The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1

by J. G. Ballard

  Kersh smiled. 'I was looking in at the commissary, overheard him tell Dr Francis that he wanted to run an experiment on a small group of the crew. An isolation drill, would you believe it. He's estimated that the tractor crews may be isolated for up to two years when the first foraging trips are made.'

  Captain Sanger, the engineering officer, added: 'He's also trying to duck his conditioning sessions. He's wearing a couple of foam pads under his earphones, missing about 90 per cent of the subsonics. We spotted it when the EEG tape we record showed no alpha waves. At first we thought it was a break in the cable, but when we checked visually on the screen we saw that he had his eyes open. He wasn't listening.'

  Francis drummed on the table. 'It wouldn't have mattered. The subsonic was a maths instruction sequence - the fourfigure antilog system.'

  'A good thing he did miss them,' Kersh said with a laugh. 'Sooner or later he'll work out that the dome is travelling in an elliptical orbit 93 million miles from a dwarf star of the G0 spectral class.'

  'What are you doing about this attempt to evade conditioning, Dr Francis?' Short asked. When Francis shrugged vaguely he added: 'I think we ought to regard the matter fairly seriously. From now on we'll be relying on the programming.'

  Flatly, Francis said: 'Abel will resume the conditioning. There's no need to do anything. Without the regular daily contact he'll soon feel lost. The sub-sonic voice is composed of his mother's vocal tones; when he no longer hears it he'll lose his orientations, feel completely deserted.'

  Short nodded slowly. 'Well, let's hope so.' He addressed Dr Kersh. 'At a rough estimate, Doctor, how long will it take to bring them back? Bearing in mind they'll have to be given complete freedom and that every TV and newspaper network in the world will interview each one a hundred times.'

  Kersh chose his words carefully. 'Obviously a matter of years, General. All the conditioning drills will have to be gradually rescored; as a stop-gap measure we may need to introduce a meteor collision... guessing, I'd say three to five years. Possibly longer.'

  'Fair enough. What would you estimate, Dr Francis?'

  Francis fiddled with his blotter, trying to view the question seriously. 'I've no idea. Bring them back. What do you really mean, General? Bring what back?' Irritated, he snapped: 'A hundred years.'

  Laughter crossed the table, and Short smiled at him, not unamiably.

  'That's fifty years more than the original project, Doctor. You can't have been doing a very good job here.'

  Francis shook his head. 'You're wrong, General. The original project was to get them to Alpha Centauri. Nothing was said about bringing them back' When the laughter fell away Francis cursed himself for his foolishness; antagonizing the General wouldn't help the people in the dome.

  But Short seemed unruffled. 'All right, then, it's obviously going to take some time.' Pointedly, with a glance at Francis he added: 'It's the men and women in the ship we're thinking of, not ourselves; if we need a hundred years we'll take them, not one less. You may be interested to hear that the Space Department chiefs feel about fifteen years will be necessary. At least.' There was a quickening of interest around the table. Francis watched Short with surprise. In fifteen years a lot could happen, there might be another spaceward swing of public opinion.

  'The Department recommends that the project continue as before, with whatever budgetary parings we can make - stopping the dome is just a start - and that we condition the crew to believe that a round trip is in progress, that their mission is merely one of reconnaissance, and that they are bringing vital information back to Earth. When they step out of the spaceship they'll be treated as heroes and accept the strangeness of the world around them.' Short looked across the table, waiting for someone to reply. Kersh stared doubtfully at his hands, and Sanger and Chalmers played mechanically with their blotters.

  Just before Short continued Francis pulled himself together, realizing that he was faced with his last opportunity to save the project. However much they disagreed with Short, none of the others would try to argue with him.

  'I'm afraid that won't do, General,' he said, 'though I appreciate the Department's foresight and your own sympathetic approach. The scheme you've outlined sounds plausible, but it just won't work.' He sat forward, his voice controlled and precise. 'General, ever since they were children these people have been trained to accept that they were a closed group, and would never have contact with anyone else. On the unconscious level, on the level of their functional nervous systems, no one else in the world exists, for them the neuronic basis of reality is isolation. You'll never train them to invert their whole universe, any more than you can train a fish to fly. If you start to tamper with the fundamental patterns of their psyches you'll produce the sort of complete mental block you see when you try to teach a left-handed person to use his right.'

