Ballard, J G - The Drowned World

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THE DROWNED WORLD

by J.G. Ballard

Published by arrangement with the author's agent.

BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, AUGUST 1962

CONTENTS

1 On the Beach at the Ritz

2 The Coming of the Iguanas

3 Towards a New Psychology

4 The Causeways of the Sun

5 Descent into Deep Time

6 The Drowned Ark

7 Carnival of Alligators

8 The Man with the White Smile

9 The Pool of Thanatos

10 Surprise Party

11 "The Ballad of Mistah Bones"

12 The Feast of Skulls

13 Too Soon, Too Late

14 Grand Slam

15 The Paradises of the Sun

CHAPTER 1

On the Beach at the Ritz

Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o'clock,

Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs

of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even

through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The

blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat,

and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-

defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a

colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant

copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.

Usually Kerans woke at five, and reached the biological testing station in time to do at

least four or five hours' work before the heat became intolerable, but this morning he found

himself reluctant to leave the cool, air-curtained haven of the hotel suite. He had spent a couple

of hours over breakfast alone, and then completed a sixpage entry in his diary, deliberately

delaying his departure until Colonel Riggs passed the hotel in his patrol boat, knowing that by

then it would be too late to go to the station. The Colonel was always eager for an hour of

conversation, particularly when sustained by a few rounds of aperitif, and it would be at least

eleven-thirty before he left, his thoughts solely upon lunch at the base.

For some reason, however, Riggs had been delayed. Presumably he was carrying out a longer

sweep than usual of the adjacent lagoons, or perhaps was waiting for Kerans to arrive at the

testing station. For a moment Kerans wondered whether to try to reach him on the radio transmitter

installed by the signals unit in the lounge, but the console was buried under a pile of books, its

battery flat. The corporal in charge of the radio station at the base had protested to Riggs when

his cheerful morning round-up of old pop songs and local news--an attack by two iguanas on the

helicopter the previous night, the latest temperature and humidity readings-- had been cut off

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abruptly half-way through the first instalment. But Riggs recognised Kerans' unconscious attempt

to sever his links with the base--the careful haphazardness of the pyramid of books hiding the set

contrasted too obviously with Kerans' otherwise meticulous neatness--and tolerantly accepted his

need to isolate himself.

Leaning on the balcony rail, the slack water ten storeys below reflecting his thin angular

shoulders and gaunt profile, Kerans watched one of the countless thermal storms rip through a dump

of huge horse-tails lining the creek which led out of the lagoon. Trapped by the surrounding

buildings and the inversion layers a hundred feet above the water, pockets of air would heat

rapidly, then explode upwards like escaping balloons, leaving behind them a sudden detonating

vacuum. For a few seconds the steam clouds hanging over the creek dispersed, and a vicious

miniature tornado lashed across the 6o-feet-high plants, toppling them like matchsticks. Then, as

abruptly, the storm vanished and the great columnar trunks subsided among one another in the water

like sluggish alligators.

Rationalising, Kerans told himself that he had been wise to remain in the hotel--the

storms were erupting more and more frequently as the temperature rose--but he knew that his real

motive was his acceptance that little now remained to be done. The biological mapping had become a

pointless game, the new flora following exactly the emergent lines anticipated twenty years

earlier, and he was sure that no-one at Camp Byrd in Northern Greenland bothered to file his

reports, let alone read them.

In fact, old Dr. Bodkin, Kerans' assistant at the station, had slyly prepared what

purported to be an eyewitness description by one of Colonel Riggs' sergeants of a large sail-

backed lizard with a gigantic dorsal fin which had been seen cruising across one of the lagoons,

in all respects indistinguishable from the Pelycosaur, an early Pennsylvanian reptile. Had the

report been taken at its face value--heralding the momentous return of the age of the great

reptiles--an army of ecologists would have descended on them immediately, backed by a tactical

atomic weapons unit and orders to proceed south at a steady twenty knots. But apart from the

routine acknowledgement signal nothing had been heard. Perhaps the specialists at Camp Byrd were

too tired even to laugh.

At the end of the month Colonel Riggs and his small holding unit would complete their

survey of the city (had it once been Berlin, Paris or London?, Kerans asked himself) and set off

northward, towing the testing station with them. Kerans found it difficult to believe that he

would ever leave the penthouse suite where he had lived for the past six months. The Ritz's

reputation, he gladly agreed, was richly deserved--the bathroom, for example, with its black

marble basins and gold-plated taps and mirrors, was like the side-chapel of a cathedral. In a

curious way it satisfied him to think that he was the last guest who would stay at the hotel,

identifying what he realised was a concluding phase of his own life--the northward odyssey through

the drowned cities in the south, soon to end with their return to Camp Byrd and its bracing

disciplines--and this farewell sunset of the hotel's long splendid history.

