Suddenly Macready noticed Kerans at the balcony rail. He spoke to the Colonel, who picked up an electric megaphone and walked forwards across the roof.
"KER-ANS!! DOC-TOR KER-ANS!!"
Giant fragments of the amplified phrases boomed among the rooftops, echoing off the aluminium in-falls set into the sheets of windows. Kerans cupped his ears, trying to distinguish what the Colonel was shouting, but the sounds were lost in the mounting roar of the helicopter. Then Riggs and Macready climbed into the cabin, and the pilot began to semaphore at Kerans through the cockpit windscreen.
Kerans translated the morse signals, then turned quickly from the rail and began to carry the deck chairs into the lounge.
"They're going to pick me up here," he told Beatrice as the helicopter rose from its pedestal and lifted diagonally across the lagoon. "You'd better get dressed or out of sight. The slip-stream will strip your towel away like tissue paper. Riggs has got enough to contend with now."
Beatrice helped him furl the awning, and stepped into the lounge as the flickering shadow of the helicopter filled the patio, the downdraught fanning across their shoulders.
"But what's happened, Robert? Why is Riggs so excited?"
Kerans shielded his head from the engine roar and stared out across the green-ringed lagoons stretching towards the horizon, a sudden spasm of anxiety twisting one corner of his mouth.
"He's not excited, just worried stiff. Everything is beginning to collapse around him. Lieutenant Hardman has disappeared!"
Like an immense putrescent sore, the jungle lay exposed below the open hatchway of the helicopter. Giant groves of gymnosperms stretched in dense clumps along the rooftops of the submerged buildings, smothering the white rectangular outlines. Here and there an old concrete water tower protruded from the morass, or the remains of a makeshift jetty still floated beside the hulk of a collapsing office block, overgrown with feathery acacias and flowering tamarisks. Narrow creeks, the canopies overhead turning them into green-lit tunnels, wound away from the larger lagoons, eventually joining the six hundred-yard-wide channels which broadened outwards across the former suburbs of the city. Everywhere the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the foetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow discs of funguscovered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.
Clamped securely to the cabin handrail by the nylon harness around his waist and shoulders, Kerans gazed down at the unfolding landscape, following the water-ways unwinding from the three central lagoons. Five hundred feet below the shadow of the helicopter raced across the mottled green surface of the water, and he focussed his attention on the area immediately around it. An immense profusion of animal life filled the creeks and canals: water-snakes coiled themselves among the crushed palisades of the water-logged bamboo groves, colonies of bats erupted out of the green tunnels like clouds of exploding soot, iguanas sat motionlessly on the shaded cornices like stone sphinxes. Often, as if disturbed by the noise of the helicopter, a human form seemed to dart and hide among the water-line windows, then revealed itself to be a crocodile snapping at a water-fowl, or one end of a subsiding log dislodged from the buffeted tree-ferns.
Twenty miles away the horizon was still obscured by the early morning mists, huge palls of golden vapour that hung from the sky like diaphanous curtains, but the air over the city was clear and vivid, the exhaust vapour of the helicopter sparkling as it receded in a long undulating signature. As they moved away from the central lagoons in their outward spiral sweep Kerans leaned against the hatchway and watched the glistening display, abandoning his search of the jungle below.
The chances of seeing Hardman from the air were infinitesimal. Unless he had taken refuge in a building near the base he would have been forced to travel along the water-ways, where he had the maximum possible protection from aerial observation under the overhanging fern trees.
In the starboard hatchway Riggs and Macready continued their vigil, passing a pair of binoculars to and fro. Without his peaked cap, his thin sandy hair blown forwards over his face, Riggs looked like a ferocious sparrow, his little jaw jutting fiercely at the open air.
He noticed Kerans gazing up at the sky and shouted: "Seen him yet, Doctor? Don't dawdle now, the secret of a successful sweep is one hundred percent cover, one hundred percent concentration."
Accepting the rebuke, Kerans scanned the tilting disc of the jungle again, the tall towers of the central lagoon pivoting around the hatchway. Hardman's disappearance had been discovered by a sick-bay orderly at 8 o'clock that morning, but his bed was cold and he had almost certainly left the previous evening, probably soon after the final ward-roll at 9-30. None of the smaller scows hitched to the jetty rail had gone, but Hardman could easily have lashed together a couple of the empty fuel drums stored in a pile by the C-Deck hold and lowered them noiselessly into the water. However crude, such a craft would paddle smoothly and carry him ten miles away by day-break, somewhere on the perimeter of a search area of some seventy-five square miles, every acre of which was honeycombed by derelict buildings.
