The Terminal Beach

by James Graham Ballard

  'Ask him. Offer him another dollar.'

  'Pointless - he'd say he had seen him just to keep me happy.'

  'What makes you so sure Springman is here?'

  'He was here,' Vandervell corrected. 'He won't be here any longer. I was with Springman in Acapulco when he looked at the map. He came here.'

  The woman carried her tumbler into the bedroom.

  'We'll have dinner at nine,' Vandervell called to her. TII let you know if he dances again.'

  Left alone, Vandervell watched the fire displays. The glow shone through the windows of the houses in the village so that they seemed to glow like charcoal. At night the collection of hovels was deserted, but a few of the men returned during the day.

  In the morning two men came from the garage in Ecuatan to reclaim the car which Vandervell had hired. He offered to pay a month's rent in advance, but they rejected this and pointed at the clinkers that had fallen on to the car from the sky, None of them was hot enough to burn the paint-work. Vandervell gave them each fifty dollars and promised to cover the car with a tarpaulin. Satisfied, the men drove away.

  After breakfast Vandervell walked out across the lava seams to the road. The stick-dancer stood by his hole above the bank, resting his hands on the two spears. The cone of the volcano, partly hidden by the dust, trembled behind his back. He watched Vandervell when he shouted across the road. Vandervell took a dollar bill from his wallet and placed it under a stone. The stick-man began to hum and rock on the balls of his feet.

  As Vandervell walked back along the road two of the villagers approached.

  'Guide,' he said to them. 'Ten dollars. One hour.' He pointed to the lip of the crater but the men ignored him and continued along the road.

  The surface of the house had once been white, but was now covered with grey dust. Two hours later, when the manager of the estate below the house rode up on a grey horse Vandervell asked: 'Is your horse white or black?' 'That's a good question, sefior.'

  'I want to hire a guide,' Vandervell said. 'To take me into the volcano.'

  'There's nothing there, señor;*

  'I want to look around the crater. I need someone who knows the pathways.'

  'It's full of smoke, Señor Vandervell. Hot sulphur. Burns the eyes. You wouldn't like it.'

  'Do you remember seeing someone called Springman?' Vandervell said. 'About three months ago.'

  'You asked me that before. I remember two Americans with a scientific truck. Then a Dutchman with white hair.' 'That could be him.'

  'Or maybe black, eh? As you say.'

  A rattle of sticks sounded from the road. After warming up, the stick-dancer had begun his performance in earnest.

  'You'd better get out of here, Señor Vandervell,' the manager said. 'The mountain could split one day.'

  Vandervell pointed to the stick-dancer. 'He'll hold it off for a while.'

  The manager rode away. 'My respects to Mrs Vandervell.' 'Miss Winston.'

  Vandervell went into the lounge and stood by the window.

  During the day the activity of the volcano increased. The column of smoke rose half a mile into the sky, threaded by gleams of flame.

  The rumbling woke the woman. In the kitchen she spoke to the houseboy.

  'He wants to leave,' she said to Vandervell afterwards.

  'Offer him more money,' he said without turning.

  'He says everyone has left now. It's too dangerous to stay.

  The men in the village are leaving for good this afternoon,'

  Vandervell watched the stick-dancer twirling his devil-sticks like a drum-major. 'Let him go if he wants to. I think the estate manager saw Springman.'

  'That's good. Then he was here.'

  'The manager sent his respects to you.'

  'I'm charmed.'

  Five minutes later, when the house-boy had gone, she returned to her bedroom. During the afternoon she came out to collect the film magazines in the bookcase.

  Vandervell watched the smoke being pumped from the volcano. Now and then the devil-sticks man climbed out of his hole and danced on a mound of lava by the road. The men came down from the village for the last time. They looked at the stick-dancer as they walked on down the road.

  At eight o'clock in the morning a police truck drove up to the village, reversed and came down again. Its roof and driving cabin were covered with ash. The policemen did not see the stick-dancer, but they saw Vandervell in the window of the house and stopped outside.

  ‘Get out!' one of the policemen shouted. 'You must go now! Take your car! What's the matter?'

  Vandervell opened the window. 'The car is all right.

