When Quimby arrived in his coracle two hours later, eager to see the bird, Crispin sent him up the mast to secure the dove to the cross-tree. Dancing about beneath the bird, the dwarf seemed mesmerized by Crispin, doing whatever the latter told him.
‘Fire a shot at her, Crisp!’ he exhorted Crispin, who stood disconsolately by the rail. ‘Over the house, that’ll bring her out!’
‘Do you think so?’ Crispin raised the rifle, ejecting the cartridge whose bullet had destroyed the bird. He watched the bright shell tumble down into the feathery water below. ‘I don’t know . . . it might frighten her. I’ll go over there.’
‘That’s the way, Crisp . . .’ The dwarf scuttled about. ‘Bring her back here – I’ll tidy it up for you.’
‘Maybe I will.’
As he berthed the launch on the beach Crispin looked back at the picket ship, reassuring himself that the dead dove was clearly visible in the distance. In the morning sunlight the plumage shone like snow against the rusting masts.
When he neared the house he saw Catherine York standing in the doorway, her wind-blown hair hiding her face, watching him approach with stern eyes.
He was ten yards from her when she stepped into the house and half closed the door. Crispin began to run, and she leaned out and shouted angrily: ‘Go away! Go back to the ship and those dead birds you love so much!’
‘Miss Catherine . . .’ Crispin stammered to a halt by the door. ‘I saved you . . . Mrs York!’
‘Saved? Save the birds, captain!’
Crispin tried to speak, but she slammed the door. He walked back through the meadow and punted across the river to the picket ship, unaware of Quimby’s insane moon eyes staring down at him from the rail.
‘Crisp . . . What’s the matter?’ For once the dwarf was gentle. ‘What happened?’
Crispin shook his head. He gazed up at the dead bird, struggling to find some solution to the woman’s last retort. ‘Quimby,’ he said in a quiet voice to the dwarf, ‘Quimby, she thinks she’s a bird.’
During the next week this conviction grew in Crispin’s bewildered mind, as did his obsession with the dead bird. Looming over him like an immense murdered angel, the dove’s eyes seemed to follow him about the ship, reminding him of when it had first appeared, almost from within his own face, in the mirror-glass of the bridge-house.
It was this sense of identity with the bird that was to spur Crispin to his final stratagem. Climbing the mast, he secured himself to the lookout’s nest, and with a hacksaw cut away the steel cables tangled around the dove’s body. In the gathering wind the great white form of the bird swayed and dipped, its fallen wings almost knocking Crispin from his perch. At intervals the rain beat across them, but the drops helped to wash away the blood on the bird’s breast and the chips of rust from the hacksaw. At last Crispin lowered the bird to the deck, then lashed it to the hatch cover behind the funnel.
Exhausted, he slept until the next day. At dawn, armed with a machete, he began to eviscerate the bird.
Three days later, Crispin stood on the cliff above the house, the picket ship far below him across the river. The hollow carcass of the dove which he wore over his head and shoulders seemed little heavier than a pillow. In the brief spell of warm sunlight he lifted the outstretched wings, feeling their buoyancy and the cutting flow of air through the feathers. A few stronger gusts moved across the crest of the ridge, almost lifting him into the wind, and he stepped closer to the small oak which hid him from the house below.
Against the trunk rested his rifle and bandoliers. Crispin lowered the wings and gazed up at the sky, making certain for the last time that no stray hawk or peregrine was about. The effectiveness of the disguise had exceeded all his hopes. Kneeling on the ground, the wings furled at his sides and the hollowed head of the bird lowered over his face, he felt he completely resembled the dove.
Below him the ground sloped towards the house. From the deck of the picket ship the cliff face had seemed almost vertical, but in fact the ground shelved downwards at a steady but gentle gradient. With luck he might even manage to be airborne for a few steps. However, for most of the way to the house he intended simply to run downhill.
As he waited for Catherine York to appear he freed his right arm from the metal clamp he had fastened to the wing bone of the bird. He reached out to set the safety catch on his rifle. By divesting himself of the weapon and his bandoliers, and assuming the disguise of the bird, he had, as he understood, accepted the insane logic of the woman’s mind. Yet the symbolic flight he was about to perform would free not only Catherine York, but himself as well, from the spell of the birds.
