The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  For half an hour they drove on, Conrad hunched against the window, Stacey watching him in the driving mirror. Gradually, the landscape began to change. The houses were taller, with coloured roofs, the sidewalks were railed off and fitted with pedestrian lights and turnstiles. They had entered the inner suburbs, completely deserted streets with multi-level supermarkets, towering cinemas and department stores.

  Chin in one hand, Conrad stared out silently. Lacking any means of transport he had never ventured into the uninhabited interior of the city, like the other children always headed in the opposite direction for the open country. Here the streets had died twenty or thirty years earlier; plate-glass shopfronts had slipped and smashed into the roadway, old neon signs, window frames and overhead wires hung down from every cornice, trailing a ragged webwork of disintegrating metal across the pavements. Stacey drove slowly, avoiding the occasional bus or truck abandoned in the middle of the road, its tyres peeling off their rims.

  Conrad craned up at the empty windows, into the narrow alleys and side-streets, but nowhere felt any sensation of fear or anticipation. These streets were merely derelict, as unhaunted as a half-empty dustbin.

  One suburban centre gave way to another, to long intervening stretches of congested ribbon developments. Mile by mile, the architecture altered its character; buildings were larger, ten-or fifteen-storey blocks, clad in facing materials of green and blue tiles, glass or copper sheathing. They were moving forward in time rather than, as Conrad had expected, back into the past of a fossil city.

  Stacey worked the car through a nexus of side-streets towards a six-lane expressway that rose on tall concrete buttresses above the roof-tops. They found a side road that circled up to it, levelled out and then picked up speed sharply, spinning along one of the clear centre lanes.

  Conrad craned forward. In the distance, two or three miles away, the tall rectilinear outlines of enormous apartment blocks reared up thirty or forty storeys high, hundreds of them lined shoulder to shoulder in apparently endless ranks, like giant dominoes.

  ‘We’re entering the central dormitories here,’ Stacey told him. On either side buildings overtopped the motorway, the congestion mounting so that some of them had been built right up against the concrete palisades.

  In a few minutes they passed between the first of the apartment batteries, the thousands of identical living units with their slanting balconies shearing up into the sky, the glass in-falls of the aluminium curtain walling speckling in the sunlight. The smaller houses and shops of the outer suburbs had vanished. There was no room on the ground level. In the narrow intervals between the blocks there were small concrete gardens, shopping complexes, ramps banking down into huge underground car parks.

  And on all sides there were the clocks. Conrad noticed them immediately, at every street corner, over every archway, three-quarters of the way up the sides of buildings, covering every conceivable angle of approach.

  Most of them were too high off the ground to be reached by anything less than a fireman’s ladder and still retained their hands. All registered the same time: 12.01.

  Conrad looked at his wristwatch, noted that it was just 2.45 p.m.

  ‘They were driven by a master clock,’ Stacey told him. ‘When that stopped they all seized at the same moment. One minute after midnight, thirty-seven years ago.’

  The afternoon had darkened, as the high cliffs cut off the sunlight, the sky a succession of narrow vertical intervals opening and closing around them. Down on the canyon floor it was dismal and oppressive, a wilderness of concrete and frosted glass. The expressway divided and pressed on westwards. After a few more miles the apartment blocks gave way to the first office buildings in the central zone. These were even taller, sixty or seventy storeys high, linked by spiralling ramps and causeways. The expressway was fifty feet off the ground yet the first floors of the office blocks were level with it, mounted on massive stilts that straddled the glass-enclosed entrance bays of lifts and escalators. The streets were wide but featureless. The sidewalks of parallel roadways merged below the buildings, forming a continuous concrete apron. Here and there were the remains of cigarette kiosks, rusting stairways up to restaurants and arcades built on platforms thirty feet in the air.

  Conrad, however, was looking only at the clocks. Never had he visualized so many, in places so dense that they obscured each other. Their faces were multi-coloured: red, blue, yellow, green. Most of them carried four or five hands. Although the master hands had stopped at a minute past twelve, the subsidiary hands had halted at varying positions, apparently dictated by their colour.

