Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  Larsen paced up and down, cracking his knuckles. Eyes half closed, Bayliss watched him steadily. “I’m pretty sure there won’t be another attack,” Larsen continued. “In fact, the best thing is probably for me to get straight back to the plant, after all there’s no point in sitting around here indefinitely. I feel more or less completely okay.”

  Bayliss nodded slowly. “In that case, then, why are you so jumpy?”

  Exasperated, Larsen clenched his fists. He could almost hear the artery thudding angrily in his temple. “I’m not jumpy! For God’s sake, Bayliss, I thought the advanced view was that psychiatrist and patient shared the illness together, forgot their own identities and took equal responsibility. You’re trying to slide out—”

  “I am not,” Bayliss cut in firmly. “I accept complete responsibility for you. That’s why I want you to stay here until you’ve come to terms with this thing.”

  Larsen snorted. “ ‘Thing’! Now you’re trying to make it sound like something out of a horror movie. All I had was a simple hallucination. And I’m not even completely convinced it was that.” He pointed through the window. “Suddenly opening the garage door in that bright sunlight—it might have been just a shadow.”

  “You described it pretty exactly,” Bayliss commented. “Color of the hair, moustache, the clothes he wore.”

  “Back projection. The detail in dreams is authentic too.” Larsen moved the chair out of the way and leaned forward across the desk. “Another thing. I don’t feel you’re being entirely frank.”

  Their eyes leveled. Bayliss studied Larsen carefully for a moment, noticing his widely dilated pupils, then looked away.

  “Well?” Larsen pressed.

  Bayliss stood up, buttoned his jacket and walked across to the door. “I’ll call in tomorrow. Meanwhile try to unwind yourself a little. I’m not trying to alarm you, Larsen, but this problem may be rather more complicated than you imagine.” He nodded, then slipped out before Larsen could reply.

  Larsen stepped over to the window, through the blind watched the psychologist disappear into his chalet. Disturbed for a moment, the sunlight again settled itself heavily over everything. A few minutes later the sounds of one of the Bartok quartets whined fretfully across the apron.

  Larsen went back to the desk and sat down, elbows thrust forward aggressively. Bayliss irritated him, with his neurotic music and inaccurate diagnoses, and he felt tempted to climb straight into his car and drive back to the plant. Strictly speaking, though, the psychologist outranked Larsen, and probably had executive authority over him while he was at the chalet, particularly as the five days he had spent there were on the company’s time.

  He gazed around the silent lounge, tracing the cool horizontal shadows that dappled the walls, listening to the low soothing hum of the air-conditioner. His argument with Bayliss had refreshed him and he felt composed and confident. Yet shallow residues of tension and uneasiness still existed, and he found it difficult to keep his eyes off the open doors to the bedroom and kitchen.

  He had arrived at the chalet five days earlier, exhausted and overwrought, on the verge of a total neuronic collapse. For three months he had been working without a break on programming the complex circuitry of a huge brain simulator which the company’s Advanced Designs Division were building for one of the big psychiatric foundations. This was a complete electronic replica of the central nervous system, each spinal level represented by a single computer, other computers holding massive memory banks in which sleep, tension, aggression and other psychic functions were coded and stored, building blocks that could be played into the CNS simulator to construct models of dissociation states and withdrawal syndromes, any psychic complex on demand.

  The design teams working on the simulator had been watched vigilantly by Bayliss and his assistants, and the weekly tests had revealed the mounting load of fatigue and worry that Larsen was carrying. Finally Bayliss had pulled him off the switchback and sent him out to the desert for two or three days’ recuperation.

  Larsen had been glad to get away. For the first two days he had lounged aimlessly around the deserted chalets, pleasantly fuddled by the barbiturates Bayliss prescribed, gazing out across the white deck of the desert floor, going to bed by eight and sleeping until noon. Every morning the caretaker had driven in from the town nearby to clean up and leave the groceries and menu slips, but Larsen never saw her, only too glad to be alone. Deliberately seeing no one, allowing the natural rhythms of his mind to re-establish themselves, he knew he would soon recover.