  Francis glanced at Dr Kersh, who was nodding in agreement. 'Believe me, General, contrary to what you and the Space Department naturally assume, the people in the dome do not want to come out. Given the choice they would prefer to stay there, just as the goldfish prefers to stay in its bowl.'

  Short paused before replying, evidently re-assessing Francis. 'You may be right, Doctor,' he admitted. 'But where does that get us? We've got 15 years, perhaps 25 at the outside.'

  'There's only one way to do it,' Francis told him. 'Let the project continue, exactly as before, but with one difference. Prevent them from marrying and having children. In 25 years only the present younger generation will still be alive, and a further five years from then they'll all be dead. A life span in the dome is little more than 45 years. At the age of 30 Abel will probably be an old man. When they start to die off no one will care about them any longer.'

  There was a full half minute's silence, and then Kersh said: 'It's the best suggestion, General. Humane, and yet faithful both to the original project and the Department's instructions. The absence of children would be only a slight deviation from the conditioned pathway. The basic isolation of the group would be strengthened, rather than diminished, also their realization that they themselves will never see planet-fall. If we drop the pedagogical drills and play down the space flight they will soon become a small close community, little different from any other out-group on the road to extinction.'

  Chalmers cut in: 'Another point, General. It would be far easier - and cheaper - to stage, and as the members died off we could progressively close down the ship until finally there might be only a single deck left, perhaps even a few cabins.'

  Short stood up and paced over to the window, looking out through the clear glass over the frosted panes at the great dome in the hangar.

  'It sounds a dreadful prospect,' he commented. 'Completely insane. As you say, though, it may be the only way out.'

  Moving quietly among the trucks parked in the darkened hangar, Francis paused for a moment to look back at the lighted windows of the control deck. Two or three of the night staff sat watch over the line of TV screens, half asleep themselves as they observed the sleeping occupants of the dome.

  He ducked out of the shadows and ran across to the dome, climbed the stairway to the entrance point thirty feet above. Opening the external lock, he crawled in and closed it behind him, then unfastened the internal entry hatch and pulled himself out of the sleeping cylinder into the silent cabin.

  A single dim light glowed over the TV monitor screen as it revealed the three orderlies in the control deck, lounging back in a haze of cigarette smoke six feet from the camera.

  Francis turned up the speaker volume, then tapped the mouthpiece sharply with his knuckle.

  Tunic unbuttoned, sleep still shadowing his eyes, Colonel Chalmers leaned forward intently into the screen, the orderlies at his shoulder.

  'Believe me, Roger, you're proving nothing. General Short and the Space Department won't withdraw their decision now that a special bill of enactment has been passed.' When Francis still looked sceptical he added: 'If anything, you're more likely to jeopardize them.'
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  'I'll take a chance,' Francis said. 'Too many guarantees have been broken in the past. Here I'll be able to keep an eye on things.' He tried to sound cool and unemotional; the cine-cameras would be recording the scene and it was important to establish the right impression. General Short would be only too keen to avoid a scandal. If he decided Francis was unlikely to sabotage the project he would probably leave him in the dome.

  Chalmers pulled up a chair, his face earnest, 'Roger, give yourself time to reconsider everything. You may be more of a discordant element than you realize. Remember, nothing would be easier than getting you out - a child could cut his way through the rusty hull with a blunt can-opener.'

  'Don't try it,' Francis warned him quietly. 'I'll be moving down to C-Deck, so if you come in after me they'll all know. Believe me, I won't try to interfere with the withdrawal programmes. And I won't arrange any teen-age marriages. But I think the people inside may need me now for more than eight hours a day.'

  'Francis!' Chalmers shouted. 'Once you go down there you'll never come out! Don't you realize you're entombing yourself in a situation that's totally unreal? You're deliberately withdrawing into a nightmare, sending yourself off on a non-stop journey to nowhere!'

