Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  The Naval Party

  When the search party came for him Traven hid in the only logical place. Fortunately the search was perfunctory, and was called off after a few hours. The sailors had brought a supply of beer with them, and the search soon turned into a drunken ramble. On the walls of the recording towers Traven later found balloons of obscene dialogue chalked into the mouths of the shadow figures, giving their postures the priapic gaiety of the dancers in cave drawings.

  The climax of the party was the ignition of a store of gasoline in an underground tank near the airstrip. As he listened, first to the megaphones shouting his name, the echoes receding among the dunes like the forlorn calls of dying birds, then to the boom of the explosion and the laughter as the landing craft left, Traven felt a premonition that these were the last sounds he would hear.

  He had hidden in one of the target basins, lying down among the bodies of the plastic dummies. In the hot sunlight their deformed faces gaped at him sightlessly from the tangle of limbs, their blurred smiles like those of the soundlessly laughing dead. Their faces filled his mind as he climbed over the bodies and returned to the bunker.

  As he walked toward the blocks he saw the figures of his wife and son standing in his path. They were less than ten yards from him, their white faces watching him with a look of almost overwhelming expectancy. Never had Traven seen them so close to the blocks. His wife’s pale features seemed illuminated from within, her lips parted as if in greeting, one hand raised to take his own. His son’s grave face, with its curiously fixed expression, regarded him with the same enigmatic smile as the girl in the photograph.

  “Judith! David!” Startled, Traven ran forward to them. Then, in a sudden movement of light, their clothes turned into shrouds, and he saw the wounds that disfigured their necks and chests. Appalled, he cried out to them. As they vanished he fled into the safety and sanity of the blocks.

  The Catechism of Good-bye

  This time he found himself, as Osborne had predicted, unable to leave the blocks.

  Somewhere in the shifting center of the maze, he sat with his back against one of the concrete flanks, his eyes raised to the sun. Around him the lines of cubes formed the horizons of his world. At times they would appear to advance toward him, looming over him like cliffs, the intervals between them narrowing so that they were little more than an arm’s length apart, a labyrinth of narrow corridors running between them. Then they would recede from him, separating from each other like points in an expanding universe, until the nearest line formed an intermittent palisade along the horizon.

  Time had become quantal. For hours it would be noon, the shadows contained within the motionless bulk of the blocks, the heat reverberating off the concrete floor. Abruptly he would find it was early afternoon or evening, the shadows everywhere like pointing fingers.

  “Good-bye, Eniwetok,” he murmured.

  Somewhere there was a flicker of light, as if one of the blocks, like a counter on an abacus, had been plucked away.

  “Good-bye, Los Alamos.” Again a block seemed to vanish. The corridors around him remained intact, but somewhere,

  Traven was convinced, in the matrix superimposed on his mind, a small interval of neutral space had been punched.

  Good-bye, Hiroshima.

  Good-bye, Alamogordo.

  Good-bye, Moscow, London, Paris, New York. . .

  Shuttles flickered, a ripple of integers. Traven stopped, accepting the futility of this megathlon farewell. Such a leave-taking required him to fix his signature on every one of the particles in the universe.

  Total Noon: Eniwetok

  The blocks now occupied positions on an endlessly revolving circus wheel. They carried him upward, to heights from which he could see the whole island and the sea, and then down again through the opaque disk of the floor. From here he looked up at the undersurface of the concrete cap, an inverted landscape of rectilinear hollows, the dome-shaped mounds of the lake system, the thousands of empty cubic pits of the blocks.

  “Good-bye, Traven”

  To his disappointment he found that this ultimate act of rejection gained him nothing.

  In an interval of lucidity, he looked down at his emaciated arms and legs propped loosely in front of him, the brittle wrists and hands covered with a lacework of ulcers. To his right was a trail of disturbed dust, the marks of slack heels.

  In front of him lay a long corridor between the blocks, joining an oblique series a hundred yards away. Among these, where a narrow interval revealed the open space beyond, was a crescentshaped shadow, poised in the air.

  During the next half hour it moved slowly, turning as the sun swung.

  The outline of a dune.

  Seizing on this cipher, which hung before him like a symbol on a shield, Traven pushed himself through the dust. He climbed precariously to his feet, and covered his eyes from all sight of the blocks.

  Ten minutes later he emerged from the western perimeter. The dune whose shadow had guided him lay fifty yards away. Beyond it, bearing the shadow like a screen, was a ridge of limestone,

  which ran away among the hillocks of a wasteland. The remains of old bulldozers, bales of barbed wire and fifty-gallon drums lay half-buried in the sand.

  Traven approached the dune, reluctant to leave this anonymous swell of sand. He shuffled around its edges, and then sat down in the shade by a narrow crevice in the ridge.

  Ten minutes later he noticed that someone was watching him.

