The Terminal Beach

by James Graham Ballard

  'Let's give me a rest,' he said to Granger. 'You're merely trying to find in me a justification for your own enforced stay. Perhaps I am extinct, but I'd rather cling to life here than vanish completely. Anyway, I have a hunch that one day they'll be coming back. Someone's got to stay behind and keep alive a sense of what life here has meant. This isn't an old husk we can throw away when we've finished with it. We were born here. It's the only place we really remember.'

  Granger nodded slowly. He was about to speak when a brilliant white arc crossed the darkened window, then soared out of sight, its point of impact with the ground lost behind one of the storage tanks.

  Holliday stood up and craned out of the window.

  'Must be a launching platform. Looked like a big one, probably one of the Russians.' A long rolling crump reverberated through the night air,' echoing away among the coral towers. Flashes of light flared up briefly. There was a series of smaller explosions, and then a wide diffuse pall of steam fanned out across the northwest.

  'Lake Atlantic,' Granger commented. 'Let's drive out there and have a look. It may have uncovered something interesting.'

  Half an hour later, a set of Granger's old sample beakers, slides and mounting equipment in the back seat, they set off in the jeep towards the southern tip of Lake Atlantic ten miles away.

  It was here that Holliday discovered the fish.

  Lake Atlantic, a narrow ribbon of stagnant brine ten miles in length by a mile wide, to the north of the Bermuda Islands, was all that remained of the former Atlantic Ocean, and was, in fact, the sole remnant of the oceans which had once covered two-thirds of the Earth's surface. The frantic mining of the oceans in the previous century to provide oxygen for the atmospheres of the new planets had made their decline swift and irreversible, and with their death had come climatic and other geophysical changes which ensured the extinction of Earth itself. As the xygen extracted electrolytically from sea-water was compressed and shipped away, the hydrogen released was discharged into the atmosphere. Eventually only a narrow layer of denser, oxygen-containing air was left, little more than a mile in depth, and those people remaining on Earth were forced to retreat into the ocean beds, abandoning the poisoned continental tables. At the hotel at Idle End, Holliday spent uncounted hours going through the library he had accumulated of magazines and books about the cities of the old Earth, and Granger often described to him his own youth when the seas had been half-full and he had worked as a marine biologist at the University of Miami, a fabulous laboratory unfolding itself for him on the lengthening beaches. 'The seas are our corporate memory,' he often said to Holliday. 'In draining them we deliberately obliterated our own pasts, to a large extent our own self-identifies. That's another reason why you should leave. Without the sea, life is insupportable. We become nothing more than the ghosts of memories, blind and homeless, flitting through the dry chambers of a gutted skull.'

  They reached the lake within half an hour, worked their way through the swamps which formed its banks. In the dim light the grey salt dunes ran on for miles, their hollows cracked into hexagonal plates, a dense cloud of vapour obscuring the surface of the water. They parked on a low promontory by the edge of the lake and looked up at the great circular shell of the launching platform. This was one of the larger vehicles, almost three hundred yards in diameter, lying upside down in the shallow water, its hull dented and burnt, riven by huge punctures where the power plants had torn themselves loose on impact and exploded off across the lake. A quarter of a mile away, hidden by the blur, they could just see a cluster of rotors pointing up into the sky. Walking along the bank, the main body of the lake on their right, they moved nearer the platform, tracing out its riveted C G G P markings along the rim. The giant vehicle had cut enormous grooves through the nexus of pools just beyond the fip of the lake, and Granger waded through the warm water, searching for specimens. Here and there were small anemones and starfish, stunted bodies twisted by cancers. Web-like algae draped themselves over his rubber boots, their nuclei beading like jewels in the phosphorescent light. They paused by one of the largest pools, a circular basin 3o0 feet across, draining slowly as the water poured out through a breach in its side. Granger moved carefully down the deepening bank, forking specimens into the rack of beakers, while Holliday stood on the narrow causeway between the pool and the lake, looking up at the dark overhang of the space platform as k loomed into the darkness above him like the stem of a ship.

