The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  Thornwald nodded dourly. Glanville was about to introduce him to Judith, standing quietly on the veranda twenty feet from him, but suddenly Thornwald stopped and glanced across the lake, as if searching for an invisible marksman hidden among the reefs.

  ‘All right?’ Glanville asked. Changing the pitch and tempo of his voice, he remarked quietly: ‘I call it the Sea of Dreams. We’re a long way from home, Captain, remember that. There are strange visions here at sunset. Keep your back turned on them.’ He waved at Judith, who was watching them approach with pursed lips. ‘Captain Thornwald, my dear. Rescue at last.’

  ‘Of a kind.’ She faced Thornwald who stood beside Glanville, as if hesitating to enter the pavilion. ‘I hope you feel all this is necessary, Captain. Revenge is a poor motive for justice.’

  Glanville cleared his throat. ‘Well, yes, my dear, but . . . Come on, Captain, sit down, we’ll have a drink. Judith, could you . . . ?

  After a pause she nodded and went into the pavilion.

  Glanville made a temporizing gesture. ‘A difficult moment, Captain. But as you know, Judith was always rather headstrong.’

  Thornwald nodded, watching Glanville as the latter drew the chair around the table. He pointed to the wreck of the excursion module. ‘How badly was it damaged? We’ll have a look at it later.’

  ‘A waste of time, Captain. It’s a complete write-off.’

  Thornwald scrutinized the wreck. ‘Even so, I’ll want to decontaminate it before we leave.’

  ‘Isn’t that pointless? – no one will ever come here. The whole planet is dead. Anyway, there’s a good deal of fuel in the tanks; if you short a circuit with your sprays the whole thing could go up.’ Glanville looked around impatiently. ‘Where are those drinks? Judith is . . .’

  He started to stand up, and found Thornwald following him to the door of the pavilion. ‘It’s all right, Captain.’

  Thornwald leaned stolidly on the door. He looked down at Glanville’s plump, sweating face. ‘Let me help you.’

  Glanville shrugged and beckoned him forward, but then stopped. ‘Captain, for heaven’s sake! If I wanted to escape I wouldn’t have been waiting for you here. Believe me, I haven’t got a gun hidden away in a whisky bottle or something – I just don’t want a scene between you and Judith.’

  Thornwald nodded, then waited in the doorway. When Glanville returned with the tray he went back to his seat, eyes searching the pavilion and the surrounding beach as if looking for a missing element in a puzzle. ‘Glanville, I have to prefer charges against you – you’re aware what you face when you get back?’

  Glanville shrugged. ‘Of course. But after all, the offence was comparatively trivial, wasn’t it?’ He reached for Thornwald’s bulky flight-suit which was spread across the veranda-rail. ‘Let me move this out of the sun. Where’s Judith gone?’

  As Thornwald glanced at the door of the pavilion Glanville reached down to the steel pencil in the right knee of the suit. He withdrew it from the slot, then deliberately dropped it to the metal floor.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘A torch?’ His thumb pushed back the nozzle and then moved quickly to the spring tab.

  ‘Don’t press that!’ Thornwald was on his feet. ‘It’s a radio reflector, you’ll fill the place with –’ He reached across the table and tried to grasp it from Glanville, then flung up his forearm to protect his face.

  A blinding jet of vaporized aluminium suddenly erupted from the nozzle of Glanville’s hand, gushing out like a firework. Within two or three seconds its spangled cloud filled the veranda, painting the walls and ceiling. Thornwald kicked aside the table and buried his face in his hands, his hair and forehead covered with the silver paint.

  Glanville backed to the steps, flecks of the paint spattering his arms and chest, hosing the jet directly at the policeman. He tossed the canister on to the floor, where its last spurts gusted out into the sunlight, swept up by the convection currents like a swarm of fireflies. Then, head down, Glanville turned and ran towards the edge of the sand-reef fifty yards away.

  Two hours later, as he crouched deep in the grottoes of the reef on the west shore of the lake, Glanville watched with amusement as Thornwald’s silver-painted figure stepped out of the pavilion into the sunlight. The cloud of vapour above the pavilion had settled, and the drab grey panels of the roof and sides were now a brilliant aluminized silver, shining in the sunlight like a temple. Framed in the doorway was Judith, watching as Thornwald walked slowly towards his capsule. Apart from the two clear handprints across his face, his entire body was covered with the aluminium particles. His hair glittered in the sunlight like silver foil.

  ‘Glanville . . . !’ Thornwald’s voice, slightly querulous, echoed in the galleries of the reef. The flap of his holster was open, but the weapon still lay within its sheath, and Glanville guessed that he had no intention of trying to track him through the galleries and corridors of the reef. The columns of fused sand could barely support their own weight; every few hours there would be a dull eruption as one or other of the great pillar-systems collapsed into a cloud of dust.

  Grinning to himself, Glanville watched Thornwald glance back at the pavilion. Evidently intrigued by this duel between the two men, Judith had sat down on the veranda, watching like some mediaeval lady at a tourney.

