‘If it worries you. However, it would be interesting to leave it, assuming you can stand the noise. There’s absolutely no danger of it going on indefinitely.’ He reached up and felt one of the spars. ‘Still firm, but I’d say it was almost there. It will soon start getting pulpy like an over-ripe fruit and begin to shred off and disintegrate, playing itself out, one hopes, with Mozart’s Requiem and the finale of the Götterdämmerung.’ He smiled at me, showing his strange teeth. ‘Die, if you prefer it.’
However, he had reckoned completely without Lorraine Drexel.
At six o’clock the next morning I was woken by the noise. The statue was now fifty feet long and crossing the flower beds on either side of the garden. It sounded as if a complete orchestra were performing some Mad Hatter’s symphony out in the centre of the lawn. At the far end, by the rockery, the sonic cores were still working their way through the Romantic catalogue, a babel of Mendelssohn, Schubert and Grieg, but near the veranda the cores were beginning to emit the jarring and syncopated rhythms of Stravinsky and Stockhausen.
I woke Carol and we ate a nervous breakfast.
‘Mr Hamilton!’ she shouted. ‘You’ve got to stop it!’ The nearest tendrils were only five feet from the glass doors of the veranda. The largest limbs were over three inches in diameter and the pulse thudded through them like water under pressure in a fire hose.
When the first police cars cruised past down the road I went into the garage and found the hacksaw.
The metal was soft and the blade sank through it quickly. I left the pieces I cut off in a heap to one side, random notes sounding out into the air. Separated from the main body of the statue, the fragments were almost inactive, as Dr Blackett had stated. By two o’clock that afternoon I had cut back about half the statue and got it down to manageable proportions.
‘That should hold it,’ I said to Carol. I walked round and lopped off a few of the noisier spars. ‘Tomorrow I’ll finish it off altogether.’
I wasn’t in the least surprised when Raymond called and said that there was no trace anywhere of Lorraine Drexel.
At two o’clock that night I woke as a window burst across the floor of my bedroom. A huge metal helix hovered like a claw through the fractured pane, its sonic core screaming down at me.
A half-moon was up, throwing a thin grey light over the garden. The statue had sprung back and was twice as large as it had been at its peak the previous morning. It lay all over the garden in a tangled mesh, like the skeleton of a crushed building. Already the advance tendrils had reached the bedroom windows, while others had climbed over the garage and were sprouting downwards through the roof, tearing away the galvanized metal sheets.
All over the statue thousands of sonic cores gleamed in the light thrown down from the window. At last in unison, they hymned out the finale of Bruckner’s Apocalyptic Symphony.
I went into Carol’s bedroom, fortunately on the other side of the house, and made her promise to stay in bed. Then I telephoned Raymond Mayo. He came around within an hour, an oxyacetylene torch and cylinders he had begged from a local contractor in the back seat of his car.
The statue was growing almost as fast as we could cut it back, but by the time the first light came up at a quarter to six we had beaten it.
Dr Blackett watched us slice through the last fragments of the statue. ‘There’s a section down in the rockery that might just be audible. I think it would be worth saving.’
I wiped the rust-stained sweat from my face and shook my head. ‘No. I’m sorry, but believe me, once is enough.’
Blackett nodded in sympathy, and stared gloomily across the heaps of scrap iron which were all that remained of the statue.
Carol, looking a little stunned by everything, was pouring coffee and brandy. As we slumped back in two of the deck chairs, arms and faces black with rust and metal filings, I reflected wryly that no one could accuse the Fine Arts Committee of not devoting itself wholeheartedly to its projects.
I went off on a final tour of the garden, collecting the section Blackett had mentioned, then guided in the local contractor who had arrived with his truck. It took him and his two men an hour to load the scrap – an estimated ton and a half – into the vehicle.
‘What do I do with it?’ he asked as he climbed into the cab. ‘Take it to the museum?’
‘No!’ I almost screamed. ‘Get rid of it. Bury it somewhere, or better still, have it melted down. As soon as possible.’
When they had gone Blackett and I walked around the garden together. It looked as if a shrapnel shell had exploded over it. Huge divots were strewn all over the place, and what grass had not been ripped up by the statue had been trampled away by us. Iron filings lay on the lawn like dust, a faint ripple of lost notes carried away on the steepening sunlight.
Blackett bent down and scooped up a handful of grains. ‘Dragon’s teeth. You’ll look out of the window tomorrow and see the B Minor Mass coming up.’ He let it run out between his fingers. ‘However, I suppose that’s the end of it.’
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Lorraine Drexel sued us. She must have come across the newspaper reports and realized her opportunity. I don’t know where she had been hiding, but her lawyers materialized quickly enough, waving the original contract and pointing to the clause in which we guaranteed to protect the statue from any damage that might be done to it by vandals, livestock or other public nuisance. Her main accusation concerned the damage we had done to her reputation – if we had decided not to exhibit the statue we should have supervised its removal to some place of safekeeping, not openly dismembered it and then sold off the fragments to a scrap dealer. This deliberate affront had, her lawyers insisted, cost her commissions to a total of at least fifty thousand dollars.
