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file:///F|/rah/J.%20G.%20Ballard/Ballard,%20J%20G%20-%20Book%201%20-%20The%20D
rowned%20World.txt 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
tech, 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 doublepadlocked. 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.
'Cyclotrime-
thylenetrinitramine: 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-mindedily with a 4-inch-diameter brass compass that had
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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, as he visualised himself throwing his weight onto the handles of a
plunger box and catapulting Riggs, the base and the testing station into the
next lagoon, he stopped and steadied himself against the rail. Smiling
ruefully at the absurdity of the fantasy, he wondered why he had indulged it.
Then he noticed the heavy cylinder of the compass dragging at his jacket. For
a moment he peered down at it thoughtfully.
"Watch out, Kerans," he murmured to himself. "You're living on two levels."
Five minutes later, when he entered the sick-bay on B-Deck, he found more
urgent problems facing him.
Three men were being treated for heat ulcers in the dispensary, but the main
twelve-bed ward was empty. Kerans nodded to the corporal issuing penicillin
band-aids and walked through to the small single ward on the starboard side of
the deck.
The door was closed, but as he turned the handle he could hear the restless
heaving motion of the cot, followed by a fractious muttering from the patient
and Dr. Bodkin's equable but firm reply. For a few moments the latter
continued to speak in a iow even monologue, punctuated by a few shrugging
protests and concluded by an interval of tired silence.
Lieutenant Hardman, the senior pilot of the helicopter (now being flown by his
co-pilot, Sergeant Daley) was the oniy other commissioned member of the survey
unit, and until the last three months had served as Riggs' deputy and chief
executive officer. A burly, intelligent but somewhat phlegmatic man of about
30, he had quietly kept himself apart from the other members of the unit.
something of an amateur naturalist, he made his own descriptive notes of the
changing flora and fauna, employing a taxonomic system of his own devising. In
one of his few unguarded moments he had shown the notebooks to Kerans, then
abruptly withdrawn into himself when Kerans tactfully pointed out that the
classifications were confused.
For the first two years Hardman had been the perfect buffer between Riggs and
Kerans. The rest of the crew took their cue from the Lieutenant, and this had
the advantage, from Kerans'
point of view, that the group never developed that sense of happy cohesion a
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