The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard

by J. G. Ballard

  Five minutes later he saw the first of his shy pursuers. Edging forward cautiously, its eyes still on the park fifty yards away, a large deer hobbled along the sidewalk, searching the dim light for Halloway. Within moments two more appeared, steering their antlers through the overhead wires that trailed across the road.

  As he watched them scenting the darkness, Halloway remembered the placid creatures in the zoo at Garden City, as lacking in aggression as these deer. The Angus and Hereford cows in their enclosure, the shire horses and saddleback pigs, the lambs, chicken and farmyard geese together memorialized all the vanished species of domestic animals. At Garden City everyone was vegetarian, not out of moral or religious conviction, but simply because they knew that the provision of grazing land, and the growing of cereal crops for animal feedstuffs, was a wastefully inefficient means of obtaining protein.

  When the deer had gone, returning to their forest between the apartment blocks, Halloway stepped down from the bus. Knowing that he must spend the night somewhere, he walked up the steps into the hotel. On the seventh floor he found a bedroom from which he could see both the Sound and the skyscraper towers of the city centre. On the opposite shore the solar reflectors were still faintly visible, drinking in the last glow of the sunset, beacons of a vanished world. He slept through the night, dreaming of glass aeroplanes, their wings like mirrors, that circled the dark air over his head, waiting to carry him away to some sunlit eyrie among the clouds.

  The next morning, after an early start, Halloway pressed on towards the city centre. He felt refreshed and confident again, fortified by an exotic breakfast of grapefruit juice, beans and peaches taken from the shelves of a nearby supermarket. Vaguely prudish about eating meat, he decided against opening any of the cans of pork and beef, the limitless varieties of salmon, tuna and sardine.

  Bright sunlight filled the streets, picking out the vivid colours of the wild flowers growing in profusion from the cracked sidewalks. Despite these embellishments, the city’s character had begun to change. Fastening his jacket across his chest, Halloway moved forward more cautiously. Above him, on all sides, were the massive structures and heavy technology of the late Twentieth Century – highway interchanges and bridge approaches, sixty-storey hotels and office-blocks. Between them, almost out of sight on the ground level, was a decaying under-stratum of bars and pintable arcades, nightclubs and clothing stores. The cheap façades and neon signs had long since collapsed into the roads. A maze of narrow side-streets ran off in all directions, but by following only the main avenues he soon lost his bearings. A wide road raised on concrete stilts carried him high into the air, and changed course in a series of giant loops. Plodding around this curving viaduct, a cambered deck eight lanes wide, Halloway wasted nearly an hour in returning to his starting point.

  It was at this time, shortly after he left the cloverleaf by an emergency staircase, that Halloway came across the first of the strange monuments he was later to find all over the city. As he stepped down from the pedestrian exit, he noticed that a nearby parking lot had been used as a municipal dump. Old tyres, industrial waste and abandoned domestic appliances lay about in a rusty moraine. Rising from its centre was a pyramid of television sets some sixty feet high, constructed with considerable care and an advanced sense of geometry. The thousand or so sets were aligned shoulder to shoulder, their screens facing outwards, the combinations of different models forming decorative patterns on the stepped sides. The whole structure, from base to apex, was invaded by wild elders, moss and firethorn, the clouds of berries forming a huge cascade.

  Halloway stared up at the rows of television sets, a pyramid of dead eyes in their worm-riddled cabinets, like the eggs of some voracious reptile waiting to be born from the bland globes embedded in this matrix of rotting organic matter. Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after millions of years of separate evolution.

  Little more than half a mile away, in a plaza between two office buildings, Halloway found a second pyramid. From a distance it resembled a funeral pyre of metal scrap built from hundreds of typewriters, telex machines and duplicators taken from the offices around the plaza, a monument to the generations of clerks and typists who had worked there. A series of narrow terraces rose one above the other, the tiers of typewriters forming ingenious baroque columns. Brilliant climbing plants, lobster-clawed clematis and honeysuckle with pink and yellow flowers, entwined themselves around the metal colonnades, the vivid blooms illuminating this memorial of rust.

