J.G. BALLARD

The Complete Short Stories

VOLUME I

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2001

This collection copyright © J. G. Ballard 2001

Most of the stories in this book previously appeared in the following collections:

The Voices of Time © J. G. Ballard 1963 The Terminal Beach © J. G. Ballard 1964

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction © Adam Thirlwell 2014

Interview © Vanora Bennett 2004

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Cover by Stanley Donwood

Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007369386

Version: 2014-08-16

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Introduction by Adam Thirlwell

Prima Belladonna

Escapement

The Concentration City

Venus Smiles

Manhole 69

Track 12

The Waiting Grounds

Now: Zero

The Sound-Sweep

Zone of Terror

Chronopolis

The Voices of Time

The Last World of Mr Goddard

Studio 5, The Stars

Deep End

The Overloaded Man

Mr F. is Mr F.

Billennium

The Gentle Assassin

The Insane Ones

The Garden of Time

The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista

Thirteen to Centaurus

Passport to Eternity

The Cage of Sand

The Watch-Towers

The Singing Statues

The Man on the 99th Floor

The Subliminal Man

The Reptile Enclosure

A Question of Re-Entry

The Time-Tombs

Now Wakes the Sea

The Venus Hunters

End-Game

Minus One

The Sudden Afternoon

The Screen Game

Time of Passage

Interview with J. G. Ballard

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.

Short stories have always been important to me. I like their snapshot quality, their ability to focus intensely on a single subject. They’re also a useful way of trying out the ideas later developed at novel length. Almost all my novels were first hinted at in short stories, and readers of The Crystal World, Crash and Empire of the Sun will find their seeds germinating somewhere in this collection.

When I started writing, fifty years ago, short stories were immensely popular with readers, and some newspapers printed a new short story every day. Sadly, I think that people at present have lost the knack of reading short stories, a response perhaps to the baggy and long-winded narratives of television serials. Young writers, myself included, have always seen their first novels as a kind of virility test, but so many novels published today would have been better if they had been recast as short stories. Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels.

The short story still survives, especially in science fiction, which makes the most of its closeness to the folk tale and the parable. Many of the stories in this collection were first published in science fiction magazines, though readers at the time loudly complained that they weren’t science fiction at all.

But I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred. The future, needless to say, is a dangerous area to enter, heavily mined and with a tendency to turn and bite your ankles as you stride forward. A correspondent recently pointed out to me that the poetry-writing computers in Vermilion Sands are powered by valves. And why don’t all those sleek people living in the future have PCs and pagers?

I could only reply that Vermilion Sands isn’t set in the future at all, but in a kind of visionary present – a description that fits the stories in this book and almost everything else I have written. But oh for a steam-powered computer and a wind-driven television set. Now, there’s an idea for a short story …

J.G. Ballard, 2001

INTRODUCTION
BY ADAM THIRLWELL
1

There is no single way of talking about the collected stories of J. G. Ballard. They are so various that no one reading will contain them. When talking about this giant oeuvre, it’s better to borrow terms from geology, and other sciences of natural phenomena; better to talk of strata, or of eras.

And a preliminary summary of these epochs in one paragraph might go something like this …

First there is the era of what might be called, for useful shorthand, science fiction: where the nature of Nature has undergone sinister changes, and become strangely technological. In these stories, many of which take place in a warped version of Palm Springs, the reader will find sonic sculptures, and singing flowers, among other curiosities. In the second era, the modulations Ballard enjoyed performing on the natural world became grander: now these modulations affected the deep conditions of being: his material became time and space. In the third era, his imagination became more and more apocalyptic, replete with visions of environmental disaster. And all these eras were ones of dense and hectic composition – the 750 pages of this complete edition’s first half move only from 1956 to 1964. Its second half, of equal length, takes in the greater time span of 1964 to 1992. And it was somewhere in the late 1960s that a new and final era emerged: where the cosmic alterations now took place in an atmosphere of late modernity – computerised finance, terror, dictator politics, and flat pornography. It was this landscape that formed the last and longest era of Ballard’s stories – a shiny, dilapidated vista of motels, space voyages, assassination attempts.

In other words, Ballard’s stories constitute a corpus that is unlike anything else in twentieth-century British fiction. This corpus is unique.

2

Interviewed by George MacBeth in 1967, Ballard tried to define the difference between his fiction and that of his contemporaries. ‘The great bulk of fiction still being written,’ he observed, ‘is retrospective in character. It’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years. It interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it.’ Whereas, he then continued: ‘when one turns to the present – and what I feel I’ve done in these pieces of mine is to rediscover the present for myself – I feel that one needs a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.’

It has a charming grandeur, this giant theory, but I’m not sure it’s precisely right. Or at least, it may be right, but it’s only a tentative sketch. The diligent reader also needs to consider some sober literary history.

For these stories in no way follow one dominant strand of the short story: the realist ironic tradition of Chekhov and Maupassant. Instead, these are stories of the high imaginary, and fantastical. The best short stories, Ballard once noted, were those of ‘Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allen Poe’. And his own stories, similarly, feature universes stretched beyond their normal limits. But to name this tradition is not quite a solution, either. Italo Calvino once wrote an essay on fantastic literature, and he offered the following definition of its underlying philosophy:

The problem of the reality of what we see – both extraordinary things, which may be just hallucinations projected by our mind, and ordinary things, which perhaps conceal beneath the most banal appearances a second nature that is more disturbing, mysterious, terrifying – is the essence of this literature of the fantastic, whose most powerful effects lie in this hovering between irreconcilable levels of reality.

And at once, the diligent reader has a problem. Maybe for Edgar Allen Poe, sure, this might be a workable definition. But it in no way helps when considering Ballard’s inventions.

At which point, this ideal reader should maybe pause: and consider a particular example.

3

One of Ballard’s greatest stories is called ‘The Voices of Time’. Its manner is not the manner of the usual avant-garde. Its early pages contain dialogue that is notable for its strained formality. (‘“What are you doing with yourself, Robert?” he asked. “Are you still going over to Whitby’s lab?”’) Judged on its stylistics, the mode seems to be the usual mode of a certain deadbeat realism. (‘He smiled sympathetically at Powers across the desk, wondering what to say to him.’) And yet the reader looking for the usual story and backstory will soon find the conventional fictional perspectives subtly altered. Some names are strange – like Kaldren, and Coma. While the backstory that is hinted at – and this is one of Ballard’s constant techniques – is vast with inexplicability: not just isolated details (‘the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago’), but also the blank precision of the vocabulary, the strange ‘camera towers’ and ‘glass polyhedrons’ of this landscape, and the intricacy of the scientific terms, which go way beyond the usual assumptions of a reader’s everyday knowledge: ‘the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates …’

It is a future that could also be a present – everything is scrambled – and the reason for this confusion is the meaning of the story. Its surface plot seems to be about the strange discoveries which Whitby, a biologist, has been making in the field of silent gene activation. His colleague, Powers, is dying – and in the time he has left he is trying to think through the implications of Whitby’s experiments, where an organism’s latent future comes to life. And the answer seems to be contained in an odd undertaking of Whitby’s in the summer before his suicide: ‘the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character …’ Eventually, Powers decides to build a version of Whitby’s diagram, in concrete, in the middle of a salt lake. When it is finished, it is revealed as a ‘mandala’ – a miniature diagram of the universe. And Powers walks out to its centre. ‘Above him he could hear the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, a true canopy of time.’

For this story’s theme is entropy. And therefore its perspective is not just the entropy of the human body, but also of the dying stars, and the dying planet. Which is why the story’s unwobbling pivot is this strange mandala. As Powers dies, ‘the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes …’

4

No wonder Ballard felt he was beyond the usual retrospective psychology! In his list of favourite books, there are predictable literary precursors – the short stories of Hemingway, Alice in Wonderland, Naked Lunch – but two items stand out for their strange abstraction: recordings of cockpit conversations retrieved from the black boxes of airplanes; and the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. The LA Yellow Pages, he once wrote, was the only book he had ever stolen – and then he added: ‘What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.’

What is a character? Or what is a motivation? The usual human motivations still exist in Ballard’s stories, but only nostalgically – in the background, like herms or hilltop cities in the old landscapes. And the reason for this relegation was a phenomenon which Ballard named the Death of Affect – the twentieth century had invented such large atrocities, not only Hiroshima and the Holocaust, but also the virtual worlds of computers and high finance, that the old human categories were no longer relevant. To argue over the rightness of such a theory is not the point. The point is that it allowed Ballard to invent fictions of a startling originality. In his strangely formal prose, he described what character might look like when all the traditional formalities had disappeared.

Rather than subjects, Ballard has a system of recurring tropes. And so in ‘The Voices of Time’, the reader will discover reworked versions of previous stories: an obsession with sound and soundwaves that is also present in ‘Venus Smiles’, or ‘The Sound Sweep’; the new planets of ‘The Waiting Grounds’; the sleeplessness of ‘Manhole 69’. But in each case, the tropes are rearranged to create a new original. You can call this system mythic, but I think the truth is stranger. It might be more precise to say: the basis of previous fiction was the isolated self, and its various particularities of politesse and ego, whereas in Ballard’s fiction the protagonists turn out to be much larger entities – the impossible and ignored coercions of society, or the environment. For this is, according to Ballard’s redefinition, how the contemporary self now lives: always blurring into a herd, or crowd. And that’s why comparing him to Borges or Kafka or Poe is not quite useful. The texture of his writing is much more deliberately contemporary than theirs – and therefore is always grainy with a faint satirical tone. Famously he claimed that he was not writing about the future but about the ‘visionary present’ – and it is the urgency of that present moment which makes his metaphysical writing so disturbing. If he resembles anyone, I sometimes think, it is the great visionary Jules Verne. In both writers, the chic and the modern – submarines, space ships, X-rays, gene theory – is revealed to be glowing with a much larger, more sinister significance.

Every writer of fiction invents the places they describe, whether ostensibly real or not. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe,’ wrote Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita, ‘and now I was faced by the task of inventing America.’ And Ballard is one of the great inventors of places in fiction. This ferocious analyst of the totalitarian was one of the experts in fiction’s own totalitarian nature: the way it so easily can dictate its own terms. Imperiously, Ballard invents unexplained acronyms, or distorts vocabulary – a technique already baroquely visible in the first story collected here, ‘Prima Belladonna’: ‘Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred …’

But his success at this place-invention is so striking because he is always, simultaneously, describing our own habitat. He is a writer of collective motivation, collective character, precisely because existence in the twentieth century was in the process of transforming itself into larger atmospheres: not just the general conditions of nature, but also the pervading clouds of advertising, stock exchanges, computerised reality. He is the great describer of the lawning of our era – the embankments and swathes of abstract space that compose our giant suburbs. Such everyday abstraction, the absence of particulars, is Ballard’s chosen locale – whether it is incarnated in a concrete beachfront with palmettos, an extra planet, or the laboratories of future technological advances.

Although I think it’s also important to point out that, for all the international roaming of his fiction, from the Apartamentos California to Cannes, the true location is always, somehow, Britain. Just think, even, of ‘The Voices of Time’: that entropy is cosmic, sure, but it is also the entropy that Ballard discovered in the postwar suburbs of a dying empire. Britain, in fact, was the most modern country on earth, precisely because it was the world-leader in entropy – and therefore also the leader in ressentiment, rancour, sadness, twilight, concrete. Dystopia! You only needed to look around you: among the flyovers and multi-storey car parks in the rain.

In his later stories, this strange form of visionary politics became more and more pronounced, culminating in the late novels, beyond the chronology of this collection: his studies of financial hyper-reality in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, then the bourgeois darknesses of Millennium People and Kingdom Come. And it came with a technical shift. The interest in vocabulary formation that had marked his early stories gradually became a more overt interest in the general culture’s linguistic deformations. Ballard became the impresario of official registers: a story could be a simple exercise in style – like the punk brilliance of ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, which he wrote in 1968, soon after Reagan became Governor of California. The story is a carnival of vocabularies – the medical, the psychoanalytic, the opinion poll – gleefully stuffed with impermissible fantasy: ‘Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan” in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.’

With that kind of shock tactic, Ballard offered new possibilities to the short story: beyond the intricate psychology of the Chekhovian mode.

5

For instead, Ballard’s subject was the system: physically, the vast urban spaces and their freeways, and mentally the vast interior landscapes of psychosis and neurosis. In his Ronald Reagan extravaganza, Ballard first perceived how the era’s separate preoccupations converged, and were even mutually complicit: the virtual worlds of cinema, of politics, of analysis, were all forms of the same violence. And that’s why his late style is so tonally acrobatic. Each closed system was revealed as a version of another.

One of his last stories, ‘The Object of the Attack’, was written in 1984. As always, it has its patina of genre fiction (‘Events are moving on apace.’). But in this story of an assassination attempt, the reader can observe all Ballard’s obsessions reacting with each other, as inside some miniature and hyper-modern laboratory: the outward tone – British, and bourgeois – encloses violent energies, where the Royal Family, the American Presidency and Space Travel are ways of encoding a manic form of pathology.

But then, why not? A mandala is an image of the world, so in a way every story is a mandala, too. Which would mean, according to the terms of Ballard’s fiction, that every story is therefore also a cosmic clock – counting down the minutes to the final catastrophe.

