The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  Powers tapped a small perspex window in the drum. ‘Fruitfly. Its huge chromosomes make it a useful test vehicle.’ He bent down, pointed to a grey V-shaped honeycomb suspended from the roof. A few flies emerged from entrances, moving about busily. ‘Usually it’s solitary, a nomadic scavenger. Now it forms itself into well-knit social groups, has begun to secrete a thin sweet lymph something like honey.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Coma asked, touching the screen.

  ‘Diagram of a key gene in the operation.’ He traced a spray of arrows leading from a link in the chain. The arrows were labelled: ‘Lymph gland’ and subdivided ‘sphincter muscles, epithelium, templates.’

  ‘It’s rather like the perforated sheet music of a player-piano,’ Powers commented, ‘or a computer punch tape. Knock out one link with an X-ray beam, lose a characteristic, change the score.’

  Coma was peering through the window of the next cage and pulling an unpleasant face. Over her shoulder Powers saw she was watching an enormous spider-like insect, as big as a hand, its dark hairy legs as thick as fingers. The compound eyes had been built up so that they resembled giant rubies.

  ‘He looks unfriendly,’ she said. ‘What’s that sort of rope ladder he’s spinning?’ As she moved a finger to her mouth the spider came to life, retreated into the cage and began spewing out a complex skein of interlinked grey thread which it slung in long loops from the roof of the cage.

  ‘A web,’ Powers told her. ‘Except that it consists of nervous tissue. The ladders form an external neural plexus, an inflatable brain as it were, that he can pump up to whatever size the situation calls for. A sensible arrangement, really, far better than our own.’

  Coma backed away. ‘Gruesome. I wouldn’t like to go into his parlour.’

  ‘Oh, he’s not as frightening as he looks. Those huge eyes staring at you are blind. Or, rather, their optical sensitivity has shifted down the band, the retinas will only register gamma radiation. Your wristwatch has luminous hands. When you moved it across the window he started thinking. World War IV should really bring him into his element.’

  They strolled back to Powers’ desk. He put a coffee pan over a bunsen and pushed a chair across to Coma. Then he opened the box, lifted out the armoured frog and put it down on a sheet of blotting paper.

  ‘Recognize him? Your old childhood friend, the common frog. He’s built himself quite a solid little air-raid shelter.’ He carried the animal across to a sink, turned on the tap and let the water play softly over its shell. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he came back to the desk.

  Coma brushed her long hair off her forehead, watched him curiously.

  ‘Well, what’s the secret?’

  Powers lit a cigarette. ‘There’s no secret. Teratologists have been breeding monsters for years. Have you ever heard of the “silent pair”?’

  She shook her head.

  Powers stared moodily at the cigarette for a moment, riding the kick the first one of the day always gave him. ‘The so-called “silent pair” is one of modern genetics’ oldest problems, the apparently baffling mystery of the two inactive genes which occur in a small percentage of all living organisms, and appear to have no intelligible role in their structure or development. For a long while now biologists have been trying to activate them, but the difficulty is partly in identifying the silent genes in the fertilized germ cells of parents known to contain them, and partly in focusing a narrow enough X-ray beam which will do no damage to the remainder of the chromosome. However, after about ten years’ work Dr Whitby successfully developed a whole-body irradiation technique based on his observation of radiobiological damage at Eniwetok.’

  Powers paused for a moment. ‘He had noticed that there appeared to be more biological damage after the tests – that is, a greater transport of energy – than could be accounted for by direct radiation. What was happening was that the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates – you remember the analogy of the bridge collapsing under the soldiers marching in step – and it occurred to him that if he could first identify the critical resonance frequency of the lattices in any particular silent gene he could then radiate the entire living organism, and not simply its germ cells, with a low field that would act selectively on the silent gene and cause no damage to the remainder of the chromosomes, whose lattices would resonate critically only at other specific frequencies.’

  Powers gestured around the laboratory with his cigarette. ‘You see some of the fruits of this “resonance transfer” technique around you.’

  Coma nodded. ‘They’ve had their silent genes activated?’

  ‘Yes, all of them. These are only a few of the thousands of specimens who have passed through here, and as you’ve seen, the results are pretty dramatic.’

  He reached up and pulled across a section of the sun curtain. They were sitting just under the lip of the dome, and the mounting sunlight had begun to irritate him.

  In the comparative darkness Coma noticed a stroboscope winking slowly in one of the tanks at the end of the bench behind her. She stood up and went over to it, examining a tall sunflower with a thickened stem and greatly enlarged receptacle. Packed around the flower, so that only its head protruded, was a chimney of grey-white stones, neatly cemented together and labelled:

  Cretaceous Chalk: 60,000,000 years

  Beside it on the bench were three other chimneys, these labelled ‘Devonian Sandstone: 290,000,000 years’, ‘Asphalt: 20 years’, ‘Polyvinylchloride: 6 months’.

