The Drowned World - Ballard James Graham - Страница 25

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On his way to fetch a hacksaw from the diving cage, he noticed a small doorway at the top of a short flight of steps behind the ticket box, apparently leading over the auditorium, either a cineprojectionist's booth or the manager's office. He pulled himself up the handrail, the metal cleats of his weighted boots skating on the slimy carpet. The door was locked, but he drove his shoulders against it and the two hinges parted easily, the door gliding away gracefully across the floor like a paper sail.

Pausing to free his lines, Kerans listened to the steady pumping in his ears. The rhythm had changed perceptibly, indicating that a different pair of operators had taken over the job. They worked more slowly, presumably unaccustomed to pumping air at the maximum pressure. For some reason, Kerans felt a slight stirring of alarm. Although fully aware of Strangman's malice and unpredictability, he felt confident that he would not try to kill him by so crude a method as blocking the air supply. Both Beatrice and Bodkin were present, and although Riggs and his men were a thousand miles away there was always the chance that some specialist government unit might pay a flying visit to the lagoons. Unless he killed Beatrice and Bodkin as well-which seemed unlikely, for a number of reasons (he obviously suspected them of knowing more about the city than they admitted)-Strangman would find Kerans' death more trouble than it was worth.

As the air hissed reassuringly through his helmet, Kerans moved forward across the empty room. A few shelves sagged from one wall, a filing cabinet loomed in a corner. Suddenly, with a shock of alarm, he saw what appeared to be a man in an immense ballooning spacesuit facing him ten feet away, white bubbles streaming from his frog-like head, hands raised in an attitude of menace, a blaze of light pouring from his helmet.

"Strangman!" he shouted at it involuntarily.

"Kerans! What is it?" Strangman's voice, closer than the whisper of his own consciousness, cut across his panic. "Kerans, you fool…!"

"Sorry, Strangman." Kerans pulled himself together, and advanced slowly towards the approaching figure. "I've just seen myself in a mirror. I'm up in the manager's office or control room, I'm not sure which. There's a private stairway from the mezzanine, may be an entrance into the auditorium."

"Good man. See if you can find the safe. It should be behind the picture frame directly over the desk."

Ignoring him, Kerans placed his hands on the glass surface and swung the helmet sharply from left to right. He was in the control booth overlooking the auditorium, his image reflected in the glass sound-proof panel. In front of him was the cabinet which had once! held the instrument console, but the unit had been removed, and the producer's swing-back seat faced out unobstructed like an insulated throne of some germ-obsessed potentate. Almost exhausted by the pressure of the water, Kerans sat down in the seat and looked out over the circular auditorium.

Dimly illuminated by the small helmet lamp, the dark vault with its blurred walls cloaked with silt rose up above him like a huge velvet-upholstered womb in a surrealist nightmare. The black opaque water seemed to hang in solid vertical curtains, screening the dais in the centre of the auditorium as if hiding the ultimate sanctum of its depths. For some reason the womb-like image of the chamber was reinforced rather than diminished by the circular rows of seats, and Kerans heard the thudding in his ears uncertain whether he was listening to the dim subliminal requiem of his dreams. He opened the small panel door which led down into the auditorium, disconnecting the telephone cable from his helmet so that he would be free of Strangman's voice.

A light coating of silt covered the carpeted steps of the aisle. In the centre of the dome the water was at least twenty degrees warmer than it had been in the control room, heated by some freak of convection, and it bathed his skin like hot balm. The projector had been removed from the dais, but the cracks in the dome sparkled with distant points of light, like the galactic profiles of some distant universe. He gazed up at this unfamiliar zodiac, watching it emerge before his eyes like the first vision of some pelagic Cortez emerging from the oceanic deeps to glimpse the immense Pacifics of the open sky.

Standing on the dais, he looked around at the blank rows of seats facing him, wondering what uterine rite to perform for the invisible audience that seemed to watch him. The air pressure inside his helmet had increased sharply, as the men on the deck lost contact with him by telephone. The valves boomed off the sides of the helmet, the silver bubbles darted and swerved away from him like frantic phantoms.

Gradually, as the minutes passed, the preservation of this distant zodiac, perhaps the very configuration of constellations that had encompassed the Earth during the Triassic Period, seemed to Kerans a task more important than any other facing him. He stepped down from the dais and began to return to the control room, dragging the air-line after him. As he reached the panel door he felt the line snake Out through his hands, and with an impulse of anger seized a loop and anchored it around the handle of the door. He waited until the line tautened, then wound a second loop around the handle, providing himself with a radius of a dozen feet. He walked back down the steps and stopped half-way down the aisle, head held back, determined to engrave the image of the constellations on his retina. Already their patterns seemed more familiar than those of the classical constellations. In a vast, convulsive recession of the equinoxes, a billion sidereal days had reborn themselves, re-aligned the nebulae and island universes in their original perspectives.

