Morley frowned dubiously. ‘That jungle is marked “private”. Even if you do, is a psychotic’s withdrawal drama going to make any sense?’
‘Of course it will. However insane it seems to us, it was real enough to them. If we know the ceiling fell in or the whole gym filled with ice-cream or turned into a maze, we’ve got something to work on.’ He sat down on the desk. ‘Do you remember that story of Chekov’s you told me about?’
‘“The Bet”? Yes.’
‘I read it last night. Curious. It’s a lot nearer what you’re really trying to say than you know.’ He gazed round the office. ‘This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes the mind driven to the furthest limits of self-awareness . . . Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell and Lang. They must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to grasp the idea, I’d say that they were conscious of nothing else. Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single gigantic eye staring back at him.’
‘So you think their withdrawal is a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?’
‘Not escape,’ Neill corrected. ‘The psychotic never escapes from anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekov’s story gives me an idea as to how they might have re-adjusted. Their particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I’m beginning to realize it was a mistake to put them in there – all those lights blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have become an external projection of their own egos.’
Neill drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘My guess is that at this moment they’re either striding around in there the size of hundred-foot giants, or else they’ve cut it down to their own dimensions. More probably that. They’ve just pulled the gym in on themselves.’
Morley grinned bleakly. ‘So all we’ve got to do now is pump them full of honey and apomorphine and coax them out. Suppose they refuse?’
‘They won’t,’ Neill said. ‘You’ll see.’
There was a rap on the door. An intern stuck his head through.
‘Lang’s coming out of it, Doctor. He’s calling for you.’
Neill bounded out.
Morley followed him into the ward.
Lang was lying in his cot, body motionless under the canvas sheet. His lips were parted slightly. No sound came from them but Morley, bending over next to Neill, could see his hyoid bone vibrating in spasms.
‘He’s very faint,’ the intern warned.
Neill pulled up a chair and sat down next to the cot. He made a visible effort of concentration, flexing his shoulders. He bent his head close to Lang’s and listened.
Five minutes later it came through again.
Lang’s lips quivered. His body arched under the sheet, straining at the buckles, and then subsided.
‘Neill . . . Neill,’ he whispered. The sounds, thin and strangled, seemed to be coming from the bottom of a well. ‘Neill . . . Neill . . . Neill . . .’
Neill stroked his forehead with a small, neat hand.
‘Yes, Bobby,’ he said gently. His voice was feather-soft, caressing. ‘I’m here, Bobby. You can come out now.’
1957
TRACK 12
‘Guess again,’ Sheringham said.
Maxted clipped on the headphones, carefully settled them over his ears. He concentrated as the disc began to spin, trying to catch some echo of identity.
The sound was a rapid metallic rustling, like iron filings splashing through a funnel. It ran for ten seconds, repeated itself a dozen times, then ended abruptly in a string of blips.
‘Well?’ Sheringham asked. ‘What is it?’
Maxted pulled off his headphones, rubbed one of his ears. He had been listening to the records for hours and his ears felt bruised and numb.
‘Could be anything. An ice-cube melting?’
Sheringham shook his head, his little beard wagging.
Maxted shrugged. ‘A couple of galaxies colliding?’
‘No. Sound waves don’t travel through space. I’ll give you a clue. It’s one of those proverbial sounds.’ He seemed to be enjoying the catechism.
Maxted lit a cigarette, threw the match onto the laboratory bench. The head melted a tiny pool of wax, froze and left a shallow black scar. He watched it pleasurably, conscious of Sheringham fidgeting beside him.
He pumped his brains for an obscene simile. ‘What about a fly –’
‘Time’s up,’ Sheringham cut in. ‘A pin dropping.’ He took the 3-inch disc off the player, angled it into its sleeve.
‘In actual fall, that is, not impact. We used a fifty-foot shaft and eight microphones. I thought you’d get that one.’
He reached for the last record, a 12-inch LP, but Maxted stood up before he got it to the turntable. Through the french windows he could see the patio, a table, glasses and decanter gleaming in the darkness. Sheringham and his infantile games suddenly irritated him; he felt impatient with himself for tolerating the man so long.
‘Let’s get some air,’ he said brusquely, shouldering past one of the amplifier rigs. ‘My ears feel like gongs.’
‘By all means,’ Sheringham agreed promptly. He placed the record carefully on the turntable and switched off the player. ‘I want to save this one until later anyway.’
They went out into the warm evening air. Sheringham turned on the Japanese lanterns and they stretched back in the wicker chairs under the open sky.
‘I hope you weren’t too bored,’ Sheringham said as he handled the decanter. ‘Microsonics is a fascinating hobby, but I’m afraid I may have let it become an obsession.’
Maxted grunted non-committally. ‘Some of the records are interesting,’ he admitted. ‘They have a sort of crazy novelty value, like blown-up photographs of moths’ faces and razor blades. Despite what you claim, though, I can’t believe microsonics will ever become a scientific tool. It’s just an elaborate laboratory toy.’