  Curtly, before he switched the set off for the last time, Francis replied: 'Not nowhere, Colonel: Alpha Centauri.'

  Sitting down thankfully in the narrow bunk in his cabin, Francis rested briefly before setting off for the commissary. All day he had been busy coding the computer punch tapes for Abel, and his eyes ached with the strain of manually stamping each of the thousands of minuscule holes. For eight hours he had sat without a break in the small isolation cell, electrodes clamped to his chest, knees and elbows while Abel measured his cardiac and respiratory rhythms.

  The tests bore no relation to the daily programmes Abel now worked out for his father, and Francis was finding it difficult to maintain his patience. Initially Abel had tested his ability to follow a prescribed set of instructions, producing an endless exponential function, then a digital representation of pi to a thousand places. Finally Abel had persuaded Francis to cooperate in a more difficult test - the task of producing a totally random sequence. Whenever he unconsciously repeated a simple progression, as he did if he was tired or bored, or a fragment of a larger possible progression, the computer scanning his progress sounded an alarm on the desk and he would have to start afresh. After a few hours the buzzer rasped out every ten seconds, snapping at him like a bad-tempered insect. Francis had finally hobbled over to the door that afternoon, entangling himself in the electrode leads, found to his annoyance that the door was locked (ostensibly to prevent any interruption by a fire patrol), then saw through the small porthole that the computer in the cubicle outside was running unattended.

  But when Francis' pounding roused Abel from the far end of the next laboratory he had been almost irritable with the doctor for wanting to discontinue the experiment.

  'Damn it, Abel, I've been punching away at these things for three weeks now.' He winced as Abel disconnected him, brusquely tearing off the adhesive tape. 'Trying to produce random sequences isn't all that easy my sense of reality is beginning to fog.' (Sometimes he wondered if Abel was secretly waiting for this.) 'I think I'm entitled to a vote of thanks.'

  'But we arranged for the trial to last three days, Doctor,' Abel pointed out. 'It's only later that the valuable results begin to appear. It's the errors you make that are interesting. The whole experiment is pointless now.'

  'Well, it's probably pointless anyway. Some mathematicians used to maintain that a random sequence was impossible to define.'

  'But we can assume that it is possible,' Abel insisted. 'I was just giving you some practice before we started on the trans-finite numbers.'

  Francis baulked here. 'I'm sorry, Abel. Maybe I'm not so fit as I used to be. Anyway, I've got other duties to attend to.'

  'But they don't take long, Doctor. There's really nothing for you to do now.'

  He was right, as Francis was forced to admit. In the year he had spent in the dome Abel had remarkably streamlined the daily routines, provided himself and Francis with an excess of leisure time, particularly as the latter never went to conditioning (Francis was frightened of the sub-sonic voices - Chalmers and Short would be subtle in their attempts to extricate him, perhaps too subtle).

  Life aboard the dome had been more of a drain on him than he anticipated. Chained to the routines of the ship, limited in his recreations and with few intellectual pastimes - there were no books aboard the ship - he found it increasingly difficult to sustain his former good humour, was beginning to sink into the deadening lethargy that had overcome most of the other crew members. Matthias Granger had retreated to his cabin, content to leave the programming to Abel, spent his time playing with a damaged clock, while the two Peters rarely strayed from Control. The three wives were almost completely inert, satisfied to knit and murmur to each other. The days passed indistinguishably. Sometimes Francis told himself wryly he nearly did believe that they were en route for Alpha Centauri. That would have been a joke for General Short!

  At 6.30 when he went to the commissary for his evening meal, he found that he was a quarter of an hour late.

  'Your meal time was changed this afternoon,' Baker told him, lowering the hatchway. 'I got nothing ready for you.'

  Francis began to remonstrate but the man was adamant. 'I can't make a special dip into space-hold just because you didn't look at Routine Orders can I, Doctor?'

  On the way out Francis met Abel, tried to persuade him to countermand the order. 'You could have warned me, Abel. Damnation, I've been sitting inside your test rig all afternoon.'