  The police captain moved towards the reef, his legs stiff and awkward, as if self-conscious of his glittering form. Chortling, Glanville scraped the sand from the curved reef over his head and rubbed it into the flecks of silver paint on his sleeves and trousers. As he drank from the flask of water he had hidden in the reef three days earlier, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly three o’clock – within four hours phantoms would move across the sand-lake. He patted the parcel wrapped in grey plastic sheeting on the ledge beside him.

  At seven o’clock the time-winds began to blow across the Sea of Dreams. As the sun fell away behind the western ridges, the long shadows of the sand-reefs crossed the lake-floor, dimming the quartz-veins as if closing off a maze of secret pathways.

  Crouched at the foot of the reef, Glanville edged along the beach, his sand-smeared figure barely visible in the darkness. Four hundred yards away, Thornwald sat alone on the veranda of the pavilion, his silver figure illuminated in the last cerise rays of the sun. Watching him across the lake-bed, Glanville assumed that already the timewinds were moving towards him, carrying strange images of ships and phantom seas, perhaps of mermaids and hallucinatory monsters. Thornwald sat stiffly in his chair, one hand on the rail in front of him.

  Glanville moved along the beach, picking his way between the veins of frosted quartz. As the wreck of the excursion module and the smaller capsule near by came between himself and the pavilion, he began to see the faint outlines of a low-hulled ship, a schooner or brigantine, with its sails reefed, as if waiting at anchor in some pirate lagoon. Ignoring it, Glanville crept into a shallow fault that crossed the lake, its floor some three feet below the surrounding surface. Catching his breath, he undid the parcel, then carried the object inside it under one arm as he set off towards the glimmering wreck of the module.

  Twenty minutes later Glanville stepped out from his vantage point behind the excursion module. Around him rode the spectral hulks of two square-sailed ships, their bows dipping through the warm sand. Intent on the pavilion ahead of him, where the silver figure of Thornwald had stood up like an electrified ghost, Glanville stepped through the translucent image of an anchor-cable that curved down into the surface of the lake in front of him. Holding the object he had taken from the parcel above his head like a lantern, he walked steadily towards the pavilion.

  The hulls of the ships rode silently at their anchors behind him as he reached the edge of the lake. Thirty yards away, the silver paint around the pavilion speckled the sand with a sheen of false moonlight, but the remainder of the beach and lake were in a profound darkness. As he walked the last yards to the pavilion with a slow rhythmic stride, Glanville could see clearly Thornwald’s tal
l figure pressed against the wall of the veranda, his appalled face, in the shape of his own hands, staring at the apparition in front of him. As Glanville reached the steps Thornwald made a passive gesture at him, one hand raised towards the pistol lying on the table.

  Quickly, Glanville threw aside the object he had carried with him. He seized the pistol before Thornwald could move, then whispered, more to himself than to Thornwald: ‘Strange seas, Captain, I warned you . . .’ He crouched down and began to back away along the veranda, the pistol levelled at Thornwald’s chest.

  Then the door on his left opened and before he could move the translucent figure of his wife stepped from the interior of the pavilion and knocked the weapon from his hand.

  He turned to her angrily, then shouted at the headless spectre that stepped through him and strode off towards the dark ships moored in the centre of the lake.

  Two hours after dawn the next morning Captain Thornwald finished his preparations for departure. In the last minutes he stood on the veranda, gazing out at the even sunlight over the empty lake as he wiped away the last traces of the aluminium paint with a solvent sponge. He looked down at the seated figure of Glanville tied to the chair by the table. Despite the events of the previous night, Glanville now seemed composed and relaxed, a trace even of humour playing about his soft mouth.

  Something about this bizarre amiability made Thornwald shudder. He secured the pistol in his holster – another evening by this insane lake and he would be pointing it at his own head.

  ‘Captain . . .’ Glanville glanced at him with docile eyes, then shrugged his fat shoulders inside the ropes. ‘When are you going to untie these? We’ll be leaving soon.’

  Thornwald threw the sponge on to the silver sand below the pavilion. ‘I’ll be going soon, Glanville. You’re staying here.’ When Glanville began to protest, he said: ‘I don’t think there’s much point in your leaving. As you said, you’ve built your own little world here.’

  ‘But . . .’ Glanville searched the captain’s face. ‘Frankly, Thornwald, I can’t understand you. Why did you come here in the first place, then? Where’s Judith, by the way? She’s around here somewhere.’

  Thornwald paused, steeling himself against the name and the memory of the previous night. ‘Yes, she’s around here, all right.’ As if testing some unconscious element of Glanville’s memory, he said clearly: ‘She’s in the module, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘The module?’ Glanville pulled at his ropes, then squinted over his shoulder into the sunlight. ‘But I told her not to go there. When’s she coming back?’

  ‘She’ll be back, don’t worry. This evening, I imagine, when the time-winds blow, though I don’t want to be here when she comes. This sea of yours had bad dreams, Glanville.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Thornwald walked across the veranda. ‘Glanville, have you any idea why I’m here, why I’ve hunted you all this way?’

  ‘God only knows – something to do with the emigration laws.’

