But even his surprise at the enormous latent power of these metal beasts paled before his first real sight of the city. He stood on the rusting catwalk, hands gripping the rail to stop himself from diving into the cold waters of the Sound and setting off to the far shore. The vast office-blocks, many over a hundred storeys high, formed a silent congregation, more remote and yet closer to him than ever before.
Below him, as the glider climbed the thermals, the first people in the crowd were standing up among their picnic hampers, the officials waving their chequered flags at Halloway. Already they had guessed that he intended to circle the lighthouse. Halloway climbed away from them, making use of the strong updraughts that rose from the heated greenhouses, solar reflectors and rooftops, the warm canals and clay tennis-courts. Already he was looking down, not only at the naval island, but at the distant towers of the city.
When Halloway reached the naval island half an hour later the shoreline of Garden City was far behind him, the lines of solar reflectors forming strips of metallic glitter. He had meant to impress everyone by making a few circuits of the lighthouse before returning, but as he soared above the water he could feel the wind carrying him further across the Sound. At any moment it would be too late to turn back. He waited for the glider to bank to port or starboard, but the sailplane pressed on across the deep water. Already Halloway could see the canyons opening among the office-blocks of the city, an abandoned dream waiting to be re-occupied. Shadow and sunlight alternated between the buildings, as if flashing some kind of cryptic message to him. But Halloway knew that he had made his decision, and why all winter he had been building this strange aircraft.
Borne along by the fronts of warm air, Halloway and his glider made their transit of the Sound. The opposing shorelines had begun to converge, and little more than three miles of water separated the beach communities from the deserted quays and motor-routes of the city suburbs. Exhilarated in a way he had never known before, Halloway gripped the control stick with his knees, and stretched out his arms to seize the vivid air. He was not alone in the sky. On all sides flights of wild birds were crossing the Sound – pintails and white-fronted geese, mallard and harlequin duck. A colony of herring gulls moved below him, changing course when they passed Halloway as if guiding him through the crowded air. No longer hunted by the vegetarian inhabitants of Garden City, immense congregations of water birds thrived around the uninhabited shores of the Sound, in the mud-flats, lagoons and sloughs between the market settlements and the old metropolis.
Ahead of him, across the mercury surface of the sea, a collapsed suspension bridge lay like a drowned saurian in the gateway of the Sound. The last of the market gardens gave way to uncultivated scrubland. The canals petered out among the sand-hills. Ten miles from the city, by some unwritten rule, as if they were aware that the physical spell of the metropolis might still intimidate them, the last inhabitants to leave their factories, offices and apartment houses had marked out a no-man’s-land to separate themselves from their pasts. Halloway remembered his grandfather’s lurid account (the old man was only too keen to be tricked into these reminiscences) of how the city, like a thousand others around the globe, had gradually come to a halt and shut itself down for ever. When the world’s reserves of fossil fuels had finally been exhausted, when the last coal silos were empty and the last oil-tankers had berthed, the power-stations and railway systems, production lines and steel-works had closed for the last time and the post-technological era had begun.
By then, twenty-five years earlier, there had been few people left anyway. By some unconscious perception of their own extinction, the huge urban populations of the late twentieth century had dwindled during the previous decades. Halloway’s parents had been among the last to leave, abandoning their apartment – the only one still occupied – in one of the high-rise blocks that Halloway could see now emerging from the haze beyond the ruined suspension bridge. Perhaps it was this long-postponed departure that had separated his father from the other inhabitants of Garden City. The small but determined parties of colonists – doctors, chemists, agronomists and engineers – had set out into the rural backwaters determined to build the first scientifically advanced agrarian society. Within a generation they, like countless similar communities around other major cities, had successfully built their pastoral paradise, in a shot-gun marriage of Arcadia and advanced technology. Here each home was equipped with recycling and solar-energy devices, set in its own five acres of intensely cultivated market garden, a self-supporting agricultural paradise linked to its neighbours by a network of canals and conduits, the whole irrigated landscape heated and cooled, powered and propelled by a technology far more sophisticated in every respect than that of the city they had abandoned, but a technology applied to the waterwheel, the tidal pump and the bicycle.
