The Drowned World

by J. G. Ballard

  After the animal had been dispatched he still stood elatedly by the rail, bouncing on the balls of his feet, as if hoping that it would resuscitate itself and make a come-back. Only when the decapitated head was hoisted away on the end of a boathook did he turn with a spasm of irritation to the business of the dive.

  Under the supervision of the Admiral, two of the crew made a preliminary dive in aqualungs. They climbed down the metal ladder into the water and glided away towards the sloping curve of the dome. They examined the fanlight, then tested the semicircular ribs of the building, pulling themselves across the dome by the cracks in the surface. After their return a third sailor descended, with suit and line. He clumped slowly across the cloudy floor of the street below, the thin light reflected off his helmet and shoulders. As the lines wound out, he entered the main doorway and disappeared from view, communicating by telephone with the Admiral, who sang out his commentary for all to hear in a rich fruity baritone. "in de pay-box... now in de main lounge... Jomo says de seats in de church, Captain Strang', but de altar gone."

  Everyone was leaning over the rail, waiting for Jomo to reappear, but Strangman was slumped back moodily in his chair, face clamped in one hand.

  "Church!" he snorted derisively. "God! Send someone else down. Jomo's a bloody fool."

  "Yes, Captain."

  More divers descended, and the first champagne cocktails were brought round by the steward. Intending to dive himself, Kerans sipped lightly at the heady effervescence.

  Beatrice touched his elbow, her face watchful. "Are you going down, Robert?"

  Kerans smiled. "To the basement, Bea. Don't worry, I'll use the big suit, it's perfectly safe."

  "I wasn't thinking of that." She looked up at the expanding ellipse of the sun just visible over the rooftop behind them. The olive-green light refracted through the heavy fern fronds filled the lake with a yellow, swampy miasma, drifting over the surface like vapour off a vat. A few moments earlier the water had seemed cool and inviting, but now had become a closed world, the barrier of the surface like a plane between two dimensions. The diving cage was swung out and lowered into the water, its red bars blurred and shimmering, so that the entire structure was completely distorted. Even the men swimming below the surface were transformed by the water, their bodies as they swerved and pivoted turned into gleaming chimeras, like exploding pulses of ideation in a neuronic jungle.

  Far below them, the great dome of the planetarium hove out of the yellow light, reminding Kerans of some cosmic space vehicle marooned on Earth for millions of years and only now revealed by the sea. He leaned behind Beatrice and said to Bodkin: "Alan, Strangman's searching for the treasure you've hidden down there."

  Bodkin smiled fleetingly. "I hope he finds it," he said mildly. "The entire ransom of the Unconscious is waiting for him if he can."

  Strangman was standing in the bows of the craft, interrogating one of the divers who had surfaced and was now being helped out of his suit, water streaming off his copper skin across the deck. As he barked his questions he noticed Bodkin and Kerans whispering to each other. Brows knitting, he stalked across the deck to where they were sitting, watching them suspiciously through halfclosed eyes, and then sidled behind them like a guard eyeing a trio of potentially troublesome prisoners.

  Toasting him with his glass of champagne, Kerans said jocularly: "I was just asking Dr. Bodkin where he'd hidden his treasure, Strangman."

  Strangman paused, staring at him coldly as Beatrice laughed uneasily, hiding her face inside the wing collars of her beach shirt. He put his hands on the back of Kerans' wicker chair, his face like white flint. "Don't worry, Kerans," he snapped softly. "I know where it is, and I don't need your help to find it." He swung round on Bodkin. "Do I, Doctor?"

  Shielding one ear from the cutting edge of his voice, Bodkin murmured: "I think you probably do know, Strangman." He pushed his chair back into the shrinking shade. "When does the gala begin?"

