The Terminal Beach

by James Graham Ballard

  After postponing his search for the night, he set out again in earnest the next morning. As he moved past the towers and blockhouses the heat lay over the island in an unbroken mantle. He had entered a zone devoid of time. Only the narrowing perimeters warned him that he was crossing the inner field of the fire-table.

  He climbed the ridge which marked the furthest point in his previous exploration of the island. From the plain below it the recording towers rose into the air like obelisks. Traven walked down towards them. On their grey walls were the faint outlines of human forms in stylized poses, the flash-shadows of the target community burnt into the cement.

  Here and there, where the concrete apron had cracked, a line of palms hung in the motionless air. The target lakes were smaller, filled with the broken bodies of plastic models.

  Most of them lay in the inoffensive domestic postures into which they had been placed before the tests.

  Beyond the furthest line of dunes, where the camera towers began to turn and face him, were the tops of what seemed to be a herd of square-backed elephants. They were drawn up in precise ranks in a hollow that formed a shallow corral, the sunlight reflected off their backs.

  Traven advanced towards them, limping on his cut foot. On either side of him the loosening sand had excavated the dunes, and several of the blockhouses tilted on their sides. This plain of bunkers stretched for some quarter of a mile, the half-submerged hulks, bombed out onto the surface in some earlier test, like the abandoned wombs that had given birth to this herd of megaliths.

  The Blocks (3)

  To grasp something of the vast number and oppressive size of the blocks, and their impact upon Traven, one must try to visualize sitting in the shade of one of these concrete monsters, or walking about in the centre of this enormous labyrinth that extended across the central table of the island. There were two thousand of them, each a perfect cube 5 feet in height, regularly spaced at ten-yard intervals. These were arranged in a series of tracts, each composed of two hundred blocks, inclined to one another and to the direction of the blast. They had weathered only slightly in the years since they were first built, and their gaunt profiles were like the cutting face. of a gigantic die-plate, devised to stamp out rectilinear volumes of air the size of a house. Three of the sides were smooth and unbroken, but the fourth, facing away from the blast, contained a narrow inspection door.

  It was this featme of the blocks that Traven found particularly disturbing. Despite the considerable number of doors, by some freak of perspective only those in a single aisle were visible at any point within the maze. As he walked from the perimeter line into the centre of the massif, line upon line of the small metal doors appeared and receded.

  Approximately twenty of the blocks, those immediately below ground zero, were solid: the walls of the remainder were of varying thicknesses. From the outside they appeared to be of uniform solidity.

  As he entered the first of the long aisles, Traven felt the sense of fatigue that had dogged him for so many months begin to lift. With their geometric regularity and finish, the blocks seemed to occupy more than their own volumes of slace, imposing on him a mood of absolute calm and order.

  He walked on into the centre of the maze, eager to shut out the rest of the island. After two random turns to left and right, he found himself alone, the vistas to the sea, lagoon and island closed.

  Here he sat down with his back to one of the blocks, the quest for his wife and son forgotten. For the first time since his arrival at the island the sense of dissociation set off by its derelict landscape began to recede.

  One development he did not expect. With dusk, and the need to leave the blocks and firal food, he realized that he had lost himself. However he retraced his steps, struck out left or right at an oblique course, oriented himself around the sun and pressed on resolutely north or south, he found himself back again at his starting point. Only when darkness came did he manage to make his escape.

  Abandoning his former home near the aircraft dump, Traven collected together what canned food he could find in the waist turret and cockpit lockers of the Super fortresses.

  He pulled them across the atoll on a crude sledge. Fifty yards from the perimeter of the blocks he took over a tilting bunker, and pinned the fading photograph of the blonde-haired child to the wall beside the door. The page was falling to pieces, like a fragmenting mirror of himself. Since the discovery of the blocks he had become a creature of reflexes, kindled from levels above those of his existing nervous system (if the autonomic system was dominated by the past, Traven sensed, the cerebro-spinal reached towards the future). Each evening when he woke he would eat without appetite and then wander among the blocks. Sometimes he took a canteen of water with him and remained there for two or three days on end.

  The Submarine Pens

  This precarious existence continued for the following weeks. As he walked out to the blocks one evening, he again saw his wife and son, standing among the dunes below a solitary camera tower, their faces watching him expressionlessly. He realized that they had followed him across the island from their former haunt among the dried-up lakes. At about this time he once again saw the distant light beckoning, and decided to continue his exploration of the island.

  Half a mile further along the atoll he found a group of four submarine pens, built over an inlet, now drained, which wound through the dunes from the sea. The pens still contained several feet of water, filled with strange luminescent fish and plants. The warning light winked at intervals from the apex of a metal scaffold. The remains of a substantial camp, only recently vacated, stood on the pier outside. Greedily, Traven heaped his sledge with the provisions stored inside one of the metal shacks.

  With this change of diet, the beri-beri receded, and during the next days he returned often to the camp. It appeared to be the site of a biological expedition. In the field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke-box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions. Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.)