London, 2014

PRIMA BELLADONNA

I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.

Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.

We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer – we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level – yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.

One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony.

‘Parker’s Choro-Flora?’ he said. ‘You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.’

When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’

Tony tilted his head slightly. ‘Over there.’

I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.

‘Careful,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t gape at her.’

I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.

‘Fourth floor,’ Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. ‘One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?’

‘Dreaming,’ I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. ‘I wonder what else she can do?’

Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. ‘Well?’ Tony asked.

‘She’s out of my league,’ I said. ‘But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.’

Harry groaned. ‘Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.’

The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her.

‘The approach has got to be equivocal,’ Harry continued, gazing into his beer. ‘Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.’

The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds.

We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.

Five minutes later the singing started.

At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull.

Harry and Tony frowned at me.

‘Your livestock’s unhappy about something,’ Tony told me. ‘Can you quieten it down?’

‘It’s not the plants,’ I told him. ‘Can’t be.’

The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges off my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.

‘Steve, look out!’ Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top.

I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair.

‘What the hell’s the matter?’

Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly.

‘That was close. You all right?’

‘It’s gone,’ Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.

‘What was it?’ I asked.

Harry peered at me closely. ‘Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.’ He sat down weakly on a beer crate. ‘Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.’

After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table.

On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of ionized fibre, the golden woman was watching me.

I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony.

There were only about a dozen true Arachnids in captivity; most of the others were either mutes or grafts from dicot stems, and I was lucky to have mine at all. I’d bought the place five years earlier from an old half-deaf man called Sayers, and the day before he left he moved a lot of rogue stock out to the garbage disposal scoop behind the apartment block. Reclaiming some of the tanks, I’d come across the Arachnid, thriving on a diet of algae and perished rubber tubing.

Why Sayers had wanted to throw it away I had never discovered. Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred, and had worked under the Director, Dr Mandel. As a young botanist of twenty-five Mandel had discovered the prime Arachnid in the Guiana forest. The orchid took its name from the Khan-Arachnid spider which pollinated the flower, simultaneously laying its own eggs in the fleshy ovule, guided, or as Mandel always insisted, actually mesmerized to it by the vibrations which the orchid’s calyx emitted at pollination time. The first Arachnid orchids beamed out only a few random frequencies, but by cross-breeding and maintaining them artificially at the pollination stage Mandel had produced a strain that spanned a maximum of twenty-four octaves.

Not that he had ever been able to hear them. At the climax of his life’s work Mandel, like Beethoven, was stone deaf, but apparently by merely looking at a blossom he could listen to its music. Strangely though, after he went deaf he never looked at an Arachnid.

That morning I could almost understand why. The orchid was in a vicious mood. First it refused to feed, and I had to coax it along in a fluoraldehyde flush, and then it started going ultra-sonic, which meant complaints from all the dog owners in the area. Finally it tried to fracture the tank by resonating.

The whole place was in uproar, and I was almost resigned to shutting them down and waking them all by hand individually – a backbreaking job with eighty tanks in the shop – when everything suddenly died away to a murmur.

I looked round and saw the golden-skinned woman walk in.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘They must like you.’

She laughed pleasantly. ‘Hello. Weren’t they behaving?’

Under the black beach robe her skin was a softer, more mellow gold, and it was her eyes that held me. I could just see them under the wide-brimmed hat. Insect legs wavered delicately round two points of purple light.

She walked over to a bank of mixed ferns and stood looking at them. The ferns reached out towards her and trebled eagerly in their liquid fluted voices.

‘Aren’t they sweet?’ she said, stroking the fronds gently. ‘They need so much affection.’

Her voice was low in the register, a breath of cool sand pouring, with a lilt that gave it music.

‘I’ve just come to Vermilion Sands,’ she said, ‘and my apartment seems awfully quiet. Perhaps if I had a flower, one would be enough, I shouldn’t feel so lonely.’

I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, brisk and businesslike. ‘What about something colourful? This Sumatra Samphire, say? It’s a pedigree mezzo-soprano from the same follicle as the Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It looks rather cruel.’

‘Or this Louisiana Lute Lily? If you thin out its SO₂ it’ll play some beautiful madrigals. I’ll show you how to do it.’

She wasn’t listening to me. Slowly, her hands raised in front of her breasts so that she almost seemed to be praying, she moved towards the display counter on which the Arachnid stood.

‘How beautiful it is,’ she said, gazing at the rich yellow and purple leaves hanging from the scarlet-ribbed vibrocalyx.

I followed her across the floor and switched on the Arachnid’s audio so that she could hear it. Immediately the plant came to life. The leaves stiffened and filled with colour and the calyx inflated, its ribs sprung tautly. A few sharp disconnected notes spat out.

‘Beautiful, but evil,’ I said.

‘Evil?’ she repeated. ‘No, proud.’ She stepped closer to the orchid and looked down into its malevolent head. The Arachnid quivered and the spines on its stem arched and flexed menacingly.

‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘It’s sensitive to the faintest respiratory sounds.’

‘Quiet,’ she said, waving me back. ‘I think it wants to sing.’

‘Those are only key fragments,’ I told her. ‘It doesn’t perform. I use it as a frequency –’

‘Listen!’ She held my arm and squeezed it tightly.

A low, rhythmic fusion of melody had been coming from the plants around the shop, and mounting above them I heard a single stronger voice calling out, at first a thin high-pitched reed of sound that began to pulse and deepen and finally swelled into full baritone, raising the other plants in chorus about itself.

I had never heard the Arachnid sing before. I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out towards her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabres.

I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. A faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence.

The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering.

‘Why did you turn it off?’ she asked heavily.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.’

She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx. One by one its leaves buckled and lost their colour.

‘How much is it?’ she asked me, opening her bag.

‘It’s not for sale,’ I said. ‘Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars –’

‘Will a thousand dollars be enough?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily.

‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,’ I added, trying to smile, ‘that Arachnid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. ‘I was stupid.’ She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists.

‘Pathétique,’ she read off a label at random. ‘I’ll take this.’

I wrapped up the scabia and slipped the instructional booklet into the crate, keeping my eye on her all the time.

‘Don’t look so alarmed,’ she said with amusement. ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before.’

I wasn’t alarmed. It was that thirty years at Vermilion Sands had narrowed my horizons.

‘How long are you staying at Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her.

‘I open at the Casino tonight,’ she said. She told me her name was Jane Ciracylides and that she was a speciality singer.

‘Why don’t you look in?’ she asked, her eyes fluttering mischievously. ‘I come on at eleven. You may find it interesting.’

I did. The next morning Vermilion Sands hummed. Jane created a sensation. After her performance three hundred people swore they’d seen everything from a choir of angels taking the vocal in the music of the spheres to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. As for myself, perhaps I’d listened to too many flowers, but at least I knew where the scorpion on the balcony had come from.

Tony Miles had heard Sophie Tucker singing the ‘St Louis Blues’, and Harry, the elder Bach conducting the B Minor Mass.

They came round to the shop and argued over their respective performances while I wrestled with the flowers.

‘Amazing,’ Tony exclaimed. ‘How does she do it? Tell me.’

‘The Heidelberg score,’ Harry ecstased. ‘Sublime, absolute.’ He looked irritably at the flowers. ‘Can’t you keep these things quiet? They’re making one hell of a row.’

They were, and I had a shrewd idea why. The Arachnid was completely out of control, and by the time I’d clamped it down in a weak saline it had blown out over three hundred dollars’ worth of shrubs.

‘The performance at the Casino last night was nothing on the one she gave here yesterday,’ I told them. ‘The Ring of the Niebelungs played by Stan Kenton. That Arachnid went insane. I’m sure it wanted to kill her.’

Harry watched the plant convulsing its leaves in rigid spasmic movements.

‘If you ask me it’s in an advanced state of rut. Why should it want to kill her?’

‘Her voice must have overtones that irritate its calyx. None of the other plants minded. They cooed like turtle doves when she touched them.’

Tony shivered happily.

Light dazzled in the street outside.

I handed Tony the broom. ‘Here, lover, brace yourself on that. Miss Ciracylides is dying to meet you.’

Jane came into the shop, wearing a flame yellow cocktail skirt and another of her hats.

I introduced her to Harry and Tony.

‘The flowers seem very quiet this morning,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with them?’

‘I’m cleaning out the tanks,’ I told her. ‘By the way, we all want to congratulate you on last night. How does it feel to be able to name your fiftieth city?’

She smiled shyly and sauntered away round the shop. As I knew she would, she stopped by the Arachnid and levelled her eyes at it.

I wanted to see what she’d say, but Harry and Tony were all around her, and soon got her up to my apartment, where they had a hilarious morning playing the fool and raiding my scotch.

‘What about coming out with us after the show tonight?’ Tony asked her. ‘We can go dancing at the Flamingo.’

‘But you’re both married,’ Jane protested. ‘Aren’t you worried about your reputations?’

‘Oh, we’ll bring the girls,’ Harry said airily. ‘And Steve here can come along and hold your coat.’

We played i-Go together. Jane said she’d never played the game before, but she had no difficulty picking up the rules, and when she started sweeping the board with us I knew she was cheating. Admittedly it isn’t every day that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but never the less I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind.

‘She’s charming,’ Harry said, after she’d left. ‘Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.’

‘I care,’ I said. ‘She cheats.’

The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear. Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me. Those in the seventeenth century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost two hundred dollars’ worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about.

Jane seemed oblivious to the trouble she was causing me.

‘What’s wrong with them all?’ she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor.

‘I don’t think they like you,’ I told her. ‘At least the Arachnid doesn’t. Your voice may move men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, laughing at me. ‘Give it to me and I’ll show you how to look after it.’

‘Are Tony and Harry keeping you happy?’ I asked her. I was annoyed that I couldn’t go down to the beach with them and instead had to spend my time draining tanks and titrating up norm solutions, none of which ever worked.

‘They’re very amusing,’ she said. ‘We play i-Go and I sing for them. But I wish you could come out more often.’

After another two weeks I had to give up. I decided to close the plants down until Jane had left Vermilion Sands. I knew it would take me three months to rescore the stock, but I had no alternative.

The next day I received a large order for mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir. They wanted delivery in three weeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, when she heard I wouldn’t be able to fill the order. ‘You must wish that I’d never come to Vermilion Sands.’

She stared thoughtfully into one of the darkened tanks.

‘Couldn’t I score them for you?’ she suggested.

‘No thanks,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve had enough of that already.’

‘Don’t be silly, of course I could.’

I shook my head.

Tony and Harry told me I was crazy.

‘Her voice has a wide enough range,’ Tony said. ‘You admit it yourself.’

‘What have you got against her?’ Harry asked. ‘That she cheats at i-Go?’

‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I said. ‘And her voice has a wider range than you think.’

We played i-Go at Jane’s apartment. Jane won ten dollars from each of us.

‘I am lucky,’ she said, very pleased with herself. ‘I never seem to lose.’ She counted up the bills and put them away carefully in her bag, her golden skin glowing.

Then Santiago sent me a repeat query.

I found Jane down among the cafés, holding off a siege of admirers.

‘Have you given in yet?’ she asked me, smiling at the young men.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ I said, ‘but anything is worth trying.’

Back at the shop I raised a bank of perennials past their thresholds. Jane helped me attach the gas and fluid lines.

‘We’ll try these first,’ I said. ‘Frequencies 543–785. Here’s the score.’

Jane took off her hat and began to ascend the scale, her voice clear and pure. At first the Columbine hesitated and Jane went down again and drew them along with her. They went up a couple of octaves together and then the plants stumbled and went off at a tangent of stepped chords.

‘Try K sharp,’ I said. I fed a little chlorous acid into the tank and the Columbine followed her up eagerly, the infra-calyxes warbling delicate variations on the treble clef.

‘Perfect,’ I said.

It took us only four hours to fill the order.

‘You’re better than the Arachnid,’ I congratulated her. ‘How would you like a job? I’ll fit you out with a large cool tank and all the chlorine you can breathe.’

‘Careful,’ she told me. ‘I may say yes. Why don’t we rescore a few more of them while we’re about it?’

‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

‘Let me try the Arachnid,’ she suggested. ‘That would be more of a challenge.’

Her eyes never left the flower. I wondered what they’d do if I left them together. Try to sing each other to death?

‘No,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow perhaps.’

We sat on the balcony together, glasses at our elbows, and talked the afternoon away.

She told me little about herself, but I gathered that her father had been a mining engineer in Peru and her mother a dancer at a Lima vu-tavern. They’d wandered from deposit to deposit, the father digging his concessions, the mother signing on at the nearest bordello to pay the rent.

‘She only sang, of course,’ Jane added. ‘Until my father came.’ She blew bubbles into her glass. ‘So you think I give them what they want at the Casino. By the way, what do you see?’

‘I’m afraid I’m your one failure,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Except you.’

She dropped her eyes. ‘That sometimes happens,’ she said. ‘I’m glad this time.’

A million suns pounded inside me. Until then I’d been reserving judgment on myself.

Harry and Tony were polite, if disappointed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Harry said sadly. ‘I won’t. How did you do it?’

‘That mystical left-handed approach, of course,’ I told him. ‘All ancient seas and dark wells.’