He had reached the western limits of the Sound. A thousand feet below was the broken back of the bridge. Halloway circled a large ceramics works on the southern shore, letting the hot air reflected from the roof-tiles lift him as high as possible before he made the crossing to the city. The downtown office-blocks and apartment-houses were still nearly ten miles away, but facing him across the bridge was a built-up area of dockyards, suburban department stores, car parks and motor-route intersections. Moored to the quays were line upon line of rusting freighters and oil-tankers, their hulls like husks.
For the first time, as he steered the glider across the bridge, Halloway could see the cars, hundreds of the dusty vehicles lining the quaysides, parked in the empty side-streets on flattened tyres. Immense roads ran everywhere, causeways of steel and concrete that moved like some kind of serpentine sculpture through complex interchanges. Traces of these broad decks, never less than six lanes wide, were still to be found in Garden City – on an intact half-mile section behind his grandfather’s house the inhabitants staged their annual bicycle rally.
Needless to say, there were no cars in Garden City. If there had been, Halloway often thought with a kind of blank bitterness, his mother and father would still be alive. Despite their severe burns, they might still have been saved by the intensive-care unit at the hospital three miles away. The fastest transport available had been the village fire-appliance. This brilliantly designed land-yacht, fitted with the most efficient system of metal sails ever devised, and with an advanced magnetic suspension invented by a local electrical engineer, achieved a top speed of six miles an hour. By the time they reached the hospital, their distraught son tearing at the aluminium sails in a frenzy, the Halloways were already in deep shock and died the next day.
As he crossed the ruined bridge, losing height in the cold air over the water, Halloway counted the cars in the parking lots along the quays. Scores had been abandoned on the bridge approach-roads when their owners set out on foot. The salt air had stripped away their roofs and body panels, exposing the engines and steering gear. Halloway had seen automobile engines before, in the encyclopaedias of industrial archaeology at the village school. Once, as a boy of ten, he had entered his father’s workshop and found him running an old gasolene engine. The violent but controlled noise, the juddering motion that shook the work-bench and timber walls, and the heady fumes like a black gas – an intoxicating smell at once dirty and exhilarating – had almost knocked him off his feet. What he remembered above all, before his father switched off the engine and crated it away for the last time, was the overwhelming energy of this machine, the power and excitement beyond anything else in their sophisticated Arcadia. And yet, as his father told him, this was no more than the power unit of a small lawnmower.
Not that there was any taboo against gasolene engines, nor for that matter against oil-or coal-fired steam engines. There was merely a tacit understanding that for two hundred years proto-industrial man had pillaged the earth’s natural resources, and these relics were unwelcome reminders of an unhappy history. Beyond this were boredom and indifference – the inhabitants of Garden City were aware that their technology, their advanced hor
ticulture and their casual winning of energy from the sun, the wind and the tides, had progressed far ahead of anything the age of oil and coal had achieved, with its protein-hungry populations, its limitless pollution of air, soil and sea.
By the time it reached the opposite shore the sailplane was barely three hundred feet above the metal-strewn water. The ragged edge of the eight-lane roadway passed below Halloway, the lines of cars forming bowers of rust from which a few sea-flowers flashed their blooms. Huge numbers of pigeons had taken over the silent city, and Halloway could almost believe that he had entered a vast bird-sanctuary. Thousands of starlings clustered among the seats of a deserted sports stadium. Generations of thrush and blackbird had nested on office window-sills and in the seats of open cars. Halloway had to bank sharply to avoid a pair of swans struggling to gain height above a row of dockyard cranes.