  ‘What were the extra hands for?’ he asked Stacey. ‘And the different colours?’

  ‘Time zones. Depending on your professional category and the consumer-shifts allowed. Hold on, though, we’re almost there.’

  They left the expressway and swung off down a ramp that fed them into the north-east corner of a wide open plaza, eight hundred yards long and half as wide, down the centre of which had once been laid a continuous strip of lawn, now rank and overgrown. The plaza was empty, a sudden block of free space bounded by tall glass-faced cliffs that seemed to carry the sky.

  Stacey parked, and he and Conrad climbed out and stretched themselves. Together they strolled across the wide pavement towards the strip of waist-high vegetation. Looking down the vistas receding from the plaza Conrad grasped fully for the first time the vast perspectives of the city, the massive geometric jungle of buildings.

  Stacey put one foot up on the balustrade running around the lawn bed, pointed to the far end of the plaza, where Conrad saw a low-lying huddle of buildings of unusual architectural style, nineteenth-century perpendicular, stained by the atmosphere and badly holed by a number of explosions. Again, however, his attention was held by the clock face built into a tall concrete tower just behind the older buildings. This was the largest clock dial he had ever seen, at least a hundred feet across, huge black hands halted at a minute past twelve. The dial was white, the first they had seen, but on wide semicircular shoulders built out off the tower below the main face were a dozen smaller faces, no more than twenty feet in diameter, running the full spectrum of colours. Each had five hands, the inferior three halted at random.

  ‘Fifty years ago,’ Stacey explained, gesturing at the ruins below the tower, ‘that collection of ancient buildings was one of the world’s greatest legislative assemblies.’ He gazed at it quietly for a few moments, then turned to Conrad. ‘Enjoy the ride?’

  Conrad nodded fervently. ‘It’s impressive, all right. The people who lived here must have been giants. What’s really remarkable is that it looks as if they left only yesterday. Why don’t we go back?’

  ‘Well, apart from the fact that there aren’t enough of us now, even if there were we couldn’t control it. In its hey-day this city was a fantastically complex social organism. The communications problems are difficult to imagine merely by looking at these blank façades. It’s the tragedy of this city that there appeared to be only one way to solve them.’

  ‘Did they solve them?’

  ‘Oh, yes, certainly. But they left themselves out of the equation. Think of the problems, though. Transporting fifteen million office workers to and from the centre every day, routeing in an endless stream of cars, buses, trains, helicopters, linking every office, almost every desk, with a videophone, every apartment with television, radio, power, water, feeding and entertaining this enormous number of people, guarding them with ancillary services, police, fire squads, medical units – it all hinged on one factor.’

  Stacey threw a fist out at the great tower clock. ‘Time! Only by synchronizing every activity, every footstep forward or backward, every meal, bus-halt and telephone call, could the organism support itself. Like the cells in your body, which proliferate into mortal cancers if allowed to grow in freedom, every individual here had to subserve the overriding needs of the city or fatal bottlenecks threw it into total chaos. You and I can turn on the tap any hour of the
day or night, because we have our own private water cisterns, but what would happen here if everybody washed the breakfast dishes within the same ten minutes?’

  They began to walk slowly down the plaza towards the clock tower. ‘Fifty years ago, when the population was only ten million, they could just provide for a potential peak capacity, but even then a strike in one essential service paralysed most of the others; it took workers two or three hours to reach their offices, as long again to queue for lunch and get home. As the population climbed the first serious attempts were made to stagger hours; workers in certain areas started the day an hour earlier or later than those in others. Their railway passes and car number plates were coloured accordingly, and if they tried to travel outside the permitted periods they were turned back. Soon the practice spread; you could only switch on your washing machine at a given hour, post a letter or take a bath at a specific period.’

  ‘Sounds feasible,’ Conrad commented, his interest mounting. ‘But how did they enforce all this?’

