The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment.

  Georges Duval was then fourteen, a slim-shouldered boy small for his age, self-composed in a grey flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his over-large wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem.

  Professor Leroux of the Sorbonne opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at thirteen, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges’s career: reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam – usually taken at fifteen or sixteen. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by eleven had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by twelve was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge.

  While this familiar catalogue was being unfolded, Georges’s eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft grey suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges’s elder brother – he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered that he had a very different role. Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern – what did he think of Vietnam, the space-race, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigitte Bardot? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humour, stating that outside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle.

  While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges’s father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval was in the least educated, and the house, into which the widow and son had moved only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from the town.

  As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: ‘I notice you didn’t ask any questions yourself.’

  ‘The whole thing was a complete set-up. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle.’

  ‘Perhaps we were.’

  ‘You think the General may be behind all this?’

  ‘It’s possible. Let’s face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more

  difficult for him to go off and work for Du Pont or IBM.’ ‘But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I’ll bet you that three years from now no one will even remember him.’

  After we returned to London my curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Centre at White City I scanned the children on the pavement. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library.

  As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high-school principal, doting mother – and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.

  And then what?

  ‘That was nearly three years ago,’ I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. ‘What’s he doing now?’

  She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. ‘Nothing. I suppose he’s taking another degree at a university somewhere.’

  ‘He’s already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life.’

  ‘He’s only seventeen. Wait until he’s a little older.’

  ‘Older? You’ve given me an idea. Let’s go back to the beginning – 1948.’

  Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first post-war prodigy, a seventeenyear-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radio-astronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed ‘quasars’.

  ‘A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He’ll be, what?, thirty-seven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.’

  We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation.

  No one had heard of Gunther Bergman.

  ‘Right, where is he?’ I asked Judy when we had exhausted all lines of inquiry. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s twenty years; he should be world-famous by now.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s dead.’

  ‘That’s possible.’ I gazed down pensively at Judy’s quizzical face. ‘Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We’re going to make the Comsats sing.’

  Three weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead’s office, there was an electric spring in my step.

  Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. ‘James, I hear you’ve been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?’

  ‘A new programme.’

  ‘New? We’ve already got Georges Duval listed in Radio Times.’

  ‘For how long?’ I pulled a chair up to his desk and opened my briefcase, then spread the dozen files in front of him. ‘Let me put you in the picture. Judy and I have been back to 1948. In those twenty years there have been eleven cases of so-called geniuses. Georges Duval is the twelfth.’

  I placed the list in front of him.

  1948 Gunther Bergman (Uppsala, Sweden)

  1950 Jaako Litmanen (Vaasa, Finland)

  1952 John Warrender (Kansas City, USA)

  1953 Arturo Bandini (Bologna, Italy)

  1955 Gesai Ray (Calcutta, India)

  1957 Giuliano Caldare (Palermo, Sicily)

  1958 Wolfgang Herter (Cologne, Germany)

  1960 Martin Sherrington (Canterbury, England)

  1962 Josef Oblensky (Leningrad, USSR)

  1964 Yen Hsi Shan (Wuhan, China)

  1965 Robert Silverberg (Tampa, USA)

  1968 Georges Duval (Montereau, France)

  Charles studied the list, now and then patting his forehead with a floral handkerchief. ‘Frankly, apart from Georges Duval, the names mean absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Isn’t that strange? There’s enough talent there to win all the Nobel Prizes three times over.’

  ‘Have you tried to trace them?’

  I let out a cry of pain. Even the placid Judy gave a despairing shudder. �
��Have we tried? My God, we’ve done nothing else. Charles, apart from checking a hundred directories and registers, we’ve contacted the original magazines and news agencies, checked with the universities that originally offered them scholarships, talked on the overseas lines to the BBC reporters in New York, Delhi and Moscow.’

  ‘And? What do they know about them?’

  ‘Nothing. A complete blank.’

  Charles shook his head doggedly. ‘They must be somewhere. What about the universities they were supposed to go to?’

  ‘Nothing there, either. It’s a curious thing, but not one of them actually went on to a university. We’ve contacted the senates of nearly fifty universities. Not a mention of them. They took external degrees while still at school, but after that they severed all connections with the academic world.’

