The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1

by J. G. Ballard

Morley picked out Lang's folder and started to sort through the cards. He suspected that Lang's responses to some of the key words and suggestion triggers lying disguised in the question forms might throw illuminating sidelights on to the real motives behind his equation of sleep and death.

  The communicating door to the orderly room opened and an intern looked in.

  'Do you want me to take over in the gym, Doctor?'

  Morley waved him away. 'Don't bother. I'm going back in a moment.'

  He selected the cards he wanted and began to initial his withdrawals. Glad to get away from the glare of the arclights, he delayed his return as long as he could, and it was three twenty-five a. m. when he finally left the office and stepped back into the gymnasium.

  The men were sitting where he had left them. Lang watched him approach, head propped comfortably on a cushion. Avery was slouched down in his armchair, nose in a magazine, while Gorrell hunched over the chessboard, hidden behind the sofa.

  'Anybody feel like coffee?' Morley called out, deciding they needed some exercise.

  None of them looked up or answered. Morley felt a flicker of annoyance, particularly at Lang, who was staring past him at the clock.

  Then he saw something that made him stop.

  Lying on the polished floor ten feet from the sofa was a chess piece. He went over and picked it up. The piece was the black king. He wondered how Gorrell could be playing chess with one of the two essential pieces of the game missing when he noticed three more pieces lying on the floor near by.

  His eyes moved to where Gorrell was sitting.

  Scattered over the floor below the chair and sofa was the rest of the set. Gorrell was slumped over the stool. One of his elbows had slipped and the arm dangled between his knees, knuckles resting on the floor. The other hand supported his face. Dead eyes peered down at his feet.

  Morley ran over to him, shouting: 'Lang! Avery! Get the orderlies!'

  He reached Gorrell and pulled him back off the stool.

  'Lang!' he called again.

  Lang was still staring at the clock, his body in the stiff, unreal posture of a waxworks dummy.

  Morley let Gorrell loll back on to the sofa, leaned over and glanced at Lang's face.

  He crossed to Avery, stretched out behind the magazine, and jerked his shoulder. Avery's head bobbed stiffly. The magazine slipped and fell from his hands, leaving his fingers curled in front of his face.

  Morley stepped over Avery's legs to the gramophone. He switched it on, gripped the volume control and swung it round to full amplitude.

  Above the orderly room door an alarm bell shrilled out through the silence.

  ***

  'Weren't you with them?' Neil! asked sharply.

  'No,' Morley admitted. They were standing by the door of the emergency ward. Two orderlies had just dismantled the electro-therapy unit and were wheeling the console away on a trolley. Outside in the gymnasium a quiet, urgent traffic of nurses and interns moved past. All but a single bank of arc-lights had been switched off, and the gymnasium seemed like a deserted stage at the end of a performance.

  'I slipped into the office to pick up a few test cards,' he explained. 'I wasn't gone more than ten minutes.'

  'You were supposed to watch them continuously,' Neil! snapped. 'Not wander off by yourself whenever you felt like it. What do you think we had the gym and this entire circus set up for?'

  It was a little after five thirty a. m. After working hopelessly on the three men for a couple of hours, he was close to exhaustion. He looked down at them, lying inertly in their cots, canvas sheets buckled up to their chins. They had barely changed, but their eyes were open and unblinking, and their faces had the empty, reflexless look of psychic zero.

  An intern bent over Lang, thumbing a hypodermic. Morley stared at the floor. 'I think they would have gone anyway.'

  'How can you say that?' Neill clamped his lips together. He felt frustrated and impotent. He knew Morley was probably right - the three men were in terminal withdrawal, unresponsive to either insulin or electrotherapy, and a vice-tight catatonic seizure didn't close in out of nowhere - but as always refused to admit anything without absolute proof.

  He led the way into his office and shut the door.

  'Sit down.' He pulled a chair out for Morley and prowled off round the room, slamming a fist into his palm.