He had commandeered the Ritz the day after their arrival, eager to exchange his cramped

cabin among the laboratory benches at the testing station for the huge, high-ceilinged state-rooms

of the deserted hotel. Already he accepted the lavish brocaded furniture and the bronze art

nouveau statuary in the corridor niches as a natural background to his existence, savouring the

subtle atmosphere of melancholy that surrounded these last vestiges of a level of civilisation now

virtually vanished forever. Too many of the other buildings around the lagoon had long since

slipped and slid away below the silt, revealing their gimcrack origins, and the Ritz now stood in

splendid isolation on the west shore, even the rich blue moulds sprouting from the carpets in the

dark corridors adding to its 19th century dignity.

The suite had originally been designed for a Milanese financier, and was lavishly

furnished and engineered. The heat curtains were still perfectly sealed, although the first six

storeys of the hotel were below water level and the load walls were beginning to crack, and the

250-amp air-conditioning unit had worked without a halt. Although it had been unoccupied for ten

years little dust had collected over the mantelpieces and gilt end-tables, and the triptych of

photo graphic portraits on the crocodile-skin desk--financier, financier and sleek well-fed

family, financier and even sleeker fifty-storey office block--revealed scarcely a blemish. Luckily

for Kerans his predecessor had left in a hurry, and the cupboards and wardrobes were packed with

treasure, ivory-handled squash rackets and handprinted dressing gowns, the cocktail bar stocked

with an ample supply of what were now vintage whiskeys and brandies.

A giant Anopheles mosquito, the size of a dragon-fly, spat through the air past his face,

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then dived down towards the floating jetty where Kerans' catamaran was moored. The sun was still

hidden behind the vegetation on the eastern side of the lagoon, but the mounting heat was bringing

the huge vicious insects out of their lairs all over the moss-covered surface of the hotel. Kerans

was reluctant to leave the balcony and retreat behind the wiremesh enclosure. In the early morning

light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the sombre green-black fronds of the

gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past, and the half-submerged white-faced buildings of the

20th century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds

apparently suspended at some junction in time, the illusion momentarily broken when a giant water

spider cleft the oily surface a hundred yards away.

In the distance, somewhere beyond the drowned bulk of a large Gothic building half a mile

to the south, a diesel engine coughed and surged. Kerans left the balcony, closing the wire door

behind him, and went into the bathroom to shave. Water had long ceased to flow through the taps,

but Kerans maintained a reservoir in the plunge bath, carefully purified in a home-made still on

the roof and piped in through the window.

Although he was only forty, Kerans' beard had been turned white by the radio-fluorine in

the water, but his bleached crew-cut hair and deep amber tan made him appear at least ten years

younger. A chronic lack of appetite, and the new malarias, had shrunk the dry leathery skin under

his cheekbones, emphasising the ascetic cast of his face. As he shaved he examined his features

critically, feeling the narrowing planes with his fingers, kneading the altered musculature which

was slowly transforming its contours and revealing a personality that had remained latent during

his previous adult life. Despite his introspective manner, he now seemed more relaxed and equable

than he could remember, his cool blue eyes surveying himself with ironic detachment. The slightly

self-conscious absorption in his own world, with its private rituals and observances, had passed.

If he kept himself aloof from Riggs and his men this was simply a matter of convenience rather

than of misanthropy.

On the way out he picked a monographed cream silk shirt from the stack left in the

wardrobe by the financier, and slipped into a pair of neatly pressed slacks with a Zurich label.

Sealing the double doors behind him--the suite was effectively a glass box inside the outer brick

walls--he made his way down the staircase.

He reached the landing stage as Colonel Riggs' cutter, a converted landing craft, pulled

in against the catamaran. Riggs stood in the bows, a trim dapper figure, one booted foot up on the

ramp, surveying the winding creeks and hanging jungles like an old-time African explorer.

"Good morning, Robert," he greeted Kerans, jumping down on to the swaying platform of

fifty-gallon drums lashed inside a wooden frame. "Glad you're still here. I've got a job on my

hands you can help me with. Can you take the day off from the station?"

Kerans helped him on to the concrete balcony that had once jutted from a seventh-floor

suite. "Of course, Colonel. As a matter of fact, I have already."

Technically Riggs had overall authority for the testing station and Kerans should have

asked his permission, but the relationship between the two men was without ceremony. They had

worked together for over three years, as the testing station and its military escort moved slowly

northward through the European lagoons, and Riggs was content to let Kerans and Bodkin get on with

their work in their own fashion, sufficiently busy himself with the jobs of mapping the shifting

keys and harbours and evacuating the last inhabitants. In the latter task he often needed Kerans'

help, for most of the people still living on in the sinking cities were either psychopaths or

suffering from malnutrition and radiation sickness.

In addition to running the testing station, Kerans served as the unit's medical officer.