At the preliminary hearings we soon realized that, absurdly, our one big difficulty was going to be proving to anyone who had not been there that the statue had actually started growing. With luck we managed to get several postponements, and Raymond and I tried to trace what we could of the statue. All we found were three small struts, now completely inert, rusting in the sand on the edge of one of the junkyards in Red Beach. Apparently taking me at my word, the contractor had shipped the rest of the statue to a steel mill to be melted down.
Our only case now rested on what amounted to a plea of self-defence.
Raymond and myself testified that the statue had started to grow, and then Blackett delivered a long homily to the judge on what he believed to be the musical shortcomings of the statue. The judge, a crusty and short-tempered old man of the hanging school, immediately decided that we were trying to pull his leg. We were finished from the start.
The final judgment was not delivered until ten months after we had first unveiled the statue in the centre of Vermilion Sands, and the verdict, when it came, was no surprise.
Lorraine Drexel was awarded thirty thousand dollars.
‘It looks as if we should have taken the pylon after, all,’ I said to Carol as we left the courtroom. ‘Even the step-pyramid would have been less trouble.’
Raymond joined us and we went out on to the balcony at the end of the corridor for some air.
‘Never mind,’ Carol said bravely. ‘At least it’s all over with.’
I looked out over the rooftops of Vermilion Sands, thinking about the thirty thousand dollars and wondering whether we would have to pay it ourselves.
The court building was a new one and by an unpleasant irony ours had been the first case to be heard there. Much of the floor and plasterwork had still to be completed, and the balcony was untiled. I was standing on an exposed steel crossbeam; one or two floors down someone must have been driving a rivet into one of the girders, and the beam under my feet vibrated soothingly.
Then I noticed that there were no sounds of riveting going on anywhere, and that the movement under my feet was not so much a vibration as a low rhythmic pulse.
I bent down and pressed my hands against the beam. Raymond and Caro
l watched me curiously. ‘Mr Hamilton, what is it?’ Carol asked when I stood up.
‘Raymond,’ I said. ‘How long ago did they first start on this building? The steel framework, anyway.’
‘Four months, I think. Why?’
‘Four.’ I nodded slowly. ‘Tell me, how long would you say it took any random piece of scrap iron to be reprocessed through a steel mill and get back into circulation?’
‘Years, if it lay around in the wrong junkyards.’
‘But if it had actually arrived at the steel mill?’
‘A month or so. Less.’
I started to laugh, pointing to the girder. ‘Feel that! Go on, feel it!’
Frowning at me, they knelt down and pressed their hands to the girder. Then Raymond looked up at me sharply.
I stopped laughing. ‘Did you feel it?’
‘Feel it?’ Raymond repeated. ‘I can hear it. Lorraine Drexel – the statue. It’s here!’
Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. ‘I think it’s humming,’ she said, puzzled. ‘It sounds like the statue.’
When I started to laugh again Raymond held my arm. ‘Snap out of it, the whole building will be singing soon!’
‘I know,’ I said weakly. ‘And it won’t be just this building either.’ I took Carol by the arm. ‘Come on, let’s see if it’s started.’
We went up to the top floor. The plasterers were about to move in and there were trestles and laths all over the place. The walls were still bare brick, girders at fifteen-foot intervals between them.
We didn’t have to look very far.
Jutting out from one of the steel joists below the roof was a long metal helix, hollowing itself slowly into a delicate sonic core. Without moving, we counted a dozen others. A faint twanging sound came from them, like early arrivals at a rehearsal of some vast orchestra of sitar-players, seated on every plain and hilltop of the earth. I remembered when we had last heard the music, as Lorraine Drexel sat beside me at the unveiling in Vermilion Sands. The statue had made its call to her dead lover, and now the refrain was to be taken up again.
‘An authentic Drexel,’ I said. ‘All the mannerisms. Nothing much to look at yet, but wait till it really gets going.’
Raymond wandered round, his mouth open. ‘It’ll tear the building apart. Just think of the noise.’
Carol was staring up at one of the shoots. ‘Mr Hamilton, you said they’d melted it all down.’
‘They did, angel. So it got back into circulation, touching off all the other metal it came into contact with. Lorraine Drexel’s statue is here, in this building, in a dozen other buildings, in ships and planes and a million new automobiles. Even if it’s only one screw or ball-bearing, that’ll be enough to trigger the rest off.’
‘They’ll stop it,’ Carol said.
‘They might,’ I admitted. ‘But it’ll probably get back again somehow. A few pieces always will.’ I put my arm round her waist and began to dance to the strange abstracted music, for some reason as beautiful now as Lorraine Drexel’s wistful eyes. ‘Did you say it was all over? Carol, it’s only just beginning. The whole world will be singing.’
1957
MANHOLE 69
For the first few days all went well.
‘Keep away from windows and don’t think about it,’ Dr Neill told them. ‘As far as you’re concerned it was just another compulsion. At eleven thirty or twelve go down to the gym and throw a ball around, play some table-tennis. At two they’re running a film for you in the Neurology theatre. Read the papers for a couple of hours, put on some records. I’ll be down at six. By seven you’ll be in a manic swing.’