  Halloway mounted a staircase of filing cabinets to the upper terrace of the pyramid. On all sides, in the nearby streets and on the raised pedestrian areas above the plaza, an extraordinary vegetation had taken root. Dahlias, marigolds and cosmos flourished among the cracked paving stones and in the ornamental urns outside the entrances to the office blocks. Along a three-hundred-yard section of the avenue all the cars had been cleared aside, and a field of poppies sprang from the broken asphalt. The bright, funeral flowers extended in a blood-red carpet down the line of hotels, as if waiting for a demonic visitor. Here and there an individual car had been picked out by this mysterious and profligate gardener, its windshield and windows knocked in and its cabin packed with blooms. As vivid as an explosion in a paint-shop, blue and carmine flowers and yellow-ribbed leaves crammed the open windows, mingled with tilting sunflowers and the vines that circled the roof and radiator grille.

  From a side-street a quarter of a mile away came the sounds of collapsing masonry. Falling glass split the air. Halloway leapt down from the pyramid, holding to a column of typewriters as the road vibrated under his feet. The slow avalanche continued, the rumble of falling brickwork and the brittle ringing of breaking glass. Then Halloway heard the heavy beating of what he guessed was some kind of huge engine, throbbing with the same rhythm as the motor he had watched his father running in his workshop years before. It moved away, breaking through some glass and masonry obstruction in its path. Already the first dust was billowing from the end of the street, lit by thousands of coloured petals.

  Halloway climbed into a nearby car, waiting as this machine moved away. In the deserted city the noise of the assault had carried with it an unmistakable violence, as if some huge and ugly creature was venting its anger at random on the buildings around it.

  ‘Halloway, time to go . . .’ Already he had decided to leave the city and make his way home. Once he had crossed the river he would be safe.

  When the streets were quiet again, and the cloud of petalled dust had drifted away down the avenue, Halloway set off, leaving the monument of typewriters and telex machines behind him. He ran silently through the field of poppies, as the last petals fell through the unsettled air around him.

  When he reached the side-street he found the roadway littered with human figures. Masonry and broken glass, sections of store window as large as his sailplane’s wings, lay among the crushed flowers. Most of the clothing stores that lined both sides of this narrow street had been attacked, their glass fronts and window displays ripped out by some giant implement.

  Everywhere the plastic mannequins lay in the sunlight, limbs crushed by the tracks of the machine, polite expressions looking up from the glass and masonry.

  Frightened for the first time by the sight of violence, Halloway ran towards the river, and by luck found the open span of a large road-bridge that carried him away from the city. Without pausing to look back, ears listening for any sound of the machine, he sprinted along in his coloured sneakers. Halfway across the bridge he slowed down for the first time to catch his breath. The cloud of petals was still drifting eastwards between the office blocks. Halloway searched the northern suburbs for the mirror-sheathed building into which he had crashed, regretting that he would have to leave the sailplane among these anonymous streets patrolled by this violent machine. />
  Angry with himself, he pulled off his fleece-lined jacket and hurled it over the balustrade. It fell into the dead water like a sad, brilliant bird. Already he looked forward to his return to Garden City, with its civilized people and sane behaviour. Thinking back, his aggressiveness at the gliding championships embarrassed him.

  ‘. . . too eager for action at any cost,’ he reproved himself as he strode along. ‘In future check that, Halloway . . .’

  He left the bridge and set off eastwards past the dockyards and warehouses. He had entered an area of single-storey factories and cheap housing, chemical tank-farms and electrical sub-stations. All around him, as well, were the monuments. He was crossing a plain of these memorials, pyramids of domestic appliances and car tyres, machine tools and office furniture that had been erected on any available patch of waste ground. Ignoring them, and their ambiguous flowers, Halloway pressed on. Already he could see the collapsed suspension bridge that marked the gateway to the Sound.