‘What’s she like?’ Tony asked eagerly. ‘I mean, does she burn or just tingle?’

Jane sang at the Casino every night from eleven to three, but apart from that I suppose we were always together. Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.

On other evenings we’d go down to one of the quiet bars at Lagoon West, and have supper out on the flats, and Jane would tease the waiters and sing honeybirds and angelcakes to the children who came in across the sand to watch her.

I realize now that I must have achieved a certain notoriety along the beach, but I didn’t mind giving the old women – and beside Jane they all seemed to be old women – something to talk about. During the Recess no one cared very much about anything, and for that reason I never questioned myself too closely over my affair with Jane Ciracylides. As I sat on the balcony with her looking out over the cool early evenings or felt her body glowing beside me in the darkness I allowed myself few anxieties.

Absurdly, the only disagreement I ever had with her was over her cheating.

I remember that I once taxed her with it.

‘Do you know you’ve taken over five hundred dollars from me, Jane? You’re still doing it. Even now!’

She laughed impishly. ‘Do I cheat? I’ll let you win one day.’

‘But why do you?’ I insisted.

‘It’s more fun to cheat,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it’s so boring.’

‘Where will you go when you leave Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her.

She looked at me in surprise. ‘Why do you say that? I don’t think I shall ever leave.’

‘Don’t tease me, Jane. You’re a child of another world than this.’

‘My father came from Peru,’ she reminded me.

‘But you didn’t get your voice from him,’ I said. ‘I wish I could have heard your mother sing. Had she a better voice than yours, Jane?’

‘She thought so. My father couldn’t stand either of us.’

That was the evening I last saw Jane. We’d changed, and in the half an hour before she left for the Casino we sat on the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music remained with me even after she’d gone, hanging faintly in the darkness around her chair.

I felt curiously sleepy, almost sick on the air she’d left behind, and at 11.30, when I knew she’d be appearing on stage at the Casino, I went out for a walk along the beach.

As I left the elevator I heard music coming from the shop.

At first I thought I’d left one of the audio switches on, but I knew the voice only too well.

The windows of the shop had been shuttered, so I got in through the passage which led from the garage courtyard round at the back of the apartment house.

The lights had been turned out, but a brilliant glow filled the shop, throwing a golden fire on to the tanks along the counters. Across the ceiling liquid colours danced in reflection.

The music I had heard before, but only in overture.

The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely.

Arched forwards into it, her head thrown back, was Jane.

I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it.

‘Jane!’ I shouted over the noise. ‘Get down!’

She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame.

While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up.

‘Where’s Jane?’ Harry asked. ‘Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.’ They both turned towards the music. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Tony peered at me suspiciously. ‘Steve, anything wrong?’

Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started towards the rear entrance.

‘Harry!’ I shouted after him. ‘Get back!’

Tony held my shoulder. ‘Is Jane in there?’

I caught them as they opened the door into the shop.

‘Good God!’ Harry yelled. ‘Let go of me, you fool!’ He struggled to get away from me. ‘Steve, it’s trying to kill her!’

I jammed the door shut and held them back.

I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size.

The next day it died.

Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterwards the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernambuco.

So if any of you around here keep a choro-florist’s, and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat.

1956

ESCAPEMENT

Neither of us was watching the play too closely when I first noticed the slip. I was stretched back in front of the fire with the crossword, braising gently and toying with 17 down (‘told by antique clocks? 5, 5.’) while Helen was hemming an old petticoat, looking up only when the third lead, a heavy-chinned youth with a 42-inch neck and a base-surge voice, heaved manfully downscreen. The play was ‘My Sons, My Sons’, one of those Thursday night melodramas Channel 2 put out through the winter months, and had been running for about an hour; we’d reached that ebb somewhere round Act 3 Scene 3 just after the old farmer learns that his sons no longer respect him. The whole play must have been recorded on film, and it sounded extremely funny to switch from the old man’s broken mutterings back to the showdown sequence fifteen minutes earlier when the eldest son starts drumming his chest and dragging in the high symbols. Somewhere an engineer was out of a job.

‘They’ve got their reels crossed,’ I told Helen. ‘This is where we came in.’

‘Is it?’ she said, looking up. ‘I wasn’t watching. Tap the set.’

‘Just wait and see. In a moment everyone in the studio will start apologizing.’

Helen peered at the screen. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen this,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we haven’t. Quiet.’

I shrugged and went back to 17 down, thinking vaguely about sand dials and water clocks. The scene dragged on; the old man stood his ground, ranted over his turnips and thundered desperately for Ma. The studio must have decided to run it straight through again and pretend no one had noticed. Even so they’d be fifteen minutes behind their schedule.

Ten minutes later it happened again.

I sat up. ‘That’s funny,’ I said slowly. ‘Haven’t they spotted it yet? They can’t all be asleep.’

‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked, looking up from her needle basket. ‘Is something wrong with the set?’

‘I thought you were watching. I told you we’d seen this before. Now they’re playing it back for the third time.’

‘They’re not,’ Helen insisted. ‘I’m sure they aren’t. You must have read the book.’

‘Heaven forbid.’ I watched the set closely. Any minute now an announcer spitting on a sandwich would splutter red-faced to the screen. I’m not one of those people who reach for their phones every time someone mispronounces meteorology, but this time I knew there’d be thousands who’d feel it their duty to keep the studio exchanges blocked all night. And for any go-ahead comedian on a rival station the lapse was a god-send.

‘Do you mind if I change the programme?’ I asked Helen. ‘See if anything else is on.’

‘Don’t. This is the most interesting part of the play. You’ll spoil it.’

‘Darling, you’re not even watching. I’ll come back to it in a moment, I promise.’

On Channel 5 a panel of three professors and a chorus girl were staring hard at a Roman pot. The question-master, a suave-voiced Oxford don, kept up a lot of crazy patter about scraping the bottom of the barrow. The professors seemed stumped, but the girl looked as if she knew exactly what went into the pot but didn’t dare say it.

On 9 there was a lot of studio laughter and someone was giving a sports-car to an enormous woman in a cartwheel hat. The woman nervously ducked her head away from the camera and stared glumly at the car. The compère opened the door for her and I was wondering whether she’d try to get into it when Helen cut in:

‘Harry, don’t be mean. You’re just playing.’

I turned back to the play on Channel 2. The same scene was on, nearing the end of its run.

‘Now watch it,’ I told Helen. She usually managed to catch on the third time round. ‘Put that sewing away, it’s getting on my nerves. God, I know this off by heart.’

‘Sh!’ Helen told me. ‘Can’t you stop talking?’

I lit a cigarette and lay back in the sofa, waiting. The apologies, to say the least, would have to be magniloquent. Two ghost runs at £100 a minute totted up to a tidy heap of doubloons.

The scene drew to a close, the old man stared heavily at his boots, the dusk drew down and –

We were back where we started from.

‘Fantastic!’ I said, standing up and turning some snow off the screen. ‘It’s incredible.’

‘I didn’t know you enjoyed this sort of play,’ Helen said calmly. ‘You never used to.’ She glanced over at the screen and then went back to her petticoat.

I watched her warily. A million years earlier I’d probably have run howling out of the cave and flung myself thankfully under the nearest dinosaur. Nothing in the meanwhile had lessened the dangers hemming in the undaunted husband.

‘Darling,’ I explained patiently, just keeping the edge out of my voice, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed they are now playing this same scene through for the fourth time.’

‘The fourth time?’ Helen said doubtfully. ‘Are they repeating it?’

I was visualizing a studio full of announcers and engineers slumped unconscious over their mikes and valves, while an automatic camera pumped out the same reel. Eerie but unlikely. There were monitor receivers as well as the critics, agents, sponsors, and, unforgivably, the playwright himself weighing every minute and every word in their private currencies. They’d all have a lot to say under tomorrow’s headlines.

‘Sit down and stop fidgeting,’ Helen said. ‘Have you lost your bone?’

I felt round the cushions and ran my hand along the carpet below the sofa.

‘My cigarette,’ I said. ‘I must have thrown it into the fire. I don’t think I dropped it.’

I turned back to the set and switched on the give-away programme, noting the time, 9.03, so that I could get back to Channel 2 at 9.15. When the explanation came I just had to hear it.

‘I thought you were enjoying the play,’ Helen said. ‘Why’ve you turned it off?’

I gave her what sometimes passes in our flat for a withering frown and settled back.

The enormous woman was still at it in front of the cameras, working her way up a pyramid of questions on cookery. The audience was subdued but interest mounted. Eventually she answered the jackpot question and the audience roared and thumped their seats like a lot of madmen. The compère led her across the stage to another sports car.

‘She’ll have a stable of them soon,’ I said aside to Helen.

The woman shook hands and awkwardly dipped the brim of her hat, smiling nervously with embarrassment.

The gesture was oddly familiar.

I jumped up and switched to Channel 5. The panel were still staring hard at their pot.

Then I started to realize what was going on.

All three programmes were repeating themselves.

‘Helen,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Get me a scotch and soda, will you?’

‘What is the matter? Have you strained your back?’

‘Quickly, quickly!’ I snapped my fingers.

‘Hold on.’ She got up and went into the pantry.

I looked at the time. 9.12. Then I returned to the play and kept my eyes glued to the screen. Helen came back and put something down on the end-table.

‘There you are. You all right?’

When it switched I thought I was ready for it, but the surprise must have knocked me flat. I found myself lying out on the sofa. The first thing I did was reach round for the drink.

‘Where did you put it?’ I asked Helen.

‘What?’

‘The scotch. You brought it in a couple of minutes ago. It was on the table.’

‘You’ve been dreaming,’ she said gently. She leant forward and started watching the play.

I went into the pantry and found the bottle. As I filled a tumbler I noticed the clock over the kitchen sink. 9.07. An hour slow, now that I thought about it. But my wristwatch said 9.05, and always ran perfectly. And the clock on the mantelpiece in the lounge also said 9.05.

Before I really started worrying I had to make sure.

Mullvaney, our neighbour in the flat above, opened his door when I knocked.

‘Hello, Bartley. Corkscrew?’

‘No, no,’ I told him. ‘What’s the right time? Our clocks are going crazy.’

He glanced at his wrist. ‘Nearly ten past.’

‘Nine or ten?’

He looked at his watch again. ‘Nine, should be. What’s up?’

‘I don’t know whether I’m losing my –’ I started to say. Then I stopped.

Mullvaney eyed me curiously. Over his shoulder I heard a wave of studio applause, broken by the creamy, unctuous voice of the giveaway compère.

‘How long’s that programme been on?’ I asked him.

‘About twenty minutes. Aren’t you watching?’

‘No,’ I said, adding casually, ‘Is anything wrong with your set?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Why?’

‘Mine’s chasing its tail. Anyway, thanks.’

‘OK,’ he said. He watched me go down the stairs and shrugged as he shut his door.

I went into the hall, picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Hello, Tom?’ Tom Farnold works the desk next to mine at the office. ‘Tom, Harry here. What time do you make it?’

‘Time the liberals were back.’

‘No, seriously.’

‘Let’s see. Twelve past nine. By the way, did you find those pickles I left for you in the safe?’

‘Yeah, thanks. Listen, Tom,’ I went on, ‘the goddamdest things are happening here. We were watching Diller’s play on Channel 2 when –’

‘I’m watching it now. Hurry it up.’

‘You are? Well, how do you explain this repetition business? And the way the clocks are stuck between 9 and 9.15?’

Tom laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suggest you go outside and give the house a shake.’

I reached out for the glass I had with me on the hall table, wondering how to explain to –

The next moment I found myself back on the sofa. I was holding the newspaper and looking at 17 down. A part of my mind was thinking about antique clocks.

I pulled myself out of it and glanced across at Helen. She was sitting quietly with her needle basket. The all too familiar play was repeating itself and by the clock on the mantelpiece it was still just after 9.

I went back into the hall and dialled Tom again, trying not to stampede myself. In some way, I hadn’t begun to understand how, a section of time was spinning round in a circle, with myself in the centre.

‘Tom,’ I asked quickly as soon as he picked up the phone. ‘Did I call you five minutes ago?’

‘Who’s that again?’

‘Harry here. Harry Bartley. Sorry, Tom.’ I paused and rephrased the question, trying to make it sound intelligible. ‘Tom, did you phone me up about five minutes ago? We’ve had a little trouble with the line here.’

‘No,’ he told me. ‘Wasn’t me. By the way, did you get those pickles I left in the safe?’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, beginning to panic. ‘Are you watching the play, Tom?’

‘Yes. I think I’ll get back to it. See you.’

I went into the kitchen and had a long close look at myself in the mirror. A crack across it dropped one side of my face three inches below the other, but apart from that I couldn’t see anything that added up to a psychosis. My eyes seemed steady, pulse was in the low seventies, no tics or clammy traumatic sweat. Everything around me seemed much too solid and authentic for a dream.

I waited for a minute and then went back to the lounge and sat down. Helen was watching the play.

I leant forward and turned the knob round. The picture dimmed and swayed off.

‘Harry, I’m watching that! Don’t switch it off.’

I went over to her. ‘Poppet,’ I said, holding my voice together. ‘Listen to me, please. Very carefully. It’s important.’

She frowned, put her sewing down and took my hands.

