Ogden paused by the staircase, listening for the sounds of any intruders. On the first afternoon, when he had snatched the children’s blankets, flung together an emergency meal of bread, milk and salami, and raced back along the beach to the blockhouse, the German had relapsed into one of the intermittent comas into which he would sink without warning. Although still staring at the tide-line, right hand clasped around the trigger butt of the machine-gun, his face was so cold and pallid that Ogden at first thought he had died. But he revived at the sound of the milk pouring into his mess tin, sat up and allowed Ogden to drape the blankets around his shoulders. Unable to stay more than an hour for fear of alerting his wife, Ogden had spent the evening in a state of hyper-excitability, for some reason terrified that the local police and members of a German military mission might arrive at any moment.
By the next morning, after Ogden had taken the car to Sainte-Mère on the pretext of visiting the war cemeteries there, the German had visibly improved. Although barely aware of Ogden, he leaned more comfortably against the damp wall. He held the mess tin against his bandaged chest, picking at the remains of the sausage. His face had more colour, and the skin was less tightly stretched against the jaw and cheekbones.
The German was often irritated by Ogden’s fumbling, and there was something strangely vulnerable about his extreme youth. Ogden visited him twice each day, bringing water, food and cigarettes, whatever he could smuggle out of the villa under the suspicious eyes of Mme Saunier. He would have liked to light a fire for the soldier, but the primus stove he had brought with him on this fourth morning would generate a little warmth. However, the German had survived in this cold – the thought of living through all those winters made Ogden shudder – and at least the summer was coming.
When he climbed the stairway to the barbette the German was sitting up, blankets around his shoulders, quietly cleaning the machine-gun. He nodded to Ogden, who sat panting on the cold floor, and continued to strip the breech, apparently uninterested in the primus stove. When Ogden handed over the pull-through the German glanced at him with a flicker of appreciation. He ate only when he had reassembled the weapon.
Ogden watched him approvingly, relieved to see the young soldier’s total dedication to his defence of this lonely strongpoint. It was this kind of courage that Ogden most admired. Earlier he had feared that once the German had recovered his strength he might decide to leave, or fall back to a more defensible position. Clearly he had missed the actual landings on Utah Beach and had no idea that he alone was keeping the war going. Ogden had no intention of telling him the truth, and the German’s resolve never wavered.
Despite his overall improvement, the German’s legs still seemed useless, and he had not moved forward sufficiently to see the boathouse two hundred yards away. Each afternoon Angela and Richard Foster climbed the dunes to this wooden shack on its miniature wheels, and disappeared into it for an hour. At times, as he waited for them to emerge, Ogden was tempted to wrest the machine-gun from the wounded German and empty its ammunition belt through the flaking weather-board. But the young soldier’s aim was probably sharper and more steady. The flare-pistol lay on the fire-sill, the shell in its barrel. When the German had cleaned it they would be ready.
Two days later, soon after one o’clock in the afternoon, began the last military engagement to take place on Utah Beach.
At eleven o’clock that morning, as Angela sat at the breakfast table reading the local French newspaper, Richard Foster returned from the telephone in the hall.
‘We’ll have to leave this afternoon. The weather’s closing in.’
‘What?’ Ogden left his chess table and joined them in the dining room. He pointed to the brilliant sunlight falling on the wet satin of the beach. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘I’ve just talked to the met. people at Cherbourg Airport. There’s a front coming in from the Scillies. The barometer’s going up like a lift.’
Ogden clasped his hands, trying to control them. ‘Well, let’s put it off for a day. The plane’s fully instrumented.’
‘Not a chance. By this time tomorrow the Channel will be packed with cumulo-nimbus. It’ll be like trying to fly through a maze of active volcanoes.’
‘Dick knows what he’s doing,’ Angela confirmed. ‘I’ll read the inventory with Mme Saunier after lunch. She can take the keys to the agents when we’ve gone.’ To Ogden, who was still staring uncertainly at Richard Foster, she said, ‘A day won’t matter, David. You’ve done nothing all week but play about on the beach by yourself.’