  He was examining the shattered air-lock of one of the crew domes when he suddenly saw something move across the surface of the deck. For a moment he imagined that he had seen a passenger who had somehow survived the vehicle's crash, then realized that it was merely the reflection in the aluminized skin of a ripple in the pool behind him.

  He turned around to see Granger, ten feet below him, up to his knees in the water, staring out carefully across the pool.

  'Did you throw something?' Granger asked.

  Holliday shook his head. 'No.' Without thinking, he added: 'It must have been a fish jumping.'

  'Fish? There isn't a single fish alive on the entire planet.

  The whole zoological class died out ten years ago. Strange, though.'

  Just then the fish jumped again.

  For a few moments, standing motionless in the half-light, they watched it together, as its slim silver body leapt frantically out of the tepid shallow water, its short glistening arcs carrying it to and fro across the pool.

  'Dog-fish,' Granger muttered. 'Shark family. Highly adaptable- need to be, to have survived here. Damn it, it may well be the only fish still living.'

  Holliday moved down the bank, his feet sinking in the oozing mud. 'Isn't the water too salty?'

  Granger bent down and scooped up some of the water, sipped it tentatively. 'Saline, but comparatively dilute.' He glanced over his shoulder at the lake. 'Perhaps there's continuous evaporation off the lake surface and local condensation here. A freak distillation couple.' He slapped Holliday on the shoulder. 'Holliday, this should be interesting.'

  The dog-fish was leaping frantically towards them, its two-foot body twisting and flicking. Low mud banks were emerging all over the surface of the pool; in only a few places towards the centre was the water more than a foot deep.

  Holliday pointed to the breach in the bank fifty yards away, gestured Granger after him and began to run towards it.

  Five minutes later they had effectively dammed up the breach. Holliday returned for the jeep and drove it carefully through the winding saddles between the pools. He lowered the ramp and began to force the sides of the fish-pool in towards each other. After two or three hours he had narrowed the diameter from a hundred yards to under sixty, and the depth of the water had increased to over two feet.

  The dog-fish had ceased to jump and swam smoothly just below the surface, snapping at the countless small plants which had been tumbled into the water by the jeep's ramp.

  Its slim white body seemed white and unmarked, the small fins trim and powerful.

  Granger sat on the bonnet of the jeep, his back against the windshield, watching Holliday with admiration.

  'You obviously have hidden reserves,' he said ungrudgingly.

  'I didn't think you had it in you.'

  Holliday washed his hands in the water, then stepped over the churned mud which formed the boundary of the pool. A few feet behind him the dog-fish veered and lunged.

  'I want to keep it alive,' Holliday said matter-of-factly.

  'Don't you see, Granger, the fishes stayed behind when the first amphibians emerged from the seas two hundred million years ago, just as you and I, in turn, are staying behind now.

  In a sense all fish are images of ourselves seen in the sea's mirror.'

  He slumped down on the running board. His clothes were soaked and streaked with salt, and he gasped at the damp air. To the west, just above the long bulk of the Florida coastline, rising from the ocean floor like an enormous aircraft carrier, were the first dawn thermal fronts
. 'Will it be all right to leave it until this evening?'

  Granger climbed into the driving seat. 'Don't worry.

  Come on, you need a rest.' He pointed up at the overhanging rim of the launching platform. 'That should shade it for a few hours, help to keep the temperature down.'

  As they neared the town Granger slowed to wave to the old people retreating from their porches, fixing the shutters on the steel cabins.

  'What about your interview with Bullen?' he asked Holliday soberly. 'He'll be waiting for you.'

  'Leave here? After last night? It's out of the question.'

  Granger shook his head as he parked the car outside the Neptune. 'Aren't you rather over-estimating the importance of one dog-fish? There were millions of them once, the vermin of the sea.'

  'You're missing the point,' Holliday said, sinking back ' into the seat, trying to wipe the salt out of his eyes. 'That fish means that there's still something to be done here.

