The Terminal Beach

by James Graham Ballard

  'What is going on?' Pelham asked, when after several minutes there was no indication of movement from the water-side group. He noticed that they formed a straight line, following the shore, rather than an arc. 'They're not watching anything at all.'

  The off-shore haze was now only five hundred yards away, obscuring the contours of the huge swells. Completely opaque, the water looked like warm oil, a few wavelets now and then dissolving into greasy bubbles as they expired limply on the sand, intermingled with bits of refuse and old cigarette cartons. Nudging the shore like this, the sea resembled an enormous pelagic beast roused from its depths and blindly groping at the sand.

  'Mildred, I'm going down to the water for a moment.'

  Pelham stood up. 'There's something curious - ' He broke off, pointing to the beach on the other side of the terrace.

  'Look! There's another group. What on earth -?'

  Again, as everyone watched, this second body of spectators formed by the.water's edge seventy-five yards from the terrace. Altogether some two hundred people were silently assembling along the shore-line, gazing out across the sea in front of them. Pelham found himself cracking his knuckles, then clasped the rail with both hands, as much to restrain himself from joining them. Only the congestion on the beach held him back.

  This time the interest of the crowd passed in a few moments, and the murmur of background noise resumed.

  'Heavens knows what they're doing.' Mildred turned her back on the group. 'There are more of them over there. They must be waiting for something.'

  Sure enough, half a dozen 'similar groups were now forming by the water's edge, at almost precise one hundred yard intervals. Pelham scanned the far ends of the bay for any signs of a motor boat. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly 3.3°. 'They can't be waiting for anything,' he said, trying to control his nervousness. Below the table his feet twitched a restless tattoo, gripping for purchase on the sandy cement.

  'The only thing expected is the satellite, and no one will see that anyway. There must be something in the water.' At the mention of the satellite he remembered Sherrington again.

  'Mildred, don't you feel - '

  Before he could continue the man behind him stood up with a curious lurch, as if hoping to reach the rail, and tipped the sharp edge of his seat into Pelham's back. For a moment, as he struggled to steady the man, Pelham was enveloped in a rancid smell of sweat and stale beer. He saw the glazed focus in the other's eyes, his rough unshaved chin and open mouth like a muzzle, pointing with a sort of impulsive appetite towards the sea.

  'The satellite!' Freeing himself Pelham craned upwards at the sky. A pale impassive blue, it was clear of both aircraft and birds - although they had seen gulls twenty miles inland that morning, as if a storm had been anticipated. As the glare stung his eyes, points of retinal light began to arc and swerve across the sky in epileptic orbits. One of these, however, apparently emerging from the western horizon, was moving steadily across the edge of his field of vision, boring dimly towards him.

  Around them, people began to stand up, and chairs scraped and dragged across the floor. Several bottles toppled from one of the tables and smashed on the concrete.

  'Mildred!'

  Below them, in a huge disorganized mel6e extending as far as the eye could see, people were climbing slowly to their feet. The diffused murmur of the beach had given way to a more urgent, harsher sound, echoing overhead from either end of the bay. The whole beach seemed to writhe and stir with activity, the only motionless figures those of the people standing by the water. These now formed a continuous palisade along the shore, shutting off the sea. More and more people joined their ranks, and in places the line wa nearly ten deep.

  Everyone on the terrace was now standing. The crowds already on the beach were being driven forward by the pressure of new arrivals from the promenade, and the party below their table had been swept a further twenty yards towards the sea.

  'Mildred, can you see Sherrington anywhere?' Confirming from her wrist-watch that it was exactly 3.30, Pelham pulled her shoulder, trying to hold her attention. Mildred returned what was almost a vacant stare, an expression of glazed incomprehension.

  'Mildred! We've got to get away from here!'

  Hoarsely, he shouted.' 'Sherrington's convinced we can see some of the infra-red light shining from the satellites, they may form a pattern setting off I R Ms laid down millions of years ago when other space Vehicles were circling the earth.

  Mildred -!'