  ‘By a system of coloured passes, coloured money, an elaborate set of schedules published every day like the TV or radio programmes. And, of course, by all the thousands of clocks you can see around you here. The subsidiary hands marked out the number of minutes remaining in any activity period for people in the clock’s colour category.’

  Stacey stopped, pointed to a blue-faced clock mounted on one of the buildings overlooking the plaza. ‘Let’s say, for example, that a lower-grade executive leaving his office at the allotted time, 12 o’clock, wants to have lunch, change a library book, buy some aspirin, and telephone his wife. Like all executives, his identity zone is blue. He takes out his schedule for the week, or looks down the blue-time columns in the newspaper, and notes that his lunch period for that day is 12.15 to 12.30. He has fifteen minutes to kill. Right, he then checks the library. Time code for today is given as 3, that’s the third hand on the clock. He looks at the nearest blue clock, the third hand says 37 minutes past – he has 23 minutes, ample time, to reach the library. He starts down the street, but finds at the first intersection that the pedestrian lights are only shining red and green and he can’t get across. The area’s been temporarily zoned off for lower-grade women office workers – red, and manuals – greens.’

  ‘What would happen if he ignored the lights?’ Conrad asked.

  ‘Nothing immediately, but all blue clocks in the zoned area would have returned to zero, and no shops or the library would serve him, unless he happened to have red or green currency and a forged set of library tickets. Anyway, the penalties were too high to make the risk worthwhile, and the whole system was evolved for his convenience, no one else’s. So, unable to reach the library, he decides on the chemist. The time code for the chemist is 5, the fifth, smallest hand. It reads 54 minutes past: he has six minutes to find a chemist and make his purchase. This done, he still has five minutes before lunch, decides to phone his wife. Checking the phone code he sees that no period has been provided for private calls that day – or the next. He’ll just have to wait until he sees her that evening.’

  ‘What if he did phone?’

  ‘He wouldn’t be able to get his money in the coin box, and even then, his wife, assuming she is a secretary, would be in a red time zone and no longer in her office for that day – hence the prohibition on phone calls. It all meshed perfectly. Your time programme told you when you could switch on your TV set and when to switch off. All electric appliances were fused, and if you strayed outside the programmed periods you’d have a hefty fine and repair bill to meet. The viewer’s economic status obviously determined the choice of programme, and vice versa, so there was no question of coercion. Each day’s programme listed your permitted activities: you could go to the hairdresser’s, cinema, bank, cocktail bar, at stated times, and if you went then you were sure of being served quickly and efficiently.’

  They had almost reached the far end of the plaza. Facing them on its tower was the enormous clock face, dominating its constellation of twelve motionless attendants.

  ‘There were a dozen socio-economic categories: blue for executives, gold for professional classes, yellow for military and government officials – incidentally, it’s odd your parents ever got hold of that wristwatch, none of your family ever worked for the government – green for manual workers and so on. But, naturally, subtle subdivisions were possible. The lower-grade executive I mentioned left his office at 12, but a senior executive, with exactly the same time codes, would leave at 11.45, have an extra fifteen minutes, would find the streets clear before the lunch-hour rush of clerical workers.’

  Stacey pointed up at the tower. ‘This was the Big Clock, the master from which all others were regulated. Central Time Control, a sort of Ministry of Time, gradually took over the old parliamentary buildings as their legislative functions diminished. The programmers were, effectively, the city’s absolute rulers.’

  As Stacey continued Conrad gazed up at the battery of timepieces, poised helplessly at 12.01. Somehow time itself seemed to have been suspended, around him the great office buildings hung in a neutral interval between yesterday and tomorrow. If one could only start the master clock the entire city would probably slide into gear and come to life, in an instant be repeopled with its dynamic jostling millions.

  They began to walk back towards the car. Conrad looked over his shoulder at the clock face, its gigantic arms upright on the silent hour.

  ‘Why did it stop?’ he asked.