‘For some reason, I don’t know why, we seem to be in a sort of circular time trap, just going round and round. You’re not aware of it, and I can’t find anyone else who is either.’

Helen stared at me in amazement. ‘Harry,’ she started, ‘what are you –’

‘Helen!’ I insisted, gripping her shoulders. ‘Listen! For the last two hours a section of time about 15 minutes long has been repeating itself. The clocks are stuck between 9 and 9.15. That play you’re watching has –’

‘Harry, darling.’ She looked at me and smiled helplessly. ‘You are silly. Now turn it on again.’

I gave up.

As I switched the set on I ran through all the other channels just to see if anything had changed.

The panel stared at their pot, the fat woman won her sports car, the old farmer ranted. On Channel 1, the old BBC service which put out a couple of hours on alternate evenings, two newspaper men were interviewing a scientific pundit who appeared on popular educational programmes.

‘What effect these dense eruptions of gas will have so far it’s impossible to tell. However, there’s certainly no cause for any alarm. These billows have mass, and I think we can expect a lot of strange optical effects as the light leaving the sun is deflected by them gravitationally.’

He started playing with a set of coloured celluloid balls running on concentric metal rings, and fiddled with a ripple tank mounted against a mirror on the table.

One of the newsmen asked: ‘What about the relationship between light and time? If I remember my relativity they’re tied up together pretty closely. Are you sure we won’t all need to add another hand to our clocks and watches?’

The pundit smiled. ‘I think we’ll be able to get along without that. Time is extremely complicated, but I can assure you the clocks won’t suddenly start running backwards or sideways.’

I listened to him until Helen began to remonstrate. I switched the play on for her and went off into the hall. The fool didn’t know what he was talking about. What I couldn’t understand was why I was the only person who realized what was going on. If I could get Tom over I might just be able to convince him.

I picked up the phone and glanced at my watch.

9.13. By the time I got through to Tom the next changeover would be due. Somehow I didn’t like the idea of being picked up and flung to the sofa, however painless it might be. I put the phone down and went into the lounge.

The jump-back was smoother than I expected. I wasn’t conscious of anything, not even the slightest tremor. A phrase was stuck in my mind: Olden Times.

The newspaper was back on my lap, folded around the crossword. I looked through the clues.

17 down: Told by antique clocks? 5, 5.

I must have solved it subconsciously.

I remembered that I’d intended to phone Tom.

‘Hullo, Tom?’ I asked when I got through. ‘Harry here.’

‘Did you get those pickles I left in the safe?’

‘Yes, thanks a lot. Tom, could you come round tonight? Sorry to ask you this late, but it’s fairly urgent.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get here. As soon as you can?’

‘Sure. I’ll leave right away. Is Helen all right?’

‘Yes, she’s fine. Thanks again.’

I went into the dining room and pulled a bottle of gin and a couple of tonics out of the sideboard. He’d need a drink when he heard what I had to say.

Then I realized he’d never make it. From Earls Court it would take him at least half an hour to reach us at Maida Vale and he’d probably get no further than Marble Arch.

I filled my glass out of the virtually bottomless bottle of scotch and tried to work out a plan of action.

The first step was to get hold of someone like myself who retained his awareness of the past switch-backs. Somewhere else there must be others trapped in their little 15-minute cages who were also wondering desperately how to get out. I could start by phoning everyone I knew and then going on at random through the phonebook. But what could we do if we did find each other? In fact there was nothing to do except sit tight and wait for it all to wear off. At least I knew I wasn’t looping my loop. Once these billows or whatever they were had burnt themselves out we’d be able to get off the round-about.

Until then I had an unlimited supply of whisky waiting for me in the half-empty bottle standing on the sink, though of course there was one snag: I’d never be able to get drunk.

I was musing round some of the other possibilities available and wondering how to get a permanent record of what was going on when an idea hit me.

I got out the phone-directory and looked up the number of KBC-TV, Channel 9.

A girl at reception answered the phone. After haggling with her for a couple of minutes I persuaded her to put me through to one of the producers.

‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Is the jackpot question in tonight’s programme known to any members of the studio audience?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I see. As a matter of interest, do you yourself know it?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘All the questions tonight are known only to our senior programme producer and M. Phillipe Soisson of Savoy Hotels Limited. They’re a closely guarded secret.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got a piece of paper handy I’ll give you the jackpot question. “List the complete menu at the Guildhall Coronation Banquet in July 1953.”’

There were muttered consultations, and a second voice came through.

‘Who’s that speaking?’

‘Mr H.R. Bartley, 129b Sutton Court Road, N.W. –’

Before I could finish I found myself back in the lounge.

The jump-back had caught me. But instead of being stretched out on the sofa I was standing up, leaning on one elbow against the mantelpiece, looking down at the newspaper.

My eyes were focused clearly on the crossword puzzle, and before I pulled them away and started thinking over my call to the studio I noticed something that nearly dropped me into the grate.

17 down had been filled in.

I picked up the paper and showed it to Helen.

‘Did you do this clue? 17 down?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I never even look at the crossword.’

The clock on the mantelpiece caught my eye, and I forgot about the studio and playing tricks with other people’s time.

9.03.

The merry-go-round was closing in. I thought the jump-back had come sooner than I expected. At least two minutes earlier, somewhere around 9.13.

And not only was the repetition interval getting shorter, but as the arc edged inwards on itself it was uncovering the real time stream running below it, the stream in which the other I, unknown to myself here, had solved the clue, stood up, walked over to the mantelpiece and filled in 17 down.

I sat down on the sofa, watching the clock carefully.

For the first time that evening Helen was thumbing over the pages of a magazine. The work basket was tucked away on the bottom shelf of the bookcase.

‘Do you want this on any longer?’ she asked me. ‘It’s not very good.’

I turned to the panel game. The three professors and the chorus girl were still playing around with their pot.

On Channel 1 the pundit was sitting at the table with his models.

‘… alarm. The billows have mass, and I think we can expect a lot of strange optical effects as the light –’

I switched it off.

The next jump-back came at 9.11. Somewhere I’d left the mantelpiece, gone back to the sofa and lit a cigarette.

It was 9.04. Helen had opened the verandah windows and was looking out into the street.

The set was on again so I pulled the plug out at the main. I threw the cigarette into the fire; not having seen myself light it, made it taste like someone else’s.

‘Harry, like to go out for a stroll?’ Helen suggested. ‘It’ll be rather nice in the park.’

Each successive jump-back gave us a new departure point. If now I bundled her outside and got her down to the end of the road, at the next jump we’d both be back in the lounge again, but probably have decided to drive to the pub instead.

‘Harry?’

‘What, sorry?’

‘Are you asleep, angel? Like to go for a walk? It’ll wake you up.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Go and get your coat.’

‘Will you be warm enough like that?’

She went off into the bedroom

I walked round the lounge and convinced myself that I was awake. The shadows, the solid feel of the chairs, the definition was much too fine for a dream.

It was 9.08. Normally Helen would take ten minutes to put on her coat.

The jump-back came almost immediately.

It was 9.06.

I was still on the sofa and Helen was bending down and picking up her work basket.

This time, at last, the set was off.

‘Have you got any money on you?’ Helen asked.

I felt in my pocket automatically. ‘Yes. How much do you want?’

Helen looked at me. ‘Well, what do you usually pay for the drinks? We’ll only have a couple.’

‘We’re going to the pub, are we?’

‘Darling, are you all right?’ She came over to me. ‘You look all strangled. Is that shirt too tight?’

‘Helen,’ I said, getting up. ‘I’ve got to try to explain something to you. I don’t know why it’s happening, it’s something to do with these billows of gas the sun’s releasing.’

Helen was watching me with her mouth open.

‘Harry,’ she started to say nervously. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m quite all right,’ I assured her. ‘It’s just that everything is happening very rapidly and I don’t think there’s much time left.’

I kept on glancing at the clock and Helen followed my eyes to it and went over to the mantelpiece. Watching me she moved it round and I heard the pendulum jangle.

‘No, no,’ I shouted. I grabbed it and pushed it back against the wall.

We jumped back to 9.07.

Helen was in the bedroom. I had exactly a minute left.

‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Darling, do you want to, or don’t you?’

I was by the lounge window, muttering something.

I was out of touch with what my real self was doing in the normal time channel. The Helen talking to me now was a phantom.

It was I, not Helen and everybody else, who was riding the merry-go-round.

Jump.

9.07-15.

Helen was standing in the doorway.

‘… down to the … the …’ I was saying.

Helen watched me, frozen. A fraction of a minute left.

I started to walk over to her.

to walk over to her

ver to her

er

I came out of it like a man catapulted from a revolving door. I was stretched out flat on the sofa, a hard aching pain running from the top of my head down past my right ear into my neck.

I looked at the time. 9.45. I could hear Helen moving around in the dining room. I lay there, steadying the room round me, and in a few minutes she came in carrying a tray and a couple of glasses.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked, making up an alka-seltzer.

I let it fizzle down and drank it.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did I collapse?’

‘Not exactly. You were watching the play. I thought you looked rather seedy so I suggested we go out for a drink. You went into a sort of convulsion.’

I stood up slowly and rubbed my neck. ‘God, I didn’t dream all that! I couldn’t have done.’

‘What was it about?’

‘A sort of crazy merry-go-round –’ The pain grabbed at my neck when I spoke. I went over to the set and switched it on. ‘Hard to explain coherently. Time was –’ I flinched as the pain bit in again.

‘Sit down and rest,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll come and join you. Like a drink?’

‘Thanks. A big scotch.’

I looked at the set. On Channel 1 there was a breakdown sign, a cabaret on 2, a flood-lit stadium on 5, and a variety show on 9. No sign anywhere of either Diller’s play or the panel game.

Helen brought the drink in and sat down on the sofa with me.

‘It started off when we were watching the play,’ I explained, massaging my neck.

‘Sh, don’t bother now. Just relax.’

I put my head on Helen’s shoulder and looked up at the ceiling, listening to the sound coming from the variety show. I thought back through each turn of the round-about, wondering whether I could have dreamt it all.

Ten minutes later Helen said, ‘Well, I didn’t think much of that. And they’re doing an encore. Good heavens.’

‘Who are?’ I asked. I watched the light from the screen flicker across her face.

‘That team of acrobats. The something Brothers. One of them even slipped. How do you feel?’

‘Fine.’ I turned my head round and looked at the screen.

Three or four acrobats with huge v-torsos and skin briefs were doing simple handstands on to each other’s arms. They finished the act and went into a more involved routine, throwing around a girl in leopard skin panties. The applause was deafening. I thought they were moderately good.

Two of them began to give what seemed to be a demonstration of dynamic tension, straining against each other like a pair of catatonic bulls, their necks and legs locked, until one of them was levered slowly off the ground.

‘Why do they keep on doing that?’ Helen said. ‘They’ve done it twice already.’

‘I don’t think they have,’ I said. ‘This is a slightly different act.’

The pivot man tremored, one of his huge banks of muscles collapsed, and the whole act toppled and then sprung apart.

‘They slipped there the last time,’ Helen said.

‘No, no,’ I pointed out quickly. ‘That one was a headstand. Here they were stretched out horizontally.’

‘You weren’t watching,’ Helen told me. She leant forward. ‘Well, what are they playing at? They’re repeating the whole thing for the third time.’

It was an entirely new act to me, but I didn’t try to argue.

I sat up and looked at the clock.

10.05.

‘Darling,’ I said, putting my arm round her. ‘Hold tight.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This is the merry-go-round. And you’re driving.’

1956

THE CONCENTRATION CITY

Noon talk on Millionth Street:

‘Sorry, these are the West Millions. You want 9775335th East.’

‘Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!’

‘Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you’ll find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.’

‘There’s a cave-in down at KEN County! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels.’

‘Listen to this – “PYROMANIACS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!”’

‘It’s a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 per cent monoxide. Cost me three hundred dollars.’

‘Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? They take only ten minutes to go up 3,000 levels!’

‘Ninety cents a foot? Buy!’

‘You say the idea came to you in a dream?’ the voice snapped. ‘You’re sure no one else gave it to you.’

‘No,’ M. said. A couple of feet away from him a spot-lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge and swung round on him again.

‘You talked it over with your friends?’

‘Only the first theory,’ M. explained. ‘About the possibility of flight.’

‘But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it from them?’

M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. ‘I was afraid they wouldn’t understand what I meant.’

The sergeant laughed. ‘Do you mean they would have thought you really were insane?’

M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of cross-questioning logic had faded. ‘The concept was a little abstract. There weren’t any words for it.’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘I’m glad to hear you say it.’ He sat down on the desk, watched M. for a moment and then went over to him.

‘Now look,’ he said confidentially. ‘It’s getting late. Do you still think both theories are reasonable?’

M. looked up. ‘Aren’t they?’

The sergeant turned to the man watching in the shadows by the window. ‘We’re wasting our time,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll hand him over to Psycho. You’ve seen enough, haven’t you, Doctor?’

The surgeon stared at his hands. He had taken no part in the interrogation, as if bored by the sergeant’s method of approach.

‘There’s something I want to find out,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone with him for half an hour.’

When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the ventilator shaft which rose out of the street below the station. A few roof lights were still burning and two hundred yards away a single policeman patrolled the iron catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness.

