The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1

by J. G. Ballard

  54) 'Immortality in the Service of Mankind'.

  55) Guests were drawn from the worlds of science and politics, the church, armed forces and the Inland Revenue.

  56) Generous fees.

  57) Service tills in Mayfair and Regent Street.

  58) He had a keen appreciation of money, but was not impressed when I told him of Torvill and Dean's earnings.

  59) He was obsessed by the nature of the chemical bond.

  60) Sitting beside him at the top table were: (1) The Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, (2) The President of the Royal Society, (3) The Archbishop of Canterbury, (4) The Chief Rabbi, (5) The Chairman of the Diners Club, (6) The Chairman of the Bank of England, (7) The General Secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation, (8) The President of Hertz Rent-a-Car, (9) The President of IBM, (10) The Chief of the General Staff, (11) Dr Henry Kissinger, (12) Myself.

  61) He stated that synthetic DNA introduced into the human germ plasm would arrest the process of ageing and extend human life almost indefinitely.

  62) Perhaps 1 million years.

  63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal.

  64) Astonishment/disbelief.

  65) He advised the audience to invest heavily in leisure industries.

  66) The value of the pound sterling rose to $8.75.

  67) American TV networks, Time Magazine, Newsweek.

  68) The Second Coming.

  69) He expressed strong disappointment at the negative attitude of the Third World.

  70) The Kremlin.

  71) He wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile.

  72) My growing disenchantment.

  73) Sexual malaise.

  74) He complained that I was spending too much time at Richmond Ice Rink.

  75) The Royal Proclamation.

  76) The pound sterling rose to $75.50.

  77) Prince Andrew. Repeatedly.

  78) Injection into the testicles.

  79) The side-effects were permanent impotence and sterility. However, as immortality was ensured, no further offspring would be needed and the procreative urge would atrophy.

  80) I seriously considered a sex-change operation.

  81) Government White Paper on Immortality.

  82) Compulsory injection into the testicles of the entire male population over eleven years.

  83) Smith & Wesson short-barrel thirty-eight.

  84) Entirely my own idea.

  85) Many hours at Richmond Ice Rink trying unsuccessfully to erase the patterns of DNA.

  86) Westminster Hall.

  87) Premeditated. I questioned his real motives.

  88) Assassination.

  89) I was neither paid nor incited by agents of a foreign power.

  90) Despair. I wish to go back to my cubicle at London Airport.

  91) Between Princess Diana and the Governor of Nevada.

  92) At the climax of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

  93) Seven feet.

  94) Three shots.

  95) Blood Group 0.

  96) I did not wish to spend the rest of eternity in my own company.

  97) I was visited in the death cell by the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  98) That I had killed the Son of God.

  99) He walked with a slight limp. He told me that, as a condemned prisoner, I alone had been spared the sterilising injections, and that the restoration of the national birthrate was now my sole duty.

  100) Yes.

  1985

  The Man Who Walked on the Moon

  I, too, was once an astronaut. As you see me sitting here, in this modest caf with its distant glimpse of Copacabana Beach, you probably assume that I am a man of few achievements. The shabby briefcase between my worn heels, the stained suit with its frayed cuffs, the unsavoury hands ready to seize the first offer of a free drink, the whole air of failure. no doubt you think that I am a minor clerk who has missed promotion once too often, and that I amount to nothing, a person of no past and less future.

  For many years I believed this myself. I had been abandoned by the authorities, who were glad to see me exiled to another continent, reduced to begging from the American tourists. I suffered from acute amnesia, and certain domestic problems with my wife and my mother. They now share my small apartment at Ipanema, while I am forced to live in a room above the projection booth of the Luxor Cinema, my thoughts drowned by the sound-tracks of science-fiction films.

  So many tragic events leave me unsure of myself. Nonetheless, my confidence is returning, and a sense of my true history and worth. Chapters of my life are still hidden from me, and seem as jumbled as the film extracts which the projectionists screen each morning as they focus their cameras. I have still forgotten my years of training, and my mind bars from me any memory of the actual space-flights. But I am certain that I was once an astronaut.

