Free The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by J. G. Ballard

pool had touched the bows of the stranded car ferry and the white rudder of the restaurant barge beached on the shore beyond the cigarette factory. Little more than an inch deep, the water extended towards the line of drilling rigs, and had almost reached the nearest tower. The stream sluiced down the bank with the comforting splash of an ornamental fountain. My earth dam had been swept aside in a flurry of small heels. In the scattered sand were the prints of a child’s foot with slender but prominent toes.
    For reasons of her own the girl was defending the stream, accepting some self-imposed challenge. She scurried through the trees, fierce eyes watching me from her pallid face, like a child-terrorist who had planted a bomb and was waiting half-fearfully for it to explode. Behind her she towed the filthy bandage, as if trying to confuse me by trailing this thread of her own blood.
    I shouted to her, but my voice was drowned in the blare of the Dakota. It swept above the lake, barely clearing the forest canopy. I stepped into its trembling reflection and walked through the warm water towards the nearest drilling tower.
    A silver arm of the lake had reached the well before me. I leaned between the trestle posts and peered into the bore, where a pool of dusty fluid rose through the discarded newspapers. A horn sounded from the police barracks. Captain Kagwa was waving to me from his jeep. He lowered my suitcases on to the wharf, shook his head in disapproval and drove away. No doubt he had assumed all along that I would stay at Port-la-Nouvelle and had thoroughly enjoyed the irony of my wells filling with water from the forest stream that I had accidentally created.
    Kagwa or no, I would stay at Port-la-Nouvelle and reopen the dispensary. And I would defend my dry wells.

8
The Creation Garden
    ‘We’re threatened, Mallory! Forget your dam!’
    ‘Go away, Sanger. Make a film about someone else.’
    ‘No! Doctor, it’s time to build an ark …’
    A familiar shabby figure in a sweat-stained safari suit hailed me across the water. Sanger lounged back in the stern of his skiff, in relaxed good humour, as always when he saw me working on one of my various futile schemes. He watched me shovel the soil on to the crumbling wall that I hoped would be one shoulder of an earth dam. As hard as I worked, the current carried away the damp clods.
    Mr Pal, his scientific adviser and general factotum, stood in the bows, punt pole sunk into the bed of the stream. He held the craft against the current, staring at my modest efforts with an expression of deep gloom, and then confided his verdict to Sanger.
    ‘Median depth is now three feet, Professor, rising approximately at one inch per hour.’ He spoke in a light educated voice, his diction giving a lilt of good news to his depressing litany. ‘Current estimated three miles per hour, capacity six hundred cubic feet per minute. Flood table imminent.’
    ‘Mallory, did you hear Mr Pal? Flood table imminent.’ I drove the spade into the bank and rested my reddened palms on the handle. Somewhere below my knees a pair of mud-caked boots had vanished into the brown water. My shorts and chest were spattered with the red mud.
    ‘What are you doing here, Sanger? Do you want to interview me?’
    Sanger gestured in an artless way, as if this was a prospect beyond all his dreams. ‘You don’t want to be interviewed, doctor. For you, television is vanity, the death-warrant of the human race written in 625 lines. Yes, you told me so, very bluntly.’ He spread a hand across the water, like a card-sharp about to tamper with a pack. ‘We might be looking for gold.’
    ‘Good, you’ll be able to pay the journalists to come back to Port-la-Nouvelle. And return my fifty dollars.’
    ‘Fifty? As little as that? I feel better about my debt to you. Every dollar you lend me is a deposit in the bank of friendship. Still, it might be worth panning here – there is equipment in the tobacco factory we