  "Gala?" Strangman glanced about irritably, apparently forgetting that he had introduced the term himself. "There are no bathing beauties here, Doctor, this isn't the local aquadrome. Wait a minute, though, I mustn't be ungallant and forget the beautiful Miss Dahl." He bowed over her with an unctuous smile. "Come, my dear, I'll make you queen of the aquacade, with an escort of fifty divine crocodiles."

  Beatrice looked away from his gleaming eyes. "No thanks, Strangman. The sea frightens me."

  "But you must. Kerans and Dr. Bodkin expect you to. And I. You'll be a Venus descending to the sea, made twice beautiful by your return." He reached down to take her hand and Beatrice flinched from him, frowning with repugnance at his oleaginous smirk. Kerans pivoted in his seat and held her arm.

  "I don't think this is Beatrice's day, Strangman. We only swim in the evenings, under a full moon. It's a question of mood, you know."

  He smiled at Strangman as the latter tightened his grip on Beatrice, his face like a white vampire's, as if becoming exasperated beyond all measure.

  Kerans stood up. "Look, Strangman, I'll take her place. All right? I'd like to go down and have a look at the planetarium." He waved Beatrice's alarms aside. "Don't worry, Strangman and the Admiral will take good care of me."

  "Of course, Kerans." Strangman's good humour had returned, instantly he radiated a benevolent willingness to please, only the slightest hint in his eyes of his pleasure at having Kerans within his clutches. 'We'll put you in the big suit, then you can talk to us over the loudspeaker. Relax, Miss DahI, there's no danger. Admiral! Suit for Dr. Kerans! Chop, chop!"

  Kerans exchanged a brief warning glance with Bodkin, then looked away when he saw Bodkin's surprise at the alacrity with which he had volunteered. He felt curiously light-headed, though he had barely touched his cocktail.

  "Don't go down for too long, Robert," Bodkin called after him. "The temperature of the water will be high, at least ninety-five degrees, you'll find it very enervating."

  Kerans nodded, then followed Strangman's eager stride to the forward deck. A couple of men were hosing down the suit and helmet, while the Admiral and Big Caesar, and the sailors resting on the pump-wheels, watched Kerans approach with noncommittal interest.

  "See if you can get down into the main auditorium," Strangman told him. "One of the boys managed to find a slit in an exit door, but the frame had rusted solid." He examined Kerans with a critical eye as he waited for the helmet to be lowered over his head. Designed for use only within the first five fathoms, it was a complete perspex bowl, braced by two lateral ribs, and affording maximum visibiity. "It suits you, Kerans, you look like the man from inner space." The rictus of a laugh twisted his face. "But don't try to reach the Unconscious, Kerans, remember it isn't equipped to go down that far!"

  Clumping slowly to the rail, the sailors carrying the lines after him, Kerans paused to wave cumbersomely to Beatrice and Dr. Bodkin, then mounted the narrow ladder and lowered himself slowly towards the slack green water below. It was shortly after eight o'clock and the sun shone directly on to the tacky vinyl envelope that enclosed him, clamming damply against his chest and legs, and he looked forward with pleasure to cooling his burning skin. The surface of the lake was now completely opaque. A litter of leaves and weed floated slowly around it, occasionally disrupted by bubbles of trapped air erupting from the interior of the dome.

  To his right he could see Bodkin and Beatrice with their chins on the rail, watching him expectantly. Directly above, on the roof of the scow, stood the tall gaunt figure of Strangman, tails of his jacket pushed back, arms akimbo, the light breeze lifting his chalkwhite hair. He was grinning soundlessly to himself, but as Kerans' feet touched the water shouted something which Kerans heard dimly relayed over the headphones. Immediately the hiss of air through the intake valves in the helmet increased and the internal circuit of the microphone came alive.

  The water was hotter than he expected. Instead of a cool revivifying bath, he was stepping into a tank filled with warm, glutinous jelly that clamped itself to
his calves and thighs like the foetid embrace of some gigantic protozoan monster. Quickly he lowered himself to his shoulders, then took his feet off the rungs and let his weight carry him slowiy downwards into the greenlit deep, hand over hand along the rail, and paused at the two-fathom mark.

