The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1

The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 Adam Thirlwell J. G. Ballard First in a two volume collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of Empire of the Sun, Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and influential novelists. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which show the germination of ideas he used in his longer fiction.This, the first book in a two-volume collection, offers a platform from which to view Ballard’s other works. Almost all of his novels had their seeds in short stories and this collection provides an extraordinary opportunity to trace the development of one of Britain’s most visionary writers. J.G. BALLARD The Complete Short Stories VOLUME I COPYRIGHT (#u0972758d-14ca-514c-ade3-7578748e8c30) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk (http://4thestate.co.uk) This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014 First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2001 This collection copyright © J. G. Ballard 2001 Most of the stories in this book previously appeared in the following collections: The Voices of Time © J. G. Ballard 1963 The Terminal Beach © J. G. Ballard 1964 The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. Introduction © Adam Thirlwell 2014 Interview © Vanora Bennett 2004 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. Cover by Stanley Donwood Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007369386 Version: 2014-08-16 CONTENTS Cover (#ufac3f166-a3b7-5d99-af13-3e363ddae982) Title Page (#u6f82c155-e8d8-52b6-aa11-de0568cbcfa5) Copyright (#ue3d18d9d-d4ef-5e24-a49e-f83688d039c9) Author’s Note (#ub4d33087-b090-5ed9-a692-cb1ed1b110a6) Introduction by Adam Thirlwell (#udac8e126-ca6f-5d26-a973-29ae0004aac2) Prima Belladonna (#u4acc6786-ccdb-5f88-a718-3058cc0e6f6e) Escapement (#u7c033a08-fdfa-5bd9-8cf3-bb54ad20b085) The Concentration City (#u3f85789b-20ec-59b0-9c41-ccd47e01d46a) Venus Smiles (#u444f8fea-119d-5d38-935a-0ea3297a0e83) Manhole 69 (#u8a15837a-375b-54e5-acba-394632e2d3ad) Track 12 (#ub6e99787-6261-5523-a6e7-41faad72ee2a) The Waiting Grounds (#ue5285515-ebb9-5960-8489-7484f7b8eb17) Now: Zero (#u0a72e117-0c11-56ca-bd66-8132284d6466) The Sound-Sweep (#uc37953ce-4d4d-5b73-971e-d4d677e7be32) Zone of Terror (#litres_trial_promo) Chronopolis (#litres_trial_promo) The Voices of Time (#litres_trial_promo) The Last World of Mr Goddard (#litres_trial_promo) Studio 5, The Stars (#litres_trial_promo) Deep End (#litres_trial_promo) The Overloaded Man (#litres_trial_promo) Mr F. is Mr F. (#litres_trial_promo) Billennium (#litres_trial_promo) The Gentle Assassin (#litres_trial_promo) The Insane Ones (#litres_trial_promo) The Garden of Time (#litres_trial_promo) The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista (#litres_trial_promo) Thirteen to Centaurus (#litres_trial_promo) Passport to Eternity (#litres_trial_promo) The Cage of Sand (#litres_trial_promo) The Watch-Towers (#litres_trial_promo) The Singing Statues (#litres_trial_promo) The Man on the 99th Floor (#litres_trial_promo) The Subliminal Man (#litres_trial_promo) The Reptile Enclosure (#litres_trial_promo) A Question of Re-Entry (#litres_trial_promo) The Time-Tombs (#litres_trial_promo) Now Wakes the Sea (#litres_trial_promo) The Venus Hunters (#litres_trial_promo) End-Game (#litres_trial_promo) Minus One (#litres_trial_promo) The Sudden Afternoon (#litres_trial_promo) The Screen Game (#litres_trial_promo) Time of Passage (#litres_trial_promo) Interview with J. G. Ballard (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) AUTHOR’S NOTE (#u0972758d-14ca-514c-ade3-7578748e8c30) Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination. Short stories have always been important to me. I like their snapshot quality, their ability to focus intensely on a single subject. They’re also a useful way of trying out the ideas later developed at novel length. Almost all my novels were first hinted at in short stories, and readers of The Crystal World, Crash and Empire of the Sun will find their seeds germinating somewhere in this collection. When I started writing, fifty years ago, short stories were immensely popular with readers, and some newspapers printed a new short story every day. Sadly, I think that people at present have lost the knack of reading short stories, a response perhaps to the baggy and long-winded narratives of television serials. Young writers, myself included, have always seen their first novels as a kind of virility test, but so many novels published today would have been better if they had been recast as short stories. Curiously, there are many perfect short stories, but no perfect novels. The short story still survives, especially in science fiction, which makes the most of its closeness to the folk tale and the parable. Many of the stories in this collection were first published in science fiction magazines, though readers at the time loudly complained that they weren’t science fiction at all. But I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred. The future, needless to say, is a dangerous area to enter, heavily mined and with a tendency to turn and bite your ankles as you stride forward. A correspondent recently pointed out to me that the poetry-writing computers in Vermilion Sands are powered by valves. And why don’t all those sleek people living in the future have PCs and pagers? I could only reply that Vermilion Sands isn’t set in the future at all, but in a kind of visionary present – a description that fits the stories in this book and almost everything else I have written. But oh for a steam-powered computer and a wind-driven television set. Now, there’s an idea for a short story … J.G. Ballard, 2001 INTRODUCTION (#u0972758d-14ca-514c-ade3-7578748e8c30) BY ADAM THIRLWELL (#u0972758d-14ca-514c-ade3-7578748e8c30) 1 There is no single way of talking about the collected stories of J. G. Ballard. They are so various that no one reading will contain them. When talking about this giant oeuvre, it’s better to borrow terms from geology, and other sciences of natural phenomena; better to talk of strata, or of eras. And a preliminary summary of these epochs in one paragraph might go something like this … First there is the era of what might be called, for useful shorthand, science fiction: where the nature of Nature has undergone sinister changes, and become strangely technological. In these stories, many of which take place in a warped version of Palm Springs, the reader will find sonic sculptures, and singing flowers, among other curiosities. In the second era, the modulations Ballard enjoyed performing on the natural world became grander: now these modulations affected the deep conditions of being: his material became time and space. In the third era, his imagination became more and more apocalyptic, replete with visions of environmental disaster. And all these eras were ones of dense and hectic composition – the 750 pages of this complete edition’s first half move only from 1956 to 1964. Its second half, of equal length, takes in the greater time span of 1964 to 1992. And it was somewhere in the late 1960s that a new and final era emerged: where the cosmic alterations now took place in an atmosphere of late modernity – computerised finance, terror, dictator politics, and flat pornography. It was this landscape that formed the last and longest era of Ballard’s stories – a shiny, dilapidated vista of motels, space voyages, assassination attempts. In other words, Ballard’s stories constitute a corpus that is unlike anything else in twentieth-century British fiction. This corpus is unique. 2 Interviewed by George MacBeth in 1967, Ballard tried to define the difference between his fiction and that of his contemporaries. ‘The great bulk of fiction still being written,’ he observed, ‘is retrospective in character. It’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years. It interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it.’ Whereas, he then continued: ‘when one turns to the present – and what I feel I’ve done in these pieces of mine is to rediscover the present for myself – I feel that one needs a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.’ It has a charming grandeur, this giant theory, but I’m not sure it’s precisely right. Or at least, it may be right, but it’s only a tentative sketch. The diligent reader also needs to consider some sober literary history. For these stories in no way follow one dominant strand of the short story: the realist ironic tradition of Chekhov and Maupassant. Instead, these are stories of the high imaginary, and fantastical. The best short stories, Ballard once noted, were those of ‘Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allen Poe’. And his own stories, similarly, feature universes stretched beyond their normal limits. But to name this tradition is not quite a solution, either. Italo Calvino once wrote an essay on fantastic literature, and he offered the following definition of its underlying philosophy: The problem of the reality of what we see – both extraordinary things, which may be just hallucinations projected by our mind, and ordinary things, which perhaps conceal beneath the most banal appearances a second nature that is more disturbing, mysterious, terrifying – is the essence of this literature of the fantastic, whose most powerful effects lie in this hovering between irreconcilable levels of reality. And at once, the diligent reader has a problem. Maybe for Edgar Allen Poe, sure, this might be a workable definition. But it in no way helps when considering Ballard’s inventions. At which point, this ideal reader should maybe pause: and consider a particular example. 3 One of Ballard’s greatest stories is called ‘The Voices of Time’. Its manner is not the manner of the usual avant-garde. Its early pages contain dialogue that is notable for its strained formality. (‘“What are you doing with yourself, Robert?” he asked. “Are you still going over to Whitby’s lab?”’) Judged on its stylistics, the mode seems to be the usual mode of a certain deadbeat realism. (‘He smiled sympathetically at Powers across the desk, wondering what to say to him.’) And yet the reader looking for the usual story and backstory will soon find the conventional fictional perspectives subtly altered. Some names are strange – like Kaldren, and Coma. While the backstory that is hinted at – and this is one of Ballard’s constant techniques – is vast with inexplicability: not just isolated details (‘the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago’), but also the blank precision of the vocabulary, the strange ‘camera towers’ and ‘glass polyhedrons’ of this landscape, and the intricacy of the scientific terms, which go way beyond the usual assumptions of a reader’s everyday knowledge: ‘the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates …’ It is a future that could also be a present – everything is scrambled – and the reason for this confusion is the meaning of the story. Its surface plot seems to be about the strange discoveries which Whitby, a biologist, has been making in the field of silent gene activation. His colleague, Powers, is dying – and in the time he has left he is trying to think through the implications of Whitby’s experiments, where an organism’s latent future comes to life. And the answer seems to be contained in an odd undertaking of Whitby’s in the summer before his suicide: ‘the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character …’ Eventually, Powers decides to build a version of Whitby’s diagram, in concrete, in the middle of a salt lake. When it is finished, it is revealed as a ‘mandala’ – a miniature diagram of the universe. And Powers walks out to its centre. ‘Above him he could hear the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, a true canopy of time.’ For this story’s theme is entropy. And therefore its perspective is not just the entropy of the human body, but also of the dying stars, and the dying planet. Which is why the story’s unwobbling pivot is this strange mandala. As Powers dies, ‘the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes …’ 4 No wonder Ballard felt he was beyond the usual retrospective psychology! In his list of favourite books, there are predictable literary precursors – the short stories of Hemingway, Alice in Wonderland, Naked Lunch – but two items stand out for their strange abstraction: recordings of cockpit conversations retrieved from the black boxes of airplanes; and the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. The LA Yellow Pages, he once wrote, was the only book he had ever stolen – and then he added: ‘What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.’ What is a character? Or what is a motivation? The usual human motivations still exist in Ballard’s stories, but only nostalgically – in the background, like herms or hilltop cities in the old landscapes. And the reason for this relegation was a phenomenon which Ballard named the Death of Affect – the twentieth century had invented such large atrocities, not only Hiroshima and the Holocaust, but also the virtual worlds of computers and high finance, that the old human categories were no longer relevant. To argue over the rightness of such a theory is not the point. The point is that it allowed Ballard to invent fictions of a startling originality. In his strangely formal prose, he described what character might look like when all the traditional formalities had disappeared. Rather than subjects, Ballard has a system of recurring tropes. And so in ‘The Voices of Time’, the reader will discover reworked versions of previous stories: an obsession with sound and soundwaves that is also present in ‘Venus Smiles’, or ‘The Sound Sweep’; the new planets of ‘The Waiting Grounds’; the sleeplessness of ‘Manhole 69’. But in each case, the tropes are rearranged to create a new original. You can call this system mythic, but I think the truth is stranger. It might be more precise to say: the basis of previous fiction was the isolated self, and its various particularities of politesse and ego, whereas in Ballard’s fiction the protagonists turn out to be much larger entities – the impossible and ignored coercions of society, or the environment. For this is, according to Ballard’s redefinition, how the contemporary self now lives: always blurring into a herd, or crowd. And that’s why comparing him to Borges or Kafka or Poe is not quite useful. The texture of his writing is much more deliberately contemporary than theirs – and therefore is always grainy with a faint satirical tone. Famously he claimed that he was not writing about the future but about the ‘visionary present’ – and it is the urgency of that present moment which makes his metaphysical writing so disturbing. If he resembles anyone, I sometimes think, it is the great visionary Jules Verne. In both writers, the chic and the modern – submarines, space ships, X-rays, gene theory – is revealed to be glowing with a much larger, more sinister significance. Every writer of fiction invents the places they describe, whether ostensibly real or not. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe,’ wrote Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita, ‘and now I was faced by the task of inventing America.’ And Ballard is one of the great inventors of places in fiction. This ferocious analyst of the totalitarian was one of the experts in fiction’s own totalitarian nature: the way it so easily can dictate its own terms. Imperiously, Ballard invents unexplained acronyms, or distorts vocabulary – a technique already baroquely visible in the first story collected here, ‘Prima Belladonna’: ‘Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred …’ But his success at this place-invention is so striking because he is always, simultaneously, describing our own habitat. He is a writer of collective motivation, collective character, precisely because existence in the twentieth century was in the process of transforming itself into larger atmospheres: not just the general conditions of nature, but also the pervading clouds of advertising, stock exchanges, computerised reality. He is the great describer of the lawning of our era – the embankments and swathes of abstract space that compose our giant suburbs. Such everyday abstraction, the absence of particulars, is Ballard’s chosen locale – whether it is incarnated in a concrete beachfront with palmettos, an extra planet, or the laboratories of future technological advances. Although I think it’s also important to point out that, for all the international roaming of his fiction, from the Apartamentos California to Cannes, the true location is always, somehow, Britain. Just think, even, of ‘The Voices of Time’: that entropy is cosmic, sure, but it is also the entropy that Ballard discovered in the postwar suburbs of a dying empire. Britain, in fact, was the most modern country on earth, precisely because it was the world-leader in entropy – and therefore also the leader in ressentiment, rancour, sadness, twilight, concrete. Dystopia! You only needed to look around you: among the flyovers and multi-storey car parks in the rain. In his later stories, this strange form of visionary politics became more and more pronounced, culminating in the late novels, beyond the chronology of this collection: his studies of financial hyper-reality in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, then the bourgeois darknesses of Millennium People and Kingdom Come. And it came with a technical shift. The interest in vocabulary formation that had marked his early stories gradually became a more overt interest in the general culture’s linguistic deformations. Ballard became the impresario of official registers: a story could be a simple exercise in style – like the punk brilliance of ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, which he wrote in 1968, soon after Reagan became Governor of California. The story is a carnival of vocabularies – the medical, the psychoanalytic, the opinion poll – gleefully stuffed with impermissible fantasy: ‘Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan” in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.’ With that kind of shock tactic, Ballard offered new possibilities to the short story: beyond the intricate psychology of the Chekhovian mode. 5 For instead, Ballard’s subject was the system: physically, the vast urban spaces and their freeways, and mentally the vast interior landscapes of psychosis and neurosis. In his Ronald Reagan extravaganza, Ballard first perceived how the era’s separate preoccupations converged, and were even mutually complicit: the virtual worlds of cinema, of politics, of analysis, were all forms of the same violence. And that’s why his late style is so tonally acrobatic. Each closed system was revealed as a version of another. One of his last stories, ‘The Object of the Attack’, was written in 1984. As always, it has its patina of genre fiction (‘Events are moving on apace.’). But in this story of an assassination attempt, the reader can observe all Ballard’s obsessions reacting with each other, as inside some miniature and hyper-modern laboratory: the outward tone – British, and bourgeois – encloses violent energies, where the Royal Family, the American Presidency and Space Travel are ways of encoding a manic form of pathology. But then, why not? A mandala is an image of the world, so in a way every story is a mandala, too. Which would mean, according to the terms of Ballard’s fiction, that every story is therefore also a cosmic clock – counting down the minutes to the final catastrophe. London, 2014 PRIMA BELLADONNA (#u0972758d-14ca-514c-ade3-7578748e8c30) I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself. Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives. We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer – we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level – yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer. One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony. ‘Parker’s Choro-Flora?’ he said. ‘You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.’ When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree. ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’ Tony tilted his head slightly. ‘Over there.’ I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite. ‘Careful,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t gape at her.’ I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously. ‘Fourth floor,’ Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. ‘One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?’ ‘Dreaming,’ I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. ‘I wonder what else she can do?’ Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. ‘Well?’ Tony asked. ‘She’s out of my league,’ I said. ‘But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.’ Harry groaned. ‘Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.’ The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her. ‘The approach has got to be equivocal,’ Harry continued, gazing into his beer. ‘Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.’ The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds. We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal. Five minutes later the singing started. At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost out of the audible range, a thin tremolo quaver which came out of nowhere and rose up the back of the skull. Harry and Tony frowned at me. ‘Your livestock’s unhappy about something,’ Tony told me. ‘Can you quieten it down?’ ‘It’s not the plants,’ I told him. ‘Can’t be.’ The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges off my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall. ‘Steve, look out!’ Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top. I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair. ‘What the hell’s the matter?’ Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly. ‘That was close. You all right?’ ‘It’s gone,’ Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street. ‘What was it?’ I asked. Harry peered at me closely. ‘Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.’ He sat down weakly on a beer crate. ‘Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.’ After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table. On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of ionized fibre, the golden woman was watching me. I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony. There were only about a dozen true Arachnids in captivity; most of the others were either mutes or grafts from dicot stems, and I was lucky to have mine at all. I’d bought the place five years earlier from an old half-deaf man called Sayers, and the day before he left he moved a lot of rogue stock out to the garbage disposal scoop behind the apartment block. Reclaiming some of the tanks, I’d come across the Arachnid, thriving on a diet of algae and perished rubber tubing. Why Sayers had wanted to throw it away I had never discovered. Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred, and had worked under the Director, Dr Mandel. As a young botanist of twenty-five Mandel had discovered the prime Arachnid in the Guiana forest. The orchid took its name from the Khan-Arachnid spider which pollinated the flower, simultaneously laying its own eggs in the fleshy ovule, guided, or as Mandel always insisted, actually mesmerized to it by the vibrations which the orchid’s calyx emitted at pollination time. The first Arachnid orchids beamed out only a few random frequencies, but by cross-breeding and maintaining them artificially at the pollination stage Mandel had produced a strain that spanned a maximum of twenty-four octaves. Not that he had ever been able to hear them. At the climax of his life’s work Mandel, like Beethoven, was stone deaf, but apparently by merely looking at a blossom he could listen to its music. Strangely though, after he went deaf he never looked at an Arachnid. That morning I could almost understand why. The orchid was in a vicious mood. First it refused to feed, and I had to coax it along in a fluoraldehyde flush, and then it started going ultra-sonic, which meant complaints from all the dog owners in the area. Finally it tried to fracture the tank by resonating. The whole place was in uproar, and I was almost resigned to shutting them down and waking them all by hand individually – a backbreaking job with eighty tanks in the shop – when everything suddenly died away to a murmur. I looked round and saw the golden-skinned woman walk in. ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘They must like you.’ She laughed pleasantly. ‘Hello. Weren’t they behaving?’ Under the black beach robe her skin was a softer, more mellow gold, and it was her eyes that held me. I could just see them under the wide-brimmed hat. Insect legs wavered delicately round two points of purple light. She walked over to a bank of mixed ferns and stood looking at them. The ferns reached out towards her and trebled eagerly in their liquid fluted voices. ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ she said, stroking the fronds gently. ‘They need so much affection.’ Her voice was low in the register, a breath of cool sand pouring, with a lilt that gave it music. ‘I’ve just come to Vermilion Sands,’ she said, ‘and my apartment seems awfully quiet. Perhaps if I had a flower, one would be enough, I shouldn’t feel so lonely.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off her. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, brisk and businesslike. ‘What about something colourful? This Sumatra Samphire, say? It’s a pedigree mezzo-soprano from the same follicle as the Bayreuth Festival Prima Belladonna.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘It looks rather cruel.’ ‘Or this Louisiana Lute Lily? If you thin out its SO it’ll play some beautiful madrigals. I’ll show you how to do it.’ She wasn’t listening to me. Slowly, her hands raised in front of her breasts so that she almost seemed to be praying, she moved towards the display counter on which the Arachnid stood. ‘How beautiful it is,’ she said, gazing at the rich yellow and purple leaves hanging from the scarlet-ribbed vibrocalyx. I followed her across the floor and switched on the Arachnid’s audio so that she could hear it. Immediately the plant came to life. The leaves stiffened and filled with colour and the calyx inflated, its ribs sprung tautly. A few sharp disconnected notes spat out. ‘Beautiful, but evil,’ I said. ‘Evil?’ she repeated. ‘No, proud.’ She stepped closer to the orchid and looked down into its malevolent head. The Arachnid quivered and the spines on its stem arched and flexed menacingly. ‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘It’s sensitive to the faintest respiratory sounds.’ ‘Quiet,’ she said, waving me back. ‘I think it wants to sing.’ ‘Those are only key fragments,’ I told her. ‘It doesn’t perform. I use it as a frequency –’ ‘Listen!’ She held my arm and squeezed it tightly. A low, rhythmic fusion of melody had been coming from the plants around the shop, and mounting above them I heard a single stronger voice calling out, at first a thin high-pitched reed of sound that began to pulse and deepen and finally swelled into full baritone, raising the other plants in chorus about itself. I had never heard the Arachnid sing before. I was listening to it open-eared when I felt a glow of heat burn against my arm. I turned and saw the woman staring intently at the plant, her skin aflame, the insects in her eyes writhing insanely. The Arachnid stretched out towards her, calyx erect, leaves like blood-red sabres. I stepped round her quickly and switched off the argon feed. The Arachnid sank to a whimper, and around us there was a nightmarish babel of broken notes and voices toppling from high C’s and L’s into discord. A faint whispering of leaves moved over the silence. The woman gripped the edge of the tank and gathered herself. Her skin dimmed and the insects in her eyes slowed to a delicate wavering. ‘Why did you turn it off?’ she asked heavily. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock here and that sort of twelve-tone emotional storm can blow a lot of valves. Most of these plants aren’t equipped for grand opera.’ She watched the Arachnid as the gas drained out of its calyx. One by one its leaves buckled and lost their colour. ‘How much is it?’ she asked me, opening her bag. ‘It’s not for sale,’ I said. ‘Frankly I’ve no idea how it picked up those bars –’ ‘Will a thousand dollars be enough?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on me steadily. ‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’d never be able to tune the others without it. Anyway,’ I added, trying to smile, ‘that Arachnid would be dead in ten minutes if you took it out of its vivarium. All these cylinders and leads would look a little odd inside your lounge.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ she agreed, suddenly smiling back at me. ‘I was stupid.’ She gave the orchid a last backward glance and strolled away across the floor to the long Tchaikovsky section popular with the tourists. ‘Path?tique,’ she read off a label at random. ‘I’ll take this.’ I wrapped up the scabia and slipped the instructional booklet into the crate, keeping my eye on her all the time. ‘Don’t look so alarmed,’ she said with amusement. ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before.’ I wasn’t alarmed. It was that thirty years at Vermilion Sands had narrowed my horizons. ‘How long are you staying at Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her. ‘I open at the Casino tonight,’ she said. She told me her name was Jane Ciracylides and that she was a speciality singer. ‘Why don’t you look in?’ she asked, her eyes fluttering mischievously. ‘I come on at eleven. You may find it interesting.’ I did. The next morning Vermilion Sands hummed. Jane created a sensation. After her performance three hundred people swore they’d seen everything from a choir of angels taking the vocal in the music of the spheres to Alexander’s Ragtime Band. As for myself, perhaps I’d listened to too many flowers, but at least I knew where the scorpion on the balcony had come from. Tony Miles had heard Sophie Tucker singing the ‘St Louis Blues’, and Harry, the elder Bach conducting the B Minor Mass. They came round to the shop and argued over their respective performances while I wrestled with the flowers. ‘Amazing,’ Tony exclaimed. ‘How does she do it? Tell me.’ ‘The Heidelberg score,’ Harry ecstased. ‘Sublime, absolute.’ He looked irritably at the flowers. ‘Can’t you keep these things quiet? They’re making one hell of a row.’ They were, and I had a shrewd idea why. The Arachnid was completely out of control, and by the time I’d clamped it down in a weak saline it had blown out over three hundred dollars’ worth of shrubs. ‘The performance at the Casino last night was nothing on the one she gave here yesterday,’ I told them. ‘The Ring of the Niebelungs played by Stan Kenton. That Arachnid went insane. I’m sure it wanted to kill her.’ Harry watched the plant convulsing its leaves in rigid spasmic movements. ‘If you ask me it’s in an advanced state of rut. Why should it want to kill her?’ ‘Her voice must have overtones that irritate its calyx. None of the other plants minded. They cooed like turtle doves when she touched them.’ Tony shivered happily. Light dazzled in the street outside. I handed Tony the broom. ‘Here, lover, brace yourself on that. Miss Ciracylides is dying to meet you.’ Jane came into the shop, wearing a flame yellow cocktail skirt and another of her hats. I introduced her to Harry and Tony. ‘The flowers seem very quiet this morning,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with them?’ ‘I’m cleaning out the tanks,’ I told her. ‘By the way, we all want to congratulate you on last night. How does it feel to be able to name your fiftieth city?’ She smiled shyly and sauntered away round the shop. As I knew she would, she stopped by the Arachnid and levelled her eyes at it. I wanted to see what she’d say, but Harry and Tony were all around her, and soon got her up to my apartment, where they had a hilarious morning playing the fool and raiding my scotch. ‘What about coming out with us after the show tonight?’ Tony asked her. ‘We can go dancing at the Flamingo.’ ‘But you’re both married,’ Jane protested. ‘Aren’t you worried about your reputations?’ ‘Oh, we’ll bring the girls,’ Harry said airily. ‘And Steve here can come along and hold your coat.’ We played i-Go together. Jane said she’d never played the game before, but she had no difficulty picking up the rules, and when she started sweeping the board with us I knew she was cheating. Admittedly it isn’t every day that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but never the less I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind. ‘She’s charming,’ Harry said, after she’d left. ‘Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.’ ‘I care,’ I said. ‘She cheats.’ The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear. Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me. Those in the seventeenth century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost two hundred dollars’ worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about. Jane seemed oblivious to the trouble she was causing me. ‘What’s wrong with them all?’ she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor. ‘I don’t think they like you,’ I told her. ‘At least the Arachnid doesn’t. Your voice may move men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.’ ‘Nonsense,’ she said, laughing at me. ‘Give it to me and I’ll show you how to look after it.’ ‘Are Tony and Harry keeping you happy?’ I asked her. I was annoyed that I couldn’t go down to the beach with them and instead had to spend my time draining tanks and titrating up norm solutions, none of which ever worked. ‘They’re very amusing,’ she said. ‘We play i-Go and I sing for them. But I wish you could come out more often.’ After another two weeks I had to give up. I decided to close the plants down until Jane had left Vermilion Sands. I knew it would take me three months to rescore the stock, but I had no alternative. The next day I received a large order for mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir. They wanted delivery in three weeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, when she heard I wouldn’t be able to fill the order. ‘You must wish that I’d never come to Vermilion Sands.’ She stared thoughtfully into one of the darkened tanks. ‘Couldn’t I score them for you?’ she suggested. ‘No thanks,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve had enough of that already.’ ‘Don’t be silly, of course I could.’ I shook my head. Tony and Harry told me I was crazy. ‘Her voice has a wide enough range,’ Tony said. ‘You admit it yourself.’ ‘What have you got against her?’ Harry asked. ‘That she cheats at i-Go?’ ‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I said. ‘And her voice has a wider range than you think.’ We played i-Go at Jane’s apartment. Jane won ten dollars from each of us. ‘I am lucky,’ she said, very pleased with herself. ‘I never seem to lose.’ She counted up the bills and put them away carefully in her bag, her golden skin glowing. Then Santiago sent me a repeat query. I found Jane down among the caf?s, holding off a siege of admirers. ‘Have you given in yet?’ she asked me, smiling at the young men. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ I said, ‘but anything is worth trying.’ Back at the shop I raised a bank of perennials past their thresholds. Jane helped me attach the gas and fluid lines. ‘We’ll try these first,’ I said. ‘Frequencies 543–785. Here’s the score.’ Jane took off her hat and began to ascend the scale, her voice clear and pure. At first the Columbine hesitated and Jane went down again and drew them along with her. They went up a couple of octaves together and then the plants stumbled and went off at a tangent of stepped chords. ‘Try K sharp,’ I said. I fed a little chlorous acid into the tank and the Columbine followed her up eagerly, the infra-calyxes warbling delicate variations on the treble clef. ‘Perfect,’ I said. It took us only four hours to fill the order. ‘You’re better than the Arachnid,’ I congratulated her. ‘How would you like a job? I’ll fit you out with a large cool tank and all the chlorine you can breathe.’ ‘Careful,’ she told me. ‘I may say yes. Why don’t we rescore a few more of them while we’re about it?’ ‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’ ‘Let me try the Arachnid,’ she suggested. ‘That would be more of a challenge.’ Her eyes never left the flower. I wondered what they’d do if I left them together. Try to sing each other to death? ‘No,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow perhaps.’ We sat on the balcony together, glasses at our elbows, and talked the afternoon away. She told me little about herself, but I gathered that her father had been a mining engineer in Peru and her mother a dancer at a Lima vu-tavern. They’d wandered from deposit to deposit, the father digging his concessions, the mother signing on at the nearest bordello to pay the rent. ‘She only sang, of course,’ Jane added. ‘Until my father came.’ She blew bubbles into her glass. ‘So you think I give them what they want at the Casino. By the way, what do you see?’ ‘I’m afraid I’m your one failure,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Except you.’ She dropped her eyes. ‘That sometimes happens,’ she said. ‘I’m glad this time.’ A million suns pounded inside me. Until then I’d been reserving judgment on myself. Harry and Tony were polite, if disappointed. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Harry said sadly. ‘I won’t. How did you do it?’ ‘That mystical left-handed approach, of course,’ I told him. ‘All ancient seas and dark wells.’ ‘What’s she like?’ Tony asked eagerly. ‘I mean, does she burn or just tingle?’ Jane sang at the Casino every night from eleven to three, but apart from that I suppose we were always together. Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and caf? terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum. On other evenings we’d go down to one of the quiet bars at Lagoon West, and have supper out on the flats, and Jane would tease the waiters and sing honeybirds and angelcakes to the children who came in across the sand to watch her. I realize now that I must have achieved a certain notoriety along the beach, but I didn’t mind giving the old women – and beside Jane they all seemed to be old women – something to talk about. During the Recess no one cared very much about anything, and for that reason I never questioned myself too closely over my affair with Jane Ciracylides. As I sat on the balcony with her looking out over the cool early evenings or felt her body glowing beside me in the darkness I allowed myself few anxieties. Absurdly, the only disagreement I ever had with her was over her cheating. I remember that I once taxed her with it. ‘Do you know you’ve taken over five hundred dollars from me, Jane? You’re still doing it. Even now!’ She laughed impishly. ‘Do I cheat? I’ll let you win one day.’ ‘But why do you?’ I insisted. ‘It’s more fun to cheat,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it’s so boring.’ ‘Where will you go when you leave Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her. She looked at me in surprise. ‘Why do you say that? I don’t think I shall ever leave.’ ‘Don’t tease me, Jane. You’re a child of another world than this.’ ‘My father came from Peru,’ she reminded me. ‘But you didn’t get your voice from him,’ I said. ‘I wish I could have heard your mother sing. Had she a better voice than yours, Jane?’ ‘She thought so. My father couldn’t stand either of us.’ That was the evening I last saw Jane. We’d changed, and in the half an hour before she left for the Casino we sat on the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music remained with me even after she’d gone, hanging faintly in the darkness around her chair. I felt curiously sleepy, almost sick on the air she’d left behind, and at 11.30, when I knew she’d be appearing on stage at the Casino, I went out for a walk along the beach. As I left the elevator I heard music coming from the shop. At first I thought I’d left one of the audio switches on, but I knew the voice only too well. The windows of the shop had been shuttered, so I got in through the passage which led from the garage courtyard round at the back of the apartment house. The lights had been turned out, but a brilliant glow filled the shop, throwing a golden fire on to the tanks along the counters. Across the ceiling liquid colours danced in reflection. The music I had heard before, but only in overture. The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely. Arched forwards into it, her head thrown back, was Jane. I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it. ‘Jane!’ I shouted over the noise. ‘Get down!’ She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame. While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up. ‘Where’s Jane?’ Harry asked. ‘Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.’ They both turned towards the music. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Tony peered at me suspiciously. ‘Steve, anything wrong?’ Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started towards the rear entrance. ‘Harry!’ I shouted after him. ‘Get back!’ Tony held my shoulder. ‘Is Jane in there?’ I caught them as they opened the door into the shop. ‘Good God!’ Harry yelled. ‘Let go of me, you fool!’ He struggled to get away from me. ‘Steve, it’s trying to kill her!’ I jammed the door shut and held them back. I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size. The next day it died. Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterwards the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernambuco. So if any of you around here keep a choro-florist’s, and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat. 1956 ESCAPEMENT (#u0972758d-14ca-514c-ade3-7578748e8c30) Neither of us was watching the play too closely when I first noticed the slip. I was stretched back in front of the fire with the crossword, braising gently and toying with 17 down (‘told by antique clocks? 5, 5.’) while Helen was hemming an old petticoat, looking up only when the third lead, a heavy-chinned youth with a 42-inch neck and a base-surge voice, heaved manfully downscreen. The play was ‘My Sons, My Sons’, one of those Thursday night melodramas Channel 2 put out through the winter months, and had been running for about an hour; we’d reached that ebb somewhere round Act 3 Scene 3 just after the old farmer learns that his sons no longer respect him. The whole play must have been recorded on film, and it sounded extremely funny to switch from the old man’s broken mutterings back to the showdown sequence fifteen minutes earlier when the eldest son starts drumming his chest and dragging in the high symbols. Somewhere an engineer was out of a job. ‘They’ve got their reels crossed,’ I told Helen. ‘This is where we came in.’ ‘Is it?’ she said, looking up. ‘I wasn’t watching. Tap the set.’ ‘Just wait and see. In a moment everyone in the studio will start apologizing.’ Helen peered at the screen. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen this,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we haven’t. Quiet.’ I shrugged and went back to 17 down, thinking vaguely about sand dials and water clocks. The scene dragged on; the old man stood his ground, ranted over his turnips and thundered desperately for Ma. The studio must have decided to run it straight through again and pretend no one had noticed. Even so they’d be fifteen minutes behind their schedule. Ten minutes later it happened again. I sat up. ‘That’s funny,’ I said slowly. ‘Haven’t they spotted it yet? They can’t all be asleep.’ ‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked, looking up from her needle basket. ‘Is something wrong with the set?’ ‘I thought you were watching. I told you we’d seen this before. Now they’re playing it back for the third time.’ ‘They’re not,’ Helen insisted. ‘I’m sure they aren’t. You must have read the book.’ ‘Heaven forbid.’ I watched the set closely. Any minute now an announcer spitting on a sandwich would splutter red-faced to the screen. I’m not one of those people who reach for their phones every time someone mispronounces meteorology, but this time I knew there’d be thousands who’d feel it their duty to keep the studio exchanges blocked all night. And for any go-ahead comedian on a rival station the lapse was a god-send. ‘Do you mind if I change the programme?’ I asked Helen. ‘See if anything else is on.’ ‘Don’t. This is the most interesting part of the play. You’ll spoil it.’ ‘Darling, you’re not even watching. I’ll come back to it in a moment, I promise.’ On Channel 5 a panel of three professors and a chorus girl were staring hard at a Roman pot. The question-master, a suave-voiced Oxford don, kept up a lot of crazy patter about scraping the bottom of the barrow. The professors seemed stumped, but the girl looked as if she knew exactly what went into the pot but didn’t dare say it. On 9 there was a lot of studio laughter and someone was giving a sports-car to an enormous woman in a cartwheel hat. The woman nervously ducked her head away from the camera and stared glumly at the car. The comp?re opened the door for her and I was wondering whether she’d try to get into it when Helen cut in: ‘Harry, don’t be mean. You’re just playing.’ I turned back to the play on Channel 2. The same scene was on, nearing the end of its run. ‘Now watch it,’ I told Helen. She usually managed to catch on the third time round. ‘Put that sewing away, it’s getting on my nerves. God, I know this off by heart.’ ‘Sh!’ Helen told me. ‘Can’t you stop talking?’ I lit a cigarette and lay back in the sofa, waiting. The apologies, to say the least, would have to be magniloquent. Two ghost runs at ?100 a minute totted up to a tidy heap of doubloons. The scene drew to a close, the old man stared heavily at his boots, the dusk drew down and – We were back where we started from. ‘Fantastic!’ I said, standing up and turning some snow off the screen. ‘It’s incredible.’ ‘I didn’t know you enjoyed this sort of play,’ Helen said calmly. ‘You never used to.’ She glanced over at the screen and then went back to her petticoat. I watched her warily. A million years earlier I’d probably have run howling out of the cave and flung myself thankfully under the nearest dinosaur. Nothing in the meanwhile had lessened the dangers hemming in the undaunted husband. ‘Darling,’ I explained patiently, just keeping the edge out of my voice, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed they are now playing this same scene through for the fourth time.’ ‘The fourth time?’ Helen said doubtfully. ‘Are they repeating it?’ I was visualizing a studio full of announcers and engineers slumped unconscious over their mikes and valves, while an automatic camera pumped out the same reel. Eerie but unlikely. There were monitor receivers as well as the critics, agents, sponsors, and, unforgivably, the playwright himself weighing every minute and every word in their private currencies. They’d all have a lot to say under tomorrow’s headlines. ‘Sit down and stop fidgeting,’ Helen said. ‘Have you lost your bone?’ I felt round the cushions and ran my hand along the carpet below the sofa. ‘My cigarette,’ I said. ‘I must have thrown it into the fire. I don’t think I dropped it.’ I turned back to the set and switched on the give-away programme, noting the time, 9.03, so that I could get back to Channel 2 at 9.15. When the explanation came I just had to hear it. ‘I thought you were enjoying the play,’ Helen said. ‘Why’ve you turned it off?’ I gave her what sometimes passes in our flat for a withering frown and settled back. The enormous woman was still at it in front of the cameras, working her way up a pyramid of questions on cookery. The audience was subdued but interest mounted. Eventually she answered the jackpot question and the audience roared and thumped their seats like a lot of madmen. The comp?re led her across the stage to another sports car. ‘She’ll have a stable of them soon,’ I said aside to Helen. The woman shook hands and awkwardly dipped the brim of her hat, smiling nervously with embarrassment. The gesture was oddly familiar. I jumped up and switched to Channel 5. The panel were still staring hard at their pot. Then I started to realize what was going on. All three programmes were repeating themselves. ‘Helen,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Get me a scotch and soda, will you?’ ‘What is the matter? Have you strained your back?’ ‘Quickly, quickly!’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Hold on.’ She got up and went into the pantry. I looked at the time. 9.12. Then I returned to the play and kept my eyes glued to the screen. Helen came back and put something down on the end-table. ‘There you are. You all right?’ When it switched I thought I was ready for it, but the surprise must have knocked me flat. I found myself lying out on the sofa. The first thing I did was reach round for the drink. ‘Where did you put it?’ I asked Helen. ‘What?’ ‘The scotch. You brought it in a couple of minutes ago. It was on the table.’ ‘You’ve been dreaming,’ she said gently. She leant forward and started watching the play. I went into the pantry and found the bottle. As I filled a tumbler I noticed the clock over the kitchen sink. 9.07. An hour slow, now that I thought about it. But my wristwatch said 9.05, and always ran perfectly. And the clock on the mantelpiece in the lounge also said 9.05. Before I really started worrying I had to make sure. Mullvaney, our neighbour in the flat above, opened his door when I knocked. ‘Hello, Bartley. Corkscrew?’ ‘No, no,’ I told him. ‘What’s the right time? Our clocks are going crazy.’ He glanced at his wrist. ‘Nearly ten past.’ ‘Nine or ten?’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Nine, should be. What’s up?’ ‘I don’t know whether I’m losing my –’ I started to say. Then I stopped. Mullvaney eyed me curiously. Over his shoulder I heard a wave of studio applause, broken by the creamy, unctuous voice of the giveaway comp?re. ‘How long’s that programme been on?’ I asked him. ‘About twenty minutes. Aren’t you watching?’ ‘No,’ I said, adding casually, ‘Is anything wrong with your set?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Why?’ ‘Mine’s chasing its tail. Anyway, thanks.’ ‘OK,’ he said. He watched me go down the stairs and shrugged as he shut his door. I went into the hall, picked up the phone and dialled. ‘Hello, Tom?’ Tom Farnold works the desk next to mine at the office. ‘Tom, Harry here. What time do you make it?’ ‘Time the liberals were back.’ ‘No, seriously.’ ‘Let’s see. Twelve past nine. By the way, did you find those pickles I left for you in the safe?’ ‘Yeah, thanks. Listen, Tom,’ I went on, ‘the goddamdest things are happening here. We were watching Diller’s play on Channel 2 when –’ ‘I’m watching it now. Hurry it up.’ ‘You are? Well, how do you explain this repetition business? And the way the clocks are stuck between 9 and 9.15?’ Tom laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suggest you go outside and give the house a shake.’ I reached out for the glass I had with me on the hall table, wondering how to explain to – The next moment I found myself back on the sofa. I was holding the newspaper and looking at 17 down. A part of my mind was thinking about antique clocks. I pulled myself out of it and glanced across at Helen. She was sitting quietly with her needle basket. The all too familiar play was repeating itself and by the clock on the mantelpiece it was still just after 9. I went back into the hall and dialled Tom again, trying not to stampede myself. In some way, I hadn’t begun to understand how, a section of time was spinning round in a circle, with myself in the centre. ‘Tom,’ I asked quickly as soon as he picked up the phone. ‘Did I call you five minutes ago?’ ‘Who’s that again?’ ‘Harry here. Harry Bartley. Sorry, Tom.’ I paused and rephrased the question, trying to make it sound intelligible. ‘Tom, did you phone me up about five minutes ago? We’ve had a little trouble with the line here.’ ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Wasn’t me. By the way, did you get those pickles I left in the safe?’ ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, beginning to panic. ‘Are you watching the play, Tom?’ ‘Yes. I think I’ll get back to it. See you.’ I went into the kitchen and had a long close look at myself in the mirror. A crack across it dropped one side of my face three inches below the other, but apart from that I couldn’t see anything that added up to a psychosis. My eyes seemed steady, pulse was in the low seventies, no tics or clammy traumatic sweat. Everything around me seemed much too solid and authentic for a dream. I waited for a minute and then went back to the lounge and sat down. Helen was watching the play. I leant forward and turned the knob round. The picture dimmed and swayed off. ‘Harry, I’m watching that! Don’t switch it off.’ I went over to her. ‘Poppet,’ I said, holding my voice together. ‘Listen to me, please. Very carefully. It’s important.’ She frowned, put her sewing down and took my hands. ‘For some reason, I don’t know why, we seem to be in a sort of circular time trap, just going round and round. You’re not aware of it, and I can’t find anyone else who is either.’ Helen stared at me in amazement. ‘Harry,’ she started, ‘what are you –’ ‘Helen!’ I insisted, gripping her shoulders. ‘Listen! For the last two hours a section of time about 15 minutes long has been repeating itself. The clocks are stuck between 9 and 9.15. That play you’re watching has –’ ‘Harry, darling.’ She looked at me and smiled helplessly. ‘You are silly. Now turn it on again.’ I gave up. As I switched the set on I ran through all the other channels just to see if anything had changed. The panel stared at their pot, the fat woman won her sports car, the old farmer ranted. On Channel 1, the old BBC service which put out a couple of hours on alternate evenings, two newspaper men were interviewing a scientific pundit who appeared on popular educational programmes. ‘What effect these dense eruptions of gas will have so far it’s impossible to tell. However, there’s certainly no cause for any alarm. These billows have mass, and I think we can expect a lot of strange optical effects as the light leaving the sun is deflected by them gravitationally.’ He started playing with a set of coloured celluloid balls running on concentric metal rings, and fiddled with a ripple tank mounted against a mirror on the table. One of the newsmen asked: ‘What about the relationship between light and time? If I remember my relativity they’re tied up together pretty closely. Are you sure we won’t all need to add another hand to our clocks and watches?’ The pundit smiled. ‘I think we’ll be able to get along without that. Time is extremely complicated, but I can assure you the clocks won’t suddenly start running backwards or sideways.’ I listened to him until Helen began to remonstrate. I switched the play on for her and went off into the hall. The fool didn’t know what he was talking about. What I couldn’t understand was why I was the only person who realized what was going on. If I could get Tom over I might just be able to convince him. I picked up the phone and glanced at my watch. 9.13. By the time I got through to Tom the next changeover would be due. Somehow I didn’t like the idea of being picked up and flung to the sofa, however painless it might be. I put the phone down and went into the lounge. The jump-back was smoother than I expected. I wasn’t conscious of anything, not even the slightest tremor. A phrase was stuck in my mind: Olden Times. The newspaper was back on my lap, folded around the crossword. I looked through the clues. 17 down: Told by antique clocks? 5, 5. I must have solved it subconsciously. I remembered that I’d intended to phone Tom. ‘Hullo, Tom?’ I asked when I got through. ‘Harry here.’ ‘Did you get those pickles I left in the safe?’ ‘Yes, thanks a lot. Tom, could you come round tonight? Sorry to ask you this late, but it’s fairly urgent.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘What’s the trouble?’ ‘I’ll tell you when you get here. As soon as you can?’ ‘Sure. I’ll leave right away. Is Helen all right?’ ‘Yes, she’s fine. Thanks again.’ I went into the dining room and pulled a bottle of gin and a couple of tonics out of the sideboard. He’d need a drink when he heard what I had to say. Then I realized he’d never make it. From Earls Court it would take him at least half an hour to reach us at Maida Vale and he’d probably get no further than Marble Arch. I filled my glass out of the virtually bottomless bottle of scotch and tried to work out a plan of action. The first step was to get hold of someone like myself who retained his awareness of the past switch-backs. Somewhere else there must be others trapped in their little 15-minute cages who were also wondering desperately how to get out. I could start by phoning everyone I knew and then going on at random through the phonebook. But what could we do if we did find each other? In fact there was nothing to do except sit tight and wait for it all to wear off. At least I knew I wasn’t looping my loop. Once these billows or whatever they were had burnt themselves out we’d be able to get off the round-about. Until then I had an unlimited supply of whisky waiting for me in the half-empty bottle standing on the sink, though of course there was one snag: I’d never be able to get drunk. I was musing round some of the other possibilities available and wondering how to get a permanent record of what was going on when an idea hit me. I got out the phone-directory and looked up the number of KBC-TV, Channel 9. A girl at reception answered the phone. After haggling with her for a couple of minutes I persuaded her to put me through to one of the producers. ‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Is the jackpot question in tonight’s programme known to any members of the studio audience?’ ‘No, of course not.’ ‘I see. As a matter of interest, do you yourself know it?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘All the questions tonight are known only to our senior programme producer and M. Phillipe Soisson of Savoy Hotels Limited. They’re a closely guarded secret.’ ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got a piece of paper handy I’ll give you the jackpot question. “List the complete menu at the Guildhall Coronation Banquet in July 1953.”’ There were muttered consultations, and a second voice came through. ‘Who’s that speaking?’ ‘Mr H.R. Bartley, 129b Sutton Court Road, N.W. –’ Before I could finish I found myself back in the lounge. The jump-back had caught me. But instead of being stretched out on the sofa I was standing up, leaning on one elbow against the mantelpiece, looking down at the newspaper. My eyes were focused clearly on the crossword puzzle, and before I pulled them away and started thinking over my call to the studio I noticed something that nearly dropped me into the grate. 17 down had been filled in. I picked up the paper and showed it to Helen. ‘Did you do this clue? 17 down?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I never even look at the crossword.’ The clock on the mantelpiece caught my eye, and I forgot about the studio and playing tricks with other people’s time. 9.03. The merry-go-round was closing in. I thought the jump-back had come sooner than I expected. At least two minutes earlier, somewhere around 9.13. And not only was the repetition interval getting shorter, but as the arc edged inwards on itself it was uncovering the real time stream running below it, the stream in which the other I, unknown to myself here, had solved the clue, stood up, walked over to the mantelpiece and filled in 17 down. I sat down on the sofa, watching the clock carefully. For the first time that evening Helen was thumbing over the pages of a magazine. The work basket was tucked away on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. ‘Do you want this on any longer?’ she asked me. ‘It’s not very good.’ I turned to the panel game. The three professors and the chorus girl were still playing around with their pot. On Channel 1 the pundit was sitting at the table with his models. ‘… alarm. The billows have mass, and I think we can expect a lot of strange optical effects as the light –’ I switched it off. The next jump-back came at 9.11. Somewhere I’d left the mantelpiece, gone back to the sofa and lit a cigarette. It was 9.04. Helen had opened the verandah windows and was looking out into the street. The set was on again so I pulled the plug out at the main. I threw the cigarette into the fire; not having seen myself light it, made it taste like someone else’s. ‘Harry, like to go out for a stroll?’ Helen suggested. ‘It’ll be rather nice in the park.’ Each successive jump-back gave us a new departure point. If now I bundled her outside and got her down to the end of the road, at the next jump we’d both be back in the lounge again, but probably have decided to drive to the pub instead. ‘Harry?’ ‘What, sorry?’ ‘Are you asleep, angel? Like to go for a walk? It’ll wake you up.’ ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Go and get your coat.’ ‘Will you be warm enough like that?’ She went off into the bedroom I walked round the lounge and convinced myself that I was awake. The shadows, the solid feel of the chairs, the definition was much too fine for a dream. It was 9.08. Normally Helen would take ten minutes to put on her coat. The jump-back came almost immediately. It was 9.06. I was still on the sofa and Helen was bending down and picking up her work basket. This time, at last, the set was off. ‘Have you got any money on you?’ Helen asked. I felt in my pocket automatically. ‘Yes. How much do you want?’ Helen looked at me. ‘Well, what do you usually pay for the drinks? We’ll only have a couple.’ ‘We’re going to the pub, are we?’ ‘Darling, are you all right?’ She came over to me. ‘You look all strangled. Is that shirt too tight?’ ‘Helen,’ I said, getting up. ‘I’ve got to try to explain something to you. I don’t know why it’s happening, it’s something to do with these billows of gas the sun’s releasing.’ Helen was watching me with her mouth open. ‘Harry,’ she started to say nervously. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I’m quite all right,’ I assured her. ‘It’s just that everything is happening very rapidly and I don’t think there’s much time left.’ I kept on glancing at the clock and Helen followed my eyes to it and went over to the mantelpiece. Watching me she moved it round and I heard the pendulum jangle. ‘No, no,’ I shouted. I grabbed it and pushed it back against the wall. We jumped back to 9.07. Helen was in the bedroom. I had exactly a minute left. ‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Darling, do you want to, or don’t you?’ I was by the lounge window, muttering something. I was out of touch with what my real self was doing in the normal time channel. The Helen talking to me now was a phantom. It was I, not Helen and everybody else, who was riding the merry-go-round. Jump. 9.07-15. Helen was standing in the doorway. ‘… down to the … the …’ I was saying. Helen watched me, frozen. A fraction of a minute left. I started to walk over to her. to walk over to her ver to her er I came out of it like a man catapulted from a revolving door. I was stretched out flat on the sofa, a hard aching pain running from the top of my head down past my right ear into my neck. I looked at the time. 9.45. I could hear Helen moving around in the dining room. I lay there, steadying the room round me, and in a few minutes she came in carrying a tray and a couple of glasses. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, making up an alka-seltzer. I let it fizzle down and drank it. ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did I collapse?’ ‘Not exactly. You were watching the play. I thought you looked rather seedy so I suggested we go out for a drink. You went into a sort of convulsion.’ I stood up slowly and rubbed my neck. ‘God, I didn’t dream all that! I couldn’t have done.’ ‘What was it about?’ ‘A sort of crazy merry-go-round –’ The pain grabbed at my neck when I spoke. I went over to the set and switched it on. ‘Hard to explain coherently. Time was –’ I flinched as the pain bit in again. ‘Sit down and rest,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll come and join you. Like a drink?’ ‘Thanks. A big scotch.’ I looked at the set. On Channel 1 there was a breakdown sign, a cabaret on 2, a flood-lit stadium on 5, and a variety show on 9. No sign anywhere of either Diller’s play or the panel game. Helen brought the drink in and sat down on the sofa with me. ‘It started off when we were watching the play,’ I explained, massaging my neck. ‘Sh, don’t bother now. Just relax.’ I put my head on Helen’s shoulder and looked up at the ceiling, listening to the sound coming from the variety show. I thought back through each turn of the round-about, wondering whether I could have dreamt it all. Ten minutes later Helen said, ‘Well, I didn’t think much of that. And they’re doing an encore. Good heavens.’ ‘Who are?’ I asked. I watched the light from the screen flicker across her face. ‘That team of acrobats. The something Brothers. One of them even slipped. How do you feel?’ ‘Fine.’ I turned my head round and looked at the screen. Three or four acrobats with huge v-torsos and skin briefs were doing simple handstands on to each other’s arms. They finished the act and went into a more involved routine, throwing around a girl in leopard skin panties. The applause was deafening. I thought they were moderately good. Two of them began to give what seemed to be a demonstration of dynamic tension, straining against each other like a pair of catatonic bulls, their necks and legs locked, until one of them was levered slowly off the ground. ‘Why do they keep on doing that?’ Helen said. ‘They’ve done it twice already.’ ‘I don’t think they have,’ I said. ‘This is a slightly different act.’ The pivot man tremored, one of his huge banks of muscles collapsed, and the whole act toppled and then sprung apart. ‘They slipped there the last time,’ Helen said. ‘No, no,’ I pointed out quickly. ‘That one was a headstand. Here they were stretched out horizontally.’ ‘You weren’t watching,’ Helen told me. She leant forward. ‘Well, what are they playing at? They’re repeating the whole thing for the third time.’ It was an entirely new act to me, but I didn’t try to argue. I sat up and looked at the clock. 