  Charles sat forward over the list, holding it like a portion of some treasure map. ‘James, it looks as if you’re going to win your bet. Somehow they all petered out in late adolescence. A sudden flaring of intelligence backed by prodigious memory, not matched by any real creative spark . . . that’s it, I suppose – none of them was a genius.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I think they all were.’ Before he could stop me I went on. ‘Forget that for the moment. Whether or not they had genius is irrelevant. Certainly they had intellects vastly beyond the average, IQs of two hundred, enormous scholastic talents in a wide range of subjects. They had a sudden burst of fame and exposure and –’

  ‘They vanished into thin air. What are you suggesting – some kind of conspiracy?’

  ‘In a sense, yes.’

  Charles handed me the list. ‘Come off it. Do you really mean that a sinister government bureau has smuggled them off, they’re slaving away now on some super-weapon?’

  ‘It’s possible, but I doubt it.’ I took a packet of photographs from the second folder. ‘Have a look at them.’

  Charles picked up the first. ‘Ah, there’s Georges. He looks older here, those TV cameras are certainly ageing.’

  ‘It’s not Georges Duval. It’s Oblensky, the Russian boy, taken six years ago. Quite a resemblance, though.’ I spread the twelve photographs on the table top. Charles moved along the half-circle, comparing the over-large eyes and bony foreheads, the same steady gaze.

  ‘Wait a minute! Are you sure this isn’t Duval?’ Charles picked up Oblensky’s photograph and pointed to the figure of a young man in a light grey suit standing behind some mayoral official in a Leningrad parlour. ‘He was at Duval’s press conference, sitting right in front of us.’

  I nodded to Judy. ‘You’re right, Charles. And he’s not only in that photo.’ I pulled together the photographs of Bobby Silverberg, Herter and Martin Sherrington. In each one the same balding figure in the dove-grey suit was somewhere in the background, his over-sharp eyes avoiding the camera lens. ‘No university admits to knowing him, nor do Shell, Philips, General Motors or a dozen other big international companies. Of course, there are other organizations he might be a talent scout for . . .’

  Charles had stood up, and was slowly walking around his desk. ‘Such as the CIA – you think he may be recruiting talent for some top-secret Government think-thank? It’s unlikely, but –’

  ‘What about the Russians?’ I cut in. ‘Or the Chinese? Let’s face it, eleven young men have vanished into thin air. What happened to them?’

  Charles stared down at the photographs. ‘The strange thing is that I vaguely recognize all these faces. Those bony skulls, and those eyes . . . somewhere. Look, James, we may have the makings of a new programme here. This English prodigy, Martin Sherrington, he should be easy to track down. Then the German, Herter. Find them and we may be on to something.’

  We set off for Canterbury the next morning. The address, which I had been given by a friend who was science editor of the Daily Express, was on a housing estate behind the big General Electric radio and television plant on the edge of the city. We drove past the lines of grey-brick houses until we found the Sherringtons’ at the end of a row. Rising out of the remains of a greenhouse was a huge ham operator’s radio mast, its stay-wires snapped and rusting. In the eight years since his tremendous mind had revealed itself to the local grammar-school master, Martin Sherrington might have gone off to the ends of the world, to Cape Kennedy, the Urals or Peking.

  In fact, not only were neither Martin nor his parents there, but it took us all of two days to find anyone who even remembered them at all. The present tenants of the house, a frayed-looking couple, had been there two years; and before them a large family of criminal inclinations who had been forced out by bailiffs and police. The headmaster of the grammar-school had retired to Scotland. Fortunately the school matron remembered Martin – ‘a brilliantly clever boy, we were all very proud of him. To tell the truth, though, I can’t say we felt much affection for him; he didn’t invite it.’ She knew nothing of Mrs Sherrington, and as for the boy’s father, they assumed he had died in the war.

  Finally, thanks to a cashier at the accounts office of the local electric company, we found where Mrs Sherrington had moved.

  As soon as I saw that pleasant white-walled villa in its prosperous suburb on the other side of Canterbury, I felt that the trail was warming. Something about the crisp gravel and large, well-trimmed garden reminded me of another house – Georges Duval’s near Paris.