Barely clearing a warehouse roof, the glider rose again in the warm air lifting from the hot concrete of the roads and parking lots. A maze of telegraph wires straggled across the quay-side streets. Halloway flew on above the rusting customs sheds, and crossed the tidal basin of a silted-up dockyard, where a boom of freighters sat in a few feet of water. Beyond a silent railroad station, where ranks of trains stood in waist-high grass, he approached the outskirts of an urban centre, one of a dozen satellite cities on the perimeter of the metropolis. Everywhere there were stores filled with domestic appliances, furniture, clothing and kitchenware, a glut of merchandise that Halloway had never anticipated. In Garden City there were few stores – everything one needed, whether a new solar-powered kitchen stove or a high-speed bicycle, was ordered direct from the craftsman who designed and built it to one’s exact needs. In Garden City everything was so well made that it lasted for ever.
Following the main arterial highway which led towards the next satellite city, Halloway crossed an area of tract housing and single-storey factories. In the open fields a local manufacturer had dumped what appeared to be a lifetime’s output of washing machines. Line upon line of the white and chromium cabinets stood in the sunlight. Warm air rose from this field of metal, carrying the glider high above the concrete embankments of a cloverleaf.
Directly in front of Halloway there was a flash of light in the glassy face of a fifteen-storey office building. Out of this sunburst huge wings moved in the bright air. A powerful aircraft, with a wing-span as large as his own sailplane’s, soared straight towards him. In panic, Halloway plunged the glider into a steep turn, cursing himself for entering the air-space of the city, with its empty towers guarded by aerial demons. As the glider banked across the face of the office building his opponent also turned. His long wings, built to the same plan as Halloway’s, were raised in a defensive gesture. A hundred feet apart, they soared together along the curtain-walling, the pilot’s white face staring at Halloway in obvious alarm.
Without warning, this timid intruder vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Turning back, Halloway circled the streets around the office block, searching for any sign of the rival sailplane. Then, as he passed the office block with its mirror-glass curtain-wall, he realized that he had been frightened by nothing more than his own reflection.
Delighted now, Halloway soared to and fro across the face of the building, playing the fool and happy to mimic himself, wingtip little more than ten feet from the curtain-walling. He waved at his reflection, holding the control stick with his knees, proud of his skill and glad to be able to show off to himself. He rose above the building on the strong currents lifting from the metal roofs of the cars, and then plunged towards himself in a 100-m.p.h. dive, swerving away at the last moment, wingtip punching out a section of the mirror.
‘Olé .. .!’
His shout of glee was lost in the splintering glass. On his third dive, as he plummeted downwards, he no longer cared when a gust of wind drove him laterally across the streets in a storm of cigarette packs. Out of control, the sailplane was hurled against the curtain-walling, knocking out a dozen windows. Colliding with his own image, Halloway fell with the broken machine among the cars a hundred feet below.
An hour later, Halloway left the crashed glider lying at the base of this huge rectilinear mirror and set off towards the towers of the city five miles away to the south-west.
Protected by the buckling wings, the cockpit of the glider had fallen among the vehicles parked outside the entrance to the office block. Hanging upside-down in the harness, Halloway punched out the fractured canopy, released his straps and lowered himself on to the roof of a green sedan.
Too shocked to do more than glance numbly at the face of the building which had dashed him from the air, Halloway had climbed across the splintered wings of the glider. Picking a car at random, he lay down in the rear seat. In this warm, stale air, almost unchanged for thirty years, he rested quietly, massaging his bruised chest and shoulders. The domed cabin of the car, with its softly sprung seats and antique contours, its raw metal functionalism, was a fitting womb to guard his passage from the open transits of the sky to the hard and immobile concrete now surrounding him on all sides.
Already, though, when he stepped from the car after an hour’s rest, Halloway was coming to terms with the scale and character of the cityscape into which he had fallen. Display signs proliferated everywhere like some voracious metal flora, untrimmed and uncontrolled. The crudeness of the asphalt and concrete streets compared with the tiled and flower-decked pathways of Garden City, the elemental technology of power cables and ventilation shafts, had all the anarchic strength of a proto-industrial society, closer to the massive cantilever bridges and steam engines of the great Victorians than to Halloway’s image of the Twentieth Century.
