Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  Making his questions sound as naive as possible, he conducted a long, careful poll. Under fifty no one appeared to know anything at all about the historical background, and even the older people were beginning to forget. He also noticed that the less educated they were the more they were willing to talk, indicating that manual and lower-class workers had played no part in the revolution and consequently had no guilt-charged memories to repress. Old Mr. Crichton, the plumber who lived in the basement apartment, reminisced without any prompting, but nothing he said threw any light on the problem.

  “Sure, there were thousands of clocks then, millions of them, everybody had one. Watches we called them, strapped to the wrist, you had to screw them up every day.”

  “But what did you do with them, Mr. Crichton?” Conrad pressed.

  “Well, you just—looked at them, and you knew what time it was. One o’clock, or two or half past seven—that was when I’d go off to work.”

  “But you go off to work now when you’ve had breakfast. And if you’re late the timer rings.”

  Crichton shook his head. “I can’t explain it to you, lad. You ask your father.”

  But Mr. Newman was hardly more helpful. The explanation promised for Conrad’s sixteenth birthday never materialized. When his questions persisted Mr. Newman, tired of sidestepping, shut him up with an abrupt: “Just stop thinking about it, do you understand? You’ll get yourself and the rest of us into a lot of trouble.”

  * * *

  Stacey, the young English teacher, had a wry sense of humor, liked to shock the boys by taking up unorthodox positions on marriage or economics. Conrad wrote an essay describing an imaginary society completely preoccupied with elaborate rituals revolving around a minute-by-minute observance of the passage of time.

  Stacey refused to play, however, and gave him a noncommittal beta plus, after class quietly asked Conrad what had prompted the fantasy. At first Conrad tried to back away, then finally came out with the question that contained the central riddle.

  “Why is it against the law to have a clock?”

  Stacey tossed a piece of chalk from one hand to the other.

  “Is it against the law?”

  Conrad nodded. “There’s an old notice in the police station offering a bounty of one hundred pounds for every clock or wrist-watch brought in. I saw it yesterday. The sergeant said it was still in force.”

  Stacey raised his eyebrows mockingly. “You’ll make a million. Thinking of going into business?”

  Conrad ignored this. “It’s against the law to have a gun because you might shoot someone. But how can you hurt anybody with a clock?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something.”

  “Well?”

  “Then you can make him do it faster.”

  At seventeen, on a sudden impulse, he built his first clock. Already his preoccupation with time was giving him a marked lead over his classmates. One or two were more intelligent, others more conscientious, but Conrad’s ability to organize his leisure and homework periods allowed him to make the most of his talents. When the others were lounging around the railway yard on their way home Conrad had already completed half his prep, allocating his time according to its various demands.

  As soon as he finished he would go up to the attic playroom, now his workshop. Here, in the old wardrobes and trunks, he made his first experimental constructions: calibrated candles, crude sundials, sandglasses, an elaborate clockwork contraption developing about half a horse power that drove its hands progressively faster and faster in an unintentional parody of Conrad’s obsession.

  His first serious clock was water-powered, a slowly leaking tank holding a wooden float that drove the hands as it sank downwards. Simple but accurate, it satisfied Conrad for several months while he carried out his ever-widening search for a real clock mechanism. He soon discovered that although there were innumerable table clocks, gold pocket watches, and timepieces of every variety rusting in junk shops and in the back drawers of most homes, none of them contained their mechanisms. These, together with the hands, and sometimes the digits, had always been removed. His own attempts to build an escapement that would regulate the motion of the ordinary clockwork motor met with no success; everything he had heard about clock movements confirmed that they were precision instruments of exact design and construction. To satisfy his secret ambition—a portable timepiece, if possible an actual wristwatch—he would have to find one, somewhere, in working order.

  Finally, from an unexpected source, a watch came to him. One afternoon in a cinema, an elderly man sitting next to Conrad had a sudden heart attack. Conrad and two members of the audience carried him out to the manager’s office. Holding one of his arms, Conrad noticed in the dim aisle light a glint of metal inside the sleeve. Quickly he felt the wrist with his fingers, identified the unmistakable lens-shaped disk of a wristwatch.

  As he carried it home its tick seemed as loud as a death knell. He clamped his hand around it, expecting everyone in the street to point accusingly at him, the Time Police to swoop down and seize him.

  In the attic he took it out and examined it breathlessly, smothering it in a cushion whenever he heard his father shift about in the bedroom below. Later he realized that its noise was almost inaudible. The watch was of the same pattern as his mother’s, though with a yellow and not a red face. The gold case was scratched and peeling, but the movement seemed to be in perfect condition. He prized off the rear plate, watched the frenzied flickering world of miniature cogs and wheels for hours, spellbound. Frightened of breaking the main spring, he kept the watch only half wound, packed away carefully in cotton wool.

  In taking the watch from its owner he had not, in fact, been motivated by theft; his first impulse had been to hide the watch before the doctor discovered it feeling for the man’s pulse. But once the watch was in his possession he abandoned any thought of tracing the owner and returning it.