Sheringham shook his head. ‘You’re completely wrong, of course. Remember the cell division series I played first of all? Amplified 100,000 times animal cell division sounds like a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart – how did you put it? – a car smash in slow motion. On the other hand, plant cell division is an electronic poem, all soft chords and bubbling tones. Now there you have a perfect illustration of how microsonics can reveal the distinction between the animal and plant kingdoms.’
‘Seems a damned roundabout way of doing it,’ Maxted commented, helping himself to soda. ‘You might as well calculate the speed of your car from the apparent motion of the stars. Possible, but it’s easier to look at the speedometer.’
Sheringham nodded, watching Maxted closely across the table. His interest in the conversation appeared to have exhausted itself, and the two men sat silently with their glasses. Strangely, the hostility between them, of so many years’ standing, now became less veiled, the contrast of personality, manner and physique more pronounced. Maxted, a tall fleshy man with a coarse handsome face, lounged back almost horizontally in his chair, thinking about Susan Sheringham. She was at the Turnbulls’ party, and but for the fact that it was no longer discreet of him to be seen at the Turnbulls’ – for the all-too-familiar reason – he would have passed the evening with her, rather than with her grotesque little husband.
He surveyed Sheringham with as much detachment as he could muster, wondering whether this prim unattractive man, with his pedantry and in-bred academic humour, had any redeeming qualities whatever. None, certainly, at a casual glance, though it required some courage and pride to have invited him round that evening. His motives, however, would be typically eccentric.
The pretext, Maxted reflected, had been slight enough – Sheringham, professor of biochemistry at the university, maintained a lavish home laboratory; Maxted, a run-down athlete with a bad degree, acte
d as torpedo-man for a company manufacturing electron microscopes; a visit, Sheringham had suggested over the phone, might be to the profit of both.
Of course, nothing of this had in fact been mentioned. But nor, as yet, had he referred to Susan, the real subject of the evening’s charade. Maxted speculated upon the possible routes Sheringham might take towards the inevitable confrontation scene; not for him the nervous circular pacing, the well-thumbed photostat, or the tug at the shoulder. There was a vicious adolescent streak running through Sheringham –
Maxted broke out of his reverie abruptly. The air in the patio had become suddenly cooler, almost as if a powerful refrigerating unit had been switched on. A rash of goose-flesh raced up his thighs and down the back of his neck, and he reached forward and finished what was left of his whisky.
‘Cold out here,’ he commented.
Sheringham glanced at his watch. ‘Is it?’ he said. There was a hint of indecision in his voice; for a moment he seemed to be waiting for a signal. Then he pulled himself together and, with an odd half-smile, said: ‘Time for the last record.’
‘What do you mean?’ Maxted asked.
‘Don’t move,’ Sheringham said. He stood up. ‘I’ll put it on.’ He pointed to a loudspeaker screwed to the wall above Maxted’s head, grinned and ducked out.
Shivering uncomfortably, Maxted peered up into the silent evening sky, hoping that the vertical current of cold air that had sliced down into the patio would soon dissipate itself.
A low noise crackled from the speaker, multiplied by a circle of other speakers which he noticed for the first time had been slung among the trellis-work around the patio.
Shaking his head sadly at Sheringham’s antics, he decided to help himself to more whisky. As he stretched across the table he swayed and rolled back uncontrollably into his chair. His stomach seemed to be full of mercury, ice-cold and enormously heavy. He pushed himself forward again, trying to reach the glass, and knocked it across the table. His brain began to fade, and he leaned his elbows helplessly on the glass edge of the table and felt his head fall onto his wrists.
When he looked up again Sheringham was standing in front of him, smiling sympathetically.
‘Not too good, eh?’ he said.
Breathing with difficulty, Maxted managed to lean back. He tried to speak to Sheringham, but he could no longer remember any words. His heart switchbacked, and he grimaced at the pain.
‘Don’t worry,’ Sheringham assured him. ‘The fibrillation is only a side effect. Disconcerting, perhaps, but it will soon pass.’
He strolled leisurely around the patio, scrutinizing Maxted from several angles. Evidently satisfied, he sat down on the table. He picked up the siphon and swirled the contents about. ‘Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body’s fluid balances, floods hydroxyl ions into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown. Really drown, that is, not merely suffocate as you would if you were immersed in an external bath. However, I mustn’t distract you.’
He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Sheringham said. Twirling the siphon by its neck he stepped over Maxted’s legs and adjusted the tone control under one of the speaker boxes. He looked blithe and spruce, almost ten years younger. ‘These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsens, amplification one thousand. I admit I’ve edited the track a little, but it’s still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become. You’ll never guess what this was.’
Maxted stirred sluggishly. The lake of mercury in his stomach was as cold and bottomless as an oceanic trench, and his arms and legs had become enormous, like the bloated appendages of a drowned giant. He could just see Sheringham bobbing about in front of him, and hear the slow beating of the sea in the distance. Nearer now, it pounded with a dull insistent rhythm, the great waves ballooning and bursting like bubbles in a lava sea.
