Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  “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 toward him, its bell jangling.

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

  The floor manager at the Coliseum initialed 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 center of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fanlike 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 high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.

  There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated off across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of colored 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 toward 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, walking away. “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. Somewhere!”

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

  “Did you hide that match?” 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 southbound 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 BIR 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 rail cars 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 suddenly slipped and fell slowly toward 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 made his imagination gape.

  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 slow 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 FP came over and dragged 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 thoughtfully to the elevator.

  He called in to see Gregson before returning to the student dormitory.

  The Gregsons lived up in the west million 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, and as she let him in with her customary smile of welcome he noticed her glancing quickly at the detector mounted in the hall.

  Gregson was in his room, happily cutting out frames of paper and pasting them onto 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, picked up a paper dart lying beside him, and tossed it out of the window. It swam out into the street, lazed down in a wide spiral and vanished into the open mouth of a ventilator shaft.

  “When are you going to build another model?” Gregson asked. “I’m not.”

  Gregson swung round. “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 crazy.”

  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!”

  “Nonfunctional space.”

  “Well?” Franz asked patiently.

  “The concept’s absurd.”

&
nbsp; “Why?”

  “Because it couldn’t exist.”

  Franz pounded his forehead in despair. “Why couldn’t it?” 182

  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 onto 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 fifty counties, including KNI, together form the 493rd Sector, and an association of fifteen hundred 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 onto the table. “Roughly 4 X 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?”

  “Further ones. Why not?”

  “Forever?” Franz pressed.

  “Well, as far as forever 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 further 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 hundred billion years ago.”

  When they got 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 FP’s 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 curb, and half a dozen heavy steel grabs were carried into the house and hooked around 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 FP’s appeared to be doing their best to wreck everything and pies and smashed crockery were strewn all over the pavement.

  “Crowd’s pretty ugly,” Franz said. “Do you want to move?”

  “Hold on.”

  The noise died away and everyone waited as the winch began to revolve. Slowly the hawsers wound in and tautened, and the front wall of the house bulged and staggered outward 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 frantically. The man helped the woman out onto the ledge and she crawled out and clung to one of the waste pipes.

  The crowd roared, “Pyros! You bloody pyros!”

  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 backward 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 involuntarily, 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, painfully 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 leaned 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 couple of 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 knew.” He smiled obliquely. “We don’t want that sort of element in this neighborhood.”

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

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

  “Careful, Franz,” Gregson warned him when the manager had gone. “He may be right. Pyros do take over small cafes and food bars.”

  Franz stirred his coffee. “Dr. McGhee estimates that at least 15 percent 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 up fifteen,” Franz said thoughtfully. “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 t
hinking. 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 around. 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, good-bye,” Franz said as they moved toward 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.”