  Years ago, before I went into space, I followed many professions - freelance journalist, translator, on one occasion even a war correspondent sent to a small war, which unfortunately was never declared. I was in and out of newspaper offices all day, hoping for that one assignment that would match my talents.

  Sadly, all this effort failed to get me to the top, and after ten years I found myself displaced by a younger generation. A certain reticence in my character, a sharpness of manner, set me off from my fellow journalists. Even the editors would laugh at me behind my back. I was given trivial assignments - film reviewing, or writing reports on office-equipment fairs. When the circulation wars began, in a doomed response to the onward sweep of television, the editors openly took exception to my waspish style. I became a part-time translator, and taught for an hour each day at a language school, but my income plummeted. My mother, whom I had supported for many years, was forced to leave her home and join my wife and myself in our apartment at Ipanema.

  At first my wife resented this, but soon she and my mother teamed up against me. They became impatient with the hours I spent delaying my unhappy visits to the single newspaper office that still held out hope my journey to work was a transit between one door slammed on my heels and another slammed in my face.

  My last friend at the newspaper commiserated with me, as I stood forlornly in the lobby. 'For heaven's sake, find a human-interest story! Something tender and affecting, that's what they want upstairs - life isn't an avant-garde movie!'

  Pondering this sensible advice, I wandered into the crowded streets. I dreaded the thought of returning home without an assignment. The two women had taken to opening the apartment door together. They would stare at me accusingly, almost barring me from my own home.

  Around me were the million faces of the city. People strode past, so occupied with their own lives that they almost pushed me from the pavement. A million human interest stories, of a banal and pointless kind, an encyclopaedia of mediocrity... Giving up, I left Copacabana Avenue and took refuge among the tables of a small caf in a side-street.

  It was there that I met the American astronaut, and began my own career in space.

  The caf terrace was almost deserted, as the office workers returned to their desks after lunch. Behind me, in the shade of the canvas awning, a fair-haired man in a threadbare tropical suit sat beside an empty glass. Guarding my coffee from the flies, I gazed at the small segment of sea visible beyond Copacabana Beach. Slowed by their mid-day meals, groups of American and European tourists strolled down from the hotels, waving away the jewellery salesmen and lottery touts. Perhaps I would visit Paris or New York, make a new life for myself as a literary critic.

  A tartan shirt blocked my view of the sea and its narrow dream of escape. An elderly American, camera slung from his heavy neck, leaned across the table, his grey-haired wife in a loose floral dress beside him.

  'Are you the astronaut?' the woman asked in a friendly but sly way, as if about to broach an indiscretion. 'The hotel said you would be at this caf...'

  'An astronaut?'

  'Yes, the astronaut Commander Scrant
on...?'

  'No, I regret that I'm not an astronaut.' Then it occurred to me that this provincial couple, probably a dentist and his wife from the corn-belt, might benefit from a well-informed courier. Perhaps they imagined that their cruise ship had berthed at Miami? I stood up, managing a gallant smile. 'Of course, I'm a qualified translator. If you -'

  'No, no...'Dismissing me with a wave, they moved through the empty tables. 'We came to see Mr Scranton.'

  Baffled by this bizarre exchange, I watched them approach the man in the tropical suit. A nondescript fellow in his late forties, he had thinning blond hair and a strong-jawed American face from which all confidence had long been drained. He stared in a resigned way at his hands, which waited beside his empty glass, as if unable to explain to them that little refreshment would reach them that day. He was clearly undernourished, perhaps an ex-seaman who had jumped ship, one of thousands of down-and-outs trying to live by their wits on some of the hardest pavements in the world.

  However, he looked up sharply enough as the elderly couple approached him. When they repeated their question about the astronaut he beckoned them to a seat. To my surprise, the waiter was summoned, and drinks were brought to the table. The husband unpacked his camera, while a relaxed conversation took place between his wife and this seedy figure.