  'All right, John. What is it?'

  Morley picked up one of the test cards lying on the desk, balanced it on a corner and spun it between his fingers. Phrases swam through his mind, tentative and uncertain, like blind fish.

  'What do you want me to say?' he asked. 'Reactivation of the infantile imago? A regression into the great, slumbering womb? Or to put it more simply still - just a fit of pique?'

  'Go on.'

  Morley shrugged. 'Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word "sleep" fifty times. After a point the brain's selfawareness dulls. It's no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift.'

  'What do we do then?'

  'Nothing. Short of re-scoring all the way down to Lumbar 1. The central nervous system can't stand narcotomy.'

  Neil! shook his head. 'You're lost,' he said curtly. 'Juggling with generalities isn't going to bring those men back. First, we've got to find out what happened to them, what they actually felt and saw.'

  Morley frowned dubiously. 'That jungle is marked "private". Even if you do, is a psychotic's withdrawal drama going to make any sense?'

  'Of course it will. However insane it seems to us, it was real enough to them. If we know the ceiling fell in or the whole gym filled with ice-cream or turned into a maze, we've got something to work on.' He sat down on the desk. 'Do you remember that story of Chekov's you told me about?'

  "The Bet"? Yes.'

  'I read it last night. Curious. It's a lot nearer what you're really trying to say than you know.' He gazed round the office. 'This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes the mind driven to the furthest limits of selfawareness... Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell and Lang. They must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to grasp the idea, I'd say that they were conscious of nothing else. Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single gigantic eye staring back at him.'

  'So you think their withdrawal is a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?'

  'Not escape,' Neill corrected. 'The psychotic never escapes from anything. He's much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekov's story gives me an idea as to how they might have re-adjusted. Their particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I'm beginning to realize it was a mistake to put them in there - all those lights blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have become an external projection of their own egos.'

  Neill drummed his fingers on the desk. 'My guess is that at this moment they're either striding around in there the size of hundred-foot giants, or else they've cut it down to their own dimensions. More probably that. They've just pulled the gym in on themselves.'

  Morley grinned bleakly. 'So all we've got to do now is pump them full of honey and apomorphine and coax them out. Suppose they refuse?'

  'They won't,' Neill said. 'You'll see.'

  There was a rap on the door. An intern stuck his head through.

  'Lang's coming out of it, Doctor. He's calling for you.'

  Neill bounded out.

  Morley followed him into the ward.

  Lang was lying in his cot, body motionless under the canvas sheet. His lips were parted slightly. No sound came from them but Morley, bending over next to Neill, could see his hyoid bone vibrating in spasms.

  'He's very faint,' the intern warned.

  Neill pulled up a chair and s
at down next to the cot. He made a visible effort of concentration, flexing his shoulders. He bent his head close to Lang's and listened.

  Five minutes later it came through again.

  Lang's lips quivered. His body arched under the sheet, straining at the buckles, and then subsided.

  'Neill... Neill,' he whispered. The sounds, thin and strangled, seemed to be coming from the bottom of a well. 'Neill... Neill... Neill..

  Neill stroked his forehead with a small, neat hand.

  'Yes, Bobby,' he said gently. His voice was feather-soft, caressing. 'I'm here, Bobby. You can come out now.'

  1957

  Track 12

  'Guess again,' Sheringham said.

  Maxted clipped on the headphones, carefully settled them over his ears. He concentrated as the disc began to spin, trying to catch some echo of identity.

  The sound was a rapid metallic rustling, like iron filings splashing through a funnel. It ran for ten seconds, repeated itself a dozen times, then ended abruptly in a string of blips.

  'Well?' Sheringham asked. 'What is it?'

  Maxted pulled off his headphones, rubbed one of his ears. He had been listening to the records for hours and his ears felt bruised and numb.

  'Could be anything. An ice-cube melting?'

  Sheringham shook his head, his little beard wagging.

