his head he said: "Part of it used to be called London, not that it matters. Curiously enough, though, I was born here. yesterday I rowed over to the old University quarter, a mass of little creeks, actually found the laboratory where my father used to teach. We left here when I was six, but I can just remember being taken to meet him one day. A few hundred yards away there was a planetarium, I saw a performance once—that was before they bad to re-align the projector. The big dome is still there, about twenty feet below water. It looks like an enormous shell, fucus growing all over it, straight out of 'The Water Babies'. Curiously, looking down at the dome seemed to bring my childhood much nearer. To tell the truth I'd more or less forgotten it—at my age all you have are the memories of memories. After we left here our existence became completely nomadic, and in a sense this city is the only home I've ever known–" He broke off abruptly, his face suddenly tired.
"Go on," Kerans said evenly.
CHAPTER SIX
THE DROWNED ARK
The two men moved quickly along the deck, their padded soles soundless on the metal plates. A white midnight sky hung across the dark surface of the lagoon, a few stationary clumps of cumulus like sleeping galleons. The low night sounds of the jungle drifted over the water; occasionally a marmoset gibbered or the iguanas shrieked distantly from their eyries in the submerged office blocks. Myriads of insects festered along the water-line, momentarily disturbed as the swells rolled in against the base, slapping at the canted sides of the pontoon.
One by one Kerans began to cast off the restraining lines, taking advantage of the swells to lift the loops off the rusting bollards. As the station slowly pivoted away he looked up anxiously at the dark bulk of the base. Gradually the three nearside blades of the helicopter came into view above the top deck, then the slender tail rotor. He paused before releasing the last line, waiting for Bodkin to give the all-clear from the starboard bridge.
The tension on the line had doubled, and it took Kerans several minutes to work the metal loop up the curving lip of the bollard, the successive swells giving him a few inches of slack as the station tilted, followed a moment later by the base. Above him he could hear Bodkin whispering impatiently—they had swung right around into the narrow interval of water behind them and were now face on to the lagoon, the single light in Beatrice's penthouse burning on its pylon. Then he cleared the lip and lowered the heavy cable into the slack water three feet below, watching it cleave back towards the base.
Freed of its attendant burden, and with its centre of gravity raised by the helicopter on its roof, the huge drum rolled over a full five degrees from the vertical, then gradually regained its balance. A light in one of the cabins went on, then flicked off again after a few moments. Kerans seized the boathook on the deck beside him as the interval of open water widened, first to twenty yards, then to fifty. A low current moved steadily through the lagoons, and would carry them back along the shore to their former mooring.
Holding the station off from the buildings they skirted, now and then crushing the soft fern trees sprouting through the windows, they soon covered two hundred yards, slowing as the current diminished around the curve, and finally lodged in a narrow inlet about a hundred feet square in size.
Kerans leaned over the rail, looking down through the dark water at the small cinema theatre twenty feet below the surface, its flat roof luckily uncluttered by elevator-heads or fire escapes. Waving to Bodkin on the deck above, he stepped in through the laboratory and made his way past the specimen tanks and sinks to the companionway leading down to the float.
Only one stop-cock had been built into the base of the float, but as he turned the handwheel a powerful jet of cold foaming water gushed up around his
"Go on," Kerans said evenly.
CHAPTER SIX
THE DROWNED ARK
The two men moved quickly along the deck, their padded soles soundless on the metal plates. A white midnight sky hung across the dark surface of the lagoon, a few stationary clumps of cumulus like sleeping galleons. The low night sounds of the jungle drifted over the water; occasionally a marmoset gibbered or the iguanas shrieked distantly from their eyries in the submerged office blocks. Myriads of insects festered along the water-line, momentarily disturbed as the swells rolled in against the base, slapping at the canted sides of the pontoon.
One by one Kerans began to cast off the restraining lines, taking advantage of the swells to lift the loops off the rusting bollards. As the station slowly pivoted away he looked up anxiously at the dark bulk of the base. Gradually the three nearside blades of the helicopter came into view above the top deck, then the slender tail rotor. He paused before releasing the last line, waiting for Bodkin to give the all-clear from the starboard bridge.
The tension on the line had doubled, and it took Kerans several minutes to work the metal loop up the curving lip of the bollard, the successive swells giving him a few inches of slack as the station tilted, followed a moment later by the base. Above him he could hear Bodkin whispering impatiently—they had swung right around into the narrow interval of water behind them and were now face on to the lagoon, the single light in Beatrice's penthouse burning on its pylon. Then he cleared the lip and lowered the heavy cable into the slack water three feet below, watching it cleave back towards the base.
Freed of its attendant burden, and with its centre of gravity raised by the helicopter on its roof, the huge drum rolled over a full five degrees from the vertical, then gradually regained its balance. A light in one of the cabins went on, then flicked off again after a few moments. Kerans seized the boathook on the deck beside him as the interval of open water widened, first to twenty yards, then to fifty. A low current moved steadily through the lagoons, and would carry them back along the shore to their former mooring.
Holding the station off from the buildings they skirted, now and then crushing the soft fern trees sprouting through the windows, they soon covered two hundred yards, slowing as the current diminished around the curve, and finally lodged in a narrow inlet about a hundred feet square in size.
Kerans leaned over the rail, looking down through the dark water at the small cinema theatre twenty feet below the surface, its flat roof luckily uncluttered by elevator-heads or fire escapes. Waving to Bodkin on the deck above, he stepped in through the laboratory and made his way past the specimen tanks and sinks to the companionway leading down to the float.
Only one stop-cock had been built into the base of the float, but as he turned the handwheel a powerful jet of cold foaming water gushed up around his
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