  'Dear, don't forget Mr Scranton...'

  'Oh, please forgive me.'

  The husband removed several bank-notes from his wallet. His wife passed them across the table to Scranton, who then stood up. Photographs were taken, first of Scranton standing next to the smiling wife, then of the husband grinning broadly beside the gaunt American. The source of all this good humour eluded me, as it did Scranton, whose eyes stared gravely at the street with a degree of respect due to the surface of the moon. But already a second group of tourists had walked down from Copacabana Beach, and I heard more laughter when one called out: 'There's the astronaut...!'

  Quite mystified, I watched a further round of photographs being taken. The couples stood on either side of the American, grinning away as if he were a camel driver posing for pennies against a backdrop of the pyramids.

  I ordered a small brandy from the waiter. He had ignored all this, pocketing his tips with a straight face.

  'This fellow...?' I asked. 'Who is he? An astronaut?'

  'Of course...' The waiter flicked a bottle-top into the air and treated the sky to a knowing sneer. 'Who else but the man in the moon?'

  The tourists had gone, strolling past the leatherware and jewellery stores. Alone now after his brief fame, the American sat among the empty glasses, counting the money he had collected.

  The man in the moon?

  Then I remembered the newspaper headline, and the expos I had read two years earlier of this impoverished American who claimed to have been an astronaut, and told his story to the tourists for the price of a drink. At first almost everyone believed him, and he had become a popular figure in the hotel lobbies along Copacabana Beach. Apparently he had flown on one of the Apollo missions from Cape Kennedy in the 1970s, and his long-jawed face and stoical pilot's eyes seemed vaguely familiar from the magazine photographs. He was properly reticent, but if pressed with a tourist dollar could talk convincingly about the early lunar flights. In its way it was deeply moving to sit at a caf table with a man who had walked on the moon Then an over-curious reporter exploded the whole pretence. No man named Scranton had ever flown in space, and the American authorities confirmed that his photograph was not that of any past or present astronaut. In fact he was a failed crop-duster from Florida who had lost his pilot's licence and whose knowledge of the Apollo flights had been mugged up from newspapers and television programmes.

  Surprisingly, Scranton's career had not ended there and then, but moved on to a second tragi-comical phase. Far from consigning him to oblivion, the exposure brought him a genuine small celebrity. Banished from the grand hotels of Copacabana, he hung about the cheaper cafs in the side-streets, still claiming to have been an astronaut, ignoring those who derided him from their car windows. The dignified way in which he maintained his fraud tapped a certain good-humoured tolerance, much like the affection felt in the United States for those eccentric old men who falsely claimed to their deaths that they were veterans of the American Civil War.

  So Scranton stayed on, willing to talk for a few dollars about his journey to the moon, quoting the same tired phrases that failed to convince the youngest schoolboy. Soon no one bothered to question him closely, and his chief function was to be photographed beside parties of visitors, an amusing oddity of the tourist trail.

  But perhaps the American was more devious than he appeared, with his shabby suit and hangdog gaze? As I sat there, guarding the brandy I could barely afford, I resented Scranton's bogus celebrity, and the tourist revenue it brought him. For years I, too, had maintained a charade - the mask of good humour that I presented to my colleagues in the newspaper world - but it had brought me nothing. Scranton at least was left alone for most of his time, something I craved more than any celebrity. Comparing our situations, there was plainly a strong element of injustice - the notorious British criminal who made a comfortable living being photographed by the tourists in the more expensive Copacabana restaurants had at least robbed one of Her Majesty's mail-trains.

  At the same time, was this the human-interest story that would help me to remake my career? Could I provide a final ironic twist by revealing that, thanks to his exposure, the bogus astronaut was now doubly successful?

