Kerans nodded. The temperature in the cabin had begun to fall, and he felt himself breathing more freely. “A change of climate will probably help as well.” There was a dull clatter outside as one of the metal scows being hauled up in its davits clanged against the hull. He added: “The atmosphere in these lagoons is pretty enervating. Three days from now when we leave I think we’ll all show a marked improvement.”
He assumed that Hardman had been told of their imminent departure, but the Lieutenant looked up at him sharply, lowering his notebook. Bodkin began to clear his throat and abruptly started talking about the danger of draughts from the ventilator. For a few seconds Kerans and Hardman watched each other steadily, and then the Lieutenant nodded briefly to himself and resumed his reading, carefully noting the time from the bedside clocks.
Angry with himself, Kerans went over to the window, his back turned to the others. He realised that he had told Hardman deliberately, unconsciously hoping to elicit precisely this response, and knowing full well why Bodkin had withheld the news. Without the shadow of a doubt he had warned Hardman, telling him that whatever tasks he had to carry out, whatever internal perspectives to bring to a common focus, this should be completed within three days.
Kerans looked down irritably at the alarm device on the table, resenting his diminishing control over his own motives. First the meaningless theft of the compass, and now this act of gratuitous sabotage. However varied his faults, in the past he had always believed them to be redressed by one outstanding virtue—a complete and objective awareness of the motives behind his actions. If he was sometimes prone to undue delays this was a result, not of irresolution, but of a reluctance to act at all where complete self-awareness was impossible—his affair with Beatrice Dahl, tilted by so many conflicting passions, from day to day walked a narrow tightrope of a thousand restraints and cautions.
In a belated attempt to reassert himself, he said to Hardman: “Don’t forget the clock, Lieutenant. If I were you, I’d set the alarm so that it rings continuously.”
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 hawser 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 thousandth time. As they neared the testing station the helicopter roared in overhead and alighted, its impact tilting the base and dipping the hawser 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 four 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 curtain-walling 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 semicircle of fading programme 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 loops 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—why the electric heater and alarm clocks?”
Bodkin slid the gramophone record into a rack of miniature discs on 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 programme 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 period.”
“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