  ‘Can you see those moist white discs on the sepals,’ Powers pointed out. ‘In some way they regulate the plant’s metabolism. It literally sees time. The older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the PVC one in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Sees time,’ Coma repeated, wonderingly. She looked up at Powers, chewing her lower lip reflectively. ‘It’s fantastic. Are these the creatures of the future, doctor?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Powers admitted. ‘But if they are their world must be a monstrous surrealist one.’

  THREE

  He went back to the desk, pulled two cups from a drawer and poured out the coffee, switching off the bunsen. ‘Some people have speculated that organisms possessing the silent pair of genes are the forerunners of a massive move up the evolutionary slope, that the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed descendants. It may well be true – perhaps we’ve broken the code too soon.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, as Whitby’s death indicates, the experiments in this laboratory have all come to a rather unhappy conclusion. Without exception the organisms we’ve irradiated have entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of specialized sensory organs whose function we can’t even guess. The results are catastrophic – the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophila cannibalize themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals is ever intended to take place, or whether we’re merely extrapolating – I don’t know. Sometimes I think, though, that the new sensory organs developed are parodies of their real intentions. The specimens you’ve seen today are all in an early stage of their secondary growth cycles. Later on they begin to look distinctly bizarre.’

  Coma nodded. ‘A zoo isn’t complete without its keeper,’ she commented. ‘What about Man?’

  Powers shrugged. ‘About one in every 100,000 – the usual average – contain the silent pair. You might have them – or I. No one has volunteered yet to undergo whole-body irradiation. Apart from the fact that it would be classified as suicide, if the experiments here are any guide the experience would be savage and violent.’

  He sipped at the thin coffee, feeling tired and somehow bored. Recapitulating the laboratory’s work had exhausted him.

  The girl leaned forward.
‘You look awfully pale,’ she said solicitously. ‘Don’t you sleep well?’

  Powers managed a brief smile. ‘Too well,’ he admitted. ‘It’s no longer a problem with me.’

  ‘I wish I could say that about Kaldren. I don’t think he sleeps anywhere near enough. I hear him pacing around all night.’ She added: ‘Still, I suppose it’s better than being a terminal. Tell me, doctor, wouldn’t it be worth trying this radiation technique on the sleepers at the Clinic? It might wake them up before the end. A few of them must possess the silent genes.’

  ‘They all do,’ Powers told her. ‘The two phenomena are very closely linked, as a matter of fact.’ He stopped, fatigue dulling his brain, and wondered whether to ask the girl to leave. Then he climbed off the desk and reached behind it, picked up a tape-recorder.

  Switching it on, he zeroed the tape and adjusted the speaker volume.

  ‘Whitby and I often talked this over. Towards the end I took it all down. He was a great biologist, so let’s hear it in his own words. It’s absolutely the heart of the matter.’

  He flipped the table on, adding: ‘I’ve played it over to myself a thousand times, so I’m afraid the quality is poor.’

  An older man’s voice, sharp and slightly irritable, sounded out above a low buzz of distortion, but Coma could hear it clearly.

  WHITBY: . . . for heaven’s sake, Robert, look at those FAO statistics. Despite an annual increase of five per cent in acreage sown over the past fifteen years, world wheat crops have continued to decline by a factor of about two per cent. The same story repeats itself ad nauseam. Cereals and root crops, dairy yields, ruminant fertility – are all down. Couple these with a mass of parallel symptoms, anything you care to pick from altered migratory routes to longer hibernation periods, and the overall pattern is incontrovertible.

  POWERS: Population figures for Europe and North America show no decline, though.

  WHITBY: Of course not, as I keep pointing out. It will take a century for such a fractional drop in fertility to have any effect in areas where extensive birth control provides an artificial reservoir. One must look at the countries of the Far East, and particularly at those where infant mortality has remained at a steady level. The population of Sumatra, for example, has declined by over fifteen per cent in the last twenty years. A fabulous decline! Do you realize that only two or three decades ago the Neo-Malthusians were talking about a ‘world population explosion’? In fact, it’s an implosion. Another factor is –

  Here the tape had been cut and edited, and Whitby’s voice, less querulous this time, picked up again.

  . . . just as a matter of interest, tell me something: how long do you sleep each night?

  POWERS: I don’t know exactly; about eight hours, I suppose.

  WHITBY: The proverbial eight hours. Ask anyone and they say automatically ‘eight hours’. As a matter of fact you sleep about ten and a half hours, like the majority of people. I’ve timed you on a number of occasions. I myself sleep eleven. Yet thirty years ago people did indeed sleep eight hours, and a century before that they slept six or seven. In Vasari’s Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead. Now he’s regarded as a prodigy, but it was unremarkable then. How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day. Of course, a second disadvantage under which we labour is a lowered basal metabolic rate – another factor no one will explain.

