Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  As he entered the Neptune—a low cream and chromium saloon which abutted the landing strip and had formerly served as a passenger lounge when thousands of migrants from the Southern Hemisphere were being shipped up to the Canaries—Granger called out to him and rattled his cane against the window, pointing to the dark outline of the migration officer’s helicopter parked on the apron fifty yards away.

  “I know,” Holliday said in a bored voice as he went over with his drink. “Relax, I saw him coming.”

  Granger grinned at him. Holliday, with his intent serious face under an unruly thatch of blond hair, and his absolute sense of personal responsibility, always amused him.

  “You relax,” Granger said, adjusting the shoulder pad under his Hawaiian shirt which disguised his sunken lung. (He had lost it skindiving thirty years earlier.) “Vm not going to fly to Mars next week.”

  Holliday stared somberly into his glass. “I’m not either.” He looked up at Granger’s wry saturnine face, then added sardonically, “Or didn’t you know?”

  Granger roared, tapping the window with his cane as if to dismiss the helicopter. “Seriously, you’re not going? You’ve made up your mind?”

  “Wrong. And right. I haven’t made up my mind yet—but at the same time I’m not going. You appreciate the distinction?”

  “Perfectly, Dr. Schopenhauer.” Granger began to grin again. He pushed away his glass. “You know, Holliday, your whole trouble is that you take yourself too seriously. You don’t realize how ludicrous you are.”

  “Ludicrous? Why?” Holliday asked guardedly.

  “What does it matter whether you’ve made up your mind or not? The only thing that counts now is to get together enough courage to head straight for the Canaries and take off into the wide blue yonder. For heaven’s sake, what are you staying for? Earth is dead and buried. Past, present, and future no longer exist here. Don’t you feel any responsibility to your own biological destiny?”

  “Spare me that.” Holliday pulled a ration card from his shirt pocket and passed it across to Granger, who was responsible for the stores allocations. “I need a new pump on the lounge refrigerator, 30-watt Frigidaire. Any left?”

  Granger groaned, took the card with a snort of exasperation. “Good God, man, you’re just a Robinson Crusoe in reverse, tinkering about with all these bits of old junk, trying to fit them together. You’re the last man on the beach who decides to stay behind after everyone else has left. Maybe you are a poet and dreamer, but don’t you realize that those two species are extinct now?”

  Holliday stared out at the helicopter on the apron, at the lights of the settlement reflected against the salt hills that encircled the town. Each day they moved in a little further. Already it was difficult to get together a weekly squad to push them back. In ten years’ time his position might well be that of a Crusoe. Luckily the big water and kerosene tanks—giant cylinders, the size of gasometers—held enough for fifty years. Without them, of course, he would have had no choice.

  “Let’s give me a rest,” he said to Granger. “You’re merely trying to find in me a justification for your own enforced stay. Perhaps I am extinct, but I’d rather cling to life here than vanish completely. Anyway, I have a hunch that one day they’ll be coming back. Someone’s got to stay behind and keep alive a sense of what life here has meant. This isn’t an old husk we can throw away when we’ve finished with it. We were born here. It’s the only place we really remember.”

  Granger nodded slowly. He was about to speak when a brilliant white arc crossed the darkened window, then soared out of sight, its point of impact with the ground lost behind one of the storage tanks.

  Holliday stood up and craned out of the window.

  “Must be a launching platform. Looked like a big one, probably one of the Russians’.” A long rolling crump reverberated through the night air, echoing away among the coral towers. Flashes of light flared up briefly. There was a series of smaller explosions, and then a wide diffuse pall of steam fanned out across the northwest.

  “Lake Atlantic,” Granger commented. “Let’s drive out there

  and have a look. It may have uncovered something interesting.”

  Half an hour later, with a set of Granger’s old sample beakers, slides, and mounting equipment in the back seat, they set off in the jeep toward the southern tip of Lake Atlantic ten miles away.