‘Any chance of a sudden blackout, Doctor?’ Avery asked.
‘Absolutely none,’ Neill said. ‘If you get tired, rest, of course. That’s the one thing you’ll probably have a little difficulty getting used to. Remember, you’re still using only 3,500 calories, so your kinetic level – and you’ll notice this most by day – will be about a third lower. You’ll have to take things easier, make allowances. Most of these have been programmed in for you, but start learning to play chess, focus that inner eye.’
Gorrell leaned forward. ‘Doctor,’ he asked, ‘if we want to, can we look out of the windows?’ Dr Neill smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The wires are cut. You couldn’t go to sleep now if you tried.’
Neill waited until the three men had left the lecture room on their way back to the Recreation Wing and then stepped down from the dais and shut the door. He was a short, broad-shouldered man in his fifties, with a sharp, impatient mouth and small features. He swung a chair out of the front row and straddled it deftly.
‘Well?’ he asked.
Morley was sitting on one of the desks against the back wall, playing aimlessly with a pencil. At thirty he was the youngest member of the team working under Neill at the Clinic, but for some reason Neill liked to talk to him.
He saw Neill was waiting for an answer and shrugged.
‘Everything seems to be all right,’ he said. ‘Surgical convalescence is over. Cardiac rhythms and EEG are normal. I saw the X-rays this morning and everything has sealed beautifully.’
Neill watched him quizzically. ‘You don’t sound as if you approve.’
Morley laughed and stood up. ‘Of course I do.’ He walked down the aisle between the desks, white coat unbuttoned, hands sunk deep in his pockets. ‘No, so far you’ve vindicated yourself on every point. The party’s only just beginning, but the guests are in damn good shape. No doubt about it. I thought three weeks was a little early to bring them out of hypnosis, but you’ll probably be right there as well. Tonight is the first one they take on their own. Let’s see how they are tomorrow morning.’
‘What are you secretly expecting?’ Neill asked wryly. ‘Massive feedback from the medulla?’
‘No,’ Morley said. ‘There again the psychometric tests have shown absolutely nothing coming up at all. Not a single trauma.’ He stared at the blackboard and then looked round at Neill. ‘Yes, as a cautious estimate I’d say you’ve succeeded.’
Neill leaned forward on his elbows. He flexed his jaw muscles. ‘I think I’ve more than succeeded. Blocking the medullary synapses has eliminated a lot of material I thought would still be there – the minor quirks and complexes, the petty aggressive phobias, the bad change in the psychic bank. Most of them have gone, or at least they don’t show in the tests. However, they’re the side targets, and thanks to you, John, and to everyone else in the team, we’ve hit a bull’s eye on the main one.’
Morley murmured something, but Neill ran on in his clipped voice. ‘None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.’
‘I only hope they know what to do with them,’ Morley commented.
‘Come, John,’ Neill snapped back. ‘That’s not an argument. What they do with the time is their responsibility anyway. They’ll make the most of it, just as we’ve always made the most, eventually, of any opportunity given us. It’s too early to think about it yet, but visualize the universal application of our technique. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.’
Tired, Neill broke off and rubbed his eyes. ‘What’s worrying you?’
Morley made a small, helpless gesture with one hand. ‘I’m not sure, it’s just that I . . .’ He played with the plastic brain mounted on a stand next to the blackboard. Reflected in one of the frontal whorls was a distorted image of Neill, with a twisted chinless face and vast domed cranium. Sitting alone among the desks in the empty lecture room he looked like an insane genius patiently waiting to take an examination no one could set him.
Mo
rley turned the model with his finger, watched the image blur and dissolve. Whatever his doubts, Neill was probably the last person to understand them.
‘I know all you’ve done is close off a few of the loops in the hypothalamus, and I realize the results are going to be spectacular. You’ll probably precipitate the greatest social and economic revolution since the Fall. But for some reason I can’t get that story of Chekov’s out of my mind – the one about the man who accepts a million-rouble bet that he can’t shut himself up alone for ten years. He tries to, nothing goes wrong, but one minute before the time is up he deliberately steps out of his room. Of course, he’s insane.’
‘So?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all week.’
Neill let out a light snort. ‘I suppose you’re trying to say that sleep is some sort of communal activity and that these three men are now isolated, exiled from the group unconscious, the dark oceanic dream. Is that it?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Nonsense, John. The further we hold back the unconscious the better. We’re reclaiming some of the marshland. Physiologically sleep is nothing more than an inconvenient symptom of cerebral anoxaemia. It’s not that you’re afraid of missing, it’s the dream. You want to hold on to your front-row seat at the peepshow.’
‘No,’ Morley said mildly. Sometimes Neill’s aggressiveness surprised him; it was almost as if he regarded sleep itself as secretly discreditable, a concealed vice. ‘What I really mean is that for better or worse Lang, Gorrell and Avery are now stuck with themselves. They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of minutes, let alone eight hours. How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself. Remember, you and I aren’t always going to be around, feeding them with tests and films. What will happen if they get fed up with themselves?’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 8