We entered the largest of the cabins, two rooms taken off the rear of a beach-house. Quinton lit a paraffin lamp. He pointed around the dingy interior. ‘You’ll be . . . comfortable,’ he said without conviction. As Judith stared at him with unconcealed distaste, he added pointedly: ‘We don’t get many visitors.’
I put the suitcases on the metal bed. Judith walked into the kitchen and Quinton began to open the empty case.
‘It’s in here?’
I took the two packets of $100 bills from my jacket. When I had handed them to him, I said: ‘The suitcase is for the . . . remains. Is it big enough?’
Quinton peered at me through the ruby light, as if baffled by our presence there. ‘You could have spared yourself the trouble. They’ve been up there a long time, Mr Groves. After the impact’ – for some reason, he cast a lewd eye in Judith’s direction – ‘there might be enough for a chess set.’
When he had gone, I went into the kitchen. Judith stood by the stove, hands on a carton of canned food. She was staring through the window at the metal salvage, refuse of the sky that still carried Robert Hamilton in its rusty centrifuge. For a moment, I had the feeling that the entire landscape of the earth was covered with rubbish and that here, at Cape Kennedy, we had found its source.
I held her shoulders. ‘Judith, is there any point in this? Why don’t we go back to Tampa? I could drive here in ten days’ time when it’s all over –’
She turned from me, her hands rubbing the suede where I had marked it. ‘Philip, I want to be here – no matter how unpleasant. Can’t you understand?’
At midnight, when I finished making a small meal for us, she was standing on the concrete wall of the settling tank. The three relic hunters sitting on their car seats watched her without moving, scarred hands like flames in the darkness.
At three o’clock that morning, as we lay awake on the narrow bed, Valentina Prokrovna came down from the sky. Enthroned on a bier of burning aluminium three hundred yards wide, she soared past on her final orbit. When I went out into the night air, the relic hunters had gone. From the rim of the settling tank, I watched them race away among the dunes, leaping like hares over the tyres and wire.
I went back to the cabin. ‘Judith, she’s coming down. Do you want to watch?’
Her blonde hair tied within a white towel, Judith lay on the bed, staring at the cracked plasterboard ceiling. Shortly after four o’clock, as I sat beside her, a phosphorescent light filled the hollow. There was the distant sound of explosions, muffled by the high wall of the dunes. Lights flared, followed by the noise of engines and sirens.
At dawn the relic hunters returned, hands wrapped in makeshift bandages, dragging their booty with them.
After this melancholy rehearsal, Judith entered a period of sudden and unexpected activity. As if preparing the cabin for some visitor, she rehung the curtains and swept out the two rooms with meticulous care, even bringing herself to ask Quinton for a bottle of cleanser. For hours she sat at the dressing table, brushing and shaping her hair, trying out first one style and then another. I watched her feel the hollows of her cheeks, searching for the contours of a face that had vanished twenty years ago. As she spoke about Robert Hamilton, she almost seemed worried that she would appear old to him. At other times, she referred to Robert as if he were a child, the son she and I had never been able to conceive since her miscarriage. These different roles followed one another like scenes in some private psychodrama. However, without knowing it, for years Judith and I had used Robert Hamilton for our own reasons. Waiting for him to land, and well aware that after this Judith would have no one to turn to except myself, I said nothing.
Meanwhile, the relic hunters worked on the fragments of Valentina Prokrovna’s capsule: the blistered heat shield, the chassis of the radio-telemetry unit and several cans of film that recorded her collision and act of death (these, if still intact, would fetch the highest prices, films of horrific and dreamlike violence played in the underground cinemas of Los Angeles, London and Moscow). Passing the next cabin, I saw a tattered silver space-suit spread-eagled on two automobile seats. Quinton and the relic hunters knelt beside it, their arms deep inside the legs and sleeves, gazing at me with the rapt and sensitive eyes of jewellers.
An hour before dawn, I was awakened by the sound of engines along the beach. In the darkness, the three relic hunters crouched by the settling tank, their pinched faces lit by the headlamps. A long convoy of trucks and half-tracks was moving into the launching ground. Soldiers jumped down from the tailboards, unloading tents and supplies.
‘What are they doing?’ I asked Quinton. ‘Are they looking for us?’
The old man cupped a scarred hand over his eyes. ‘It’s the Army,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Manoeuvres, maybe. They haven’t been here before like this.’
‘What about Hamilton?’ I gripped his bony arm. ‘Are you sure –’
He pushed me away with a show of nervous temper. ‘We’ll get him first. Don’t worry, he’ll be coming sooner than they think.’
Two nights later, as Quinton prophesied, Robert Hamilton began his final descent. From the dunes near the settling tanks, we watched him emerge from the stars on his last run. Reflected in the windows of the buried cars, a thousand images of the capsule flared in the saw grass around us. Behind the satellite, a wide fan of silver spray opened in a phantom wake.
In the Army encampment by the gantries, there was a surge of activity. A blaze of headlamps crossed the concrete lanes. Since the arrival of these military units, it had become plain to me, if not to Quinton, that far from being on manoeuvres, they were preparing for the landing of Robert Hamilton’s capsule. A dozen half-tracks had been churning around the dunes, setting fire to the abandoned cabins and crushing the old car bodies. Platoons of soldiers were repairing the perimeter fence and replacing the sections of metalled road that the relic hunters had dismantled.