  That others were still wearing watches hardly surprised him. The water clock had demonstrated that a calibrated timepiece added another dimension to life, organized its energies, gave the countless activities of everyday existence a yardstick of significance. Conrad spent hours in the attic gazing at the small yellow dial, watching its minute hand revolve slowly, its hour hand press on imperceptibly, a compass charting his passage through the future. Without it he felt rudderless, adrift in a gray purposeless limbo of timeless events. His father began to seem idle and stupid, sitting around vacantly with no idea when anything was going to happen.

  Soon he was wearing the watch all day. He stitched together a slim cotton sleeve, fitted with a narrow flap below which he could see the face. He timed everything—the length of classes, football games, meal breaks, the hours of daylight and darkness, sleep and waking. He amused himself endlessly by baffling his friends with demonstrations of this private sixth sense, anticipating the frequency of their heart beats, the hourly newscasts on the radio, boiling a series of identically consistent eggs without the aid of a timer.

  Then he gave himself away.

  Stacey, shrewder than any of the others, discovered that he was wearing a watch. Conrad had noticed that Stacey’s English classes lasted exactly forty-five minutes; he let himself slide into the habit of tidying his desk a minute before Stacey’s timer pipped up. Once or twice he noticed Stacey looking at him curiously, but he could not resist the temptation to impress Stacey by always being the first one to make for the door.

  One day he had stacked his books and clipped away his pen when Stacey pointedly asked him to read out a precis he had done. Conrad knew the timer would pip out in less than ten seconds, and decided to sit tight and wait for the usual stampede to save him the trouble.

  Stacey stepped down from the dais, waiting patiently. One or two boys turned around and frowned at Conrad, who was counting away the closing seconds.

  Then, amazed, he realized that the timer had failed to sound! Panicking, he first thought h
is watch had broken, just restrained himself in time from looking at it.

  “In a hurry, Newman?” Stacey asked dryly. He sauntered down the aisle to Conrad. Baffled, his face reddening with embarrassment, Conrad fumbled open his exercise book, read out the precis.

  A few minutes later, without waiting for the timer, Stacey dismissed the class.

  “Newman,” he called out. “Here a moment.”

  He rummaged behind the rostrum as Conrad approached. “What happened then?” he asked. “Forget to wind up your watch this morning?”

  Conrad said nothing. Stacey took out the timer, switched off the silencer and listened to the pip that buzzed out.

  “Where did you get it from? Your parents? Don’t worry, the Time Police were disbanded years ago.”

  Conrad examined Stacey’s face. “It was my mother’s,” he lied. “I found it among her things.” Stacey held out his hand and Conrad nervously unstrapped the watch and handed it to him.

  Stacey slipped it half out of its sleeve, glanced briefly at the yellow face. “Your mother, you say? Hmh.”

  “Are you going to report me?” Conrad asked.

  “What, and waste some overworked psychiatrist’s time even further?”

  “Isn’t it breaking the law to wear a watch?”

  “Well, you’re not exactly the greatest living menace to public security.” Stacey started for the door, gesturing Conrad with him. He handed the watch back. “Cancel whatever you’re doing on Saturday afternoon. You and I are taking a trip.”

  “Where?” Conrad asked.

  “Back into the past,” Stacey said lightly. “To Chronopolis, the Time City.”

  Stacey had hired a car, a huge battered mastodon of chromium and fins. He waved jauntily to Conrad as he picked him up outside the Public Library.

  “Climb into the turret.” He pointed to the bulging briefcase Conrad slung onto the seat between them. “Have you had a look at those yet?”

  Conrad nodded. As they moved off around the deserted square he opened the briefcase and pulled out a thick bundle of road maps. “I’ve just worked out that the city covers over five hundred square miles. I’d never realized it was so big. Where is everybody?”

  Stacey laughed. They crossed the main street, cut down into a long tree-lined avenue of semidetached houses. Half of them were empty, windows wrecked and roofs sagging. Even the inhabited houses had a makeshift appearance, crude water towers on homemade scaffolding lashed to their chimneys, piles of logs dumped in overgrown front gardens.

  “Thirty million people once lived in this city,” Stacey remarked. “Now the population is little more than two, and still declining. Those of us left hang on in what were once the distal suburbs, so that the city today is effectively an enormous ring, five miles in width, encircling a vast dead center forty or fifty miles in diameter.”

  They wove in and out of various back roads, past a small factory still running although work was supposed to end at noon, finally picked up a long, straight boulevard that carried them steadily westward. Conrad traced their progress across successive maps. They were nearing the edge of the annulus Stacey had described. On the map it was overprinted in green so that the central interior appeared a flat, uncharted gray, a massive terra incognita.

  They passed the last of the small shopping thoroughfares he remembered, a frontier post of mean terraced houses, dismal streets spanned by massive steel viaducts. Stacey pointed up at one as they drove below it. “Part of the elaborate railway system that once existed, an enormous network of stations and junctions that carried fifteen million people into a dozen great terminals every day.”

  For half an hour they drove on, Conrad hunched against the window, Stacey watching him in the driving mirror. Gradually, the landscape began to change. The houses were taller, with colored roofs, the sidewalks were railed off and fitted with pedestrian lights and turnstiles. They had entered the inner suburbs, completely deserted streets with multilevel supermarkets, towering cinemas, and department stores.