  We're staying for a few days. Gracias, Sergeant.'

  'Nol Get out!' The policeman climbed down from the cabin. 'The mountain - pfft! Dust, burning!' He took off his cap and waved it. 'You go now.'

  As he remonstrated Vandervell closed the window and took his jacket off the chair. Inside he felt for his wallet.

  After he had paid the policemen they saluted and drove away. The woman came out of the bedroom.

  'You're lucky your father is rich,' she said. 'What would you do if he was poor?'

  'Springman was poor,' Vandervell said. He took his handkerchief from his jacket. The dust was starting to seep into the house. 'Money only postpones one's problems.'

  'How long are you going to stay? Your father told me to keep an eye on you.'

  'Relax. I won't come to any mischlef here.'

  'Is that a joke? With this volcano over our heads?'

  Vandervell pointed to the stick-dancer. 'It doesn't worry him. This mountain has been active for fifty years.'

  'Then why do we have to come here now?'

  'I'm looking for Springman. I think he came here three months ago.'

  'Where is he? Up in the village?'

  'I doubt it. He's probably five thousand miles under our feet, sucked down by the back-pressure. A century from now he'll come up through Vesuvius.'

  'I hope not.'

  'Have you thought of that, though? It's a wonderful idea.'

  'No. Is that what you're planning for me?'

  Anders hissed in the roof tank, spitting faintly like boiling rain.

  'Think of them, Gloria - Pompeiian matrons, Aztec virgins, bits of old Prometheus himself they're raining down on the just and the unjust.'

  'What about your friend Springman?'

  ‘Now that you remind me… ' Vandervell raised a finger to the ceiling. 'Let's listen. What's the matter?'

  'Is that why you came here? To think of Springman being burnt to ashes?'

  'Don't be a fool.' Vandervell turned to the window.

  'What are you worrying about, anyway?'

  'Nothing,' Vandervell said. 'For once in a long time I'm not worrying about anything at all.' He rubbed the pane with his sleeve. 'Where's the old devil-boy? Don't tell me he's gone.' He peered through the falling dust. 'There he The figure stood on the ridge above the road, illuminated by the flares from the crater. A pall of ash hung in the air around him.

  'What's he waiting for?' the woman asked. 'Another dollar?'

  'A lot more than a dollar,' Vandervell said. 'He's waiting for me.'

  'Don't burn your fingers,' she said, closing the door.

  That afternoon, when she came into the lounge after waking up, she found that Vandervell had left. She went to the window and looked up towards the crater. The falls of ash and cinders obscured the village, and hundreds of embers glowed on the lava flows. Through the dust she could see the explosions inside the crater lighting up the rim. Vandervell's jacket lay over a chair. She waited for three hours for him to return. By this time the noise from the crater was continuous. The lava flows dragged and heaved like chains, shaking the walls of the house. At five o'clock Vandervell had not come back. A second crater had opened in the summit of the volcano, into which part of the village had fallen. When she was sure that the devil-sticks man had gone, the woman took the money from Vandervell's jacket and drove down the mo
untain.

  Billennium

  All day long, and often into the early hours of the morning, the tramp of feet sounded up and down the stairs outside Ward's cubicle. Built into a narrow alcove in a bend of the staircase between the fourth and fifth floors, its plywood walls flexed and creaked with every footstep like the timbers of a rotting windmill. Over a hundred people lived in the top three floors of the old rooming house, and sometimes Ward would lie awake on his narrow bunk until o or 3 a.m., mechanically counting the last residents returning from the all-night movies in the stadium half a mile away. Through the window he could hear giant fragments of the amplified dialogue booming among the rooftops. The stadium was never empty. During the day the huge four-sided screen was raised on its davit and athletics meetings or football matches ran continuously. For the people in the houses abutting the stadium the noise must have been unbearable.

  Ward, at least, had a certain degree of privacy. Two months earlier, before he came to live on the staircase, he had shared a room with seven others on the ground floor of a house in 755th Street, and the ceaseless press of people jostling past the window had reduced him to a state of exhaustion. The street was always full, an endless clamour of voices and shuffling feet. By 6.5% when he woke, hurrying to take his place in the bathroom queue, the crowds already jammed it from sidewalk to sidewalk, the din punctuated every half minute by the roar of the elevated trains running over the shops on the opposite side of the road. As soon as he saw the advertisement describing the staircase cubicle he had left (like everyone else, he spent most of his spare time scanning the classifieds in the newspapers, moving his lodgings ah average of once every two months) despite the higher rental. A cubicle on a staircase would almost certainly be on its own.