Shortly after midnight, at an elevation of forty-two degrees in the north-west, betwen Lyra and Hercules, Robert Hamilton appeared for the last time. As Judith stood up and shouted into the night air, an immense blade of light cleft the sky. The expanding corona sped towards us like a gigantic signal flare, illuminating every fragment of the landscape.
‘Mrs Groves!’ Quinton darted after Judith and pulled her down into the grass as she ran towards the approaching satellite. Three hundred yards away, the silhouette of a half-track stood out on an isolated dune, its feeble spotlights drowned by the glare.
With a low metallic sigh, the burning capsule of the dead astronaut soared over our heads, the vaporizing metal pouring from its hull. A few seconds later, as I shielded my eyes, an explosion of detonating sand rose from the ground behind me. A curtain of dust lifted into the darkening air like a vast spectre of powdered bone. The sounds of the impact rolled across the dunes. Near the launching gantries, fires flickered where fragments of the capsule had landed. A pall of phosphorescing gas hung in the air, particles within it beading and winking.
Judith had gone, running after the relic hunters through the swerving spotlights. When I caught up with them, the last fires of the explosion were dying among the gantries. The capsule had landed near the old Atlas launching pads, forming a shallow crater fifty yards in diameter. The slopes were scattered with glowing particles, sparkling like fading eyes. Judith ran distraughtly up and down, searching the fragments of smouldering metal.
Someone struck my shoulder. Quinton and his men, hot ash on their scarred hands, ran past like a troop of madmen, eyes wild in the crazed night. As we darted away through the flaring spotlights, I looked back at the beach. The gantries were enveloped in a pale-silver sheen that hovered there, and then moved away like a dying wraith over the sea.
At dawn, as the engines growled among the dunes, we collected the last remains of Robert Hamilton. The old man came into our cabin. As Judith watched from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel, he gave me a cardboard shoe-box.
I held the box in my hands. ‘Is this
all you could get?’
‘It’s all there was. Look at them, if you want.’
‘That’s all right. We’ll be leaving in half an hour.’
He shook his head. ‘Not now. They’re all around. If you move, they’ll find us.’
He waited for me to open the shoe-box, then grimaced and went out into the pale light.
We stayed for another four days, as the Army patrols searched the surrounding dunes. Day and night, the half-tracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a half-track and two jeeps came within four hundred yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.
During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoe-box on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvage-filled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.
On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.
The shoe-box was open. In the centre of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, grey flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.
She looked at me with puzzled eyes. ‘They’re black,’ she said.
Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loudspeaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.
When they moved away, Judith said: ‘We can go now.’
‘In a little while, when it’s clear. What about these?’
‘Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter.’ She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.
Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe-box, scraping up Robert Hamilton’s ash with a dessert spoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.
It was on the third day that we fell ill.
After a long, noise-filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.
Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.
‘Philip . . .’ Judith swayed towards me. ‘Do you feel – What is it?’
‘The water.’ I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. ‘It must be fouled.’
‘Can we leave?’ She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. ‘Philip, for God’s sake – I’m losing all my hair!’
Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.
Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked towards them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird’s eyes.
Half an hour later, they were gone.
The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoe-box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear-changes of the half-tracks. The sounds from the loudspeakers drummed like fists on my head.
Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind.
‘ . . . contaminated area . . . evacuate . . . radioactive . . .’
I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith’s hands.
‘Philip . . .’ She looked up at me weakly. ‘Give it back to me.’
Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached towards me like the claw of a cadaver.
I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. ‘For God’s sake, it’s this! Don’t you see – why we’re ill?’
‘Philip – where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you.’
‘They’ve gone. They went yesterday, I told you.’ I let the box fall on to the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. ‘Quinton knew what was happening – why the Army is here. They’re trying to warn us.’
‘What do you mean?’ Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. ‘Don’t let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We’ll come back later.’
‘Judith!’ I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. ‘Don’t you realize – there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!’ I pulled back the curtains from the window. ‘My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn’t ever be really sure . . .’
‘Philip . . .’
‘Don’t worry, I used him – thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!’
There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half-track with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.
‘Judith, before we go, tell me . . . I never asked you –’
Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.
As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.
1968
THE COMSAT ANGELS
When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV’s science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteen-year-old child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon’s new series, which I was scripting, ‘The Expanding Mind’, about the role of communications satellites and data-processing devices in the so-called information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.
‘Charles, you’ll destroy the whole thing,’ I protested across his desk that morning. ‘These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they’re being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?’
‘He might be, James. Who can say?’ Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. ‘We’re doing a programme about advanced communications systems – if they have any justification at all, it’s that they bring rare talents like this one to light.’
‘Rubbish – these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a cross-channel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.’
In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.
For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity
out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.
‘Do you remember Minou Drouet?’ I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. ‘A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, “Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet.”’
‘James, relax . . . Like all scientists, you can’t bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let’s wait until we see him. He might surprise us.’ He certainly did, though not as we expected.
Georges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau, on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals’ house was an expensively built white-walled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A well-tended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and water-meadows.
Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from Radio-Television-Française and a Mercedes with a Paris-Match sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharp-faced maid led us without ado towards the press conference. In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hoˆtel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of thirty-five with calm grey eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemn-faced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table.
Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three dark-suited men – the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institut Pascal, a centre of advanced study – gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a shiny suit, and the boy’s schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed man hunched around his pipe.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 112