M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back into his legs.

Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet.

Name…………….. | Franz M.
Age………………. | 20.
Occupation………. | Student.
Address………….. | 3599719 West 783rd St, Level 549-7705-45 KNI (Local).
Charge…………… | Vagrancy.

‘Tell me about this dream,’ he said, idly flexing a steel rule between his hands as he looked across at M.

‘I think you’ve heard everything, sir,’ M. said.

‘In detail.’

M. shifted uneasily. ‘There wasn’t much to it, and what I do remember isn’t too clear now.’

The surgeon yawned. M. waited and then started to recite what he had already repeated twenty times.

‘I was suspended in the air above a flat stretch of open ground, something like the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down, floating –’

‘Hold on,’ the surgeon interrupted. ‘Are you sure you weren’t swimming?’

‘No,’ M. said. ‘I’m certain I wasn’t. All around me there was free space. That was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness. That’s all I remember.’

The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my friends helped me construct it.’

The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet and crushed it with a single motion of his hand.

‘Don’t be absurd, Franz!’ Gregson remonstrated. They took their places in the chemistry cafeteria queue. ‘It’s against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your buoyancy?’

‘Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane,’ Franz explained as they shuffled past the hatchways. ‘Say ten feet across, like one of those composition wall sections, with hand grips on the ventral surface. And then you jumped down from the gallery at the Coliseum Stadium. What would happen?’

‘You’d make a hole in the floor. Why?’

‘No, seriously.’

‘If it was large enough and held together you’d swoop down like a paper dart.’

‘Glide,’ Franz said. ‘Right.’ Thirty levels above them one of the intercity expresses roared over, rattling the tables and cutlery in the cafeteria. Franz waited until they reached a table and sat forward, his food forgotten.

‘And say you attached a propulsive unit, such as a battery-driven ventilator fan, or one of those rockets they use on the Sleepers. With enough thrust to overcome your weight. What then?’

Gregson shrugged. ‘If you could control the thing, you’d, you’d …’ He frowned at Franz. ‘What’s the word? You’re always using it.’

‘Fly.’

‘Basically, Matheson, the machine is simple,’ Sanger, the physics lector, commented as they entered the science library. ‘An elementary application of the Venturi Principle. But what’s the point of it? A trapeze would serve its purpose equally well, and be far less dangerous. In the first place consider the enormous clearances it would require. I hardly think the traffic authorities will look upon it with any favour.’

‘I know it wouldn’t be practical here,’ Franz admitted. ‘But in a large open area it should be.’

‘Allowed. I suggest you immediately negotiate with the Arena Garden on Level 347–25,’ the lector said whimsically. ‘I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear about your scheme.’

Franz smiled politely. ‘That wouldn’t be large enough. I was really thinking of an area of totally free space. In three dimensions, as it were.’

Sanger looked at Franz curiously. ‘Free space? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Space is a dollar a cubic foot.’ He scratched his nose. ‘Have you begun to construct this machine yet?’

‘No,’ Franz said.

‘In that event I should try to forget all about it. Remember, Matheson, the task of science is to consolidate existing knowledge, to systematize and reinterpret the discoveries of the past, not to chase wild dreams into the future.’

He nodded and disappeared among the dusty shelves.

Gregson was waiting on the steps.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Let’s try it out this afternoon,’ Franz said. ‘We’ll cut Text 5 Pharmacology. I know those Fleming readings backwards. I’ll ask Dr McGhee for a couple of passes.’

They left the library and walked down the narrow, dimly-lit alley which ran behind the huge new civil engineering laboratories. Over seventy-five per cent of the student enrolment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meagre two per cent in pure sciences. Consequently the physics and chemistry libraries were housed in the oldest quarter of the university, in two virtually condemned galvanized hutments which once contained the now closed philosophy school.

At the end of the alley they entered the university plaza and started to climb the iron stairway leading to the next level a hundred feet above. Halfway up a white-helmeted F.P. checked them cursorily with his detector and waved them past.

‘What did Sanger think?’ Gregson asked as they stepped up into 637th Street and walked across to the suburban elevator station.

‘He’s no use at all,’ Franz said. ‘He didn’t even begin to understand what I was talking about.’

Gregson laughed ruefully. ‘I don’t know whether I do.’

Franz took a ticket from the automat and mounted the down platform. An elevator dropped slowly towards him, its bell jangling.

‘Wait until this afternoon,’ he called back. ‘You’re really going to see something.’

The floor manager at the Coliseum initialled the two passes.

‘Students, eh? All right.’ He jerked a thumb at the long package Franz and Gregson were carrying. ‘What have you got there?’

‘It’s a device for measuring air velocities,’ Franz told him.

The manager grunted and released the stile.

Out in the centre of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fan-like wing of wire and paper, a narrow strutted fuselage and a high curving tail.

Franz picked it up and launched it into the air. The model glided for twenty feet and then slithered to a stop across the sawdust.

‘Seems to be stable,’ Franz said. ‘We’ll tow it first.’

He pulled a reel of twine from his pocket and tied one end to the nose. As they ran forward the model lifted gracefully into the air and followed them around the stadium, ten feet off the floor.

‘Let’s try the rockets now,’ Franz said. He adjusted the wing and tail settings and fitted three firework display rockets into a wire bracket mounted above the wing.

The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred and fifty feet high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.

There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of coloured smoke spitting out behind it. Its wings rocked gently from side to side. Suddenly the tail burst into flames. The model lifted steeply and looped up towards the roof, stalled just before it hit one of the pilot lights and dived down into the sawdust.

They ran across to it and stamped out the glowing cinders. ‘Franz!’ Gregson shouted. ‘It’s incredible! It actually works.’

Franz kicked the shattered fuselage. ‘Of course it works,’ he said impatiently. ‘But as Sanger said, what’s the point of it?’

‘The point? It flies! Isn’t that enough?’

‘No. I want one big enough to hold me.’

‘Franz, slow down. Be reasonable. Where could you fly it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Franz said fiercely. ‘But there must be somewhere!’

The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the stadium to them.

‘Did you hide the matches?’ Franz asked quickly. ‘They’ll lynch us if they think we’re Pyros.’

Three afternoons later Franz took the elevator up 150 levels to 677–98, where the Precinct Estate Office had its bureau.

‘There’s a big development between 493 and 554 in the next sector,’ one of the clerks told him. ‘I don’t know whether that’s any good to you. Sixty blocks by twenty by fifteen levels.’

‘Nothing bigger?’ Franz queried.

The clerk looked up. ‘Bigger? No. What are you looking for – a slight case of agoraphobia?’

Franz straightened the maps spread across the counter. ‘I wanted to find an area of more or less continuous development. Two or three hundred blocks long.’

The clerk shook his head and went back to his ledger. ‘Didn’t you go to engineering school?’ he asked scornfully. ‘The City won’t take it. One hundred blocks is the maximum.’

Franz thanked him and left.

A south-bound express took him to the development in two hours. He left the car at the detour point and walked the three hundred yards to the end of the level.

The street, a seedy but busy thoroughfare of garment shops and small business premises running through the huge ten-mile-thick B.I.R. Industrial Cube, ended abruptly in a tangle of ripped girders and concrete. A steel rail had been erected along the edge and Franz looked down over it into the cavity, three miles long, a mile wide and twelve hundred feet deep, which thousands of engineers and demolition workers were tearing out of the matrix of the City.

Eight hundred feet below him unending lines of trucks and railcars carried away the rubble and debris, and clouds of dust swirled up into the arc-lights blazing down from the roof. As he watched, a chain of explosions ripped along the wall on his left and the whole face slipped and fell slowly towards the floor, revealing a perfect cross-section through fifteen levels of the City.

Franz had seen big developments before, and his own parents had died in the historic QUA County cave-in ten years earlier, when three master-pillars had sheared and two hundred levels of the City had abruptly sunk ten thousand feet, squashing half a million people like flies in a concertina, but the enormous gulf of emptiness still stunned his imagination.

All around him, standing and sitting on the jutting terraces of girders, a silent throng stared down.

‘They say they’re going to build gardens and parks for us,’ an elderly man at Franz’s elbow remarked in a patient voice. ‘I even heard they might be able to get a tree. It’ll be the only tree in the whole county.’

A man in a frayed sweat-shirt spat over the rail. ‘That’s what they always say. At a dollar a foot promises are all they can waste space on.’

Below them a woman who had been looking out into the air started to simper nervously. Two bystanders took her by the arms and tried to lead her away. The woman began to thresh about and an F.P. came over and pulled her away roughly.

‘Poor fool,’ the man in the sweat-shirt commented. ‘She probably lived out there somewhere. They gave her ninety cents a foot when they took it away from her. She doesn’t know yet she’ll have to pay a dollar ten to get it back. Now they’re going to start charging five cents an hour just to sit up here and watch.’

Franz looked out over the railing for a couple of hours and then bought a postcard from one of the vendors and walked back to the elevator.

He called in to see Gregson before returning to the student dormitory. The Gregsons lived in the West millions on 985th Avenue, in a top three-room flat right under the roof. Franz had known them since his parents’ death, but Gregson’s mother still regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion. As she let him in with her customary smile of welcome he noticed her glancing at the detector mounted in the hall.

Gregson was in his room, happily cutting out frames of paper and pasting them on to a great rickety construction that vaguely resembled Franz’s model.

‘Hullo, Franz. What was it like?’

Franz shrugged. ‘Just a development. Worth seeing.’

Gregson pointed to his construction. ‘Do you think we can try it out there?’

‘We could do.’ Franz sat down on the bed. He picked up a paper dart lying beside him and tossed it out of the window. It swam into the street, lazed down in a wide spiral and vanished into the open mouth of the ventilator shaft.

‘When are you going to build another model?’ Gregson asked.

‘I’m not.’

Gregson looked up. ‘Why? You’ve proved your theory.’

‘That’s not what I’m after.’

‘I don’t get you, Franz. What are you after?’

‘Free space.’

‘Free?’ Gregson repeated.

Franz nodded. ‘In both senses.’

Gregson shook his head sadly and snipped out another paper panel. ‘Franz, you’re mad.’

Franz stood up. ‘Take this room,’ he said. ‘It’s twenty feet by fifteen by ten. Extend its dimensions infinitely. What do you find?’

‘A development.’

‘Infinitely!’

‘Non-functional space.’

‘Well?’ Franz asked patiently.

‘The concept’s absurd.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it couldn’t exist.’

Franz pounded his forehead in despair. ‘Why couldn’t it?’

Gregson gestured with the scissors. ‘It’s self-contradictory. Like the statement “I am lying”. Just a verbal freak. Interesting theoretically, but it’s pointless to press it for meaning.’ He tossed the scissors on to the table. ‘And anyway, do you know how much free space would cost?’

Franz went over to the bookshelf and pulled out one of the volumes. ‘Let’s have a look at your street atlas.’ He turned to the index. ‘This gives a thousand levels. KNI County, one hundred thousand cubic miles, population 30 million.’

Gregson nodded.

Franz closed the atlas. ‘Two hundred and fifty counties, including KNI, together form the 493rd Sector, and an association of 1,500 adjacent sectors comprise the 298th Local Union.’ He broke off and looked at Gregson. ‘As a matter of interest, ever heard of it?’

Gregson shook his head. ‘No. How did –’

Franz slapped the atlas on to the table. ‘Roughly 4 × 10¹⁵ cubic Great-Miles.’ He leaned on the window-ledge. ‘Now tell me: what lies beyond the 298th Local Union?’

‘Other unions, I suppose,’ Gregson said. ‘I don’t see your difficulty.’

‘And beyond those?’

‘Farther ones. Why not?’

‘For ever?’ Franz pressed.

‘Well, as far as for ever is.’

‘The great street directory in the old Treasury Library on 247th Street is the largest in the county,’ Franz said. ‘I went down there this morning. It occupies three complete levels. Millions of volumes. But it doesn’t extend beyond the 598th Local Union. No one there had any idea what lay farther out. Why not?’

‘Why should they?’ Gregson asked. ‘Franz, what are you driving at?’

Franz walked across to the door. ‘Come down to the Bio-History Museum. I’ll show you.’

The birds perched on humps of rock or waddled about the sandy paths between the water pools.

‘“Archaeopteryx”,’ Franz read off one of the cage indicators. The bird, lean and mildewed, uttered a painful croak when he fed a handful of beans to it.

‘Some of these birds have the remnants of a pectoral girdle,’ Franz said. ‘Minute fragments of bone embedded in the tissues around their rib cages.’

‘Wings?’

‘Dr McGhee thinks so.’

They walked out between the lines of cages.

‘When does he think they were flying?’

‘Before the Foundation,’ Franz said. ‘Three million years ago.’

When they were outside the museum they started down 859th Avenue. Halfway down the street a dense crowd had gathered and people were packed into the windows and balconies above the elevated, watching a squad of Fire Police break their way into a house.

The bulkheads at either end of the block had been closed and heavy steel traps sealed off the stairways from the levels above and below. The ventilator and exhaust shafts were silent and already the air was stale and soupy.

‘Pyros,’ Gregson murmured. ‘We should have brought our masks.’