  Earth isn't dead and exhausted after all. We can breed new forms of life, a completely new biological kingdom.'

  Eyes fixed on his private vision, Holliday sat holding the steering wheel while Granger went into the bar to collect a crate of beer. On his return the migration officer was with him.

  Bullen put a foot on the running board, looked into the car. 'Well, how about it, Holliday? I'd like to make an early start. If you're not interested I'll be off. There's a rich new life out there, first step to the stars. Torn Juranda and the Merryweather boys are leaving next week. Do you want to be with them?'

  'Sorry,' Holliday said curtly. He pulled the crate of beer into the car and let out the clutch, gunned the jeep away down the empty street in a roar of dust.

  Half an hour later, as he stepped out on to the terrace at Idle End, cool and refreshed after his shower, he watched the helicopter roar overhead, its black propeller scudding, then disappear over the kelp flats towards the hull of the wrecked space platform.

  'Come on, let's go! What's the matter?'

  'Hold it,' Granger said. 'You're getting over-eager. Don't interfere too much, you'll kill the damn thing with kindness.

  What have you got there?' He pointed to the can Holliday had placed in the dashboard compartment.

  'Breadcrumbs.'

  Granger sighed, then gently closed the door. 'I'm impressed.

  I really am. I wish you'd look after me this way.

  I'm gasping for air too.'

  They were five miles from the lake when Holliday leaned forward over the wheel and pointed to the crisp tyre-prints in the soft salt flowing over the road ahead.

  'Someone's there already.'

  Granger shrugged. 'What of it? They've probably gone to look at the platform.' He chuckled quietly. 'Don't you want to share the New Eden with anyone else? Or just you alone, and a consultant biologist?'

  Holliday peered through the windshield. 'Those platforms annoy me, the way they're hurled down as if Earth were a garbage dump. Still, if it wasn't for this one I wouldn't have found the fish.'

  They reached the lake and made their way towards the pool, the erratic track of the car ahead winding in and out of the pools. Two hundred yards from the platform it had been parked, blocking the route for Holliday and Granger.

  'That's the Merryweathers' car,' Holliday said as they walked around the big stripped-down Buick, slashed with yellow paint and fitted with sirens and pennants. 'The two boys must have come out here.'

  Granger pointed. 'One of them's up on the platform.'

  The younger brother had climbed on to the rim, was shouting down like an umpire at the antics of two other boys, one his brother, the other Torn Juranda, a tall broad-shouldered youth in a space cadet's jerkin. They were standing at the edge of the fish-pool, stones and salt blocks in their hands, hurling them into the pool.

  Leaving Granger, Holliday sprinted on ahead, shouting at the top of his voice. Too preoccupied to hear him, the boys continued to throw their missiles into the pool, while the younger Merryweather egged them on from the platform above. Just before Holliday reached them Torn Juranda ran a few yards along the bank and began to kick the mud-wall into the air, then resumed his target throwing.

  'Juranda! Get away from there I' Holliday bellowed. 'Put those stones down I'

  He reached Juranda as the youth was about to hurl a brick-sized lump of salt into the pool, seized him by the shoulder and flung him round, knocking the salt out of his hand into a shower of damp crystals, then lunged at the elder Merryweather boy, kicking him away.

  The pool had been drained. A deep breach had been cut through the bank and the water had poured out into the surrounding gulleys and pools. Down in the centre of the basin, in a litter of stones and spattered salt, was the crushed but still wriggling body of the dog-fish, twisting itself helplessly in the bare inch of water that remained. Dark red blood poured from wounds in its body, staining the salt.

  Holliday hurled himself at Juranda, shook the youth savagely by the shoulders.

  'Juranda! Do you realize what you've done, you -' Exhausted, Holliday released him and staggered down into the centre of the pool, kicked away the stones and stood looking at the fish twitching at his feet.

  'Sorry, Holliday,' the older Merryweather boy said tentatively behind him. 'We didn't know it was your fish.'