Many of the people they came across required immediate hospitalisation before being flown out in

the helicopter to one of the large tank-landing craft ferrying refugees up to Camp Byrd. Injured

military personnel marooned on an office block in a deserted swamp, dying recluses unable to

separate their own identities from the cities where they had spent their lives, disheartened

freebooters who had stayed behind to dive for loot--all these Riggs good-humouredly but firmly

helped back to safety, Kerans ready at his elbow to administer an analgesic or tranquilliser.

Despite his brisk military front, Kerans found the Colonel intelligent and sympathetic, and with a

concealed reserve of droll humour. Sometimes he wondered whether to test this by telling the

Colonel about Bodkin's Pelycosaur, but on the whole decided against it.

The sergeant concerned in the hoax, a dour conscientious Scotsman called Macready, had

climbed up onto the wire cage that enclosed the deck of the cutter and was carefully sweeping away

the heavy fronds and vines strewn across it. None of the three other men tried to help him; under

their heavy tans their faces looked pinched and drawn, and they sat inertly in a row against a

bulkhead. The continuous heat and the massive daily doses of antibiotics drained all energy from

them.

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As the sun rose over the lagoon, driving clouds of steam into the great golden pall,

Kerans felt the terrible stench of the water-line, the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation

and rotting animal carcases. Huge flies spun by, bouncing off the wire cage of the cutter, and

giant bats raced across the heating water towards their eyries in the ruined buildings. Beautiful

and serene from his balcony a few minutes earlier, Kerans realised that the lagoon was nothing

more than a garbage-filled swamp.

"Let's go up onto the deck," he suggested to Riggs, lowering his voice so that the others

would not hear. "I'll buy you a drink."

"Good man. I'm glad to see you've really caught on to the grand manner." Riggs shouted at

Macready: "Sergeant, I'm going up to see if I can get the Doctor's distillation unit to work." He

winked at Kerans as Macready acknowledged this with a sceptical nod, but the subterfuge was

harmless. Most of the men carried hip-flasks, and once they secured the sergeant's grudging

approval they would bring them out and settle down placidly until the Colonel returned.

Kerans climbed over the window-sill into the bedroom overlooking the jetty. 'What's your

problem, Colonel?"

"It's not _my_ problem. If anything, in fact, it's yours."

They trudged up the staircase, Riggs slapping with his baton at the vines entwined around

the rail. "Haven't you got the elevator working yet? I always thought this place was over-rated."

However, be smiled appreciatively when they stepped into the clear ivorycool air of the penthouse,

and sat down thankfully in one of the gilt-legged Louis XV armchairs. "Well, this is very

gracious. You know, Robert, I think you have a natural talent for beachcombing. I may move in here

with you. Any vacancies?"

Kerans shook his head, pressing a tab in the wall and waiting as the cocktail bar

disgorged itself from a fake bookcase. "Try the Hilton. The service is better."

The reply was jocular, but much as he liked Riggs he preferred to see as little of him as

possible. At present they were separated by the intervening lagoons, and the constant clatter of

the galley and armoury at the base were safely muffled by the jungle. Although he had known each

of the twenty men in the unit for at least a couple of years, with the exception of Riggs and

Sergeant Macready, and a few terse grunts and questions in the sickbay, he had spoken to none of

them for six months. Even his contacts with Bodkin he kept to a minimum. By mutual consent the two

biologists had dispensed with the usual pleasantries and small-talk that had sustained them for

the first two years during their sessions of cataloguing and slide preparation at the laboratory.

This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit

and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism

and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he

wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was

symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but 0f a careful preparation for a radically new

environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would

merely be an encumbrance.

He handed a large Scotch to Riggs, then took his own over to the desk, self-consciously

removed some of the books stacked over the radio console.

"Ever try listening to that thing?" Riggs asked, playfully introducing a hint of reproof

into his voice.

"Never," Kerans said. "Is there any point? We know all the news for the next three million

years."

"You don't. Really, you should switch it on just now and then. Hear all sorts of

interesting things." He put his drink down and sat forward. "For example, this morning you would

have heard that exactly three days from now we're packing up and leaving for good." He nodded when

Kerans looked around in surprise. "Came through last night from Byrd. Apparently the water level

is still rising, all the work we've done has been a total waste--as I've always maintained,

incidentally. The American and Russian units are being recalled as well. Temperatures at the

Equator are up to one hundred and eighty degrees now, going up steadily, and the rain belts are

continuous as high as the 20th parallel. There's more silt too--"

He broke off, watching Kerans speculatively. 'What's the matter? Aren't you relieved to be

going?"

"Of course," Kerans said automatically. He was holding an empty glass, and walked across

the room, intending to put it on the bar, instead found himself absent-mindedly touching the clock

over the mantelpiece. He seemed to be searching the room for something. "Three days, you said?"

