The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  Tony hesitated, then nodded. ‘I couldn’t help it. Some of those outfits wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

  Clifford clamped his lips and picked the synopsis off the floor. ‘Well, Margot, have you decided where you want to go?’

  Margot fiddled with the synopsis. ‘There are so many to choose from.’

  Tony started for the door. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ He waved a hand at them. ‘Have fun.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Clifford told him. ‘Margot hasn’t made up her mind yet.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ Tony asked. He indicated the line of vehicles outside, their crews now climbing into their driving cabs and turrets. ‘Take your time. You may bite off more than you can chew.’

  ‘Exactly. So as soon as Margot decides where we’re going you can make the final arrangements for us and get rid of that menagerie.’

  ‘But Clifford, give me a chance.’

  ‘Sorry. Now Margot, hurry up.’

  Margot flipped through the synopsis, screwing up her mouth. ‘It’s so difficult, Clifford, I don’t really like any of these. I still think the best agency was the little one I found in the Bazaar.’

  ‘No,’ Tony groaned, sinking down on a sofa. ‘Margot, please, after all the trouble I’ve gone to.’

  ‘Yes, definitely that one. The dream bureau. What was it called –’

  Before she could finish there was a roar of engines starting up in the boulevard. Startled, Clifford saw the column of cars and trucks churn across the gravel towards the villa. Music, throbbing heavily, came down from the room above, and a sick musky odour seeped through the air.

  Tony pulled himself off the sofa. ‘They must have had this place wired,’ he said quickly. ‘You’d better call the police. Believe me, some of these people don’t waste time arguing.’

  Outside three helmeted men in brown uniforms ran past the terrace, unwinding a coil of fuse wire. The sharp hissing sound of para-rays sucked through the air from the drive.

  Margot hid back in her slumber seat. ‘Trantino!’ she wailed.

  Clifford went back into his study. He switched the transceiver to the emergency channel.

  Instead of the police signal a thin automatic voice beeped through. ‘Remain seated, remain seated. Take-off in zero two minutes, Purser’s office on G Deck now –’

  Clifford switched to another channel. There was a blare of studio applause and a loud unctuous voice called out:

  ‘And now over to brilliant young Clifford Gorrell and his charming wife Margot about to enter their dream-pool at the fabulous Riviera-Neptune. Are you there, Cliff ?’

  Angrily, Clifford turned to a third. Static and morse chattered, and then someone rapped out in a hard iron tone: ‘Colonel Sapt is dug in behind the swimming pool. Enfilade along the garage roof –’

  Clifford gave up. He went back to the lounge. The music was deafening. Margot was prostrate in her slumber-seat, Tony down on the floor by the window, watching a pitched battle raging in the drive. Heavy black palls of smoke drifted across the terrace, and two tanks with stylized archers emblazoned on their turrets were moving up past the burning wrecks of the studio location vans.

  ‘They must be Arco’s!’ Tony shouted. ‘The police will look after them, but wait until the extra-sensory gang take over!’

  Crouching behind a low stone parapet running off the terrace was a group of waiters in dishevelled evening dress, lab technicians in scorched white overalls and musicians clutching their instrument cases. A bolt of flame from one of the tanks flickered over their heads and crashed into the grove of flamingo trees, sending up a shower of sparks and broken notes.

  Clifford pulled Tony to his feet. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. We’ll try the library windows into the garden. You’d better take Margot.’

  Her yellow beach robe had apparently died of shock, and was beginning to blacken like a dried-out banana skin. Discreetly averting his eyes, Tony picked her up and followed Clifford out into the hall.

  Three croupiers in gold uniforms were arguing hotly with two men in white surgeons’ coats. Behind them a couple of mechanics were struggling a huge vibrobath up the stairs.

  The foreman came over to Clifford. ‘Gorrell?’ he asked, consulting an invoice. ‘Trans-Ocean.’ He jerked a thumb at the bath. ‘Where do you want it?’

