The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Ursula, bring your father . . .’ The old astronaut could once again see himself suspended in space, this time upside down in the inverted image, hung by his heels from the yardarm of the sky.

  Surprised by the perverse pleasure he took in this notion, Franklin walked back to the car. But as they helped Trippett from his seat, trying to reassure the old man, there was a clatter of metallic noise across the desert. An angular shadow flashed over their faces, and a small aircraft soared past, little more than twenty feet above the ground. It scuttled along like a demented gnat, minute engine buzzing up a storm, its wired wings strung around an open fuselage.

  A white-haired man sat astride the miniature controls, naked except for the aviator’s goggles tied around his head. He handled the plane in an erratic but stylish way, exploiting the sky to display his showy physique.

  Ursula tried to steady her father, but the old man broke away from her and tottered off among the mirrors, his clenched fists pummelling the air. Seeing him, the pilot banked steeply around the sun-tower, then dived straight towards him, pulling up at the last moment in a blare of noise and dust. As Franklin ran forward and pressed Trippett to the ground the plane banked and came round again in a wide turn. The pilot steered the craft with his bare knees, arms trailing at his sides as if mimicking Franklin’s image in the dish above the tower.

  ‘Slade! Calm down, for once . . .’ Franklin wiped the stinging grit from his mouth. He had seen the man up to too many extravagant tricks ever to be sure what he would do next. This former air force pilot and would-be astronaut, whose application Franklin had rejected three years earlier when he was chairman of the medical appeals board, had now returned to plague him with these absurd antics – spraying flocks of swallows with gold paint, erecting a circle of towers out in the desert (‘my private space programme,’ he termed it proudly), building a cargo cult airport with wooden control tower and planes in the air base car park, a cruel parody intended to punish the few remaining servicemen.

  And this incessant stunt flying. Had Slade recognized Franklin’s distant reflection as he sped across the desert in the inverted aircraft, then decided to buzz the Mercedes for the fun of it, impress Trippett and Ursula, even himself, perhaps?

  The plane was coming back at them, engine wound up to a scream. Franklin saw Ursula shouting at him soundlessly. The old astronaut was shaking like an unstuffed scarecrow, one hand pointing to the mirrors. Reflected in the metal panes were the multiple images of the black aircraft, hundreds of vulture-like birds that hungrily circled the ground.

  ‘Ursula, into the car!’ Franklin took off his jacket and ran through the mirrors, hoping to draw the aircraft away from Trippett. But Slade had decided to land. Cutting the engine, he let the microlight die in the air, then stalled the flapping machine on to the service road. As it trundled towards the Mercedes with its still spinning propeller, Franklin held off the starboard wing, almost tearing the doped fabric.

  ‘Doctor! You’ve already grounded me once too often . . .’ Slade inspected the dented fabric, then pointed to Franklin’s trembling fingers. ‘Those hands . . . I hope you aren’t allowed to operate on your patients.’

  Franklin looked down at the white-haired pilot. His own hands were shaking, an understandable reflex of alarm. For all Slade’s ironic drawl, his naked body was as taut as a trap, every muscle tense with hostility. His eyes surveyed Franklin with the ever-alert but curiously dead gaze of a psychopath. His pallid skin was almost luminous, as if after ending his career as an astronaut he had made some private pact with the sun. A narrow lap belt held him to the seat, but his shoulders bore the scars of a strange harness – the restraining straps of a psychiatric unit, Franklin guessed, or some kind of sexual fetishism.

  ‘My hands, yes. They’re always the first to let me down. You’ll be glad to hear that I retire this week.’ Quietly, Franklin added: ‘I didn’t ground you.’

  Slade pondered this, shaking his head. ‘Doctor, you practically closed the entire space programme down single-handed. It must have provoked you in a special way. Don’t worry, though, I’ve started my own space programme now, another one.’ He pointed to Trippett, who was being soothed by Ursula in the car. ‘Why are you still bothering the old man? He won’t buy off any unease.’

  ‘He enjoys the drives – speed seems to do him good. And you too, I take it. Be careful of those fugues. If you want to, visit me at the clinic.’