For the next half an hour Ogden tried to find some excuse for them to stay, pacing up and down the sitting room as suitcases were dragged around upstairs. He tried to shut the two women’s voices out of his mind, realizing that his entire scheme was about to fall to pieces. Already he had made his morning visit to the blockhouse, taking coffee, soup and cigarettes. The young German had almost recovered, and had moved the machine-gun closer to the parapet. Now Ogden would have to leave him there. Within days he would realize that the war was over and hand himself in to the French authorities.
Behind him the front door closed. Ogden heard Foster’s voice in the drive, Angela calling to him about something. He watched them from the window, in a flat way admiring their nerve. They were setting off for their last walk together, Foster holding Angela’s elbow in one hand, the shotgun in the other.
Still surprised by the blatant way in which they were advertising their affair – during the past two days they had done everything but get into Angela’s bed together – Ogden pressed his hands against the window. A faint chance still remained. He remembered the almost provocative way in which Angela had watched him across the dining table the previous evening, confident that he would do absolutely nothing . . .
Fifteen minutes later Ogden had left the house and an exasperated Mme Saunier, and was running head down, shotgun in hand, through the pools of water which the stiffening sea had swilled across Utah Beach.
‘Langsamer! Zu schnell. Langsam . . .’
Trying to calm Ogden, the young German raised a white hand and gestured him away from the parapet. He reached forward and shifted the bipod, swinging the machine-gun to take in the section of beach containing the boathouse, at which Ogden had been gesticulating since his arrival.
Ogden crouched against the wall, only too ready to let the German take command. The young soldier’s recovery in the space of a few days had been remarkable. Though his hands and face retained their albino-like whiteness, he seemed almost to have put on weight. He moved easily around the fire-sill, in complete control of his heavy weapon. The bolt was cocked back, trigger set for automatic fire. A kind of wan smile, an ironic grimace, hung about his cold mouth, as if he too knew that his long wait was about to come to an end.
Ogden nodded encouragingly, holding his shotgun in as military a grip as he could muster. Its fire-power was nothing by comparison with the German’s machine-gun, but it was all he could offer. In some obscure way he felt obligated to this young soldier, and guilty at implicating him in what would in a sense be the last war crime committed during World War II.
‘They’re – Look!’ Ogden ducked behind the parapet, gesturing frantically. The boathouse door had opened, a cracked glass pane throwing a blade of sunlight at them. Ogden lifted himself on to his knees, the flare-pistol in both hands. The German had come to life, moving with professional command, all trace of his injuries forgotten. He adjusted his rear sight, his bandaged shoulder traversing the heavy weapon. Angela and Richard Foster stepped through the door of the boathouse. They paused in the sunlight, Foster casually inspecting the nearby dunes. The shotgun rested on his shoulder, trigger guard clasped around two fingers.
Unnerved for a moment by this aggressive stance, Ogden raised the flare-pistol, cocked the trigger and fired the fat shell into the air over Foster’s head. The pilot looked up at its weak parabola, then ran forward, shouting to Angela as the shell lost height and fell like a dead bird i
nto the calm sea.
‘A dud . . . !’ Angry with himself, Ogden stood up in the embrasure, his head and chest exposed. Raising the shotgun, he fired the left barrel at Foster, who was darting through the dunes little more than a hundred yards from the blockhouse. Beside Ogden the young German was taking aim. The long barrel of the machine-gun followed the running figure. At last he opened fire, the violent noise jarring the parapet. Ogden was standing in the embrasure, happily listening to the roar of the machine-gun, when Richard Foster stood up in the long grass ten yards from the blockhouse and shot him through the chest.
‘Is he ...?’
Angela waited in the dim light by the stairway, the collar of her fur coat pressed against her cheeks. Avoiding the body on the floor of the barbette, she watched Foster rest his shotgun against the wall and kneel on the floor.
‘Stand back as far as you can.’ Foster waved her back. He examined the body, then touched the flare-pistol with a blood-stained shoe. He was still shaking, both from fear and from the exhaustion of the past week. By contrast, Angela was completely calm. He noticed that with characteristic thoroughness she had insisted on climbing the stairway.