  A surgeon elbowed him aside. ‘Mr Gorrell?’ he asked suavely. ‘We are from Cerebro-Tonic Travel. Please allow me to give you a sedative. All this noise –’

  Clifford pushed past him and started to walk down the corridor to the library, but the floor began to slide and weave.

  He stopped and looked around unsteadily.

  Tony was down on his knees, Margot flopped out of his arms across the floor.

  Someone swayed up to Clifford and held out a tray.

  On it were three tickets.

  Around him the walls whirled.

  He woke in his bedroom, lying comfortably on his back, gently breathing a cool amber air. The noise had died away, but he could still hear a vortex of sound spinning violently in the back of his mind. It spiralled away, vanished, and he moved his head and looked around.

  Margot was lying asleep beside him, and for a moment he thought that the attack on the house had been a dream. Then he noticed the skull-plate clamped over his head, and the cables leading off from a boom to a large console at the foot of the bed. Massive spools loaded with magnetic tape waited in the projector ready to be played.

  The real nightmare was still to come! He struggled to get up, found himself clamped in a twilight sleep, unable to move more than a few centimetres.

  He lay there powerlessly for ten minutes, tongue clogging his mouth like a wad of cotton-wool when he tried to shout. Eventually a small neatly featured alien in a pink silk suit opened the door and padded quietly over to them. He peered down at their faces and then turned a couple of knobs on the console.

  Clifford’s consciousness began to clear. Beside him Margot stirred and woke.

  The alien beamed down pleasantly. ‘Good evening,’ he greeted them in a smooth creamy voice. ‘Please allow me to apologize for any discomfort you have suffered. However, the first day of a vacation is often a little confused.’

  Margot sat up. ‘I remember you. You’re from the little bureau in the Bazaar.’ She jumped round happily. ‘Clifford!’

  The alien bowed. ‘Of course, Mrs Gorrell. I am Dr Terence Sotal-2 Burlington, Professor – Emeritus,’ he added to himself as an afterthought, ‘– of Applied Drama at the University of Alpha Leporis, and the director of the play you and your husband are to perform during your vacation.’

  Clifford cut in: ‘Would you release me from this machine immediately? And then get out of my house! I’ve had –’

  ‘Clifford!’ Margot snapped. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  Clifford dragged at the skull plate and Dr Burlington quietly moved a control on the console. Part of Clifford’s brain clouded and he sank back helplessly.

  ‘Everything is all right, Mr Gorrell,’ Dr Burlington said.

  ‘Clifford,’ Margot warned him. ‘Remember your promise.’ She smiled at Dr Burlington. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, Doctor. Please go on.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Gorrell.’ Dr Burlington bowed again, as Clifford lay half-asleep, groaning impotently.

  ‘The play we have designed for you,’ Dr Burlington explained, ‘is an adaptation of a classic masterpiece in the Diphenyl 2-4-6 Cyclopropane canon, and though based on the oldest of human situations, is nonetheless fascinating. It was recently declared the outright winner at the Mira Nuptial Contest, and will always have a proud place in the private repertoires. To you, I believe, it is known as “The Taming of the Shrew”.’

  Margot giggled and then looked surprised. Dr Burlington smiled urbanely. ‘However, allow me to show you the script.’ He excused himself and slipped out.

  Margot fretted anxiously, while Clifford pulled weakly at the skull-plate.

  ‘Clifford,
I’m not sure that I like this altogether. And Dr Burlington does seem rather strange. But I suppose it’s only for three weeks.’

  Just then the door opened and a stout bearded figure, erect in a stiff blue uniform, white yachting cap jauntily on his head, stepped in.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Gorrell.’ He saluted Margot smartly, ‘Captain Linstrom.’ He looked down at Clifford. ‘Good to have you aboard, sir.’

  ‘Aboard?’ Clifford repeated weakly. He looked around at the familiar furniture in the room, the curtains drawn neatly over the windows. ‘What are you raving about? Get out of my house!’