  It was here that Holliday discovered the fish.

  Lake Atlantic, a narrow ribbon of stagnant brine ten miles in length by a mile wide, to the north of the Bermuda Islands, was all that remained of the former Atlantic Ocean, and was, in fact, the sole remnant of the oceans which had once covered two thirds of the Earth’s surface. The frantic mining of the oceans in the previous century to provide oxygen for the atmospheres of the new planets had made their decline swift and irreversible, and with their death had come climatic and other geophysical changes which ensured the extinction of Earth itself. As the oxygen extracted electrolytically from sea water was compressed and shipped away, the hydrogen released was discharged into the atmosphere. Eventually only a narrow layer of denser, oxygen-containing air was left, little more than a mile in depth, and those people remaining on Earth were forced to retreat into the ocean beds, abandoning the poisoned continental tables.

  At the hotel at Idle End, Holliday spent uncounted hours going through the library he had accumulated of magazines and books about the cities of the old Earth, and Granger often described to him his own youth when the seas had been half full and he had worked as a marine biologist at the University of Miami, a fabulous laboratory unfolding itself for him on the lengthening beaches.

  “The seas are our corporate memory,” he often said to Holliday. “In draining them we deliberately obliterated our own pasts, to a large extent our own self-identities. That’s another reason why you should leave. Without the sea, life is unsupportable. We become nothing more than the ghosts of memories, blind and homeless, flitting through the dry chambers of a gutted skull.”

  They reached the lake within half an hour, and worked their way through the swamps which formed its banks. In the dim light the gray salt dunes ran on for miles, their hollows cracked into hexagonal plates, a dense cloud of vapor obscuring the surface of the water. They parked on a low promontory by the edge of the lake and looked up at the great circular shell of the launching platform. This was one of the larger vehicles, almost three hundred yards in diameter, lying upside down in the shallow water, its hull dented and burnt, riven by huge punctures where the power plants had torn themselves loose on impact and exploded off across the lake. A quarter of a mile away, hidden by the blur, they could just see a cluster of rotors pointing up into the sky.

  Walking along the bank, the main body of the lake on their right, they moved nearer the platform, tracing out its riveted CCCP markings along the rim. The giant vehicle had cut enormous grooves through the nexus of pools just beyond the tip of the lake, and Granger waded through the warm water, searching for specimens. Here and there were small anemones and starfish, stunted bodies twisted by cancers. Weblike algae draped themselves over his rubber boots, their nuclei beading like jewels in the phosphorescent light. They paused by one of the largest pools, a circular basin three hundred feet across, draining slowly as the water poured out through a breach in its side. Granger moved carefully down the deepening bank, forking specimens into the rack of beakers, while Holliday stood on the narrow causeway between the pool and the lake, looking up at the dark overhang of the space platform as it loomed into the darkness above him like the stern of a ship.

  He was examining the shattered airlock of one of the crew domes when he saw something suddenly move across the surface of the deck. For a moment he imagined that he had seen a passenger who had somehow survived the vehicle’s crash, then realized that it was merely the reflection in the aluminized skin of a ripple in the pool behind him.

  He turned around to see Granger, ten feet below him, up to his knees in the water, staring out carefu
lly across the pool.

  “Did you throw something?” Granger asked quietly.

  Holliday shook his head. “No.” Without thinking, he added, “Must have been a fish jumping.”

  “Fish? There isn’t a single fish alive on the entire planet. The whole zoological class died out ten years ago. Funny, though.”

  Just then the fish jumped again.

  For a few moments, standing motionless in the half-light, they watched it together, as its slim silver body leapt frantically out of the tepid shallow water, its short glistening arcs carrying it to and fro across the pool.

  “Dogfish,” Granger muttered. “Shark family. Highly adaptable. It would need to be, to have survived here. Damn it, it may well be the only fish still living.”