A door opened in the house, a broken pane of glass catching the sunlight. Crispin stood up behind the oak, his hands bracing themselves on the wings. Catherine York appeared, carrying something across the yard. She paused by the rebuilt nest, her white hair lifting in the breeze, and adjusted some of the feathers.
Stepping from behind the tree, Crispin walked forward down the slope. Ten yards ahead he reached a patch of worn turf. He began to run, the wings flapping unevenly at his sides. As he gained speed his feet raced across the ground. Suddenly the wings steadied as they gained their purchase on the updraught, and he found himself able to glide, the air rushing past his face.
He was a hundred yards from the house when the woman noticed him. A few moments later, when she had brought her shotgun from the kitchen, Crispin was too busy trying to control the speeding glider in which he had become a confused but jubilant passenger. His voice cried out as he soared across the falling ground, feet leaping in ten-yard strides, the smell of the bird’s blood and plumage filling his lungs.
He reached the perimeter of the meadow that ringed the house, crossing the hedge fifteen feet above the ground. He was holding with one hand to the soaring carcass of the dove, his head half-lost inside the skull, when the woman fired twice at him. The first charge went through the tail, but the second shot hit him in the chest, down into the soft grass of the meadow among the dead birds.
Half an hour later, when she saw that Crispin had died, Catherine York walked forward to the twisted carcass of the dove and began to pluck away the choicest plumes, carrying them back to the nest which she was building again for the great bird that would come one day and bring back her son.
1966
TOMORROW IS A MILLION YEARS
In the evening the time-winds would blow across the Sea of Dreams, and the silver wreck of the excursion module would loom across the jewelled sand to where Glanville lay in the pavilion by the edge of the reef. During the first week after the crash, when he could barely move his head, he had seen the images of the Santa Maria and the Golden Hind sailing towards him through the copper sand, the fading light of the sunset illuminating the ornamental casements of the high stern-castles. Later, sitting up in the surgical chair, he had seen the spectral crews of these spectral ships, their dark figures watching him from the quarter-decks. Once, when he could walk again, Glanville went out on to the surface of the lake, his wife guiding his elbow as he hobbled on his stick. Two hundred yards from the module he had suddenly seen an immense ship materialize from the wreck and move through the sand towards them, its square sails lifted by the time-winds. In the cerise light Glanville recognized the two bow anchors jutting like tusks, the tryworks amidships, and the whaling irons and harpoons. Judith held his arm, drawing him back to the pavilion, but Glanville knocked away her hand.
Rolling slowly, the great ship crested silently through the sand, its hull towering above them as if they had been watching from a skiff twenty yards off its starboard bow. As it swept by with a faint sigh of sand, the whisper of the time-winds, Glanville pointed to the three men looking down at them from the quarter-rail, the tallest with stern eyes and a face like biscuit, the second jaunty, the third ruddy and pipe-smoking.
‘Can you see them?’ Glanville shouted. ‘Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, the mates of the Pequod!’ Glanville pointed to the helm, where a wild-eyed old
man gazed at the edge of the reef on which he seemed collision-bent. ‘Ahab . . . !’ he cried in warning. But the ship had reached the reef, and then in an instant faded across the clinker-like rocks, its mizzen-sail lit for a last moment by the dying light.
‘The Pequod! My God, you could see the crew, Ishmael and Tashtego . . . Ahab was there, and the mates, Melville’s three momentous men! Did you see them, Judith?’
His wife nodded, helping him on towards the pavilion, her frown hidden in the dusk light. Glanville knew perfectly well that she never saw the spectral ships, but nonetheless she seemed to sense that something vast and strange moved across the sand-lake out of the time-winds. For the moment, she was more interested in making certain that he recovered from the long flight and the absurd accident when the excursion module had crashed on landing.