  ‘Emigration laws?’ Thornwald shook his head. ‘Any charges there would be minor.’ After a pause, he said: ‘Murder, Glanville.’

  Glanville looked up with real surprise. ‘Murder? You’re out of your mind! Of whom, for heaven’s sake?’

  Thornwald patted the raw skin around his chin. The pale image of his hands still clung to his face. ‘Of your wife.’

  ‘Judith? But she’s here, you idiot! You saw her yourself when you arrived!’

  ‘You saw her, Glanville. I didn’t. But I realized that you’d brought her here with you when you started playing her part, using that mincing crazy voice of yours. You weren’t very keen on my going out to the module. Then, last night, you brought something from it for me.’

  Thornwald walked across the veranda, averting his eyes from the wreck of the module. He remembered the insane vision he had seen the previous evening as he sat watching for Glanville, waiting for this madman who had absconded with the body of his murdered wife. The time-winds had carried across to him the image of a spectral ship whose rotting timbers had formed a strange portcullis in the evening sun – a dungeon-grate. Then, suddenly, he had seen a terrifying apparition walking across this sea of blood towards him, the nightmare commander of this ship of Hell, a tall woman with the slow rhythmic stride of his own requiem. ‘Her locks were yellow as gold . . . the nightmare life-in-death was she, who thicks man’s blood with cold.’ Aghast at the sight of Judith’s head on this lamia, he had barely recognized Glanville, her mad Mariner, bearing her head like a wild lantern before he snatched the pistol.

  Glanville flexed his shoulders against the ropes. ‘Captain, I don’t know about Judith . . . she’s not too happy here, and we’ve never got on with just ourselves for company. I’d like to come with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Glanville, there’s not much point – you’re in the right place here.’

  ‘But, Captain, aren’t you exceeding your authority? If there is a murder charge . . .’

  ‘Not “captain”, Glanville – “commissioner”. I was promoted before I left, and that gives me absolute discretion in these cases. I think this planet is remote enough; no one’s likely to come here and disturb you.’

  He went over to Glanville and looked down at him, then took a clasp knife from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘You should be able to get a hand around that if you stand up. Goodbye, Glanville, I’ll leave you here in your gilded hell.’

  ‘But Thornwald . . . Commissioner!’ Glanville swung himself round in the chair. ‘Where’s Judith? Call her.’

  Thornwald glanced back across the sunlight. ‘I can’t, Glanville. But you’ll see her soon. This evening, when the time-winds blow, they’ll bring her back to you, a dead woman from the dead sea.’

  He set off towards the capsule across the jewelled sand.

  1966

  THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY CONSIDERED AS A DOWNHILL MOTOR RACE

  Author’s note. – The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, raised many questions, not all of which were answered by the Report of the Warren Commission. It is suggested that a less conventional view of the events of that grim day may provide a more satisfactory explanation. In particular, Alfred Jarry’s The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race gives us a useful lead.

  Oswald was the starter.

  From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.

  Kennedy got off to a bad start.

  There was a governor in his car and its speed remained constant at about fifteen miles an hour. However, shortly afterwards, when the governor had been put out of action, the car accelerated rapidly, and continued at high speed along the remainder of the course.

  The visiting teams. As befitting the inauguration of the first production car race through the streets of Dallas, both the President and the Vice-President participated. The Vice-President, Johnson, took up his position behind Kennedy on the starting line. The concealed rivalry between the two men was of keen interest to the crowd. Most of them supported the home driver, Johnson.

  The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed on the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.

  The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then onto the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motor-racing, second only to the Sarajevo track discontinued in 1914.

  Kennedy went downhill rapidly. After the damage to the governor the car shot forward at high speed. An alarmed track official attempted to mount the car, which continued on its way, cornering on two wheels.

  Turns. Kennedy was disqualified at t
he Hospital, after taking a turn for the worse. Johnson now continued the race in the lead, which he maintained to the finish.

  The flag. To signify the participation of the President in the race Old Glory was used in place of the usual chequered square. Photographs of Johnson receiving his prize after winning the race reveal that he had decided to make the flag a memento of his victory.

  Previously, Johnson had been forced to take a back seat, as his position on the starting line behind the President indicates. Indeed, his attempts to gain a quick lead on Kennedy during the false start were forestalled by a track steward, who pushed Johnson to the floor of his car.

  In view of the confusion at the start of the race, which resulted in Kennedy, clearly expected to be the winner on past form, being forced to drop out at the Hospital turn, it has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop him completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald. After he finally managed to give the send-off Oswald immediately left the race, and was subsequently apprehended by track officials.

  Johnson had certainly not expected to win the race in this way. There were no pit stops.

  Several puzzling aspects of the race remain. One is the presence of the President’s wife in the car, an unusual practice for racing drivers. Kennedy, however, may have maintained that as he was in control of the ship of state he was therefore entitled to captain’s privileges.

  The Warren Commission. The rake-off on the book of the race. In their report, prompted by widespread complaints of foul play and other irregularities, the syndicate laid full blame on the starter, Oswald.

  Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?