  Shortly before noon, when the river crossing was three miles behind him, Halloway came across the airport. As he approached the perimeter fence he could see the control tower, and the tails of parked airliners as high as three-storey buildings. The entire surface of the airport, the concrete runways and grass verges, was covered with thousands of automobiles. Variants of no more than two or three models, they stretched away in a huge metallized dream.

  Curious to see the airliners, Halloway followed the perimeter fence towards the entrance. He guessed that the cars had been new models fresh from the production line, stored here by the manufacturers when the oil tap had been turned off. With luck, one of the cars might start for him.

  Now that he had left the city, Halloway began to relax again. The airport was a zone that he found curiously reassuring, and in some obscure way made up for the loss of his sailplane. He visualized his father landing and taking off in one of the single-engine aircraft parked nose-to-tail on the other side of the perimeter fence.

  At the airport entrance, in the centre of a traffic island, Halloway found the largest of the pyramids he had seen so far. Well over one hundred feet high, the memorial had been constructed entirely from automobile radiator grilles, a tour-de-force of ironic humour. Row upon row, the grilles rose to the apex, cunningly welded together to form staircases and internal galleries. For once, the tropical flora had barely gained a purchase on the base of the pyramid, and the still-gleaming chrome formed a brilliant lacework.

  Impressed by the structure, Halloway made his way around it into the airport. Service roads led in all directions to the terminal buildings and air-freight offices. Fuel tankers and breakdown vehicles blocked the narrow lanes. Losing himself in this maze, Halloway decided to climb to the roof of a ten-storey car park whose canted floors spiralled up into the air behind the terminal buildings.

  As he passed the elevators on his way to the staircase, Halloway without thinking touched the call button. To his surprise, the doors promptly responded, opening without any hesitation on well-oiled castors. The interior of the elevator was clean and well-maintained, the control panel freshly polished.

  Listening to the faint drumming of an electric generator somewhere above the shaft, Halloway gathered his courage together. There was something seductive about this immaculate compartment, and already he was becoming impatient with himself for turning tail and leaving the city at the first alarm. Sooner or later he intended to come to terms with whatever creature prowled its deserted canyons, and this car park would make a good observation post.

  Stepping into the elevator, he inspected the control panel and pushed a button at random.

  Within less than a minute he had ridden to the seventh floor and stepped out into what he soon discovered was a museum of automobiles. At first glance the cars were indistinguishable from the thousands of vehicles he had passed that day. But as he walked through the dim light, seeing his reflection in the burnished cellulose and waxed leather, he realized that he had stumbled on to a unique private museum. The sixty or so cars on this canted deck were all exhibition pieces, sitting squarely on inflated tyres, antique coachwork lovingly restored.

  ‘Pierce Arrow . . . Bugatti . . . Hispano-Suiza . . . Chevrolet Impala . . .’ Aloud, he read out the names from the manufacturers’ medallions. Many of the cars dated back well over a century to the dawn of the automobile age, huge perambulators of brass and steel with high seats and coaching lamps larger than their diminutive engines. Others, slab-decked saloons and limousines, were as new as the models that covered the runways of the airport.

  Cord. Stutz. Chrysler Imperial. Halloway climbed the deck to the eighth floor. More cars, all lovingly waxed and polished, faced each other through the gloom.

  The one exception was parked in the centre of the ramp, a grimy six-wheeled breakdown truck with a heavy crane mounted on its rear platform. The engine cowling was still warm. Halloway opened the driver’s door; on the seat were a toolkit and a set of maps of the city marked off into various zones. Ignition keys hung from the dashboard, and from the whole compartment came the raw but potent odour of carbonized oil, gasolene and engine coolant.

  Sitting behind the steering wheel, Halloway felt the controls, trying to remember something of the casual expertise with which he so easily impressed the gang of ten-year-olds who watched him demonstrate how to drive.

