The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1

by J. G. Ballard

  'What is the basic personality, though? A skilful analyst can manipulate the psyche to suit the suggestion, magnify a small streak of self-destruction until it cleaves the entire personality like an axe splitting a log.'

  Forbis pondered this gloomily for a few moments, then brightened slightly. 'Well, I seem to have the suggestion beaten. Whatever happens, I can't actually reach the roof, so I must have enough strength to fight it.'

  Vansittart shook his head. 'As a matter of fact, you haven't. It's not you who's keeping yourself off the roof, it's me.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I implanted another hypnotic suggestion, holding you on the 99th floor. When I uncovered the first suggestion I tried to erase it, found I wasn't even scratching the surface, so just as a precaution I inserted a second of my own. "Get off at the 99th floor." How long it will hold you there I don't know, but already it's fading. Today it took you over seven hours to call me. Next time you may get up enough steam to hit the roof. That's why I think we should take a new line, really get to the bottom of this obsession, or rather' - he smiled ruefully - 'to the top.'

  Forbis sat up slowly, massaging his face. 'What do you suggest?'

  'We'll let you reach the roof. I'll erase my secondary command and we'll see what happens when you step out on to the top deck. Don't worry, I'll be with you if anything goes wrong. It may seem pretty thin consolation, but frankly, Forbis, it would be so easy to kill you and get away with it that I can't understand anyone bothering to go to all this trouble. Obviously there's some deeper motive, something connected, perhaps, with the 100th floor.' Vansittart paused, watching Forbis carefully, then asked in a casual voice: 'Tell me, have you ever heard of anyone called Fowler?'

  He said nothing when Forbis shook his head, but privately noted the reflex pause of unconscious recognition.

  'All right?' Vansittart asked as they reached the bottom of the final stairway.

  'Fine,' Forbis said quietly, catching his breath. He looked up at the rectangular opening above them, wondering how he would feel when he finally reached the roof-top. They had sneaked into the building by one of the service entrances at the rear, and then taken a freight elevator to the 80th floor.

  'Let's go, then,' Vansittart walked on ahead, beckoning Forbis after him. Together they climbed up to the final doorway, and stepped out into the bright sunlight.

  'Doctor...!' Forbis exclaimed happily. He felt fresh and exhilarated, his mind clear and unburdened at last. He gazed around the small flat roof, a thousand ideas tumbling past each other in his mind like the crystal fragments of a mountain stream. Somewhere below, however, a deeper current tugged at him.

  _Go up to the 100th floor and..._

  Around him lay the roof-tops of the city, and half a mile away, hidden by the haze, was the spire of the building he had tried to scale the previous day. He strolled about the roof, letting the cool air clear the sweat from his face. There were no suicide grilles around the balcony, but their absence caused him no anxiety.

  Vansittart was watching him carefully, black valise in one hand. He nodded encouragingly, then gestured Forbis toward the balcony, eager to rest the valise on the ledge.

  'Feel anything?'

  'Nothing.' Forbis laughed, a brittle chuckle. 'It must have been one of those impractical jokes - "Now let's see you get down." Can I look into the street?'

  'Of course,' Vansittart agreed, bracing himself to seize Forbis if the little man attempted to jump. Beyond the balcony was a thousand-foot drop into a busy shopping thoroughfare.

  Forbis clasped the near edge of the balcony in his palms and peered down at the lunch crowds below. Cars edged and shunted like coloured fleas, and people milled about aimlessly on the pavements. Nothing of any interest seemed to be happening.

  Beside him, Vansittart frowned and glanced at his watch, wondering whether something had misfired. 'It's 12.30,' he said. 'We'll give up - , He broke off as footsteps creaked on the stairway below. He swung around and watched the doorway, gesturing to Forbis to keep quiet.

  As he turned his back the small man suddenly reached up and cut him sharply across the neck with the edge of his right hand, stunning him momentarily. When Vansittart staggered back he expertly chopped him on both sides of the throat, then sat him down and kicked him senseless with his knees.

  Working swiftly, he ignored the broad shadow which reached across the roof to him from the doorway. He carefully fastened Vansittart's three jacket buttons, and then levered him up by the lapels on to his shoulder.