  Chin in one hand, Conrad stared out silently. Lacking any means of transport he had never ventured into the uninhabited interior of the city, like the other children always headed in the opposite direction for the open country. Here the streets had died twenty or thirty years earlier; plateglass shopfronts had slipped and smashed into the roadway, old neon signs, window frames and overhead wires hung down from every cornice, trailing a ragged web work of disintegrating metal across the pavements. Stacey drove slowly, avoiding the occasional bus or truck abandoned in the middle of the road, its tires peeling off their rims.

  Conrad craned up at the empty windows, into the narrow alleys and side streets, but nowhere felt any sensation of fear or anticipation. These streets were merely derelict, as unhaunted as a half-empty dustbin.

  One suburban center gave way to another, to long intervening stretches of congested ribbon developments. Mile by mile, the architecture altered its character; buildings were larger, ten- or fifteen-story blocks, clad in facing materials of green and blue tiles, glass or copper sheathing. They were moving forward in time rather than, as Conrad had expected, back into the past of a fossil city.

  Stacey worked the car through a nexus of side streets toward a six-lane expressway that rose on concrete buttresses above the rooftops. They found a side road that circled up to it, leveled out, and then picked up speed sharply, spinning along one of the clear center lanes.

  Conrad craned forward. In the distance, two or three miles away, the rectilinear outlines of enormous apartment blocks reared thirty or forty stories high, hundreds of them lined shoulder to shoulder in apparently endless ranks, like giant dominoes.

  “We’re entering the central dormitories here,” Stacey told him. On either side buildings overtopped the motorway, the congestion mounting so that some of them had been built right up against the concrete palisades.

  In a few minutes they passed between the first of the apartment batteries, the thousands of identical living units with their slanting balconies shearing up into the sky, the glass in-falls of the aluminum curtain walling speckling in the sunlight. The smaller houses and shops of the outer suburbs had vanished. There was no room on the ground level. In the narrow intervals between the blocks there were small concrete gardens, shopping complexes, ramps banking down into huge underground car parks.

  And on all sides there were the clocks. Conrad noticed them immediately, at every street corner, over every archway, three quarters of the way up the sides of buildings, covering every conceivable angle of approach. Most of them were too high off the ground to be reached by anything less than a fireman’s ladder and still retained their hands. All registered the same time: 12:01.

  Conrad looked at his wristwatch, noted that it was just 2:45 p.m.

  “They were driven by a master clock,” Stacey told him. “When that stopped they all ceased at the same moment. One minute after midnight, thirty-seven years ago.”

  The afternoon had darkened, as the high cliffs cut off the sunlight, the sky a succession of narrow vertical intervals opening and closing around them. Down on the canyon floor it was dismal and oppressive, a wilderness of concrete and frosted glass. The expressway divided and pressed on westward. After a few more miles the apartment blocks gave way to the first office buildings in the central zone. These were even taller, sixty or seventy stories high, linked by spiraling ramps and causeways. The expressway was fifty feet off die ground yet the first floors of the office blocks were level with it, mounted on massive stilts that straddled the glass-enclosed entrance bays of lifts and escalators. The streets were wide but featureless. The sidewalks of parallel roadways merged below the buildings, forming a continuous concrete apron. Here and there were the remains of cigarette kiosks, rusting stairways up to restaurants and arcades built on platforms thirty feet in the air.

  Conrad, however, was looking only at the clocks. Never had he visualized so many, in places so dense that they obscured each other. Their faces were multicolored: red,
blue, yellow, green. Most of them carried four or five hands. Although the master hands had stopped at a minute past twelve, the subsidiary hands had halted at varying positions, apparently dictated by their color.

  “What were the extra hands for?” he asked Stacey. “And the different colors?”

  “Time zones. Depending on your professional category and the consumer-shifts allowed. Hold on, though, we’re almost there.”

  They left the expressway and swung off down a ramp that fed them into the northeast comer of a wide open plaza, eight hundred yards long and half as wide, down the center of which had once been laid a continuous strip of lawn, now rank and overgrown. The plaza was empty, a sudden block of free space bounded by tall glass-faced cliffs that seemed to carry the sky.

  Stacey parked, and he and Conrad climbed out and stretched themselves. Together they strolled across the wide pavement toward the strip of waist-high vegetation. Looking down the vistas receding from the plaza Conrad grasped fully for the first time the vast perspectives of the city, the massive geometric jungle of buildings.

  Stacey put one foot up on the balustrade running around the lawn bed, pointed to the far end of the plaza, where Conrad saw a low-lying huddle of buildings of unusual architectural style, nineteenth-century perpendicular, stained by the atmosphere and badly holed by a number of explosions. Again, however, his attention was held by the clock face built into a tall concrete tower just behind the older buildings. This was the largest clock dial he had ever seen, at least a hundred feet across, huge black hands halted at a minute past twelve. The dial was white, the first they had seen, but on wide semicircular shoulders built below the main face were a dozen smaller faces, no more than twenty feet in diameter, running the full spectrum of colors. Each had five hands, the inferior three halted at random.