  Maxted shrugged. 'A couple of galaxies colliding?'

  'No. Sound waves don't travel through space. I'll give you a clue. It's one of those proverbial sounds.' He seemed to be enjoying the catechism.

  Maxted lit a cigarette, threw the match onto the laboratory bench. The head melted a tiny pool of wax, froze and left a shallow black scar. He watched it pleasurably, conscious of Sheringham fidgeting beside him.

  He pumped his brains for an obscene simile. 'What about a fly - '

  'Time's up,' Sheringham cut in. 'A pin dropping.' He took the 3-inch disc off the player, angled it into its sleeve.

  'In actual fall, that is, not impact. We used a fifty-foot shaft and eight microphones. I thought you'd get that one.'

  He reached for the last record, a 12-inch LP, but Maxted stood up before he got it to the turntable. Through the french windows he could see the patio, a table, glasses and decanter gleaming in the darkness. Sheringham and his infantile games suddenly irritated him; he felt impatient with himself for tolerating the man so long.

  'Let's get some air,' he said brusquely, shouldering past one of the amplifier rigs. 'My ears feel like gongs.'

  'By all means,' Sheringham agreed promptly. He placed the record carefully on the turntable and switched off the player. 'I want to save this one until later anyway.'

  They went out into the warm evening air. Sheringham turned on the Japanese lanterns and they stretched back in the wicker chairs under the open sky.

  'I hope you weren't too bored,' Sheringham said as he handled the decanter. 'Microsonics is a fascinating hobby, but I'm afraid I may have let it become an obsession.'

  Maxted grunted non-committally. 'Some of the records are interesting,' he admitted. 'They have a sort of crazy novelty value, like blown-up photographs of moths' faces and razor blades. Despite what you claim, though, I can't believe microsonics will ever become a scientific tool. It's just an elaborate laboratory toy.'

  Sheringham shook his head. 'You're completely wrong, of course. Remember the cell division series I played first of all? Amplified 100,000 times animal cell division sounds like a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart - how did you put it? - a car smash in slow motion. On the other hand, plant cell division is an electronic poem, all soft chords and bubbling tones. Now there you have a perfect illustration of how microsonics can reveal the distinction between the animal and plant kingdoms.'

  'Seems a damned roundabout way of doing it,' Maxted commented, helping himself to soda. 'You might as well calculate the speed of your car from the apparent motion of the stars. Possible, but it's easier to look at the speedometer.'

  Sheringham nodded, watching Maxted closely across the table. His interest in the conversation appeared to have exhausted itself, and the two men sat silently with their glasses. Strangely, the hostility between them, of so many years' standing, now became less veiled, the contrast of personality, manner and physique more pronounced. Maxted, a tall fleshy man with a coarse handsome face, lounged back almost horizontally in his chair, thinking about Susan Sheringham. She was at the Turnbulls' party, and but for the fact that it was no longer discreet of him to be seen at the Turnbulls' - for the all-toofamiliar reason - he would have passed the evening with her, rather than with her grotesque little husband.

  He surveyed Sheringham with as much detachment as he could muster, wondering whether this prim unattractive man, with his pedantry and in-bred academic humour, had any redeeming qualities whatever. None, certainly, at a casual glance, though it required some courage and pride to have invited him round that evening. His motives, however, would be typically eccentric.

  The pretext, Maxted reflected, had been slight enough - Sheringham, professor of biochemistry at the university, maintained a lavish home laboratory; Maxted, a run-down athlete with a bad degree, acted as torpedo-man for a company manufacturing electron microscopes; a visit, Sheringham had suggested over the phone, might be to the profit of both.

