The Drowned World Part 5

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. "G.o.d! Send someone else down. Jomo's a b.l.o.o.d.y fool."

"Yes, Captain."

More divers descended, and the first champagne c.o.c.ktails 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 s.h.i.+mmering, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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?"

s.h.i.+elding 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 Dahl, 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 c.o.c.ktail.

"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 s.p.a.ce." 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 c.u.mbersomely 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 slowly 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, mollusks 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 d.y.k.es had collapsed.

Pa.s.sing 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 d.y.k.es 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 jimmied 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 rea.s.suringly 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 s.p.a.cesuit facing him ten feet away, white bubbles streaming from his frog-like head, hands raised in an att.i.tude 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 gla.s.s surface and swung the helmet sharply from left to right. He was in the control booth overlooking the auditorium, his image reflected in the gla.s.s 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 un.o.bstructed 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 pa.s.sed, the preservation of this distant zodiac, perhaps the very configuration of constellations that had encompa.s.sed the Earth during the Tria.s.sic 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 cla.s.sical 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 stumbled 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 s.h.i.+ning through the uterine night, but eventually even their light was dimmed and he was only aware of the faint glimmer of ident.i.ty 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 ident.i.ty be would never comprehend...

Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, was.h.i.+ng 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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! G.o.d, 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."

Kerans managed a weak smile. From the speed of his recovery he realised that he had suffered only mildly from the drowning. The remainder of the crew had moved away to their duties, no longer interested.

"Thank you, Strangman. I'll let you know when I have the answer."

On the way back to the Ritz he sat silently in the stern of the scow, thinking to himself of the great womb-chamber of the planetarium and the multilayered overlay of its a.s.sociations, trying to erase from his mind the terrible 'either/or' which Strangman had correctly posed. Had he unconsciously locked the air-pipe, knowing that the tension in the cable would suffocate him, or had it been a complete accident, even, possibly, an attempt by Strangman to injure him? But for the rescue by the two skin divers (perhaps he had counted on them setting out after him when the telephone cable was disconnected) he would certainly have found the answer. His reasons for making the dive at all remained obscure. There was no doubt that he had been impelled by a curious urge to place himself at Strangman's mercy, almost as if he were staging his own murder.

During the next few days the conundrum remained unsolved. Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for the south which had possessed Hardman, no more than an impulse to suicide, an unconscious acceptance of the logic of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero? Rather than try to live with yet another enigma, and more and more frightened of the real role that Strangman played in his mind, Kerans systematically repressed his memories of the accident. Likewise, Bodkin and Beatrice ceased to refer to it, as if accepting that an answer to the question would solve for them many of the other mysterious enigmas which now alone sustained them, delusions which, like all the ambiguous but necessary a.s.sumptions about their own personalities, they would only sacrifice with reluctance.

10 - Surprise Party

"Kerans...!"

Roused by the deep blare of the hydroplane as it approached the landing stage, Kerans stirred fretfully, his head lolling from side to side on the stale pillow. He focused his eyes on the bright green parallelograms which dappled the ceiling above the venetian blinds, listening to the engines outside reverse and accelerate, then with an effort pulled himself off the bed. It was already after 7-30, an hour later than he had woken a month earlier, and the brilliant sunlight reflected off the lagoon thrust its fingers into the darkened room like a ravenous golden monster.

With a pang of annoyance he noticed that he had forgotten to switch off the bedside fan before going to sleep. He had begun to fall asleep now at unpredictable moments, sometimes sitting halfupright on the bed while unlacing his shoes. In an attempt to conserve his fuel he had closed down the bedroom and moved the heavy gilt-framed double bed into the lounge, but its a.s.sociations with sleep were so powerful that he was soon forced to move it back again.

"Kerans...!"

Strangman's voice echoed warningly down the corridor below. Kerans limped slowly to the bathroom, managed to splash his face by the time Strangman let himself into the suite.

Tossing his helmet on to the floor, Strangman produced a decanter of hot black coffee and a canned gorgonzola green with age.

"A present for you." He examined Kerans' dulled eyes with an amiable frown. 'Well, how are things in deep time?"

Kerans sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the booming of the phantom jungles in his mind to fade. Like an endless shallows, the residues of the dreams stretched away below the surface of the reality around him. 'What brings you here?" he asked flatly.