  However, this had its drawbacks. Most evenings his friends from the library would call in, eager to rest their elbows after the bruising crush of the public reading room… The cubicle was slightly more than four and a half square metres in floor area, half a square metre over the statutory maximum for a single person, the carpenters having taken advantage, illegally, of a recess beside a nearby chimney breast. Consequently Ward had been able to fit a small straight-backed chair into the interval between the bed and the door, so that only one person at a time needed to sit on the bed - in most single cubicles host and guest had to sit side by side on the bed, conversing over their shoulders and changing places periodically to avoid neck-strain.

  'You were lucky to find this place,' Rossiter, the most regular visitor, never tired of telling him. He reclined back on the bed, gesturing at the cubicle. 'It's enormous, the perspectives really zoom. I'd be surprised if you haven't got at least five metres here, perhaps six.'

  Ward shook his head categorically. Rossiter was his closest friend, but the quest for living space had forged powerful reflexes. 'Just over four and a half, I've measured it carefully. There's no doubt about it.'

  Rossiter lifted one eyebrow. 'I'm amah. ed. It must be the ceiling then.'

  Manipulating the ceiling was a favourite trick of unscrupulous landlords - most assessments of area were made upon the ceiling, out of convenience, and by tilting back the plywood partitions the rated area of a cubicle could be either increased, for the benefit of a prospective tenant (many married couples were thus bamboozled into taking a single cubicle), or decreased temporarily on the visits of the housing inspectors. Ceilings were criss-crossed with pencil marks staking out the rival claims of tenants on opposite sides of a party wall. Someone timid of his rights could be literally squeezed out of existence - in fact, the advertisement 'quiet clientele' was usually a tacit invitation to this sort of piracy.

  'The wall does tilt a little,' Ward admitted. 'Actually, it's about four degrees out- I used a plumb-line. But there's still plenty of room on the stairs for people to get by.'

  Rossiter grinned. 'Of course, John. I'm just envious, that's all. My room is driving me crazy.' Like everyone, he used the term 'room' to describe his tiny cubicle, a hangover from the days fifty years earlier when people had indeed lived one to a room, sometimes, unbelievably, one to an apartment or house. The microfilms in the architecture catalogues at the library showed scenes of museums, concert halls and other public buildings in what appeared to be everyday settings, often virtually empty, two or three people wandering down an enormous gallery or staircase. Traffic moved freely along the centre of streets, and in the quieter districts sections of sidewalk would be deserted for fifty yards or more.

  Now, of course, the older buildings had been torn down and replaced by housing batteries, or converted into apartment blocks. The great banqueting room in the former City Hall had been split horizontally into four decks, each of these cut up into hundreds of cubicles.

  As for the streets, traffic had long since ceased to move about them. Apart from a few hours before dawn when only the sidewalks were crowded, every thoroughfare was always packed with a shuffling mob of pedestrians, perforce ignoring the countless 'Keep Left' signs suspended over their heads, wrestling past each other on their way to home and office, their clothes dusty and shapeless. Often 'locks' would occur when a huge crowd at a street junction became immovably jammed. Sometimes these locks would last for days. Two years earlier Ward had been caught in one outside the stadium, for over forty-eight hours was trapped in a gigantic pedestrian jam containing over o%0o0 people, fed by the crowds leaving the stadium on one side and those approaching it on the other. An entire square mile of the local neighbourhood had been paralysed, and he vividly remembered the nightmare of swaying helplessly on his feet as the jam shifted and heaved, terrified of losing his balance and being trampled underfoot. When the police had finally sealed off the stadium and dispersed the jam he had gone back to his cubicle and slept for a week, his body blue with bruises.

  'I hear they may reduce the allocation to three and a half metres,' Rossiter remarked.