  POWERS: I suppose you could take the view that the lengthened sleep interval is a compensation device, a sort of mass neurotic attempt to escape from the terrifying pressures of urban life in the late twentieth century.

  WHITBY: You could, but you’d be wrong. It’s simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies inscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they’ve been running now for over a thousand million years. It’s time to re-tool. Just as an individual organism’s life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself. My total failure, my absolute lack of any moral or biological right to existence, is implicit in every cell of my body ...

  The tape ended, the spool ran free and stopped. Powers closed the machine, then massaged his face. Coma sat quietly, watching him and listening to the chimp playing with a box of puzzle dice.

  ‘As far as Whitby could tell,’ Powers said, ‘the silent genes represent a last desperate effort of the biological kingdom to keep its head above the rising waters. Its total life period is determined by the amount of radiation emitted by the sun, and once this reaches a certain point the sure-death line has been passed and extinction is inevitable. To compensate for this, alarms have been built in which alter the form of the organism and adapt it to living in a hotter radiological climate. Soft-skinned organisms develop hard shells, these contain heavy metals as radiation screens. New organs of perception are developed too. According to Whitby, though, it’s all wasted effort in the long run – but sometimes I wonder.’

  He smiled at Coma and shrugged. ‘Well, let’s talk about something else. How long have you known Kaldren?’ ‘About three weeks. Feels like ten thousand years.’

  ‘How do you find him now? We’ve been rather out of touch lately.’

  Coma grinned. ‘I don’t seem to see very much of him either. He makes me sleep all the time. Kaldren has many strange talents, but he lives just for himself. You mean a lot to him, doctor. In fact, you’re my one serious rival.’

  ‘I thought he couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just a sort of surface symptom. He really thinks of you continually. That’s why we spend all our time following you around.’ She eyed Powers shrewdly. ‘I think he feels guilty about something.’

  ‘Guilty?’ Powers exclaimed. ‘He does? I thought I was supposed to be the guilty one.’

  ‘Why?’ she pressed. She hesitated, then said: ‘You carried out some experimental surgical technique on him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Powers admitted. ‘It wasn’t altogether a success, like so much of what I seem to be involved with. If Kaldren feels guilty, I suppose it’s because he feels he must take some of the responsibility.’

  He looked down at the girl, her intelligent eyes watching him closely. ‘For one or two reasons it may be necessary for you to know. You said Kaldren paced around all night and didn’t get enough sleep. Actually he doesn’t get any sleep at all.’

  The girl nodded. ‘You . . .’ She made a snapping gesture with her fingers.

  ‘. . . narcotomized him,’ Powers completed. ‘Surgically speaking, it was a great success, one might well share a Nobel for it. Normally the hypothalamus regulates the period of sleep, raising the threshold of consciousness in order to relax the venous capillaries in the brain and drain them of accumulating toxins. However, by sealing off some of the control loops the subject is unable to receive the sleep cue, and the capillaries drain while he remains conscious. All he feels is a temporary lethargy, but this passes within three or four hours. Physically speaking, Kaldren has had another twenty years added to his life. But the psyche seems to need sleep for its own private reasons, and conseque
ntly Kaldren has periodic storms that tear him apart. The whole thing was a tragic blunder.’

  Coma frowned pensively. ‘I guessed as much. Your papers in the neurosurgery journals referred to the patient as K. A touch of pure Kafka that came all too true.’

  ‘I may leave here for good, Coma,’ Powers said. ‘Make sure that Kaldren goes to his clinics. Some of the deep scar tissue will need to be cleaned away.’

  ‘I’ll try. Sometimes I feel I’m just another of his insane terminal documents.’

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Kaldren’s collection of final statements about homo sapiens. The complete works of Freud, Beethoven’s blind quartets, transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, an automatic novel, and so on.’ She broke off. ‘What’s that you’re drawing?’

  ‘Where?’

  She pointed to the desk blotter, and Powers looked down and realized he had been unconsciously sketching an elaborate doodle, Whitby’s four-armed sun. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. Somehow, though, it had a strangely compelling force.

  Coma stood up to leave. ‘You must come and see us, doctor. Kaldren has so much he wants to show you. He’s just got hold of an old copy of the last signals sent back by the Mercury Seven twenty years ago when they reached the moon, and can’t think about anything else. You remember the strange messages they recorded before they died, full of poetic ramblings about the white gardens. Now that I think about it they behaved rather like the plants in your zoo here.’

  She put her hands in her pockets, then pulled something out. ‘By the way, Kaldren asked me to give you this.’

  It was an old index card from the observatory library. In the centre had been typed the number:

  96,688,365,498,720

  ‘It’s going to take a long time to reach zero at this rate,’ Powers remarked dryly. ‘I’ll have quite a collection when we’re finished.’

  After she had left he chucked the card into the waste bin and sat down at the desk, staring for an hour at the ideogram on the blotter.