"What do you want--three million?" Riggs grinned broadly. "Robert, I think you secretly

want to stay behind."

Kerans reached the bar and filled his glass, collecting himself. He had oniy managed to

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survive the monotony and boredom of the previous year by deliberately suspending himself outside

the normal world of time and space, and the abrupt return to earth had momentarily disconcerted

him. In addition, he knew, there were other motives and responsibilities.

"Don't be absurd," he replied easily. "I simply hadn't realised that we might withdraw at

such short notice. Naturally I'm glad to be going. Though I admit I have enjoyed being here." He

gestured at the suite around them. "Perhaps it appeals to my _fin de siecle_ temperament. Up at

Camp Byrd I'll be living in half a mess tin. The nearest I'll ever get to this sort of thing will

be 'Bouncing with Beethoven' on the local radio show."

Riggs roared at this display of disgruntled humour, then stood up, buttoning his tunic.

"Robert, you're a strange one."

Kerans finished his drink abruptly. "Look, Colonel, I don't think I'll be able to help you

this morning after all. Something rather urgent has come up." He noticed Riggs nodding slowly.

"Oh, I see. That was your problem. _My_ problem."

"Right. I saw her last night, and again this morning after the news came through. You'll

have to convince her, Robert. At present she refuses point-blank to go. She doesn't realise that

this time is the end, that there'll be no more holding units. She may be able to hang on for

another six months, but next March, when the rain belts reach here, we won't even be able to get a

helicopter in. Anyway, by then no-one will care. I told her that and she just walked away."

Kerans smiled bleakly, visualising the familiar swirl of hip and haughty stride. "Beatrice

can be difficult sometimes," he temporised, hoping that she hadn't offended Riggs. It would

probably take more than three days to change her mind and he wanted to be sure that the Colonel

would still be waiting. "She's a complex person, lives on many levels. Until they all synchronise

she can behave as if she's insane."

They left the suite, Kerans sealing the air-locks and setting the thermostat alarms so

that the air would be a pleasant eighty degrees in two hours' time. They made their way down to

the landing stage, Riggs pausing occasionally to savour the cool gilded air in one of the public

drawing rooms overlooking the lagoon, hissing at the snakes which glided softly among the damp,

fungus-covered settees. They stepped into the cutter and Macready slammed the door of the cage

behind them.

Five minutes later, the catamaran gliding and swirling behind the cutter, they set off

from the hotel across the lagoon. Golden waves glimmered up into the boiling air, the ring of

massive plants around them seeming to dance in the heat gradients like a voodoo jungle.

Riggs peered sombrely through the cage. "Thank God for that signal from Byrd. We should

have got out years ago. All this detailed mapping of harbours for use in some hypothetical future

is absurd. Even if the solar flares subside it will be ten years before there's any serious

attempt to re-occupy these cities. By then most of the bigger buildings will have been smothered

under the silt. It'll take a couple of divisions to clear the jungle away from this lagoon alone.

Bodkin was telling me this morning that already some of the canopies--of non-lignified plants,

mark you--are over two hundred feet high. The whole place is nothing but a confounded zoo."

He took off his peaked cap and rubbed his forehead, then shouted across the mounting roar

of the two outboard diesels: "If Beatrice stays here much longer she _will_ be insane. By the way,

that reminds me of another reason why we've got to get out." He glanced across at the tall lonely

figure of Sergeant Macready at the tiller, staring fixedly at the breaking water, and at the

pinched haunted faces of the other men. "Tell me, Doctor, how do you sleep these days?"

Puzzled, Kerans turned to look at the Colonel, wondering whether the question obliquely

referred to his relationship with Beatrice Dahl. Riggs watched him with his bright intelligent

eyes, baton flexed between his neat hands. "Very soundly," he replied carefully. "Never better.

Why do you ask?"

But Riggs merely nodded and began to shout instructions at Macready.

CHAPTER 2

The Coming of the Iguanas

Screeching like a dispossessed banshee, a large hammer-nosed bat soared straight out of

one of the narrow inlets off the creek and swerved straight toward the cutter. Its sonar confused

by the labyrinth of giant webs spun across the inlet by the colonies of wolf spiders, it missed

the wire hood above Kerans' head by only a few feet, and then sailed away along the line of

submerged office blocks, gliding in and out of the huge sail-like fronds of the fern trees

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sprouting from their roofs. Suddenly, as it passed one of the projecting cornices, a motionless

stone-headed creature snapped out and plucked the bat from the air. There was a brief piercing

squawk and Kerans caught a glimpse of the crushed wings clamped in the lizard's jaws. Then the

reptile shrank back invisibly among the foliage.