‘But why the Pequod?’ Glanville asked, as they sat in their chairs on the veranda of the pavilion. He mopped his plump, unshaven face with a flowered handkerchief. ‘The Golden Hind and the Santa Maria, yes . . . ships of discovery; Drake circumnavigating the globe has a certain resemblance to ourselves half-crossing the universe – but Crusoe’s ship would have been more appropriate, don’t you agree?’
‘Why?’ Judith glanced at the sand inundating the slatted metal floor of the veranda. She filled her glass with soda from the siphon, and then played with the sparkling fluid, watching the bubbles with her severe eyes. ‘Because we’re marooned?’
‘No . . .’ Irritated by his wife’s reply, Glanville turned to face her. Sometimes her phlegmatic attitude annoyed him – she seemed almost to enjoy deflating his mood of optimism, however forced that might be. ‘What I meant was that Crusoe, like ourselves here, made a new world for himself out of the pieces of the old he brought with him. We can do the same, Judith.’ He paused, wondering how to re-assert his physical authority, and then said with quiet emphasis: ‘We’re not marooned.’
His wife nodded, her long face expressionless. Barely moving her head, she looked up at the night sky visible beyond the edge of the awning. High above them, a single point of light traversed the starless sky, its intermittent beacon punctuating its way towards the northern pole. ‘No, we’re not marooned – not for long, anyway, with that up there. It won’t be long at all before Captain Thornwald catches up with us.’
Glanville stared into the bottom of his glass. Unlike his wife, he took little pleasure in the sight of the automatic emergency beacon of the control ship broadcasting their position to the universe at large. ‘He’ll catch up with us, all right. That’s the luck of the thing. Instead of having him always at our heels we’ll finally be free of him for ever. They won’t send anyone after Thornwald.’
‘Perhaps not.’ Judith tapped the metal table. ‘But how do you propose to get rid of him – don’t tell me you’re going to be locked together in mortal combat? At the moment you can hardly move one foot after the other.’
Glanville smiled, with an effort ignoring the sarcasm in his wife’s voice. Whatever the qualities of skill, shrewdness and even courage, of a kind, that had brought them here, she still regarded him as something of an obscure joke. At times he wondered whether it would have been better to have left her behind. Alone here, on this lost world, he would have had no one to remind him of his sagging, middle-aged figure, his little indecisions and fantasies. He would have been able to sit back in front of the long sunsets and enjoy the strange poetry of the Sea of Dreams.
However, once he had disposed of Captain Thornwald she might at last take him seriously. ‘Don’t worry, there’ll be no mortal combat – we’ll let the time-winds blow over him.’
Undeterred, Judith said: ‘You’ll let one of your spectral ships run him down? But perhaps he won’t see them.’
Glanville gazed out at the dark grottoes of the sand-reef that fringed the northern shore of the lake two miles away. Despite its uniformity – the lake-systems covered the entire planet – the flat perspectives of the landscape fascinated him. ‘It doesn’t matter whether he sees them or not. By the way, the Pequod this evening . . . it’s a pity you missed Ahab. They were all there, exactly as Melville described them in Moby Dick.’
His wife stood up, as if aware that he might begin one of his rhapsodies again. She brushed away the white sand that lay like lace across the blue brocade of her gown. ‘I hope you’re right. Perhaps you’ll see the Flying Dutchman next.’
Distracted by his thoughts, Glanville watched her tall figure move away across the gradient of the beach, following the tide-line formed by the sand blown off the lake’s surface. The Flying Dutchman? A curious remark. By coming to this remote planet they themselves would lose seven years of their lives by time-dilation if they ever chose to return home, by coincidence the period that elapsed while the condemned Dutchman roved the seas . . . Every seven years he would come ashore, free to stay there only if he found the love of a faithful woman.
Was he himself the Dutchman? Perhaps, in a remote sense. Or Thornwald? He and Judith had met during the preliminary inquiries and, incredible though it seemed, there might have been something between them – it was difficult to believe that Thornwald would have pursued them this far, sacrificing all hopes of seniority and promotion, over a minor emigration infringement. The bacterial scattering might be serious on some planets, but they had restricted themselves to arid worlds on an empty edge of the universe.
