Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  The old man led Conrad over to a wall chart, pointed to the total listed against a column of dates. “Look at this. There are now 278 running continuously. Believe me, I’m glad you’ve come. It takes me half my time to keep them wound.”

  He made breakfast for Conrad and told him something about himself. His name was Marshall. Once he had worked in Central Time Control as a programmer. He had survived the revolt and the Time Police, and ten years later returned to the city. At the beginning of each month he cycled out to one of the perimeter towns to cash his pension and collect supplies. The rest of the time he spent winding the steadily increasing number of functioning clocks and searching for others he could dismantle and repair.

  “All these years in the rain hasn’t done them any good,” he explained, “and there’s nothing I can do with the electrical ones.” Conrad wandered off among the desks, gingerly feeling the dismembered timepieces that lay around like the nerve cells of some vast unimaginable robot. He felt exhilarated and yet at the same time curiously calm, like a man who has staked his whole life on the turn of a wheel and is waiting for it to spin.

  “How can you make sure that they all tell the same time?” he asked Marshall, wondering why the question seemed so important.

  Marshall gestured irritably. “I can’t, but what does it matter? There is no such thing as a perfectly accurate clock. The nearest you can get is one that has stopped. Although you never know when, it is absolutely accurate twice a day.”

  Conrad went over to the window, pointed to the great clock visible in an interval between the rooftops. “If only we could start that, and run all the others off it.”

  “Impossible. The entire mechanism was dynamited. Only the chimer is intact. Anyway, the wiring of the electrically driven clocks perished years ago. It would take an army of engineers to recondition them.”

  Conrad looked at the scoreboard again. He noticed that Marshall appeared to have lost his way through the years—the completion dates he listed were seven and a half years out. Idly, Conrad reflected on the significance of this irony, but decided not to mention it to Marshall.

  For three months Conrad lived with the old man, following him on foot as he cycled about on his rounds, carrying the ladder and the satchel full of keys with which Marshall wound up the clocks, helping him to dismantle recoverable ones and carry them back to the workshop. All day, and often through half the night, they worked together, repairing the movements, restarting the clocks, and returning them to their original positions.

  All the while, however, Conrad’s mind was fixed upon the great clock in its tower dominating the plaza. Once a day he managed to sneak off and make his way into the ruined Time buildings. As Marshall had said, neither the clock nor its twelve satellites would ever run again. The movement house looked like the engine room of a sunken ship, a rusting tangle of rotors and drive wheels exploded into contorted shapes. Every week he would climb the long stairway up to the topmost platform two hundred feet above, look out through the bell tower at the flat roofs of the office blocks stretching away to the horizon. The hammers rested against their trips in long ranks just below him. Once he kicked one of the treble trips playfully, sent a dull chime out across the plaza.

  The sound drove strange echoes into his mind.

  Slowly he began to repair the chimer mechanism, rewiring the hammers and the pulley systems, trailing fresh wire up the great height of the tower, dismantling the winches in the movement room below and renovating their clutches.

  He and Marshall never discussed their self-appointed tasks. Like animals obeying an instinct they worked tirelessly, barely aware of their own motives. When Conrad told him one day that he intended to leave and continue the work in another sector of the city, Marshall agreed immediately, gave Conrad as many tools as he could spare and bade him good-bye.

  Six months later, almost to the day, the sounds of the great clock chimed out across the rooftops of the city, marking the hours, the half hours and the quarter hours, steadily tolling the progress of the day. Thirty miles away, in the towns forming the perimeter of the city, people stopped in the streets and in doorways, listening to the dim haunted echoes reflected through the long aisles of apartment blocks on the far horizon, involuntarily counting the slow final sequences that told the hour. Older people whispered to each other: “Four o’clock, or was it five? They have started the clock again. It seems strange after these years.”

  And all through the day they would pause as the quarter and half hours reached across the miles to them, a voice from their childhoods reminding them of the ordered world of the past. They began to reset their timers by the chimes, at night before they slept they would listen to the long count of midnight, wake to hear them again in the thin clear air of the morning.

  Some went down to the police station and asked if they could have their watches and clocks back again.

  After sentence, twenty years for the murder of Stacey, five for fourteen offenses under the Time Laws, to run concurrently, Newman was led away to the holding cells in the basement of the court. He had expected the sentence and made no comment when invited by the judge. After waiting trial for a year the afternoon in the courtroom was nothing more than a momentary intermission.

  He made no attempt to defend himself against the charge of killing Stacey, partly to shield Marshall, who would be able to continue their work unmolested, and partly because he felt indirectly responsible for the policeman’s death. Stacey’s body, skull fractured by a twenty- or thirty-story fall, had been discovered in the back seat of his car in a basement garage not far from the plaza. Presumably Marshall had discovered him prowling around. Newman recalled that one day Marshall had disappeared altogether and had been curiously irritable for the rest of the week.

