Free The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

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."
    He broke off and Riggs stared hard at the map, peaked cap pulled down over his eyes in a gesture of concentration.
    "But why south?" Daley protested. "Once he leaves the channel there's nothing but solid jungle and open sea. The temperature is going up all the time—he'll fry ."
    Riggs looked up at Kerans. "Sergeant Daley has a point, Doctor. Why should Hardman choose to travel south?"
    Looking out across the water again, Kerans replied in a flat voice: "Colonel, there isn't any other direction."
    Riggs hesitated, then glanced at Macready, who had stepped back from the group and was standing beside Kerans, his tall stooped figure silhouetted like a gaunt crow against the water. Almost imperceptibly he nodded to Riggs, answering the unspoken question. Even Daley put a foot up on the cockpit entry step, accepting the logic of Kerans' argument and the shared understanding of Hardman's motives once Kerans had made them explicit.
    Three minutes later the helicopter was