  ‘Franklin . . .’ Controlling his irritation, Slade carefully relaxed his jaw and mouth, as if dismantling an offensive weapon. ‘I don’t have the fugues any longer. I found a way of . . . dealing with them.’

  ‘All this flying around? You frightened the old boy.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ He watched Trippett nodding to himself. ‘In fact, I’d like to take him with me – we’ll fly out into space again, one day. Just for him I’ll build a gentle space-craft, made of rice paper and bamboo . . .’

  ‘That sounds your best idea yet.’

  ‘It is.’ Slade stared at Franklin with sudden concern and the almost boyish smile of a pupil before a favourite teacher. ‘There is a way out, doctor, a way out of time.’

  ‘Show me, Slade. I haven’t much time left.’

  ‘I know that, doctor. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Together, Marion and I are going to help you.’

  ‘Marion –?’ But before Franklin could speak, the aircraft’s engine racketed into life. Fanning the tailplane, Slade deftly turned the craft within its own length. He replaced the goggles over his eyes, and took off in a funnel of dust that blanched the paintwork of the Mercedes. Safely airborne, he made a final circuit, gave a curious underhand salute and soared away.

  Franklin walked to the car and leaned against the roof, catching his breath. The old man was quiet again, his brief fit forgotten.

  ‘That was Slade. Do you know him, Ursula?’

  ‘Everyone does. Sometimes he works on our computer at Soleri, or just starts a fight. He’s a bit crazy, trying all the time not to fugue.’

  Franklin nodded, watching the plane disappear towards Las Vegas, lost among the hotel towers. ‘He was a trainee astronaut once. My wife thinks he’s trying to kill me.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s right. I remember now – he said that except for you he would have gone to the moon.’

  ‘We all went to the moon. That was the trouble . . .’

  Franklin reversed the Mercedes along the service road. As they set off along the highway he thought of Slade’s puzzling reference to Marion. It was time to be wary. Slade’s fugues should have been lengthening for months, yet somehow he kept them at bay. All that violent energy contained in his skull would one day push apart the sutures, burst out in some ugly act of revenge . . .

  ‘Dr Franklin! Listen!’

  Franklin felt Ursula’s hands on his shoulder. In a panic he slowed down and began to search the sky for the returning microlight.

  ‘It’s Dad, doctor! Look!’

  The old man had sat up, and was peering through the window in a surprisingly alert way. The slack musculature of his face had drilled itself into the brisk profile of a sometime naval officer. He seemed uninterested in his daughter or Franklin, but stared sharply at a threadbare palm tree beside a wayside motel, and at the tepid water in the partly drained pool.

  As the car swayed across the camber Trippett nodded to himself, thoroughly approving of the whole arid landscape. He took his daughter’s hand, emphasizing some conversational point that had been interrupted by a pot-hole.

  ‘. . . it’s green here, more like Texas than Nevada. Peaceful, too. Plenty of cool trees and pasturage, all these fields and sweet lakes. I’d like to stop and sleep for a while. We’ll come out and swim, dear, perhaps tomorrow. Would you like that?’

  He squeezed his daughter’s hand with sudden affection. But before he could speak again, a door closed within his face and he had gone.

  They reached the clinic and returned Trippett to his darkened ward. Later, while Ursula cycle
d away down the silent runways, Franklin sat at his desk in the dismantled laboratory. His fingers sparred with each other as he thought of Trippett’s curious utterance. In some way Slade’s appearance in the sky had set it off. The old astronaut’s brief emergence into the world of time, those few lucid seconds, gave him hope. Was it possible that the fugues could be reversed? He was tempted to go back to the ward, and bundle Trippett into the car for another drive.

  Then he remembered Slade’s aircraft speeding towards him across the solar mirrors, the small, vicious propeller that shredded the light and air, time and space. This failed astronaut had first come to the clinic seven months earlier. While Franklin was away at a conference, Slade arrived by air force ambulance, posing as a terminal patient. With his white hair and obsessive gaze, he had instantly charmed the clinic’s director, Dr Rachel Vaisey, into giving him the complete run of the place. Moving about the laboratories and corridors, Slade took over any disused cupboards and desk drawers, where he constructed a series of little tableaux, psychosexual shrines to the strange gods inside his head.

