Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  “I realize that, but it’s the worst thing you can do. Why, whenever anyone grapples with a ghost, does it always vanish instantly? Because forcibly occupying the same physical coordinates as the double jolts the psychic projector onto a single channel again, the two separate streams of retinal images coincide and fuse. You’ve got to try, Larsen. It may be quite an effort, but you’ll cure yourself once and for all, really blast those neuronic pathways clear again.”

  Larsen shook his head stubbornly. “The idea’s insane.” To himself he added: I’d rather shoot the thing. Then he remembered the .38 in his suitcase, and the presence of the weapon gave him a stronger sense of security than all Bayliss’s drugs and advice. The revolver was a simple symbol of aggression, and even if the phantom was only an intruder in his own mind, it gave that portion which still remained intact greater confidence, enough possibly to dissipate the double’s power.

  Eyes half closed with fatigue, he listened vaguely to Bayliss, nodding agreement to the latter’s injunctions. Half an hour later he went back to his chalet, found the revolver and hid it under a magazine in the letter box outside the lounge door. It was too conspicuous to carry, and anyway might fire accidentally and injure him. Outside the front door it would be safely hidden and yet easily accessible, ready to mete out a little old-fashioned punishment to any double dealer trying to play a fifth ace into the game.

  Two days later, with unexpected vengeance, the opportunity came.

  Bayliss had driven into town to buy a new stylus for the stereogram, leaving Larsen to prepare lunch for them while he was away. Larsen pretended to resent the chore, but secretly he was glad of something to do, tired of hanging around the chalets while Bayliss watched him as if he were an experimental animal, eagerly waiting for the next crisis. With luck this might never come, if only to spite Bayliss, who had been having everything too much his own way. Larsen had cut out the amphetamines altogether and felt nearer normality than he had done at any time over the last three months.

  After laying the table in Bayliss’s kitchenette and getting plenty of ice ready for the martinis (alcohol was just the thing, Larsen readily decided, a wonderful CNS depressant) he went back to his chalet and put on a clean shirt. On an impulse he decided to change his shoes and suit as well, and fished out the blue office serge and black oxfords he had worn on his way out to the desert. Not only were the associations of the cream suit and sports shoes unpleasant, but a complete change of costume might well forestall the double’s reappearance, provide a fresh psychic image of himself powerful enough to suppress any wandering visions. Looking at himself in the mirror, he decided to carry the principle even further, switched on his shaver and cut away his moustache. Then he thinned out his hair, plastered it back smoothly across his scalp.

  The transformation was certainly effective. When Bayliss climbed out of his car and walked into the lounge he almost failed to recognize Larsen, flinched back involuntarily at the sight of the sleek-haired, dark-suited figure who stepped suddenly from behind the kitchen door.

  “What the hell are you playing at?” he snapped at Larsen. “This is no time for practical jokes.” He surveyed Larsen critically. “You look like a cheap detective.”

  Larsen guffawed. The incident put him in high spirits, and after several martinis he began to feel extremely buoyant, talking away rapidly through the meal, a fund of wisecracks and humorous asides. Strangely, though, Bayliss seemed eager to get rid of him; he realized why shortly after he returned to his chalet. His pulse had quickened, he found himself prowling around with rapid nervous movements, his brain felt overactive and accelerated. The martinis had only been partly responsible for his elation. Now that they were wearing off he began to see the real agent—some stimulant Bayliss had slipped him in the hope of precipitating another crisis.

  Larsen stood by the window, staring out angrily at Bayliss’s chalet. The psychologist’s impudence and utter lack of scruple outraged him. His fingers fretted nervously across the blind, he suddenly felt like kicking the whole place down and speeding off. With its plywood-thin walls and matchbox furniture the chalet was nothing more than a cardboard asylum, everything that had happened there, the breakdowns and his nightmarish phantoms, had probably been schemed up by Bayliss deliberately.

  Larsen noticed that the stimulant seemed to be extremely powerful. The takeoff was sustained and unbroken. He tried hopelessly to relax and level off, went into the bedroom and kicked his suitcase around, lit two cigarettes without realizing it.

  Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he slammed the front door back and stormed out across the apron, determined to have everything out with Bayliss and demand an immediate sedative.

  Bayliss’s lounge was empty. Larsen plunged through into the kitchen and bedroom, discovered to his annoyance that Bayliss was having a shower. He hung around helplessly in the lounge for a few moments, then decided to wait in his chalet.

  Head down, he crossed the bright sunlight at a fast stride and was only a few steps from the darkened doorway when he noticed that a man in a blue suit was standing there watching him.

  Heart seizing, Larsen shrank back, recognizing the double even before he had completely accepted the change of costume, the smooth-shaven face with its altered planes. The man hovered indecisively, flexing his fingers, and appeared to be on the verge of stepping down into the sunlight.

