Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  “Fifty years ago,” Stacey explained, gesturing at the ruins below the tower, “that collection of ancient buildings was one of the world’s greatest legislative assemblies.” He gazed at it quietly for a few moments, then turned to Conrad. “Enjoy the ride?”

  Conrad nodded fervently. “It’s impressive, all right. The people who lived here must have been giants. What’s really remarkable is that it looks as if they left only yesterday. Why don’t we go back?”

  “Well, apart from the fact that there aren’t enough of us now, even if there were we couldn’t control it. In its heyday this city was a fantastically complex social organism. The communications problems are difficult to imagine merely by looking at these blank facades. It’s the tragedy of this city that there appeared to be only one way to solve them.”

  “Did they solve them?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly. But they left themselves out of the equation. Think of the problems, though. Transporting fifteen million office workers to and from the center every day; routing in an endless stream of cars, buses, trains, helicopters; linking every office, almost every desk, with a videophone, every apartment with television, radio, power, water; feeding and entertaining this enormous number of people; guarding them with ancillary services, police, fire squads, medical units—it all hinged on one factor.”

  Stacey threw a fist out at the great tower clock. “Time! Only by synchronizing every activity, every footstep forward or backward, every meal, bus halt, and telephone call, could the organism support itself. Like the cells in your body, which proliferate into mortal cancers if allowed to grow in freedom, every individual here had to serve the overriding needs of the city or fatal bottlenecks threw it into total chaos. You and I can turn on the tap any hour of the day or night, because we have our own private water cisterns, but what would happen here if everybody washed the breakfast dishes within the same ten minutes?”

  They began to walk slowly down the plaza toward the clock tower. “Fifty years ago, when the population was only ten million, they could just provide for a potential peak capacity, but even then a strike in one essential service paralyzed most of the others; it took workers two or three hours to reach their offices, as long again to queue for lunch and get home. As the population climbed the first serious attempts were made to stagger hours; workers in certain areas started the day an hour earlier or later than those in others. Their railway passes and car number plates were colored accordingly, and if they tried to travel outside the permitted periods they were turned back. Soon the practice spread; you could only switch on your washing machine at a given hour, post a letter or take a bath at a specific period.”

  “Sounds feasible,” Conrad commented, his interest mounting. “But how did they enforce all this?”

  “By a system of colored passes, colored money, an elaborate set of schedules published every day like TV or radio programs. And, of course, by all the thousands of clocks you can see around you here. The subsidiary hands marked out the number of minutes remaining in any activity period for people in the clock’s color category.”

  Stacey stopped, pointed to a blue-faced clock mounted on one of the buildings overlooking the plaza. “Let’s say, for example, that a lower-grade executive leaving his office at the allotted time, twelve o’clock, wants to have lunch, change a library book, buy some aspirin, and telephone his wife. Like all executives, his identity zone is blue. He takes out his schedule for the week, or looks down the blue-time columns in the newspaper, and notes that his lunch period for that day is twelve-fifteen to twelve-thirty. He has fifteen minutes to kill. Right, he then checks the library. Time code for today is given as three, that’s the third hand on the clock. He looks at the nearest blue clock, the third hand says thirty-seven minutes past—he has twenty-three minutes, ample time, to reach the library. He starts down the street, but finds at the first intersection that the pedestrian lights are only shining red and green and he can’t get across. The area’s been temporarily zoned off for lower-grade women office workers—red, and manuals—green.”

  “What would happen if he ignored the lights?” Conrad asked.

  “Nothing immediately, but all blue clocks in the zoned area would have returned to zero, and no shops or the library would serve him, unless he happened to have red or green currency and a forged set of library tickets. Anyway, the penalties were too high to make the risk worthwhile, and the whole system was evolved for his convenience, no one else’s. So, unable to reach the library, he decides on the chemist. The time code for the chemist is five, the fifth, smallest hand. It reads fifty-four minutes past: he has six minutes to find a chemist and make his purchase. This done, he still has five minutes before lunch, decides to phone his wife. Checking the phone code he sees that no period has been provided for private calls that day—or the next. He’ll just have to wait until he sees her that evening.”

  “What if he did phone?”

  “He wouldn’t be able to get his money in the coin box, and even then, his wife, assuming she is a secretary, would be in a red time zone and no longer in her office for that day—hence the prohibition on phone calls. It all meshed perfectly. Your time program told you when you could switch on your TV set and when to switch off. All electric appliances were fused, and if you strayed outside the programmed periods you’d have a hefty fine and repair bill to meet. The viewer’s economic status obviously determined the choice of program, and vice versa, so there was no question of coercion. Each day’s program listed your permitted activities: you could go to the hairdresser’s, cinema, bank, cocktail bar, at stated times, and if you went then you were sure of being served quickly and efficiently.”

  They had almost reached the far end of the plaza. Facing them on its tower was the enormous clock face, dominating its constellation of twelve motionless attendants.