  Suddenly the engine was alive, thundering out between the concrete decks as if trying to shake itself apart. The heavy vehicle was vibrating fiercely, and the unlatched door bumped against Halloway’s elbow. A blaze of lights lit up the dashboard. Gripping the wheel cautiously, Halloway released the handbrake and let the truck roll forward down the concrete incline, pressing the accelerator as the vehicle moved along at a steady two miles an hour.

  Within thirty minutes he was driving around the airport at speed, roaring along the perimeter roads and down the one exposed section of runway. Flocks of startled ducks and geese rose from the reservoirs to the east of the airport, fleeing from the noise of the careening vehicle. When he first emerged from the car park the truck had come to a halt, and it had taken Halloway some time to discover that the gear lever was in neutral. He soon learned to engage it, and set off at breakneck pace, slamming in and out of the parked cars. The heavy truck and its wildly swinging crane, steel hook lashing about, sent up a spray of rust from the cars kicked out of their way. The forward power of the vehicle, after the agile but passive motion of the sailplane, astonished Halloway. The slightest pressure of his foot on the accelerator sent the truck hurtling ahead. It was the raw energy of the machine that most impressed him, this gut-driven dynamo totally at one with the city across the river.

  Carried away by his new-found determination, and confident that he could take on any opponent now, Halloway headed out of the airport. As he left the main gates he was already moving at sixty m.p.h. Too late, he released the accelerator as the road veered off to circle the traffic island with its pyramid of radiator grilles. Trying to slow down, he plunged across the grass verge, the concrete kerb almost rolling the truck on to its side. It hurtled forward, the crane’s hook and heavy chains thrashing the cabin behind Halloway’s head. He clung to the wheel, face hidden behind his arms, and felt himself flung across the cabin as the truck struck the lowest tier of the pyramid. It tore out a dozen radiator grilles, which hung like trophies from the dented fenders as it swerved away, ran head-on into the steel pylon of a route indicator and came to a halt on its side, cabin buried in the soft earth.

  He was waking from a dream of powered flight.

  He soared across a dark, windless sky. Through the rigging and fuselage struts behind his head came the steady beat of an engine. Beside him in the cockpit a man was crouching over the controls, as if hiding himself from Halloway. When he tried to see the face of this mysterious pilot the aircraft banked steeply, throwing Halloway against the canopy. Searching for a way to escape from the aircraft, he realized that it was built of glass, and that he could see the stars through
the wings and fuselage. Unable to restrain himself, he seized the man’s shoulder and tried to wrest the control column from him. As they struggled together the aircraft plunged across the sky, its engine screaming . . .

  He woke to find himself in a dimly lit cabin, lying on a bed attached to the panelled wall. Leaning over Halloway, pulling with concern at his shoulder, was a young man about five years older than himself, a tall, slimly built Negro with an expression of wary concern on his shy but intelligent face.

  Rest – you’ve landed safely.

  A line of scarlet letters, in a stylized computer typeface, glowed in Halloway’s eyes, hovering in the air two feet from him.

  Can you hear me? You’re not flying now.

  Halloway nodded weakly, gazing at the message that seemed to emerge from the man’s hand. Although there were windows in the cabin the air outside was almost opaque, as if they were contained by yet another building. Twenty feet away a second ceiling tilted across the sky.

  ‘There was an engine on the glider,’ Halloway explained. He sat up, pointing to the roof of the cabin. Somewhere above him there was the steady drumming of an internal-combustion engine. ‘I can hear it now ...’

  Lights flickered in the Negro’s palm. Again the strange alphabet sorted itself into a message. His pensive eyes presided over these reassembling letters as if over the anagrams of stigmata.

  There is a power generator on the roof.

  As if to reassure Halloway, he pressed a wall switch.

  When the electric light – an antique tungsten-filament glow – came on in the cabin Halloway examined his surroundings. He was lying on a bunk in a large landcruiser, one of a group drawn up together on what he guessed was the top floor of the car park. In front of him, beyond a small kitchen, was the driver’s compartment, the steering wheel and instrument panel below a high windshield.