10.05. ‘Darling,’ I said, putting my arm round her. ‘Hold tight.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘This is the merry-go-round. And you’re driving.’ 1956 THE CONCENTRATION CITY (#ulink_a56ed005-d662-5377-b79b-b4693e937d77) Noon talk on Millionth Street: ‘Sorry, these are the West Millions. You want 9775335th East.’ ‘Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!’ ‘Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you’ll find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.’ ‘There’s a cave-in down at KEN County! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels.’ ‘Listen to this – “PYROMANIACS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!”’ ‘It’s a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 per cent monoxide. Cost me three hundred dollars.’ ‘Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? They take only ten minutes to go up 3,000 levels!’ ‘Ninety cents a foot? Buy!’ ‘You say the idea came to you in a dream?’ the voice snapped. ‘You’re sure no one else gave it to you.’ ‘No,’ M. said. A couple of feet away from him a spot-lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge and swung round on him again. ‘You talked it over with your friends?’ ‘Only the first theory,’ M. explained. ‘About the possibility of flight.’ ‘But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it from them?’ M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. ‘I was afraid they wouldn’t understand what I meant.’ The sergeant laughed. ‘Do you mean they would have thought you really were insane?’ M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of cross-questioning logic had faded. ‘The concept was a little abstract. There weren’t any words for it.’ The sergeant shook his head. ‘I’m glad to hear you say it.’ He sat down on the desk, watched M. for a moment and then went over to him. ‘Now look,’ he said confidentially. ‘It’s getting late. Do you still think both theories are reasonable?’ M. looked up. ‘Aren’t they?’ The sergeant turned to the man watching in the shadows by the window. ‘We’re wasting our time,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll hand him over to Psycho. You’ve seen enough, haven’t you, Doctor?’ The surgeon stared at his hands. He had taken no part in the interrogation, as if bored by the sergeant’s method of approach. ‘There’s something I want to find out,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone with him for half an hour.’ When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the ventilator shaft which rose out of the street below the station. A few roof lights were still burning and two hundred yards away a single policeman patrolled the iron catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness. M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back into his legs. Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet. ‘Tell me about this dream,’ he said, idly flexing a steel rule between his hands as he looked across at M. ‘I think you’ve heard everything, sir,’ M. said. ‘In detail.’ M. shifted uneasily. ‘There wasn’t much to it, and what I do remember isn’t too clear now.’ The surgeon yawned. M. waited and then started to recite what he had already repeated twenty times. ‘I was suspended in the air above a flat stretch of open ground, something like the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down, floating –’ ‘Hold on,’ the surgeon interrupted. ‘Are you sure you weren’t swimming?’ ‘No,’ M. said. ‘I’m certain I wasn’t. All around me there was free space. That was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness. That’s all I remember.’ The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule. ‘Go on.’ ‘Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my friends helped me construct it.’ The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet and crushed it with a single motion of his hand. ‘Don’t be absurd, Franz!’ Gregson remonstrated. They took their places in the chemistry cafeteria queue. ‘It’s against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your buoyancy?’ ‘Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane,’ Franz explained as they shuffled past the hatchways. ‘Say ten feet across, like one of those composition wall sections, with hand grips on the ventral surface. And then you jumped down from the gallery at the Coliseum Stadium. What would happen?’ ‘You’d make a hole in the floor. Why?’ ‘No, seriously.’ ‘If it was large enough and held together you’d swoop down like a paper dart.’ ‘Glide,’ Franz said. ‘Right.’ Thirty levels above them one of the intercity expresses roared over, rattling the tables and cutlery in the cafeteria. Franz waited until they reached a table and sat forward, his food forgotten. ‘And say you attached a propulsive unit, such as a battery-driven ventilator fan, or one of those rockets they use on the Sleepers. With enough thrust to overcome your weight. What then?’ Gregson shrugged. ‘If you could control the thing, you’d, you’d …’ He frowned at Franz. ‘What’s the word? You’re always using it.’ ‘Fly.’ ‘Basically, Matheson, the machine is simple,’ Sanger, the physics lector, commented as they entered the science library. ‘An elementary application of the Venturi Principle. But what’s the point of it? A trapeze would serve its purpose equally well, and be far less dangerous. In the first place consider the enormous clearances it would require. I hardly think the traffic authorities will look upon it with any favour.’ ‘I know it wouldn’t be practical here,’ Franz admitted. ‘But in a large open area it should be.’ ‘Allowed. I suggest you immediately negotiate with the Arena Garden on Level 347–25,’ the lector said whimsically. ‘I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear about your scheme.’ Franz smiled politely. ‘That wouldn’t be large enough. I was really thinking of an area of totally free space. In three dimensions, as it were.’ Sanger looked at Franz curiously. ‘Free space? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Space is a dollar a cubic foot.’ He scratched his nose. ‘Have you begun to construct this machine yet?’ ‘No,’ Franz said. ‘In that event I should try to forget all about it. Remember, Matheson, the task of science is to consolidate existing knowledge, to systematize and reinterpret the discoveries of the past, not to chase wild dreams into the future.’ He nodded and disappeared among the dusty shelves. Gregson was waiting on the steps. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Let’s try it out this afternoon,’ Franz said. ‘We’ll cut Text 5 Pharmacology. I know those Fleming readings backwards. I’ll ask Dr McGhee for a couple of passes.’ They left the library and walked down the narrow, dimly-lit alley which ran behind the huge new civil engineering laboratories. Over seventy-five per cent of the student enrolment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meagre two per cent in pure sciences. Consequently the physics and chemistry libraries were housed in the oldest quarter of the university, in two virtually condemned galvanized hutments which once contained the now closed philosophy school. At the end of the alley they entered the university plaza and started to climb the iron stairway leading to the next level a hundred feet above. Halfway up a white-helmeted F.P. checked them cursorily with his detector and waved them past. ‘What did Sanger think?’ Gregson asked as they stepped up into 637th Street and walked across to the suburban elevator station. ‘He’s no use at all,’ Franz said. ‘He didn’t even begin to understand what I was talking about.’ Gregson laughed ruefully. ‘I don’t know whether I do.’ Franz took a ticket from the automat and mounted the down platform. An elevator dropped slowly towards him, its bell jangling. ‘Wait until this afternoon,’ he called back. ‘You’re really going to see something.’ The floor manager at the Coliseum initialled the two passes. ‘Students, eh? All right.’ He jerked a thumb at the long package Franz and Gregson were carrying. ‘What have you got there?’ ‘It’s a device for measuring air velocities,’ Franz told him. The manager grunted and released the stile. Out in the centre of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fan-like wing of wire and paper, a narrow strutted fuselage and a high curving tail. Franz picked it up and launched it into the air. The model glided for twenty feet and then slithered to a stop across the sawdust. ‘Seems to be stable,’ Franz said. ‘We’ll tow it first.’ He pulled a reel of twine from his pocket and tied one end to the nose. As they ran forward the model lifted gracefully into the air and followed them around the stadium, ten feet off the floor. ‘Let’s try the rockets now,’ Franz said. He adjusted the wing and tail settings and fitted three firework display rockets into a wire bracket mounted above the wing. The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred and fifty feet high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers. There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of coloured smoke spitting out behind it. Its wings rocked gently from side to side. Suddenly the tail burst into flames. The model lifted steeply and looped up towards the roof, stalled just before it hit one of the pilot lights and dived down into the sawdust. They ran across to it and stamped out the glowing cinders. ‘Franz!’ Gregson shouted. ‘It’s incredible! It actually works.’ Franz kicked the shattered fuselage. ‘Of course it works,’ he said impatiently. ‘But as Sanger said, what’s the point of it?’ ‘The point? It flies! Isn’t that enough?’ ‘No. I want one big enough to hold me.’ ‘Franz, slow down. Be reasonable. Where could you fly it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Franz said fiercely. ‘But there must be somewhere!’ The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the stadium to them. ‘Did you hide the matches?’ Franz asked quickly. ‘They’ll lynch us if they think we’re Pyros.’ Three afternoons later Franz took the elevator up 150 levels to 677–98, where the Precinct Estate Office had its bureau. ‘There’s a big development between 493 and 554 in the next sector,’ one of the clerks told him. ‘I don’t know whether that’s any good to you. Sixty blocks by twenty by fifteen levels.’ ‘Nothing bigger?’ Franz queried. The clerk looked up. ‘Bigger? No. What are you looking for – a slight case of agoraphobia?’ Franz straightened the maps spread across the counter. ‘I wanted to find an area of more or less continuous development. Two or three hundred blocks long.’ The clerk shook his head and went back to his ledger. ‘Didn’t you go to engineering school?’ he asked scornfully. ‘The City won’t take it. One hundred blocks is the maximum.’ Franz thanked him and left. A south-bound express took him to the development in two hours. He left the car at the detour point and walked the three hundred yards to the end of the level. The street, a seedy but busy thoroughfare of garment shops and small business premises running through the huge ten-mile-thick B.I.R. Industrial Cube, ended abruptly in a tangle of ripped girders and concrete. A steel rail had been erected along the edge and Franz looked down over it into the cavity, three miles long, a mile wide and twelve hundred feet deep, which thousands of engineers and demolition workers were tearing out of the matrix of the City. Eight hundred feet below him unending lines of trucks and railcars carried away the rubble and debris, and clouds of dust swirled up into the arc-lights blazing down from the roof. As he watched, a chain of explosions ripped along the wall on his left and the whole face slipped and fell slowly towards the floor, revealing a perfect cross-section through fifteen levels of the City. Franz had seen big developments before, and his own parents had died in the historic QUA County cave-in ten years earlier, when three master-pillars had sheared and two hundred levels of the City had abruptly sunk ten thousand feet, squashing half a million people like flies in a concertina, but the enormous gulf of emptiness still stunned his imagination. All around him, standing and sitting on the jutting terraces of girders, a silent throng stared down. ‘They say they’re going to build gardens and parks for us,’ an elderly man at Franz’s elbow remarked in a patient voice. ‘I even heard they might be able to get a tree. It’ll be the only tree in the whole county.’ A man in a frayed sweat-shirt spat over the rail. ‘That’s what they always say. At a dollar a foot promises are all they can waste space on.’ Below them a woman who had been looking out into the air started to simper nervously. Two bystanders took her by the arms and tried to lead her away. The woman began to thresh about and an F.P. came over and pulled her away roughly. ‘Poor fool,’ the man in the sweat-shirt commented. ‘She probably lived out there somewhere. They gave her ninety cents a foot when they took it away from her. She doesn’t know yet she’ll have to pay a dollar ten to get it back. Now they’re going to start charging five cents an hour just to sit up here and watch.’ Franz looked out over the railing for a couple of hours and then bought a postcard from one of the vendors and walked back to the elevator. He called in to see Gregson before returning to the student dormitory. The Gregsons lived in the West millions on 985th Avenue, in a top three-room flat right under the roof. Franz had known them since his parents’ death, but Gregson’s mother still regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion. As she let him in with her customary smile of welcome he noticed her glancing at the detector mounted in the hall. Gregson was in his room, happily cutting out frames of paper and pasting them on to a great rickety construction that vaguely resembled Franz’s model. ‘Hullo, Franz. What was it like?’ Franz shrugged. ‘Just a development. Worth seeing.’ Gregson pointed to his construction. ‘Do you think we can try it out there?’ ‘We could do.’ Franz sat down on the bed. He picked up a paper dart lying beside him and tossed it out of the window. It swam into the street, lazed down in a wide spiral and vanished into the open mouth of the ventilator shaft. ‘When are you going to build another model?’ Gregson asked. ‘I’m not.’ Gregson looked up. ‘Why? You’ve proved your theory.’ ‘That’s not what I’m after.’ ‘I don’t get you, Franz. What are you after?’ ‘Free space.’ ‘Free?’ Gregson repeated. Franz nodded. ‘In both senses.’ Gregson shook his head sadly and snipped out another paper panel. ‘Franz, you’re mad.’ Franz stood up. ‘Take this room,’ he said. ‘It’s twenty feet by fifteen by ten. Extend its dimensions infinitely. What do you find?’ ‘A development.’ ‘Infinitely!’ ‘Non-functional space.’ ‘Well?’ Franz asked patiently. ‘The concept’s absurd.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because it couldn’t exist.’ Franz pounded his forehead in despair. ‘Why couldn’t it?’ Gregson gestured with the scissors. ‘It’s self-contradictory. Like the statement “I am lying”. Just a verbal freak. Interesting theoretically, but it’s pointless to press it for meaning.’ He tossed the scissors on to the table. ‘And anyway, do you know how much free space would cost?’ Franz went over to the bookshelf and pulled out one of the volumes. ‘Let’s have a look at your street atlas.’ He turned to the index. ‘This gives a thousand levels. KNI County, one hundred thousand cubic miles, population 30 million.’ Gregson nodded. Franz closed the atlas. ‘Two hundred and fifty counties, including KNI, together form the 493rd Sector, and an association of 1,500 adjacent sectors comprise the 298th Local Union.’ He broke off and looked at Gregson. ‘As a matter of interest, ever heard of it?’ Gregson shook his head. ‘No. How did –’ Franz slapped the atlas on to the table. ‘Roughly 4 ? 10 cubic Great-Miles.’ He leaned on the window-ledge. ‘Now tell me: what lies beyond the 298th Local Union?’ ‘Other unions, I suppose,’ Gregson said. ‘I don’t see your difficulty.’ ‘And beyond those?’ ‘Farther ones. Why not?’ ‘For ever?’ Franz pressed. ‘Well, as far as for ever is.’ ‘The great street directory in the old Treasury Library on 247th Street is the largest in the county,’ Franz said. ‘I went down there this morning. It occupies three complete levels. Millions of volumes. But it doesn’t extend beyond the 598th Local Union. No one there had any idea what lay farther out. Why not?’ ‘Why should they?’ Gregson asked. ‘Franz, what are you driving at?’ Franz walked across to the door. ‘Come down to the Bio-History Museum. I’ll show you.’ The birds perched on humps of rock or waddled about the sandy paths between the water pools. ‘“Archaeopteryx”,’ Franz read off one of the cage indicators. The bird, lean and mildewed, uttered a painful croak when he fed a handful of beans to it. ‘Some of these birds have the remnants of a pectoral girdle,’ Franz said. ‘Minute fragments of bone embedded in the tissues around their rib cages.’ ‘Wings?’ ‘Dr McGhee thinks so.’ They walked out between the lines of cages. ‘When does he think they were flying?’ ‘Before the Foundation,’ Franz said. ‘Three million years ago.’ When they were outside the museum they started down 859th Avenue. Halfway down the street a dense crowd had gathered and people were packed into the windows and balconies above the elevated, watching a squad of Fire Police break their way into a house. The bulkheads at either end of the block had been closed and heavy steel traps sealed off the stairways from the levels above and below. The ventilator and exhaust shafts were silent and already the air was stale and soupy. ‘Pyros,’ Gregson murmured. ‘We should have brought our masks.’ ‘It’s only a scare,’ Franz said. He pointed to the monoxide detectors which were out everywhere, their long snouts sucking at the air. The dial needles stood safely at zero. ‘Let’s wait in the restaurant opposite.’ They edged their way over to the restaurant, sat down in the window and ordered coffee. This, like everything else on the menu, was cold. All cooking appliances were thermostated to a maximum 95°F., and only in the more expensive restaurants and hotels was it possible to obtain food that was at most tepid. Below them in the street a lot of shouting went up. The Fire Police seemed unable to penetrate beyond the ground floor of the house and had started to baton back the crowd. An electric winch was wheeled up and bolted to the girders running below the kerb, and half a dozen heavy steel grabs were carried into the house and hooked round the walls. Gregson laughed. ‘The owners are going to be surprised when they get home.’ Franz was watching the house. It was a narrow shabby dwelling sandwiched between a large wholesale furniture store and a new supermarket. An old sign running across the front had been painted over and evidently the ownership had recently changed. The present tenants had made a half-hearted attempt to convert the ground floor room into a cheap stand-up diner. The Fire Police appeared to be doing their best to wreck everything, and pies and smashed crockery were strewn all over the pavement. The noise died away and everyone waited as the winch began to revolve. The hawsers wound in and tautened, and the front wall of the house staggered outwards in rigid jerky movements. Suddenly there was a yell from the crowd. Franz raised his arm. ‘Up there! Look!’ On the fourth floor a man and woman had come to the window and were looking down helplessly. The man lifted the woman on to the ledge and she crawled out and clung to one of the waste pipes. Bottles were lobbed up at them and bounced down among the police. A wide crack split the house from top to bottom and the floor on which the man was standing dropped and catapulted him backwards out of sight. Then one of the lintels in the first floor snapped and the entire house tipped over and collapsed. Franz and Gregson stood up, almost knocking over the table. The crowd surged forward through the cordon. When the dust had settled there was nothing left but a heap of masonry and twisted beams. Embedded in this was the battered figure of the man. Almost smothered by the dust he moved slowly, trying to free himself with one hand, and the crowd started roaring again as one of the grabs wound in and dragged him down under the rubble. The manager of the restaurant pushed past Franz and leant out of the window, his eyes fixed on the dial of a portable detector. Its needle, like all the others, pointed to zero. A dozen hoses were playing on the remains of the house and after a few minutes the crowd shifted and began to thin out. The manager switched off the detector and left the window, nodding to Franz. ‘Damn Pyros. You can relax now, boys.’ Franz pointed at the detector. ‘Your dial was dead. There wasn’t a trace of monoxide anywhere here. How do you know they were Pyros?’ ‘Don’t worry, we know.’ He smiled obliquely. ‘We don’t want that sort of element in this neighbourhood.’ Franz shrugged and sat down. ‘I suppose that’s one way of getting rid of them.’ The manager eyed Franz. ‘That’s right, boy. This is a good dollar five neighbourhood.’ He smirked to himself. ‘Maybe a dollar six now everybody knows about our safety record.’ ‘Careful, Franz,’ Gregson warned him when the manager had gone. ‘He may be right. Pyromaniacs do take over small caf?s and food bars.’ Franz stirred his coffee. ‘Dr McGhee estimates that at least fifteen per cent of the City’s population are submerged Pyros. He’s convinced the number’s growing and that eventually the whole City will flame-out.’ He pushed away his coffee. ‘How much money have you got?’ ‘On me?’ ‘Altogether.’ ‘About thirty dollars.’ ‘I’ve saved fifteen,’ Franz said. ‘Forty-five dollars; that should be enough for three or four weeks.’ ‘Where?’ Gregson asked. ‘On a Supersleeper.’ ‘Super –!’ Gregson broke off, alarmed. ‘Three or four weeks! What do you mean?’ ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Franz explained calmly. ‘I can’t just sit here thinking. Somewhere there’s free space and I’ll ride the Sleeper until I find it. Will you lend me your thirty dollars?’ ‘But Franz –’ ‘If I don’t find anything within a couple of weeks I’ll change tracks and come back.’ ‘But the ticket will cost …’ Gregson searched ‘… billions. Forty-five dollars won’t even get you out of the Sector.’ ‘That’s just for coffee and sandwiches,’ Franz said. ‘The ticket will be free.’ He looked up from the table. ‘You know …’ Gregson shook his head doubtfully. ‘Can you try that on the Supersleepers?’ ‘Why not? If they query it I’ll say I’m going back the long way round. Greg, will you?’ ‘I don’t know if I should.’ Gregson played helplessly with his coffee. ‘Franz, how can there be free space? How?’ ‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ Franz said. ‘Think of it as my first physics practical.’ Passenger distances on the transport system were measured point to point by the application of a = ? b + c + d . The actual itinerary taken was the passenger’s responsibility, and as long as he remained within the system he could choose any route he liked. Tickets were checked only at the station exits, where necessary surcharges were collected by an inspector. If the passenger was unable to pay the surcharge – ten cents a mile – he was sent back to his original destination. Franz and Gregson entered the station on 984th Street and went over to the large console where tickets were automatically dispensed. Franz put in a penny and pressed the destination button marked 984. The machine rumbled, coughed out a ticket, and the change slot gave him back his coin. ‘Well, Greg, goodbye,’ Franz said as they moved towards the barrier. ‘I’ll see you in about two weeks. They’re covering me down at the dormitory. Tell Sanger I’m on Fire Duty.’ ‘What if you don’t get back, Franz?’ Gregson asked. ‘Suppose they take you off the Sleeper?’ ‘How can they? I’ve got my ticket.’ ‘And if you do find free space? Will you come back then?’ ‘If I can.’ Franz patted Gregson on the shoulder reassuringly, waved and disappeared among the commuters. He took the local Suburban Green to the district junction in the next county. The Green Line train travelled at an interrupted 70 m.p.h. and the ride took two and a half hours. At the junction he changed to an express elevator which lifted him out of the sector in ninety minutes, at 400 m.p.h. Another fifty minutes in a Through-Sector Special brought him to the Mainline Terminus which served the Union. There he bought a coffee and gathered his determination together. Supersleepers ran east and west, halting at this and every tenth station. The next arrived in seventy-two hours time, westbound. The Mainline Terminus was the largest station Franz had seen, a mile-long cavern thirty levels in depth. Hundreds of elevator shafts sank through the station and the maze of platforms, escalators, restaurants, hotels and theatres seemed like an exaggerated replica of the City itself. Getting his bearings from one of the information booths, Franz made his way up an escalator to Tier 15, where the Supersleepers berthed. Running the length of the station were two steel vacuum tunnels each three hundred feet in diameter, supported at thirty-four intervals by huge concrete buttresses. Franz walked along the platform and stopped by the telescopic gangway that plunged into one of the airlocks. Two hundred and seventy degrees true, he thought, gazing up at the curving underbelly of the tunnel. It must come out somewhere. He had forty-five dollars in his pocket, sufficient coffee and sandwich money to last him three weeks, six if he needed it, time anyway to find the City’s end. He passed the next three days nursing cups of coffee in any of the thirty cafeterias in the station, reading discarded newspapers and sleeping in the local Red trains which ran four-hour journeys round the nearest sector. When at last the Supersleeper came in he joined the small group of Fire Police and municipal officials waiting by the gangway, and followed them into the train. There were two cars; a sleeper which no one used, and a day coach. Franz took an inconspicuous corner seat near one of the indicator panels in the day coach, and pulled out his notebook ready to make his first entry. 1st Day: West 270 °. Union 4,350. ‘Coming out for a drink?’ a Fire Captain across the aisle asked. ‘We have a ten-minute break here.’ ‘No thanks,’ Franz said. ‘I’ll hold your seat for you.’ Dollar five a cubic foot. Free space, he knew, would bring the price down. There was no need to leave the train or make too many inquiries. All he had to do was borrow a paper and watch the market averages. 2nd Day: West 270 °. Union 7,550. ‘They’re slowly cutting down on these Sleepers,’ someone told him. ‘Everyone sits in the day coach. Look at this one. Seats sixty, and only four people in it. There’s no need to move around. People are staying where they are. In a few years there’ll be nothing left but the suburban services.’ 97 cents. At an average of a dollar a cubic foot, Franz calculated idly, it’s so far worth about $4 ? 10 . ‘Going on to the next stop, are you? Well, goodbye, young fellow.’ Few of the passengers stayed on the Sleeper for more than three or four hours. By the end of the second day Franz’s back and neck ached from the constant acceleration. He managed to take a little exercise walking up and down the narrow corridor in the deserted sleeping coach, but had to spend most of his time strapped to his seat as the train began its long braking runs into the next station. 3rd Day: West 270 °. Federation 657. ‘Interesting, but how could you demonstrate it?’ ‘It’s just an odd idea of mine,’ Franz said, screwing up the sketch and dropping it in the disposal chute. ‘Hasn’t any real application.’ ‘Curious, but it rings a bell somewhere.’ Franz sat up. ‘Do you mean you’ve seen machines like this? In a newspaper or a book?’ ‘No, no. In a dream.’ Every half day’s run the pilot signed the log, the crew handed over to their opposites on an Eastbound sleeper, crossed the platform and started back for home. 125 cents. $8 ? 10 . 4th Day: West 270 °. Federation 1,225. ‘Dollar a cubic foot. You in the estate business?’ ‘Starting up,’ Franz said easily. ‘I’m hoping to open a new office of my own.’ He played cards, bought coffee and rolls from the dispenser in the washroom, watched the indicator panel and listened to the talk around him. ‘Believe me, a time will come when each union, each sector, almost I might say, each street and avenue will have achieved complete local independence. Equipped with its own power services, aerators, reservoirs, farm laboratories …’ The car bore. $6 ? 10 . 5th Day: West 270 °. 17th Greater Federation. At a kiosk on the station Franz bought a clip of razor blades and glanced at the brochure put out by the local chamber of commerce. ‘12,000 levels, 98 cents a foot, unique Elm Drive, fire safety records unequalled …’ He went back to the train, shaved, and counted the thirty dollars left. He was now ninety-five million Great-Miles from the suburban station on 984th Street and he knew he could not delay his return much longer. Next time he would save up a couple of thousand. $7 ? 10 . 7th Day: West 270 °. 212th Metropolitan Empire. Franz peered at the indicator. ‘Aren’t we stopping here?’ he asked a man three seats away. ‘I wanted to find out the market average.’ ‘Varies. Anything from fifty cents a –’ ‘Fifty!’ Franz shot back, jumping up. ‘When’s the next stop? I’ve got to get off!’ ‘Not here, son.’ He put out a restraining hand. ‘This is Night Town. You in real estate?’ Franz nodded, holding himself back. ‘I thought …’ ‘Relax.’ He came and sat opposite Franz. ‘It’s just one big slum. Dead areas. In places it goes as low as five cents. There are no services, no power.’ It took them two days to pass through. ‘City Authority are starting to seal it off,’ the man told him. ‘Huge blocks. It’s the only thing they can do. What happens to the people inside I hate to think.’ He chewed on a sandwich. ‘Strange, but there are a lot of these black areas. You don’t hear about them, but they’re growing. Starts in a back street in some ordinary dollar neighbourhood; a bottleneck in the sewage disposal system, not enough ash cans, and before you know it – a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle. They try a relief scheme, pump in a little cyanide, and then – brick it up. Once they do that they’re closed for good.’ Franz nodded, listening to the dull humming air. ‘Eventually there’ll be nothing left but these black areas. The City will be one huge cemetery!’ 10th Day: East 90°. 755 Greater Metropolitan – ‘Wait!’ Franz leapt out of his seat and stared at the indicator panel. ‘What’s the matter?’ someone opposite asked. ‘East!’ Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights held. ‘Has this train changed direction?’ ‘No, it’s eastbound,’ another of the passengers told him. ‘Are you on the wrong train?’ ‘It should be heading west,’ Franz insisted. ‘It has been for the last ten days.’ ‘Ten days!’ the man exclaimed. ‘Have you been on this sleeper for ten days?’ Franz went forward and found the car attendant. ‘Which way is this train going? West?’ The attendant shook his head. ‘East, sir. It’s always been going east.’ ‘You’re crazy,’ Franz snapped. ‘I want to see the pilot’s log.’ ‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible. May I see your ticket, sir?’ ‘Listen,’ Franz said weakly, all the accumulated frustration of the last twenty years mounting inside him. ‘I’ve been on this …’ He stopped and went back to his seat. The five other passengers watched him carefully. ‘Ten days,’ one of them was still repeating in an awed voice. Two minutes later someone came and asked Franz for his ticket. ‘And of course it was completely in order,’ the police surgeon commented. ‘Strangely enough there’s no regulation to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. I used to go for free rides myself when I was younger, though I never tried anything like your journey.’ He went back to the desk. ‘We’ll drop the charge,’ he said. ‘You’re not a vagrant in any indictable sense, and the transport authorities can do nothing against you. How this curvature was built into the system they can’t explain, it seems to be some inherent feature of the City itself. Now about yourself. Are you going to continue this search?’ ‘I want to build a flying machine,’ M. said carefully. ‘There must be free space somewhere. I don’t know … perhaps on the lower levels.’ The surgeon stood up. ‘I’ll see the sergeant and get him to hand you over to one of our psychiatrists. He’ll be able to help you with your dreams!’ The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. ‘Look,’ he began to explain, ‘you can’t get out of time, can you? Subjectively it’s a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you’ll never be able to stop that clock’ – he pointed to the one on the desk – ‘or make it run backwards. In exactly the same way you can’t get out of the City.’ ‘The analogy doesn’t hold,’ M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the street outside. ‘All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?’ ‘It’s always been here,’ the surgeon said. ‘Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it.’ ‘The first bricks were laid by someone,’ M. insisted. ‘There was the Foundation.’ ‘A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don’t try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can’t have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it and, even more difficult, where they came from?’ ‘There must be free space somewhere,’ M. said doggedly. ‘The City must have bounds.’ ‘Why?’ the surgeon asked. ‘It can’t be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you’re trying to believe?’ M. sank back limply. ‘No.’ The surgeon watched M. silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. ‘This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You’re caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven’t misinterpreted something you’ve heard about the Wall?’ M. looked up. ‘Which wall?’ The surgeon nodded to himself. ‘Some advanced opinion maintains that there’s a wall around the City, through which it’s impossible to penetrate. I don’t pretend to understand the theory myself. It’s far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they’ve confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.’ He went over to the door. ‘Wait here, and I’ll see about getting you a probationary release. Don’t worry, the psychiatrists will straighten everything out for you.’ When the surgeon had left M. stared at the floor, too exhausted to feel relieved. He stood up and stretched himself, walking unsteadily round the room. Outside the last pilot lights were going out and the patrolman on the catwalk under the roof was using his torch. A police car roared down one of the avenues crossing the street, its rails screaming. Three lights snapped on along the street and then one by one went off again. M. wondered why Gregson hadn’t come down to the station. Then the calendar on the desk riveted his attention. The date exposed on the fly leaf was 12 August. That was the day he had started off on his journey – exactly three weeks ago. Today! Take a westbound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and get a Red elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the station on Route 175, change to a 438 suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blue line to the Plaza, get off at 4th and 275th, turn left at the roundabout and – You’re back where you first started from. $Hell ? 10 . 1957 VENUS SMILES (#ulink_70d471ae-5102-5d2c-9af7-ca50dc9497e6) Low notes on a high afternoon. As we drove away after the unveiling my secretary said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I suppose you realize what a fool you’ve made of yourself?’ ‘Don’t sound so prim,’ I told her. ‘How was I to know Lorraine Drexel would produce something like that?’ ‘Five thousand dollars,’ she said reflectively. ‘It’s nothing but a piece of old scrap iron. And the noise! Didn’t you look at her sketches? What’s the Fine Arts Committee for?’ My secretaries have always talked to me like this, and just then I could understand why. I stopped the car under the trees at the end of the square and looked back. The chairs had been cleared away and already a small crowd had gathered around the statue, staring up at it curiously. A couple of tourists were banging one of the struts, and the thin metal skeleton shuddered weakly. Despite this, a monotonous and high-pitched wailing sounded from the statue across the pleasant morning air, grating the teeth of passers-by. ‘Raymond Mayo is having it dismantled this afternoon,’ I said. ‘If it hasn’t already been done for us. I wonder where Miss Drexel is?’ ‘Don’t worry, you won’t see her in Vermilion Sands again. I bet she’s halfway to Red Beach by now.’ I patted Carol on the shoulder. ‘Relax. You looked beautiful in your new skirt. The Medicis probably felt like this about Michelangelo. Who are we to judge?’ ‘You are,’ she said. ‘You were on the committee, weren’t you?’ ‘Darling,’ I explained patiently. ‘Sonic sculpture is the thing. You’re trying to fight a battle the public lost thirty years ago.’ We drove back to my office in a thin silence. Carol was annoyed because she had been forced to sit beside me on the platform when the audience began to heckle my speech at the unveiling, but even so the morning had been disastrous on every count. What might be perfectly acceptable at Expo 75 or the Venice Biennale was all too obviously pass? at Vermilion Sands. When we had decided to commission a sonic sculpture for the square in the centre of Vermilion Sands, Raymond Mayo and I had agreed that we should patronize a local artist. There were dozens of professional sculptors in Vermilion Sands, but only three had deigned to present themselves before the committee. The first two we saw were large, bearded men with enormous fists and impossible schemes – one for a hundred-foot-high vibrating aluminium pylon, and the other for a vast booming family group that involved over fifteen tons of basalt mounted on a megalithic step-pyramid. Each had taken an hour to be argued out of the committee room. The third was a woman: Lorraine Drexel. This elegant and autocratic creature in a cartwheel hat, with her eyes like black orchids, was a sometime model and intimate of Giacometti and John Cage. Wearing a blue cr?pe de Chine dress ornamented with lace serpents and other art nouveau emblems, she sat before us like some fugitive Salome from the world of Aubrey Beardsley. Her immense eyes regarded us with an almost hypnotic calm, as if she had discovered that very moment some unique quality in these two amiable dilettantes of the Fine Arts Committee. She had lived in Vermilion Sands for only three months, arriving via Berlin, Calcutta and the Chicago New Arts Centre. Most of her sculpture to date had been scored for various Tantric and Hindu hymns, and I remembered her brief affair with a world-famous pop-singer, later killed in a car crash, who had been an enthusiastic devotee of the sitar. At the time, however, we had given no thought to the whining quarter-tones of this infernal instrument, so grating on the Western ear. She had shown us an album of her sculptures, interesting chromium constructions that compared favourably with the run of illustrations in the latest art magazines. Within half an hour we had drawn up a contract. I saw the statue for the first time that afternoon thirty seconds before I started my speech to the specially selected assembly of Vermilion Sands notables. Why none of us had bothered to look at it beforehand I fail to understand. The title printed on the invitation cards – ‘Sound and Quantum: Generative Synthesis 3’ – had seemed a little odd, and the general shape of the shrouded statue even more suspicious. I was expecting a stylized human figure but the structure under the acoustic drapes had the proportions of a medium-sized radar aerial. However, Lorraine Drexel sat beside me on the stand, her bland eyes surveying the crowd below. A dream-like smile gave her the look of a tamed Mona Lisa. What we saw after Raymond Mayo pulled the tape I tried not to think about. With its pedestal the statue was twelve feet high. Three spindly metal legs, ornamented with spikes and crosspieces, reached up from the plinth to a triangular apex. Clamped on to this was a jagged structure that at first sight seemed to be an old Buick radiator grille. It had been bent into a rough U five feet across, and the two arms jutted out horizontally, a single row of sonic cores, each about a foot long, poking up like the teeth of an enormous comb. Welded on apparently at random all over the statue were twenty or thirty filigree vanes. That was all. The whole structure of scratched chromium had a blighted look like a derelict antenna. Startled a little by the first shrill whoops emitted by the statue, I began my speech and was about halfway through when I noticed that Lorraine Drexel had left her seat beside me. People in the audience were beginning to stand up and cover their ears, shouting to Raymond to replace the acoustic drape. A hat sailed through the air over my head and landed neatly on one of the sonic cores. The statue was now giving out an intermittent high-pitched whine, a sitar-like caterwauling that seemed to pull apart the sutures of my skull. Responding to the boos and protests, it suddenly began to whoop erratically, the horn-like sounds confusing the traffic on the far side of the square. As the audience began to leave their seats en masse I stuttered inaudibly to the end of my speech, the wailing of the statue interrupted by shouts and jeers. Then Carol tugged me sharply by the arm, her eyes flashing. Raymond Mayo pointed with a nervous hand. The three of us were alone on the platform, the rows of overturned chairs reaching across the square. Standing twenty yards from the statue, which had now begun to whimper plaintively, was Lorraine Drexel. I expected to see a look of fury and outrage on her face, but instead her unmoving eyes showed the calm and implacable contempt of a grieving widow insulted at her husband’s funeral. As we waited awkwardly, watching the wind carry away the torn programme cards, she turned on a diamond heel and walked across the square. No one else wanted anything to do with the statue, so I was finally presented with it. Lorraine Drexel left Vermilion Sands the day it was dismantled. Raymond spoke briefly to her on the telephone before she went. I presumed she would be rather unpleasant and didn’t bother to listen in on the extension. ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Does she want it back?’ ‘No.’ Raymond seemed slightly preoccupied. ‘She said it belonged to us.’ ‘You and me?’ ‘Everybody.’ Raymond helped himself to the decanter of scotch on the veranda table. ‘Then she started laughing.’ ‘Good. What at?’ ‘I don’t know. She just said that we’d grow to like it.’ There was nowhere else to put the statue so I planted it out in the garden. Without the stone pedestal it was only six feet high. Shielded by the shrubbery, it had quietened down and now emitted a pleasant melodic harmony, its soft rondos warbling across the afternoon heat. The sitar-like twangs, which the statue had broadcast in the square like some pathetic love-call from Lorraine Drexel to her dead lover, had vanished completely, almost as if the statue had been rescored. I had been so stampeded by the disastrous unveiling that I had had little chance to see it and I thought it looked a lot better in the garden than it had done in Vermilion Sands, the chromium struts and abstract shapes standing out against the desert like something in a vodka advertisement. After a few days I could almost ignore it. A week or so later we were out on the terrace after lunch, lounging back in the deck chairs. I was nearly asleep when Carol said, ‘Mr Hamilton, I think it’s moving.’ ‘What’s moving?’ Carol was sitting up, head cocked to one side. ‘The statue. It looks different.’ I focused my eyes on the statue twenty feet away. The radiator grille at the top had canted around slightly but the three stems still seemed more or less upright. ‘The rain last night must have softened the ground,’ I said. I listened to the quiet melodies carried on the warm eddies of air, and then lay back drowsily. I heard Carol light a cigarette with four matches and walk across the veranda. When I woke in an hour’s time she was sitting straight up in the deck chair, a frown creasing her forehead. ‘Swallowed a bee?’ I asked. ‘You look worried.’ Then something caught my eye. I watched the statue for a moment. ‘You’re right. It is moving.’ Carol nodded. The statue’s shape had altered perceptibly. The grille had spread into an open gondola whose sonic cores seemed to feel at the sky, and the three stem-pieces were wider apart. All the angles seemed different. ‘I thought you’d notice it eventually,’ Carol said as we walked over to it. ‘What’s it made of?’ ‘Wrought iron – I think. There must be a lot of copper or lead in it. The heat is making it sag.’ ‘Then why is it sagging upwards instead of down?’ I touched one of the shoulder struts. It was springing elastically as the air moved across the vanes and went on vibrating against my palm. I gripped it in both hands and tried to keep it rigid. A low but discernible pulse pumped steadily against me. I backed away from it, wiping the flaking chrome off my hands. The Mozartian harmonies had gone, and the statue was now producing a series of low Mahler-like chords. As Carol stood there in her bare feet I remembered that the height specification we had given to Lorraine Drexel had been exactly two metres. But the statue was a good three feet higher than Carol, the gondola at least six or seven across. The spars and struts looked thicker and stronger. ‘Carol,’ I said. ‘Get me a file, would you? There are some in the garage.’ She came back with two files and a hacksaw. ‘Are you going to cut it down?’ she asked hopefully. ‘Darling, this is an original Drexel.’ I took one of the files. ‘I just want to convince myself that I’m going insane.’ I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint. ‘All right,’ I said when I had finished. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’ We sat on the veranda and waited. I fixed my eyes on the statue and could have sworn that it didn’t move. But when we went back an hour later the gondola had swung right round again, hanging down over us like an immense metal mouth. There was no need to check the notch intervals against the file. They were all at least double the original distance apart. ‘Mr Hamilton,’ Carol said. ‘Look at this.’ She pointed to one of the spikes. Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. One or two were already beginning to hollow themselves. Unmistakably they were incipient sonic cores. Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new shoots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate construction. A medley of half-familiar sounds, fragments of a dozen overtures and symphonies, murmured all over it. The statue was well over twelve feet high. I felt one of the heavy struts and the pulse was stronger, beating steadily through the metal, as if it was thrusting itself on to the sound of its own music. Carol was watching me with a pinched and worried look. ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘It’s only growing.’ We went back to the veranda and watched. By six o’clock that evening it was the size of a small tree. A spirited simultaneous rendering of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture and Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto trumpeted across the garden. ‘The strangest thing about it,’ Raymond said the next morning, raising his voice above the din, ‘is that it’s still a Drexel.’ ‘Still a piece of sculpture, you mean?’ ‘More than that. Take any section of it and you’ll find the original motifs being repeated. Each vane, each helix has all the authentic Drexel mannerisms, almost as if she herself were shaping it. Admittedly, this penchant for the late Romantic composers is a little out of keeping with all that sitar twanging, but that’s rather a good thing, if you ask me. You can probably expect to hear some Beethoven any moment now – the Pastoral Symphony, I would guess.’ ‘Not to mention all five piano concertos – played at once,’ I said sourly. Raymond’s loquacious delight in this musical monster out in the garden annoyed me. I closed the veranda windows, wishing that he himself had installed the statue in the living room of his downtown apartment. ‘I take it that it won’t go on growing for ever?’ Carol handed Raymond another scotch. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’ Raymond shrugged. ‘Why worry?’ he said airily. ‘When it starts tearing the house down cut it back. Thank God we had it dismantled. If this had happened in Vermilion Sands …’ Carol touched my arm. ‘Mr Hamilton, perhaps that’s what Lorraine Drexel expected. She wanted it to start spreading all over the town, the music driving everyone crazy –’ ‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘You’re running away with yourself. As Raymond says, we can chop it up any time we want to and melt the whole thing down.’ ‘Why don’t you, then?’ ‘I want to see how far it’ll go,’ I said. In fact my motives were more mixed. Clearly, before she left, Lorraine Drexel had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork. As Raymond had said, the present babel of symphonic music had no connection with the melancholy cries the statue had first emitted. Had those forlorn chords been intended to be a requiem for her dead lover – or even, conceivably, the beckoning calls of a still unsurrendered heart? Whatever her motives, they had now vanished into this strange travesty lying across my garden. I watched the statue reaching slowly across the lawn. It had collapsed under its own weight and lay on its side in a huge angular spiral, twenty feet long and about fifteen feet high, like the skeleton of a futuristic whale. Fragments of the Nutcracker Suite and Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony sounded from it, overlaid by sudden blaring excerpts from the closing movements of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The selection of these hack classics seemed deliberately designed to get on my nerves. I had been up with the statue most of the night. After Carol went to bed I drove my car on to the strip of lawn next to the house and turned on the headlamps. The statue stood out almost luminously in the darkness, booming away to itself, more and more of the sonic cores budding out in the yellow glare of the lights. Gradually it lost its original shape; the toothed grille enveloped itself and then put out new struts and barbs that spiralled upwards, each throwing off secondary and tertiary shoots in its turn. Shortly after midnight it began to lean and then suddenly toppled over. By now its movement was corkscrew. The plinth had been carried into the air and hung somewhere in the middle of the tangle, revolving slowly, and the main foci of activity were at either end. The growth rate was accelerating. We watched a new shoot emerge. As one of the struts curved round a small knob poked through the flaking chrome. Within a minute it grew into a spur an inch long, thickened, began to curve and five minutes later had developed into a full-throated sonic core twelve inches long. Raymond pointed to two of my neighbours standing on the roofs of their houses a hundred yards away, alerted by the music carried across to them. ‘You’ll soon have everyone in Vermilion Sands out here. If I were you, I’d throw an acoustic drape over it.’ ‘If I could find one the size of a tennis court. It’s time we did something, anyway. See if you can trace Lorraine Drexel. I’m going to find out what makes this statue go.’ Using the hacksaw, I cut off a two-foot limb and handed it to Dr Blackett, an eccentric but amiable neighbour who sometimes dabbled in sculpture himself. We walked back to the comparative quiet of the veranda. The single sonic core emitted a few random notes, fragments from a quartet by Webern. ‘What do you make of it?’ ‘Remarkable,’ Blackett said. He bent the bar between his hands. ‘Almost plastic.’ He looked back at the statue. ‘Definite circumnutation there. Probably phototropic as well. Hmm, almost like a plant.’ ‘Is it alive?’ Blackett laughed. ‘My dear Hamilton, of course not. How can it be?’ ‘Well, where is it getting its new material? From the ground?’ ‘From the air. I don’t know yet, but I imagine it’s rapidly synthesizing an allotropic form of ferrous oxide. In other words, a purely physical rearrangement of the constituents of rust.’ Blackett stroked his heavy brush moustache and stared at the statue with a dream-like eye. ‘Musically, it’s rather curious – an appalling conglomeration of almost every bad note ever composed. Somewhere the statue must have suffered some severe sonic trauma. It’s behaving as if it had been left for a week in a railroad shunting yard. Any idea what happened?’ ‘Not really.’ I avoided his glance as we walked back to the statue. It seemed to sense us coming and began to trumpet out the opening bars of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ march. Deliberately breaking step, I said to Blackett: ‘So in fact all I have to do to silence the thing is chop it up into two-foot lengths?’ ‘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 G?tterd?mmerung.’ 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 Carol 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 (#ulink_6dee6010-05d9-5be9-b58c-f477233e22a1) 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. Morley 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?’ ‘They won’t,’ Neill said. He stood up, suddenly bored by Morley’s questions. ‘The total tempo of their lives will be lower than ours, these stresses and tensions won’t begin to crystallize. We’ll soon seem like a lot of manic-depressives to them, running round like dervishes half the day, then collapsing into a stupor the other half.’ He moved towards the door and reached out to the light switch. ‘Well, I’ll see you at six o’clock.’ They left the lecture room and started down the corridor together. ‘What are you doing now?’ Morley asked. Neill laughed. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.’ A little after midnight Avery and Gorrell were playing table-tennis in the floodlit gymnasium. They were competent players, and passed the ball backwards and forwards with a minimum of effort. Both felt strong and alert; Avery was sweating slightly, but this was due to the arc-lights blazing down from the roof – maintaining, for safety’s sake, an illusion of continuous day – rather than to any excessive exertion of his own. The oldest of the three volunteers, a tall and somewhat detached figure, with a lean, closed face, he made no attempt to talk to Gorrell and concentrated on adjusting himself to the period ahead. He knew he would find no trace of fatigue, but as he played he carefully checked his respiratory rhythms and muscle tonus, and kept one eye on the clock. Gorrell, a jaunty, self-composed man, was also subdued. Between strokes he glanced cautiously round the gymnasium, noting the hangar-like walls, the broad, polished floor, the shuttered skylights in the roof. Now and then, without realizing it, he fingered the circular trepan scar at the back of his head. Out in the centre of the gymnasium a couple of armchairs and a sofa had been drawn up round a gramophone, and here Lang was playing chess with Morley, doing his section of night duty. Lang hunched forward over the chessboard. Wiry-haired and aggressive, with a sharp nose and mouth, he watched the pieces closely. He had played regularly against Morley since he arrived at the Clinic four months earlier, and the two were almost equally matched, with perhaps a slight edge to Morley. But tonight Lang had opened with a new attack and after ten moves had completed his development and begun to split Morley’s defence. His mind felt clear and precise, focused sharply on the game in front of him, though only that morning had he finally left the cloudy limbo of post-hypnosis through which he and the two others had drifted for three weeks like lobotomized phantoms. Behind him, along one wall of the gymnasium, were the offices housing the control unit. Over his shoulder he saw a face peering at him through the circular observation window in one of the doors. Here, at constant alert, a group of orderlies and interns sat around waiting by their emergency trollies. (The end door, into a small ward containing three cots, was kept carefully locked.) After a few moments the face withdrew. Lang smiled at the elaborate machinery watching over him. His transference on to Neill had been positive and he had absolute faith in the success of the experiment. Neill had assured him that, at worst, the sudden accumulation of metabolites in his bloodstream might induce a mild torpor, but his brain would be unimpaired. ‘Nerve fibre, Robert,’ Neill had told him time and again, ‘never fatigues. The brain cannot tire.’ While he waited for Morley to move he checked the time from the clock mounted against the wall. Twelve twenty. Morley yawned, his face drawn under the grey skin. He looked tired and drab. He slumped down into the armchair, face in one hand. Lang reflected how frail and primitive those who slept would soon seem, their minds sinking off each evening under the load of accumulating toxins, the edge of their awareness worn and frayed. Suddenly he realized that at that very moment Neill himself was asleep. A curiously disconcerting vision of Neill, huddled in a rumpled bed two floors above, his blood-sugar low, and his mind drifting, rose before him. Lang laughed at his own conceit, and Morley retrieved the rook he had just moved. ‘I must be going blind. What am I doing?’ ‘No,’ Lang said. He started to laugh again. ‘I’ve just discovered I’m awake.’ Morley smiled. ‘We’ll have to put that down as one of the sayings of the week.’ He replaced the rook, sat up and looked across at the table-tennis pair. Gorrell had hit a fast backhand low over the net and Avery was running after the ball. ‘They seem to be okay. How about you?’ ‘Right on top of myself,’ Lang said. His eyes flicked up and down the board and he moved before Morley caught his breath back. Usually they went right through into the end-game, but tonight Morley had to concede on the twentieth move. ‘Good,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You’ll be able to take on Neill soon. Like another?’ ‘No. Actually the game bores me. I can see that’s going to be a problem.’ ‘You’ll face it. Give yourself time to find your legs.’ Lang pulled one of the Bach albums out of its rack in the record cabinet. He put a Brandenburg Concerto on the turntable and lowered the sapphire. As the rich, contrapuntal patterns chimed out he sat back, listening intently to the music. Morley thought: Absurd. How fast can you run? Three weeks ago you were strictly a hep-cat. The next few hours passed rapidly. At one thirty they went up to the Surgery, where Morley and one of the interns gave them a quick physical, checking their renal clearances, heart rate and reflexes. Dressed again, they went into the empty cafeteria for a snack and sat on the stools, arguing what to call this new fifth meal. Avery suggested ‘Midfood’, Morley ‘Munch’. At two they took their places in the Neurology theatre, and spent a couple of hours watching films of the hypno-drills of the past three weeks. When the programme ended they started down for the gymnasium, the night almost over. They were still relaxed and cheerful; Gorrell led the way, playfully teasing Lang over some of the episodes in the films, mimicking his trance-like walk. ‘Eyes shut, mouth open,’ he demonstrated, swerving into Lang, who jumped nimbly out of his way. ‘Look at you; you’re doing it even now. Believe me, Lang, you’re not awake, you’re somnambulating.’ He called back to Morley, ‘Agreed, Doctor?’ Morley swallowed a yawn. ‘Well, if he is, that makes two of us.’ He followed them along the corridor, doing his best to stay awake, feeling as if he, and not the three men in front of him, had been without sleep for the last three weeks. Though the Clinic was quiet, at Neill’s orders all lights along the corridors and down the stairway had been left on. Ahead of them two orderlies checked that windows they passed were safely screened and doors were shut. Nowhere was there a single darkened alcove or shadow-trap. Neill had insisted on this, reluctantly acknowledging a possible reflex association between darkness and sleep: ‘Let’s admit it. In all but a few organisms the association is strong enough to be a reflex. The higher mammals depend for their survival on a highly acute sensory apparatus, combined with a varying ability to store and classify information. Plunge them into darkness, cut off the flow of visual data to the cortex, and they’re paralysed. Sleep is a defence reflex. It lowers the metabolic rate, conserves energy, increases the organism’s survival-potential by merging it into its habitat …’ On the landing halfway down the staircase was a wide, shuttered window that by day opened out on to the parkscape behind the Clinic. As he passed it Gorrell stopped. He went over, released the blind, then unlatched the shutter. Still holding it closed, he turned to Morley, watching from the flight above. ‘Taboo, Doctor?’ he asked. Morley looked at each of the three men in turn. Gorrell was calm and unperturbed, apparently satisfying nothing more sinister than an idle whim. Lang sat on the rail, watching curiously with an expression of clinical disinterest. Only Avery seemed slightly anxious, his thin face wan and pinched. Morley had an irrelevant thought: four a.m. shadow – they’ll need to shave twice a day. Then: why isn’t Neill here? He knew they’d make for a window as soon as they got the chance. He noticed Lang giving him an amused smile and shrugged, trying to disguise his uneasiness. ‘Go ahead, if you want to. As Neill said, the wires are cut.’ Gorrell threw back the shutter, and they clustered round the window and stared out into the night. Below, pewter-grey lawns stretched towards the pines and low hills in the distance. A couple of miles away on their left a neon sign winked and beckoned. Neither Gorrell nor Lang noticed any reaction, and their interest began to flag within a few moments. Avery felt a sudden lift under the heart, then controlled himself. His eyes began to sift the darkness; the sky was clear and cloudless, and through the stars he picked out the narrow, milky traverse of the galactic rim. He watched it silently, letting the wind cool the sweat on his face and neck. Morley stepped over to the window and leaned his elbows on the sill next to Avery. Out of the corner of his eye he carefully waited for any motor tremor – a fluttering eyelid, accelerated breathing – that would signal a reflex discharging. He remembered Neill’s warning: ‘In Man sleep is largely volitional, and the reflex is conditioned by habit. But just because we’ve cut out the hypothalamic loops regulating the flow of consciousness doesn’t mean the reflex won’t discharge down some other pathway. However, sooner or later we’ll have to take the risk and give them a glimpse of the dark side of the sun.’ Morley was musing on this when something nudged his shoulder. ‘Doctor,’ he heard Lang say. ‘Doctor Morley.’ He pulled himself together with a start. He was alone at the window. Gorrell and Avery were halfway down the next flight of stairs. ‘What’s up?’ Morley asked quickly. ‘Nothing,’ Lang assured him. ‘We’re just going back to the gym.’ He looked closely at Morley. ‘Are you all right?’ Morley rubbed his face. ‘God, I must have been asleep.’ He glanced at his watch. Four twenty. They had been at the window for over fifteen minutes. All he could remember was leaning on the sill. ‘And I was worried about you.’ Everybody was amused, Gorrell particularly. ‘Doctor,’ he drawled, ‘if you’re interested I can recommend you to a good narcotomist.’ After five o’clock they felt a gradual ebb of tonus from their arm and leg muscles. Renal clearances were falling and breakdown products were slowly clogging their tissues. Their palms felt damp and numb, the soles of their feet like pads of sponge rubber. The sensation was vaguely unsettling, allied to no feelings of mental fatigue. The numbness spread. Avery noticed it stretching the skin over his cheekbones, pulling at his temples and giving him a slight frontal migraine. He doggedly turned the pages of a magazine, his hands like lumps of putty. Then Neill came down, and they began to revive. Neill looked fresh and spruce, bouncing on the tips of his toes. ‘How’s the night shift going?’ he asked briskly, walking round each one of them in turn, smiling as he sized them up. ‘Feel all right?’ ‘Not too bad, Doctor,’ Gorrell told him. ‘A slight case of insomnia.’ Neill roared, slapped him on the shoulder and led the way up to the Surgery laboratory. At nine, shaved and in fresh clothes, they assembled in the lecture room. They felt cool and alert again. The peripheral numbness and slight head torpor had gone as soon as the detoxication drips had been plugged in, and Neill told them that within a week their kidneys would have enlarged sufficiently to cope on their own. All morning and most of the afternoon they worked on a series of IQ, associative and performance tests. Neill kept them hard at it, steering swerving blips of light around a cathode screen, juggling with intricate numerical and geometric sequences, elaborating word-chains. He seemed more than satisfied with the results. ‘Shorter access times, deeper memory traces,’ he pointed out to Morley when the three men had gone off at five for the rest period. ‘Barrels of prime psychic marrow.’ He gestured at the test cards spread out across the desk in his office. ‘And you were worried about the Unconscious. Look at those Rorschachs of Lang’s. Believe me, John, I’ll soon have him reminiscing about his foetal experiences.’ Morley nodded, his first doubts fading. Over the next two weeks either he or Neill was with the men continuously, sitting out under the floodlights in the centre of the gymnasium, assessing their assimilation of the eight extra hours, carefully watching for any symptoms of withdrawal. Neill carried everyone along, from one programme phase to the next, through the test periods, across the long hours of the interminable nights, his powerful ego injecting enthusiasm into every member of the unit. Privately, Morley worried about the increasing emotional overlay apparent in the relationship between Neill and the three men. He was afraid they were becoming conditioned to identify Neill with the experiment. (Ring the meal bell and the subject salivates; but suddenly stop ringing the bell after a long period of conditioning and it temporarily loses the ability to feed itself. The hiatus barely harms a dog, but it might trigger disaster in an already oversensitized psyche.) Neill was fully alert to this. At the end of the first two weeks, when he caught a bad head cold after sitting up all night and decided to spend the next day in bed, he called Morley into his office. ‘The transference is getting much too positive. It needs to be eased off a little.’ ‘I agree,’ Morley said. ‘But how?’ ‘Tell them I’ll be asleep for forty-eight hours,’ Neill said. He picked up a stack of reports, plates and test cards and bundled them under one arm. ‘I’ve deliberately overdosed myself with sedative to get some rest. I’m worn to a shadow, full fatigue syndrome, load-cells screaming. Lay it on.’ ‘Couldn’t that be rather drastic?’ Morley asked. ‘They’ll hate you for it.’ But Neill only smiled and went off to requisition an office near his bedroom. That night Morley was on duty in the gymnasium from ten p.m. to six a.m. As usual he first checked that the orderlies were ready with their emergency trollies, read through the log left by the previous supervisor, one of the senior interns, and then went over to the circle of chairs. He sat back on the sofa next to Lang and leafed through a magazine, watching the three men carefully. In the glare of the arc-lights their lean faces had a sallow, cyanosed look. The senior intern had warned him that Avery and Gorrell might overtire themselves at table-tennis, but by eleven p.m. they stopped playing and settled down in the armchairs. They read desultorily and made two trips up to the cafeteria, escorted each time by one of the orderlies. Morley told them about Neill, but surprisingly none of them made any comment. Midnight came slowly. Avery read, his long body hunched up in an armchair. Gorrell played chess against himself. Morley dozed. Lang felt restless. The gymnasium’s silence and absence of movement oppressed him. He switched on the gramophone and played through a Brandenburg, analysing its theme-trains. Then he ran a word-association test on himself, turning the pages of a book and using the top right-hand corner words as the control list. Morley leaned over. ‘Anything come up?’ he asked. ‘A few interesting responses.’ Lang found a note-pad and jotted something down. ‘I’ll show them to Neill in the morning – or whenever he wakes up.’ He gazed up pensively at the arc-lights. ‘I was just speculating. What do you think the next step forward will be?’ ‘Forward where?’ Morley asked. Lang gestured expansively. ‘I mean up the evolutionary slope. Three hundred million years ago we became air-breathers and left the seas behind. Now we’ve taken the next logical step forward and eliminated sleep. What’s next?’ Morley shook his head. ‘The two steps aren’t analogous. Anyway, in point of fact you haven’t left the primeval sea behind. You’re still carrying a private replica of it around as your bloodstream. All you did was encapsulate a necessary piece of the physical environment in order to escape it.’ Lang nodded. ‘I was thinking of something else. Tell me, has it ever occurred to you how completely death-orientated the psyche is?’ Morley smiled. ‘Now and then,’ he said, wondering where this led. ‘It’s curious,’ Lang went on reflectively. ‘The pleasure-pain principle, the whole survival-compulsion apparatus of sex, the Super-Ego’s obsession with tomorrow – most of the time the psyche can’t see farther than its own tombstone. Now why has it got this strange fixation? For one very obvious reason.’ He tapped the air with his forefinger. ‘Because every night it’s given a pretty convincing reminder of the fate in store for it.’ ‘You mean the black hole,’ Morley suggested wryly. ‘Sleep?’ ‘Exactly. It’s simply a pseudo-death. Of course, you’re not aware of it, but it must be terrifying.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t think even Neill realizes that, far from being restful, sleep is a genuinely traumatic experience.’ So that’s it, Morley thought. The great father analyst has been caught napping on his own couch. He tried to decide which were worse – patients who knew a lot of psychiatry, or those who only knew a little. ‘Eliminate sleep,’ Lang was saying, ‘and you also eliminate all the fear and defence mechanisms erected round it. Then, at last, the psyche has a chance to orientate towards something more valid.’ ‘Such as …?’ Morley asked. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps … Self?’ ‘Interesting,’ Morley commented. It was three ten a.m. He decided to spend the next hour going through Lang’s latest test cards. He waited a discretionary five minutes, then stood up and walked over to the surgery office. Lang hooked an arm across the back of the sofa and watched the orderly room door. ‘What’s Morley playing at?’ he asked. ‘Have either of you seen him anywhere?’ Avery lowered his magazine. ‘Didn’t he go off into the orderly room?’ ‘Ten minutes ago,’ Lang said. ‘He hasn’t looked in since. There’s supposed to be someone on duty with us continuously. Where is he?’ Gorrell, playing solitaire chess, looked up from his board. ‘Perhaps these late nights are getting him down. You’d better wake him before Neill finds out. He’s probably fallen asleep over a batch of your test cards.’ Lang laughed and settled down on the sofa. Gorrell reached out to the gramophone, took a record out of the rack and slid it on to the turntable. As the gramophone began to hum Lang noticed how silent and deserted the gymnasium seemed. The Clinic was always quiet, but even at night a residual ebb and flow of sound – a chair dragging in the orderly room, a generator charging under one of the theatres – eddied through and kept it alive. Now the air was flat and motionless. Lang listened carefully. The whole place had the dead, echoless feel of an abandoned building. He stood up and strolled over to the orderly room. He knew Neill discouraged casual conversation with the control crew, but Morley’s absence puzzled him. He reached the door and peered through the window to see if Morley was inside. The room was empty. The light was on. Two emergency trollies stood in their usual place against the wall near the door, a third was in the middle of the floor, a pack of playing cards strewn across its deck, but the group of three or four interns had gone. Lang hesitated, reached down to open the door, and found it had been locked. He tried the handle again, then called out over his shoulder: ‘Avery. There’s nobody in here.’ ‘Try next door. They’re probably being briefed for tomorrow.’ Lang stepped over to the surgery office. The light was off but he could see the white enamelled desk and the big programme charts round the wall. There was no one inside. Avery and Gorrell were watching him. ‘Are they in there?’ Avery asked. ‘No.’ Lang turned the handle. ‘The door’s locked.’ Gorrell switched off the gramophone and he and Avery came over. They tried the two doors again. ‘They’re here somewhere,’ Avery said. ‘There must be at least one person on duty.’ He pointed to the end door. ‘What about that one?’ ‘Locked,’ Lang said. ‘69 always has been. I think it leads down to the basement.’ ‘Let’s try Neill’s office,’ Gorrell suggested. ‘If they aren’t in there we’ll stroll through to Reception and try to leave. This must be some trick of Neill’s.’ There was no window in the door to Neill’s office. Gorrell knocked, waited, knocked again more loudly. Lang tried the handle, then knelt down. ‘The light’s off,’ he reported. Avery turned and looked round at the two remaining doors out of the gymnasium, both in the far wall, one leading up to the cafeteria and the Neurology wing, the other into the car park at the rear of the Clinic. ‘Didn’t Neill hint that he might try something like this on us?’ he asked. ‘To see whether we can go through a night on our own.’ ‘But Neill’s asleep,’ Lang objected. ‘He’ll be in bed for a couple of days. Unless …’ Gorrell jerked his head in the direction of the chairs. ‘Come on. He and Morley are probably watching us now.’ They went back to their seats. Gorrell dragged the chess stool over to the sofa and set up the pieces. Avery and Lang stretched out in armchairs and opened magazines, turning the pages deliberately. Above them the banks of arc-lights threw their wide cones of light down into the silence. The only noise was the slow left-right, left-right motion of the clock. Three fifteen a.m. The shift was imperceptible. At first a slight change of perspective, a fading and regrouping of outlines. Somewhere a focus slipped, a shadow swung slowly across a wall, its angles breaking and lengthening. The motion was fluid, a procession of infinitesimals, but gradually its total direction emerged. The gymnasium was shrinking. Inch by inch, the walls were moving inwards, encroaching across the periphery of the floor. As they shrank towards each other their features altered: the rows of skylights below the ceiling blurred and faded, the power cable running along the base of the wall merged into the skirting board, the square baffles of the air vents vanished into the grey distemper. Above, like the undersurface of an enormous lift, the ceiling sank towards the floor … Gorrell leaned his elbows on the chessboard, face sunk in his hands. He had locked himself in a perpetual check, but he continued to shuttle the pieces in and out of one of the corner squares, now and then gazing into the air for inspiration, while his eyes roved up and down the walls around him. Somewhere, he knew, Neill was watching him. He moved, looked up and followed the wall opposite him down to the far corner, alert for the telltale signs of a retractable panel. For some while he had been trying to discover Neill’s spy-hole, but without any success. The walls were blank and featureless; he had twice covered every square foot of the two facing him, and apart from the three doors there appeared to be no fault or aperture of even the most minute size anywhere on their surface. After a while his left eye began to throb painfully, and he pushed away the chessboard and lay back. Above him a line of fluorescent tubes hung down from the ceiling, mounted in checkered plastic brackets that diffused the light. He was about to comment on his search for the spy-hole to Avery and Lang when he realized that any one of them could conceal a microphone. He decided to stretch his legs, stood up and sauntered off across the floor. After sitting over the chessboard for half an hour he felt cramped and restless, and would have enjoyed tossing a ball up and down, or flexing his muscles on a rowing machine. But annoyingly no recreational facilities, apart from the three armchairs and the gramophone, had been provided. He reached the end wall and wandered round, listening for any sound from the adjacent rooms. He was beginning to resent Neill spying on him and the entire keyhole conspiracy, and he noted with relief that it was a quarter past three: in under three hours it would all be over. The gymnasium closed in. Now less than half its original size, its walls bare and windowless, it was a vast, shrinking box. The sides slid into each other, merging along an abstract hairline, like planes severing in a multi-dimensional flux. Only the clock and a single door remained … Lang had discovered where the microphone was hidden. He sat forward in his chair, cracking his knuckles until Gorrell returned, then rose and offered him his seat. Avery was in the other armchair, feet up on the gramophone. ‘Sit down for a bit,’ Lang said. ‘I feel like a stroll.’ Gorrell lowered himself into the chair. ‘I’ll ask Neill if we can have a ping-pong table in here. It should help pass the time and give us some exercise.’ ‘A good idea,’ Lang agreed. ‘If we can get the table through the door. I doubt if there’s enough room in here, even if we moved the chairs right up against the wall.’ He walked off across the floor, surreptitiously peering through the orderly room window. The light was on, but there was still no one inside. He ambled over to the gramophone and paced up and down near it for a few moments. Suddenly he swung round and caught his foot under the flex leading to the wall socket. The plug fell out on to the floor. Lang left it where it lay, went over and sat down on the arm of Gorrell’s chair. ‘I’ve just disconnected the microphone,’ he confided. Gorrell looked round carefully. ‘Where was it?’ Lang pointed. ‘Inside the gramophone.’ He laughed softly. ‘I thought I’d pull Neill’s leg. He’ll be wild when he realizes he can’t hear us.’ ‘Why do you think it was in the gramophone?’ Gorrell asked. ‘What better place? Besides, it couldn’t be anywhere else. Apart from in there.’ He gestured at the light bowl suspended from the centre of the ceiling. ‘It’s empty except for the two bulbs. The gramophone is the obvious place. I had a feeling it was there, but I wasn’t sure until I noticed we had a gramophone, but no records.’ Gorrell nodded sagely. Lang moved away, chuckling to himself. Above the door of Room 69 the clock ticked on at three fifteen. The motion was accelerating. What had once been the gymnasium was now a small room, seven feet wide, a tight, almost perfect cube. The walls plunged inwards, along colliding diagonals, only a few feet from their final focus … Avery noticed Gorrell and Lang pacing around his chair. ‘Either of you want to sit down yet?’ he asked. They shook their heads. Avery rested for a few minutes and then climbed out of the chair and stretched himself. ‘Quarter past three,’ he remarked, pressing his hands against the ceiling. ‘This is getting to be a long night.’ He leaned back to let Gorrell pass him, and then started to follow the others round the narrow space between the armchair and the walls. ‘I don’t know how Neill expects us to stay awake in this hole for twenty-four hours a day,’ he went on. ‘Why haven’t we got a television set in here? Even a radio would be something.’ They sidled round the chair together, Gorrell, followed by Avery, with Lang completing the circle, their shoulders beginning to hunch, their heads down as they watched the floor, their feet falling into the slow, leaden rhythm of the clock. This, then, was the manhole: a narrow, vertical cubicle, a few feet wide, six deep. Above, a solitary, dusty bulb gleamed down from a steel grille. As if crumbling under the impetus of their own momentum, the surface of the walls had coarsened, the texture was that of stone, streaked and pitted … Gorrell bent down to loosen one of his shoelaces and Avery bumped into him sharply, knocking his shoulder against the wall. ‘All right?’ he asked, taking Gorrell’s arm. ‘This place is a little overcrowded. I can’t understand why Neill ever put us in here.’ He leaned against the wall, head bowed to prevent it from touching the ceiling, and gazed about thoughtfully. Lang stood squeezed into the corner next to him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Gorrell squatted down on his heels below them. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked. ‘I’d say about three fifteen,’ Lang offered. ‘More or less.’ ‘Lang,’ Avery asked, ‘where’s the ventilator here?’ Lang peered up and down the walls and across the small square of ceiling. ‘There must be one somewhere.’ Gorrell stood up and they shuffled about, examining the floor between their feet. ‘There may be a vent in the light grille,’ Gorrell suggested. He reached up and slipped his fingers through the cage, running them behind the bulb. ‘Nothing there. Odd. I should have thought we’d use the air in here within half an hour.’ ‘Easily,’ Avery said. ‘You know, there’s something –’ Just then Lang broke in. He gripped Avery’s elbow. ‘Avery,’ he asked. ‘Tell me. How did we get here?’ ‘What do you mean, get here? We’re on Neill’s team.’ Lang cut him off. ‘I know that.’ He pointed at the floor. ‘I mean, in here.’ Gorrell shook his head. ‘Lang, relax. How do you think? Through the door.’ Lang looked squarely at Gorrell, then at Avery. ‘What door?’ he asked calmly. Gorrell and Avery hesitated, then swung round to look at each wall in turn, scanning it from floor to ceiling. Avery ran his hands over the heavy masonry, then knelt down and felt the floor, digging his fingers at the rough stone slabs. Gorrell crouched beside him, scrabbling at the thin seams of dirt. Lang backed out of their way into a corner, and watched them impassively. His face was calm and motionless, but in his left temple a single vein fluttered insanely. When they finally stood up, staring at each other unsteadily, he flung himself between them at the opposite wall. ‘Neill! Neill!’ he shouted. He pounded angrily on the wall with his fists. ‘Neill! Neill!’ Above him the light began to fade. Morley closed the door of the surgery office behind him and went over to the desk. Though it was three fifteen a.m., Neill was probably awake, working on the latest material in the office next to his bedroom. Fortunately that afternoon’s test cards, freshly marked by one of the interns, had only just reached his in-tray. Morley picked out Lang’s folder and started to sort through the cards. He suspected that Lang’s responses to some of the key words and suggestion triggers lying disguised in the question forms might throw illuminating sidelights on to the real motives behind his equation of sleep and death. The communicating door to the orderly room opened and an intern looked in. ‘Do you want me to take over in the gym, Doctor?’ Morley waved him away. ‘Don’t bother. I’m going back in a moment.’ He selected the cards he wanted and began to initial his withdrawals. Glad to get away from the glare of the arc-lights, he delayed his return as long as he could, and it was three twenty-five a.m. when he finally left the office and stepped back into the gymnasium. The men were sitting where he had left them. Lang watched him approach, head propped comfortably on a cushion. Avery was slouched down in his armchair, nose in a magazine, while Gorrell hunched over the chessboard, hidden behind the sofa. ‘Anybody feel like coffee?’ Morley called out, deciding they needed some exercise. None of them looked up or answered. Morley felt a flicker of annoyance, particularly at Lang, who was staring past him at the clock. Then he saw something that made him stop. Lying on the polished floor ten feet from the sofa was a chess piece. He went over and picked it up. The piece was the black king. He wondered how Gorrell could be playing chess with one of the two essential pieces of the game missing when he noticed three more pieces lying on the floor near by. His eyes moved to where Gorrell was sitting. Scattered over the floor below the chair and sofa was the rest of the set. Gorrell was slumped over the stool. One of his elbows had slipped and the arm dangled between his knees, knuckles resting on the floor. The other hand supported his face. Dead eyes peered down at his feet. Morley ran over to him, shouting: ‘Lang! Avery! Get the orderlies!’ He reached Gorrell and pulled him back off the stool. ‘Lang!’ he called again. Lang was still staring at the clock, his body in the stiff, unreal posture of a waxworks dummy. Morley let Gorrell loll back on to the sofa, leaned over and glanced at Lang’s face. He crossed to Avery, stretched out behind the magazine, and jerked his shoulder. Avery’s head bobbed stiffly. The magazine slipped and fell from his hands, leaving his fingers curled in front of his face. Morley stepped over Avery’s legs to the gramophone. He switched it on, gripped the volume control and swung it round to full amplitude. Above the orderly room door an alarm bell shrilled out through the silence. ‘Weren’t you with them?’ Neill asked sharply. ‘No,’ Morley admitted. They were standing by the door of the emergency ward. Two orderlies had just dismantled the electro-therapy unit and were wheeling the console away on a trolley. Outside in the gymnasium a quiet, urgent traffic of nurses and interns moved past. All but a single bank of arc-lights had been switched off, and the gymnasium seemed like a deserted stage at the end of a performance. ‘I slipped into the office to pick up a few test cards,’ he explained. ‘I wasn’t gone more than ten minutes.’ ‘You were supposed to watch them continuously,’ Neill snapped. ‘Not wander off by yourself whenever you felt like it. What do you think we had the gym and this entire circus set up for?’ It was a little after five thirty a.m. After working hopelessly on the three men for a couple of hours, he was close to exhaustion. He looked down at them, lying inertly in their cots, canvas sheets buckled up to their chins. They had barely changed, but their eyes were open and unblinking, and their faces had the empty, reflexless look of psychic zero. An intern bent over Lang, thumbing a hypodermic. Morley stared at the floor. ‘I think they would have gone anyway.’ ‘How can you say that?’ Neill clamped his lips together. He felt frustrated and impotent. He knew Morley was probably right – the three men were in terminal withdrawal, unresponsive to either insulin or electrotherapy, and a vice-tight catatonic seizure didn’t close in out of nowhere – but as always refused to admit anything without absolute proof. He led the way into his office and shut the door. ‘Sit down.’ He pulled a chair out for Morley and prowled off round the room, slamming a fist into his palm. ‘All right, John. What is it?’ Morley picked up one of the test cards lying on the desk, balanced it on a corner and spun it between his fingers. Phrases swam through his mind, tentative and uncertain, like blind fish. ‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked. ‘Reactivation of the infantile imago? A regression into the great, slumbering womb? Or to put it more simply still – just a fit of pique?’ ‘Go on.’ Morley shrugged. ‘Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word “sleep” fifty times. After a point the brain’s self-awareness dulls. It’s no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift.’ ‘What do we do then?’ ‘Nothing. Short of re-scoring all the way down to Lumbar 1. The central nervous system can’t stand narcotomy.’ Neill shook his head. ‘You’re lost,’ he said curtly. ‘Juggling with generalities isn’t going to bring those men back. First, we’ve got to find out what happened to them, what they actually felt and saw.’ 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 (#ulink_f4a32ce1-b306-54a6-8456-249cab3abe65) ‘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, acted 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 (#ulink_44a4231b-7266-5b77-a3d2-0ed6c550be43) 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. ‘You’ll have plenty of spare time on your hands,’ the Deputy Director of the Astrographic Institute on Ceres had warned me when I initialled the contract. ‘There’s a certain amount of routine maintenance, checking the power feeds to the reflector traverses and the processing units, but otherwise you won’t need to touch the telescope. A big digital does the heavy thinking, tapes all the data down in 2000-hour schedules. You fly the cans out with you when you go on leave.’ ‘So apart from shovelling the sand off the doorstep there’s virtually nothing for me to do?’ I’d commented. ‘That’s what you’re being paid for. Probably not as much as you deserve. Two years will seem a long time, even with three leave intervals. But don’t worry about going crazy. You aren’t alone on Murak. You’ll just be bored. ?2000 worth, to be exact. However, you say you have a thesis to write. And you never know, you may like it there. Tallis, the observer you’re taking over from, went out in ’03 for two years like yourself, and stayed fifteen. He’ll show you the ropes. Pleasant fellow, by all accounts, a little whimsical, probably try to pull your leg.’ Tallis drove me down to the settlement the first morning to collect my heavy vacuum baggage that had travelled spacehold. ‘Murak Reef,’ he pointed out as the old ’95 Chrysler half-track churned through the thick luminous ash silted over the metal road. We crossed a system of ancient lava lakes, flat grey disks half a mile wide, their hard crusts blistered and pocked by the countless meteor showers that had driven into Murak during the past million years. In the distance a group of long flat-roofed sheds and three high ore elevators separated themselves from the landscape. ‘I suppose they warned you. One supplies depot, a radio terminal and the minerals concession. Latest reliable estimates put the total population at seven.’ I stared out at the surrounding desert floor, cracked and tiered by the heat swings into what looked like huge plates of rusted iron, and at the massed cones of the volcano jungle yellowing in the sand haze. It was 4 o’clock local time – early morning – but the temperature was already over 80°. We drove with windows shuttered, sun curtain down, refrigerating unit pumping noisily. ‘Must be fun on Saturday night,’ I commented. ‘Isn’t there anything else?’ ‘Just the thermal storms, and a mean noon temperature of 160°.’ ‘In the shade?’ Tallis laughed. ‘Shade? You must have a sense of humour. There isn’t any shade on Murak. Don’t ever forget it. Half an hour before noon the temperature starts to go up two degrees a minute. If you’re caught out in it you’ll be putting a match to your own pyre.’ Murak Reef was a dust hole. In the sheds backing onto the depot the huge ore crushers and conveyors of the extraction plants clanked and slammed. Tallis introduced me to the agent, a morose old man called Pickford, and to two young engineers taking the wraps off a new grader. No one made any attempt at small talk. We nodded briefly, loaded my luggage onto the half-track and left. ‘A taciturn bunch,’ I said. ‘What are they mining?’ ‘Tantalum, Columbium, the Rare Earths. A heartbreaking job, the concentrations are barely workable. They’re tempted to Murak by fabulous commission rates, but they’re lucky if they can even fill their norms.’ ‘You can’t be sorry you’re leaving. What made you stay here fifteen years?’ ‘It would take me fifteen years to tell you,’ Tallis rejoined. ‘I like the empty hills and the dead lakes.’ I murmured some comment, and aware that I wasn’t satisfied he suddenly scooped a handful of grey sand off the seat, held it up and let it sift away through his fingers. ‘Prime archezoic loam. Pure bedrock. Spit on it and anything might happen. Perhaps you’ll understand me if I say I’ve been waiting for it to rain.’ ‘Will it?’ Tallis nodded. ‘In about two million years, so someone who came here told me.’ He said it with complete seriousness. During the next few days, as we checked the stores and equipment inventories and ran over the installation together, I began to wonder if Tallis had lost his sense of time. Most men left to themselves for an indefinite period develop some occupational interest: chess or an insoluble dream-game or merely a compulsive wood-whittling. But Tallis, as far as I could see, did nothing. The cabin, a three-storey drum built round a central refrigerating column, was spartan and comfortless. Tallis’s only recreation seemed to be staring out at the volcano jungle. This was an almost obsessive activity – all evening and most of the afternoon he would sit up on the lounge deck, gazing out at the hundreds of extinct cones visible from the observatory, their colours running the spectrum from red to violet as the day swung round into night. The first indication of what Tallis was watching for came about a week before he was due to leave. He had crated up his few possessions and we were clearing out one of the small storage domes near the telescope. In the darkness at the back, draped across a pile of old fans, track links and beer coolers, were two pedal-powered refrigerator suits, enormous unwieldy sacks equipped with chest pylons and hand-operated cycle gears. ‘Do you ever have to use these?’ I asked Tallis, glumly visualizing what a generator failure could mean. He shook his head. ‘They were left behind by a survey team which did some work out in the volcanoes. There’s an entire camp lying around in these sheds, in case you ever feel like a weekend on safari.’ Tallis was by the door. I moved my flashlight away and was about to switch it off when something flickered up at me from the floor. I stepped over the debris, searched about and found a small circular aluminium chest, about two feet across by a foot deep. Mounted on the back was a battery pack, thermostat and temperature selector. It was a typical relic of an expensively mounted expedition, probably a cocktail cabinet or hat box. Embossed in heavy gold lettering on the lid were the initials ‘C.F.N.’ Tallis came over from the door. ‘What’s this?’ he asked sharply, adding his flash to mine. I would have left the case where it lay, but there was something in Tallis’s voice, a distinct inflection of annoyance, that made me pick it up and shoulder past into the sunlight. I cleaned off the dust, Tallis at my shoulder. Keying open the vacuum seals I sprung back the lid. Inside was a small tape recorder, spool racks and a telescopic boom mike that cantilevered three feet up into the air, hovering a few inches from my mouth. It was a magnificent piece of equipment, a single-order job hand-made by a specialist, worth at least ?500 apart from the case. ‘Beautifully tooled,’ I remarked to Tallis. I tipped the platform and watched it spring gently. ‘The air bath is still intact.’ I ran my fingers over the range indicator and the selective six-channel reading head. It was even fitted with a sonic trip, a useful device which could be set to trigger at anything from a fly’s foot-fall to a walking crane’s. The trip had been set; I wondered what might have strayed across it when I saw that someone had anticipated me. The tape between the spools had been ripped out, so roughly that one spool had been torn off its bearings. The rack was empty, and the two frayed tabs hooked to the spool axles were the only pieces of tape left. ‘Somebody was in a hurry,’ I said aloud. I depressed the lid and polished the initials with my fingertips. ‘This must have belonged to one of the members of the survey. C. F. N. Do you want to send it on to him?’ Tallis watched me pensively. ‘No. I’m afraid the two members of the team died here. Just over a year ago.’ He told me about the incident. Two Cambridge geologists had negotiated through the Institute for Tallis’s help in establishing a camp ten miles out in the volcano jungle, where they intended to work for a year, analysing the planet’s core materials. The cost of bringing a vehicle to Murak was prohibitive, so Tallis had transported all the equipment to the camp site and set it up for them. ‘I arranged to visit them once a month with power packs, water and supplies. The first time everything seemed all right. They were both over sixty, but standing up well to the heat. The camp and laboratory were running smoothly, and they had a small transmitter they could have used in an emergency. ‘I saw them three times altogether. On my fourth visit they had vanished. I estimated that they’d been missing for about a week. Nothing was wrong. The transmitter was working, and there was plenty of water and power. I assumed they’d gone out collecting samples, lost themselves and died quickly in the first noon high.’ ‘You never found the bodies?’ ‘No. I searched for them, but in the volcano jungle the contours of the valley floors shift from hour to hour. I notified the Institute and two months later an inspector flew in from Ceres and drove out to the site with me. He certified the deaths, told me to dismantle the camp and store it here. There were a few personal things, but I’ve heard nothing from any friends or relatives.’ ‘Tragic,’ I commented. I closed the tape recorder and carried it into the shed. We walked back to the cabin. It was an hour to noon, and the parabolic sun bumper over the roof was a bowl of liquid fire. I said to Tallis: ‘What on earth were they hoping to catch in the volcano jungle? The sonic trip was set.’ ‘Was it?’ Tallis shrugged. ‘What are you suggesting?’ ‘Nothing. It’s just curious. I’m surprised there wasn’t more of an investigation.’ ‘Why? To start with, the fare from Ceres is ?800, over ?3000 from Earth. They were working privately. Why should anyone waste time and money doubting the obvious?’ I wanted to press Tallis for detail, but his last remark seemed to close the episode. We ate a silent lunch, then went out on a tour of the solar farms, replacing burnt-out thermo-couples. I was left with a vanished tape, two deaths, and a silent teasing suspicion that linked them neatly together. Over the next days I began to watch Tallis more closely, waiting for another clue to the enigma growing around him. I did learn one thing that astonished me. I had asked him about his plans for the future; these were indefinite – he said something vague about a holiday, nothing he anticipated with any eagerness, and sounded as if he had given no thought whatever to his retirement. Over the last few days, as his departure time drew closer, the entire focus of his mind became fixed upon the volcano jungle; from dawn until late into the night he sat quietly in his chair, staring out at the ghostless panorama of disintegrating cones, adrift in some private time sea. ‘When are you coming back?’ I asked with an attempt at playfulness, curious why he was leaving Murak at all. He took the question seriously. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be. Fifteen years is long enough, just about the limit of time one can spend continuously in a single place. After that one gets institutionalized –’ ‘Continuously?’ I broke in. ‘You’ve had your leaves?’ ‘No, I didn’t bother. I was busy here.’ ‘Fifteen years!’ I shouted. ‘Good God, why? In this of all places! And what do you mean, “busy”? You’re just sitting here, waiting for nothing. What are you supposed to be watching for, anyway?’ Tallis smiled evasively, started to say something and then thought better of it. The question pressed round him. What was he waiting for? Were the geologists still alive? Was he expecting them to return, or make some signal? As I watched him pace about the cabin on his last morning I was convinced there was something he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell me. Almost melodramatically he watched out over the desert, delaying his departure until the thirty-minute take-off siren hooted from the port. As we climbed into the half-track I fully expected the glowing spectres of the two geologists to come looming out of the volcano jungle, uttering cries of murder and revenge. He shook my hand carefully before he went aboard. ‘You’ve got my address all right? You’re quite sure?’ For some reason, which confused my cruder suspicions, he had made a special point of ensuring that both I and the Institute would be able to contact him. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you know if it rains.’ He looked at me sombrely. ‘Don’t wait too long.’ His eyes strayed past my head towards the southern horizon, through the sand-haze to the endless sea of cones. He added: ‘Two million years is a long time.’ I took his arm as we walked to the ramp. ‘Tallis,’ I asked quietly, ‘what are you watching for? There’s something, isn’t there?’ He pulled away from me, collected himself. ‘What?’ he said shortly, looking at his wristwatch. ‘You’ve been trying to tell me all week,’ I insisted. ‘Come on, man.’ He shook his head abruptly, muttered something about the heat and stepped quickly through the lock. I started to shout after him: ‘Those two geologists are out there …!’ but the five-minute siren shattered the air and by the time it stopped Tallis had disappeared down the companionway and crewmen were shackling on the launching gantry and sealing the cargo and passenger locks. I stood at the edge of the port as the ship cleared its take-off check, annoyed with myself for waiting until the last impossible moment to press Tallis for an explanation. Half an hour later he was gone. Over the next few days Tallis began to slide slowly into the back of my mind. I gradually settled into the observatory, picked out new routines to keep time continuously on the move. Mayer, the metallurgist down at the mine, came over to the cabin most evenings to play chess and forget his pitifully low extraction rates. He was a big, muscular fellow of thirty-five who loathed Murak’s climate, geology and bad company, a little crude but the sort of tonic I needed after an overdose of Tallis. Mayer had met Tallis only once, and had never heard about the deaths of the two geologists. ‘Damned fools, what were they looking for? Nothing to do with geology, Murak hasn’t got one.’ Pickford, the old agent down at the depot, was the only person on Murak who remembered the two men, but time had garbled his memories. ‘Salesmen, they were,’ he told me, blowing into his pipe. ‘Tallis did the heavy work for them. Should never have come here, trying to sell all those books.’ ‘Books?’ ‘Cases full. Bibles, if I recall.’ ‘Textbooks,’ I suggested. ‘Did you see them?’ ‘Sure I did,’ he said, puttering to himself. ‘Guinea moroccos.’ He jerked his head sharply. ‘You won’t sell them here, I told them.’ It sounded exactly like a dry piece of academic humour. I could see Tallis and the two scientists pulling Pickford’s leg, passing off their reference library as a set of commercial samples. I suppose the whole episode would eventually have faded, but Tallis’s charts kept my interest going. There were about twenty of them, half million aerials of the volcano jungle within a fifteen-mile radius of the observatory. One of them was marked with what I assumed to be the camp site of the geologists and alternative routes to and from the observatory. The camp was just over ten miles away, across terrain that was rough but not over-difficult for a tracked car. I still suspected I was getting myself wound up over nothing. A meaningless approach arrow on the charts, the faintest suggestion of a cryptic ‘X’, and I should have been off like a rocket after a geldspar mine or two mysterious graves. I was almost sure that Tallis had not been responsible, either by negligence or design, for the deaths of the two men, but that still left a number of unanswered questions. The next clear day I checked over the half-track, strapped a flare pistol into my knee holster and set off, warning Pickford to listen out for a mayday call on the Chrysler’s transmitter. It was just after dawn when I gunned the half-track out of the observatory compound and headed up the slope between two battery farms, following the route mapped out on the charts. Behind me the telescope swung slowly on its bogies, tirelessly sweeping its great steel ear through the Cepheid talk. The temperature was in the low seventies, comfortably cool for Murak, the sky a fresh cerise, broken by lanes of indigo that threw vivid violet lights on the drifts of grey ash on the higher slopes of the volcano jungle. The observatory soon fell behind, obscured by the exhaust dust. I passed the water synthesizer, safely pointed at ten thousand tons of silicon hydrate, and within twenty minutes reached the nearest cone, a white broad-backed giant two hundred feet high, and drove round it into the first valley. Fifty feet across at their summits, the volcanoes jostled together like a herd of enormous elephants, separated by narrow dust-filled valleys, sometimes no more than a hundred yards apart, here and there giving way to the flat mile-long deck of a fossil lava lake. Wherever possible the route took advantage of these, and I soon picked up the tracks left by the Chrysler on its trips a year earlier. I reached the site in three hours. What was left of the camp stood on a beach overlooking one of the lakes, a dismal collection of fuel cylinders, empty cold stores and water tanks sinking under the tides of dust washed up by the low thermal winds. On the far side of the lake the violet-capped cones of the volcanoes ranged southwards. Behind, a crescent of sharp cliffs cut off half the sky. I walked round the site, looking for some trace of the two geologists. A battered tin field-desk lay on its side, green paint blistered and scratched. I turned it over and pulled out its drawers, finding nothing except a charred notebook and a telephone, the receiver melted solidly into its cradle. Tallis had done his job too well. The temperature was over 100° by the time I climbed back into the half-track and a couple of miles ahead I had to stop as the cooling unit was draining power from the spark plugs and stalling the engine. The outside temperature was 130°, the sky a roaring shield, reflected in the slopes around me so that they seemed to stream with molten wax. I sealed all the shutters and changed into neutral, even then having to race the ancient engine to provide enough current for the cooler. I sat there for over an hour in the dim gloom of the dashboard, ears deadened by the engine roar, right foot cramping, cursing Tallis and the two geologists. That evening I unfurled some crisp new vellum, flexed my slide rule and determined to start work on my thesis. One afternoon, two or three months later, as we turned the board between chess games, Mayer remarked: ‘I saw Pickford this morning. He told me he had some samples to show you.’ ‘TV tapes?’ ‘Bibles, I thought he said.’ I looked in on Pickford the next time I was down at the settlement. He was hovering about in the shadows behind the counter, white suit dirty and unpressed. He puffed smoke at me. ‘Those salesmen,’ he explained. ‘You were inquiring about. I told you they were selling Bibles.’ I nodded. ‘Well?’ ‘I kept some.’ I put out my cigarette. ‘Can I see them?’ He gestured me round the counter with his pipe. ‘In the back.’ I followed him between the shelves, loaded with fans, radios and TV-scopes, all outdated models imported years earlier to satisfy the boom planet Murak had never become. ‘There it is,’ Pickford said. Standing against the back wall of the depot was a three-by-three wooden crate, taped with metal bands. Pickford ferreted about for a wrench. ‘Thought you might like to buy some.’ ‘How long has it been here?’ ‘About a year. Tallis forgot to collect it. Only found it last week.’ Doubtful, I thought: more likely he was simply waiting for Tallis to be safely out of the way. I watched while he prised off the lid. Inside was a tough brown wrapping paper. Pickford broke the seals and folded the sides back carefully, revealing a layer of black morocco-bound volumes. I pulled out one of them and held the heavily ribbed spine up to the light. It was a Bible, as Pickford had promised. Below it were a dozen others. ‘You’re right,’ I said. Pickford pulled up a radiogram and sat down, watching me. I looked at the Bible again. It was in mint condition, the King James Authorized Version. The marbling inside the endboards was unmarked. A publisher’s ticket slipped out onto the floor, and I realized that the copy had hardly come from a private library. The bindings varied slightly. The next volume I pulled out was a copy of the Vulgate. ‘How many crates did they have altogether?’ I asked Pickford. ‘Bibles? Fourteen, fifteen with this one. They ordered them all after they got here. This was the last one.’ He pulled out another volume and handed it to me. ‘Good condition, eh?’ It was a Koran. I started lifting the volumes out and got Pickford to help me sort them on the shelves. When we counted them up there were ninety in all: thirty-five Holy Bibles (twenty-four Authorized Versions and eleven Vulgates), fifteen copies of the Koran, five of the Talmud, ten of the Bhagavat Gita and twenty-five of the Upanishads. I took one of each and gave Pickford a ?10 note. ‘Any time you want some more,’ he called after me. ‘Maybe I can arrange a discount.’ He was chuckling to himself, highly pleased with the deal, one up on the salesmen. When Mayer called round that evening he noticed the six volumes on my desk. ‘Pickford’s samples,’ I explained. I told him how I had found the crate at the depot and that it had been ordered by the geologists after their arrival. ‘According to Pickford they ordered a total of fifteen crates. All Bibles.’ ‘He’s senile.’ ‘No. His memory is good. There were certainly other crates because this one was sealed and he knew it contained Bibles.’ ‘Damned funny. Maybe they were salesmen.’ ‘Whatever they were they certainly weren’t geologists. Why did Tallis say they were? Anyway, why didn’t he ever mention that they had ordered all these Bibles?’ ‘Perhaps he’d forgotten.’ ‘Fifteen crates? Fifteen crates of Bibles? Heavens above, what did they do with them?’ Mayer shrugged. He went over to the window. ‘Do you want me to radio Ceres?’ ‘Not yet. It still doesn’t add up to anything.’ ‘There might be a reward. Probably a big one. God, I could go home!’ ‘Relax. First we’ve got to find out what these so-called geologists were doing here, why they ordered this fantastic supply of Bibles. One thing: whatever it was, I swear Tallis knew about it. Originally I thought they might have discovered a geldspar mine and been double-crossed by Tallis – that sonic trip was suspicious. Or else that they’d deliberately faked their own deaths so that they could spend a couple of years working the mine, using Tallis as their supply source. But all these Bibles mean we must start thinking in completely different categories.’ Round the clock for three days, with only short breaks for sleep hunched in the Chrysler’s driving seat, I systematically swept the volcano jungle, winding slowly through the labyrinth of valleys, climbing to the crest of every cone, carefully checking every exposed quartz vein, every rift or gulley that might hide what I was convinced was waiting for me. Mayer deputized at the observatory, driving over every afternoon. He helped me recondition an old diesel generator in one of the storage domes and we lashed it on to the back of the half-track to power the cabin heater needed for the ?30° nights and the three big spotlights fixed on the roof, providing a 360° traverse. I made two trips with a full cargo of fuel out to the camp site, dumped them there and made it my base. Across the thick glue-like sand of the volcano jungle, we calculated, a man of sixty could walk at a maximum of one mile an hour, and spend at most two hours in 70° or above sunlight. That meant that whatever there was to find would be within twelve square miles of the camp site, three square miles if we included a return journey. I searched the volcanoes as exactingly as I could, marking each cone and the adjacent valleys on the charts as I covered them, at a steady five miles an hour, the great engine of the Chrysler roaring ceaselessly, from noon, when the valleys filled with fire and seemed to run with lava again, round to midnight, when the huge cones became enormous mountains of bone, sombre graveyards presided over by the fantastic colonnades and hanging galleries of the sand reefs, suspended from the lake rims like inverted cathedrals. I forced the Chrysler on, swinging the bumpers to uproot any suspicious crag or boulder that might hide a mine shaft, ramming through huge drifts of fine white sand that rose in soft clouds around the half-track like the dust of powdered silk. I found nothing. The reefs and valleys were deserted, the volcano slopes untracked, craters empty, their shallow floors littered with meteor debris, rock sulphur and cosmic dust. I decided to give up just before dawn on the fourth morning, after waking from a couple of hours of cramped and restless sleep. ‘I’m coming in now,’ I reported to Mayer over the transmitter. ‘There’s nothing out here. I’ll collect what fuel there is left from the site and see you for breakfast.’ Dawn had just come up as I reached the site. I loaded the fuel cans back onto the half-track, switched off the spotlights and took what I knew would be my last look round. I sat down at the field desk and watched the sun arching upward through the cones across the lake. Scooping a handful of ash off the desk, I scrutinized it sadly for geldspar. ‘Prime archezoic loam,’ I said, repeating Tallis’s words aloud to the dead lake. I was about to spit on it, more in anger than in hope, when some of the tumblers in my mind started to click. About five miles from the far edge of the lake, silhouetted against the sunrise over the volcanoes, was a long 100-foot-high escarpment of hard slate-blue rock that lifted out of the desert bed and ran for about two miles in a low clean sweep across the horizon, disappearing among the cones in the south-west. Its outlines were sharp and well defined, suggesting that its materials pre-dated the planet’s volcanic period. The escarpment sat squarely across the desert, gaunt and rigid, and looked as if it had been there since Murak’s beginning, while the soft ashy cones and grey hillocks around it had known only the planet’s end. It was no more than an uninformed guess, but suddenly I would have bet my entire two years’ salary that the rocks of the escarpment were archezoic. It was about three miles outside the area I had been combing, just visible from the observatory. The vision of a geldspar mine returned sharply! The lake took me nearly halfway there. I raced the Chrysler across it at forty, wasted thirty minutes picking a route through an elaborate sand reef, and then entered a long steeply walled valley which led directly towards the escarpment. A mile away I saw that the escarpment was not, as it first seemed, a narrow continuous ridge, but a circular horizontal table. A curious feature was the almost perfect flatness of the table top, as if it had been deliberately levelled by a giant sword. Its sides were unusually symmetrical; they sloped at exactly the same angle, about 35°, and formed a single cliff unbroken by fissures or crevices. I reached the table in an hour, parked the half-track at its foot and looked up at the great rounded flank of dull blue rock sloping away from me, rising like an island out of the grey sea of the desert floor. I changed down into bottom gear and floored the accelerator. Steering the Chrysler obliquely across the slope to minimize the angle of ascent, I roared slowly up the side, tracks skating and racing, swinging the half-track around like a frantic pendulum. Scaling the crest, I levelled off and looked out over a plateau about two miles in diameter, bare except for a light blue carpet of cosmic dust. In the centre of the plateau, at least a mile across, was an enormous metallic lake, heat ripples spiralling upwards from its dark smooth surface. I edged the half-track forward, head out of the side window, watching carefully, holding down the speed that picked up too easily. There were no meteorites or rock fragments lying about; presumably the lake surface cooled and set at night, to melt and extend itself as the temperature rose the next day. Although the roof seemed hard as steel I stopped about 300 yards from the edge, cut the engine and climbed up onto the cabin. The shift of perspective was slight but sufficient. The lake vanished, and I realized I was looking down at a shallow basin, about half a mile wide, scooped out of the roof. I swung back into the cab and slammed in the accelerator. The basin, like the table top, was a perfect circle, sloping smoothly to the floor about one hundred feet below its rim, in imitation of a volcanic crater. I braked the half-track at the edge and jumped out. Four hundred yards away, in the basin’s centre, five gigantic rectangular slabs of stone reared up from a vast pentagonal base. This, then, was the secret Tallis had kept from me. The basin was empty, the air warmer, strangely silent after three days of the Chrysler’s engine roaring inside my head. I lowered myself over the edge and began to walk down the slope towards the great monument in the centre of the basin. For the first time since my arrival on Murak I was unable to see the desert and the brilliant colours of the volcano jungle. I had strayed into a pale blue world, as pure and exact as a geometric equation, composed of the curving floor, the pentagonal base and the five stone rectangles towering up into the sky like the temple of some abstract religion. It took me nearly three minutes to reach the monument. Behind me, on the sky-line, the half-track’s engine steamed faintly. I went up to the base stone, which was a yard thick and must have weighed over a thousand tons, and placed my palms on its surface. It was still cool, the thin blue grain closely packed. Like the megaliths standing on it, the pentagon was unornamented and geometrically perfect. I heaved myself up and approached the nearest megalith. The shadows around me were enormous parallelograms, their angles shrinking as the sun blazed up into the sky. I walked slowly round into the centre of the group, dimly aware that neither Tallis nor the two geologists could have carved the megaliths and raised them onto the pentagon, when I saw that the entire inner surface of the nearest megalith was covered by row upon row of finely chiselled hieroglyphs. Swinging round, I ran my hands across its surface. Large patches had crumbled away, leaving a faint indecipherable tracery, but most of the surface was intact, packed solidly with pictographic symbols and intricate cuneiform glyphics that ran down it in narrow columns. I stepped over to the next megalith. Here again, the inner face was covered with tens of thousands of minute carved symbols, the rows separated by finely cut dividing rules that fell the full fifty-foot height of the megalith. There were at least a dozen languages, all in alphabets I had never seen before, strings of meaningless ciphers among which I could pick odd cross-hatched symbols that seemed to be numerals, and peculiar serpentine forms that might have represented human figures in stylized poses. Suddenly my eye caught: Below was another, damaged but legible. There were blanks among the letters, where time had flaked away minute grains of the stone. My eyes raced down the column. There were a score more entries: The list of names, all from Alpha Leporis, continued down the column. I followed it to the base, where the names ended three inches from the bottom, then moved along the surface, across rows of hieroglyphs, and picked up the list three or four columns later. I went over to the megalith on my left and began to examine the inscriptions carefully. Here the entries read: There were fewer blanks; to the right of the face the entries were more recent, the lettering sharper. In all there were five distinct languages, four of them, including Earth’s, translations of the first entry running down the left-hand margin of each column. The third and fourth megaliths recorded entries from Gamma Grus and Beta Trianguli. They followed the same pattern, their surfaces divided into eighteen-inch-wide columns, each of which contained five rows of entries, the four hieroglyphic languages followed by Earth’s, recording the same minimal data in the same terse formula: Name – Place – Date I had looked at four of the megaliths. The fifth stood with its back to the sun, its inner face hidden. I walked over to it, crossing the oblique panels of shadow withdrawing to their sources, curious as to what fabulous catalogue of names I should find. The fifth megalith was blank. My eyes raced across its huge unbroken surface, marked only by the quarter-inch-deep grooves of the dividing rules some thoughtful master mason from the stars had chiselled to tabulate the entries from Earth that had never come. I returned to the other megaliths and for half an hour read at random, arms outstretched involuntarily across the great inscription panels, fingertips tracing the convolutions of the hieroglyphs, seeking among the thousands of signatures some clue to the identity and purpose of the four stellar races. Dynasties recurred again and again, Cyrark’s, Minys-’s, -Go’s, separated by twenty-or thirty-year intervals that appeared to be generations. Before AD 1200 all entries were illegible. This represented something over half the total. The surfaces of the megaliths were almost completely covered, and initially I assumed that the first entries had been made roughly 2200 years earlier, shortly after the birth of Christ. However, the frequency of the entries increased algebraically: in the 15th century there were one or two a year, by the 20th century there were five or six, and by the present year the number varied from twenty entries from Delta Argus to over thirty-five from Alpha Leporis. The last of these, at the extreme right corner of the megalith, was: The letters were freshly incised, perhaps no more than a day old, even a few hours. Below, a free space of two feet reached to the floor. Breaking off my scrutiny, I jumped down from the base stone and carefully searched the surrounding basin, sweeping the light dust carpet for vehicle or foot marks, the remains of implements or scaffolding. But the basin was empty, the dust untouched except for the single file of prints leading down from the half-track. I was sweating uncomfortably, and the thermo-alarm strapped to my wrist rang, warning me that the air temperature was 85°, ninety minutes to noon. I re-set it to 100°, took a last look round the five megaliths, and then made my way back to the half-track. Heat waves raced and glimmered round the rim of the basin, and the sky was a dark inflamed red, mottled by the thermal pressure fields massing overhead like storm clouds. I jogged along at a half run, in a hurry to contact Mayer. Without his confirmation the authorities on Ceres would treat my report as the fantasy of a sand-happy lunatic. In addition, I wanted him to bring his camera; we could develop the reels within half an hour and radio a dozen stills as indisputable proof. More important, I wanted someone to share the discovery, provide me with at least some cover in numbers. The frequency of entries on the megaliths, and the virtual absence of any further space – unless the reverse sides were used, which seemed unlikely – suggested a climax was soon to be reached, probably the climax for which Tallis had been waiting. Hundreds of entries had been made during his fifteen years on Murak; watching all day from the observatory he must have seen every landing. As I swung into the half-track the emergency light on the transceiver above the windscreen was pulsing insistently. I switched to audio and Mayer’s voice snapped into my ear. ‘Quaine? Is that you? Where the hell are you, man? I nearly put out a mayday for you!’ He was at the camp site. Calling in from the observatory when I failed to arrive, he assumed I had broken down and abandoned the half-track, and had come out searching for me. I picked him up at the camp site half an hour later, retroversed the tracks in a squealing circle of dust and kicked off again at full throttle. Mayer pressed me all the way back but I told him nothing, driving the Chrysler hard across the lake, paralleling the two previous sets of tracks and throwing up a huge cloud of dust 150 feet into the air. It was now over 95°, and the ash hills in the valley at the end of the lake were beginning to look angry and boiled. Eager to get Mayer down into the basin, and with my mind spinning like a disintegrating flywheel, it was only as the half-track roared up the table slope that I felt a first chilling pang of fear. Through the windscreen I hesitantly scanned the tilting sky. Soon after reaching the basin we would have to shut down for an hour, two of us crammed together in the fume-filled cabin, deafened by the engine, sitting targets with the periscope blinded by the glare. The centre of the plateau was a pulsing blur, as the air trapped in the basin throbbed upward into the sun. I drove straight towards it, Mayer stiffening in his seat. A hundred yards from the basin’s edge the air suddenly cleared and we could see the tops of the megaliths. Mayer leapt up and swung out of the door onto the running board as I cut the engine and slammed the half-track to a halt by the rim. We jumped down, grabbing flare pistols and shouting to each other, slid into the basin and sprinted through the boiling air to the megaliths looming up in the centre. I half-expected to find a reception party waiting for us, but the megaliths were deserted. I reached the pentagon fifty yards ahead of Mayer, climbed up and waited for him, gulping in the molten sunlight. I helped him up and led him over to one of the megaliths, picked a column and began to read out the entries. Then I took him round the others, recapitulating everything I had discovered, pointing out the blank tablet reserved for Earth. Mayer listened, broke away and wandered off, staring up dully at the megaliths. ‘Quaine, you’ve really found something,’ he muttered softly. ‘Crazy, must be some sort of temple.’ I followed him round, wiping the sweat off my face and shielding my eyes from the glare reflected off the great slabs. ‘Look at them, Mayer! They’ve been coming here for ten thousand years! Do you know what this means?’ Mayer tentatively reached out and touched one of the megaliths. ‘“Argive League XXV … Beta Tri-”’ he read out. ‘There are others, then. God Almighty. What do you think they look like?’ ‘What does it matter? Listen. They must have levelled this plateau themselves, scooped out the basin and cut these tablets from the living rock. Can you even imagine the tools they used?’ We crouched in the narrow rectangle of shadow in the lee of the sunward megalith. The temperature climbed, forty-five minutes to noon,105° ‘What is all this, though?’ Mayer asked. ‘Their burial ground?’ ‘Unlikely. Why leave a tablet for Earth? If they’ve been able to learn our language they’d know the gesture was pointless. Anyway, elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence, and there’s something here that suggests the exact opposite. I’m convinced they expect that some time in the future we’ll take an active part in whatever is celebrated here.’ ‘Maybe, but what? Think in new categories, remember?’ Mayer squinted up at the megaliths. ‘This could be anything from an ethnological bill of lading to the guest list at an all-time cosmic house party.’ He noticed something, frowned, then suddenly wrenched away from me. He leapt to his feet, pressed his hands against the surface of the slab behind us and ran his eyes carefully over the grain. ‘What’s worrying you?’ I asked. ‘Shut up!’ he snapped. He scratched his thumbnail at the surface, trying to dislodge a few grains. ‘What are you talking about, Quaine, these slabs aren’t made of stone!’ He slipped out his jack knife, sprung the blade and stabbed viciously at the megalith, slashing a two-foot-long groove across the inscriptions. I stood up and tried to restrain him but he shouldered me away and ran his finger down the groove, collecting a few fragments. He turned on me angrily. ‘Do you know what this is? Tantalum oxide! Pure ninety-nine per cent paygold. No wonder our extraction rates are fantastically small. I couldn’t understand it, but these people –’ he jerked his thumb furiously at the megaliths ‘– have damn well milked the planet dry to build these crazy things!’ It was 115°. The air was beginning to turn yellow and we were breathing in short exhausted pants. ‘Let’s get back to the truck,’ I temporized. Mayer was losing control, carried away by his rage. With his big burly shoulders hunched in anger, staring up blindly at the five great megaliths, face contorted by the heat, he looked like an insane sub-man pinned in the time trophy of a galactic super-hunter. He was ranting away as we stumbled through the dust towards the half-track. ‘What do you want to do?’ I shouted. ‘Cut them down and put them through your ore crushers?’ Mayer stopped, the blue dust swirling about his legs. The air was humming as the basin floor expanded in the heart. The half-track was only fifty yards away, its refrigerated cabin a cool haven. Mayer was watching me, nodding slowly. ‘It could be done. Ten tons of Hy-Dyne planted round those slabs would crack them into small enough pieces for a tractor to handle. We could store them out at the observatory, then sneak them later into my refining tanks.’ I walked on, shaking my head with a thin grin. The heat was hitting Mayer, welling up all the irrational bitterness of a year’s frustration. ‘It’s an idea. Why don’t you get in touch with Gamma Grus? Maybe they’ll give you the lease.’ ‘I’m serious, Quaine,’ Mayer called after me. ‘In a couple of years we’d be rich men.’ ‘You’re crazy!’ I shouted back at him. ‘The sun’s boiling your brains.’ I began to scale the slope up to the rim. The next hour in the cabin was going to be difficult, cooped up with a maniac eager to tear the stars apart. The butt of the flare pistol swinging on my knee caught my eye; a poor weapon, though, against Mayer’s physique. I had climbed almost up to the rim when I heard his feet thudding through the dust. I started to turn round just as he was on me, swinging a tremendous blow that struck me on the back of the head. I fell, watched him close in and then stood up, my skull exploding, and grappled with him. We stumbled over each other for a moment, the walls of the basin diving around us like a switchback, and then he knocked my hands away and smashed a heavy right cross into my face. I fell on my back, stunned by the pain; the blow seemed to have loosened my jaw and damaged all the bones on the left side of my face. I managed to sit up and saw Mayer running past. He reached one hand to the rim, pulled himself up and lurched over to the half-track. I dragged the flare pistol out of its holster, snapped back the bolt and trained it at Mayer. He was thirty yards away, turning the nearside door handle. I held the butt with both hands and fired as he opened the door. He looked round at the sharp detonation and watched the silver shell soar swiftly through the air towards him, ready to duck. The shell missed him by three feet and exploded against the cabin roof. There was a brilliant flash of light that resolved itself a fraction of a second later into a fireball of incandescent magnesium vapour ten feet in diameter. This slowly faded to reveal the entire driving cabin, bonnet and forward side-panels of the half-track burning strongly with a loud, heavy crackling. Out of this maelstrom suddenly plunged the figure of Mayer, moving with violent speed, blackened arms across his face. He tripped over the rim, catapulted down into the dust and rolled for about twenty yards before he finally lay still, a shapeless bundle of smoking rags. I looked numbly at my wristwatch. It was ten minutes to noon. The temperature was 130°. I pulled myself to my feet and trudged slowly up the slope towards the half-track, head thudding like a volcano, uncertain whether I would be strong enough to lift myself out of the basin. When I was ten feet from the rim I could see that the windscreen of the half-track had melted and was dripping like treacle onto the dashboard. I dropped the flare pistol and turned round. It was five minutes to noon. Around me, on all sides, enormous sheets of fire were cascading slowly from the sky, passing straight through the floor of the basin, and then rising again in an inverted torrent. The megaliths were no longer visible, screened by curtains of brilliant light, but I groped forward, following the slope, searching for what shade would still be among them. Twenty yards farther on I saw that the sun was directly overhead. It expanded until the disc was as wide as the basin, and then lowered itself to about ten feet above my head, a thousand rivers of fire streaming across its surface in all directions. There was a terrifying roaring and barking noise, overlaid by a dull, massive pounding as all the volcanoes in the volcano jungle began to erupt again. I walked on, in a dream, shuffling slowly, eyes closed to shut out the furnace around me. Then I discovered that I was sitting on the floor of the basin, which started to spin, setting up a high-pitched screaming. A strange vision swept like a flame through my mind. For aeons I plunged, spiralling weightlessly through a thousand whirling vortexes, swirled and buffeted down chasmic eddies, splayed out across the disintegrating matrix of the continuum, a dreamless ghost in flight from the cosmic Now. Then a million motes of light prickled the darkness above me, illuminating enormous curving causeways of time and space veering out past the stars to the rim of the galaxy. My dimensions shrank to a metaphysical extension of astral zero, I was propelled upward to the stars. Aisles of light broke and splintered around me, I passed Aldebaran, soared over Betelgeuse and Vega, zoomed past Antares, finally halted a hundred light years above the crown of Canopus. Epochs drifted. Time massed on gigantic fronts, colliding like crippled universes. Abruptly, the infinite worlds of tomorrow unfolded before me – ten thousand years, a hundred thousand, unnumbered millennia raced past me in a blur of light, an iridescent cataract of stars and nebulae, interlaced by flashing trajectories of flight and exploration. I entered deep time. Deep Time: 1,000,000 mega-years. I saw the Milky Way, a wheeling carousel of fire, and Earth’s remote descendants, countless races inhabiting every stellar system in the galaxy. The dark intervals between the stars were a continuously flickering field of light, a gigantic phosphorescent ocean, filled with the vibrating pulses of electromagnetic communication pathways. To cross the enormous voids between the stars they have progressively slowed their physiological time, first ten, then a hundred-fold, so accelerating stellar and galactic time. Space has become alive with transient swarms of comets and meteors, the constellations have begun to dislocate and shift, the slow majestic rotation of the universe itself is at last visible. Deep Time: 10,000,000 mega-years. Now they have left the Milky Way, which has started to fragment and dissolve. To reach the island galaxies they have further slowed their time schemes by a factor of 10,000, and can thus communicate with each other across vast inter-galactic distances in a subjective period of only a few years. Continuously expanding into deep space, they have extended their physiological dependence upon electronic memory banks which store the atomic and molecular patterns within their bodies, transmit them outward at the speed of light, and later re-assemble them. Deep Time: 100,000,000 mega-years. They have spread now to all the neighbouring galaxies, swallowing thousands of nebulae. Their time schemes have decelerated a million-fold, they have become the only permanent forms in an ever-changing world. In a single instant of their lives a star emerges and dies, a sub-universe is born, a score of planetary life-systems evolve and vanish. Around them the universe sparkles and flickers with myriad points of light, as untold numbers of constellations appear and fade. Now, too, they have finally shed their organic forms and are composed of radiating electromagnetic fields, the primary energy substratum of the universe, complex networks of multiple dimensions, alive with the constant tremor of the sentient messages they carry, bearing the life-ways of the race. To power these fields, they have harnessed entire galaxies riding the wave-fronts of the stellar explosions out towards the terminal helixes of the universe. Deep Time: 1,000,000,000 mega-years. They are beginning to dictate the form and dimensions of the universe. To girdle the distances which circumscribe the cosmos they have reduced their time period to 0.00000001 of its previous phase. The great galaxies and spiral nebulae which once seemed to live for eternity are now of such brief duration that they are no longer visible. The universe is now almost filled by the great vibrating mantle of ideation, a vast shimmering harp which has completely translated itself into pure wave form, independent of any generating source. As the universe pulses slowly, its own energy vortices flexing and dilating, so the force-fields of the ideation mantle flex and dilate in sympathy, growing like an embryo within the womb of the cosmos, a child which will soon fill and consume its parent. Deep Time: 10,000,000,000 mega-years. The ideation-field has now swallowed the cosmos, substituted its own dynamic, its own spatial and temporal dimensions. All primary time and energy fields have been engulfed. Seeking the final extension of itself within its own bounds the mantle has reduced its time period to an almost infinitesimal 0.00000000 … n of its previous interval. Time has virtually ceased to exist, the ideation-field is nearly stationary, infinitely slow eddies of sentience undulating outward across its mantles. Ultimately it achieves the final predicates of time and space, eternity and infinity, and slows to absolute zero. Then with a cataclysmic eruption it disintegrates, no longer able to contain itself. Its vast energy patterns begin to collapse, the whole system twists and thrashes in its mortal agony, thrusting outwards huge cataracts of fragmenting energy. In parallel, time emerges. Out of this debris the first proto-galactic fields are formed, coalescing to give the galaxies and nebulae, the stars encircled by their planetary bodies. Among these, from the elemental seas, based on the carbon atom, emerge the first living forms. So the cycle renews itself … The stars swam, their patterns shifting through a dozen constellations, novas flooded the darkness like blinding arcs, revealing the familiar profiles of the Milky Way, the constellations Orion, Coma Berenices, Cygnus. Lowering my eyes from the storm-tossed sky, I saw the five megaliths. I was back on Murak. Around me the basin was filled with a great concourse of silent figures, ranged upward along the darkened slopes, shoulder to shoulder in endless ranks, like spectators in a spectral arena. Beside me a voice spoke, and it seemed to have told me everything I had witnessed of the great cosmic round. Just before I sank into unconsciousness for the last time I tried to ask the question ever present in my drifting mind, but it answered before I spoke, the star-littered sky, the five megaliths and the watching multitude spinning and swirling away into a dream as it said ‘Meanwhile we wait here, at the threshold of time and space, celebrating the identity and kinship of the particles within our bodies with those of the sun and the stars of our brief private times with the vast periods of the galaxies, with the total unifying time of the cosmos …’ I woke lying face downward in the cool evening sand, shadows beginning to fill the basin, the thermal winds blowing a crisp refreshing breeze across my head and back. Below, the megaliths rose up into the thin blue air, their lower halves cut by the shadow-line of the sinking sun. I lay quietly, stirring my legs and arms tentatively, conscious of the gigantic rifts that had driven through my mind. After a few minutes I pulled myself to my feet and gazed round at the slopes curving away from me, the memory of the insane vision vivid in my mind. The vast concourse that had filled the basin, the dream of the cosmic cycle, the voice of my interlocutor – were still real to me, a world in parallel I had just stepped from, and the door to which hung somewhere in the air around me. Had I dreamed everything, assembling the entire fantasy in my mind as I lay raving in the noon heat, saved by some thermodynamic freak of the basin’s architecture? I held my thermo-alarm up to the fading light, checking the maximum and minimum levels. The maximum read 162°. Yet I had survived! I felt relaxed, restored, almost rejuvenated. My hands and face were unburnt – a temperature of over 160° would have boiled the flesh off my bones, left my skin a blackened crisp. Over my shoulder I noticed the half-track standing on the rim. I ran towards it, for the first time remembering Mayer’s death. I felt my cheek-bones, testing my jaw muscles. Surprisingly Mayer’s heavy punches had left no bruise. Mayer’s body had gone! A single line of footsteps led down from the half-track to the megaliths, but otherwise the carpet of light blue dust was untouched. Mayer’s prints, all marks of our scuffle, had vanished. I quickly scaled the rim and reached the half-track, peering under the chassis and between the tracks. I flung open the cabin door, found the compartment empty. The windscreen was intact. The paintwork on the door and bonnet was unmarked, the metal trim around the windows unscratched. I dropped to my knees, vainly searched for any flakes of magnesium ash. On my knee the flare pistol lodged securely in its holster, a primed star shell in the breach. I left the Chrysler, jumped down into the basin and ran over to the megaliths. For an hour I paced round them, trying to resolve the countless questions that jammed my mind. Just before I left I went over to the fifth tablet. I looked up at the top left corner, wondering whether I should have qualified for its first entry had I died that afternoon. A single row of letters, filled with shadow by the falling light, stood out clearly. I stepped back and craned up at them. There were the symbols of the four alien languages, and then, proudly against the stars: ‘Tell me, Quaine, where would you like to be when the world ends?’ In the seven years since Tallis first asked me this question I must have re-examined it a thousand times. Somehow it seems the key to all the extraordinary events that have happened on Murak, with their limitless implications for the people of Earth (to me a satisfactory answer contains an acceptable statement of one’s philosophy and beliefs, an adequate discharge of the one moral debt we owe ourselves and the universe). Not that the world is about to ‘end’. The implication is rather that it has already ended and regenerated itself an infinite number of times, and that the only remaining question is what to do with ourselves in the meantime. The four stellar races who built the megaliths chose to come to Murak. What exactly they are waiting for here I can’t be certain. A cosmic redeemer, perhaps, the first sight of the vast mantle of ideation I glimpsed in my vision. Recalling the period of two million years Tallis cited for life to appear on Murak it may be that the next cosmic cycle will receive its impetus here, and that we are advance spectators, five kings come to attend the genesis of a super-species which will soon outstrip us. That there are others here, invisible and sustained by preternatural forces, is without doubt. Apart from the impossibility of surviving a Murak noon, I certainly didn’t remove Mayer’s body from the basin and arrange to have him electrocuted by one of the data-processing units at the observatory. Nor did I conceive the vision of the cosmic cycle myself. It looks as if the two geologists stumbled upon the Waiting Grounds, somehow divined their significance, and then let Tallis in on their discovery. Perhaps they disagreed, as Mayer and I did, and Nelson may have been forced to kill his companion, to die himself a year later in the course of his vigil. Like Tallis I shall wait here if necessary for fifteen years. I go out to the Grounds once a week and watch them from the observatory the rest of the time. So far I have seen nothing, although two or three hundred more names have been added to the tablets. However, I am certain that whatever we are waiting for will soon arrive. When I get tired or impatient, as I sometimes do, I remind myself that they have been coming to Murak and waiting here, generation upon generation, for 10,000 years. Whatever it is, it must be worth waiting for. 1959 NOW: ZERO (#ulink_172a6ad2-b068-516b-ae3c-2c57fb6b7612) You ask: how did I discover this insane and fantastic power? Like Dr Faust, was it bestowed upon me by the Devil himself, in exchange for the deed to my soul? Did I, perhaps, acquire it with some strange talismanic object – idol’s eyepiece or monkey’s paw – unearthed in an ancient chest or bequeathed by a dying mariner? Or, again, did I stumble upon it myself while researching into the obscenities of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Black Mass, suddenly perceiving its full horror and magnitude through clouds of sulphurous smoke and incense? None of these. In fact, the power revealed itself to me quite accidentally, during the commonplaces of the everyday round, appearing unobtrusively at my fingertips like a talent for embroidery. Indeed, its appearance was so unheralded, so gradual, that at first I failed to recognize it at all. But again you ask: why should I tell you this, describe the incredible and hitherto unsuspected sources of my power, freely catalogue the names of my victims, the date and exact manner of their quietus? Am I so mad as to be positively eager for justice – arraignment, the black cap, and the hangman leaping on to my shoulders like Quasimodo, ringing the deathbell from my throat? No, (consummate irony!) it is the strange nature of my power that I have nothing to fear from broadcasting its secret to all who will listen. I am the power’s servant, and in describing it now I still serve it, carrying it faithfully, as you shall see, to its final conclusion. However, to begin. Rankin, my immediate superior at the Everlasting Insurance company, became the hapless instrument of the fate which was first to reveal the power to me. I loathed Rankin. He was bumptious and assertive, innately vulgar, and owed his position solely to an unpleasant cunning and his persistent refusal to recommend me to the directorate for promotion. He had consolidated his position as department manager by marrying a daughter of one of the directors (a dismal harridan, I may add) and was consequently unassailable. Our relationship was based on mutual contempt, but whereas I was prepared to accept my role, confident that my own qualities would ultimately recommend themselves to the directors, Rankin deliberately took advantage of his seniority, seizing every opportunity to offend and denigrate me. He would systematically undermine my authority over the secretarial staff, who were tacitly under my control, by appointing others at random to the position. He would give me long-term projects of little significance to work on, so segregating me from the rest of the office. Above all, he sought to antagonize me by his personal mannerisms. He would sing, hum, sit uninvited on my desk as he made small talk with the typists, then call me into his office and keep me waiting pointlessly at his shoulder as he read silently through an entire file. Although I controlled myself, my abomination of Rankin grew remorselessly. I would leave the office seething with anger at his viciousness, sit in the train home with my newspaper opened but my eyes blinded by rage. My evenings and weekends would be ruined, wastelands of anger and futile bitterness. Inevitably, thoughts of revenge grew, particularly as I suspected that Rankin was passing unfavourable reports of my work to the directors. Satisfactory revenge, however, was hard to achieve. Finally I decided upon a course I despised, driven to it by desperation: the anonymous letter – not to the directors, for the source would have been too easily discovered, but to Rankin and his wife. My first letters, the familiar indictments of infidelity, I never posted. They seemed na?ve, inadequate, too obviously the handiwork of a paranoiac with a grudge. I locked them away in a small steel box, later re-drafted them, striking out the staler crudities and trying to substitute something more subtle, a hint of perversion and obscenity, that would plunge deeper barbs of suspicion into the reader’s mind. It was while composing the letter to Mrs Rankin, itemizing in an old notebook the more despicable of her husband’s qualities, that I discovered the curious relief afforded by the exercise of composition, by the formal statement, in the minatory language of the anonymous letter (which is, certainly, a specialized branch of literature, with its own classical rules and permitted devices) of the viciousness and depravity of the letter’s subject and the terrifying nemesis awaiting him. Of course, this catharsis is familiar to those regularly able to recount unpleasant experiences to priest, friend or wife, but to me, who lived a solitary, friendless life, its discovery was especially poignant. Over the next few days I made a point each evening on my return home of writing out a short indictment of Rankin’s iniquities, analysing his motives, and even anticipating the slights and abuses of the next day. These I would cast in the form of narrative, allowing myself a fair degree of licence, introducing imaginary situations and dialogues that served to highlight Rankin’s atrocious behaviour and my own stoical forbearance. The compensation was welcome, for simultaneously Rankin’s campaign against me increased. He became openly abusive, criticized my work before junior members of the staff, even threatened to report me to the directors. One afternoon he drove me to such a frenzy that I barely restrained myself from assaulting him. I hurried home, unlocked my writing box and sought relief in my diaries. I wrote page after page, re-enacting in my narrative the day’s events, then reaching forward to our final collision the following morning, culminating in an accident that intervened to save me from dismissal. My last lines were: … Shortly after 2 o’clock the next afternoon, spying from his usual position on the 7th floor stairway for any employees returning late from lunch, Rankin suddenly lost his balance, toppled over the rail and fell to his death in the entrance hall below. As I wrote this fictitious scene it seemed scant justice, but little did I realize that a weapon of enormous power had been placed gently between my fingers. Coming back to the office after lunch the next day I was surprised to find a small crowd gathered outside the entrance, a police car and ambulance pulled up by the kerb. As I pushed forward up the steps, several policemen emerged from the building clearing the way for two orderlies carrying a stretcher across which a sheet had been drawn, revealing the outlines of a human form. The face was concealed, and I gathered from conversation around me that someone had died. Two of the directors appeared, their faces shocked and drawn. ‘Who is it?’ I asked one of the office boys who were hanging around breathlessly. ‘Mr Rankin,’ he whispered. He pointed up the stairwell. ‘He slipped over the railing on the 7th floor, fell straight down, completely smashed one of those big tiles outside the lift …’ He gabbled on, but I turned away, numbed and shaken by the sheer physical violence that hung in the air. The ambulance drove off, the crowd dispersed, the directors returned, exchanging expressions of grief and astonishment with other members of the staff, the janitors took away their mops and buckets, leaving behind them a damp red patch and the shattered tile. Within an hour I had recovered. Sitting in front of Rankin’s empty office, watching the typists hover helplessly around his desk, apparently unconvinced that their master would never return, my heart began to warm and sing. I became transformed, a load which had threatened to break me had been removed from my back, my mind relaxed, the tensions and bitterness dissipated. Rankin had gone, finally and irrevocably. The era of injustice had ended. I contributed generously to the memorial fund which made the rounds of the office; I attended the funeral, gloating inwardly as the coffin was bundled into the sod, joining fulsomely in the expressions of regret. I readied myself to occupy Rankin’s desk, my rightful inheritance. My surprise a few days later can easily be imagined when Carter, a younger man of far less experience and generally accepted as my junior, was promoted to fill Rankin’s place. At first I was merely baffled, quite unable to grasp the tortuous logic that could so offend all laws of precedence and merit. I assumed that Rankin had done his work of denigrating me only too well. However, I accepted the rebuff, offered Carter my loyalty and assisted his reorganization of the office. Superficially these changes were minor. But later I realized that they were far more calculating than at first seemed, and transferred the bulk of power within the office to Carter’s hands, leaving me with the routine work, the files of which never left the department or passed to the directors. I saw too that over the previous year Carter had been carefully familiarizing himself with all aspects of my job and was taking credit for work I had done during Rankin’s tenure of office. Finally I challenged Carter openly, but far from being evasive he simply emphasized my subordinate role. From then on he ignored my attempts at a rapprochement and did all he could to antagonize me. The final insult came when Jacobson joined the office to fill Carter’s former place and was officially designated Carter’s deputy. That evening I brought down the steel box in which I kept record of Rankin’s persecutions and began to describe all that I was beginning to suffer at the hands of Carter. During a pause the last entry in the Rankin diary caught my eye: … Rankin suddenly lost his balance, toppled over the rail and fell to his death in the entrance hall below. The words seemed to be alive, they had strangely vibrant overtones. Not only were they a remarkably accurate forecast of Rankin’s fate, but they had a distinctly magnetic and compulsive power that separated them sharply from the rest of the entries. Somewhere within my mind a voice, vast and sombre, slowly intoned them. On a sudden impulse I turned the page, found a clean sheet and wrote: The next afternoon Carter died in a street accident outside the office. What childish game was I playing? I was forced to smile at myself, as primitive and irrational as a Haitian witch doctor transfixing a clay image of his enemy. I was sitting in the office the following day when the squeal of tyres in the street below riveted me to my chair. Traffic stopped abruptly and there was a sudden hubbub followed by silence. Only Carter’s office overlooked the street; he had gone out half an hour earlier so we pressed past his desk and leaned out through the window. A car had skidded sharply across the pavement and a group of ten or a dozen men were lifting it carefully back on to the roadway. It was undamaged but what appeared to be oil was leaking sluggishly into the gutter. Then we saw the body of a man outstretched beneath the car, his arms and head twisted awkwardly. The colour of his suit was oddly familiar. Two minutes later we knew it was Carter. That night I destroyed my notebook and all records I had made about Rankin’s behaviour. Was it coincidence, or in some way had I willed his death, and in the same way Carter’s? Impossible – no conceivable connection could exist between the diaries and the two deaths, the pencil marks on the sheets of paper were arbitrary curved lines of graphite, representing ideas which existed only in my mind. But the solution to my doubts and speculations was too obvious to be avoided. I locked the door, turned a fresh page of the notebook and cast round for a suitable subject. I picked up my evening paper. A young man had just been reprieved from the death penalty for the murder of an old woman. His face stared from a photograph coarse, glowering, conscienceless. I wrote: Frank Taylor died the next day in Pentonville Prison. The scandal created by Taylor’s death almost brought about the resignations of both the Home Secretary and the Prison Commissioners. During the next few days violent charges were levelled in all directions by the newspapers, and it finally transpired that Taylor had been brutally beaten to death by his warders. I carefully read the evidence and findings of the tribunal of enquiry when they were published, hoping that they might throw some light on the extraordinary and malevolent agency which linked the statements in my diaries with the inevitable deaths on the subsequent day. However, as I feared, they suggested nothing. Meanwhile I sat quietly in my office, automatically carrying out my work, obeying Jacobson’s instructions without comment, my mind elsewhere, trying to grasp the identity and import of the power bestowed on me. Still unconvinced, I decided on a final test, in which I would give precisely detailed instructions, to rule out once and for all any possibility of coincidence. Conveniently, Jacobson offered himself as my subject. So, the door locked securely behind me, I wrote with trembling fingers, fearful lest the pencil wrench itself from me and plunge into my heart. Jacobson died at 2.43 P.M. the next day after slashing his wrists with a razor blade in the second cubicle from the left in the men’s washroom on the third floor. I sealed the notebook into an envelope, locked it into the box and lay awake through a sleepless night, the words echoing in my ears, glowing before my eyes like jewels of Hell. After Jacobson’s death – exactly according to my instructions – the staff of the department were given a week’s holiday (in part to keep them away from curious newspapermen, who were beginning to scent a story, and also because the directors believed that Jacobson had been morbidly influenced by the deaths of Rankin and Carter). During those seven days I chafed impatiently to return to work. My whole attitude to the power had undergone a considerable change. Having to my own satisfaction verified its existence, if not its source, my mind turned again towards the future. Gaining confidence, I realized that if I had been bequeathed the power it was my obligation to restrain any fears and make use of it. I reminded myself that I might be merely the tool of some greater force. Alternatively, was the diary no more than a mirror which revealed the future, was I in some fantastic way twenty-four hours ahead of time when I described the deaths, simply a recorder of events that had already taken place? These questions exercised my mind ceaselessly. On my return to work I found that many members of the staff had resigned, their places being filled only with difficulty, news of the three deaths, particularly Jacobson’s suicide, having reached the newspapers. The directors’ appreciation of those senior members of the staff who remained with the firm I was able to turn to good account in consolidating my position. At last I took over command of the department – but this was no more than my due, and my eyes were now set upon a directorship. All too literally, I would step into dead men’s shoes. Briefly, my strategy was to precipitate a crisis in the affairs of the firm which would force the board to appoint new executive directors from the ranks of the department managers. I therefore waited until a week before the next meeting of the board, and then wrote out four slips of paper, one for each of the executive directors. Once a director I should be in a position to propel myself rapidly to the chairmanship of the board, by appointing my own candidates to vacancies as they successively appeared. As chairman I should automatically find a seat on the board of the parent company, there to repeat the process, with whatever variations necessary. As soon as real power came within my orbit my rise to absolute national, and ultimately global, supremacy would be swift and irreversible. If this seems na?vely ambitious, remember that I had as yet failed to appreciate the real dimensions and purpose of the power, and still thought in the categories of my own narrow world and background. A week later, as the sentences on the four directors simultaneously expired, I sat calmly in my office, reflecting upon the brevity of human life, waiting for the inevitable summons to the board. Understandably, the news of their deaths, in a succession of car accidents, brought general consternation upon the office, of which I was able to take advantage by retaining the only cool head. To my amazement the next day I, with the rest of the staff, received a month’s pay in lieu of notice. Completely flabbergasted – at first I feared that I had been discovered – I protested volubly to the chairman, but was assured that although everything I had done was deeply appreciated, the firm was nonetheless no longer able to support itself as a viable unit and was going into enforced liquidation. A farce indeed! So a grotesque justice had been done. As I left the office for the last time that morning I realized that in future I must use my power ruthlessly. Hesitation, the exercise of scruple, the calculation of niceties – these merely made me all the more vulnerable to the inconstancies and barbarities of fate. Henceforth I would be brutal, merciless, bold. Also, I must not delay. The power might wane, leave me defenceless, even less fortunately placed than before it revealed itself. My first task was to establish the power’s limits. During the next week I carried out a series of experiments to assess its capacity, working my way progressively up the scale of assassination. It happened that my lodgings were positioned some two or three hundred feet below one of the principal airlanes into the city. For years I had suffered the nerve-shattering roar of airliners flying in overhead at two-minute intervals, shaking the walls and ceiling, destroying thought. I took down my notebooks. Here was a convenient opportunity to couple research with redress. You wonder did I feel no qualms of conscience for the 75 victims who hurtled to their deaths across the evening sky twenty-four hours later, no sympathy for their relatives, no doubts as to the wisdom of wielding my power indiscriminately? I answer: No! Far from being indiscriminate I was carrying out an experiment vital to the furtherance of my power. I decided on a bolder course. I had been born in Stretchford, a mean industrial slum that had done its best to cripple my spirit and body. At last it could justify itself by testing the efficacy of the power over a wide area. In my notebook I wrote the short flat statement: Every inhabitant of Stretchford died at noon the next day. Early the following morning I went out and bought a radio, sat by it patiently all day, waiting for the inevitable interruption of the afternoon programmes by the first horrified reports of the vast Midland holocaust. Nothing, however, was reported! I was astonished, the orientations of my mind disrupted, its very sanity threatened. Had my power dissipated itself, vanishing as quickly and unexpectedly as it had appeared? Or were the authorities deliberately suppressing all mention of the cataclysm, fearful of national hysteria? I immediately took the train to Stretchford. At the station I tactfully made inquiries, was assured that the city was firmly in existence. Were my informants, though, part of the government’s conspiracy of silence, was it aware that a monstrous agency was at work, and was somehow hoping to trap it? But the city was inviolate, its streets filled with traffic, the smoke of countless factories drifting across the blackened rooftops. I returned late that evening, only to find my landlady importuning me for my rent. I managed to postpone her demands for a day, promptly unlocked my diary and passed sentence upon her, praying that the power had not entirely deserted me. The sweet relief I experienced the next morning when she was discovered at the foot of the basement staircase, claimed by a sudden stroke, can well be imagined. So my power still existed! During the succeeding weeks its principal features disclosed themselves. First, I discovered that it operated only within the bounds of feasibility. Theoretically the simultaneous deaths of the entire population of Stretchford might have been effected by the coincident explosions of several hydrogen bombs, but as this event was itself apparently impossible (hollow, indeed, are the boastings of our militarist leaders) the command was never carried out. Secondly, the power entirely confined itself to the passage of the sentence of death. I attempted to control or forecast the motions of the stock market, the results of horse races, the behaviour of my employers at my new job – all to no avail. As for the sources of the power, these never revealed themselves. I could only conclude that I was merely the agent, the willing clerk, of some macabre nemesis struck like an arc between the point of my pencil and the vellum of my diaries. Sometimes it seemed to me that the brief entries I made were cross-sections through the narrative of some vast book of the dead existing in another dimension, and that as I made them my handwriting overlapped that