  In fact, though, the first person he had seen had suddenly stepped up to him straight out of a nightmare.

  Larsen still looked back on the encounter with a shudder.

  After lunch on his third day at the chalet he had decided to drive out into the desert and examine an old quartz mine in one of the canyons. This was a two-hour trip and he had made up a thermos of iced martinis and stowed it in the back seat. The garage was adjacent to the chalet, set back from the kitchen side entrance, and fitted with a roll steel door that lifted vertically and curved up under the roof.

  Larsen had locked the chalet behind him, then raised the garage door and driven his car out onto the apron. Going back for the thermos which he had left on the bench at the rear of the garage he had noticed a full can of gas in the shadows against one comer. For a moment he paused, adding up his mileage, and decided to take the can with him. He carried it over to the car, then turned around to close the garage door.

  The roll had failed to retract completely when he had first raised it, and reached down to the level of his chin. Putting his weight on the handle, Larsen managed to move it down a few inches, the sunlight reflected in the steel panels dazzling his eyes, but the inertia was too much for him. Pressing his palms under the door, he jerked it upward slightly to gain more momentum on the downward swing.

  The interval was small, no more than six inches, but it was just enough for him to see into the darkened garage.

  Hiding in the shadows against the back wall near the bench, was the indistinct but nonetheless unmistakable figure of a man. He stood motionless, arms loosely at his sides, watching Larsen. He wore a light cream suit, covered by patches of shadow that gave him a curious fragmentary look, a neat blue sportshirt, and two-tone shoes. He was stockily built, with a thick brush moustache and plump face, eyes that stared steadily at Larsen but somehow seemed to be focused beyond him.

  Still holding the door with both hands, Larsen gaped at the man blankly. Not only was there no means by which he could have entered the garage—there were no windows or side doors—but there was something definitely menacing about his stance.

  Larsen was about to call to him when the man suddenly moved forward and stepped straight out of the shadows toward him.

  Aghast, Larsen backed away. The dark patches across the man’s suit were not shadows at all, but the outline of the work bench directly behind him.

  The man*s body and clothes were transparent, he was a living zombie!

  Galvanized into life, Larsen choked off his scream, seized the garage door and hurled it down. He dived at the lock, snapped the bolt in and jammed it closed with both hands, knees pressed against it desperately.

  Half paralyzed by cramp and barely breathing, suit soaked in sweat, he was still holding the door down when Bayliss drove up thirty minutes later.

  Larsen drummed his fingers irritably on the desk, stood up and went into the kitchen. Cut off from the barbiturates they had been intended to counteract, the three amphetamines had begun to make him feel restless and overstimulated. He switched the coffee percolator on and then off, prowled back to the lounge and sat down on the sofa with the copy of Kretschmer.

  He read a few pages, increasingly impatient. What light Kretschmer threw on his problem was hard to see, most of the case histories described deep schizos and irreversible paranoids. His own problem was much more superficial, a momentary aberration due to overloading. Why wouldn’t Bayliss see this? For some reas
on he seemed to be unconsciously wishing for a major crisis, probably because he, the psychologist, secretly wanted to become the patient.

  Larsen tossed the book aside, looked out through the window at the desert. Suddenly the chalet seemed dark and cramped, a claustrophobic focus of suppressed aggressions. He stood up, strode over to the door and stepped out into the clear open air.

  Grouped in a loose semicircle, the chalets seemed to shrink towards the ground as he strolled to the rim of the concrete apron a hundred yards away, the mountains behind looming up enormously. It was late afternoon, on the edge of dusk, and the sky was a vivid vibrant blue, highlighted by the deepening colors of the desert floor, overlayed by the huge lanes of shadow that reached from the mountains against the sun line. Larsen turned and looked back at the chalets. There was no sign of movement, other than a faint discordant echo of the atonal music Bayliss was playing, and the whole scene seemed suddenly unreal.