Strangman put on an expression of deep injury.

"Kerans, I like you. You keep forgetting that." He turned up the volume of the air-conditioner, smiling at Kerans, who gazed watchfully at the wry, perverted leer. "Actually I have another motive-I want you to have dinner with me tonight. Don't start shaking your bead. I have to keep coming here, it's time I returned your hospitality. Beatrice and old Bodkin will be there, it should be pretty swagger-firework displays, bongo drums and a surprise."

"What exactly?"

"You'll see. Something really spectacular, believe me, I don't do things by halves. I'd have those 'gators dancing on the tips of their tails if I wanted to." He nodded solemnly. "Kerans, you're going to be impressed. And it may even do you some good mentally, stop this crazy time machine of yours." His mood changed, becoming distant and abstracted. "But I mustn't poke fun at you, Kerans, I couldn't bear a tenth of the personal responsibility you've shouldered. The tragic loneliness, for example, of those haunted Tria.s.sic swamps." He picked a book off the air-conditioner, a copy of Donne's poems, and extemporised a line: 'World within world, each man an island unto himself, swimming through seas of archipelagoes..."

Fairly certain that he was fooling, Kerans asked: "How's the diving going?"

"Frankly, not very well. The city's too far north for much to have been left. But we've discovered a few interesting things. You'll see tonight."

Kerans hesitated, doubting whether he would have enough energy to make small talk with Dr. Bodkin and Beatrice-he had seen neither of them since the debacle of the diving party, though every evening Strangman drove over in his hydroplane to Beatrice's apartment house (what success he had Kerans could only guess, but Strangman's references to her-"Women are like spiders, they sit there watching you and knitting their webs" or "she keeps talking about you, Robert, confound her"-indicated a negative response).

However, the particular twist of emphasis in Strangman's voice suggested that Kerans' attendance was obligatory, and that he would not be allowed to refuse. Strangman followed him into the lounge, waiting for a reply.

"It's rather short notice, Strangman."

"I'm terribly sorry, Kerans, but as we know each other so well I felt sure you wouldn't mind. Blame it on my manic-depressive personality, I'm always seizing on wild schemes."

Kerans found two gold-plated porcelain coffee cups and filled them from the decanter. Know each other so well, he repeated to himself ironically. I'm d.a.m.ned if I know you at all, Strangman. Racing around the lagoons like the delinquent spirit of the drowned city, apotheosis of all its aimless violence and cruelty, Strangman was half-buccaneer, half-devil. Yet he had a further neuronic role, in which he seemed almost a positive influence, holding a warning mirror up to Kerans and obliquely cautioning him about the future he had chosen. It was this bond that kept them together, for otherwise Kerans would long since have left the lagoon and moved southwards.

"I a.s.sume this isn't a farewell celebration?" he asked Strangman. "You aren't leaving us?"

"Kerans, of course not," Strangman remonstrated. "We've only just got here. Besides," he added sagely, "where would we go? There's nothing much left now-I can tell you, I sometimes feel like Phiebas the Phoenician. Though that's really your role, isn't it?

"- A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He pa.s.sed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool."

He continued to pester Kerans until the latter accepted his invitation, then made off jubilantly. Kerans finished the coffee in the decanter, when he began to recover drew the venetian blinds and let in the bright sunlight.

Outside, in his chair on the veranda, a white monitor lizard sat and regarded him with its stony eyes, waiting for something to happen.

As he rode across the lagoon to the paddle-s.h.i.+p that evening, Kerans speculated on the probable nature of Strangman's 'surprise', hoping that it would not be some elaborate practical joke. The effort of shaving off his beard and putting on a white dinner jacket had tired him.

Considerable preparations were obviously afoot in the lagoon. The depot s.h.i.+p had been moored about fifty yards from sh.o.r.e, strung with awnings and coloured lights, and the two remaining SCOWS were working systematically along the banks, driving the alligators into the central lagoon.

Kerans pointed to a big caiman thras.h.i.+ng about in a circle of boathooks, and said to Big Caesar: "What's on the menu tonight- roast alligator?"

The giant hunch-backed mulatto at the helm of the scow shrugged with studied vagueness. "Strang' got a big show tonight, Mistah Kerans, a real big show. You see."

Kerans left his seat and leaned on the bridge. "Big Caesar, how long have you known the Captain?"