  Of course, nothing of this had in fact been mentioned. But nor, as yet, had he referred to Susan, the real subject of the evening's charade. Maxted speculated upon the possible routes Sheringham might take towards the inevitable confrontation scene; not for him the nervous circular pacing, the well-thumbed photostat, or the tug at the shoulder. There was a vicious adolescent streak running through Sheringham - Maxted broke out of his reverie abruptly. The air in the patio had become suddenly cooler, almost as if a powerful refrigerating unit had been switched on. A rash of goose-flesh raced up his thighs and down the back of his neck, and he reached forward and finished what was left of his whisky.

  'Cold out here,' he commented.

  Sheringham glanced at his watch. 'Is it?' he said. There was a hint of indecision in his voice; for a moment he seemed to be waiting for a signal. Then he pulled himself together and, with an odd half-smile, said: 'Time for the last record.'

  'What do you mean?' Maxted asked.

  'Don't move,' Sheringham said. He stood up. 'I'll put it on.' He pointed to a loudspeaker screwed to the wall above Maxted's head, grinned and ducked out.

  Shivering uncomfortably, Maxted peered up into the silent evening sky, hoping that the vertical current of cold air that had sliced down into the patio would soon dissipate itself.

  A low noise crackled from the speaker, multiplied by a circle of other speakers which he noticed for the first time had been slung among the trellis-work around the patio.

  Shaking his head sadly at Sheringham's antics, he decided to help himself to more whisky. As he stretched across the table he swayed and rolled back uncontrollably into his chair. His stomach seemed to be full of mercury, ice-cold and enormously heavy. He pushed himself forward again, trying to reach the glass, and knocked it across the table. His brain began to fade, and he leaned his elbows helplessly on the glass edge of the table and felt his head fall onto his wrists.

  When he looked up again Sheringham was standing in front of him, smiling sympathetically.

  'Not too good, eh?' he said.

  Breathing with difficulty, Maxted managed to lean back. He tried to speak to Sheringham, but he could no longer remember any words. His heart switchbacked, and he grimaced at the pain.

  'Don't worry,' Sheringham assured him. 'The fibrillation is only a side effect. Disconcerting, perhaps, but it will soon pass.'

  He strolled leisurely around the patio, scrutinizing Maxted from several angles. Evidently satisfied, he sat down on the table. He picked up the siphon and swirled the contents about. 'Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body's fluid balances, floods hydroxyl ions into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown. Really drown, that is
, not merely suffocate as you would if you were immersed in an external bath. However, I mustn't distract you.'

  He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.

  'Fantastic, isn't it?' Sheringham said. Twirling the siphon by its neck he stepped over Maxted's legs and adjusted the tone control under one of the speaker boxes. He looked blithe and spruce, almost ten years younger. 'These are 30second repeats, 400 microsens, amplification one thousand. I admit I've edited the track a little, but it's still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become. You'll never guess what this was.'

  Maxted stirred sluggishly. The lake of mercury in his stomach was as cold and bottomless as an oceanic trench, and his arms and legs had become enormous, like the bloated appendages of a drowned giant. He could just see Sheringham bobbing about in front of him, and hear the slow beating of the sea in the distance. Nearer now, it pounded with a dull insistent rhythm, the great waves ballooning and bursting like bubbles in a lava sea.

  'I'll tell you, Maxted, it took me a year to get that recording,' Sheringham was saying. He straddled Maxted, gesturing with the siphon. 'A year. Do you know how ugly a year can be?' For a moment he paused, then tore himself from the memory. 'Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. You know, Maxted, there are audio-probes everywhere here. Slim as pencils, with a six-inch focus. I had four in that headrest alone.' He added, as a footnote: 'The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.'

  Maxted drifted in a wash of sound.

  Some while later Sheringham's face filled his eyes, beard wagging, mouth working wildly.

  'Maxted! You've only two more guesses, so for God's sake concentrate,' he shouted irritably, his voice almost lost among the thunder rolling from the sea. 'Come on, man, what is it? Maxted!' he bellowed. He leapt for the nearest loudspeaker and drove up the volume. The sound boomed out of the patio, reverberating into the night.