‘It’s only a scare,’ Franz said. He pointed to the monoxide detectors which were out everywhere, their long snouts sucking at the air. The dial needles stood safely at zero. ‘Let’s wait in the restaurant opposite.’

They edged their way over to the restaurant, sat down in the window and ordered coffee. This, like everything else on the menu, was cold. All cooking appliances were thermostated to a maximum 95°F., and only in the more expensive restaurants and hotels was it possible to obtain food that was at most tepid.

Below them in the street a lot of shouting went up. The Fire Police seemed unable to penetrate beyond the ground floor of the house and had started to baton back the crowd. An electric winch was wheeled up and bolted to the girders running below the kerb, and half a dozen heavy steel grabs were carried into the house and hooked round the walls.

Gregson laughed. ‘The owners are going to be surprised when they get home.’

Franz was watching the house. It was a narrow shabby dwelling sandwiched between a large wholesale furniture store and a new supermarket. An old sign running across the front had been painted over and evidently the ownership had recently changed. The present tenants had made a half-hearted attempt to convert the ground floor room into a cheap stand-up diner. The Fire Police appeared to be doing their best to wreck everything, and pies and smashed crockery were strewn all over the pavement.

The noise died away and everyone waited as the winch began to revolve. The hawsers wound in and tautened, and the front wall of the house staggered outwards in rigid jerky movements.

Suddenly there was a yell from the crowd.

Franz raised his arm. ‘Up there! Look!’

On the fourth floor a man and woman had come to the window and were looking down helplessly. The man lifted the woman on to the ledge and she crawled out and clung to one of the waste pipes. Bottles were lobbed up at them and bounced down among the police. A wide crack split the house from top to bottom and the floor on which the man was standing dropped and catapulted him backwards out of sight. Then one of the lintels in the first floor snapped and the entire house tipped over and collapsed.

Franz and Gregson stood up, almost knocking over the table.

The crowd surged forward through the cordon. When the dust had settled there was nothing left but a heap of masonry and twisted beams. Embedded in this was the battered figure of the man. Almost smothered by the dust he moved slowly, trying to free himself with one hand, and the crowd started roaring again as one of the grabs wound in and dragged him down under the rubble.

The manager of the restaurant pushed past Franz and leant out of the window, his eyes fixed on the dial of a portable detector. Its needle, like all the others, pointed to zero.

A dozen hoses were playing on the remains of the house and after a few minutes the crowd shifted and began to thin out.

The manager switched off the detector and left the window, nodding to Franz. ‘Damn Pyros. You can relax now, boys.’

Franz pointed at the detector. ‘Your dial was dead. There wasn’t a trace of monoxide anywhere here. How do you know they were Pyros?’

‘Don’t worry, we know.’ He smiled obliquely. ‘We don’t want that sort of element in this neighbourhood.’

Franz shrugged and sat down. ‘I suppose that’s one way of getting rid of them.’

The manager eyed Franz. ‘That’s right, boy. This is a good dollar five neighbourhood.’ He smirked to himself. ‘Maybe a dollar six now everybody knows about our safety record.’

‘Careful, Franz,’ Gregson warned him when the manager had gone. ‘He may be right. Pyromaniacs do take over small cafés and food bars.’

Franz stirred his coffee. ‘Dr McGhee estimates that at least fifteen per cent of the City’s population are submerged Pyros. He’s convinced the number’s growing and that eventually the whole City will flame-out.’

He pushed away his coffee. ‘How much money have you got?’

‘On me?’

‘Altogether.’

‘About thirty dollars.’

‘I’ve saved fifteen,’ Franz said. ‘Forty-five dollars; that should be enough for three or four weeks.’

‘Where?’ Gregson asked.

‘On a Supersleeper.’

‘Super –!’ Gregson broke off, alarmed. ‘Three or four weeks! What do you mean?’

‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Franz explained calmly. ‘I can’t just sit here thinking. Somewhere there’s free space and I’ll ride the Sleeper until I find it. Will you lend me your thirty dollars?’

‘But Franz –’

‘If I don’t find anything within a couple of weeks I’ll change tracks and come back.’

‘But the ticket will cost …’ Gregson searched ‘… billions. Forty-five dollars won’t even get you out of the Sector.’

‘That’s just for coffee and sandwiches,’ Franz said. ‘The ticket will be free.’ He looked up from the table. ‘You know …’

Gregson shook his head doubtfully. ‘Can you try that on the Supersleepers?’

‘Why not? If they query it I’ll say I’m going back the long way round. Greg, will you?’

‘I don’t know if I should.’ Gregson played helplessly with his coffee. ‘Franz, how can there be free space? How?’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ Franz said. ‘Think of it as my first physics practical.’

Passenger distances on the transport system were measured point to point by the application of a = √ b² + c² + d². The actual itinerary taken was the passenger’s responsibility, and as long as he remained within the system he could choose any route he liked. Tickets were checked only at the station exits, where necessary surcharges were collected by an inspector. If the passenger was unable to pay the surcharge – ten cents a mile – he was sent back to his original destination.

Franz and Gregson entered the station on 984th Street and went over to the large console where tickets were automatically dispensed. Franz put in a penny and pressed the destination button marked 984. The machine rumbled, coughed out a ticket, and the change slot gave him back his coin.

‘Well, Greg, goodbye,’ Franz said as they moved towards the barrier. ‘I’ll see you in about two weeks. They’re covering me down at the dormitory. Tell Sanger I’m on Fire Duty.’

‘What if you don’t get back, Franz?’ Gregson asked. ‘Suppose they take you off the Sleeper?’

‘How can they? I’ve got my ticket.’

‘And if you do find free space? Will you come back then?’

‘If I can.’

Franz patted Gregson on the shoulder reassuringly, waved and disappeared among the commuters.

He took the local Suburban Green to the district junction in the next county. The Green Line train travelled at an interrupted 70 m.p.h. and the ride took two and a half hours.

At the junction he changed to an express elevator which lifted him out of the sector in ninety minutes, at 400 m.p.h. Another fifty minutes in a Through-Sector Special brought him to the Mainline Terminus which served the Union.

There he bought a coffee and gathered his determination together. Supersleepers ran east and west, halting at this and every tenth station. The next arrived in seventy-two hours time, westbound.

The Mainline Terminus was the largest station Franz had seen, a mile-long cavern thirty levels in depth. Hundreds of elevator shafts sank through the station and the maze of platforms, escalators, restaurants, hotels and theatres seemed like an exaggerated replica of the City itself.

Getting his bearings from one of the information booths, Franz made his way up an escalator to Tier 15, where the Supersleepers berthed. Running the length of the station were two steel vacuum tunnels each three hundred feet in diameter, supported at thirty-four intervals by huge concrete buttresses.

Franz walked along the platform and stopped by the telescopic gangway that plunged into one of the airlocks. Two hundred and seventy degrees true, he thought, gazing up at the curving underbelly of the tunnel. It must come out somewhere. He had forty-five dollars in his pocket, sufficient coffee and sandwich money to last him three weeks, six if he needed it, time anyway to find the City’s end.

He passed the next three days nursing cups of coffee in any of the thirty cafeterias in the station, reading discarded newspapers and sleeping in the local Red trains which ran four-hour journeys round the nearest sector.

When at last the Supersleeper came in he joined the small group of Fire Police and municipal officials waiting by the gangway, and followed them into the train. There were two cars; a sleeper which no one used, and a day coach.

Franz took an inconspicuous corner seat near one of the indicator panels in the day coach, and pulled out his notebook ready to make his first entry.

1st Day: West 270 °. Union 4,350.

‘Coming out for a drink?’ a Fire Captain across the aisle asked. ‘We have a ten-minute break here.’

‘No thanks,’ Franz said. ‘I’ll hold your seat for you.’

Dollar five a cubic foot. Free space, he knew, would bring the price down. There was no need to leave the train or make too many inquiries. All he had to do was borrow a paper and watch the market averages.

2nd Day: West 270 °. Union 7,550.

‘They’re slowly cutting down on these Sleepers,’ someone told him. ‘Everyone sits in the day coach. Look at this one. Seats sixty, and only four people in it. There’s no need to move around. People are staying where they are. In a few years there’ll be nothing left but the suburban services.’

97 cents.

At an average of a dollar a cubic foot, Franz calculated idly, it’s so far worth about $4 × 10²⁷.

‘Going on to the next stop, are you? Well, goodbye, young fellow.’

Few of the passengers stayed on the Sleeper for more than three or four hours. By the end of the second day Franz’s back and neck ached from the constant acceleration. He managed to take a little exercise walking up and down the narrow corridor in the deserted sleeping coach, but had to spend most of his time strapped to his seat as the train began its long braking runs into the next station.

3rd Day: West 270 °. Federation 657.

‘Interesting, but how could you demonstrate it?’

‘It’s just an odd idea of mine,’ Franz said, screwing up the sketch and dropping it in the disposal chute. ‘Hasn’t any real application.’

‘Curious, but it rings a bell somewhere.’

Franz sat up. ‘Do you mean you’ve seen machines like this? In a newspaper or a book?’

‘No, no. In a dream.’

Every half day’s run the pilot signed the log, the crew handed over to their opposites on an Eastbound sleeper, crossed the platform and started back for home.

125 cents.

$8 × 10²⁸.

4th Day: West 270 °. Federation 1,225.

‘Dollar a cubic foot. You in the estate business?’

‘Starting up,’ Franz said easily. ‘I’m hoping to open a new office of my own.’

He played cards, bought coffee and rolls from the dispenser in the washroom, watched the indicator panel and listened to the talk around him.

‘Believe me, a time will come when each union, each sector, almost I might say, each street and avenue will have achieved complete local independence. Equipped with its own power services, aerators, reservoirs, farm laboratories …’

The car bore.

$6 × 10⁷⁵.

5th Day: West 270 °. 17th Greater Federation.

At a kiosk on the station Franz bought a clip of razor blades and glanced at the brochure put out by the local chamber of commerce.

‘12,000 levels, 98 cents a foot, unique Elm Drive, fire safety records unequalled …’

He went back to the train, shaved, and counted the thirty dollars left. He was now ninety-five million Great-Miles from the suburban station on 984th Street and he knew he could not delay his return much longer. Next time he would save up a couple of thousand.

$7 × 10¹²⁷.

7th Day: West 270 °. 212th Metropolitan Empire.

Franz peered at the indicator.

‘Aren’t we stopping here?’ he asked a man three seats away. ‘I wanted to find out the market average.’

‘Varies. Anything from fifty cents a –’

‘Fifty!’ Franz shot back, jumping up. ‘When’s the next stop? I’ve got to get off!’

‘Not here, son.’ He put out a restraining hand. ‘This is Night Town. You in real estate?’

Franz nodded, holding himself back. ‘I thought …’

‘Relax.’ He came and sat opposite Franz. ‘It’s just one big slum. Dead areas. In places it goes as low as five cents. There are no services, no power.’

It took them two days to pass through.

‘City Authority are starting to seal it off,’ the man told him. ‘Huge blocks. It’s the only thing they can do. What happens to the people inside I hate to think.’ He chewed on a sandwich. ‘Strange, but there are a lot of these black areas. You don’t hear about them, but they’re growing. Starts in a back street in some ordinary dollar neighbourhood; a bottleneck in the sewage disposal system, not enough ash cans, and before you know it – a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle. They try a relief scheme, pump in a little cyanide, and then – brick it up. Once they do that they’re closed for good.’

Franz nodded, listening to the dull humming air.

‘Eventually there’ll be nothing left but these black areas. The City will be one huge cemetery!’

10th Day: East 90°. 755th Greater Metropolitan –

‘Wait!’ Franz leapt out of his seat and stared at the indicator panel.

‘What’s the matter?’ someone opposite asked.

‘East!’ Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights held. ‘Has this train changed direction?’

‘No, it’s eastbound,’ another of the passengers told him. ‘Are you on the wrong train?’

‘It should be heading west,’ Franz insisted. ‘It has been for the last ten days.’

‘Ten days!’ the man exclaimed. ‘Have you been on this sleeper for ten days?’

Franz went forward and found the car attendant. ‘Which way is this train going? West?’

The attendant shook his head. ‘East, sir. It’s always been going east.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Franz snapped. ‘I want to see the pilot’s log.’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible. May I see your ticket, sir?’

‘Listen,’ Franz said weakly, all the accumulated frustration of the last twenty years mounting inside him. ‘I’ve been on this …’

He stopped and went back to his seat.

The five other passengers watched him carefully.

‘Ten days,’ one of them was still repeating in an awed voice.

Two minutes later someone came and asked Franz for his ticket.

‘And of course it was completely in order,’ the police surgeon commented. ‘Strangely enough there’s no regulation to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. I used to go for free rides myself when I was younger, though I never tried anything like your journey.’

He went back to the desk. ‘We’ll drop the charge,’ he said. ‘You’re not a vagrant in any indictable sense, and the transport authorities can do nothing against you. How this curvature was built into the system they can’t explain, it seems to be some inherent feature of the City itself. Now about yourself. Are you going to continue this search?’

‘I want to build a flying machine,’ M. said carefully. ‘There must be free space somewhere. I don’t know … perhaps on the lower levels.’

The surgeon stood up. ‘I’ll see the sergeant and get him to hand you over to one of our psychiatrists. He’ll be able to help you with your dreams!’