  The Marooned Japanese

  This corpse, whose eyes stared up at Traven, lay to his left at the bottom of the crevice. That of a man of middle age and powerful build, it lay on its side with its head on a pillow of stone, as if surveying the window of the sky. The fabric of the clothes had rotted to a gray tattered vestment, but in the absence of any small animal predators on the island the skin and musculature had been preserved. Here and there, at the angle of knee or wrist, a bony point shone through the leathery integument of the yellow skin, but the facial mask was still intact, and revealed a male Japanese of the professional classes. Looking down at the strong nose, high forehead, and broad mouth, Traven guessed that the Japanese had been a doctor or lawyer.

  Puzzled as to how the corpse had found itself here, Traven slid a few feet down the slope. There were no radiation burns on the skin, which indicated that the Japanese had been there for less than five years. Nor did he appear to be wearing a uniform, so had not been a member of a military or scientific mission.

  To the left of the corpse, within reach of his hand, was a frayed leather case, the remains of a map wallet. To the right was the bleached husk of a haversack, open to reveal a canteen of water and a small can.

  Greedily, the reflex of starvation making him for the moment ignore this discovery that the Japanese had deliberately chosen to die in the crevice, Traven slid down the slope until his feet touched the splitting soles of the corpse’s shoes. He reached forward and seized the canteen. A cupful of flat water swilled around the rusting bottom. Traven gulped down the water, the dissolved metal salts cloaking his lips and tongue with a bitter film. He pried the lid off the can, which was empty but for a tacky coating of condensed syrup. He scraped at this with the lid and chewed at the tarry flakes. They filled his mouth with an almost intoxicating sweetness. After a few moments he felt light-headed and sat back beside the corpse. Its sightless eyes regarded him with unmoving compassion.

  The Fly

  (A small fly, which Travert presumes has followed him into the crevice, now buzzes about the corpse*s face. Traven leans forward to kill it, then reflects that perhaps this minuscule sentry had been the corpse*s faithful companion, in return fed on the rich liqueurs and distillations of its pores. Carefully, to avoid injuring the fly, he encourages it to alight on his wrist.)

  DR. YASUDA: Thank you, Traven. (The voice is rough, as if unused to conversation.) In my position, you understand.

  TRAVEN: Of course, Doctor. I’m sorry I tried to kill it. These ingrained habits,
you know, they’re not easy to shrug off. Your sister’s children in Osaka in ’44, the exigencies of war, I hate to plead them, most known motives are so despicable one searches the unknown in the hope that. . .

  YASUDA: Please, Traven, do not be embarrassed. The fly is lucky to retain its identity for so long. That son you mourn, not to mention my own two nieces and nephew, did they not die each day? Every parent in the world mourns the lost sons and daughters of their past childhoods.

  TRAVEN: You’re very tolerant, Doctor. I wouldn’t dare—

  YASUDA: Not at all, Traven. I make no apologies for you. After all, each one of us is little more than the meagre residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives. But your son and my nieces are fixed in our minds forever, their identities as certain as the stars.

  TRAVEN {not entirely convinced): That may be so, Doctor, but it leads to a dangerous conclusion in the case of this island. For instance, the blocks . . .

  YASUDA: They are precisely to what I refer. Here among the blocks, Traven, you at last find the image of yourself free of time and space. This island is an ontological Garden of Eden; why try to expel yourself into a quantal world?

  TRAVEN: Excuse me. (The fly has flown back to the corpse’s face and sits in one of the orbits, giving the good doctor an expression of quizzical beadiness. Reaching forward, Traven entices it onto his palm.) Well, yes, these bunkers may be ontological objects, but whether this is the ontological fly seems doubtful. It’s true that on this island it’s the only fly, which is the next best thing.

  YASUDA: You can’t accept the plurality of the universe, Traven. Ask yourself, why? Why should this obsess you. It seems to me that you are hunting for the white leviathan, zero. The beach is a dangerous zone; avoid it. Have a proper humility; pursue a philosophy of acceptance.

  TRAVEN: Then may I ask why you came here, Doctor?

  YASUDA: To feed this fly. “What greater love-?”

  TRAVEN (still puzzling): It doesn’t really solve my problem. The blocks, you see . . .

  YASUDA: Very well, if you must have it that way . . .

  TRAVEN: But, Doctor—

  YASUDA (peremptorily): Kill that fly!

  TRAVEN: That’s not an end, or a beginning. (Hopelessly he kills the fly. Exhausted, he falls asleep beside the corpse.)

  The Terminal Beach

  Searching for a piece of rope in the refuse dump behind the dunes, Traven found a bale of rusty wire. He unwound it, then secured a harness around the corpse’s chest and dragged it from the crevice. The lid of a wooden crate served as a sledge. Traven fastened the corpse into a sitting position, and set off along the perimeter of the blocks. Around him the island was silent. The lines of palms hung in the sunlight, only his own motion varying the shifting ciphers of their crisscrossing trunks. The square turrets of the camera towers jutted from the dunes like forgotten obelisks.