Glanville looked out at the wreck of the excursion module. For a moment there was a glimmer of royals and top-gallants, as if the entire Cutty Sark was about to disgorge itself from the sand. This strange phenomenon, a consequence of the time-sickness brought on by the vast distances of interstellar space, had revealed itself more and more during their long flight. The farther they penetrated into deep space, the greater the nostalgia of the human mind and its eagerness to transform any man-made objects, such as the spaceships in which they travelled, into their archaic forebears. Judith, for some reason, had been immune, but Glanville had seen a succession of extraordinary visions, fragments of the myths and dreams of the Earth’s past, reborn out of the dead lakes and fossil seas of the alien worlds.
Judith, of course, not only lacked all imagination but felt no sense of guilt – Glanville’s crime, the memory of which he had almost completely repressed, was no responsibility of hers, man and wife though they might be. Besides, the failures of which she silently accused him every day were those of character, more serious in her eyes than embezzlement, grand larceny or even murder. It was precisely this that made possible his plan to deal once and for all with Captain Thornwald.
Three weeks later, when Thornwald arrived, Glanville had recovered completely from the accident. From the top of the sand-reef overhanging the western edge of the lake he watched the police captain’s capsule land two hundred yards from the pavilion. Judith stood under the awning on the veranda, one hand raised to ward off the dust kicked up by the retro-jets. She had never questioned Glanville’s strategy for dealing with Thornwald, but now and then he had noticed her glancing upwards at the beacon of the control ship, as if calculating the number of days it would take Thornwald to catch up with them. Glanville was surprised by her patience. Once, a week before Thornwald arrived, he almost challenged her to say whether she really believed he would be able to outwit the police captain. By a curious irony, he realized that she probably did but if so, why did she still despise him?
As the starboard hatch of the capsule fell back, Glanville stood up on the edge of the reef and began to wave with both arms. He made his way down the side of the reef, then jumped the last five feet to the lake floor and ran across to the capsule. ‘Thornwald! Captain, it’s good to see you!’
Framed within the steel collar of his suit, the policeman’s tired face looked up at Glanville through the open hatch. He stood up with an effort and accepted Glanville’s hand, then climbed down on to the ground. Careful not to turn his back on Glanville, he unzipped his suit and glanced quickly at the pavilion and the wreck of the excursion module.
Glanville strolled to and fro around him. Thornwald’s cautious manner, the hand near the weapon in his holster, for some reason amused him. ‘Captain, you made a superb landing, beautiful marksmanship – getting here at all, for that matter. You saw the beacon, I suppose, but even so . . .’ When Thornwald was about to speak, Glanville rattled on: ‘No, of course I didn’t leave it on deliberately – damn it, we actually crashed! Can you imagine it, after coming all this way – very nearly broke our necks. Luckily, Judith was all right, not a scratch on her. She’ll be glad to see you, Captain.’
Thornwald nodded slowly, his eyes following Glanville’s pudgy, sweating figure as it roved about the capsule. A tall, stooped man with a tough, pessimistic face and all the wariness of a long-serving policeman, he seemed somehow unsettled by Glanville’s manic gaiety.
Glanville pointed to the pavilion. ‘Come on, we’ll have lunch, you must be tired out.’ He gestured at the sand-lake and the blank sky. ‘Nothing much here, I know, but it’s restful. After a few days –’
‘Glanville!’ Thornwald stopped. Face set, he put a hand out as if to touch Glanville’s shoulder. ‘You realize why I’m here?’
‘Of course, Captain.’ Glanville gave him an easy smile. ‘For heaven’s sake, stop looking so serious. I’m not going to escape. There’s nowhere to go.’
‘As long as you realize that.’ Thornwald plodded forward through the top surface of fine sand, his feet placed carefully as if testing the validity of this planet with its euphoric tenant. ‘You can have something to eat, then we’ll get ready to go back.’
‘If you like, Captain. Still, there’s no desperate hurry. Seven years here and back, what difference will a few hours or even days make? All those whipper-snappers you left behind you in the department will be chief commissioners now; I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry. Besides, the emigration laws may even have been changed . . .’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 104