  Stacey looked at him curiously. ‘Haven’t I made it fairly plain?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Conrad pulled his eyes off the scores of clocks lining the plaza, frowned at Stacey.

  ‘Can you imagine what life was like for all but a few of the thirty million people here?’

  Conrad shrugged. Blue and yellow clocks, he noticed, outnumbered all others; obviously the major governmental agencies had operated from the plaza area. ‘Highly organized but better than the sort of life we lead,’ he replied finally, more interested in the sights around him. ‘I’d rather have the telephone for one hour a day than not at all. Scarcities are always rationed, aren’t they?’

  ‘But this was a way of life in which everything was scarce. Don’t you think there’s a point beyond which human dignity is surrendered?’

  Conrad snorted. ‘There seems to be plenty of dignity here. Look at these buildings, they’ll stand for a thousand years. Try comparing them with my father. Anyway, think of the beauty of the system, engineered as precisely as a watch.’

  ‘That’s all it was,’ Stacey commanded dourly. ‘The old metaphor of the cog in the wheel was never more true than here. The full sum of your existence was printed for you in the newspaper columns, mailed to you once a month from the Ministry of Time.’

  Conrad was looking off in some other direction and Stacey pressed on in a slightly louder voice. ‘Eventually, of course, revolt came. It’s interesting that in any industrial society there is usually one social revolution each century, and that successive revolutions receive their impetus from progressively higher social levels. In the eighteenth century it was the urban proletariat, in the nineteenth the artisan classes, in this revolt the white collar office worker, living in his tiny so-called modern flat, supporting through credit pyramids an economic system that denied him all freedom of will or personality, chained him to a thousand clocks . . .’ He broke off. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Conrad was staring down one of the side streets. He hesitated, then asked in a casual voice: ‘How were these clocks driven? Electrically?’

  ‘Most of them. A few mechanically. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered . . . how they kept them all going.’ He dawdled at Stacey’s heels, checking the time from his wristwatch and glancing to his left. There were twenty or thirty clocks hanging from the buildings along the side street, indistinguishable from those he had seen all afternoon.

  Except for the fact that one of them was working!

  It was mounted in the centre o
f a black glass portico over an entrance-way fifty yards down the right-hand side, about eighteen inches in diameter, with a faded blue face. Unlike the others its hands registered 3.15, the correct time. Conrad had nearly mentioned this apparent coincidence to Stacey when he had suddenly seen the minute hand move on an interval. Without doubt someone had restarted the clock; even if it had been running off an inexhaustible battery, after thirty-seven years it could never have displayed such accuracy.

  He hung behind Stacey, who was saying: ‘Every revolution has its symbol of oppression . . .’

  The clock was almost out of view. Conrad was about to bend down and tie his shoelace when he saw the minute hand jerk downwards, tilt slightly from the horizontal.

  He followed Stacey towards the car, no longer bothering to listen to him. Ten yards from it he turned and broke away, ran swiftly across the roadway towards the nearest building.

  ‘Newman!’ he heard Stacey shout. ‘Come back!’ He reached the pavement, ran between the great concrete pillars carrying the building. He paused for a moment behind an elevator shaft, saw Stacey climbing hurriedly into the car. The engine coughed and roared out, and Conrad sprinted on below the building into a rear alley that led back to the side-street. Behind him he heard the car accelerating, a door slam as it picked up speed.

  When he entered the side-street the car came swinging off the plaza thirty yards behind him. Stacey swerved off the roadway, bumped up on to the pavement and gunned the car towards Conrad, throwing on the brakes in savage lurches, blasting the horn in an attempt to frighten him. Conrad side-stepped out of its way, almost falling over the bonnet, hurled himself up a narrow stairway leading to the first floor and raced up the steps to a short landing that ended in tall glass doors. Through them he could see a wide balcony that ringed the building. A fire-escape crisscrossed upwards to the roof, giving way on the fifth floor to a cafeteria that spanned the street to the office building opposite.