  Helplessly, they were lifted from their seats and pressed against the rail. A huge concourse of people was moving down the beach, and soon the entire five-mile-long slope was packed with standing figures. No one was talking, and everywhere there was the same4expression, self-immersed and preoccupied, like that on the faces of a crowd leaving a stadium. Behind them the great wheel of the fair-ground was rotating slowly, but the gondolas were empty, and Pelham looked back at the deserted fun-fair only a hundred yards from the multitude on the beach, its roundabouts revolving among the empty sideshows.

  Quickly he helped Mildred over the edge of the rail, then jumped down on to the sand, hoping to work their way back to the promenade. As they stepped around the corner, however, the crowd advancing down the beach carried them back, tripping over the abandoned radios in the sand.

  Still together, they found their footing when the pressure behind them ceased. Steadying himself, Pelham continued: '… Sherrington thinks Cro-Magnon Man was driven frantic by panic, like the Gadarene swine - most of the bone-beds have been found under lake shores. The reflex may be too strong -' He broke off.

  The noise had suddenly subsided, as the immense congregation, now packing every available square foot of the beach, stood silently facing the water. Pelham turned towards the sea, where the haze, only fifty yards away, edged in great clouds towards the beach. The forward line of the crowd, their heads bowed slightly, stared passively at the gathering billows. The surface of the water glowed with an intense luminous light, vibrant and spectral, and the air over the beach, grey by comparison, made the lines of motionless figures loom like tombstones.

  Obliquely in front of Pelham, twenty yards away in the front rank, stood a tall man with a quiet, meditative expression, his beard and high temples identifying him without doubt.

  'Sherrington!' Pelham started to shout. Involuntarily he looked upwards to the sky, and felt a blinding speck of light singe his retinas.

  In the background the music of the fun-fair revolved in the empty air.

  Then, with a galvanic surge, everyone on the beach began to walk forward into the water.

  The Delta at Sunset

  Each evening, when the dense powdery dusk lay over the creeks and drained mud-basins of the delta, the snakes would come out on to the beaches. Half-asleep on the wicker stretcher-chair below the awning of his tent, Charles Gifford watched their sinuous forms coiling and uncoiling as they wound their way up the slopes. In the opaque blue light the dusk swept like a fading searchlight over the damp beaches, and the interlocked bodies shone with an almost phosphorescent brilliance.

  The nearest creeks were three hundred yards from the camp, but for some reason the appearance of the snakes always coincided with Gifford's recovery from his evening fever. As this receded, carrying with it the familiar diorama of reptilian phantoms, he would sit up in the stretcher-chair and find the snakes crawling across the beaches, almost as if they had materialized from his dreams. Involuntarily he would search the sand around the tent for any signs of their damp skins.

  'The strange thing is they always come out at the same time,' Gifford said to the Indian head-boy who had emerged from the mess tent and was now covering him with a blanket.

  'One minute there's nothing at all, and the next thousands of them are swarming all over the mud.'

  'You not cold, sir?' the Indian asked.

  'Look at them now, before the light goes. It's really fantastic. There must be a sharply defined threshold - '

  He tri
ed to lift his pale, bearded face above the hillock formed by the surgical cradle over his foot, and snapped: 'All right, all right I'

  'Doctor?' The head-boy, a thirty-year-old Indian named Mechippe, continued to straighten the cradle, his limpid eyes, set in a face of veined and weathered teak, watching Gifford.

  'I said get out of the damned way I' Leaning weakly on one elbow, Gifford watched the last fight fade across the winding causeways of the delta, taking with it a final image of the snakes. Each evening, as the heat mounted with the advancing summer, they came out in greater numbers, as if aware of the lengthening periods of his fever.

  'Sir, I get more blanket for you?'

