He was going through his notes for the last time when a steward bent over his shoulder. ‘Telephone for you, Dr Ward.’
‘I can’t take it now,’ Ward whispered. ‘Tell them to call later.’
‘The caller said it was extremely urgent, Doctor. Something about some people from the Neptune arriving.’
‘The Neptune?’
‘I think that’s a hotel in Santa Vera. Maybe the Russian delegates have turned up after all.’
Ward pushed his chair back, made his apologies and slipped away.
Professor Cameron was waiting in the alcove outside the banqueting hall when Ward stepped out of the booth. ‘Anything the trouble, Andrew? It’s not your father, I hope –’
‘It’s Kandinski,’ Ward said hurriedly. ‘He’s out in the desert, near the farm-strip. He says he’s seen another space vehicle.’
‘Oh, is that all.’ Cameron shook his head. ‘Come on, we’d better get back. The poor fool!’
‘Hold on,’ Ward said. ‘He’s got it under observation now. It’s on the ground. He told me to call General Wayne at the air base and alert the Strategic Air Command.’ Ward chewed his lip. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Cameron took him by the arm. ‘Andrew, come on. MacIntyre’s winding up.’
‘What can we do, though?’ Ward asked. ‘He seemed all right, but then he said that he thought they were hostile. That sounds a little sinister.’
‘Andrew!’ Cameron snapped. ‘What’s the matter with you? Leave Kandinski to himself. You can’t go now. It would be unpardonable rudeness.’
‘I’ve got to help Kandinski,’ Ward insisted. ‘I’m sure he needs it this time.’ He wrenched himself away from Cameron.
‘Ward!’ Professor Cameron called. ‘For God’s sake, come back!’ He followed Ward onto the balcony and watched him run down the steps and disappear across the lawn into the darkness.
As the wheels of the car thudded over the deep ruts, Ward cut the headlights and searched the dark hills which marked the desert’s edge. The warm glitter of Vernon Gardens lay behind him and only a few isolated lights shone in the darkness on either side of the road. He passed the farmhouse from which he assumed Kandinski had telephoned, then drove on slowly until he saw the bicycle Kandinski had left for him.
It took him several minutes to mount the huge machine, his feet well clear of the pedals for most of their stroke. Laboriously he covered a hundred yards, and after careering helplessly into a clump of scrub was forced to dismount and continue on foot.
Kandinski had told him that the ridge was about a mile up the valley. It was almost night and the starlight reflected off the hills lit the valley with fleeting, vivid colours. He ran on heavily, the only sounds he could hear were those of a thresher rattling like a giant metal insect half a mile behind him. Filling his lungs, he pushed on across the last hundred yards.
Kandinski was still lying on the edge of the ridge, watching the space-ship and waiting impatiently for Ward. Below him in the hollow the upper and lower rotor sections swung around more slowly, at about one revolution per second. The space-ship had sunk a further ten feet into the desert floor and he was now on the same level as the observation dome. A single finger of light poked out into the darkness, circling the ridge walls in jerky sweeps.
Then out of the valley behind him he saw someone stumbling along towards the ridge at a broken run. Suddenly a feeling of triumph and exhilaration came over him, and he knew that at last he had his witness.
Ward climbed up the slope to where he could see Kandinski. Twice he lost his grip and slithered downwards helplessly, tearing his hands on the gritty surface. Kandinski was lying flat on his chest, his head just above the ridge. Covered by dust, he was barely distinguishable from the slope itself.
‘Are you all right?’ Ward whispered. He pulled off his bow tie and ripped open his collar. When he had controlled his breathing he crawled up beside Kandinski.
‘Where?’ he asked.
Kandinski pointed down into the hollow.
Ward raised his head, levering himself up on his elbows. For a few seconds he peered out into the darkness, and then drew his head back.
‘You see it?’ Kandinski whispered. His voice was short and laboured. When Ward hesitated before replying he suddenly seized Ward’s wrist in a vice-like grip. In the faint light reflected by the white dust on the ridge Ward could see plainly his bright inflamed eyes.
‘Ward! Can you see it?’
The powerful fingers remained clamped to his wrist as he lay beside Kandinski and gazed down into the darkness.
Below the compartment window one of Ward’s fellow passengers was being seen off by a group of friends, and the young women in bright hats and bandanas and the men in slacks and beach sandals made him feel that he was leaving a seaside resort at the end of a holiday. From the window he could see the observatory domes of Mount Vernon rising out of the trees, and he identified the white brickwork of the Hoyle Library a thousand feet below the summit. Edna Cameron had brought him to the station, but he had asked her not to come onto the platform, and she had said goodbye and driven off. Cameron himself he had seen only once, when he had collected his books from the Institute.
Trying to forget it all, Ward noted thankfully that the train would leave within five minutes. He took his bankbook out of his wallet and counted the last week’s withdrawals. He winced at the largest item, 600 dollars which he had transferred to Kandinski’s account to pay for the cablegrams.
Deciding to buy something to read, he left the car and walked back to the news-stand. Several of the magazines contained what could only be described as discouraging articles about himself, and he chose two or three newspapers.