  Holliday moved down the bank, his feet sinking in the oozing mud. “Isn’t the water too salty?”

  Granger bent down and scooped up some of the water, sipped it tentatively. “Saline, but comparatively dilute.” He glanced over his shoulder at the lake. “Perhaps there’s continuous evaporation off the lake surface and local condensation here. A freak distillation couple.” He slapped Holliday on the shoulder. “Holliday, this should be interesting.”

  The dogfish was leaping frantically toward them, its two-foot body twisting and flicking. Low mud banks were emerging all over the surface of the pool; in only a few places toward the center was the water more than a foot deep.

  Holliday pointed to the breach in the bank fifty yards away, gestured Granger after him and began to run toward it.

  Five minutes later they had effectively dammed up the breach. Then Holliday returned for the jeep and drove it carefully through the winding saddles between the pools. He lowered the ramp and began to force the sides of the fish pool in toward each other. After two or three hours he had narrowed the diameter from a hundred yards to under sixty, and the depth of the water had increased to over two feet. The dogfish had ceased to jump and swam smoothly just below the surface, snapping at the countless small plants which had been tumbled into the water by the jeep’s ramp. Its slim white body seemed white and unmarked, the small fins trim and powerful.

  Granger sat on the hood of the jeep, his back against the windshield, watching Holliday with admiration.

  “You obviously have hidden reserves,” he said ungrudgingly. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Holliday washed his hands in the water, then stepped over the churned mud which formed the boundary of the pool. A few feet behind him the dogfish veered and lunged.

  “I want to keep it alive,” Holliday said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you see, Granger, the fish stayed behind when the first amphibians emerged from the seas two hundred million years ago, just as you and I, in turn, are staying behind now. In a sense all fish are images of ourselves seen in the sea’s mirror.”

  He slumped down on the running board. His clothes were soaked and streaked with salt, and he gasped at the damp air. To the east, just above the long bulk of the Florida coastline, rising from the ocean floor like an enormous aircraft carrier, were the

  first dawn thermal fronts. “Will it be all right to leave it until this evening?”

  Granger climbed into the driving seat. “Don’t worry. Come on, you need a rest.” He pointed up at the overhanging rim of the launching platform. “That should shade it for a few hours, help to keep the temperature down.”

  As they neared the town Granger slowed to wave to the old people retreating from their porches, fixing the shutters on the steel cabins.

  “What about your interview with Bullen?” he asked Holliday soberly. “He’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Leave here? After last night? It’s out of the question.”

  Granger shook his head as he parked the car outside the Neptune. “Aren’t you rather overestimating the importance of one dogfish? There were millions of them once; they were the vermin of the sea.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Holliday said, sinking back into the seat, trying to wipe the salt out of his eyes. “That fish means that there’s still something to be done here. Earth isn’t dead and exhausted after all. We can breed new forms of life, a completely new biological kingdom.”

  Eyes fixed on this private vision, Holliday sat holding the steering wheel while Granger went into the bar to collect a crate of beer. On his return the migration officer was with him.

  Bullen put a foot on the running board, looked into the car. “Well, how about it, Holliday? I’d like to make an early start. If you’re not interested I’ll be off. There’s a rich new life out there; it’s the first step to the stars. Tom Juranda and the Merryweather boys are leaving next week. Do you want to be with them?”

  “Sorry,” Holliday said curtly. He pulled the crate of beer into the car and let out the clutch, then gunned the jeep away down the empty street in a roar of dust.

  Half an hour later, as he stepped out onto the terrace at Idle End, cool and refreshed after his shower, he watched the helicopter roar overhead, its black propeller scudding, then disappear over the kelp flats toward the hull of the wrecked space platform.

  “Come on, let’s go! What’s the matter?”

  “Hold it,” Granger said. “You’re getting overeager. Don’t interfere too much, you’ll kill the damn thing with kindness. What have you got there?” He pointed to the can Holliday had placed in the dashboard compartment.