  During the next days I visited the caf promptly at noon. Note book at the ready, I kept a careful watch for Scranton. He usually appeared in the early afternoon, as soon as the clerks and secretaries had finished their coffee. In that brief lull, when the shadows crossed from one side of the street to the other, Scranton would materialise, as if from a trapdoor in the pavement. He was always alone, walking straight-backed in his faded suit, but with the uncertainty of someone who suspects that he is keeping an appointment on the wrong day. He would slip into his place under the caf awning, order a glass of beer from the sceptical waiter and then gaze across the street at the vistas of an invisible space.

  It soon became clear that Scranton's celebrity was as threadbare as his shirt cuffs. Few tourists visited him, and often a whole afternoon passed without a single customer. Then the waiter would scrape the chairs around Scranton's table, trying to distract him from his reveries of an imaginary moon. Indeed, on the fourth day, within a few minutes of Scranton's arrival, the waiter slapped the table-top with his towel, already cancelling the afternoon's performance.

  'Away, away... it's impossible!' He seized the newspaper that Scranton had found on a nearby chair. 'No more stories about the moon...'

  Scranton stood up, head bowed beneath the awning. He seemed resigned to this abuse. 'All right... I can take my trade down the street.'

  To forestall this, I left my seat and moved through the empty tables.

  'Mr Scranton? Perhaps we can speak? I'd like to buy you a drink.'

  'By all means.' Scranton beckoned me to a chair. Ready for business, he sat upright, and with a conscious effort managed to bring the focus of his gaze from infinity to a distance of fifty feet away. He was poorly nourished, and his perfunctory shave revealed an almost tubercular pallor. Yet there was a certain resolute quality about this vagrant figure that I had not expected. Sitting beside him, I was aware of an intense and almost wilful isolation, not just in this foreign city, but in the world at large.

  I showed him my card. 'I'm writing a book of criticism on the science-fiction cinema. It would be interesting to hear your opinions. You are Commander Scranton, the Apollo astronaut?'

  'That is correct.'

  'Good. I wondered how you viewed the science-fiction film... how convincing you found the presentation of outer space, the lunar surface and so on..

  Scranton stared bleakly at the table-top. A faint smile exposed his yellowing teeth, and I assumed that he had seen through my little ruse
.

  'I'll be happy to set you straight,' he told me. 'But I make a small charge.'

  'Of course,' I searched in my pockets. 'Your professional expertise, naturally..

  I placed some coins on the table, intending to hunt for a modest bank-note. Scranton selected three of the coins, enough to pay for a loaf of bread, and pushed the rest towards me.

  'Science-fiction films -? They're good. Very accurate. On the whole I'd say they do an excellent job.'

  'That's encouraging to hear. These Hollywood epics are not usually noted for their realism.'

  'Well... you have to understand that the Apollo teams brought back a lot of film footage.'

  'I'm sure.' I tried to keep the amusement out of my voice. 'The studios must have been grateful to you. After all, you could describe the actual moon-walks.'

  Scranton nodded sagely. 'I acted as consultant to one of the Hollywood majors. All in all, you can take it from me that those pictures are pretty realistic.'

  'Fascinating... coming from you that has authority. As a matter of interest, what was being on the moon literally like?'

  For the first time Scranton seemed to notice me. Had he glimpsed some shared strain in our characters? This care-worn American had all the refinement of an unemployed car mechanic, and yet he seemed almost tempted to befriend me.

  'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. 'It was just like being here.'

  'So...'I put away my notebook. Any further subterfuge was unnecessary. I had treated our meeting as a joke, but Scranton was sincere, and anyway utterly indifferent to my opinion of him. The tourists and passing policemen, the middle-aged women sitting at a nearby table, together barely existed for him. They were no more than shadows on the screen of his mind, through which he could see the horizons of an almost planetary emptiness.

  For the first time I was in the presence of someone who had nothing - even less than the beggars of Rio, for they at least were linked to the material world by their longings for it. Scranton embodied the absolute loneliness of the human being in space and time, a situation which in many ways I shared. Even the act of convincing himself that he was a former astronaut only emphasised his isolation.