  Here the water was cooler, and he flexed his arms and legs thankfully, accustoming his eyes to the pale light. A few small angel fish swam past, their bodies gleaming like silver stars in the blue blur that extended from the surface to a depth of five feet, a 'sky' of light reflected from the millions of dust and pollen particles. Forty feet away from him loomed the pale curved hull of the planetarium, far larger and more mysterious than it had seemed from the surface, like the stern of an ancient sunken liner. The once polished aluminium roof had become dull and blunted, molluscs and bivalves clinging to the narrow ledges formed by the transverse vaulting. Lower down, where the dome rested on the square roof of the auditorium, a forest of giant fucus floated delicately from their pedestals, some of the fronds over ten feet tall, exquisite marine wraiths that fluttered together like the spirits of a sacred neptunian grove.

  Twenty feet from the bottom the ladder ended, but Kerans was now almost at equilibrium with the water. He let himself sink downwards until he was holding the tips of the ladder above his head with his fingers, then released them and glided away backwards towards the lake floor, the twin antennae of his air-line and telephone cable winding up the narrow well of light, reflected by the disturbed water, to the silver rectangular hull of the scow.

  Cut off by the water from any other sounds, the noise of. the air pump and the relayed rhythms of his own respiration drummed steadily in his ears, increasing in volume as the air pressure was raised. The sounds seemed to boom around him in the dark olivegreen water, thudding like the immense tidal pulse he had heard in his dreams.

  A voice grated from his headphones. "Strangman here, Kerans. How's the grey sweet mother of us all?"

  "Feels like home. I've nearly reached the bottom now. The diving cage is over by the entrance."

  He sank to his knees in the soft loam which covered the floor, and steadied himself against a barnacled lamp post. In a relaxed, graceful moon-stride he loped slowly through the deep sludge, which rose from his footprints like clouds of disturbed gas. On his right were the dim flanks of the buildings lining the side-walk, the silt piled in soft dunes up to their first-floor windows. In the intervals between the buildings the slopes were almost twenty feet high, and the retaining grilles were locked into them like huge portcullises. Most of the windows were choked with debris, fragments of furniture and metal cabinets, sections of full boards, matted together by the fucus and cephalopods.

  The diving cage swung slowly on its cable five feet off the street, a selection of hacksaws and spanners loosely tied to the floor. Kerans approached the doorway of the planetarium, steering the lines behind him and occasionally pulled lightly off his feet when they became over-extended.

  Like an immense submarine temple, the white bulk of the planetarium stood before him, illuminated by the vivid surface water. The steel barricades around the entrance had been dismantled by the previous divers, and the semi-circular arc of doors which led into the foyer was open. Kerans switched on his helmet lamp and walked through the entrance. He peered carefully among the pillars and alcoves, following the steps which led up into the mezzanine. The metal railings and chromium display panels had rusted, but the whole interior of the planetarium, sealed off by the barricades from the plant and animal life of the lagoons, seemed completely untouched, as clean and untarnished as on the day the last dykes had collapsed.

  Passing the ticket booth, he propelled himself slowly along the mezzanine, and paused by the rail to read the signs over the cloakroom doors, their luminous letters reflecting the light. A circular corridor led around the auditorium, the lamp throwing a pale cone of light down the solid black water. In the faint hope that the dykes would be repaired, the management of the planetarium had sealed a second inner ring of barricades around the auditorium, locked into place by padlocked cross-bars which had now rusted into immovable bulkheads.

  The top right-hand corner panel of the second bulkhead had been jemmied back to provide a small peephole into the auditorium. Too tired by the water pressing on his chest and abdomen to lift the heavy suit, Kerans contented himself with a glimpse of a few motes of light gleaming through the cracks in the dome.

  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 th
e 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.