The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

fish and the airbreathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and Triassic Eras."
    Bodkin moved back to his desk, and ran his hand over the rack of records. Listening distantly to Bodkin's quiet, unhurried voice, Kerans toyed with the notion that the row of parallel black discs was a model of a neurophonic spinal column. He remembered the faint drumming emitted by the record player in Hardman's cabin, and its strange undertones. Perhaps the conceit was closer to the truth than he imagined?
    Bodkin went on: "If you like, you could call this the Psychology of Total Equivalents—let's say 'Neuronics' for short—and dismiss it as metabiological fantasy. However, I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amnionic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total re-orientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as they re-appear we'll be swept back helplessly in the flood-tide like pieces of flotsam." He picked one of the records from the rack, then pushed it away with a gesture of uncertainty. 'This afternoon I may have been taking a risk with Hardman, using the heater to simulate the sun and raise the temperature well into the 120's, but it was worth a chance. For the previous three weeks his dreams were almost driving him out of his mind, but during the last few days he's been much less disturbed, almost as if he were accepting the dreams and allowing himself to be carried back without retaining any conscious control. For his own sake I want to keep him awake as long as possible—the alarm clocks may do it."
    "If he remembers to keep them set," Kerans commented quietly.
    Outside in the lagoon the sounds of Riggs' cutter droned past. Stretching his legs, Kerans walked over to the window, and watched the landing craft swing in a diminishing arc around the base. While it berthed by the jetty Riggs held an informal conference with Macready across the gangway. Several times he pointed to the testing station with his baton, and Kerans assumed that they were preparing to tow the station over to the base. But for some reason the imminent departure left him unmoved. Bodkin's speculations, however nebulous, and his new psychology of Neuronics, offered a more valid explanation for the metamorphosis taking place in his mind than any other. The tacit assumption made by the UN directorate—that within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions—was obviously fallacious, as the mounting flood-water and temperature would show when they reached the so-called polar redoubts. A more important task than map ping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents.
    "Alan," he asked over his shoulder, still watching Riggs stamping about on the landing jetty, "why don't you draft a report to Byrd, I think you should let them know. There's always a chance of—"
    But Bodkin had gone. Kerans listened to his feet dump slowly up the stairway and disappear into his cabin, the fatigued tread of a man too old and too experienced to care whether or not his warnings were heeded.
    Kerans went back to his desk and sat down. From his jacket pocket he withdrew the compass and placed it in front of him, cradling it between his hands. Around him the muted sounds of the laboratory formed a low background to his mind, the furry puttering of the marmoset, the tick of a