  “Bread crumbs.”

  Granger sighed, then gently closed the door. “I’m impressed. I really am. I wish you’d look after me this way. I’m gasping for air too.”

  They were five miles from the lake when Holliday leaned forward over the wheel and pointed to the crisp tire prints in the soft salt flowing over the road ahead.

  “Someone’s there already.”

  Granger shrugged. “What of it? They’ve probably gone to look at the platform.” He chuckled quietly. “Don’t you want to share the New Eden with anyone else? Or just you alone, and a consultant biologist?”

  Holliday laughed. “Those platforms annoy me, the way they’re hurled down as if Earth were a garbage dump. Still, if it wasn’t for this one I wouldn’t have found the fish.”

  They reached the lake and made their way toward the pool, the erratic track of the car ahead winding in and out of the pools. Two hundred yards from the platform it had been parked, blocking the route for Holliday and Granger, its passengers having gone ahead on foot.

  “That’s the Merryweathers’ car,” Holliday said as they walked around the big stripped-down Buick, slashed with yellow paint and fitted with sirens and pennants. “The two boys must have come out here.”

  Granger pointed. “One of them’s up on the platform.”

  The younger brother had scaled onto the rim and was shouting down like an umpire at the antics of two other boys, one his brother, the other Tom Juranda, a tall broad-shouldered youth in a space cadet’s jerkin. They were standing at the edge of the fish pool, stones and salt blocks in their hands, hurling them into the pool.

  Leaving Granger, Holliday sprinted on ahead, shouting at the top of his voice. Too preoccupied to hear him, the boys continued to throw their missiles into the pool, while the younger Merryweather egged them on from the platform above. Just before Holliday reached them Tom Juranda ran a few yards along the bank and began to kick the mud wall into the air, then resumed his target throwing.

  “Juranda! Get away from there!” Holliday bellowed. “Put those stones down!”

  He reached Juranda as the youth was about to hurl a bricksized lump of salt into the pool, seized him by the shoulder and flung him round, knocking the salt out of his hand into a shower of damp crystals, then lunged at the elder Merryweather boy, kicking him away.

  The pool had been drained. A deep breach had been cut through the bank and the water had poured out into the surrounding gullies and pools. Down in the center of the basin, in a litter of stones and spattered salt, was the crushed but still wriggling body of the dogfish, twisting itself helplessly in the
bare inch of water that remained. Dark red blood poured from wounds in its body, staining the salt.

  Holliday hurled himself at Juranda, shook the youth savagely by the shoulders.

  “Juranda! Do you realize what you’ve done, you—” Exhausted, Holliday released him and staggered down into the center of the pool, kicked away the stones, and stood looking at the fish twitching spasmodically at his feet.

  “Sorry, Holliday,” the older Merryweather boy said tentatively behind him. “We didn’t know it was your fish.”

  Holliday waved him away, then let his arms fall limply to his sides. He felt numbed and baffled, unable to resolve his anger and frustration.

  Tom Juranda suddenly began to laugh, and shouted something derisively. Their tension broken, the boys turned and ran off together across the dunes toward their car, yelling and playing catch with each other, mimicking Holliday’s outrage.

  Granger let them go by, then walked across to the pool, wincing when he saw the empty basin.

  “Holliday,” he called. “Come on, man.”

  Holliday shook his head, his eyes staring at the beaten body of the fish.

  Granger stepped down the bank to him. Sirens hooted in the distance as the Buick roared off. “Those damn children.” He took Holliday gently by the arm. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “But it’s not the end of the world.”

  Bending down, Holliday reached toward the fish, lying still now, the mud around it slick with blood. His hands hesitated, then retreated.

  “Nothing we can do, is there?” he said impersonally.

  Granger examined the fish. Apart from the large wound in its side and the flattened skull the skin was intact. “Why not have it stuffed?” he suggested seriously.