J. Ballard - The Drowned World

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.

Kerans began: "I'm sorry I let slip that we were leaving in three days' time. I hadn't realised you'd kept that from Hardman."

Bodkin shrugged, dismissing this as of little importance. "It's a complex situation, Robert. Having gone a few steps towards unravelling it I didn't want to introduce another slip knot."

"But why not tell him?" Kerans pressed, hoping obliquely to absolve himself of his slight feeling of guilt. "Surely the prospect of leaving might well jolt him out of his lethargy?"

Bodkin lowered his glasses to the end of his nose and regarded Kerans quizzically. "It doesn't seem to have had that effect on you, Robert. Unless I'm very much mistaken you look rather un-jolted. Why should Hardman's reactions be any different?"

Kerans smiled. "Touché, Alan. I don't want to interfere, having more or less dropped Hardman into your lap, but what exactly are you and he playing about with-the electric heater and alarm clocks?"

Bodkin slid the gramophone record into a rack of miniature discs the shelf behind him. He looked up at Kerans and for a few moments watched him with the mild but penetrating gaze with which he had observed Hardman, and Kerans realised that their relationship, until now that of colleagues confiding completely in each other, had become closer to that of observer and subject. After a pause Bodkin glanced away at the program charts, and Kerans chuckled involuntarily. To himself he said: Damn the old boy, he's got me up there now with the algae and nautiloids, next he'll be playing his records at me.

Bodkin stood up and pointed to the three rows of laboratory benches, crowded with vivaria and specimen jars, pages from notebooks pinned to the fume hoods above them.

"Tell me, Robert, if you had to sum up the last three years' work in a single conclusion, how would you set about it?"

Kerans hesitated, then gestured off-handedly. "It wouldn't be too difficult." He saw that Bodkin expected a serious answer, and composed his thoughts. 'Well, one could simply say that in response to the rises in temperature, humidity and radiation levels the flora and fauna of this planet are beginning to assume once again the forms they displayed the last time such conditions were present-roughly speaking, the Triassic."

"Correct." Bodkin strolled off among the benches. "During the last three years, Robert, you and I have examined something like five thousand species in the animal kingdom, seen literally tens of thousands of new plant varieties. Everywhere the same pattern has unfolded, countless mutations completely transforming the organisms to adapt them for survival in the new environment. Everywhere there's been the same avalanche backwards into the past-so much so that the few complex organisms which have managed to retain a foothold unchanged on the slope look distinctly anomalous-a handful of amphibians, the birds, and _Man_. It's a curious thing that although we've carefully catalogued the backward journeys of so many plants and animals, we've ignored the most important creature on this planet."

Kerans laughed. "I'll willingly take a small bow there, Alan. But what are you suggesting-that _Homo sapiens_ is about to transform himself into Cro-Magnon and Java Man, and ultimately into _Sinanthropus_? Unlikely, surely. Wouldn't that merely be Lamarkism in reverse?"

"Agreed. I'm _not_ suggesting that." Bodkin leaned against one of the benches, feeding a handful of peanuts to a small marmoset caged in a converted fume cupboard. "Though obviously after two or three hundred million years _Homo sapiens_ might well die out and our little cousin here become the highest form of life on the planet. However, a biological process isn't completely reversible." He pulled the silk handkerchief out of his pocket and flicked it at the marmoset, which flinched away tremulously. "If _we_ return to the jungle we'll dress for dinner."

He went over to a window and gazed out through the mesh screen, the overhang of the deck above shutting out all but a narrow band of the intense sunlight. Steeped in the vast heat, the lagoon lay motionlessly, pails of steam humped over the water like elephantine spectres.

"But I'm really thinking of something else. Is it only the external' landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of deja vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well. However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field-rat's inherited image of the hawk's silhouette is the classic example-even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or the equally surprising-in view of their comparative rarity-hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet's dominant life form."