  Backing against the balcony, he slid him on to the ledge, straightening his legs one after the other. Vansittart stirred helplessly, head lolling from side to side.

  And... and...

  Behind Forbis the shadow drew nearer, reaching up the side of the balcony, a broad neckless head between heavy shoulders.

  Cutting off his pumping breath, Forbis reached out with both hands and pushed.

  Ten seconds later, as horns sounded up dimly from the street below, he turned around.

  'Good boy, Forbis.'

  The big man's voice was flat but relaxed. Ten feet from Forbis, he watched him amiably. His face was plump and sallow, a callous mouth half-hidden by a brush moustache. He wore a bulky black overcoat, and one hand rested confidently in a deep pocket.

  'Fowler!' Involuntarily, Forbis tried to move forward, for a moment attempting to reassemble his perspectives, but his feet had locked into the white surface of the roof.

  Three hundred feet above, an airliner roared over. In a lucid interval provided by the noise, Forbis recognized Fowler, Vansittart's rival for the psychology professorship, remembered the long sessions of hypnosis after Fowler had picked him up in a bar three months earlier, offering to cure his chronic depression before it slid into alcoholism.

  With a grasp, he remembered too the rest of the buried command.

  So Vansittart had been the real target, not himself! Go up to the 100th floor and... His first attempt at Vansittart had been a month earlier, when Fowler had left him on the roof and then pretended to be the janitor, but Vansittart had brought two others with him. The mysterious hidden command had been the bait to lure Vansittart to the roof again. Cunningly, Fowler had known that sooner or later Vansittart would yield to the temptation.

  'And...' he said aloud.

  Looking for Vansittart, in the absurd hope that he might have survived the thousand-foot fall, he started for the balcony, then tried to hold himself back as the current caught him.

  'And - ? Fowler repeated pleasantly. His eyes, two festering points of light, made Forbis sway. 'There's still some more to come, isn't there, Forbis? You're beginning to remember it now.'

  Mind draining, Forbis turned to the balcony, dry mouth sucking at the air.

  'And - ?' Fowler snapped, his voice harder.

  ... And... and...

  Numbly, Forbis jumped up on to the balcony, and poised on the narrow ledge like a diver, the streets swaying before his eyes. Below, the horns were silent again and the traffic had resumed its flow, a knot of vehicles drawn up in the centre of a small crowd by the edge of the pavement. For a few moments he managed to resist, and then the current caught him, toppling him like a drifting spar.

  Fowler stepped quietly through the doorway. Ten seconds later, the horns sounded again.

  1962

  The Subliminal Man

  'The signs, Doctor! Have you seen the signs?'

  Frowning with annoyance, Dr Franklin quickened his pace and hurried down the hospital steps towards the line of parked cars. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of a young man in ragged sandals and paint-stained jeans waving to him from the far side of the drive.

  'Dr Franklin! The signs!'

  Head down, Franklin swerved around an elderly couple approaching the out-patients department. His car was over a hundred yards away. Too tired to start running himself, he waited for the young man to catch him up.

  'All right, Hathaway, what is it this time?' he snapped. 'I'm si
ck of you hanging around here all day.'

  Hathaway lurched to a halt in front of him, uncut black hair like an awning over his eyes. He brushed it back with a claw-like hand and turned on a wild smile, obviously glad to see Franklin and oblivious of the latter's hostility.

  'I've been trying to reach you at night, Doctor, but your wife always puts the phone down on me,' he explained without a hint of rancour, as if well-used to this kind of snub. 'And I didn't want to look for you inside the Clinic.' They were standing by a privet hedge that shielded them from the lower windows of the main administrative block, but Franklin's regular rendezvous with Hathaway and his strange messianic cries had already become the subject of amused comment.

  Franklin began to say: 'I appreciate that - ' but Hathaway brushed this aside. 'Forget it, Doctor, there are more important things now. They've started to build the first big signs! Over a hundred feet high, on the traffic islands outside town. They'll soon have all the approach roads covered. When they do we might as well stop thinking.'