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department

stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly. They launched

themselves into the wake of the cutter, snapping at the insects dislodged from the air-weed and

rotting logs, then swam through the windows and clambered up the staircases to their former

vantage points, piled three deep across each other. Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the

creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like

beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-

time boardrooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant

form of life.

Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they

roused, rekindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles

had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class

feels towards another that usurps it.

At the end of the creek they entered the next lagoon, a wide circle of dark green water

almost half a mile in diameter. A lane of red plastic buoys marked a channel towards an opening on

the far side. The cutter had a draught of little more than a foot, and as they moved along through

the flat water, the sun slanting down behind them opening up the submerged depths, they could see

the clear outlines of five- and six-storey buildings looming like giant ghosts, here and there a

moss-covered roof breaking the surface as the swell rolled past it.

Sixty feet below the cutter a straight grey promenade stretched away between the

buildings, the remains of some former thoroughfare, the rusting humped shells of cars still

standing by the curb. Many of the lagoons in the centre of the city were surrounded by an intact

ring of buildings, and consequently little silt had entered them. Free of vegetation, apart from a

few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like

a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of

the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick

houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting

tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky,

smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Matto

Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms

returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations

military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former

cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged.

Kerans could remember the unending succession of green twilights that had settled behind

them as he and Riggs moved slowly northward across Europe, leaving one city after another, the

miasmic vegetation swamping the narrow canals and crowding from rooftop to rooftop.

Now they were to abandon yet another city. Despite the massive construction of the main

commercial buildings, it consisted of little more than three principal lagoons, surrounded by a

nexus of small lakes fifty yards in diameter and a network of narrow creeks and inlets which wound

off, roughly following the original street-plan of the city, into the outlying jungle. Here and

there they vanished altogether or expanded into the steaming sheets of open water that were the

residues of the former oceans. In turn these gave way to the archipelagoes that coalesced to form

the solid jungles of the southern massif.

The military base set up by Riggs and his platoon, which harboured the biological testing

station, was in the most southerly of the three lagoons, sheltered by a number of the tallest

buildings of the city, thirty-storey blocks in what had once been the down-town financial sector.

As they crossed the lagoon the yellow-striped drum of the floating base was on its sun-

ward side, almost obscured in the reflected light, the rotating blades of the helicopter on its

roof throwing brilliant lances across the smaller white-painted hull of the biological testing

water at them. Two hundred yards down shore was the smaller white-pointed hull of the biological

testing station, moored against a broad hump-backed building which had formerly been a concert

hall.

Kerans gazed up at the rectangular cliffs, enough of the windows intact to remind him of

the illustrations of sun-dazzled promenades at Nice, Rio and Miami he had read about as a child in

the encyclopaedias at Camp Byrd. Curiously, though, despite the potent magic of the lagoon worlds

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and the drowned cities, he had never felt any interest in their contents, and never bothered to

identify which of the cities he was stationed in.

Dr. Bodkin, twenty-five years his senior, had actually lived in several of them, both in

Europe and America, and spent most of his spare time punting around the remoter water-ways,

searching out former libraries and museums. Not that they contained anything other than his

memories.

Perhaps it was this absence of personal memories that made Kerans indifferent to the

spectacle of these sinking civilisations. He had been born and brought up entirely within what had

once been known as the Arctic Circle--now a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature of

eighty-five degrees--and had come southward only on joining one of the ecological surveys in his

early 30's. The vast swamps and jungles had been a fabulous laboratory, the submerged cities

little more than elaborate pedestals.

Apart from a few older men such as Bodkin there was no-one who remembered living in them--

and even during Bodkin's childhood the cities had been beleagured citadels, hemmed in by enormous

dykes and disintegrated by panic and despair, reluctant Venices to their marriage with the sea.

Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes

of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.

The succession of gigantic geophysical upheavals which had transformed the Earth's climate

had made their first impact some sixty or seventy years earlier. A series of violent and prolonged

solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in the Sun had enlarged the Van

Allen belts and diminished the Earth's gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere.

As these vanished into space, depleting the Earth's barrier against the full impact of solar

radiation, temperatures began to climb steadily, the heated atmosphere expanding outwards into the

ionosphere where the cycle was completed.

All over the world, mean temperatures rose by a few degrees each year. The majority of

tropical areas rapidly became uninhabitable, entire populations migrating north or south from

temperatures of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty degrees. Once-temperate areas became

tropical, Europe and North America sweltering under continuous heat waves, temperatures rarely

falling below a hundred degrees. Under the direction of the United Nations, the colonisation began

of the Antarctic plateau and of the northern borders of the Canadian and Russian continents.

Over this initial period of twenty years a gradual adjustment of life took place to meet

the altered climate. A slackening of the previous tempo was inevitable, and there was little spare

energy available to cut back the encroaching jungles of the equatorial region. Not only was the

growth of all plant forms accelerated, but the higher levels of radioactivity increased the rate

at which mutations occurred. The first freak botanical forms appeared, recalling the giant tree-

ferns of the Carboniferous period, and there was a drastic upsurge of all lower plant and animal

forms.