  Traven: In Parenthesis

  Elements in a quantal world:

  The terminal beach.

  The terminal bunker.

  The blocks.

  The landscape is coded.

  Entry points into the future =Levels in a spinal landscape =zones of significant time.

  August 5. Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior o! the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him… He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project - unstated - but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island… In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing… August 6. He has the eyes of the possessed. I would guess that he is neither the first, nor the last, to visit the island. from Dr Cl. Osborne, Eniwetok Diary

  Traven lost within the Blocks

  With the exhaustion of his supplies, Traven remained within the perimeter of the blocks almost continuously, conserving what strength remained to him to walk slowly down their empty corridors. The infection in his right foot made it difficult for him to replenish his supplies from the stores left by the biologists, and as his strength ebbed he found progressively less incentive to make his way out of the blocks.

  The system of megaliths now provided a complete substitute for those functions of his mind which gave to it its sense of the sustained
rational order of time and space. Without them, his awareness of reality shrank to little more than the few square inches of sand beneath his feet. On one of his last ventures into the maze, he spent all night and much of the following morning in a futile attempt to escape. Dragging himself from one rectangle of shadow to another, his leg as heavy as a club and apparently inflamed to the knee, he realized that he must soon find an equivalent for the blocks or he would end his life within them, trapped inside this self-constructed mausoleum as surely as the retinue of Pharaoh.

  He was sitting helplessly somewhere in the centre of the system, the faceless lines of tomb-booths receding from him, when the sky was slowly divided by the drone of a fight aircraft. This passed overhead, and then returned five minutes later. Seizing his opportunity, Traven struggled to his feet and made his exit from the blocks, his head raised to follow the faintly glistening beacon of the exhaust trail. As he lay in the bunker he dimly heard the aircraft return and carry out an inspection of the site.

  Belated Rescue

  'Who are you? Do you realize you're on your last legs?'

  'Traven I've had some sort of accident. I'm glad you flew over.' 'I'm sure you are. But why didn't you use our radio-tele-phone? Anyway, we'll call the Navy and have you picked up.' 'No…' Traven sat up on one elbow and felt weakly in his hip pocket. 'I have a pass somewhere. I'm carrying out research.' 'Into what?' The question assumed a complete understanding of Traven's motives. He lay in the shade under the lee of the bunker, and drank weakly from a canteen as Dr Osborne dressed his foot. 'You've also been stealing our stores.' Traven shook his head. Fifty yards away the striped blue Cessna stood on the concrete apron like a brilliant dragonfly. 'I didn't realize you were coming back.' 'You must be in a trance.' The young woman sitting at the controls of the aircraft climbed out and walked over to them. She glanced at the grey bunkers and towers, and seemed uninterested in the decrepit figure of Traven. Osborne spoke to her and after a downward glance at Traven she went back to the aircraft. As she turned Traven rose involuntarily, recognizing the child in the photograph he had pinned to the wall of the bunker. Then he remembered that the magazine could not have been more than four or five years old. The engine of the aircraft started. As Traven watched, it turned on to one of the roadways and took offinto the wind.

  Later that afternoon the young woman drove over to the blocks by jeep and unloaded a small camp-bed and a canvas awning. During the intervening hours Traven had slept. He woke refreshed when Osborne returned from his scrutiny of the surrounding dunes.

  'What are you doing here?' the young woman asked as she secured the guy-ropes to the roof of the bunker.

  Traven watched her move about. 'I'm… searching for my wife and son.'

  'They're on this island?' Surprised, but taking the reply at face value, she looked around her. 'Here?'

  'In a manner of speaking.'

  After inspecting the bunker, Osborne joined them. 'The child in the photograph - is she your daughter?'

  Traven hesitated. 'No. She's adopted me.'

  Unable to make any sense of his replies, but accepting his assurances that he would leave file island, Osborne and the young woman drove back to their camp. Each day Osborne returned to change the dressing, driven by the young woman, who seemed now to grasp the role cast for her by Traven.

  Osborne, when he learned of Traven's previous career as a military pilot, appeared to suspect that he might be a latter-day martyr left high and dry by the moratorium on thermonuclear tests.

  'A guilt complex isn't an indiscriminate supply of moral sanctions. I think you may be over-stretching yours.' When he mentioned the name Eatherly, Traven shook his head.

  Undeterred, Osborne pressed: 'Are you sure you're not making similar use of the image of Eniwetok - waiting for your Pentecostal wind?'

  'Believe me, Doctor, no,' Traven replied firmly. 'For me the hydrogen bomb was a symbol of absolute freedom. I feel it's given me the right- the obligation, even- to do anything I want.'

  'That seems strange logic,' Osborne commented. 'Aren't we at least responsible for our physical selves, if for nothing else?'

  'Not now, I think,' Traven replied. 'After all, in effect we are men raised from the dead.'