  Ward paused to allow a party of tenants from the sixth floor to pass down the staircase, holding the door to prevent it jumping off its latch. 'So they're always saying,' he commented.

  'I can remember that rumour ten years ago.'

  'It's no rumour,' Rossiter warned him. 'It may well be necessary soon. Thirty million people are packed into this city now, a million increase in just one year. There's been some pretty serious talk at the Housing Department.'

  Ward shook his head. 'A drastic revaluation like that is almost impossible to carry out. Every single partition would have to be dismantled and nailed up again, the administrative job alone is so vast it's difficult to visualize. Millions of cubicles to be redesigned and certified, licences to be issued, plus the complete resettlement of every tenant. Most of the buildings put up since the last revaluation are designed around a four-metre modulus - you can't simply take half a metre off the end of each cubicle and then say that makes so many new cubicles. They may be only six inches wide.'

  He laughed. 'Besides, how can you live in just three and a half metres?'

  Rossiter smiled. 'That's the ultimate argument, isn't it?

  They used it twenty-five years ago at the last revaluation, when the minimum was cut from five to four. It couldn't be done they all said, no one could stand living in only four square metres, it was enough room for a bed and suitcase, but you couldn't open the door to get in.' Rossiter chuckled softly. 'They were all wrong. It was merely decided that from then on all doors would open outwards. Four square metres was here to stay.'

  Ward looked at his watch. It was 7.30. 'Time to eat. Let's see if we can get into the food-bar across the road.'

  Grumbling at the prospect, Rossiter pulled himself off the bed. They left the cubicle and made their way down the staircase. This was crammed with luggage and packing cases so that only a narrow interval remained around the banister. On the floors below the congestion was worse.

  Corridors were wide enough to be chopped up into single I8o cubicles, and the air was stale and dead, cardboard walls hung with damp laundry and makeshift larders. Each of the five rooms o
n the floors contained a dozen tenants, their voices reverberating through the partitions.

  People were sitting on the steps above the second floor, using the staircase as an informal lounge, although this was against the fire regulations, women talking to the men queueing in their shirtsleeves outside the washroom, children diving around them. By the time they reached the entrance Ward and Rossiter were having to force their way through the tenants packed together on every landing, loitering around the notice boards or pushing in from the street below.

  Taking a breath at the top of the steps, Ward pointed to the food-bar on the other side of the road. It was only thirty yards away, but the throng moving down the street swept past like a river at full tide, crossing them from right to left. The first picture show at the stadium started at 9 o'clock, and people were setting off already to make sure of getting in.

  'Can't we go somewhere else?' Rossiter asked, screwing his face up at the prospect of the food-bar. Not only was it packed and would take them half an hour to be served, but the food was fat and unappetizing. The journey from the library four blocks away had given him an appetite.

  Ward shrugged. 'There's a place on the corner, but I doubt if we can make it.' This was two hundred yards upstream; they would be fighting the crowd all the way.

  'Maybe you're right.' Rossiter put his hand on Ward's shoulder. 'You know, John, your trouble is that you never go anywhere, you're too disengaged, you just don't realize how bad everything is getting.'

  Ward nodded. Rossiter was right. In the morning, when he set off for the library, the pedestrian traffic was moving with him towards the down-town offices; in the evening, when he came back, it was flowing in the opposite direction. By and large he never altered his routine. Brought up from the age of ten in a municipal hostel, he had gradually lost touch with his father and mother, who lived on the east side I81

  the city and had been unable, or unwilling, to make the journey to see him. Having surrendered his initiative to the dynamics of the city he was reluctant to try to win it back merely for a better cup of coffee. Fortunately his job at the library brought him into contact with a wide range of young people of similar interests. Sooner or later he would marry, find a double cubicle near the library and settle down. If they had enough children (three was the required minimum) they might even one day own a small room of their own. They stepped out into the pedestrian stream, carried along by it for ten or twenty yards, then quickened their pace and side-stepped through the crowd, slowly tacking across to the other side of the road. There they found the shelter of the shop-fronts, slowly worked their way back to the food-bar, shoulders braced against the countless minor collisions 'What are the latest population estimates?' Ward asked as they circled a cigarette kiosk, stepping forward whenever a gap presented itself.