  The Captain chuckled. ‘Your husband has a sense of humour, Mrs Gorrell. A useful asset on these long trips. Your friend Mr Harcourt in the next cabin seems sadly lacking in one.’

  ‘Tony?’ Margot exclaimed. ‘Is he still here?’

  Captain Linstrom laughed. ‘I quite understand you. He seems very worried, quite over-eager to return to Mars. We shall be passing there one day, of course, though not I fear for some time. However, time is no longer a consideration to you. I believe you are to spend the entire voyage in sleep. But a very pleasantly coloured sleep nonetheless.’ He smiled roguishly at Margot.

  As he reached the door Clifford managed to gasp out: ‘Where are we? For heaven’s sake, call the police!’

  Captain Linstrom paused in surprise. ‘But surely you know, Mr Gorrell?’ He strode to the window and flung back the curtains. In place of the large square casement were three small portholes. Outside a blaze of incandescent light flashed by, a rush of stars and nebulae.

  Captain Linstrom gestured theatrically. ‘This is the Dream of Osiris, under charter to Terminal Tours, three hours out from Zenith City on the non-stop run. May I wish you sweet dreams!’

  1962

  THE CAGE OF SAND

  At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped on to his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent façades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Haloes of moonlight beaded the lamp-standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.

  As Bridgman watched, his lean bronzed arms propped against the rusting rail, the last whorls of light sank away into the cerise funnel withdrawing below the horizon, and the first wind stirred across the dead Martian sand. Here and there miniature cyclones whirled about a sand-spur, drawing off swirling feathers of moon-washed spray, and a nimbus of white dust swept across the dunes and settled in the dips and hollows. Gradually the drifts accumulated, edging towards the former shoreline below the hotels. Already the first four floors had been inundated, and the sand now reached up to within two feet of Bridgman’s balcony. After the next sandstorm he would be forced yet again to move to the floor above.

  ‘Bridgman!’

  The voice cleft the darkness like a spear. Fifty yards to his right, at the edge of the derelict sand-break he had once attempted to build below the hotel, a square stocky figure wearing a pair of frayed cotton shorts waved up at him. The moonlight etched the broad sinewy muscles of his chest, the powerful bowed legs sinking almost to their calves in the soft Martian sand. He was about forty-five years old, his thinning hair close-cropped so that he seemed almost bald. In his right hand he carried a large canvas hold-all.

  Bridgman smiled to himself. Standing there patiently in the moonlight below the derelict hotel, Travis reminded him of some long-delayed tourist arriving at a ghost resort years after its extinction.

  ‘Bridgman, are you coming?’ When the latter still leaned on his balcony rail, Travis added: ‘The next conjunction is tomorrow.’

  Bridgman shook his head, a rictus of annoyance twisting his mouth. He hated the bi-monthly conjunctions, when all seven of the derelict satellite capsules still orbiting the Earth crossed the sky together. Invariably on these nights he remained in his room, playing over the old memo-tapes he had salvaged from the submerged chalets and motels further along the beach (the hysterical ‘This is Mamie Goldberg, 62955 Cocoa Boulevard, I really wanna protest against this crazy evacuation . . .’ or resigned ‘Sam Snade here, the Pontiac convertible in the back garage belongs to anyone who can dig it out’). Travis and Louise Woodward always came to the hotel on the conjunction nights – it was the highest building in the resort, with an unrestricted view from horizon to horizon – and would follow the seven converging stars as they pursued their endless courses around the globe. Both would be oblivious of everything else, which the wardens knew only too well, and they reserved their most careful searches of the sand-sea for these bi-monthly occasions. Invariably Bridgman found himself forced to act as look-out for the other two.

  ‘I was out last night,’ he called down to Travis. ‘Keep away from the north-east perimeter fence by the Cape. They’ll be busy repairing the track.’