  Often, however, he thought of Eatherly: the prototypal Pre-Third Man - dating the Pre-Third from August 6, 945 - carrying a full load of cosmic guilt.

  Shortly after Traven was strong enough to walk, he had to be rescued from the blocks for a second time. Osborne became less conciliatory.

  'Our work is almost complete,' he said warningly. 'You'll die here, Traven. What are you looking for among those blocks?'

  To himself, Traven murmured: the tomb of the unknown civilian, Homo hydrogenesis, Eniwetok Man. 'Doctor,' he said, 'your laboratory is at the wrong end of this island.'

  Tartly, Osborne replied: 'I'm aware of that, Traven. There are rarer fish swimming in your head than in any submarine pen.'

  On the day before they left, the young woman drove Traven over to the lakes where he had first arrived. As a final present, an ironic gesture unexpected from the elderly biologist, she had brought from Osborne the correct list of legends for the chromosome charts. They stopped by the derelict juke-box and she pasted them on to the selection panel.

  They wandered among the supine wrecks of the Super-fortresses. Traven lost sight of her, and for the next ten minutes searched in and out of the dunes. He found her standing in a small amphitheatre formed by the sloping 5o mirrors of a solar energy device built by one of the visiting expeditions. She smiled to Traven as he stepped through the scaffolding. A dozen fragmented images of herself were reflected in the broken panes - in some she was sans head, in others multiples of her arms circled about her like the serpent limbs of a Hindu goddess. Confused, Traven turned and walked back to the jeep.

  As they drove away he recovered himself. He described his glimpses of his. wife and son. 'Their faces are always calm,' he said. 'My son's particularly, though really he was always laughing. The only time his face was grave was when he was being born - then he seemed millions of years old.'

  The young woman nodded. 'I hope you find them.' As an afterthought she added: 'Dr Osborne is going to tell the Navy that you're here. Hide somewhere.'

  Traven thanked her.

  From the centre of the blocks he waved to her the following day when she flew away for the last time.

  The Naval Party

  When the search party came for him Traven hid in the only logical place. Fortunately the search was perfunctory, and was called off after a few hours. The sailors had brought a supply of beer with them and the search soon turned into a drunken ramble.

  On the walls of the recording towers Traven later found balloons of obscene dialogue chalked into the mouths of the shadowy figures, giving their postures the priapic gaiety of the dancers in cave drawings.

  The climax of the party was the ignition of a store of gasoline in an underground tank near the air-strip. As he listened, first to the megaphones shouting his name, the echoes receding among the dunes like the forlorn calls of dying birds, then to the boom of the explosion and the laughter as the landing craft left, Traven felt a premonition that these were the last sounds he would hear.

  He had hidden in one of the target basins, lying among the broken bodies of the plastic models. In the hot sunlight their deformed faces gaped at him sightlessly from the tangle of 15I limbs, their blurred smiles like those of the soundlessly laughing dead.

  Their faces filled his mind as he climbed over the bodies and returned to his bunker. As he walked towards the blocks he saw the figures of his wife and son standing in his path.

  They were less than ten yards from him, their white faces watching him with a look of almost overwhelming expectancy.

  Never had Traven seen them so close to the blocks. His wife's pale features seemed illuminated from within, her lips parted as if in greeting, one hand raised to take his own. His son's face, with its curiously fixed expression, regarded him wi
th the same enigmatic smile of the child in the photograph.

  'Judith! David!' Startled, Traven ran forwards to them.

  Then, in a sudden movement of light, their clothes turned into shrouds, and he saw the wounds that disfigured their necks and chests. Appalled, he cried out. As they vanished, he ran off into the safety of the blocks.

  The Catechism of Goodbye This time he found himself, as Osborne had predicted, unable to leave the blocks.

  Somewhere in the centre of the maze, he sat with his back against one of the concrete flanks, his eyes raised to the sun.

  Around him the lines of cubes formed the horizon of his world. At times they would appear to advance towards him, looming over him like cliffs, the intervals between them narrowing so that they were little more than an arm's length apart, a labyrinth of corridors running between them. They then would recede from him, separating from each other like points in an expanding universe, until the nearest line formed an intermittent palisade along the horizon.

  Time had become quantal. For hours it would be noon, the shadows contained within the blocks, the het reflected off the concrete floor. Abruptly, he would find that it was early afternoon or evening, the shadows everywhere like pointing fingers.

  'Good-bye, Eniwetok,' he murmured.

  Somewhere there was a flicker of light, as if one of the blocks, like a counter on an abacus, had been plucked away.

  Good-bye, Los Alamos. Again, a block seemed to vanish. The corridors around him remained intact, but somewhere in his mind had appeared a small interval of neutral space. Good-bye, Hiroshima. Good-bye, Alamagordo.

  Good-bye, Moscow, London, Paris, New ork…

  Shuttles flickered, a ripple of lost integers. He stopped, realizing the futility of this megathlon farewell. Such a leave-taking required him to fix his signature upon every one of the particles in the universe.