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 bone-like 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.”
CHAPTER THREE TOWARDS A NEW PSYCHOLOGY
BERTHING THE CATAMARAN against the landing stage, Kerans shipped the outboard and then made his way up the gangway into the base. As he let himself through the screen hatch he looked back over his shoulder across the lagoon, and caught a brief glimpse through the heat waves of Beatrice standing at her balcony rail. When he waved, however, she characteristically turned away without responding.
“One of her moody days, Doctor?” Sergeant Macready stepped from the guard cubicle, a trace of humour relaxing his beak-like face. “She’s a strange one, all right.”
Kerans shrugged. “These tough bachelor girls, you know, Sergeant. If you’re not careful they frighten the wits out of you. I’ve been trying to persuade her to pack up and come with us. With a little luck I think she will.”
Macready peered shrewdly at the distant roof of the apartment house. “I’m glad to hear you say so, Doctor,” he ventured noncommittally, but Kerans was unable to decide if his scepticism was directed at Beatrice or himself.
Whether or not they finally stayed behind, Kerans had resolved to maintain the pretence that they were leaving—every spare minute of the next three days would be needed to consolidate their supplies and steal whatever extra equipment they required from the base stores. Kerans had still not made up his mind—once away from Beatrice his indecision returned (ruefully he wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse him, Pandora with her killing mouth and witch’s box of desires and frustrations, unpredictably opening and shutting the lid)—but rather than stumble about in a state of tortured uncertainty, which Riggs and Bodkin would soon diagnose, he decided to postpone a final reckoning until the last moment possible. Much as he loathed the base, he knew that the sight of it actually sailing off would act as a wonderful catalyst for emotions of fear and panic, and any more abstract motives for staying behind would soon be abandoned. A year earlier, he had been accidentally marooned on a small key while taking an unscheduled geomagnetic reading, the departure siren muffled by his headphones as he crouched over his instruments in an old basement bunker. When he emerged ten minutes later and found the base six hundred yards away across a widening interval of flat water he had felt like a child parted forever from its mother, barely managed to control his panic in time to fire a warning shell from his flare pistol.
“Dr. Bodkin asked me to call you as soon as you arrived, sir. Lieutenant Hardman hasn’t been too happy this morning.”
Kerans nodded, glancing up and down the empty deck. He had taken lunch with Beatrice, knowing that the base was deserted in the afternoons. Half the crew were away with either Riggs or the helicopter, the rest asleep in their bunks, and he had hoped to carry out a private tour of the stores and armoury. Now unluckily, Macready, the Colonel’s ever-alert watch-dog, was hanging about at his heels, ready to escort him up the companion-way to the sick-bay on B-Deck.
Kerans studiously examined a pair of Anopheles mosquitoes which had slipped through the wire hatch behind him. “They’re still getting in,” he pointed out to Macready. “What’s happened to the double screening you were supposed to be putting up?”
Swatting at the mosquitoes with his forage cap, Macready looked around uncertainly. A secondary layer of screening around the wire mesh enclosing the base had long been one of Colonel Riggs’ pet projects. At times he would tell Macready to detail a squad to carry out the work, but as this involved sitting on a wooden trestle in the open sunlight in the centre of a cloud of mosquitoes only a few token sections around Riggs’ cabin had been completed. Now that they were moving northward the utility of the project had faded, but Macready’s Presbyterian conscience, once roused, refused to let him rest.
“I’ll get the men on to it this evening, Doctor,” he assured Kerans, pulling a ball-pen and note-book from his hip pocket.
“No hurry, Sergeant, but if you’ve nothing better to do. I know the Colonel’s very keen.” Kerans left him squinting along the metal louvres and walked off down the deck. As soon as he was out of sight he stepped through the first doorway.
C-Deck, the lowest of the three decks comprising the base, contained the crew’s quarters and galley. Two or three men lay about among their tropical gear in the cabins, but the recreation-room was empty, a radio playing to itself by the table-tennis tournament board in the corner. Kerans paused, listening to the strident rhythms of the guitar music, overlayed by the distant blare of the helicopter circling over the next lagoon, then made his way down the central stair-well which led to the armoury and workshops housed in the pontoon.
Three-quarters of the hull was occupied by the 2,000-h.p. diesels which powered the twin screws, and by the oil and aviation fuel tanks, and the workshops had been temporarily transferred during the final aerial sweeps to two vacant offices on A-Deck, beside the officers’ quarters, so that the mechanics could service the helicopter with the maximum speed.
The armoury was closed when Kerans entered, a single light burning in the technical corporal’s glass-walled booth. Kerans gazed around the heavy wooden benches and cabinets lined with carbines and submachine-guns. Steel rods through the trigger guards locked the weapons into their cases, and he idly touched the heavy stocks, doubting whether he could handle any of the weapons even if he stole one. In a drawer at the testing station was a Colt .45 and fifty rounds issued to him three years earlier. Once a year he made an official return on the ammunition discharged—in his case none—and exchanged the unused shells for a fresh issue, but he had never tried to fire the pistol.
On his way out he scanned the dark green ammunition boxes stacked around the wall below the cabinets, all of them double-padlocked. He was passing the booth when the light through the door illuminated the dusty labels on a row of metal cartons below one of the work benches.
‘Hy-Dyne.’ On an impulse Kerans stopped, pushed his fingers through the wire cage and brushed the dust off a label, tracing the formula with his fingers. ‘Cyclo-trimethylene-trinitramine: Gas discharge speed—8,000 metres/second.’
Speculating on the possible uses of the explosive—it would be a brilliant tour de force to sink one of the office buildings into the exit creek after Riggs had left, blocking any attempt to return—he leaned his elbows on the bench, playing absent-mindedly with a 4-inch-diameter brass compass that had been left for repair. The calibrated annulus was loose and had been rotated a full 180 degrees, the point emphasised with a chalked cross.
Still thinking about the explosive, and the possibility of stealing detonators and fuse-wire, Kerans rubbed away the blunt chalk marks and then lifted the compass and weighed it in his hand. Leaving the armoury, he began to climb the stairway, uncaging the compass and letting the pointer dance and float. A sailor walked past along C-Deck, and Kerans quickly slipped the compass into his jacket pocket.
Suddenly,