The arrival of these distant forbears was overlayed by the second major geophysical

upheaval. The continued heating of the atmosphere had begun to melt the polar ice-caps. The

entrained ice-seas of the Antarctic plateau broke and dissolved, tens of thousands of glaciers

around the Arctic Circle, from Greenland and Northern Europe, Russia and North America, poured

themselves into the sea, millions of acres of permafrost liquefied into gigantic rivers.

Here again the rise of global water levels would have been little more than a few feet,

but the huge discharging channels carried with them billions of tons of top-soil. Massive deltas

formed at their mouths, extending the continental coastlines and damming up the oceans. Their

effective spread shrank from two-thirds of the world's area to only slightly more than half.

Driving the submerged silt before them, the new seas completely altered the shape and

contours of the continents. The Mediterranean contracted into a system of inland lakes, the

British Isles was linked again with northern France. The Middle West of the United States, filled

by the Mississippi as it drained the Rocky Mountains, became an enormous gulf opening into the

Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean Sea was transformed into a desert of silt and salt flats. Europe

became a system of giant lagoons, centred on the principal low-lying cities, inundated by the silt

carried southwards by the expanding rivers.

During the next thirty years the pole-ward migration of populations continued. A few

fortified cities defied the rising waterlevels and the encroaching jungles, building elaborate sea-

walls around their perimeters, but one by one these were breached. Only within the former Arctic

and Antarctic Circles was life tolerable. The oblique incidence of the Sun's rays provided a

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shield against the more powerful radiation. Cities on higher ground in mountainous areas nearer

the Equator had been abandoned despite their cooler temperatures because of the diminished

atmospheric protection.

It was this last factor which provided its own solution to the problem of re-settling the

migrant populations of the new Earth. The steady decline in mammalian fertility, and the growing

ascendancy of amphibian and reptile forms best adapted to an aquatic life in the lagoons and

swamps, inverted the ecological balances, and by the time of Kerans' birth at Camp Byrd, a city of

ten thousand in Northern Greenland, it was estimated that fewer than five million people were

still living on the polar caps.

The birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in ten yielded

any offspring. As Kerans sometimes reminded himself, the genealogical tree of mankind was

systematically pruning itself, apparently moving backwards in time, and a point might ultimately

be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden.

Riggs noticed him smiling to himself at this conceit. "What's amusing you, Robert? Another

of your obscure jokes? Don't try to explain it to me."

"I was just casting myself in a new role." Kerans looked out over the ramp at the office

blocks sliding past twenty feet away, the wash from the cutter splashing through the open windows

along the water-line. The sharp tang of wet lime contrasted freshly with the over-sweet odours of

the vegetation. Macready had taken them into the shadow of the buildings and it was pleasantly

cool behind the breaking spray.

Across the lagoon he could see the portly bare-chested figure of Dr. Bodkin on the

starboard bridge of the testing station, the Paisley cummerbund around his waist and the green

celluloid shade shielding his eyes making him look like a riverboat gambler on his morning off. He

was plucking the orange-sized berries from the ferns overhanging the station and tossing them up

at the chittering marmosets dangling from the branches above his head, egging them on with playful

shouts and whistles. Fifty feet away, on a projecting cornice, a trio of iguanas watched with

stony disapproval, whipping their tails slowly from side to side in a gesture of impatience.

Macready swung the tiller, and they pivoted in a fan of spray into the lee of a tall white-

faced building which lifted a full twenty storeys out of the water. The roof of an adjacent

smaller block served as a jetty, next to which was moored a rusty white-hulled power cruiser. The

raked perspex windows of the driving cabin were cracked and stained, and the exhaust vents leaked

a scaly oil onto the water.

As the cutter jockeyed in behind the power cruiser under Macready's expert hand, they

clambered over to the wire door, jumped down onto the jetty and crossed a narrow metal gangway

that led into the apartment block. The walls of the corridor were slick with moisture, huge

patches of mould feeding on the plaster, but the elevator was still working, powered by an

emergency diesel. They rose slowly towards the roof, and stepped out on to the upper level of the

duplex, then walked down a service corridor to the outer deck.

Directly below them was the lower level, a small swimming pooi with a covered patio,

bright deck chairs drawn up in the shade by the diving board. Yellow venetian blinds masked the

windows around three sides of the pool, but through the vanes they could see the cool shadows in

the interior lounge, the glint of cut-glass and silver on the occasional tables. In the dim light

under the striped blue awning at the rear of the patio was a long chromium counter, as inviting as

an air-conditioned bar seen from a dusty street, glasses and decanters reflected in a diamond-

paned mirror. Everything in this private haven seemed clean and discreet, thousands of miles away

from the fly-blown vegetation and tepid jungle water twenty storeys below.