  Reflecting on this, Larsen felt something shift inside his mind. The sensation was undefined, like an expected cue that had failed to materialize, a forgotten intention. He tried to recall it, unable to remember whether he had switched on the coffee percolator.

  He walked back to the chalets, noticing that he had left the kitchen door open. As he passed the lounge window on his way to close it he glanced in over his shoulder.

  A man was sitting on the sofa, legs crossed, face hidden by the volume of Kretschmer. For a moment Larsen assumed that Bayliss had called in to see him, and walked on, deciding to make coffee for them both. Then he noticed that the stereogram was still playing in Bayliss’s chalet.

  Picking his steps carefully, he moved back to the lounge window and craned around it cautiously. The man’s face was still hidden, but a single glance confirmed that the visitor was not Bayliss. He was wearing the same cream suit Larsen had seen two days earlier, the same two-tone shoes. But this time the man was no hallucination, his hands and clothes were solid and palpable. He shifted about on the sofa, denting one of the cushions, turned a page of the book, flexing the spine between his hands.

  Pulse thickening, Larsen watched him carefully, bracing himself against the window ledge. Something about the man, his posture, the way he held his hands, convinced him that he had seen him before their fragmentary encounter in the garage.

  Then the man lowered the book and threw it onto the seat beside him. He sat back and looked through the window, his focus only a few inches from Larsen’s face.

  Mesmerized, Larsen stared back at him. He recognized the man without doubt, the pudgy face, the nervous eyes, the too thick moustache. Now at last he could see him clearly and realized he knew him only too well, better than anyone else on Earth.

  The man was himself!

  Bayliss clipped the hypodermic into his valise, placed it on the lid of the stereogram.

  “Hallucination is the wrong term altogether,” he told Larsen, who was lying stretched out on Bayliss’s sofa, sipping weakly at a glass of hot whiskey. “Stop using it. A psychoretinal image of remarkable strength and duration, but not a hallucination.”

  Larsen gestured feebly. He had stumbled into Bayliss’s chalet an hour earlier, literally beside himself with fright. Bayliss had calmed him down, then dragged him back across the apron to the lounge window, made him accept that his double had gone. Bayliss wasn’t in the least surprised at the identity of the phantom, and this worried Larsen almost as much as the actual hallucination. What else was Bayliss hiding up his sleeve?

  “I’m surprised you didn’t realize it sooner yourself,” Bayliss remarked. “Your description of the man in the garage was so obvious—the same cream suit, the same shoes and shirt, let alone the exact physical similarity, even down to your moustache.”

  Recovering a little, Larsen sat up. He smoothed down his cream gabardine suit, brushed the dust off his brown and white shoes. “Thanks for warning me. All you’ve got to do now is tell me who he is.”

  Bayliss sat down in one of the chairs. “What do you mean, who he is? He’s you, of course.”

  “I know that, but why, where does he come from? God, I must be going insane.”

  Bayliss snapped his fingers. “No, you’re not, pull yourself together. This is a purely functional disorder, like double vision or amnesia, nothing more serious. If it was I’d have pulled you out of here long ago. Perhaps I should have done anyway, but I think we can find a quick safe way out of the image maze you’re in.”

  He took a notebook out of his breast pocket. “Let’s have a look at what we’ve got. Now, two features stand out above all others. First, the phantom is yourself, there’s no doubt about that, he’s an exact replica of you. More important, though, he is you as you are now, your exact contemporary in time, unidealized, unmutilated, with no compensation devices working at all. He isn’t the shining youthful hero of the superego, or the haggard graybeard of the death wish. He is simply a photographic double. Displace one eyeball gently with your finger and you’ll see a double of me. Your double is no more unusual, with the exception that the displacement is not in space but in time. You see, the second thing I noticed about your garbled description of this phantom was that, not only was he a photographic double, but he was doing exactly what you yourself had been doing a few minutes previously. The man in the garage was standing by the workbench, just where you stood when you were wondering whether to take the can of gas. Again, the man reading in the armchair was merely repeating exactly what you had been doing, with the same book, five minutes earlier. He even stared out of the window as you say you did before going out for a stroll.”