  'No, for God's sake.' Gifford's thin shoulders shivered in the dusk air, but he ignored the discomfort. He looked down at his inert, corpse-like body below the blanket, examining it with far more detachment than he had felt for the unknown Indians dying in the makeshift WHO field hospital at Taxcol. At least there was a passive repose about the Indians a sense of the still intact integrity of flesh and spirit, if anything reinforced by the failure of one of the partners. It was this paradigm of fatalism which Gifford would have liked to achieve - even the most wretched native, identifying himself with the irrevocable flux of nature, had bridged a greater span of years than the longest-lived European or American with his obsessive time-consciousness, cramming m-called significant experiences into his life like a glutton. By contrast, Gifford realized, he himself had merely thrown aside his own body, divorcing it like some no longer useful partner in a functional business marriage. So marked a lack of loyalty depressed him.

  He tapped his bony loins. 'It's not this, Mechippe, that ties us to mortality, but our confounded egos.' He smiled slyly at the head-boy. 'Louise would appreciate that, don't you think?'

  The head-boy was watching a refuse fire being raised behind the mess tent. He looked down sharply at the supine figure on the stretcher-chair, his half-savage eyes glinting like arrow heads in the oily light of the burning brush. 'Sir?

  You want-?'

  'Forget it,' Gifford told him. 'Bring two whisky sodas.

  And some more chairs. Where's Mrs Gifford?'

  He glanced up at Mechippe when he failed to reply.

  Briefly their eyes met, in an instant of absolute clarity.

  Fifteen years earlier, when Gifford had come to the delta 120

  with his first archaeological expedition, Mechippe had been one of the junior camp followers. Now he was in the late middle age of the Indian, the notches on his cheeks lost in the deep hatchwork of lines and scars, wise in the tent-lore of the visitors.

  'Miss' Gifford- resting,' he said cryptically. In an attempt to alter the tempo and direction of their dialogue, he added: 'I tell Mr Lowry, then bring whiskies and hot towel, Doctor.' 'O.K., Mechippe.' Lying back with an ironic smile, Oifford listened to the cad-boy's footsteps move away softly through the sand. The muted sounds of the camp stirred around him - the cooling plash of water in the shower stall, the soft interchanges of the Indians, the whining of a desert dog waiting to approach the refuse dump - and he sank downwards into the thin tired body stretched out in front of him like a collection of bones in a carpet bag, rekindling' the fading senses of touch and pressure in his limbs. In the moonlight, the white beaches of the delta glistened like banks of luminous chalk, the snakes festering on the slope like the worshippers of a midnight sun.

  Half an hour later they drank their whiskies together in the dark tinted air. Revived by Mechippe's message, Charles Gifford sat uprlght in the stretcher-chair, gesturing with his glass. The whisky had momentarily cleared his brain; usually he was reluctant to discuss the snakes in his wife's presence, let alone Lowry's, but the marked increase in their numbers seemed important enough to mention. There was also the mildly malicious pleasure - less amusing now than it had been - of seeing Louise shudder at any mention of the snakes.

  'What is so unusual,' he explained, 'is the way they emerge on to the banks at the same time. There must be a precise level of luminosity, an exact number of photons, to which they all respond - presumably an innate trigger.' Dr Richard Lowry, Gifford's assistant and since his accident the acting leader of the expedition, watched Gifford uncomfortably from the edge of his canvas chair, rotating his glass below his long nose. He had been placed down-wind from the loose bandages swaddling Gifford's foot (little revenges of this kind, however childish, alone sustained Gifford's interest in the people around him), and carefully averted his face as he asked: 'But why the sudden increase in numbers? A month ago there was barely a snake in sight?'

  'Dick, please!' Louise Gifford turned an expression of martyred weariness on Lowry. 'Must we?'

  'There's an obvious answer,' Oifford said to Lowry.

  'During the summer the delta drains, and begins to look like the half-empty lagoons that were here fifty million years ago.

  The giant amphibians had died out, and the small reptiles were the dominant species. These snakes are probably carrying around what is virtually a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene as sharp as our own memories of New York and London.' He turned to his wife, the shadows cast by the distant refuse fire hollowing his cheeks. 'What's the matter, Louise? Don't say you can't remember New York and London?'

  'I don't know whether I can or not.' She pushed a lock of fraying blonde hair off her forehead. 'I wish you wouldn't think about the snakes all the time.'