  An hour later, when Traven reached his bunker, he untied the wire cord he had fastened around his waist. He took the chair left for him by Dr. Osborne and carried it to a point midway between the bunker and the blocks. Then he tied the body of the Japanese to the chair, arranging the hands so that they rested on the wooden arms, giving the moribund figure a posture of calm repose.

  This done to his satisfaction, Traven returned to the bunker and squatted under the awning.

  As the next days passed into weeks, the dignified figure of the Japanese sat in his chair fifty yards from him, guarding Traven from the blocks. Their magic still filled Traven’s reveries, but he now had sufficient strength to rouse himself and forage for food. In the hot sunlight the skin of the Japanese became more and more bleached, and sometimes Traven would wake at night to find the white sepulchral figure sitting there, arms resting at its sides, in the shadows that crossed the concrete floor. At these moments he would often see his wife and son watching him from the dunes. As time passed they came closer, and he would sometimes turn to find them only a few yards behind him.

  Patiently Traven waited for them to speak to him, thinking of the great blocks whose entrance was guarded by the seated figure of the dead archangel, as the waves broke on the distant shore and the burning bombers fell through his dreams.

  Manhole 69

  For the first few days all went well.

  “Keep away from windows and don’t think about it,” Dr. Neill told them. “As far as you’re concerned it was just another compulsion. At eleven thirty or twelve go down to the gym and throw a ball around, play some table tennis. At two they’re running a film for you in the neurology theater. Read the papers for a couple of hours, put on some records. I’ll be down at six. By seven you’ll be in a manic swing.”

  “Any chance of a sudden blackout, Doctor?” Avery asked.

  “Absolutely none,” Neill said. “If you get tired, rest, of course. That’s the one thing you’ll probably have a little difficulty getting used to. Remember, you’re still using only 3,500 calories, so your kinetic level—and you’ll notice this most by day—will be about a third lower. You’ll have to take things easier, make allowances. Most of these have been programmed in for you, but start learning to play chess, focus that inner eye.”

  Gorrell leaned forward. “Doctor,” he asked, “if we want to, can we look out of the windows?”

  Dr. Neill smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The wires are cut. You couldn’t go to sleep now if you tried.”

  Neill waited until the three men had left the lecture room on their way back to the Recreation Wing and then stepped down from the dais and shut the door. He was a short, broad-shouldered man in his fifties, with a sharp, impatient mouth and small features. He swung a chair out of the front row and straddled it deftly.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Morley was sitting on one of the desks against the back wall, playing aimlessly with a pencil. At thirty he was the youngest member of the team working under Neill at the Clinic, but for some reason Neill liked to talk to him.

  He saw Neill was waiting for an answer and shrugged.

  “Everything seems to be all right,” he said. “Surgical convalescence is over. Cardiac rhythms and EEG are normal. I saw the X rays this morning and everything has sealed beautifully.”

  Neill watched him quizzically. “You don’t sound as if you approve.”

  Morley laughed and stood up. “Of course I do.” He walked down the aisle between the desks, white coat unbuttoned, hands sunk deep in his pockets. “No, so far you’ve vindicated yourself on every point. The party’s only just beginning, but the guests are in damn good shape. No doubt about it. I thought three weeks was a little early to bring them out of hypnosis, but you’ll probably be right there as well. Tonight is the first one they take on their own. Let’s see how they are tomorrow morning.”

  “What are you secretly expecting?” Neill asked wryly. “Massive feedback from the medulla?”

  “No,” Morley said. “There again the psychometric tests have shown absolutely nothing coming up at all. Not a single trauma.” He stared at the blackboard and then looked round at Neill. “Yes, as a cautious estimate I’d say you’ve succeeded.”

  Neill leaned forward on his elbows. He flexed his jaw muscles. “I think I’ve more than succeeded. Blocking the medullary synapses has eliminated a lot of material I thought would still be there—the minor quirks and complexes, the petty aggressive phobias, the bad change in the psychic bank. Most of them have gone, or at least they don’t show in the tests. However, they’re the side targets, and thanks to you, John, and to everyone else in the team, we’ve hit a bull’s-eye on the main one.”

  Morley murmured something, but Neill ran on in his clipped voice. “None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.”

  “I o
nly hope they know what to do with them,” Morley commented.

  “Come, John,” Neill snapped back. “That’s not an argument.

  What they do with the time is their responsibility anyway. They’ll make the most of it, just as we’ve always made the most, eventually, of any opportunity given us. It’s too early to think about it yet, but visualize the universal application of our technique. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four-hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.”

  Tired, Neill broke off and rubbed his eyes. “What’s worrying you?”

  Morley made a small, helpless gesture with one hand. “I’m not sure, it’s just that I. . .” He played with the plastic brain mounted on a stand next to the blackboard. Reflected in one of the frontal whorls was a distorted image of Neill, with a twisted chinless face and vast domed cranium. Sitting alone among the desks in the empty lecture room he looked like an insane genius patiently waiting to take an examination no one could set him.

  Morley turned the model with his finger, watched the image blur and dissolve. Whatever his doubts, Neill was probably the last person to understand them.