corridor.
"This is it without a doubt-agree, Sergeant?" Riggs asked, stepping out into the sunlight to look up at the crescent of apartment blocks. A chain of autonomous units, they were linked by short causeways between the elevator wells at the end of each building. Most of the windows were broken, the cream facing tiles covered by huge patches of fungus, and the whole complex looked like an over-ripe camembert cheese.
Macready knelt down by one of the hulls, cleaning away the silt, then traced out the code number painted across the bow. "UNAF 22-H-549-that"s us, sir. The drop tanks were being cleared out yesterday, we"d stored them on C-Deck. He must have taken a spare bed from the sick-bay afterward-roll."
"Good." Rubbing his hands together with pleasure, Riggs stepped over to Kerans, smiling jauntily, his self-confidence and good humour fully restored. "Excellent, Robert. Superb diagnostic skill, you were quite right, of course." He peered shrewdly at Kerans, as if speculating on the real sources of this remarkable insight, invisibly marking him off. "Cheer up, Hardman will be grateful to you when we take him back."
Kerans stood on the edge of the balcony, the slope of caking silt below him. He looked up at the silent curve of windows, wondering which of the thousand or so rooms would be Hardman"s hiding place. "I hope you"re right. You"ve still got to catch him."
"Don"t worry, we will." Riggs began to shout up at the two men on the roof, helping Daley lash down the helicopter. "Wilson, keep a look-out from the south-west end; Caldwell, you work your way across to the north. Keep an eye on both sides, he might try to swim for it."
The two men saluted and moved off, their carbines held at their hips. Macready cradled a Thompson gun in the crook of his arm, and as Riggs unb.u.t.toned the flap of his holster Kerans said quietly: "Colonel, we"re not tracking down a wild dog."
Riggs waved this aside. "Relax, Robert, it"s just that I don"t want my leg bitten off by some sleeping croc. Though as a matter of interest-" here he flashed Kerans a gleaming smile "-Hardman has got a.45 Colt with him."
Leaving Kerans to digest this, he picked up the electric megaphone.
"HARDMAN!! THIS IS COLONEL RIGGS!!" He bellowed Hardman"s name at the silent heat, then winked at Kerans and added: "DR. KERANS WANTS TO TALK TO YOU, LIEUTENANT!!"
Focused by the crescent of buildings, the sounds echoed away across the swamps and creeks, booming distantly over the great empty mudflats. Around them everything glistened in the immense heat, and the men on the roof fretted nervously under their forage caps. A thick cloacal stench exuded from the silt flat, a corona of a million insects pulsing and humming hungrily above it, and a sudden spasm of nausea knotted Kerans" gullet, for a moment dizzying him. Pressing a wrist tightly to his forehead, he leaned back against a pillar, listening to the echoes reverberate around him. Four hundred yards away two white-faced clock towers protruded through the vegetation, like the temple spires of some lost jungle religion, and the sounds of his name-"Kerans... Kerans... Kerans"- reflected off them seemed to Kerans to toll with an intense premonition of terror and disaster, the meaningless orientation of the clock hands identifying him, more completely than anything he had previously experienced, with all the confused and minatory spectres that cast their shadows more and more darkly through his mind, the myriad-handed mandala of cosmic time.
His name still echoed faintly in his ears as they began their search of the building. He took up his position at the stairwell at the centre of each corridor while Figgs and Macready inspected the apartments, keeping a look-out as they climbed the floors. The building had been gutted. All the floorboards had rotted or been ripped out, and they moved slowly along the tiled inlays, stepping warily from one concrete tie-beam to another. Most of the plaster had slipped from the walls and lay in grey heaps along the skirting boards. Wherever sunlight filtered through, the bare lathes were intertwined with creeper and wire-moss, and the original fabric of the building seemed solely supported by the profusion of vegetation ramifying through every room and corridor.
Through the cracks in the floors rose the stench of the greasy water swirling through the windows below. Disturbed for the first time in many years, the bats which hung from the tilting picture rails flew frantically for the windows, dispersing with cries of pain in the brilliant sunlight. Lizards scuttered and darted through the floor cracks, or skated desperately around the dry baths in the bathrooms.
Exacerbated by the heat, Riggs" impatience mounted as they climbed the floors and had covered all but the top two without Success.