  He built the first of the shrines in Rachel Vaisey’s bidet, an ugly assemblage of hypodermic syringes, fractured sunglasses and blood-stained tampons. Other shrines appeared in corridor alcoves and unoccupied beds, relics of a yet to be experienced future left here as some kind of psychic deposit against his treatment’s probable failure. After an outraged Dr Vaisey insisted on a thorough inspection Slade discharged himself from the clinic and made a new home in the sky.

  The shrines were cleared away, but one alone had been carefully preserved. Franklin opened the centre drawer of his desk and stared at the assemblage laid out like a corpse on its bier of surgical cotton. There was a labelled fragment of lunar rock stolen from the NASA museum in Houston; a photograph taken with a zoom lens of Marion in a hotel bathroom, her white body almost merging into the tiles of the shower stall; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory, with its soft watches and expiring embryo; a set of leucotomes whose points were masked by metal peas; and an emergency organ-donor card bequeathing to anyone in need his own brain. Together the items formed an accurate anti-portrait of all Franklin’s obsessions, a side-chapel of his head. But Slade had always been a keen observer, more interested in Franklin than in anyone else.

  How did he elude the fugues? When Franklin had last seen him at the clinic Slade was already suffering from fugues that lasted an hour or more. Yet somehow he had sprung a trapdoor in Trippett’s mind, given him his vision of green fields.

  When Rachel Vaisey called to complain about the unauthorized drive Franklin brushed this aside. He tried to convey his excitement over Trippett’s outburst.

  ‘He was there, Rachel, completely himself, for something like thirty seconds. And there was no effort involved, no need to remember who he was. It’s frightening to think that I’d given him up for lost.’

  ‘It is strange – one of those inexplicable remissions. But try not to read too much into it.’ Dr Vaisey stared with distaste at the perimeter camera mounted beside its large turntable. Like most members of her staff, she was only too glad that the clinic was closing, and that the few remaining patients would soon be transferred to some distant sanatorium or memorial home. Within a month she and her colleagues would return to the universities from which they had been seconded. None of them had yet been affected by the fugues, and that Franklin should be the only one to succumb seemed doubly cruel, confirming all their longstanding suspicions about this wayward physician. Franklin had been the first of the NASA psychiatrists to identify the time-sickness, to have seen the astronauts’ original fugues for what they were.

  Sobered by the prospect facing Franklin, she managed a conciliatory smile. ‘You say he spoke coherently. What did he talk about?’

  ‘He babbled of green fields.’ Franklin stood behind his desk, staring at the open drawer hidden from Dr Vaisey’s suspicious gaze. ‘I’m sure he actually saw them.’

  ‘A childhood memory? Poor man, at least he seems happy, wherever he really is.’

  ‘Rachel . . . !’ Franklin drove the drawer into the desk. ‘Trippett was staring at the desert along the road – nothing but rock, dust and a few dying palms, yet he saw green fields, lakes, forests of trees. We’ve got to keep the clinic open a little longer, I feel I have a chance now. I want to go back to the beginning and think everything through again.’

  Before Dr Vaisey could stop him, Franklin had started to pace the floor, talking to his desk. ‘Perhaps the fugues are a preparation for something, and we’ve been wrong to fear them. The symptoms are so widespread, there’s virtually an invisible epidemic, one in a hundred of the population involved, probably another five unaware that they’ve been affected, certainly out here in Nevada.’

  ‘It’s the desert – topography clearly plays a part in the fugues. It’s been bad for you, Robert. For all of us.’

  ‘All the more reason to stay and face it. Rachel, listen: I’m willing to work with the others more than I have done, this time we’ll be a true team.’

  ‘That is a concession.’ Dr Vaisey spoke without irony. ‘But too late, Robert. You’ve tried everything.’