  Most nights Bridgman divided his time between excavating the buried motels for caches of supplies (the former inhabitants of the resort area had assumed the government would soon rescind its evacuation order) and disconnecting the sections of metal roadway laid across the desert for the wardens’ jeeps. Each of the squares of wire mesh was about five yards wide and weighed over three hundred pounds. After he had snapped the lines of rivets, dragged the sections away and buried them among the dunes he would be exhausted, and spend most of the next day nursing his strained hands and shoulders. Some sections of the track were now permanently anchored with heavy steel stakes, and he knew that sooner or later they would be unable to delay the wardens by sabotaging the roadway.

  Travis hesitated, and with a noncommittal shrug disappeared among the dunes, the heavy tool-bag swinging easily from one powerful arm. Despite the meagre diet which sustained him, his energy and determination seemed undiminished – in a single night Bridgman had watched him dismantle twenty sections of track and then loop together the adjacent limbs of a crossroad, sending an entire convoy of six vehicles off into the wastelands to the south.

  Bridgman turned from the balcony, then stopped when a faint tang of brine touched the cool air. Ten miles away, hidden by the lines of dunes, was the sea, the long green rollers of the middle Atlantic breaking against the red Martian strand. When he had first come to the beach five years earlier there had never been the faintest scent of brine across the intervening miles of sand. Slowly, however, the Atlantic was driving the shore back to its former margins. The tireless shoulder of the Gulf Stream drummed against the soft Martian dust and piled the dunes into grotesque rococo reefs which the wind carried away into the sand-sea. Gradually the ocean was returning, reclaiming its great smooth basin, sifting out the black quartz and Martian obsidian which would never be wind-borne and drawing these down into its deeps. More and more often the stain of brine would hang on the evening air, reminding Bridgman why he had first come to the beach and removing any inclination to leave.

  Three years earlier he had attempted to measure the rate of approach, by driving a series of stakes into the sand at the water’s edge, but the shifting contours of the dunes carried away the coloured poles. Later, using the promontory at Cape Canaveral, where the old launching gantries and landing ramps reared up into the sky like derelict pieces of giant sculpture, he had calculated by triangulation that the advance was little more than thirty yards per year. At this rate – without wanting to, he had automatically made the calculation – it would be well over five hundred years before the Atlantic reached its former littoral at Cocoa Beach. Though discouragingly slow, the movement was nonetheless in a forward direction,
and Bridgman was happy to remain in his hotel ten miles away across the dunes, conceding towards its time of arrival the few years he had at his disposal.

  Later, shortly after Louise Woodward’s arrival, he had thought of dismantling one of the motel cabins and building himself a small chalet by the water’s edge. But the shoreline had been too dismal and forbidding. The great red dunes rolled on for miles, cutting off half the sky, dissolving slowly under the impact of the slate-green water. There was no formal tide-line, but only a steep shelf littered with nodes of quartz and rusting fragments of Mars rockets brought back with the ballast. He spent a few days in a cave below a towering sand-reef, watching the long galleries of compacted red dust crumble and dissolve as the cold Atlantic stream sluiced through them, collapsing like the decorated colonnades of a baroque cathedral. In the summer the heat reverberated from the hot sand as from the slag of some molten sun, burning the rubber soles from his boots, and the light from the scattered flints of washed quartz flickered with diamond hardness. Bridgman had returned to the hotel grateful for his room overlooking the silent dunes.

  Leaving the balcony, the sweet smell of brine still in his nostrils, he went over to the desk. A small cone of shielded light shone down over the tape-recorder and rack of spools. The rumble of the wardens’ unsilenced engines always gave him at least five minutes’ warning of their arrival, and it would have been safe to install another lamp in the room – there were no roadways between the hotel and the sea, and from a distance any light reflected on to the balcony was indistinguishable from the corona of glimmering phosphors which hung over the sand like myriads of fire-flies. However, Bridgman preferred to sit in the darkened suite, enclosed by the circle of books on the makeshift shelves, the shadow-filled air playing over his shoulders through the long night as he toyed with the memo-tapes, fragments of a vanished and unregretted past. By day he always drew the blinds, immolating himself in a world of perpetual twilight.