"Well, where is he?" Riggs rested against the stair-rail, gesturing for quiet, and listened to the silent building, breathing tightly through his teeth. "We"ll stand easy for five minutes, Sergeant. Now"s the time for caution. He"s somewhere around here."
Macready slung his Thompson over his shoulder and climbed to the fan light on the next landing which let in a thin breeze. Kerans leaned against the wall, the sweat pouring across his back and chest, temples thudding from the exertion of mounting the stairs. It was 11-30, and the temperature outside was well over 120 degrees. He looked down at Riggs" flushed pink face, admiring the Colonel"s self-discipline and single-mindedness.
"Don"t look so condescending, Robert. I know I"m sweating like a pig, but I haven"t had as much rest as you lately."
The two men exchanged glances, each aware of the conflict of att.i.tude towards Hardman, and Kerans, in an effort to resolve the rivalry between them, said quietly: "You"ll probably catch him now, ColoneL"
Searching for somewhere to sit, be walked off down the corridor and pushed back the door into the first apartment.
As he unlatched the door the frame collapsed weakly into a litter of worm-eaten dust and timbers, and he stepped across it to the wide french windows over-looking the balcony. A little air funneled through, and Kerans let it play over his face and chest, surveying the jungle below. The promontory on which the crescent of apartment houses stood had at one time been a small hill, and a number of the buildings visible beneath the vegetation on the other side of the silt flat were still above the flood-waters. Kerans stared at the two clock towers jutting up like white obelisks above the fern fronds. The yellow air of the noon high seemed to press down like a giant translucent counterpane on the leafy spread, a thousand motes of light spitting like diamonds whenever a bough moved and deflected the sun"s rays. The obscured outline of a cla.s.sical portico and colonnaded facade below the towers suggested that the buildings were once part of some small munic.i.p.al centre. One of the clock-faces was without its hands; the other, by coincidence, had stopped at almost exactly the right time-11-35. Kerans wondered whether the clock was in fact working, tended by some mad recluse clinging to a last meaningless register of sanity, though if the mechanism were still operable Riggs might well perform that role. Several times, before they abandoned one of the drowned cities, he had wound the two-ton mechanism of some rusty cathedral clock and they had sailed off to a last carillon of chimes across the water. For nights afterwards, in his dreams, Kerans had seen Riggs dressed as William Tell, striding about in a huge Dalinian landscape, planting immense dripping sundials like daggers in the fused sand.
Kerans leaned against the window, waiting as the minutes pa.s.sed and left behind the clock fixed at 11-35, overtaking it like a vehicle in a faster lane. Or was it not stationary (guaranteed though it would be to tell the time with complete, unquestionable accuracy twice a day-more than most time-pieces) but merely so slow that its motion appeared to be imperceptible? The slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time-in fact, by reversing a clock"s direction and running it backwards one could devise a time-piece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatio-temporal system.
Kerans" amus.e.m.e.nt at this conceit was distracted by his discovery among the clutter of debris on the opposite bank of a small cemetery sloping down into the water, its leaning headstones advancing to their crowns like a party of bathers. He remembered again one ghastly cemetery over which they had moored, its ornate florentine tombs cracked and sprung, corpses floating out in their unraveling winding-sheets in a grim rehearsal of the Day of Judgement.
Averting his eyes, he turned away from the window, with a jolt realised that a tall black-bearded man was standing motionlessly in a doorway behind him. Startled, Kerans stared uncertainly at the figure, with an effort rea.s.sembling his thoughts. The big man stood in a slightly stooped but relaxed pose, his heavy arms loosely at his sides. Black mud caked across his wrists and forehead, and clogged his boots and the fabric of his drill trousers, for a moment reminding Kerans of one of the resurrected corpses. His bearded chin was sunk between his broad shoulders, the impression of constraint and fatigue heightened by the medical orderly"s blue denim jacket several sizes too small which he wore, the corporal"s stripe pulled up over the swell of his deltoid muscle. The expression on his face was one of hungry intensity, but he gazed at Kerans with somber detachment, his eyes like heavily banked fires, a thin glow of interest in the biologist the only outward show of the energy within.
Kerans waited until his eyes adjusted themselves to the darkness at the rear of the room, looking involuntarily at the bedroom doorway through which the bearded man had stepped. He reached out one hand to him, half-afraid of breaking the spell between them, warning him not to move, and elicited in return an expression of curiously understanding sympathy, almost as if their roles were reversed.
"Hardman!" Kerans whispered.