  ‘I’ve tried nothing . . .’ Franklin placed a hand on the huge lens of the perimeter camera, hiding the deformed figure who mimicked his gestures from the glass cell. Distorted reflections of himself had pursued him all day, as if he were being presented with brief clips from an obscene film in which he would shortly star. If only he had spent more time on Trippett, rather than on the volunteer panels of housewives and air force personnel. But the old astronaut intimidated him, touched all his feelings of guilt over his complicity in the space programme. As a member of the medical support team, he had helped to put the last astronauts into space, made possible the year-long flights that had set off the whole time-plague, cracked the cosmic hour-glass . . .

  ‘And Trippett? Where are you going to hide him away?’

  ‘We aren’t. His daughter has volunteered to take him. She seems a reasonable girl.’

  Giving in to her concern, Dr Vaisey stepped forward and took Franklin’s hand from the camera lens. ‘Robert – are you going to be all right? Your wife will look after you, you say. I wish you’d let me meet her. I could insist . . .’

  Franklin was thinking about Trippett – the news that the old astronaut would still be there, presumably living up in Soleri II, had given him hope. The work could go on ...

  He felt a sudden need to be alone in the empty clinic, to be rid of Dr Vaisey, this well-meaning, middle-aged neurologist with her closed mind and closed world. She was staring at him across the desk, clearly unsure what to do about Franklin, her eyes distracted by the gold and silver swallows that swooped across the runways. Dr Vaisey had always regretted her brief infatuation with Slade. Franklin remembered their last meeting in her office, when Slade had taken out his penis and masturbated in front of her, then insisted on mounting his hot semen on a slide. Through the microscope eyepiece Rachel Vaisey had watched the thousand replicas of this young psychotic frantically swimming. After ten minutes they began to falter. Within an hour they were all dead.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Marion knows exactly what I need. And Slade will be around to help her.’

  ‘Slade? How on earth . . . ?’

  Franklin eased the centre drawer from his desk. Carefully, as if handling an explosive device, he offered the shrine to Dr Vaisey’s appalled gaze.

  ‘Take it, Rachel. It’s the blueprint of our joint space programme. You might care to come along . . .’

  When Dr Vaisey had gone, Franklin returned to his desk. First, he took off his wristwatch and massaged the raw skin of his forearm. Every fifteen minutes he returned the hand of the stopwatch to zero. This nervous tic, a time-twitch, had long been a joke around the clinic. But after the onset of a fugue the accumulating total gave him a reasonably exact record of its duration. A crude device, he was almost glad that he would soon escape from time altogether.
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br />   Though not yet. Calming himself, he looked at the last pages of his diary.

  June 19 – fugues: 8-30 to 9-11 am; 11-45 to 12-27 am; 5-15 to 6-08 pm; 11-30 to 12-14 pm. Total: 3 hours.

  The totals were gaining on him. June 20 – 3 hours 14 mins; June 21 – 3 hours 30 mins; June 22 – 3 hours 46 mins. This gave him little more than ten weeks, unless the fugues began to slow down, or he found that trapdoor through which Trippett had briefly poked his head.

  Franklin closed the diary and stared back at the watching lens of the perimeter camera. Curiously, he had never allowed himself to be photographed by the machine, as if the contours of his body constituted a secret terrain whose codes had to be held in reserve for his last attempt to escape. Standing or reclining on the rotating platform, the volunteer patients had been photographed in a continuous scan that transformed them into a landscape of undulating hills and valleys, not unlike the desert outside. Could they take an aerial photograph of the Sahara and Gobi deserts, reverse the process and reconstitute the vast figure of some sleeping goddess, an Aphrodite born from a sea of dunes? Franklin had become obsessed with the camera, photographing everything from cubes and spheres to cups and saucers and then the naked patients themselves, in the hope of finding the dimension of time locked in those undulating spaces.

  The volunteers had long since retired to their terminal wards, but their photographs were still pinned to the walls – a retired dentist, a police sergeant on the Las Vegas force, a middle-aged hair stylist, an attractive mother of year-old twins, an air-traffic controller from the base. Their splayed features and distorted anatomies resembled the nightmarish jumble seen by all patients if they were deliberately roused from their fugues by powerful stimulants or electric shock – oozing forms in an elastic world, giddying and unpleasant. Without time, a moving face seemed to smear itself across the air, the human body became a surrealist monster.