J. Ballard - The Drowned World

The great sun beating in his mind almost drowned out the sounds of the looting and revelry, the roars of explosives and shotguns. Like a blind man he stumbled in and out of the old arcades and entrances, his white dinner Suit stained and grimy, jeered at by the sailors as they charged by him, playfully buffeting his shoulders. At midnight he would wander through the roistering singers in the square and sit beside Strangman at his parties, hiding back under the shadow of the paddle-ship, watching the dancing and listening to the beat of the drums and guitars, overlayed in his mind by the insistent pounding of the black sun.

He abandoned any attempt to return to the hotel-the creek was blocked by the two pumping scows and the intervening lagoon seethed with alligators-and during the day either slept in Beatrice's apartment on the sofa or sat numbly in a quiet alcove on the gaming deck 0f the depot ship. Most of the crew would be asleep among the crates or arguing over their spoils, waiting with surly impatience for the dusk, and they left him alone. By an inversion of logic it was safer to stay close to Strangman than to try to continue his previous separate regimen. Bodkin attempted this, withdrawing in a growing state of shock to the testing station-now reached by a precipitous climb up a dilapidated fire escape-but on one of his midnight forays out into the streets of the university quarter behind the planetarium he had been seized by a group of sailors and roughly manhandled. By attaching himself to Strangman's entourage Kerans had at last conceded his absolute authority over the lagoons.

Once he managed to force himself to visit Bodkin, found him resting quietly in his bunk, cooled by a homemade fan and the fading air-conditioner. Like himself, Bodkin seemed to be isolated on a small spur of reality in the centre of the time sea.

"Robert," he murmured through his swollen lips, "get away from here. Take her, the girl-" here he searched for the name "-Beatrice, and find another lagoon."

Kerans nodded, hunching himself inside the narrow cone of cool air projected by the air-conditioner. "I know, Alan, Strangman's insane and dangerous, but for some reason I can't leave yet. I don't know why, but there's something here-those naked streets." He gave up cloudily. "What is it? There's a strange incubus on my mind, I must lift it first."

Bodkin managed to sit up weakly. "Kerans, listen. Take her and go. Tonight. Time doesn't exist here now."

In the laboratory below a pallid brown scum was draped over the great semi-circle of progress charts, Bodkin's dismembered neuronic zodiac, and veiled the stranded benches and fume cupboards. Kerans made a half-hearted attempt to replace the charts that had fallen to the floor, then gave up and spent the next hour washing his silk dinner jacket in a pool of water left behind in one of the sinks.

Perhaps in imitation of himself, several of the crew now also sported tuxedos and black ties. A pantechnicon full of evening wear sealed inside water-tight envelopes had been found in one of the warehouses. Egged on by Strangman, half a dozen of the sailors dressed themselves up, bow ties around their bare necks, and pranced through the streets in tremendous glee, tails flaring and knees high-kicking, like a troupe of lunatic waiters at a dervish carnival.

After the initial abandon, the looting began to take on a more serious note. Whatever his private reasons, Strangman was solely interested in objets d'art, and after a careful reconnaissance identified one of the city's principal museums. But, to his annoyance, the building had been stripped, and his only salvage was a large mosaic which his men removed tile by tile from the entrance hail and laid out like a vast jig-saw on the observation deck of the depot ship.

This disappointment prompted Kerans to warn Bodkin that Strangman might try to vent his spleen on him, but when he climbed up to the testing station early the next evening he found that Bodkin had gone. The air-conditioner had exhausted its fuel, and Bodkin, deliberately it seemed, had opened the windows before he left, so that the entire station steamed like a cauldron.

Curiously, Bodkin's disappearance gave Kerans little concern. Immersed in himself, he merely assumed that the biologist had followed his own advice and moved out to one of the lagoons to the south.

Beatrice, however, was still there. Like Kerans, she had sunk into a private reverie. Kerans rarely saw her during the day, when she would be locked into her bedroom, but at midnight, when it became cool, she would always come down from her penthouse among the stars and join Strangman at his parties. She sat numbly beside him in her blue evening dress, her hair studded with three or four of the tiaras Strangman had looted from the old jewellery vaults, her breasts smothered under a mass of glittering chains and crescents, like a mad queen in a horror drama.

Strangman treated her with a strange deference, not unmarked by a polite hostility, almost as if she were a tribal totem, a deity whose power was responsible for their continued good fortune but nonetheless resented. Kerans tried to stay near her, within her orbit of protection, and the evening after Bodkin's disappearance leaned across the cushions to say: "Alan's gone. Old Bodkin. Did he see you before he left?"

But Beatrice stared out over the fires burning in the square, without looking at him said in a vague voice: "Listen to the drumming, Robert. How many suns are there, do you think?"

Wilder now than Kerans had ever seen him, Strangman danced about the camp fires, sometimes forcing Kerans to join him, inciting the bongo drummers to ever faster rhythms. Then, exhausted, he would slump back on his divan, his thin white face like blue chalk.

Leaning on one elbow, he stared sombrely at Kerans, squatting on a cushion behind him.

"Do you know why they fear me, Kerans? The Admiral, Big Caesar and the others. Let me tell you my secret." Then, in a whisper: "Because they think I'm dead."

In a spasm of laughter, he rocked back into the divan, shaking helplessly. "Oh, my God, Kerans! What's the matter with you two. Come out of that trance." He looked up as Big Caesar approached, doffing the dried alligator's head which he wore like a hood over his own. "Yes, what is it? A special song for Doctor Kerans? Capital! Did you hear that, Doctor? Let's go then, with _The Ballad of Mistah Bones!_"

Clearing his throat, with much prancing and gesticulation, the big negro began, his voice deep and guttural.

With a sudden shout, Strangman leapt from the divan, raced past Big Caesar into the centre of the square, pointing up at the perimeter wall of the lagoon high above them. Outlined against the setting sky was the small square figure of Dr. Bodkin, picking his way slowly across the wooden barrage that held back the creek waters outside. Unaware that he had been spotted by the party below, he carried a small wooden box in one hand, a faint light fizzing from a trailing wire.

Wide awake, Strangman bellowed: "Admiral, Big Caesar! Get him, he's got a bomb!"