Beyond the far end of the pool, screened by an ornamental balcony, was a wide open view of

the lagoon, the city emerging from the encroaching jungle, flat sheets of silver water expanding

towards the green blur along the southern horizon. Massive silt banks lifted their backs through

the surface, a light yellow fur along their spines marking the emergence of the first giant bamboo

groves.

The helicopter rose from its platform on the roof of the base and arced upwards into the

air towards them, the pilot swinging the tail as he changed direction, then roared overhead, two

men in the open hatchway searching the rooftops with binoculars.

Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the

shadows like a sleeping python. The pink-tipped fingers of one hand rested lightly on an ice-

filled glass on a table beside her, while the other hand turned slowly through the pages of a

magazine. Wide blue-black sunglasses hid her smooth sleek face, but Kerans noted the slightly

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sullen pout of her firm lower lip. Presumably Riggs had annoyed her, forcing her to accept the

logic of his argument.

The Colonel paused at the rail, looking down at the beautiful supple body with ungrudging

approval. Noticing him, Beatrice pulled off her sunglasses, then tightened the loose back-straps

of her bikini under her arms. Her eyes glinted quietly.

"All right, you two, get on with it. I'm not a strip show."

Riggs chuckled and trotted down the white metal stairway, Kerans at his heels, wondering

how he was going to persuade Beatrice to leave her private sanctuary.

"My dear Miss Dahl, you should be flattered that I keep coming to see you," Riggs told

her, lifting back the awning and sitting down on one of the chairs. "Besides, as the military

governor of this area--" here he winked playfully at Kerans "--I have certain responsibilities

towards you. And vice versa."

Beatrice regarded him briefly with a jaundiced eye and reached out to turn up the volume

of the radiogram behind her. "Oh God. . . ." She muttered some further, less polite imprecation

under her breath and looked up at Kerans. "And what about you, Robert? What brings you out so

early in the day?"

Kerans shrugged, smiling at her amiably. "I missed you."

"Good boy. I thought perhaps that the gauleiter here had been trying to frighten you with

his horror stories."

"Well, he has, as a matter of fact." Kerans took the magazine propped against Beatrice's

knee and leafed through it idly. It was a forty-year-old issue of Paris Vogue, from its icy pages

evidently kept somewhere in cold storage. He dropped it on the green-tiled floor. "Bea, it looks

as if we'll all have to leave here in a couple of days' time. The Colonel and his men are pulling

out for good. We can't very well stay on after he's gone."

"_We?_" she repeated dryly. "I didn't know there was any chance of your staying behind?"

Kerans glanced involuntarily at Riggs, who was watching him steadily. "There isn't," he

said firmly. "You know what I mean. There'll be a lot to do in the next forty-eight hours, try not

to complicate things by making a last emotional stand."

Before the girl could cut back at Kerans, Riggs added smoothly: "The temperature is still

going up, Miss Dahl, you won't find it easy to stand one hundred and thirty degrees when the fuel

for your generator runs out. The big Equatorial rain belts are moving northward, and they'll be

here in a couple of months. When they leave, and the cloud cover goes, the water in that pool--"

he indicated the tank of steaming, insect-strewn fluid "--will damn nearly boil. What with the

Type X Anopheles, skin cancers and the iguanas shrieking all night down below, you'll get precious

little sleep." Closing his eyes, he added pensively: "That is, assuming that you still want any."

At this last remark the girl's mouth fretted slightly. Kerans realised that the quiet

ambiguity in Riggs' voice when he asked how the biologist slept had not been directed at his

relationship with Beatrice.

The Colonel went on: "In addition, some of the human scavengers driven northward out of

the Mediterranean lagoons won't be too easy to deal with."

Beatrice tossed her long black hair over one shoulder. "I'll keep the door locked,

Colonel."

Irritated, Kerans snapped: "For God's sake, Beatrice, what are you trying to prove? These

self-destructive impulses may be amusing to play with now, but when we've gone they won't be so

funny. The Colonel's only trying to help you--he doesn't really give a hoot whether you stay

behind or not."

Riggs let out a brief laugh. 'Well, I wouldn't say that. But if the thought of my personal

concern worries you so much, Miss Dahl, you can just put it down to my over-developed sense of

duty."

"That's interesting, Colonel," Beatrice commented sarcastically. "I've always understood

that our duty was to stay on here as long as possible and make every sacrifice necessary to that

end. Or at least--" here the familiar gleam of sharp humour crossed her eyes "--that was the

reason my grandfather was given when the government confiscated most of his property." She noticed

Riggs peering over his shoulder at the bar. "What's the matter, Colonel? Looking for your

punkahwallah? I'm not going to get you a drink, if that's what you're after. I think you men only

come up here to booze."