  'Your trouble is that you're thinking too much,' Franklin told him. 'You've been rambling about these signs for weeks now. Tell me, have you actually seen one signalling?'

  Hathaway tore a handful of leaves from the hedge, exasperated by this irrelevancy. 'Of course I haven't, that's the whole point, Doctor.' He dropped his voice as a group of nurses walked past, watching his raffish figure out of the corners of their eyes. 'The construction gangs were out again last night, laying huge power cables. You'll see them on the way home. Everything's nearly ready now.'

  'They're traffic signs,' Franklin explained patiently. 'The flyover has just been completed. Hathaway, for God's sake, relax. Try to think of Dora and the child.'

  'I am thinking of them!' Hathaway's voice rose to a controlled scream. 'Those cables were 40,000-volt lines, Doctor, with terrific switch-gear. The trucks were loaded with enormous metal scaffolds. Tomorrow they'll start lifting them up all over the city, they'll block off half the sky! What do you think Dora will be like after six months of that? We've got to stop them, Doctor, they're trying to transistorize our brains!'

  Embarrassed by Hathaway's high-pitched shouting, Franklin had momentarily lost his sense of direction. Helplessly he searched the sea of cars for his own. 'Hathaway, I can't waste any more time talking to you. Believe me, you need skilled help, these obsessions are beginning to master you.'

  Hathaway started to protest, and Franklin raised his right hand firmly. 'Listen. For the last time, if you can show me one of these signs, and prove it's transmitting subliminal commands, I'll go to the police with you. But you haven't got a shred of evidence, and you know it. Subliminal advertising was banned thirty years ago, and the laws have never been repealed. Anyway, the technique was unsatisfactory, any success it had was marginal. Your idea of a huge conspiracy with all these thousands of giant signs everywhere is preposterous.'

  'All right, Doctor.' Hathaway leaned against the bonnet of one of the cars. His mood seemed to switch abruptly from one level to the next. He watched Franklin amiably. 'What's the matter - lost your car?'

  'All your damned shouting has confused me.' Franklin pulled out his ignition key and read the number off the tag: 'NYN 299-566-367-21 can you see it?'

  Hathaway leaned around lazily, one sandal up on the bonnet, surveying the square of a thousand or so cars facing them. 'Difficult, isn't it, when they're all identical, even the same colour? Thirty years ago there were about ten different makes, each in a dozen colours.'

  Franklin spotted his car and began to walk towards it. 'Sixty years ago there were a hundred makes. What of it? The economies of standardization are obviously bought at a price.'

  Hathaway drummed his palm on the roofs. 'But these cars aren't all that cheap, Doctor. In fact, comparing them on an average income basis with those of thirty years ago they're about forty per cent more expensive. With only one make being produced you'd expect a substantial reduction in price, not an increase.'

  'Maybe,' Franklin said, opening his door. 'But mechanically the cars of today are far more sophisticated. They're lighter, more durable, safer to drive.'

  Hathaway shook his head sceptically. 'They bore me. The same model, same styling, same colour, year after year. It's a sort of communism.' He rubbed a greasy finger over the windshield. 'This is a new one again, isn't it, Doctor? Where's the old one - you only had it for three months?'

  'I traded it in,' Franklin told him, starting the engine. 'If you ever had any money you'd realize that it's the most economical way of owning a car. You don't keep driving the same one until it falls apart. It's the same with everything else - television sets, washing machines, refrigerators. But you aren't faced with the problem.'

  Hathaway ignored the gibe, and leaned his elbow on Franklin's window. 'Not a bad idea, either, Doctor. It gives me time to think. I'm not working a twelve-hour day to pay for a lot of things I'm too busy to use before they're obsolete.'

  He waved as Franklin reversed the car out of its line, then shouted into the wake of exhaust: 'Drive with your eyes closed, Doctor!'

  On the way home Franklin kept carefully to the slowest of the four-speed lanes. As usual after his discussions with Hathaway, he felt vaguely depressed. He realized that unconsciously he envied Hathaway his footloose existence. Despite the grimy cold-water apartment in the shadow and roar of the flyover, despite his nagging wife and their sick child, and the endless altercations with the landlord and the supermarket credit manager, Hathaway still retained his freedom intact. Spared any responsibilities, he could resist the smallest encroachment upon him by the rest of society, if only by generating obsessive fantasies such as his latest one about subliminal advertising.

