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curiously light-headed, though he had barely touched his cocktail.
"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
space." 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 cumbersomely 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,
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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 slowiy 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, molluscs 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.
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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, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]