  The last time he had seen the old man had been during the three days before the police arrived. Each morning as the chimes boomed out across the plaza Newman had seen his tiny figure striding briskly down the plaza toward him, waving up energetically at the tower, bareheaded and unafraid.

  Now Newman was faced with the problem of how to devise a clock that would chart his way through the coming twenty years. His fears increased when he was taken the next day to the cell block which housed the long-term prisoners—passing his cell on the way to meet the superintendent he noticed that his window looked out onto a small shaft. He pumped his brains desperately as he stood at attention during the superintendent’s homilies, wondering how he could retain his sanity. Short of counting the seconds, each one of the 86,400 in every day, he saw no possible means of assessing the time.

  Locked into his cell, he sat limply on the narrow bed, too tired to unpack his small bundle of possessions. A moment’s inspection confirmed the uselessness of the shaft. A powerful light mounted halfway up masked the sunlight that slipped through a steel grille fifty feet above.

  He stretched himself out on the bed and examined the ceiling. A lamp was recessed into its center, but a second, surprisingly, appeared to have been fitted to the cell. This was on the wall, a few feet above his head. He could see the curving bowl of the protective case, some ten inches in diameter.

  He was wondering whether this could be a reading light when he realized that there was no switch.

  Swinging around, he sat up and examined it, then leapt to his feet in astonishment.

  It was a clock! He pressed his hands against the bowl, reading the circle of numerals, noting the inclination of the hands. 4:53, near enough the present time. Not simply a clock, but one in running order! Was this some sort of macabre joke, or a misguided attempt at rehabilitation?

  His pounding on the door brought a warder.

  “What’s all the noise about? The clock? What’s the matter with it?” He unlocked the door and barged in, pushing Newman back.

  “Nothing. But why is it here? They’re against the law.”

  “Is that what’s worrying you.” The warder shrugged. “Well, you see, the rules are a little different in here. You lads ha
ve got a lot of time ahead of you, it’d be cruel not to let you know where you stood. You know how to work it, do you? Good.” He slammed the door and bolted it fast, then smiled at Newman through the cage. “It’s a long day here, son, as you’ll be finding out. That’ll help you get through it.”

  Gleefully, Newman lay on the bed, his head on a rolled blanket at its foot, staring up at the clock. It appeared to be in perfect order, electrically driven, moving in rigid half-minute jerks. For an hour after the warder left he watched it without a break, then began to tidy up his cell, glancing over his shoulder every few minutes to reassure himself that it was still there, still running efficiently. The irony of the situation, the total inversion of justice, delighted him, even though it would cost him twenty years of his life.

  He was still chuckling over the absurdity of it all two weeks later when for the first time he noticed the clock’s insanely irritating tick . . .

  Build-Up

  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-‘PYROS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!’ ”

  “It’s a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 percent monoxide. Cost me $300.”

  “Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? Takes only ten minutes to go up three thousand levels!”

  “Ninety cents a foot? Buy!”

  “You say the idea came to you in a dream?” the voice jabbed out. “You’re sure no one else gave it to you?”

  “No,” M. said flatly. 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 around on him again.

  “You talked it over with your friends?”

  “Only the first theory,” M. explained quietly. “About the possibility of flight.”

  “But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it quiet 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 sourly. “You mean they would have thought you really were crazy?”

  M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs and lumbar muscles felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of crossquestioning, logic had faded and he groped helplessly. “The concept was a little abstract. There weren’t any words for it.”

  The sergeant snorted. “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 angrily 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, Doc?”

  The surgeon stared thoughtfully at his hands. He was a tall heavy-shouldered man, built like a wrestler, with thick coarsely-lined features.

  He ambled forward, knocking back one of the chairs with his knee.

  “There’s something I want to check,” he said curtly. “Leave me alone with him for half an hour.”

  The sergeant shrugged. “All right,” he said, going over to the door. “But be careful with him.”

  When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared vacantly out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the huge ninety-foot 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 slowly 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 Str., Level 549-7705-45

  KNI (Local).

  Charge ..........Vagrancy.

  “Tell me about this dream,” he said slowly, 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, crushed it with a single motion of his hand and flicked it into the wastebasket.

  “Don’t be crazy, 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 handgrips on the ventral surface. And then you jump 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 . . .” He frowned at Franz. “What’s the word? You’re always using it.” “Fly.”

  “Basically, Mattheson, 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 favor.”

  “I know it wouldn’t be practicable 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.”

  Sa
nger 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, Mattheson, 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 75 percent of the student enrollment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meager 2 percent 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 FP 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.