‘It’s a damn lucky thing he fired that first, I might not have had time otherwise . . . But where the hell did he find it? And all this other equipment?’
‘Let’s leave and call the police.’ Angela waited, but Foster was still searching the floor. ‘Dick! An hour from now I may not sound very convincing.’
‘Look at this gear – World War II webbing, machine-gun ammunition, primus stove, German phrase-book and all these cans of soup . . .’
‘He was camping here. I told you it would take a lot to provoke him.’
‘Angela!’ Foster stepped back and beckoned her towards him. ‘Look at him . . . For God’s sake, he’s wearing a German uniform. Boots, tunic, the whole thing.’
‘Dick!’
As they made their way from the blockhouse, the alarmed figure of Mme Saunier was hurrying along the beach towards them. Foster held Angela’s arm.
‘Now. Are you all right?’
‘Of course.’ With a grimace, Angela picked her way down the grimy concrete steps. ‘You know, he must have thought we were coming ashore. He was always talking about Utah Beach.’
1978
ZODIAC 2000
Author’s note
An updating, however modest, of the signs of the zodiac seems long overdue. The houses of our psychological sky are no longer tenanted by rams, goats and crabs but by helicopters, cruise missiles and intra-uterine coils, and by all the spectres of the psychiatric ward. A few correspondences are obvious – the clones and the hypodermic syringe conveniently take the place of the twins and the archer. But there remains the problem of all those farmyard animals so important to the Chaldeans. Perhaps our true counterparts of these workaday creatures are the machines which guard and shape our lives in so many ways – above all, the taurean computer, seeding its limitless possibilities. As for the ram, that tireless guardian of the domestic flock, his counterpart in our own homes seems to be the Polaroid camera, shepherding our smallest memories and emotions, our most tender sexual acts. Here, anyway, is an s-f zodiac, which I assume the next real one will be ...
The Sign of the Polaroid
The skies were sliding. Already the first of the television crews had arrived in the hospital’s car park and were scanning the upper floors of the psychiatric wing through their binoculars. He lowered the plastic blind, exhausted by all this attention, the sense of a world both narrowing and expanding around him. He waited as Dr Vanessa adjusted the lens of the cine-camera. Her untidy hair, still uncombed since she first collected him from the patients’ refectory, fell across the view-finder. Was she placing the filter of her own tissues between herself and whatever threatening message the film might reveal? Since Professor Rotblat’s arrival in the Home Office limousine she had done nothing but photograph him obsessively during a range of meaningless activities – studying the tedious Rorschach images, riding the bicycle in the physiology laboratory, squatting across the bidet in her apartment. Why had they suddenly picked him out, an unknown long-term patient whom everyone had ignored since his admission ten years earlier? Throughout his adolescence he had often stood on the roof of the dormitory block and taken the sky into himself, but not even Dr Vanessa had noticed. Pushing back her blonde hair, she looked at him with unexpected concern. ‘One last reel, and then you must pack – the helicopter’s coming for us.’ All night she had sat with him on her bed, projecting the films on to the wall of the apartment.
The Sign of the Computer
He sat at the metal desk beside the podium, staring at the hushed faces of the delegates as Professor Rotblat gestured with the print-outs. ‘A routine cytoplasmic scan was performed six months ago on the patients of this obscure mental institution, as part of the clinical trials of a new antenatal tranquillizer. Thanks to Dr Vanessa Carrington, the extraordinary and wholly anomalous cell chemistry of the subject was brought to my attention, above all the laevo-rotatory spiral of the DNA helix. The most exhaustive analyses conducted by MIT’s ULTRAC 666, the world’s most powerful computer, confirm that this unknown young man, an orphan of untraceable parentage, seems to have been born from a mirror universe, propelled into our own world by cosmic forces of unlimited power. They also indicate that in opting for its original right-hand bias our biological kingdom made the weaker of two choices. All the ULTRAC predictions suggest that the combinative possibilities of laevo-rotatory DNA exceed those of our own cell chemistry by a factor of 1027. I may add that the ULTRAC programmers have constructed a total information model of this alternative universe, with implications that are both exalting and terrifying for us all ...’