A sharp spur of pain drove itself into his eustachian tube, forcing him to swallow. Abruptly he realised that the intake valve of the helmet supply was no longer working. A faint hiss seeped through every ten seconds, but the pressure had fallen steeply. Dizzying, he stmnbled up the aisle and tried to free the air-line from the handle, certain now that Strangman had seized the opportunity to fabricate an accident. Breath exploding, he tripped over one of the steps, fell awkwardly across the seats with a gentle ballooning motion.

As the spotlight flared across the domed ceiling, illuminating the huge vacant womb for the last time, Kerans felt the warm bloodfilled nausea of the chamber flood in upon him. He lay back, spreadeagled across the steps, his hand pressed numbly against the loop of line around the door handle, the soothing pressure of the water penetrating his suit so that the barriers between his own private blood-stream and that of the giant amnion seemed no longer to exist. The deep cradle of silt carried him gently like an immense placenta, infinitely softer than any bed he had ever known. Far above him, as his consciousness faded, he could see the ancient nebulae and galaxies shining through the uterine night, but eventually even their light was dimmed and he was only aware of the faint glimmer of identity within the deepest recesses of his mind. Quietly he began to move towards it, floating slowly towards the centre of the dome, knowing that this faint beacon was receding more rapidly then he could approach it. When it was no longer visible he pressed on through the darkness alone, like a blind fish in an endless forgotten sea, driven by an impulse whose identity be would never comprehend…

Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface. Within his lungs an immense inland lake seemed to be bursting outwards, his rib-cage distended like a whale's to contain the oceanic volumes of water.

"Kerans…"

He looked up at the bright deck, at the brilliant panoply of light on the canvas shade above him, at the watchful ebony face of the Admiral sitting across his legs and pumping his chest in his huge hands.

"Strangman, he…" Choking on the expressed fluid in his throat, Kerans let his head loll back onto the hot deck, the sunlight stinging his eyes. A circle of faces looked down at him intently-Beatrice, her eyes wide with alarm, Bodkin frowning seriously, a motley of brown faces under khaki kepis. Abruptly a single white grinning face interposed itself. Only a few feet from him, it leered like an obscene statue.

"Strangman, you-"

The grin broke into a winning smile. "No, I didn't, Kerans. Don't try to pin the blame on me. Dr. Bodkin will vouch for that." He waggled a finger at Kerans. "I warned you not to go down too far."

The Admiral stood up, evidently satisfied that Kerans had recovered. The deck seemed to be made of burning iron, and Kerans pulled himself up on one elbow, sat weakly in the pool of water. A few feet away, creased in the scuppers, the suit lay like a deflated corpse.

Beatrice pushed through the circle of onlookers, and crouched down beside him. "Robert, relax, don't think about it now." She put her arm around his shoulders, glancing up watchfully at Strangman. He stood behind Kerans, grinning with pleasure, hands on hips, "The cable seized…" Kerans cleared his head, his lungs like two bruised, tender flowers. He breathed slowly, soothing them with the cool air. "They were pulling it from above. Didn't you stop…"

Bodkin stepped forward with Kerans' jacket and draped it across his shoulders. "Easy, Robert, it doesn't matter now. Actually, I'm sure it wasn't Strangman's fault, he was talking to Beatrice and me when it happened. The cable was hooked round some obstruction, it looks as if it was a complete accident."

"No, it wasn't, Doctor," Strangman cut in. "Don't perpetuate a myth, Kerans will be much more grateful for the truth. He anchored that cable himself, quite deliberately. Why?" Here Strangman tapped the air magisterially. "Because he wanted to become part of the drowned world." He began to laugh to himself, slapping his thighs with amusement as Kerans hobbled weakly to his chair. "And the joke is that he doesn't know whether I'm telling the truth or not. Do you realise that, Bodkin? Look at him, he genuinely isn't sure! God, what irony!"

"Strangman!" Beatrice snapped at him angrily, overcoming her fears. "Stop saying that! It might have been an accident."

Strangman shrugged theatrically. "It _might_," he repeated with great emphasis. "Let's admit that. It makes it more interesting-particularly for Kerans. '_Did I or did I not try to kill myself?_' One of the few existential absolutes, far more significant than 'To be or not to be?', which merely underlines the uncertainty of the suicide, rather than the eternal ambivalence of his victim." He smiled down patronisingly at Kerans as the latter sat quietly in his chair, sipping at the drink Beatrice had brought him. "Kerans, I envy you the task of finding out-if you can."

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