  Holliday waved him away, then let his arms fall limply to his sides. He felt numbed and baffled, unable to resolve his anger and frustration.

  Torn Juranda began to laugh, and shouted something derisively. Their tension broken, the boys turned and ran off together across the dunes towards their car, yelling and playing catch with each other, mimicking Holliday's outrage.

  Granger let them go by, then walked across the pool, wincing when he saw the empty basin.

  'Holliday,' he called. 'Come on.'

  Holliday shook his head, staring at the beaten body of the fish.

  Granger stepped down the bank to him. Sirens hooted in the distance as the Buick roared off. 'Those damn children.'

  He took Holliday gently by the arm. 'I'm sorry,' he said quietly. 'But it's not the end of the world.'

  Bending down, Holliday reached towards the fish, lying still now, the mud around it slick with blood. His hands hesitated, then retreated.

  'Nothing we can do, is there?' he said impersonally.

  Granger examined the fish. Apart from the large wound in its side and the flattened skull the skin was intact. 'Why not have it stuffed?' he suggested seriously.

  Holliday stared at him incredulously, his face contorting.

  For a moment he said nothing. Then, almost berserk, he shouted: 'Have it stuffed? Are you crazy? Do you think I want to make a dummy of myself, fill my own head with straw?'

  Turning on his heel, he shouldered past Granger and swung himself roughly out of the pool.

  The Volcano Dances

  They lived in a house on the mountain Tlaxlhuatl half a mile below the summit. The house was built on a lava flow like the hide of an elephant. In the afternoon and evening the man, Charles Vandervell, sat by the window in the lounge, watching the fire displays that came from the crater. The noise rolled down the mountain side like a series of avalanches. At intervals a falling cinder hissed as it extinguished itself in the water tank on the roof. The woman slept most of the time in the bedroom overlooking the valley or, when she wished to be close to Vandervell, on the settee in the lounge.

  In the afternoon she woke briefly when the 'devil-sticks' man performed his dance by the road a quarter of a mile from the house. This mendicant had come to the mountain for the benefit of the people in the village below the summit, but his dance had failed to subdue the volcano and prevent the villagers from leaving. As they passed him pushing their carts he would rattle his spears and dance, but they walked on without looking up. When he became discouraged and seemed likely to leave, Vandervell sent the house-boy out to him with an American dollar. From then on the stick-dancer came every day.

  'Is he still here?' the womal'asked. She
walked into the lounge, folding her robe around her waist. 'What's he supposed to be doing?'

  'He's fighting a duel with the spirit of the volcano,' Vandervell said. 'He's putting a lot of thought and energy into it, but he hasn't a chance.'

  'I thought you were on his side,' the woman said. 'Aren't you paying him a retainer?'

  'That's only to formalize the relationship. To show him that I understand what's going on. Strictly speaking, I'm on the volcano's side.'

  A shower of cinders rose a hundred feet above the erater illuminating the jumping stickman.

  'Are you sure it's safe here?'

  Vandervell waved her away 'Of course. Go back to bed rest. This thin air is bad for the complexion.'

  ‘Can't feel all right. I heard the ground move.'

  'It's been moving for weeks.' He watched the stickman conclude his performance with a series of hops, as if leapfrogging over a partner. 'On his diet that's not bad.'

  'You should take him back to Mexico City and put him in one of the cabarets. He'd make more than a dollar.'

  'He wouldn't be interested. He's a serious artist, this Nijinsky of the mountain side. Can't you see that?'

  The woman haft-filled a tumbler from the decanter on the table. 'How long are you going to keep him out there?'

  'As long as he'll stay.' He turned to face the woman. 'Remember that. When he leaves it will be time to go.'

  The stick-man, a collection of tatters when not in motion, disappeared into his lair, one of the holes in the lava beside the road.

  'I wonder if he met Springman?' Vandervell said. 'On balance it's possible. Springman would have come up the south face. This is the only road to the village.'