Riggs stood up. "All right, Miss Dahl. I give in. I'll see you later, Doctor." He saluted

Beatrice with a smile. "Some time tomorrow I'll send the cutter over to collect your gear, Miss

Dahl."

When Riggs had gone Kerans lay back in his chair, watching the helicopter circle over the

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adjacent lagoon. Now and then it dived along the water's edge, the down-draught from its rotor

blades beating through the flapping fronds of the fern trees, driving the iguanas across the

rooftops. Beatrice brought a drink from the bar and sat down on the chair at his feet.

"I wish you wouldn't analyse me in front of that man, Robert." She handed him the drink

and then leaned against his knees, resting her chin on one wrist. Usually she looked sleek and

well-fed, but her expression today seemed tired and wistful.

"I'm sorry," Kerans apologised. "Perhaps I was really analysing myself. Riggs' ultimatum

came as a bit of a surprise; I wasn't expecting to leave so soon."

"You are going to leave then?"

Kerans paused. The automatic player in the radiogram switched from Beethoven's Pastoral to

the Seventh, Toscanini giving way to Bruno Walter. All day, without a break, it played through the

cycle of nine symphonies. He searched for an answer, the change of mood, to the sombre opening

motif of the Seventh, overlaying his indecision.

"I suppose I want to, but I haven't yet found an adequate reason. Satisfying one's

emotional needs isn't enough. There's got to be a more valid motive. Perhaps these sunken lagoons

simply remind me. of the drowned world of my uterine childhood--if so, the best thing is to leave

straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There's little hope of standing up to the rainstorms

and the malaria."

He placed his hand on her forehead, feeling her temperature like a child. "What did Riggs

mean when he said you wouldn't sleep well? That was the second time this morning he mentioned it."

Beatrice looked away for a moment. "Oh, nothing. I've just had one or two peculiar

nightmares recently. A lot of people get them . . . Forget it. Tell me, Robert, seriously--if I

decide to stay on here, would you? You could share this apartment."

Kerans grinned. "Trying to tempt me, Bea? What a question. Remember, not only are you the

most beautiful woman here, but you're the only woman. Nothing is more essential than a basis for

comparison. Adam had no aesthetic sense, or he would have realised that Eve was a pretty haphazard

piece of work."

"You are being frank today." Beatrice stood up and went over to the edge of the pool. She

swept her hair back off her forehead with both hands, her long supple body gleaming against the

sunlight. "But is there as much urgency as Riggs claims? We've got the cruiser."

"It's a wreck. The first serious storm will split it open like a rusty can.

Nearing noon, the heat on the terrace had become uncomfortable and they left the patio and

went indoors. Double venetian blinds filtered a thin sunlight into the low wide lounge, and the

refrigerated air was cool and soothing. Beatrice stretched out on a long pale-blue elephant-hide

sofa, one hand playing with the fleecy pile of the carpet. The apartment had been one of her

grandfather's _pied a terres_, and Beatrice's home since her parents' death shortly after her

birth. She had been brought up under the supervision of the grandfather, who had been a lonely,

eccentric tycoon (the sources of his wealth Kerans had never established; when he asked Beatrice,

shortly after he and Riggs stumbled upon her penthouse eyrie, she replied succinctly: "Let's say

he was in money") and a great patron of the arts in his earlier days. His tastes leaned

particularly towards the experimental and bizarre, and Kerans often wondered how far his

personality and its strange internal perspectives had been carried forward into his granddaughter.

Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th century surrealist Delvaux, in which

ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral

bonelike landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst's self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles

screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.

For a few moments Kerans stared quietly at the dim yellow annulus of Ernst's sun glowering

through the exotic vegetation, a curious feeling of memory and recognition signalling through his

brain. Far more potent than the Beethoven, the image of the archaic sun burned against his mind,

illuminating the fleeting shadows that darted fitfully through its profoundest deeps.

"Beatrice."

She looked up at him as he walked across to her, a light frown crossing her eyes. "What's

the matter, Robert?"

Kerans hesitated, suddenly aware that, however brief and imperceptible, a moment of

significant time had elapsed, carrying him forward with its passage into a zone of commitment from

which he would not be able to withdraw.

"You realise that if we let Riggs go without us we don't merely leave here later. We

_stay_."

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file:///F|/rah/J.%20G.%20Ballard/Ballard,%20J%20G%20-%20Book%201%20-%20T\he%20Drowned%20World.txtTHEDROWNEDWORLDbyJ.G.BallardCopyright1962byJ.G.BallardPublishedbyarrangementwiththeauthor'sagent.BERKLEYMEDALLIONEDITION,AUGUST1962CONTENTS1OntheBeachattheRitz2TheComingoftheIguanas3TowardsaNewPsychology...

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Ballard, J G - The Drowned World

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