  * * *

  Larsen nodded slowly, sipping a whiskey. “You’re suggesting then, that the hallucination was nothing more than a sort of mental flashback?”

  “Precisely. The stream of retinal images reaching the optic lobes is nothing more than a film strip. Every image is stored away, thousands of reels, a hundred thousand hours of running time. Usually flashbacks are deliberate, when we consciously select a few blurry stills from the film library, a childhood scene, the image of our neighborhood streets we carry around with us all day near the surface of consciousness. But upset the projector slightly—overstrain could do it—suddenly jolt it back a few hundred frames, and you’ll superimpose a completely irrelevant strip of already exposed film, in your case a glimpse of yourself sitting on the sofa. It’s the apparent irrelevancy that is so frightening.”

  Larsen gestured with his glass. “Wait a minute, though. When I was on the sofa reading Kretschmer I didn’t actually see myself, any more than I can see myself now. So where did the superimposed images come from?”

  Bayliss put away his notebook. “Don’t take the analogy of the film strip too literally. You may not see yourself sitting on that sofa, but your awareness of being there is just as powerful as visual corroboration. It’s the multichannel stream of tactile, positional, and psychic images that form the real data store. Very little extrapolation is needed to transpose the observer’s eye a few yards to the other side of a room. Purely visual memories are never completely accurate anyway.”

  “How do you explain why the man I saw in the garage was transparent?”

  “Quite simply. The process was only just beginning, the intensity of the image was weak. The one you saw this afternoon was much stronger. I cut you off barbiturates deliberately knowing full well that those stimulants you were taking on the sly would really trigger something if they were allowed to operate unopposed.”

  He went over to Larsen, took his glass and refilled it from the decanter. “But let’s think of the future. The most interesting aspect of all this is the light it throws on one of the oldest archetypes in the human psyche—the ghost—and the whole supernatural army of phantoms, witches, demons, and so on. Are they all, in fact, nothing more than psychoretinal flashbacks, transposed images of the observer himself, jolted onto the retinal screen by fear, bereavement, religious obsession? The most notable thing about the majority of ghosts is how prosaically equippe
d they are, compared with the elaborate literary productions of the great mystics and dreamers. The nebulous white sheet is probably the observer’s own nightgown. It’s an interesting field for speculation. For example, take the most famous ghost in literature and reflect how much more sense Hamlet makes if you realize that the ghost of his murdered father is really Hamlet himself.”

  “All right, all right,” Larsen cut in irritably. “But how does this help me?”

  Bayliss broke off his reflective up and down patrol of the floor, fixed an eye on Larsen. “I’m coming to that. There are two methods of dealing with this dysfunction of yours. The classical technique is to pump you full of tranquilizers and brick you into a bed for a year or so. Gradually your mind would knit together, and primary neural pathways reassemble themselves. Long job, boring for you and everybody else. The alternative method is frankly experimental, but I think it might work. I mentioned the phenomenon of the ghost because it’s an interesting fact that although there have been tens of thousands of recorded cases of people being pursued by ghosts, and a few of the ghosts themselves being pursued, there have been no cases of ghost and observer actually meeting of their own volition. Tell me, what would have happened if, when you saw your double this afternoon, you had gone straight into the lounge and spoken to him?”

  Larsen shuddered. “Obviously nothing, if your theory holds. I wouldn’t like to test it.”

  “That’s just what you’re going to do. Don’t panic. The next time you see a double sitting in a chair reading Kretschmer go up and speak to him. If he doesn’t reply sit down in the chair yourself. That’s all you have to do.”

  Larsen jumped up, gesticulating. “For heaven’s sake, Bayliss, are you crazy? Do you know what it’s like to suddenly see yourself? All you want to do is run.”