J. Ballard - The Drowned World

Riggs climbed up into the cockpit 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 canals 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-assyrian 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 fibre-glass 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 be 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 passage 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 cockpit 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 morass 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 iow 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, spaced 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.