The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. ‘Look,’ he began to explain, ‘you can’t get out of time, can you? Subjectively it’s a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you’ll never be able to stop that clock’ – he pointed to the one on the desk – ‘or make it run backwards. In exactly the same way you can’t get out of the City.’

‘The analogy doesn’t hold,’ M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the street outside. ‘All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?’

‘It’s always been here,’ the surgeon said. ‘Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it.’

‘The first bricks were laid by someone,’ M. insisted. ‘There was the Foundation.’

‘A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don’t try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can’t have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it and, even more difficult, where they came from?’

‘There must be free space somewhere,’ M. said doggedly. ‘The City must have bounds.’

‘Why?’ the surgeon asked. ‘It can’t be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you’re trying to believe?’

M. sank back limply. ‘No.’

The surgeon watched M. silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. ‘This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You’re caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven’t misinterpreted something you’ve heard about the Wall?’

M. looked up. ‘Which wall?’

The surgeon nodded to himself. ‘Some advanced opinion maintains that there’s a wall around the City, through which it’s impossible to penetrate. I don’t pretend to understand the theory myself. It’s far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they’ve confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.’

He went over to the door. ‘Wait here, and I’ll see about getting you a probationary release. Don’t worry, the psychiatrists will straighten everything out for you.’

When the surgeon had left M. stared at the floor, too exhausted to feel relieved. He stood up and stretched himself, walking unsteadily round the room.

Outside the last pilot lights were going out and the patrolman on the catwalk under the roof was using his torch. A police car roared down one of the avenues crossing the street, its rails screaming. Three lights snapped on along the street and then one by one went off again.

M. wondered why Gregson hadn’t come down to the station. Then the calendar on the desk riveted his attention. The date exposed on the fly leaf was 12 August. That was the day he had started off on his journey – exactly three weeks ago.

Today!

Take a westbound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and get a Red elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the station on Route 175, change to a 438 suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blue line to the Plaza, get off at 4th and 275th, turn left at the roundabout and –

You’re back where you first started from.

$Hell × 10n.

1957

VENUS SMILES

Low notes on a high afternoon.

As we drove away after the unveiling my secretary said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I suppose you realize what a fool you’ve made of yourself?’

‘Don’t sound so prim,’ I told her. ‘How was I to know Lorraine Drexel would produce something like that?’

‘Five thousand dollars,’ she said reflectively. ‘It’s nothing but a piece of old scrap iron. And the noise! Didn’t you look at her sketches? What’s the Fine Arts Committee for?’

My secretaries have always talked to me like this, and just then I could understand why. I stopped the car under the trees at the end of the square and looked back. The chairs had been cleared away and already a small crowd had gathered around the statue, staring up at it curiously. A couple of tourists were banging one of the struts, and the thin metal skeleton shuddered weakly. Despite this, a monotonous and high-pitched wailing sounded from the statue across the pleasant morning air, grating the teeth of passers-by.

‘Raymond Mayo is having it dismantled this afternoon,’ I said. ‘If it hasn’t already been done for us. I wonder where Miss Drexel is?’

‘Don’t worry, you won’t see her in Vermilion Sands again. I bet she’s halfway to Red Beach by now.’

I patted Carol on the shoulder. ‘Relax. You looked beautiful in your new skirt. The Medicis probably felt like this about Michelangelo. Who are we to judge?’

‘You are,’ she said. ‘You were on the committee, weren’t you?’

‘Darling,’ I explained patiently. ‘Sonic sculpture is the thing. You’re trying to fight a battle the public lost thirty years ago.’

We drove back to my office in a thin silence. Carol was annoyed because she had been forced to sit beside me on the platform when the audience began to heckle my speech at the unveiling, but even so the morning had been disastrous on every count. What might be perfectly acceptable at Expo 75 or the Venice Biennale was all too obviously passé at Vermilion Sands.

When we had decided to commission a sonic sculpture for the square in the centre of Vermilion Sands, Raymond Mayo and I had agreed that we should patronize a local artist. There were dozens of professional sculptors in Vermilion Sands, but only three had deigned to present themselves before the committee. The first two we saw were large, bearded men with enormous fists and impossible schemes – one for a hundred-foot-high vibrating aluminium pylon, and the other for a vast booming family group that involved over fifteen tons of basalt mounted on a megalithic step-pyramid. Each had taken an hour to be argued out of the committee room.

The third was a woman: Lorraine Drexel. This elegant and autocratic creature in a cartwheel hat, with her eyes like black orchids, was a sometime model and intimate of Giacometti and John Cage. Wearing a blue crêpe de Chine dress ornamented with lace serpents and other art nouveau emblems, she sat before us like some fugitive Salome from the world of Aubrey Beardsley. Her immense eyes regarded us with an almost hypnotic calm, as if she had discovered that very moment some unique quality in these two amiable dilettantes of the Fine Arts Committee.

She had lived in Vermilion Sands for only three months, arriving via Berlin, Calcutta and the Chicago New Arts Centre. Most of her sculpture to date had been scored for various Tantric and Hindu hymns, and I remembered her brief affair with a world-famous pop-singer, later killed in a car crash, who had been an enthusiastic devotee of the sitar. At the time, however, we had given no thought to the whining quarter-tones of this infernal instrument, so grating on the Western ear. She had shown us an album of her sculptures, interesting chromium constructions that compared favourably with the run of illustrations in the latest art magazines. Within half an hour we had drawn up a contract.

I saw the statue for the first time that afternoon thirty seconds before I started my speech to the specially selected assembly of Vermilion Sands notables. Why none of us had bothered to look at it beforehand I fail to understand. The title printed on the invitation cards – ‘Sound and Quantum: Generative Synthesis 3’ – had seemed a little odd, and the general shape of the shrouded statue even more suspicious. I was expecting a stylized human figure but the structure under the acoustic drapes had the proportions of a medium-sized radar aerial. However, Lorraine Drexel sat beside me on the stand, her bland eyes surveying the crowd below. A dream-like smile gave her the look of a tamed Mona Lisa.

What we saw after Raymond Mayo pulled the tape I tried not to think about. With its pedestal the statue was twelve feet high. Three spindly metal legs, ornamented with spikes and crosspieces, reached up from the plinth to a triangular apex. Clamped on to this was a jagged structure that at first sight seemed to be an old Buick radiator grille. It had been bent into a rough U five feet across, and the two arms jutted out horizontally, a single row of sonic cores, each about a foot long, poking up like the teeth of an enormous comb. Welded on apparently at random all over the statue were twenty or thirty filigree vanes.

That was all. The whole structure of scratched chromium had a blighted look like a derelict antenna. Startled a little by the first shrill whoops emitted by the statue, I began my speech and was about halfway through when I noticed that Lorraine Drexel had left her seat beside me. People in the audience were beginning to stand up and cover their ears, shouting to Raymond to replace the acoustic drape. A hat sailed through the air over my head and landed neatly on one of the sonic cores. The statue was now giving out an intermittent high-pitched whine, a sitar-like caterwauling that seemed to pull apart the sutures of my skull. Responding to the boos and protests, it suddenly began to whoop erratically, the horn-like sounds confusing the traffic on the far side of the square.

As the audience began to leave their seats en masse I stuttered inaudibly to the end of my speech, the wailing of the statue interrupted by shouts and jeers. Then Carol tugged me sharply by the arm, her eyes flashing. Raymond Mayo pointed with a nervous hand.

The three of us were alone on the platform, the rows of overturned chairs reaching across the square. Standing twenty yards from the statue, which had now begun to whimper plaintively, was Lorraine Drexel. I expected to see a look of fury and outrage on her face, but instead her unmoving eyes showed the calm and implacable contempt of a grieving widow insulted at her husband’s funeral. As we waited awkwardly, watching the wind carry away the torn programme cards, she turned on a diamond heel and walked across the square.

No one else wanted anything to do with the statue, so I was finally presented with it. Lorraine Drexel left Vermilion Sands the day it was dismantled. Raymond spoke briefly to her on the telephone before she went. I presumed she would be rather unpleasant and didn’t bother to listen in on the extension.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Does she want it back?’

‘No.’ Raymond seemed slightly preoccupied. ‘She said it belonged to us.’

‘You and me?’

‘Everybody.’ Raymond helped himself to the decanter of scotch on the veranda table. ‘Then she started laughing.’

‘Good. What at?’

‘I don’t know. She just said that we’d grow to like it.’

There was nowhere else to put the statue so I planted it out in the garden. Without the stone pedestal it was only six feet high. Shielded by the shrubbery, it had quietened down and now emitted a pleasant melodic harmony, its soft rondos warbling across the afternoon heat. The sitar-like twangs, which the statue had broadcast in the square like some pathetic love-call from Lorraine Drexel to her dead lover, had vanished completely, almost as if the statue had been rescored. I had been so stampeded by the disastrous unveiling that I had had little chance to see it and I thought it looked a lot better in the garden than it had done in Vermilion Sands, the chromium struts and abstract shapes standing out against the desert like something in a vodka advertisement. After a few days I could almost ignore it.

A week or so later we were out on the terrace after lunch, lounging back in the deck chairs. I was nearly asleep when Carol said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I think it’s moving.’

‘What’s moving?’

Carol was sitting up, head cocked to one side. ‘The statue. It looks different.’

I focused my eyes on the statue twenty feet away. The radiator grille at the top had canted around slightly but the three stems still seemed more or less upright.

‘The rain last night must have softened the ground,’ I said. I listened to the quiet melodies carried on the warm eddies of air, and then lay back drowsily. I heard Carol light a cigarette with four matches and walk across the veranda.

When I woke in an hour’s time she was sitting straight up in the deck chair, a frown creasing her forehead.

‘Swallowed a bee?’ I asked. ‘You look worried.’

Then something caught my eye.

I watched the statue for a moment. ‘You’re right. It is moving.’

Carol nodded. The statue’s shape had altered perceptibly. The grille had spread into an open gondola whose sonic cores seemed to feel at the sky, and the three stem-pieces were wider apart. All the angles seemed different.

‘I thought you’d notice it eventually,’ Carol said as we walked over to it. ‘What’s it made of?’

‘Wrought iron – I think. There must be a lot of copper or lead in it. The heat is making it sag.’

‘Then why is it sagging upwards instead of down?’

I touched one of the shoulder struts. It was springing elastically as the air moved across the vanes and went on vibrating against my palm. I gripped it in both hands and tried to keep it rigid. A low but discernible pulse pumped steadily against me.

I backed away from it, wiping the flaking chrome off my hands. The Mozartian harmonies had gone, and the statue was now producing a series of low Mahler-like chords. As Carol stood there in her bare feet I remembered that the height specification we had given to Lorraine Drexel had been exactly two metres. But the statue was a good three feet higher than Carol, the gondola at least six or seven across. The spars and struts looked thicker and stronger.

‘Carol,’ I said. ‘Get me a file, would you? There are some in the garage.’

She came back with two files and a hacksaw.

‘Are you going to cut it down?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Darling, this is an original Drexel.’ I took one of the files. ‘I just want to convince myself that I’m going insane.’

I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint.

‘All right,’ I said when I had finished. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

We sat on the veranda and waited. I fixed my eyes on the statue and could have sworn that it didn’t move. But when we went back an hour later the gondola had swung right round again, hanging down over us like an immense metal mouth.

There was no need to check the notch intervals against the file. They were all at least double the original distance apart.

‘Mr Hamilton,’ Carol said. ‘Look at this.’

She pointed to one of the spikes. Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. One or two were already beginning to hollow themselves. Unmistakably they were incipient sonic cores.

Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new shoots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate construction. A medley of half-familiar sounds, fragments of a dozen overtures and symphonies, murmured all over it. The statue was well over twelve feet high. I felt one of the heavy struts and the pulse was stronger, beating steadily through the metal, as if it was thrusting itself on to the sound of its own music.

Carol was watching me with a pinched and worried look.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘It’s only growing.’

We went back to the veranda and watched.

By six o’clock that evening it was the size of a small tree. A spirited simultaneous rendering of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture and Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto trumpeted across the garden.

‘The strangest thing about it,’ Raymond said the next morning, raising his voice above the din, ‘is that it’s still a Drexel.’

‘Still a piece of sculpture, you mean?’

‘More than that. Take any section of it and you’ll find the original motifs being repeated. Each vane, each helix has all the authentic Drexel mannerisms, almost as if she herself were shaping it. Admittedly, this penchant for the late Romantic composers is a little out of keeping with all that sitar twanging, but that’s rather a good thing, if you ask me. You can probably expect to hear some Beethoven any moment now – the Pastoral Symphony, I would guess.’

‘Not to mention all five piano concertos – played at once,’ I said sourly. Raymond’s loquacious delight in this musical monster out in the garden annoyed me. I closed the veranda windows, wishing that he himself had installed the statue in the living room of his downtown apartment. ‘I take it that it won’t go on growing for ever?’

Carol handed Raymond another scotch. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’

Raymond shrugged. ‘Why worry?’ he said airily. ‘When it starts tearing the house down cut it back. Thank God we had it dismantled. If this had happened in Vermilion Sands …’

Carol touched my arm. ‘Mr Hamilton, perhaps that’s what Lorraine Drexel expected. She wanted it to start spreading all over the town, the music driving everyone crazy –’

‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘You’re running away with yourself. As Raymond says, we can chop it up any time we want to and melt the whole thing down.’