  Larsen was about ten feet from him, directly in line with Bayliss's door. He backed away, at the same time swinging to his left to the lee of the garage. There he stopped and pulled himself together. The double was still hesitating in the doorway, longer, he was sure, than he himself had done. Larsen looked carefully at the face, repulsed and nauseated, not so much by the absolute accuracy of the image, but by a strange, almost luminous pastiness that gave the double’s features the distinctive waxy sheen of a corpse. It was this unpleasant gloss that held Larsen back—the double was an arm’s length from the letter box holding the .38, and nothing could have induced Larsen to approach it.

  He decided to enter the chalet and watch the double from behind. Rather than use the kitchen door, which gave access to the lounge on the double’s immediate right, he turned to circle the garage and climb in through the bedroom window on the far side.

  He was picking his way through a dump of old mortar and barbed wire behind the garage when he heard a voice call out, “Larsen, you idiot, what do you think you’re doing?”

  It was Bayliss, leaning out of his bathroom window. Larsen stumbled, found his balance, and waved Bayliss back angrily. Bayliss merely shook his head, leaned further out, drying his neck with a towel.

  Larsen retraced his steps, signaling to Bayliss to keep quiet. He was crossing the interval between the garage wall and the near corner of Bayliss’s chalet when out of the side of his eye he noticed a dark-suited figure standing with its back to him a few yards from the garage door.

  The double had moved! Larsen stopped and whirled around, Bayliss forgotten, and watched the double warily. He was poised on the balls of his feet, as Larsen had been only a minute or so earlier, elbows up, hands weaving defensively. His eyes were hidden, but he appeared to be looking at the front door of Larsen’s chalet.

  Automatically, Larsen’s eyes also moved to the doorway.

  The original blue-suited figure still stood there, staring out into the sunlight!

  There was not one double now, but two!

  For a moment Larsen goggled helplessly at the two figures, standing on either side of the apron like half-animated dummies in a waxworks tableau.

  Suddenly the figure with its back to him swung sharply on one heel and began to stalk rapidly toward him. He stared sightlessly at Larsen, the sunlight exposing his face, and with a jolt of horror Larsen recognized for the first time the perfect similarity of the double—the same plump cheeks, the same mole by the right nostril, the white upper lip with the same small razor cut where the moustache had been shaved away. But above all he recognized the man’s state
of shock and anxiety, the nervous lips, the tension around the neck and facial muscles, the utter exhaustion just below the surface of the mask.

  His voice strangled, Larsen turned and bolted.

  He stopped running about two hundred yards out in the desert beyond the edge of the apron. Gasping for breath, he dropped to one knee behind a narrow sandstone outcropping and looked back at the chalets. The second double was making his way around the garage, climbing through the tangle of old wire. The other was crossing the interval between the chalets. Oblivious of them both, Bayliss was struggling with the bathroom window, forcing it back so that he could see out into the desert.

  Trying to steady himself, Larsen wiped his face on his jacket sleeve. So Bayliss had been right, although he had never anticipated that more than one image could be seen during any single attack. But in fact Larsen had spawned two in close succession, each at a critical phase during the last five minutes. Somehow the psychic projector must have received two separate jolts, was now throwing two distinct streams of images onto the retinal screen.

  Wondering whether to wait for the images to fade, Larsen remembered the revolver in the letter box. However irrational, it seemed his only hope. With it he would be able to test the ultimate validity of the doubles, drive them back out of his mind.

  The outcropping ran diagonally to the right to the edge of the apron. Crouching forward, he scurried along it, pausing at intervals to follow the scene. The two doubles were still holding their positions, though Bayliss had closed his window and disappeared.

  Larsen reached the edge of the apron, which was built on a shallow table about a foot off the desert floor, and moved along its rim to where an old fifty-gallon drum gave him a vantage point. To reach the revolver he decided to go around the far side of Bayliss's chalet, where he would find his own doorway unguarded except for the double watching by the garage.

  He was about to step forward when something made him look over his shoulder.

  Running straight toward him along the outcropping, head down, hands almost touching the ground, was an enormous ratlike creature, moving at tremendous speed. Every ten or fifteen yards it paused for a moment, and looked out at the chalets, and Larsen caught a glimpse of its face, insane and terrified, another replica of his own.

  “Larsen! Larsen!”

  Bayliss stood by the chalet, waving out at the desert.

  Larsen glanced back at the phantom hurtling toward him, now only thirty feet away, then jumped up and lurched helplessly across to Bayliss.

  Bayliss caught him firmly with his hands, pulled him together. “Larsen, what’s the matter with you? Are you having an attack?”

  Larsen gestured frantically at the figures around him. “Stop them, Bayliss, for God’s sake,” he gasped. “I can’t get away from them.”

  Bayliss shook him roughly. “You can see more than one? Where are they, show me.”

  Larsen pointed at the two figures hovering luminously near the chalet, then waved limply in the direction of the desert. “By the garage, and over there along the wall. There’s another hiding along that ridge.”

  Bayliss seized him by the arm. “Come on, man, you’ve got to face up to them, it’s no use running.” He tried to drag Larsen toward the garage, but Larsen pulled away and slipped down onto the concrete.

  “I can’t, Bayliss, believe me. There’s a gun in my letter box. Get it for me, it’s the only way.”

  Bayliss hesitated, looking down at Larsen, slumped inertly on his knees. “All right. Try to hold on.”