A mile to the north-east a line of rusting cranes marked the shoreline of the Sound. If he walked through the side-streets he could reach the ruined suspension bridge in less than an hour, cross the channel by swimming from one section to the next, and be home by evening.
Without thinking, Halloway turned his back on the shore, on the cranes and rusting freighters. For all their apparent menace, the cluster of skyscrapers offered more security to him than the pastoral world of Garden City with its kindly farmers and engineers. Somewhere among those tall buildings – on the topmost floor, he was certain – was the apartment in which his mother and father had lived. As for any worries that his grandparents might have for his safety, Halloway was sure that they, like the crowds on the beach, knew only too well where he had gone.
Halloway climbed over the broken-backed fuselage of the glider. He stared at the wreckage, thinking of the months he had spent building the craft. Lying here at the foot of this mirror it reminded him of the body of his father stretched out below the solar reflector in the burnt-out ruins of his house.
‘Come on! Forget it, Halloway!’ With a whoop, Halloway leapt over the tailplane and set off along the street. Shouting to himself, he ran in and out of the cars, pounding on the roofs with his fists. He was going home.
For the next two hours, as the sun drifted across the Sound, Halloway pressed on down the long avenues that carried him, block after block, into the heart of the metropolis. The office-buildings and apartment-houses grew larger, but the centre of the city remained as distant as ever. But Halloway was in no hurry, far more interested in the sights around him. His first feelings of nervousness had gone. Curiosity devouring everything, he ran past the cars that sat on flattened tyres in the roadway, skipping from one side of the avenue to the other when something caught his eye. Many of the stores, bars and offices were unlocked. In a hairdressing salon – an Aladdin’s cave of chromium gadgetry, mirrors, thousands of coloured bottles – he sat in the rotating chairs, and tried on a succession of wigs, grimacing at himself in the dusty mirrors. In an empty department-store he lost himself in a maze of furnished rooms, each like a stage-set, decorated in the styles of nearly half a century earlier. The synthetic curtain and carpet fabrics, with their elaborate patterns and lamé threads, were totally unlike the simple hand-woven wor
steds and woollens of Garden City.
Halloway wandered around these darkened tableaux, these ghosts of bedroom suites and dining-rooms. He lay back grandly on an ornate four-poster, stroking the deep pile of the bedspread. What amused him, above all, was the feel of this vanished world, a surprise more tactile than visual.
In the dim light of a men’s-wear department he pulled clothes racks on to the counters, jerked open the cabinet drawers. A cornucopia of suits and shirts, shoes and hats spilled across the floor. Stripping off his woollen trousers and jerkin, like the uniform of an ignorant medieval churl, he selected a new costume – red-white-and-blue sneakers, yellow suede trousers and a fleece-lined jacket with silver-thread embroidery and leather tassels as long as his arm.
In this modest attire he swung happily along the avenue. Thousands of cars lined the streets, their flamboyant bodywork covered with moss. Wild flowers peeped from the radiator grilles. Halloway stopped at every tenth car and tried to start the engine. Sitting behind these dead controls, he remembered the car he had found buried in the dunes at Garden City. The roof and doors had rusted away, but he sat for hours behind the wheel of this drowned hulk. By contrast, the cars here had barely been touched by the weather. Under the moss and dirt the lurid paint was as bright as ever.
Halloway was disappointed that none would start. Rocking a black limousine that took his fancy in an automobile showroom, he could hear the fuel still swishing in its tank.
‘Somewhere, Halloway,’ he told himself aloud, ‘you’ll find a car that runs. I’ve decided you’re going to arrive in style . . .’
At dusk, as Halloway passed a park filled with wild trees, shrubs and flowers of every kind, he realized that someone was following him. The soft tap of feet, sometimes barely moving, then running obliquely behind him, sounded faintly through the dark air. Heart racing, Halloway crouched among the cars. Nothing moved across the street. He filled his lungs with air, and broke away with a burst of speed, darting in and out of the cars. He dived through the open door of an evacuation bus parked by a hotel entrance and watched from the rear seats.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 128