  From the roof of my car parked next to the hedge we watched a handsome, strong-shouldered woman strolling in the rose garden.

  ‘She’s come up in the world,’ I commented. ‘Who pays for this pad?’

  The meeting was curious. This rather homely, quietly dressed woman in her late thirties gazed at us across the silver tea-set like a tamed Mona Lisa. She told us that we had absolutely no chance of interviewing Martin on television.

  ‘So much interest in your son was roused at the time, Mrs Sherrington. Can you tell us about his subsequent academic career? Which university did he go to?’

  ‘His education was completed privately.’ As for his present whereabouts, she believed he was now abroad, working for a large international organization whose name she was not at liberty to divulge.

  ‘Not a government department, Mrs Sherrington?’

  She hesitated, but only briefly. ‘I am told the organization is intimately connected with various governments, but I have no real knowledge.’

  Her voice was over-precise, as if she were hiding her real accent. As we left, I realized how lonely her life was; but as Judy remarked, she had probably been lonely ever since Martin Sherrington had first learned to speak.

  Our trip to Germany was equally futile. All traces of Wolfgang Herter had vanished from the map. A few people in the small village near the Frankfurt autobahn remembered him, and the village postman said that Frau Herter had moved to Switzerland, to a lakeside villa near Lucerne. A woman of modest means and education, but the son had no doubt done very well.

  I asked one or two questions.

  Wolfgang’s father? Frau Herter had arrived with the child just after the war; the husband had probably perished in one of the nameless prison-camps or battlegrounds of World War II.

  The balding man in the light grey suit? Yes, he had definitely come to the village, helping Frau Herter arrange her departure.

  ‘Back to London,’ I said to Judy. ‘This needs bigger resources than you and I have.’

  As we flew back Judy said: ‘One thing I don’t understand. Why have the fathers always disappeared?’

  ‘A good question. Putting it crudely, love, a unique genetic coupling produced these twelve boys. It almost looks as if someone has torn the treasure map in two and kept one half. Think of the stock bank they’re building up, enough sperm on ice in a eugenic cocktail to repopulate the entire planet.’

  This nightmare prospect was on my mind when I walked into Charles Whitehead’s office the next morning. It was the first time I had seen Charles in his shirtsleeves. To my surprise, he brushed aside my apologies, then beckoned me to the huge
spread of photographs pinned to the plaster wall behind his desk. The office was a clutter of newspaper cuttings and blown-up newsreel stills. Charles was holding a magnifying glass over a photograph of President Johnson and McNamara at a White House reception.

  ‘While you were gone we’ve been carrying out our own search,’ he said. ‘If it’s any consolation, we couldn’t trace any of them at first.’

  ‘Then you have found them? Where?’

  ‘Here.’ He gestured at the dozens of photographs. ‘Right in front of our noses. We’re looking at them every day.’

  He pointed to a news agency photograph of a Kremlin reception for Premier Ulbricht of East Germany. Kosygin and Brezhnev were there, Soviet President Podgorny talking to the Finnish Ambassador, and a crowd of twenty party functionaries.

  ‘Recognize anyone? Apart from Kosygin and company?’

  ‘The usual bunch of hatchet-faced waiters these people like to surround themselves with. Wait a minute, though.’

  Charles’s finger had paused over a quiet-faced young man with a high dolichocephalic head, standing at Kosygin’s elbow. Curiously, the Soviet Premier’s face was turned towards him rather than to Brezhnev.

  ‘Oblensky – the Russian prodigy. What’s he doing with Kosygin? He looks like an interpreter.’

  ‘Between Kosygin and Brezhnev? Hardly. I’ve checked with the BBC and Reuters correspondents in Moscow. They’ve seen him around quite a bit. He never says anything in public, but the important men always talk to him.’

  I put down the photograph. ‘Charles, get on to the Foreign Office and the US Embassy. It makes sense – all eleven of them are probably there, in the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Relax. That’s what we thought. But have a look at these.’

  The next picture had been taken at a White House meeting between Johnson, McNamara and General Westmoreland discussing US policy in Vietnam. There were the usual aides, secretaries and Secret Service men out on the lawn. One face had been ringed, that of a man in his early thirties standing unobtrusively behind Johnson and Westmoreland.