  'Well, I'm beginning to understand them. I was always baffled by the way they'd appear at the same time. Besides, there's nothing else to do. I don't want to sit here staring at that damned Toltec ruin of yours.'

  He gestured towards the low ridge of sandstone, its profile illuminated against the white moonlit clouds, which marked the margins of the alluvial bench half a mile from the camp.

  Before Gifford's accident their chairs had faced the mined terrace city emerging from the thistles which covered the ridge. But Gifford had tired of staring all day at the crumbling galleries and colonnades where his wife and Lowry worked together. He told Mechippe to dismantle the tent and turn it through ninety degrees, so that he could watch the last light of the sunset fading over the western delta. The burning refuse fires they now faced provided at least a few wisps of motion. Gazing for hours across the endless creeks and mud-banks, whose winding outlines became more and more serpentine as the summer drought persisted and the level of the water table fell, he had one evening discovered the snakes.

  'Surely it's simply a shortage of dissolved oxygen,' Lowry commented. He noticed Gifford regarding him with an expression of critical distaste, and added: 'Jung believes the snake is primarily a symbol of the unconscious, and that its appearance always heralds a crisis in the psyche.'

  'I suppose I accept that,' Charles Gifford said. With rather forced laughter he added, shaking his foot in the cradle: 'I have to. Don't I, Louise?' Before his wife, who was watching the fires with a distracted expression, could reply he went on: 'Though in fact I disagree with Jung. For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Paleocene are re-created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing, is the snake a symbol of wisdom.'

  Richard Lowry frowned doubtfully into his glass. 'I'm not convinced, sir. It was primitive man who had to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche.'

  'Absolutely right,' Gifford rejoined. 'How else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience? The only real landscapes are the internal ones, or the external projections of them, such as this delta.' He passed his empty glass to his wife. 'Agree, Louise? Though perhaps you take a Freudian view of the snakes?'

  This thin jibe, uttered with the cold humour which had become characteristic of Oifford, brought their conversation to a halt. Restlessly, Lowry looked at his watch, eager to be away from Oifford and his pathetic boorishness. Gifford, a cold smirk on his lips, waited for Lowry to catch his eye; by a curious paradox his dislike of his
assistant was encouraged by the latter's reluctance to retaliate, rather than by the still ambiguous but crystallizing relationship between Lowry and Louise. Lowry's meticulous neutrality and good manners seemed to Oifford an attempt to preserve a world on which Gifford had turned his back, that world where there were no snakes on the beaches and where events moved on a single plane of time like the blurred projection of a three-dimensional object by a defective camera obscura.

  Lowry's politeness was also, of course, an attempt to shield himself and Louise from Gifford's waspish tongue. Like Hamlet taking advantage of his madness to insult and cross-examine anyone at will, Gifford often used the exhausted half-lucid interval after his fever subsided to make his more pointed comments. As he emerged from the penumbral shallows, the looming figures of his wife and assistant still surrounded by the rotating mandalas he saw in his dreams, he would give full rein to his tortured humour That in this way he was helping his wife and Lowry towards an inevitable climax only encouraged Gifford.

  His long farewell to Louise, protracted now for so many years, at last seemed feasible, even if only part of the greater good-bye, the vast leave-taking that Gifford was about to embark upon. The fifteen years of their marriage had been little more than a single frustrated farewell, a search for a means to an end which their own strengths of character had always prevented.

  Looking up at Louise's sun-grazed but still handsome profile, at her fading blonde hair swept back off her angular shoulders, Gifford realized that his dislike of her was in no way personal, but merely part of the cordial distaste he felt for almost the entire human race. And even this deeply ingrained misanthropy was only a reflection of his own undying self-contempt. If there were few people whom he had ever liked, there were, equally, few moments during which he had ever liked himself. His entire life as an archaeologist, from his early adolescence when he had first collected fossil ammonites from a nearby limestone outcropping, was an explicit attempt to return to the past and discover the sources of his self-loathing.