Just then someone put a hand on his shoulder. He turned and saw Kandinski.
‘Are you leaving?’ Kandinski asked quietly. He had trimmed his beard so that only a pale vestige of the original bloom remained, revealing his high bony cheekbones. His face seemed almost fifteen years younger, thinner and more drawn, but at the same time composed, like that of a man recovering slowly from the attack of some intermittent fever.
‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ Ward said as they walked back to the car. ‘I should have said goodbye to you but I thought I’d better not.’
Kandinski’s expression was subdued but puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
Ward shrugged. ‘I’m afraid everything here has more or less come to an end for me, Charles. I’m going back to Princeton until the spring. Freshman physics.’ He smiled ruefully at himself. ‘Boyle’s Law, Young’s Modulus, getting right back to fundamentals. Not a bad idea, perhaps.’
‘But why are you leaving?’ Kandinski pressed.
‘Well, Cameron thought it might be tactful of me to leave. After our statement to the Secretary-General was published in The New York Times I became very much persona non grata at the Hubble. The trustees were on to Professor Renthall again this morning.’
Kandinski smiled and seemed relieved. ‘What does the Hubble matter?’ he scoffed. ‘We have more important work to do. You know, Ward, when Mrs Cameron told me just now that you were leaving I couldn’t believe it.’
‘I’m sorry, Charles, but it’s true.’
‘Ward,’ Kandinski insisted. ‘You can’t leave. The Primes will be returning soon. We must prepare for them.’
‘I know, Charles, and I wish I could stay.’ They reached the car and Ward put his hand out. ‘Thanks for coming to see me off.’
Kandinski held his hand tightly. ‘Andrew, tell me the truth. Are you afraid of what people will think of you? Is that why you want to leave? Haven’t you enough courage and faith in yourself?’
‘Perhaps that’s it,’ Ward conceded, wishing the train would start. He reached for the rail and began to climb into the car but Kandinski held him.
‘Ward, you can’t drop your responsibilities like this!’
‘Please, Charles,’ Ward said, feeling his temper rising. He pulled his hand away but
Kandinski seized him by the shoulder and almost dragged him off the car.
Ward wrenched himself away. ‘Leave me alone!’ he snapped fiercely. ‘I saw your space-ship, didn’t I?’
Kandinski watched him go, a hand picking at his vanished beard, completely perplexed.
Whistles sounded, and the train began to edge forward.
‘Goodbye, Charles,’ Ward called down. ‘Let me know if you see anything else.’
He went into the car and took his seat. Only when the train was twenty miles from Mount Vernon did he look out of the window.
1963
END-GAME
After his trial they gave Constantin a villa, an allowance and an executioner. The villa was small and high-walled, and had obviously been used for the purpose before. The allowance was adequate to Constantin’s needs – he was never permitted to go out and his meals were prepared for him by a police orderly. The executioner was his own. Most of the time they sat on the enclosed veranda overlooking the narrow stone garden, playing chess with a set of large well-worn pieces.
The executioner’s name was Malek. Officially he was Constantin’s supervisor, and responsible for maintaining the villa’s tenuous contact with the outside world, now hidden from sight beyond the steep walls, and for taking the brief telephone call that came promptly at nine o’clock every morning. However, his real role was no secret between them. A powerful, doughy-faced man with an anonymous expression, Malek at first intensely irritated Constantin, who had been used to dealing with more subtle sets of responses. Malek followed him around the villa, never interfering – unless Constantin tried to bribe the orderly for a prohibited newspaper, when Malek merely gestured with a slight turn of one of his large hands, face registering no disapproval, but cutting off the attempt as irrevocably as a bulkhead – nor making any suggestions as to how Constantin should spend his time. Like a large bear, he sat motionlessly in the lounge in one of the faded armchairs, watching Constantin.
After a week Constantin tired of reading the old novels in the bottom shelf of the bookcase – somewhere among the grey well-thumbed pages he had hoped to find a message from one of his predecessors – and invited Malek to play chess. The set of chipped mahogany pieces reposed on one of the empty shelves of the bookcase, the only item of decoration or recreational equipment in the villa. Apart from the books and the chess set the small six-roomed house was completely devoid of ornament. There were no curtains or picture rails, bedside tables or standard lamps, and the only electrical fittings were the lights recessed behind thick opaque bowls into the ceilings. Obviously the chess set and the row of novels had been provided deliberately, each representing one of the alternative pastimes available to the temporary tenants of the villa. Men of a phlegmatic or philosophical temperament, resigned to the inevitability of their fate, would choose to read the novels, sinking backwards into a self-anaesthetized trance as they waded through the turgid prose of those nineteenth-century romances.
On the other hand, men of a more volatile and extrovert disposition would obviously prefer to play chess, unable to resist the opportunity to exercise their Machiavellian talents for positional manoeuvre to the last. The games of chess would help to maintain their unconscious optimism and, more subtly, sublimate or divert any attempts at escape.
When Constantin suggested that they play chess Malek promptly agreed, and so they spent the next long month as the late summer turned to autumn. Constantin was glad he had chosen chess; the game brought him into immediate personal involvement with Malek, and like all condemned men he had soon developed a powerful emotional transference on to what effectively was the only person left in his life.