The Sign of the Clones
He steadied himself against the balcony rail, retching on to the turquoise tiles. Twenty feet below his hotel room was the curvilinear roof of the conference centre, its white concrete back like an immense occluded lens. For all Professor Rotblat’s talk of alternative universes, the delegates would see nothing through that eyepiece. They seemed to be more impressed by the potency of this over-productive computer than they were by his own. So far his life had been without any possibilities at all – volleyball with the paraplegics, his shins bruised by their wheelchairs, boring hours pretending to paint like Van Gogh in the occupational therapy classes, then evenings spent with TV and largactil. But at least he could look up at the sky and listen to the time-music of the quasars. He waited for the nausea to pass, regretting that he had agreed to be flown here. The lobbies of the hotel were filled with suspiciously deferential officials. Where was Dr Vanessa? Already he missed her reassuring hands, her scent around the projection theatre. He looked up from the vomit on the balcony. Below him the television director was standing on the roof of the conference centre, waving to him in a friendly but cryptic way. There was something uncannily familiar about his face and stance, like a too-perfect reflection in a mirror. At times the man seemed to be mimicking him, trying to signal the codes of an escape combination. Or was he some kind of sinister twin, a right-hand replica of himself being groomed to take his place? Wiping his mouth, he noticed the green pill in the vomit between his feet. So the police orderly had tried to sedate him. Without thinking, he decided to escape, and picked up the manual which the Home Office horoscopist had pushed into his hands after lunch.
The Sign of the IUD
He could smell her vulva on his hands. He lay on his side in the darkened bedroom, waiting until she returned from the bathroom. Through the glass door he could see her blurred thighs and breasts, as if distorted by some computer permutating all the possibilities of an alternative anatomy. This likeable but strange young woman, with her anonymous apartment and random conversation filled with sudden references to quasars, the overthrow of capitalism, nucleic acids and horoscopy – had she any idea what would soon happen to her? Clearly she had been waiting for him in the hotel’s car park, all too ready to hide h
im in the jump seat of her sports car. Was she the courier of a rival consortium, sent to him by the unseen powers who presided over the quasars? On the bedside table was the intra-uterine coil, with the draw-string he had felt at the neck of her womb. On some confused impulse she had decided to remove it, as if determined to preserve at least one set of his wild genes within the safekeeping of her placental vault. He swung the coil by its draw-string, this technological cipher that seemed to contain in its double swastika an anagram of all the zodiacal emblems in the horoscopy manual. Was it a clue left for him, a modulus to be multiplied by everything in this right-handed world – the contours of this young woman’s breasts, the laws of chemical kinetics, the migration song of swallows? After the camera, the computer and the clones, the coil was the fourth house of that zodiac he had already entered, the twelve-chambered mansion through which he must move with the guile of a master-burglar. He looked up as Renata gently pushed him back on to the pillow. ‘Rest for an hour.’ She seemed to be forwarding instructions from another sky. ‘Then we’ll leave for Jodrell Bank.’
The Sign of the Radar Bowl
As they waited in the stationary traffic on the crowded deck of the flyover Renata fiddled impatiently with the radio, unable to penetrate the static from the cars around them. Smiling at her, he turned off the sound and pointed to the sky over her head. ‘Ignore the horizon. Beyond the Pole Star you can hear the island universes.’ He sat back, trying to ignore the thousand satellite transmissions, a barbarous chatter below the great music of the quasars. Even now, through the afternoon sunlight over this provincial city, he could read the comsat relays and the radar beams of Fylingdales and the Norad line in northern Canada, and hear the answering over-the-horizon probes of the Russian sites near Murmansk, distant lions roaring their fear at each other, marking their claims to impossible territories. An incoming missile would be fixed in the cat’s cradle of his mind like a fly trapped in the sound-space of a Beethoven symphony. Startled, he saw a pair of scarred hands seize the rim of the windshield. A thick-set man with a hard beard had leapt between the airline buses and was staring at him, his left eye inflamed by some unpleasant virus. To Renata he snapped: ‘Get into the back – we’ve only a week to the First Secretary’s visit.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 143