Unable to see Bodkin before being winched aboard the helicopter, Kerans could only speculate about Hardman's motives for leaving the base, and whether these were part of a grander design maturing slowly in the Lieutenant's mind or merely a sudden meaningless reaction to the news that they were leaving the lagoons for the north. Kerans' initial excitement had evaporated, and he felt a curious sense of relief, as if one of the opposing lines of force that encircled him had been removed by Hardman's disappearance and the tension and impotence contained in the system suddenly released. If anything, however, the task of remaining behind would now be even more difficult.
Unshackling his harness, Riggs stood up with a gesture of exasperation and handed the binoculars to one of the two soldiers squatting on the floor at the rear of the cabin.
"Open searches are a waste of time over this type of terrain," he shouted at Kerans. 'We'll go down somewhere and have a careful look at the map, you can have a shot at reading Hardman's psychology."
They were about ten miles north-west of the central lagoons, the towers almost obscured in the mists along the horizon. Five miles away, directly between them and the base, was one of the two motor launches, cruising down an open channel, its white wake fading across the glass sheet of the water. Blocked by the urban concentration to the south, less silt had penetrated into the area, and the vegetation was lighter, more expanses of unbroken water between the principal lines of buildings. Altogether the zone below them was empty and uncongested, and Kerans felt convinced, though for no rational reason, that Hardman would not be found in the north-west sector.
Riggs climbed up into the cockpit and a moment later the speed and inclination of the helicopter altered. They began to make a shallow dive, swinging down to within a hundred feet of the water, glided in and out of the wide canals looking for a convenient rooftop on which to perch. Finally they picked out the humped back of a half-submerged cinema and let down slowly onto the square firm roof of the neo-assyrian portico.
For a few minutes they steadied their legs, gazing out over the expanses of blue water. The nearest structure was an isolated department store two hundred yards away, and the open vistas reminded Kerans of Herodotus' description of the landscape in Egypt at floodtime, with its rampart cities like the islands of the Aegean Sea.
Riggs opened his map wallet and spread the polythene print across the cabin floor. Resting his elbows on the edge of the hatchway, he put his finger on their present landing stage.
"Well, Sergeant," he told Daley, "we seem to be half-way back to Byrd. Apart from wearing out the engine we haven't achieved much."
Daley nodded, his small serious face hidden inside the fibre-glass helmet. "Sir, I think our only chance is to carry out low-level inspections over a few selected runs. There's just a hope we might see something-a raft or an oil patch."
"Agreed. But the problem is-" here Riggs drummed on the map with his baton "-where? Hardman is very probably no more than two or three miles from the base. What's your guess, Doctor?"
Kerans shrugged. "I don't really know what Hardman's motives are, Colonel. Latterly he'd been in Bodkin's charge. It may be…"
His voice began to trail off, and Daley cut in with another suggestion, distracting Riggs' attention. For the next five minutes the Colonel, Daley and Macready argued about possible routes Hardman had taken, marking only the wider water-ways as if Hardman were navigating a pocket battleship. Kerans looked around at the water eddying slowly past the cinema. A few branches and dumps of weed drifted along on the northward current, the bright sunlight masking the molten mirror of the surface. The water drummed against the portico beneath his feet, beating slowly against his mind, and setting up a widening circle of interference patterns as if crossing it at an opposite direction to its own course of flow. He watched a succession of wavelets lapping at the sloping roof, wishing that be could leave the Colonel and walk straight down into the water, dissolve himself and the ever-present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical calm, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea.
Suddenly he realised without any shadow of doubt where Hardman was to be found.
He waited for Daley to finish. "… I knew Lieutenant Hardman, sir, flew nearly five thousand hours with him, he's obviously had a brain-storm. He wanted to get back to Byrd, must have decided he couldn't wait any longer, not even two days. He'll have headed north, be resting somewhere along these open channels out of the city."
Riggs nodded doubtfully, apparently unconvinced but prepared to accept the Sergeant's advice in default of any other.
"Well, you may be right. I suppose it's worth trying. What do you think, Kerans?"
Kerans shook his head. "Colonel, it's a complete waste of time searching the areas north of the city. Hardman wouldn't have come up here, it's too open and isolated. I don't know whether he's on foot or paddling a raft, but he certainly isn't going north-Byrd is the last place on Earth he wants to return to. There's only one direction in which Hardman is heading-south." Kerans pointed to the nexus of channels which flowed into the central lagoons, tributaries of a single huge water-way three miles south of the city, its passage indented and diverted by the giant silt banks. "Hardman will be somewhere along there. It probably took him all night to reach the main channel, and I should guess that he's resting in one of the small inlets before he moves on tonight."