  'But you went back to your cabin, Doctor,' Abel pointed out smoothly. 'You pass three SRO bulletins on your way from the laboratory. Always look at them at every opportunity, remember. Last-minute changes are liable at any time. I'm afraid you'll have to wait until 10.30 now.'

  Francis went back to his cabin, suspecting that the sudden change had been Abel's revenge on him for discontinuing the test. He would have to be more conciliatory with Abel, or the young man could make his life a hell, literally starve him to death. Escape from the dome was impossible now - there was a mandatory 20 year sentence on anyone making an unauthorized entry into the space simulator.

  After resting for an hour or so, he left his cabin at 8 o'clock to carry out his duty checks of the pressure seals by the B-Deck Meteor Screen. He always went through the pretence of reading them, enjoying the sense of participation in the space flight which the exercise gave him, deliberately accepting the illusion.

  The seals were mounted in the control point set at ten yard intervals along the perimeter corridor, a narrow circular passageway around the main corridor. Alone there, the servos clicking and snapping, he felt at peace within the space vehicle. 'Earth itself is in orbit around the Sun,' he mused as he checked the seals, 'and the whole solar system is travelling at 40 miles a second towards the constellation Lyra. The degree of illusion that exists is a complex question.'

  Something cut through his reverie.

  The pressure indicator was flickering slightly. The needle wavered between 0.001 and 0.0015 psi. The pressure inside the dome was fractionally above atmospheric, in order that dust might be expelled through untoward cracks (though the main object of the pressure seals was to get the crew safely into the vacuum-proof emergency cylinders in case the dome was damaged and required internal repairs).

  For a moment Francis panicked, wondering whether Short had decided to come in after him - the reading, although meaningless, indicated that a breach had opened in the hull. Then the hand moved back to zero, and footsteps sounded along the radial corridor at right angles past the next bulkhead.

  Quickly Francis stepped into its shadow. Before his death old Peters had spent a lot of time mysteriously pottering around the corridor, probably secreting a private food cache behind one of the rusting panels.

  He leaned forward as the footsteps cro
ssed the corridor.

  Abel?

  ***

  He watched the young man disappear down a stairway, then made his way into the radial corridor, searching the steelgrey sheeting for a retractable panel. Immediately adjacent to the end wall of the corridor, against the outer skin of the dome, was a small fire control booth.

  A tuft of slate-white hairs lay on the floor of the booth.

  Asbestos fibres!

  Francis stepped into the booth, within a few seconds located a loosened panel that had rusted off its rivets. About ten inches by six, it slid back easily. Beyond it was the outer wall of the dome, a hand's breadth away. Here too was a loose plate, held in position by a crudely fashioned hook.

  Francis hesitated, then lifted the hook and drew back the panel.

  He was looking straight down into the hangar!

  Below, a line of trucks was disgorging supplies on to the concrete floor under a couple of spotlights, a sergeant shouting orders at the labour squad. To the right was the control deck, Chalmers in his office on the evening shift.

  The spy-hole was directly below the stairway, and the overhanging metal steps shielded it from the men in the hangar. The asbestos had been carefully frayed so that it concealed the retractable plate. The wire hook was as badly rusted as the rest of the hull, and Francis estimated that the window had been in use for over 30 or 40 years.

  So almost certainly old Peters had regularly looked out through the window, and knew perfectly well that the space ship was a myth. None the less he had stayed aboard, perhaps realizing that the truth would destroy the others, or preferring to be captain of an artificial ship rather than a self-exposed curiosity in the world outside.

  Presumably he had passed on the secret. Not to his bleak taciturn son, but to the one other lively mind, one who would keep the secret and make the most of it. For his own reasons he too had decided to stay in the dome, realizing that he would soon be the effective captain, free to pursue his experiments in applied psychology. He might even have failed to grasp that Francis was not a true member of the crew. His confident mastery of the programming, his lapse of interest in Control, his casualness over the safety devices, all meant one thing - Abel knew!