  “There were a dozen socioeconomic categories: blue for executives, gold for professional classes, yellow for military and government officials—incidentally, it’s odd your parents ever got hold of that wristwatch, none of your family ever worked for the government—green for manual workers and so on. Naturally, subtle subdivisions were possible. The lower-grade executive I mentioned left his office at twelve, but a senior executive, with exactly the same time codes, would leave at eleven forty-five and have an extra fifteen minutes, would find the streets clear before the lunch-hour rush of clerical workers.”

  Stacey pointed up at the tower. “This was the Big Clock, the master from which all others were regulated. Central Time Control, a sort of Ministry of Time, gradually took over the old parliamentary buildings as their legislative functions diminished. The programmers were, effectively, the city’s absolute rulers.”

  As Stacey continued Conrad gazed up at the battery of timepieces, poised helplessly at 12:01. Somehow time itself seemed to have been suspended, around him the great office buildings hung in a neutral interval between yesterday and tomorrow. If one could only start the master clock the entire city would probably slide into gear and come to life, in an instant be repeopled with its dynamic jostling millions.

  They began to walk back toward the car. Conrad looked over his shoulder at the clock face, its gigantic arms upright on the silent hour.

  “Why did it stop?” he asked.

  Stacey looked at him curiously. “Haven’t I made it fairly plain?”

  “What do you mean?” Conrad pulled his eyes off the scores of clocks lining the plaza, frowned at Stacey.

  “Can you imagine what life was like for all but a few of the thirty million people here?”

  Conrad shrugged. Blue and yellow clocks, he noticed, outnumbered all others; obviously the major governmental agencies had operated from the plaza area. “Highly organized but better than the sort of life we lead,” he replied finally, more interested in the sights around him. “I’d rather have the telephone for one hour a day than not at all. Scarcities are always rationed, aren’t they?”

  “But this was a way of life in which everything was
scarce. Don’t you think there’s a point beyond which human dignity is surrendered?”

  Conrad snorted. “There seems to be plenty of dignity here. Look at these buildings, they’ll stand for a thousand years. Try comparing them with my father. Anyway, think of the beauty of the system, engineered as precisely as a watch.”

  “That’s all it was,” Stacey commented dourly. “The old metaphor of the cog in the wheel was never more true than here. The full sum of your existence was printed for you in the newspaper columns, mailed to you once a month from the Ministry of Time.”

  Conrad was looking off in some other direction and Stacey pressed on in a slightly louder voice. “Eventually, of course, revolt came. It’s interesting that in any industrial society there is usually one social revolution each century, and that successive revolutions receive their impetus from progressively higher social levels. In the eighteenth century it was the urban proletariat, in the nineteenth the artisan classes, in this revolt the white-collar office worker, living in his tiny so-called modern flat, supporting through credit pyramids an economic system that denied him all freedom of will or personality, chained him to a thousand clocks . . .’’He broke off. “What’s the matter?”

  Conrad was staring down one of the side streets. He hesitated, then asked in a casual voice: “How were these clocks driven? Electrically?”

  “Most of them. A few mechanically. Why?”

  “I just wondered . . . how they kept them all going.” He dawdled at Stacey’s heels, checking the time from his wristwatch and glancing to his left. There were twenty or thirty clocks hanging from the buildings along the side street, indistinguishable from those he had seen all afternoon.

  Except for the fact that one of them was working!

  It was mounted in the center of a black glass portico over an entranceway fifty yards down the right-hand side, about eighteen inches in diameter, with a faded blue face. Unlike the others its hands registered three-fifteen, the correct time. Conrad had nearly mentioned this apparent coincidence to Stacey when he had suddenly seen the minute hand move on an interval. Without doubt someone had restarted the clock; even if it had been running off an inexhaustible battery, after thirty-seven years it could never have displayed such accuracy.

  He hung behind Stacey, who was saying: “Every revolution has its symbol of oppression . .

  The clock was almost out of view. Conrad was about to bend down and tie his shoelace when he saw the minute hand jerk downward, tilt slightly from the horizontal.

  He followed Stacey toward the car, no longer bothering to listen to him. Ten yards from it he turned and broke away, ran swiftly across the roadway toward the nearest building.

  “Newman!” he heard Stacey shout. “Come back!” He reached the pavement, ran between the great concrete pillars carrying the building. He paused for a moment behind an elevator shaft, saw Stacey climbing hurriedly into the car. The engine coughed and roared out, and Conrad sprinted on below the building into a rear alley that led back to the side street. Behind him he heard the car accelerating, a door slam as it picked up speed.

  When he entered the side street the car came swinging off the plaza thirty yards behind him. Stacey swerved off the roadway, bumped up onto the pavement and gunned the car toward Conrad, throwing on the brakes in savage lurches, blasting the horn in an attempt to frighten him. Conrad sidestepped out of its way, almost falling over the hood, hurled himself up a narrow stairway leading to the first floor, and raced up the steps to a short landing that ended in tall glass doors. Through them he could see a wide balcony that ringed the building. A fire escape crisscrossed upward

  to the roof, giving way on the fifth floor to a cafeteria that spanned the street to the office building opposite.