  Larsen stood up, pointed to the far corner of Bayliss’s chalet. “I’ll wait over there for you.”

  As Bayliss ran off swiftly he hobbled toward the corner. Half-273

  way there he tripped across the remains of an old ladder lying on the ground, twisted his right ankle savagely between two of the rungs.

  Clasping his foot, he sat down just as Bayliss appeared between the chalets, the .38 in his hand. He looked around uncertainly for Larsen, who cleared his throat to call to him.

  Before he could open his mouth he saw the double who had followed him along the ridge leap up from behind the drum and stumble up to Bayliss across the concrete floor. He was disheveled and exhausted, jacket almost off his shoulders, collar open, the tie knot under one ear. So the image was still pursuing him, dogging his footsteps like an obsessed shadow.

  Larsen tried to call to Bayliss again, but something he saw choked the voice in his throat.

  Bayliss was looking at his double!

  Larsen wrenched himself to his feet, feeling a sudden premonition of terror. He tried to wave to Bayliss, but the latter was watching the double intently as it pointed to the figures nearby, nodding to it in apparent agreement.

  “Bayliss!”

  The shot drowned his cry. Bayliss had fired somewhere between the garages, and the echo of the shot bounded among the chalets. The double was still beside him, pointing in all directions. Bayliss raised the revolver and fired again. The sound slammed violently at Larsen, making him feel stunned and sick.

  Now Bayliss too was suffering the same psychotic attack, seeing two simultaneous images, but in his case not of himself, but of Larsen, on whom his mind had been focusing for the past weeks. A repetition of Larsen stumbling over to him and pointing at the phantoms was being played over onto Bayliss’s retinal screens, diabolically at the exact moment when he had returned with the revolver and was searching for a target.

  Larsen started to stumble away, trying to reach the comer wall. A third shot roared through the air and a vicious flash of fire was reflected in the bathroom window.

  He had almost reached the comer when he heard Bayliss scream. Leaning one hand against the wall he looked back.

  Mouth open, Bayliss was staring wildly at him, the revolver clenched like a bomb in his hand. Beside him the blue-suited figure stood quietly, straightening its tie.

  At last Bayliss had realized he could see two images of Larsen, one beside him, the other twenty feet away against the chalet.

  But how was he to know which was the real Larsen? Staring blankly at Larsen, he seemed unable to decide.

  Then the double by his shoulder raised one arm and pointed at Larsen, toward the comer wall to which he himself had pointed a minute earlier.

  Larsen tried to scream, then hurled himself at the wall and desperately pulled himself along it. Behind him Bayliss’s feet came thudding across the concrete.

  He heard only the first of the three shots.

  The Cage of Sand

  At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped onto his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Halos of moonlight beaded the lamp standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.

  As Bridgman watched, his lean bronzed arms propped against the rusting rail, the last whorls of light sank away into the cerise funnel withdrawing below the horizon, and the first wind stirred across the dead Martian sand. Here and there miniature cyclones whirled about a sand spur, drawing off swirling feathers of moon-washed spray, and a nimbus of white dust swept across the dunes and settled in the dips and hollows. Gradually the drifts accumulated, edging toward the former shoreline below the hotels. Already the first four floors had been inundated, and the sand now reached up to within two feet of Bridgman’s balcony. After the next sandstorm he would be forced yet again to move to the floor above.

  “Bridgman!”


  The voice cleft the darkness like a spear. Fifty yards to his right, at the edge of the derelict sandbreak he had once attempted to build below the hotel, a square stocky figure wearing a pair of frayed cotton shorts waved up at him. The moonlight etched the broad sinewy muscles of his chest, the powerful bowed legs sinking almost to their calves in the soft Martian sand. He was about forty-five years old, his thinning hair close-cropped so that he seemed almost bald. In his right hand he carried a large canvas holdall.

  Bridgman smiled to himself. Standing there patiently in the moonlight below the derelict hotel, Travis reminded him of some long-delayed tourist arriving at a ghost resort years after its extinction.

  “Bridgman, are you coming?” When the latter still leaned on his balcony rail, Travis added, “The next conjunction is tomorrow.”

  Bridgman shook his head, a rictus of annoyance twisting his mouth. He hated the bimonthly conjunctions, when all seven of the derelict satellite capsules still orbiting the Earth crossed the sky together. Invariably on these nights he remained in his room, playing over the old memo-tapes he had salvaged from the submerged chalets and motels further along the beach (the hysterical “This is Mamie Goldberg, 62955 Cocoa Boulevard, I really wanna protest against this crazy evacuation . . .” or resigned “Sam Snade here, the Pontiac convertible in the back garage belongs to anyone who can dig it out.”) Travis and Louise Woodward always came to the hotel on the conjunction nights—it was the highest building in the resort, with an unrestricted view from horizon to horizon— and would follow the seven converging stars as they pursued their endless courses around the globe. Both would be oblivious of everything else, which the wardens knew only too well, and they reserved their most careful searches of the sand sea for these bimonthly occasions. Invariably Bridgman found himself forced to act as lookout for the other two.