‘I’ll tell you, Maxted, it took me a year to get that recording,’ Sheringham was saying. He straddled Maxted, gesturing with the siphon. ‘A year. Do you know how ugly a year can be?’ For a moment he paused, then tore himself from the memory. ‘Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. You know, Maxted, there are audio-probes everywhere here. Slim as pencils, with a six-inch focus. I had four in that headrest alone.’ He added, as a footnote: ‘The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.’
Maxted drifted in a wash of sound.
Some while later Sheringham’s face filled his eyes, beard wagging, mouth working wildly.
‘Maxted! You’ve only two more guesses, so for God’s sake concentrate,’ he shouted irritably, his voice almost lost among the thunder rolling from the sea. ‘Come on, man, what is it? Maxted!’ he bellowed. He leapt for the nearest loudspeaker and drove up the volume. The sound boomed out of the patio, reverberating into the night.
Maxted had almost gone now, his fading identity a small featureless island nearly eroded by the waves beating across it.
Sheringham knelt down and shouted into his ear.
‘Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you’re drowning?’
A succession of gigantic flaccid waves, each more lumbering and enveloping than the last, rode down upon them.
‘In a kiss!’ Sheringham screamed. ‘A kiss!’
The island slipped and slid away into the molten shelf of the sea.
1958
THE WAITING GROUNDS
Whether Henry Tallis, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can’t say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me – a job which could easily have been done in three days – were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven’t yet faced up to.
I remember that on the first evening after my arrival at Murak he asked me a question I’ve been puzzling over ever since.
We were up on the lounge deck of the observatory, looking out at the sand-reefs and fossil cones of the volcano jungle glowing in the false dusk, the great 250-foot steel bowl of the telescope humming faintly in the air above us.
‘Tell me, Quaine,’ Tallis suddenly asked, ‘where would you like to be when the world ends?’
‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ I admitted. ‘Is there any urgency?’
‘Urgency?’ Tallis smiled at me thinly, his eyes amiable but assessing me shrewdly. ‘Wait until you’ve been here a little longer.’
He had almost finished his last tour at the observatory and I assumed he was referring to the desolation around us which he, after fifteen years, was leaving thanklessly to my entire care. Later, of course, I realized how wrong I was, just as I misjudged the whole of Tallis’s closed, complex personality.
He was a lean, ascetic-looking man of about fifty, withheld and moody, as I discovered the moment I debarked from the freighter flying me in to Murak – instead of greeting me at the ramp he sat in the half-track a hundred yards away at the edge of the port, watching silently through dark glasses as I heaved my suitcases across the burning, lava-thick sunlight, legs weary after the massive deceleration, stumbling in the unfamiliar gravity.
The gesture seemed characteristic. Tallis’s manner was aloof and sardonic; everything he said had the same deliberately ambiguous overtones, that air of private mystery recluses and extreme introjects assume as a defence. Not that Tallis was in any way pathological – no one could spend fifteen years, even with six-monthly leaves, virtually alone on a remote planetary clinker like Murak without developing a
few curious mannerisms. In fact, as I all too soon realized, what was really remarkable about Tallis was the degree to which he had preserved his sanity, not surrendered it.
He listened keenly to the latest news from Earth.
‘The first pilotless launchings to Proxima Centauri are scheduled for 2250 . . . the UN Assembly at Lake Success have just declared themselves a sovereign state . . . V-R Day celebrations are to be discontinued – you must have heard it all on the radiocasts.’
‘I haven’t got a radio here,’ Tallis said. ‘Apart from the one up there, and that’s tuned to the big spiral networks in Andromeda. On Murak we listen only to the important news.’
I nearly retorted that by the time it reached Murak the news, however important, would be a million years old, but on that first evening I was preoccupied with adjusting myself to an unfamiliar planetary environment – notably a denser atmosphere, slightly higher (1.2 E) gravity, vicious temperature swings from –30° to +160° – and programming new routines to fit myself into Murak’s 18-hour day.
Above all, there was the prospect of two years of near-absolute isolation.
Ten miles from Murak Reef, the planet’s only settlement, the observatory was sited among the first hills marking the northern edge of the inert volcano jungle which spread southward to Murak’s equator. It consisted of the giant telescope and a straggling nexus of twenty or thirty asbestos domes which housed the automatic data processing and tracking units, generator and refrigerating plant, and a miscellany of replacement and vehicle stores, workshops and ancillary equipment.
The observatory was self-sufficient as regards electric power and water. On the near-by slopes farms of solar batteries had been planted out in quarter-mile strips, the thousands of cells winking in the sunlight like a field of diamonds, sucking power from the sun to drive the generator dynamos. On another slope, its huge mouth permanently locked into the rock face, a mobile water synthesizer slowly bored its way through the desert crust, mining out oxygen and hydrogen combined into the surface minerals.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 11