At present it was neither negative nor positive; but a relationship of acute dependence – already Malek’s notional personality was becoming overlaid by the associations of all the anonymous but nonetheless potent figures of authority whom Constantin could remember since his earliest childhood: his own father, the priest at the seminary he had seen hanged after the revolution, the first senior commissars, the party secretaries at the ministry of foreign affairs and, ultimately, the members of the central committee themselves. Here, where the anonymous faces had crystallized into those of closely observed colleagues and rivals, the process seemed to come full circle, so that he himself was identified with those shadowy personas who had authorized his death and were now represented by Malek.
Constantin had also, of course, become dominated by another obsession, the need to know: when? In the weeks after the trial and sentence he had remained in a curiously euphoric state, too stunned to realize that the dimension of time still existed for him, he had already died a posteriori. But gradually the will to live, and his old determination and ruthlessness, which had served him so well for thirty years, reasserted themselves, and he realized that a small hope still remained to him. How long exactly in terms of time he could only guess, but if he could master Malek his survival became a real possibility.
The question remained: When?
Fortunately he could be completely frank with Malek. The first point he established immediately.
‘Malek,’ he asked on the tenth move one morning, when he had completed his development and was relaxing for a moment. ‘Tell me, do you know – when?’
Malek looked up from the board, his large almost bovine eyes gazing blandly at Constantin. ‘Yes, Mr Constantin, I know when.’ His voice was deep and functional, as expressionless as a weighing machine’s.
Constantin sat back reflectively. Outside the glass panes of the veranda the rain fell steadily on the solitary fir tree which had maintained a precarious purchase among the stones under the wall. A few miles to the south-west of the villa were the outskirts of the small port, one of the dismal so-called ‘coastal resorts’ where junior ministry men and party hacks were sent for their bi-annual holidays. The weather, however, seemed peculiarly inclement, the sun never shining through the morose clouds, and for a moment, before he checked himself, Constantin felt glad to be within the comparative warmth of the villa.
‘Let me get this straight,’ he said to Malek. ‘You don’t merely know in a general sense – for example, after receiving an instruction from so-and-so – but you know specifically when?’
‘Exactly.’ Malek moved his queen out of the game. His chess was sound but without flair or a personal style, suggesting that he had improved merely by practice – most of his opponents, Constantin realized with sardonic amusement, would have been players of a high class.
‘You know the day and the hour and the minute,’ Constantin pressed. Malek nodded slowly, most of his attention upon the game, and Constantin rested his smooth sharp chin in one hand, watching his opponent. ‘It could be within the next ten seconds, or again, it might not be for ten years?’
‘As you say.’ Malek gestured at the board. ‘Your move.’
Constantin waved this aside. ‘I know, but don’t let’s rush it. These games are played on many levels, Malek. People who talk about three-dimensional chess obviously know nothing about the present form.’ Occasionally he made these openings in the hope of loosening Malek’s tongue, but conversation with him seemed to be impossible.
Abruptly he sat forward across the board, his eyes searching Malek’s. ‘You alone know the date, Malek, and as you have said, it might not be for ten years – or twenty. Do you think you can keep such a secret to yourself for so long?’
Malek made no attempt to answer this, and waited for Constantin to resume play. Now and then his eyes inspected the corners of the veranda, or glanced at the stone garden outside. From the kitchen came the occasional sounds of the orderly’s boots scraping the floor as he lounged by the telephone on the deal table.
As he scrutinized the board Constantin wondered how he could provoke any response whatever from Malek; the man had shown no reaction at the mention of ten years, although the period was ludicrously far ahead. In all probability their real game would be a short one. The indeterminate date of the execution, which imbued
the procedure with such a bizarre flavour, was not intended to add an element of torture or suspense to the condemned’s last days, but simply to obscure and confuse the very fact of his exit. If a definite date were known in advance there might be a last-minute rally of sympathy, an attempt to review the sentence and perhaps apportion the blame elsewhere, and the unconscious if not conscious sense of complicity in the condemned man’s crimes might well provoke an agonized reappraisal and, after the execution of the sentence, a submerged sense of guilt upon which opportunists and intriguers could play to advantage.
By means of the present system, however, all these dangers and unpleasant side-effects were obviated, the accused was removed from his place in the hierarchy when the opposition to him was at its zenith and conveniently handed over to the judiciary, and thence to one of the courts of star chamber whose proceedings were always held in camera and whose verdicts were never announced.
As far as his former colleagues were concerned, he had disappeared into the endless corridor world of the bureaucratic purgatories, his case permanently on file but never irrevocably closed. Above all, the fact of his guilt was never established and confirmed. As Constantin was aware, he himself had been convicted upon a technicality in the margins of the main indictment against him, a mere procedural device, like a bad twist in the plot of a story, designed solely to bring the investigation to a close. Although he knew the real nature of his crime, Constantin had never been formally notified of his guilt; in fact the court had gone out of its way to avoid preferring any serious charges against him whatever.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 74