  The ability to react to stimuli, even irrationally, was a valid criterion of freedom. By contrast, what freedom Franklin possessed was peripheral, sharply demarked by the manifold responsibilities in the centre of his life - the three mortgages on his home, the mandatory rounds of cocktail parties, the private consultancy occupying most of Saturday which paid the instalments on the multitude of household gadgets, clothes and past holidays. About the only time he had to himself was driving to and from work.

  But at least the roads were magnificent. Whatever other criticisms might be levelled at the present society, it certainly knew how to build roads. Eight-, ten- and twelve-lane expressways interlaced across the country, plunging from overhead causeways into the giant car parks in the centre of the cities, or dividing into the great suburban arteries with their multiacre parking aprons around the marketing centres. Together the roadways and car parks covered more than a third of the country's entire area, and in the neighbourhood of the cities the proportion was higher. The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.

  The ten-mile journey to his home in fact covered over twenty-five miles and took him twice as long as it had done before the construction of the expressway, the additional miles contained within the three giant clover-leaves. New cities were springing from the motels, cafs and car marts around the highways. At the slightest hint of an intersection a shanty town of shacks and filling stations sprawled away among the forest of electric signs and route indicators.

  All around him cars bulleted along, streaming towards the suburbs. Relaxed by the smooth motion of the car, Franklin edged outwards into the next speed-lane. As he accelerated from 40 to 50 m.p.h. a strident ear-jarring noise drummed out from his tyres, shaking the chassis of the car. Ostensibly an aid to lane discipline, the surface of the road was covered with a mesh of small rubber studs, spaced progressively farther apart in each of the lanes so that the tyre hum resonated exactly on 40, 50, 60 and 70 m.p.h. Driving at an intermediate speed for more than a few seconds became nervously exhausting, and soon resulted in damage to the car and tyres.

  When the studs wore out they were replaced by slightly different patterns, matching those on the latest tyres, so that regular tyre changes were ne
cessary, increasing the safety and efficiency of the expressway. It also increased the revenues of the car and tyre manufacturers. Most cars over six months old soon fell to pieces under the steady battering, but this was regarded as a desirable end, the greater turnover reducing the unit price and making more frequent model changes, as well as ridding the roads of dangerous vehicles.

  A quarter of a mile ahead, at the approach to the first of the cloverleaves, the traffic stream was slowing, huge police signs signalling 'Lanes Closed Ahead' and 'Drop Speed by 10 m.p.h.'. Franklin tried to return to the previous lane, but the cars were jammed bumper to bumper. As the chassis began to shudder and vibrate, jarring his spine, he clamped his teeth and tried to restrain himself from sounding the horn. Other drivers were less self-controlled and everywhere engines were plunging and snarling, horns blaring. Road taxes were now so high, up to thirty per cent of the gross national product (by contrast, income taxes were a bare two per cent) that any delay on the expressways called for an immediate government inquiry, and the major departments of state were concerned with the administration of the road systems.

  Nearer the clover-leaf the lanes had been closed to allow a gang of construction workers to erect a massive metal sign on one of the traffic islands. The palisaded area swarmed with engineers and surveyors, and Franklin assumed that this was the sign Hathaway had seen unloaded the previous night. His apartment was in one of the gimcrack buildings in the settlement that straggled away around a near-by flyover, a low-rent area inhabited by service-station personnel, waitresses and other migrant labour.

  The sign was enormous, at least a hundred feet high, fitted with heavy concave grilles similar to radar bowls. Rooted in a series of concrete caissons, it reared high into the air above the approach roads, visible for miles. Franklin craned up at the grilles, tracing the power cables from the transformers up into the intricate mesh of metal coils that covered their surface. A line of red aircraft-warning beacons was already alight along the top strut, and Franklin assumed that the sign was part of the ground approach system of the city airport ten miles to the east.