The sergeant shook his head. ‘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 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, Doctor?’
The surgeon stared at his hands. He had taken no part in the interrogation, as if bored by the sergeant’s method of approach.
‘There’s something I want to find out,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone with him for half an hour.’
When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the 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 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 St, Level
549–7705–45 KNI (Local).
Charge..............
Vagrancy.
‘Tell me about this dream,’ he said, 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 and crushed it with a single motion of his hand.
‘Don’t be absurd, 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 hand grips on the ventral surface. And then you jumped 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, you’d . . .’ He frowned at Franz. ‘What’s the word? You’re always using it.’
‘Fly.’
‘Basically, Matheson, 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 favour.’
‘I know it wouldn’t be practical 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.’
Sanger 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, Matheson, 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 seventy-five per cent of the student enrolment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meagre two per cent 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 F.P. 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.
‘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 towards him, its bell jangling.
‘Wait until this afternoon,’ he called back. ‘You’re really going to see something.’
The floor manager at the Coliseum initialled 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 centre of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fan-like 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 th
e wing.
The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred and fifty feet high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.
There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of coloured 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 towards 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. ‘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!’
The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the stadium to them.
‘Did you hide the matches?’ 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 south-bound 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 B.I.R. 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 railcars 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 slipped and fell slowly towards 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 stunned his imagination.
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 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 F.P. came over and pulled 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 to the elevator.
He called in to see Gregson before returning to the student dormitory. The Gregsons lived in the West millions 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. As she let him in with her customary smile of welcome he noticed her glancing at the detector mounted in the hall.
Gregson was in his room, happily cutting out frames of paper and pasting them on to 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. He picked up a paper dart lying beside him and tossed it out of the window. It swam into the street, lazed down in a wide spiral and vanished into the open mouth of the
ventilator shaft.
‘When are you going to build another model?’ Gregson asked.
‘I’m not.’
Gregson looked up. ‘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 mad.’
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!’
‘Non-functional space.’
‘Well?’ Franz asked patiently.
‘The concept’s absurd.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it couldn’t exist.’
Franz pounded his forehead in despair. ‘Why couldn’t it?’
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 on to 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 and fifty counties, including KNI, together form the 493rd Sector, and an association of 1,500 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 on to 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?’
‘Farther ones. Why not?’
‘For ever?’ Franz pressed.
‘Well, as far as for ever is.’
‘The great street directory in the old Treasury Library on 247th Street is the largest in the county,’ Franz said. ‘I went down th
ere 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 farther 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 million years ago.’
When they were 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 Fire Police 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 kerb, and half a dozen heavy steel grabs were carried into the house and hooked round the walls.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 5