  Below he heard Stacey’s feet running across the pavement. The glass doors were locked. He pulled a fire extinguisher from its bracket, tossed the heavy cylinder against the center of the plate. The glass slipped and crashed to the tiled floor in a sudden cascade, splashing down the steps. Conrad stepped through onto the balcony, began to climb the stairway. He had reached the third floor when he saw Stacey below, craning upward. Hand over hand, Conrad pulled himself up the next two flights, swung over a bolted metal turnstile into the open court of the cafeteria. Tables and chairs lay about on their sides, mixed up with the splintered remains of desks thrown down from the upper floors.

  The doors into the covered restaurant were open, a large pool of water lying across the floor. Conrad splashed through it, went over to a window and peered down past an old plastic plant into the street. Stacey seemed to have given up. Conrad crossed the rear of the restaurant, straddled the counter, and climbed through a window onto the open terrace running across the street. Beyond the rail he could see into the plaza, the double line of tire marks curving into the street below.

  He had almost crossed to the opposite balcony when a shot roared out into the air. There was a sharp tinkle of falling glass and the sound of the explosion boomed away among the empty canyons.

  For a few seconds he panicked. He flinched back from the exposed rail, his eardrums numbed, looking up at the great rectangular masses towering above him on either side, the endless tiers of windows like the faceted eyes of gigantic insects. So Stacey had been armed, almost certainly was a member of the Time Police!

  On his hands and knees Conrad scurried along the terrace, slid through the turnstiles and headed for a half-open window on the balcony.

  Climbing through, he quickly lost himself in the building.

  He finally took up a position in a corner office on the sixth floor, the cafeteria just below him to the right, the stairway up which he had escaped directly opposite.

  All afternoon Stacey drove up and down the adjacent streets, sometimes freewheeling silently with the engine off, at others blazing through at speed. Twice he fired into the air, stopping the car afterward to call out, his words lost among the echoes rolling from one street to the next. Often he drove along the pavements, swerved about below the buildings as if he expected to flush Conrad from behind one of the banks of escalators.

  Finally he appeared to drive off for good, and Conrad turned his attention to the clock in the portico. It had moved on to six forty-five, almost exactly the time given by his own watch. Conrad reset this to what he assumed was the correct time, then sat back and waited for whoever had wound it to appear. Around him the thirty or forty other clocks he could see remained stationary at 12:01.

  For five minutes he left his vigil, scooped some water off the pool in the cafeteria, suppressed his hunger, and shortly after midnight fell asleep in a comer behind the desk.

  He woke the next morning to bright sunlight flooding into the office. Standing up, he dusted his clothes, turned around to find a small gray-haired man in a patched tweed suit surveying him with sharp eyes. Slung in the crook of his arm was a large black-barreled weapon, its hammers menacingly cocked.

  The man put down a steel ruler he had evidently tapped against a cabinet, waited for Conrad to collect himself.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked in a testy voice. Conrad noticed his pockets were bulging with angular objects that weighed down the sides of his jacket.

  “I . . . er . . .” Conrad searched for something to say. Something about the old man convinced him that this was the clock winder. Suddenly he decided he had nothing to lose by being frank, and blurted out, “I saw the clock working. Down there on the left. I want to help wind them all up again.”

  The old man watched him shrewdly. He had an alert birdlike face, twin folds under his chin like a cockerel’s.

  “How do you propose to do that?” he asked.

  Stuck by this one, Conrad said lamely, “I’d find a key somewhere.”

  The old man frowned. “One key? That wouldn’t do much good.” He seemed to be relaxing, and shook his pockets with a dull chink.

  For a few moments neither of them said anything. Then Conrad had an inspiration, bared his wrist. “I have a watch
,” he said. “It’s seven forty-five.”

  “Let me see.” The old man stepped forward, briskly took Conrad’s wrist and examined the yellow dial. “Movado Supermatic,” he said to himself. “CTC issue.” He stepped back, lowering the shotgun, and seemed to be summing Conrad up. “Good,” he remarked at last. “Let’s see. You probably need some breakfast.”

  They made their way out of the building, and began to walk quickly down the street.

  “People sometimes come here,” the old man said. “Sightseers and police. I watched your escape yesterday, you were lucky not to be killed.” They swerved left and right across the empty streets, the old man darting between the stairways and buttresses. As he walked he held his hands stiffly to his sides, preventing his pockets from swinging. Glancing into them, Conrad saw that they were full of keys, large and rusty, of every design and combination.

  “I presume that was your father’s watch,” the old man remarked.

  “Grandfather’s,” Conrad corrected. He remembered Stacey’s lecture, and added, “He was killed in the plaza.”

  The old man frowned sympathetically, for a moment held Conrad’s arm.

  They stopped below a building, indistinguishable from the others nearby, at one time a bank. The old man looked carefully around him, eyeing the high cliff walls on all sides, then led the way up a stationary escalator.

  His quarters were on the second floor, beyond a maze of steel grilles and strongdoors, a stove and a hammock slung in the center of a large workshop. Lying about on thirty or forty desks in what had once been a typing pool, was an enormous collection of clocks, all being simultaneously repaired. Tall cabinets surrounded them, loaded with thousands of spare parts in neatly labeled correspondence trays—escapements, ratchets, cogwheels, barely recognizable through the rust.