‘Why don’t you, then?’

‘I want to see how far it’ll go,’ I said. In fact my motives were more mixed. Clearly, before she left, Lorraine Drexel had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork. As Raymond had said, the present babel of symphonic music had no connection with the melancholy cries the statue had first emitted. Had those forlorn chords been intended to be a requiem for her dead lover – or even, conceivably, the beckoning calls of a still unsurrendered heart? Whatever her motives, they had now vanished into this strange travesty lying across my garden.

I watched the statue reaching slowly across the lawn. It had collapsed under its own weight and lay on its side in a huge angular spiral, twenty feet long and about fifteen feet high, like the skeleton of a futuristic whale. Fragments of the Nutcracker Suite and Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony sounded from it, overlaid by sudden blaring excerpts from the closing movements of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The selection of these hack classics seemed deliberately designed to get on my nerves.

I had been up with the statue most of the night. After Carol went to bed I drove my car on to the strip of lawn next to the house and turned on the headlamps. The statue stood out almost luminously in the darkness, booming away to itself, more and more of the sonic cores budding out in the yellow glare of the lights. Gradually it lost its original shape; the toothed grille enveloped itself and then put out new struts and barbs that spiralled upwards, each throwing off secondary and tertiary shoots in its turn. Shortly after midnight it began to lean and then suddenly toppled over.

By now its movement was corkscrew. The plinth had been carried into the air and hung somewhere in the middle of the tangle, revolving slowly, and the main foci of activity were at either end. The growth rate was accelerating. We watched a new shoot emerge. As one of the struts curved round a small knob poked through the flaking chrome. Within a minute it grew into a spur an inch long, thickened, began to curve and five minutes later had developed into a full-throated sonic core twelve inches long.

Raymond pointed to two of my neighbours standing on the roofs of their houses a hundred yards away, alerted by the music carried across to them. ‘You’ll soon have everyone in Vermilion Sands out here. If I were you, I’d throw an acoustic drape over it.’

‘If I could find one the size of a tennis court. It’s time we did something, anyway. See if you can trace Lorraine Drexel. I’m going to find out what makes this statue go.’

Using the hacksaw, I cut off a two-foot limb and handed it to Dr Blackett, an eccentric but amiable neighbour who sometimes dabbled in sculpture himself. We walked back to the comparative quiet of the veranda. The single sonic core emitted a few random notes, fragments from a quartet by Webern.

‘What do you make of it?’

‘Remarkable,’ Blackett said. He bent the bar between his hands. ‘Almost plastic.’ He looked back at the statue. ‘Definite circumnutation there. Probably phototropic as well. Hmm, almost like a plant.’

‘Is it alive?’

Blackett laughed. ‘My dear Hamilton, of course not. How can it be?’

‘Well, where is it getting its new material? From the ground?’

‘From the air. I don’t know yet, but I imagine it’s rapidly synthesizing an allotropic form of ferrous oxide. In other words, a purely physical rearrangement of the constituents of rust.’ Blackett stroked his heavy brush moustache and stared at the statue with a dream-like eye. ‘Musically, it’s rather curious – an appalling conglomeration of almost every bad note ever composed. Somewhere the statue must have suffered some severe sonic trauma. It’s behaving as if it had been left for a week in a railroad shunting yard. Any idea what happened?’

‘Not really.’ I avoided his glance as we walked back to the statue. It seemed to sense us coming and began to trumpet out the opening bars of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ march. Deliberately breaking step, I said to Blackett: ‘So in fact all I have to do to silence the thing is chop it up into two-foot lengths?’

‘If it worries you. However, it would be interesting to leave it, assuming you can stand the noise. There’s absolutely no danger of it going on indefinitely.’ He reached up and felt one of the spars. ‘Still firm, but I’d say it was almost there. It will soon start getting pulpy like an over-ripe fruit and begin to shred off and disintegrate, playing itself out, one hopes, with Mozart’s Requiem and the finale of the Götterdämmerung.’ He smiled at me, showing his strange teeth. ‘Die, if you prefer it.’

However, he had reckoned completely without Lorraine Drexel.

At six o’clock the next morning I was woken by the noise. The statue was now fifty feet long and crossing the flower beds on either side of the garden. It sounded as if a complete orchestra were performing some Mad Hatter’s symphony out in the centre of the lawn. At the far end, by the rockery, the sonic cores were still working their way through the Romantic catalogue, a babel of Mendelssohn, Schubert and Grieg, but near the veranda the cores were beginning to emit the jarring and syncopated rhythms of Stravinsky and Stockhausen.

I woke Carol and we ate a nervous breakfast.

‘Mr Hamilton!’ she shouted. ‘You’ve got to stop it!’ The nearest tendrils were only five feet from the glass doors of the veranda. The largest limbs were over three inches in diameter and the pulse thudded through them like water under pressure in a fire hose.

When the first police cars cruised past down the road I went into the garage and found the hacksaw.

The metal was soft and the blade sank through it quickly. I left the pieces I cut off in a heap to one side, random notes sounding out into the air. Separated from the main body of the statue, the fragments were almost inactive, as Dr Blackett had stated. By two o’clock that afternoon I had cut back about half the statue and got it down to manageable proportions.

‘That should hold it,’ I said to Carol. I walked round and lopped off a few of the noisier spars. ‘Tomorrow I’ll finish it off altogether.’

I wasn’t in the least surprised when Raymond called and said that there was no trace anywhere of Lorraine Drexel.

At two o’clock that night I woke as a window burst across the floor of my bedroom. A huge metal helix hovered like a claw through the fractured pane, its sonic core screaming down at me.

A half-moon was up, throwing a thin grey light over the garden. The statue had sprung back and was twice as large as it had been at its peak the previous morning. It lay all over the garden in a tangled mesh, like the skeleton of a crushed building. Already the advance tendrils had reached the bedroom windows, while others had climbed over the garage and were sprouting downwards through the roof, tearing away the galvanized metal sheets.

All over the statue thousands of sonic cores gleamed in the light thrown down from the window. At last in unison, they hymned out the finale of Bruckner’s Apocalyptic Symphony.

I went into Carol’s bedroom, fortunately on the other side of the house, and made her promise to stay in bed. Then I telephoned Raymond Mayo. He came around within an hour, an oxyacetylene torch and cylinders he had begged from a local contractor in the back seat of his car.

The statue was growing almost as fast as we could cut it back, but by the time the first light came up at a quarter to six we had beaten it.

Dr Blackett watched us slice through the last fragments of the statue. ‘There’s a section down in the rockery that might just be audible. I think it would be worth saving.’

I wiped the rust-stained sweat from my face and shook my head. ‘No. I’m sorry, but believe me, once is enough.’

Blackett nodded in sympathy, and stared gloomily across the heaps of scrap iron which were all that remained of the statue.

Carol, looking a little stunned by everything, was pouring coffee and brandy. As we slumped back in two of the deck chairs, arms and faces black with rust and metal filings, I reflected wryly that no one could accuse the Fine Arts Committee of not devoting itself wholeheartedly to its projects.

I went off on a final tour of the garden, collecting the section Blackett had mentioned, then guided in the local contractor who had arrived with his truck. It took him and his two men an hour to load the scrap – an estimated ton and a half – into the vehicle.

‘What do I do with it?’ he asked as he climbed into the cab. ‘Take it to the museum?’

‘No!’ I almost screamed. ‘Get rid of it. Bury it somewhere, or better still, have it melted down. As soon as possible.’

When they had gone Blackett and I walked around the garden together. It looked as if a shrapnel shell had exploded over it. Huge divots were strewn all over the place, and what grass had not been ripped up by the statue had been trampled away by us. Iron filings lay on the lawn like dust, a faint ripple of lost notes carried away on the steepening sunlight.

Blackett bent down and scooped up a handful of grains. ‘Dragon’s teeth. You’ll look out of the window tomorrow and see the B Minor Mass coming up.’ He let it run out between his fingers. ‘However, I suppose that’s the end of it.’

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Lorraine Drexel sued us. She must have come across the newspaper reports and realized her opportunity. I don’t know where she had been hiding, but her lawyers materialized quickly enough, waving the original contract and pointing to the clause in which we guaranteed to protect the statue from any damage that might be done to it by vandals, livestock or other public nuisance. Her main accusation concerned the damage we had done to her reputation – if we had decided not to exhibit the statue we should have supervised its removal to some place of safekeeping, not openly dismembered it and then sold off the fragments to a scrap dealer. This deliberate affront had, her lawyers insisted, cost her commissions to a total of at least fifty thousand dollars.

At the preliminary hearings we soon realized that, absurdly, our one big difficulty was going to be proving to anyone who had not been there that the statue had actually started growing. With luck we managed to get several postponements, and Raymond and I tried to trace what we could of the statue. All we found were three small struts, now completely inert, rusting in the sand on the edge of one of the junkyards in Red Beach. Apparently taking me at my word, the contractor had shipped the rest of the statue to a steel mill to be melted down.

Our only case now rested on what amounted to a plea of self-defence. Raymond and myself testified that the statue had started to grow, and then Blackett delivered a long homily to the judge on what he believed to be the musical shortcomings of the statue. The judge, a crusty and short-tempered old man of the hanging school, immediately decided that we were trying to pull his leg. We were finished from the start.

The final judgment was not delivered until ten months after we had first unveiled the statue in the centre of Vermilion Sands, and the verdict, when it came, was no surprise.

Lorraine Drexel was awarded thirty thousand dollars.

‘It looks as if we should have taken the pylon after, all,’ I said to Carol as we left the courtroom. ‘Even the step-pyramid would have been less trouble.’

Raymond joined us and we went out on to the balcony at the end of the corridor for some air.

‘Never mind,’ Carol said bravely. ‘At least it’s all over with.’

I looked out over the rooftops of Vermilion Sands, thinking about the thirty thousand dollars and wondering whether we would have to pay it ourselves.

The court building was a new one and by an unpleasant irony ours had been the first case to be heard there. Much of the floor and plasterwork had still to be completed, and the balcony was untiled. I was standing on an exposed steel crossbeam; one or two floors down someone must have been driving a rivet into one of the girders, and the beam under my feet vibrated soothingly.

Then I noticed that there were no sounds of riveting going on anywhere, and that the movement under my feet was not so much a vibration as a low rhythmic pulse.

I bent down and pressed my hands against the beam. Raymond and Carol watched me curiously. ‘Mr Hamilton, what is it?’ Carol asked when I stood up.

‘Raymond,’ I said. ‘How long ago did they first start on this building? The steel framework, anyway.’

‘Four months, I think. Why?’

‘Four.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, how long would you say it took any random piece of scrap iron to be reprocessed through a steel mill and get back into circulation?’

‘Years, if it lay around in the wrong junkyards.’

‘But if it had actually arrived at the steel mill?’

‘A month or so. Less.’

I started to laugh, pointing to the girder. ‘Feel that! Go on, feel it!’

Frowning at me, they knelt down and pressed their hands to the girder. Then Raymond looked up at me sharply.

I stopped laughing. ‘Did you feel it?’

‘Feel it?’ Raymond repeated. ‘I can hear it. Lorraine Drexel – the statue. It’s here!’

Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. ‘I think it’s humming,’ she said, puzzled. ‘It sounds like the statue.’

When I started to laugh again Raymond held my arm. ‘Snap out of it, the whole building will be singing soon!’

‘I know,’ I said weakly. ‘And it won’t be just this building either.’ I took Carol by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s see if it’s started.’

We went up to the top floor. The plasterers were about to move in and there were trestles and laths all over the place. The walls were still bare brick, girders at fifteen-foot intervals between them.

We didn’t have to look very far.

Jutting out from one of the steel joists below the roof was a long metal helix, hollowing itself slowly into a delicate sonic core. Without moving, we counted a dozen others. A faint twanging sound came from them, like early arrivals at a rehearsal of some vast orchestra of sitar-players, seated on every plain and hilltop of the earth. I remembered when we had last heard the music, as Lorraine Drexel sat beside me at the unveiling in Vermilion Sands. The statue had made its call to her dead lover, and now the refrain was to be taken up again.

‘An authentic Drexel,’ I said. ‘All the mannerisms. Nothing much to look at yet, but wait till it really gets going.’

Raymond wandered round, his mouth open. ‘It’ll tear the building apart. Just think of the noise.’

Carol was staring up at one of the shoots. ‘Mr Hamilton, you said they’d melted it all down.’

‘They did, angel. So it got back into circulation, touching off all the other metal it came into contact with. Lorraine Drexel’s statue is here, in this building, in a dozen other buildings, in ships and planes and a million new automobiles. Even if it’s only one screw or ball-bearing, that’ll be enough to trigger the rest off.’

‘They’ll stop it,’ Carol said.

‘They might,’ I admitted. ‘But it’ll probably get back again somehow. A few pieces always will.’ I put my arm round her waist and began to dance to the strange abstracted music, for some reason as beautiful now as Lorraine Drexel’s wistful eyes. ‘Did you say it was all over? Carol, it’s only just beginning. The whole world will be singing.’

1957

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.