of a greater scribe’s along the narrow pencilled line where our respective planes of time crossed each other, instantly drawing from the eternal banks of death a final statement of account on to some victim within the tangible world around me. The diaries I kept securely sealed within a large steel safe and all entries were made with the utmost care and secrecy, to prevent any suspicion linking me with the mounting catalogue of deaths and disasters. The majority of these were effected solely for purposes of experiment and brought me little or no personal gain. It was therefore all the more surprising when I discovered that the police had begun to keep me under sporadic observation. I first noticed this when I saw my landlady’s successor in surreptitious conversation with the local constable, pointing up the stairs to my room and making head-tapping motions, presumably to indicate my telepathic and mesmeric talents. Later, a man whom I can now identify as a plainclothes detective stopped me in the street on some flimsy pretext and started a wandering conversation about the weather, obviously designed to elicit information. No charges were ever laid against me, but subsequently my employers also began to watch me in a curious manner. I therefore assumed that the possession of the power had invested me with a distinct and visible aura, and it was this that stimulated curiosity. As this aura became detectable by greater and greater numbers of people – it would be noticed in bus queues and caf?s – and the first oblique, and for some puzzling reason, amused references to it were made openly by members of the public, I knew that the power’s period of utility was ending. No longer would I be able to exercise it without fear of detection. I should have to destroy the diary, sell the safe which so long had held its secret, probably even refrain from ever thinking about the power lest this alone generate the aura. To be forced to lose the power, when I was only on the threshold of its potential, seemed a cruel turn of fate. For reasons which still remained closed to me, I had managed to penetrate behind the veil of commonplaces and familiarity which masks the inner world of the timeless and the preternatural. Must the power, and the vision it revealed, be lost forever? This question ran through my mind as I looked for the last time through my diary. It was almost full now, and I reflected that it formed one of the most extraordinary texts, if unpublished, in the history of literature. Here, indeed, was established the primacy of the pen over the sword! Savouring this thought, I suddenly had an inspiration of remarkable force and brilliance. I had stumbled upon an ingenious but simple method of preserving the power in its most impersonal and lethal form without having to wield it myself and itemize my victims’ names. This was my scheme: I would write and have published an apparently fictional story in conventional narrative in which I would describe, with complete frankness, my discovery of the power and its subsequent history. I would detail precisely the names of my victims, the mode of their deaths, the growth of my diary and the succession of experiments I carried out. I would be scrupulously honest, holding nothing back whatsoever. In conclusion I would tell of my decision to abandon the power and publish a full and dispassionate account of all that had happened. Accordingly, after a considerable labour, the story was written and published in a magazine of wide circulation. You show surprise? I agree; as such I should merely have been signing my own death warrant in indelible ink and delivering myself straight to the gallows. However, I omitted a single feature of the story: its denouement, or surprise ending, the twist in its tail. Like all respectable stories, this one too had its twist, indeed one so violent as to throw the earth itself out of its orbit. This was precisely what it was designed to do. For the twist in this story was that it contained my last command to the power, my final sentence of death. Upon whom? Who else, but upon the story’s reader! Ingenious, certainly, you willingly admit. As long as issues of the magazine remain in circulation (and their proximity to victims of this extraordinary plague guarantees that) the power will continue its task of annihilation. Its author alone will remain unmolested, for no court will hear evidence at second hand, and who will live to give it at first hand? But where, you ask, was the story published, fearful that you may inadvertently buy the magazine and read it. I answer: Here! It is the story that lies before you now. Savour it well, its finish is your own. As you read these last few lines you will be overwhelmed by horror and revulsion, then by fear and panic. Your heart seizes, its pulse falling … your mind clouds … your life ebbs … you are sinking, within a few seconds you will join eternity … three … two … one … Now! Zero. 1959 THE SOUND-SWEEP (#ulink_29988a09-0156-5b35-80f8-cd5a61ba3a8a) ONE By midnight Madame Gioconda’s headache had become intense. All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the mid-town flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, a frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines that hammered down the empty corridors and stairways to the sound stage on the second floor, making the faded air feel leaden and angry. Exhausting but at least impersonal, these sounds Madame Gioconda could bear. At dusk, however, when the flyover quietened, they were overlaid by the mysterious clapping of her phantoms, the sourceless applause that rustled down on to the stage from the darkness around her. At first a few scattered ripples from the front rows, it soon spread to the entire auditorium, mounting to a tumultuous ovation in which she suddenly detected a note of sarcasm, a single shout of derision that drove a spear of pain through her forehead, followed by an uproar of boos and catcalls that filled the tortured air, driving her away towards her couch where she lay gasping helplessly until Mangon arrived at midnight, hurrying on to the stage with his sonovac. Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing under-layer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened in Madame Gioconda’s make-shift home – the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silver-screen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the programme director’s podium; the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine cuttings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac’s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day. By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle on to the stove for Russian tea, sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser, switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it. Down in the alley behind the studio he clipped the sonovac on to the intake manifold of the sound truck. The vacuum drained in a few seconds, but he waited a discretionary two or three minutes before returning, keeping up the pretence that Madame Gioconda’s phantom audience was real. Of course the cylinder was always empty, containing only the usual daily detritus – the sounds of a door slam, a partition collapsing somewhere or the kettle whistling, a grunt or two, and later, when the headaches began, Madame Gioconda’s pitiful moanings. The riotous applause, which would have lifted the roof off the Met, let alone a small radio station, the jeers and hoots of derision were, he knew, quite imaginary, figments of Madame Gioconda’s world of fantasy, phantoms from the past of a once great prima donna who had been dropped by her public and had retreated into her imagination, each evening conjuring up a blissful dream of being once again applauded by a full house at the Metropolitan, a dream that guilt and resentment turned sour by midnight, inverting it into a nightmare of fiasco and failure. Why she should torment herself was difficult to understand, but at least the nightmare kept Madame Gioconda just this side of sanity and Mangon, who revered and loved Madame Gioconda, would have been the last person in the world to disillusion her. Each evening, when he finished his calls for the day, he would drive his sound truck all the way over from the West Side to the abandoned radio station under the flyover at the deserted end of F Street, go through the pretence of sweeping Madame Gioconda’s apartment on the stage of studio 2, charging no fee, make tea and listen to her reminiscences and plans for revenge, then see her asleep and tiptoe out, a wry but pleased smile on his youthful face. He had been calling on Madame Gioconda for nearly a year, but what his precise role was in relation to her he had not yet decided. Oddly enough, although he was more or less indispensable now to the effective operation of her fantasy world she showed little personal interest or affection for Mangon, but he assumed that this indifference was merely part of the autocratic personality of a world-famous prima donna, particularly one very conscious of the tradition, now alas meaningless, Melba – Callas – Gioconda. To serve at all was the privilege. In time, perhaps, Madame Gioconda might accord him some sign of favour. Without him, certainly, her prognosis would have been poor. Lately the headaches had become more menacing, as she insisted that the applause was growing stormier, the boos and catcalls more vicious. Whatever the psychic mechanism generating the fantasy system, Mangon realized that ultimately she would need him at the studio all day, holding back the enveloping tides of nightmare and insanity with sham passes of the sonovac. Then, perhaps, when the dream crumbled, he would regret having helped her to delude herself. With luck though she might achieve her ambition of making a comeback. She had told him something of her scheme – a serpentine mixture of blackmail and bribery – and privately Mangon hoped to launch a plot of his own to return her to popularity. By now she had unfortunately reached the point where success alone could save her from disaster. She was sitting up when he returned, propped back on an enormous gold lam? cushion, the single lamp at the foot of the couch throwing a semicircle of light on to the great flats which divided the sound stage from the auditorium. These were all from her last operatic role – The Medium – and represented a complete interior of the old spiritualist’s seance chamber, the one coherent feature in Madame Gioconda’s present existence. Surrounded by fragments from a dozen roles, even Madame Gioconda herself, Mangon reflected, seemed compounded of several separate identities. A tall regal figure, with full shapely shoulders and massive rib-cage, she had a large handsome face topped by a magnificent coiffure of rich blue-black hair – the exact prototype of the classical diva. She must have been almost fifty, yet her soft creamy complexion and small features were those of a child. The eyes, however, belied her. Large and watchful, slashed with mascara, they regarded the world around her balefully, narrowing even as Mangon approached. Her teeth too were bad, stained by tobacco and cheap cocaine. When she was roused, and her full violet lips curled with rage, revealing the blackened hulks of her dentures and the acid flickering tongue, her mouth looked like a very vent of hell. Altogether she was a formidable woman. As Mangon brought her tea she heaved herself up and made room for him by her feet among the debris of beads, loose diary pages, horoscopes and jewelled address books that littered the couch. Mangon sat down, surreptitiously noting the time (his first calls were at 9.30 the next morning and loss of sleep deadened his acute hearing), and prepared himself to listen to her for half an hour. Suddenly she flinched, shrank back into the cushion and gestured agitatedly in the direction of the darkened bandstand. ‘They’re still clapping!’ she shrieked. ‘For God’s sake sweep them away, they’re driving me insane. Oooohh …’ she rasped theatrically, ‘over there, quickly …!’ Mangon leapt to his feet. He hurried over to the bandstand and carefully focused his ears on the tiers of seats and plywood music stands. They were all immaculately clean, well below the threshold at which embedded sounds began to radiate detectable echoes. He turned to the corner walls and ceiling. Listening very carefully he could just hear seven muted pads, the dull echoes of his footsteps across the floor. They faded and vanished, followed by a low threshing noise like blurred radio static – in fact Madame Gioconda’s present tantrum. Mangon could almost distinguish the individual words, but repetition muffled them. Madame Gioconda was still writhing about on the couch, evidently not to be easily placated, so Mangon climbed down off the stage and made his way through the auditorium to where he had left his sonovac by the door. The power lead was outside in the truck but he was sure Madame Gioconda would fail to notice. For five minutes he worked away industriously, pretending to sweep the bandstand again, then put down the sonovac and returned to the couch. Madame Gioconda emerged from the cushion, sounded the air carefully with two or three slow turns of the head, and smiled at him. ‘Thank you, Mangon,’ she said silkily, her eyes watching him thoughtfully. ‘You’ve saved me again from my assassins. They’ve become so cunning recently, they can even hide from you.’ Mangon smiled ruefully to himself at this last remark. So he had been a little too perfunctory earlier on; Madame Gioconda was keeping him up to the mark. However, she seemed genuinely grateful. ‘Mangon, my dear,’ she reflected as she remade her face in the mirror of an enormous compact, painting on magnificent green eyes like a cobra’s, ‘what would I do without you? How can I ever repay you for looking after me?’ The questions, whatever their sinister undertones (had he detected them, Mangon would have been deeply shocked) were purely rhetorical, and all their conversations for that matter entirely one-sided. For Mangon was a mute. From the age of three, when his mother had savagely punched him in the throat to stop him crying, he had been stone dumb, his vocal cords irreparably damaged. In all their endless exchanges of midnight confidences, Mangon had contributed not a single spoken word. His muteness, naturally, was part of the attraction he felt for Madame Gioconda. Both of them in a sense had lost their voices, he to a cruel mother, she to a fickle and unfaithful public. This bound them together, gave them a shared sense of life’s injustice, though Mangon, like all innocents, viewed his misfortune without rancour. Both, too, were social outcasts. Rescued from his degenerate parents when he was four, Mangon had been brought up in a succession of state institutions, a solitary wounded child. His one talent had been his remarkable auditory powers, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to the Metropolitan Sonic Disposal Service. Regarded as little better than garbage collectors, the sound-sweeps were an outcast group of illiterates, mutes (the city authorities preferred these – their discretion could be relied upon) and social cripples who lived in a chain of isolated shacks on the edge of an old explosives plant in the sand dunes to the north of the city which served as the sonic dump. Mangon had made no friends among the sound-sweeps, and Madame Gioconda was the first person in his life with whom he had been intimately involved. Apart from the pleasure of being able to help her, a considerable factor in Mangon’s devotion was that until her decline she had represented (as to all mutes) the most painful possible reminder of his own voiceless condition, and that now he could at last come to terms with years of unconscious resentment. This soon done, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to serving Madame Gioconda. Inhaling moodily on a black cigarette clamped into a long jade holder, she was outlining her plans for a comeback. These had been maturing for several months and involved nothing less than persuading Hector LeGrande, chairman-in-chief of Video City, the huge corporation that transmitted a dozen TV and radio channels, into providing her with a complete series of television spectaculars. Built around Madame Gioconda and lavishly dressed and orchestrated, they would spearhead the international revival of classical opera that was her unfading dream. ‘La Scala, Covent Garden, the Met – what are they now?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Bowling alleys! Can you believe, Mangon, that in those immortal theatres where I created my Tosca, my Butterfly, my Br?nnhilde, they now have –’ she spat out a gust of smoke ‘– beer and skittles!’ Mangon shook his head sympathetically. He pulled a pencil from his breast-pocket and on the wrist-pad stitched to his left sleeve wrote: Mr LeGrande? Madame Gioconda read the note, let it fall to the floor. ‘Hector? Those lawyers poison him. He’s surrounded by them, I think they steal all my telegrams to him. Of course Hector had a complete breakdown on the spectaculars. Imagine, Mangon, what a scoop for him, a sensation! ‘The great Gioconda will appear on television!’ Not just some moronic bubblegum girl, but the Gioconda in person.’ Exhausted by this vision Madame Gioconda sank back into her cushion, blowing smoke limply through the holder. Mangon wrote: Contract? Madame Gioconda frowned at the note, then pierced it with the glowing end of her cigarette. ‘I am having a new contract drawn up. Not for the mere 300,000 I was prepared to take at first, not even 500,000. For each show I shall now demand precisely one million dollars. Nothing less! Hector will have to pay for ignoring me. Anyway, think of the publicity value of such a figure. Only a star could think of such vulgar extravagance. If he’s short of cash he can sack all those lawyers. Or devalue the dollar, I don’t mind.’ Madame Gioconda hooted with pleasure at the prospect. Mangon nodded, then scribbled another message. Be practical. Madame Gioconda ground out her cigarette. ‘You think I’m raving, don’t you, Mangon? “Fantastic dreams, million-dollar contracts, poor old fool.” But let me assure you that Hector will be only too eager to sign the contract. And I don’t intend to rely solely on his good judgement as an impresario.’ She smirked archly to herself. What else? Madame Gioconda peered round the darkened stage, then lowered her eyes. ‘You see, Mangon, Hector and I are very old friends. You know what I mean, of course?’ She waited for Mangon, who had swept out a thousand honeymoon hotel suites, to nod and then continued: ‘How well I remember that first season at Bayreuth, when Hector and I …’ Mangon stared unhappily at his feet as Madame Gioconda outlined this latest venture into blackmail. Certainly she and LeGrande had been intimate friends – the cuttings scattered around the stage testified frankly to this. In fact, were it not for the small monthly cheque which LeGrande sent Madame Gioconda she would long previously have disintegrated. To turn on him and threaten ancient scandal (LeGrande was shortly to enter politics) was not only grotesque but extremely dangerous, for LeGrande was ruthless and unsentimental. Years earlier he had used Madame Gioconda as a stepping-stone, reaping all the publicity he could from their affair, then abruptly kicking her away. Mangon fretted. A solution to her predicament was hard to find. Brought about through no fault of her own, Madame Gioconda’s decline was all the harder to bear. Since the introduction a few years earlier of ultrasonic music, the human voice – indeed, audible music of any type – had gone completely out of fashion. Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music. The re-scoring of the classical repertoire allowed the ultrasonic audience the best of both worlds. The majestic rhythms of Beethoven, the popular melodies of Tchaikovsky, the complex fugal elaborations of Bach, the abstract images of Schoenberg – all these were raised in frequency above the threshold of conscious audibility. Not only did they become inaudible, but the original works were re-scored for the much wider range of the ultrasonic orchestra, became richer in texture, more profound in theme, more sensitive, tender or lyrical as the ultrasonic arranger chose. The first casualty in this change-over was the human voice. This alone of all instruments could not be re-scored, because its sounds were produced by non-mechanical means which the neurophonic engineer could never hope, or bother, to duplicate. The earliest ultrasonic recordings had met with resistance, even ridicule. Radio programmes consisting of nothing but silence interrupted at half-hour intervals by commercial breaks seemed absurd. But gradually the public discovered that the silence was golden, that after leaving the radio switched to an ultrasonic channel for an hour or so a pleasant atmosphere of rhythm and melody seemed to generate itself spontaneously around them. When an announcer suddenly stated that an ultrasonic version of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or Tchaikovsky’s Path?tique had just been played the listener identified the real source. A second advantage of ultrasonic music was that its frequencies were so high they left no resonating residues in solid structures, and consequently there was no need to call in the sound-sweep. After an audible performance of most symphonic music, walls and furniture throbbed for days with disintegrating residues that made the air seem leaden and tumid, an entire room virtually uninhabitable. An immediate result was the swift collapse of all but a few symphony orchestras and opera companies. Concert halls and opera houses closed overnight. In the age of noise the tranquillizing balms of silence began to be rediscovered. But the final triumph of ultrasonic music had come with a second development – the short-playing record, spinning at 900 r.p.m., which condensed the 45 minutes of a Beethoven symphony to 20 seconds of playing time, the three hours of a Wagner opera to little more than two minutes. Compact and cheap, SP records sacrificed nothing to brevity. One 30-second SP record delivered as much neurophonic pleasure as a natural length recording, but with deeper penetration, greater total impact. Ultrasonic SP records swept all others off the market. Sonic LP records became museum pieces – only a crank would choose to listen to an audible full-length version of Siegfried or the Barber of Seville when he could have both wrapped up inaudibly inside the same five-minute package and appreciate their full musical value. The heyday of Madame Gioconda was over. Unceremoniously left on the shelf, she had managed to survive for a few months vocalizing on radio commercials. Soon these too went ultrasonic. In a despairing act of revenge she bought out the radio station which fired her and made her home on one of the sound stages. Over the years the station became derelict and forgotten, its windows smashed, neon portico collapsing, aerials rusting. The huge eight-lane flyover built across it sealed it conclusively into the past. Now Madame Gioconda proposed to win her way back at stiletto-point. Mangon watched her impassively as she ranted on nastily in a cloud of purple cigarette smoke, a large seedy witch. The phenobarbitone was making her drowsy and her threats and ultimatums were becoming disjointed. ‘… memoirs too, don’t forget, Hector. Frank exposure, no holds barred. I mean … damn, have to get a ghost. Hotel de Paris at Monte, lots of pictures. Oh yes, I kept the photographs.’ She grubbed about on the couch, came up with a crumpled soap coupon and a supermarket pay slip. ‘Wait till those lawyers see them. Hector –’ Suddenly she broke off, stared glassily at Mangon and sagged back. Mangon waited until she was finally asleep, stood up and peered closely at her. She looked forlorn and desperate. He watched her reverently for a moment, then tiptoed to the rheostat mounted on the control panel behind the couch, damped down the lamp at Madame Gioconda’s feet and left the stage. He sealed the auditorium doors behind him, made his way down to the foyer and stepped out, sad but at the same time oddly exhilarated, into the cool midnight air. At last he accepted that he would have to act swiftly if he was to save Madame Gioconda. TWO Driving his sound truck into the city shortly after nine the next morning, Mangon decided to postpone his first call – the weird Neo-Corbusier Episcopalian Oratory sandwiched among the office blocks in the down-town financial sector – and instead turned west on Mainway and across the park towards the white-faced apartment batteries which reared up above the trees and lakes along the north side. The Oratory was a difficult and laborious job that would take him three hours of concentrated effort. The Dean had recently imported some rare thirteenth-century pediments from the Church of St Francis at Assisi, beautiful sonic matrices rich with seven centuries of Gregorian chant, overlaid by the timeless tolling of the Angelus. Mounted into the altar they emanated an atmosphere resonant with litany and devotion, a mellow, deeply textured hymn that silently evoked the most sublime images of prayer and meditation. But at 50,000 dollars each they also represented a terrifying hazard to the clumsy sound-sweep. Only two years earlier the entire north transept of Rheims Cathedral, rose window intact, purchased for a record 1,000,000 dollars and re-erected in the new Cathedral of St Joseph at San Diego, had been drained of its priceless heritage of tonal inlays by a squad of illiterate sound-sweeps who had misread their instructions and accidentally swept the wrong wall. Even the most conscientious sound-sweep was limited by his skill, and Mangon, with his auditory super-sensitivity, was greatly in demand for his ability to sweep selectively, draining from the walls of the Oratory all extraneous and discordant noises – coughing, crying, the clatter of coins and mumble of prayer – leaving behind the chorales and liturgical chants which enhanced their devotional overtones. His skill alone would lengthen the life of the Assisi pediments by twenty years; without him they would soon become contaminated by the miscellaneous traffic of the congregation. Consequently he had no fears that the Dean would complain if he failed to appear as usual that morning. Halfway along the north side of the park he swung off into the forecourt of a huge forty-storey apartment block, a glittering white cliff ribbed by jutting balconies. Most of the apartments were Superlux duplexes occupied by showbusiness people. No one was about, but as Mangon entered the hallway, sonovac in one hand, the marble walls and columns buzzed softly with the echoing chatter of guests leaving parties four or five hours earlier. In the elevator the residues were clearer – confident male tones, the sharp wheedling of querulous wives, soft negatives of amatory blondes, punctuated by countless repetitions of ‘dahling’. Mangon ignored the echoes, which were almost inaudible, a dim insect hum. He grinned to himself as he rode up to the penthouse apartment; if Madame Gioconda had known his destination she would have strangled him on the spot. Ray Alto, doyen of the ultrasonic composers and the man more than any other responsible for Madame Gioconda’s decline, was one of Mangon’s regular calls. Usually Mangon swept his apartment once a week, calling at three in the afternoon. Today, however, he wanted to make sure of finding Alto before he left for Video City, where he was a director of programme music. The houseboy let him in. He crossed the hall and made his way down the black glass staircase into the sunken lounge. Wide studio windows revealed an elegant panorama of park and mid-town skyscrapers. A white-slacked young man sitting on one of the long slab sofas – Paul Merrill, Alto’s arranger – waved him back. ‘Mangon, hold on to your dive breaks. I’m really on reheat this morning.’ He twirled the ultrasonic trumpet he was playing, a tangle of stops and valves from which half a dozen leads trailed off across the cushions to a cathode tube and tone generator at the other end of the sofa. Mangon sat down quietly and Merrill clamped the mouthpiece to his lips. Watching the ray tube intently, where he could check the shape of the ultrasonic notes, he launched into a brisk allegretto sequence, then quickened and flicked out a series of brilliant arpeggios, stripping off high P and Q notes that danced across the cathode screen like frantic eels, fantastic glissandos that raced up twenty octaves in as many seconds, each note distinct and symmetrically exact, tripping off the tone generator in turn so that escalators of electronic chords interweaved the original scale, a multi-channel melodic stream that crowded the cathode screen with exquisite, flickering patterns. The whole thing was inaudible, but the air around Mangon felt vibrant and accelerated, charged with gaiety and sparkle, and he applauded generously when Merrill threw off a final dashing riff. ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee,’ Merrill told him. He tossed the trumpet aside and switched off the cathode tube. He lay back and savoured the glistening air for a moment. ‘Well, how are things?’ Just then the door from one of the bedrooms opened and Ray Alto appeared, a tall, thoughtful man of about forty, with thinning blonde hair, wearing pale sunglasses over cool eyes. ‘Hello, Mangon,’ he said, running a hand over Mangon’s head. ‘You’re early today. Full programme?’ Mangon nodded. ‘Don’t let it get you down.’ Alto picked a dictaphone off one of the end tables, carried it over to an armchair. ‘Noise, noise, noise – the greatest single disease-vector of civilization. The whole world’s rotting with it, yet all they can afford is a few people like Mangon fooling around with sonovacs. It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago people completely failed to realize that sound left any residues.’ ‘Are we any better?’ Merrill asked. ‘This month’s Transonics claims that eventually unswept sonic resonances will build up to a critical point where they’ll literally start shaking buildings apart. The entire city will come down like Jericho.’ ‘Babel,’ Alto corrected. ‘Okay, now, let’s shut up. We’ll be gone soon, Mangon. Buy him a drink, would you, Paul.’ Merrill brought Mangon a coke from the bar, then wandered off. Alto flipped on the dictaphone, began to speak steadily into it. ‘Memo 7: Betty, when does the copyright on Stravinsky lapse? Memo 8: Betty, file melody for projected nocturne: L, L sharp, BB, Y flat, Q, VT, L, L sharp. Memo 9: Paul, the bottom three octaves of the ultra-tuba are within the audible spectrum of the canine ear – congrats on that SP of the Anvil Chorus last night; about three million dogs thought the roof had fallen in on them. Memo 10: Betty –’ He broke off, put down the microphone. ‘Mangon, you look worried.’ Mangon, who had been lost in reverie, pulled himself together and shook his head. ‘Working too hard?’ Alto pressed. He scrutinized Mangon suspiciously. ‘Are you still sitting up all night with that Gioconda woman?’ Embarrassed, Mangon lowered his eyes. His relationship with Alto was, obliquely, almost as close as that with Madame Gioconda. Although Alto was brusque and often irritable with Mangon, he took a sincere interest in his welfare. Possibly Mangon’s muteness reminded him of the misanthropic motives behind his hatred of noise, made him feel indirectly responsible for the act of violence Mangon’s mother had committed. Also, one artist to another, he respected Mangon’s phenomenal auditory sensitivity. ‘She’ll exhaust you, Mangon, believe me.’ Alto knew how much the personal contact meant to Mangon and hesitated to be over-critical. ‘There’s nothing you can do for her. Offering her sympathy merely fans her hopes for a come-back. She hasn’t a chance.’ Mangon frowned, wrote quickly on his wrist-pad: She WILL sing again! Alto read the note pensively. Then, in a harder voice, he said: ‘She’s using you for her own purposes, Mangon. At present you satisfy one whim of hers – the neurotic headaches and fantasy applause. God forbid what the next whim might be.’ She is a great artist. ‘She was,’ Alto pointed out. ‘No more, though, sad as it is. I’m afraid that the times change.’ Annoyed by this, Mangon gritted his teeth and tore off another sheet. Entertainment, perhaps. Art, No! Alto accepted the rebuke silently; he reproved himself as much as Mangon did for selling out to Video City. In his four years there his output of original ultrasonic music consisted of little more than one nearly finished symphony – aptly titled Opus Zero – shortly to receive its first performance, a few nocturnes and one quartet. Most of his energies went into programme music, prestige numbers for spectaculars and a mass of straight transcriptions of the classical repertoire. The last he particularly despised, fit work for Paul Merrill, but not for a responsible composer. He added the sheet to the two in his left hand and asked: ‘Have you ever heard Madame Gioconda sing?’ Mangon’s answer came back scornfully: No! But you have. Please describe. Alto laughed shortly, tore up his sheets and walked across to the window. ‘All right, Mangon, you’ve made your point. You’re carrying a torch for art, doing your duty to one of the few perfect things the world has ever produced. I hope you’re equal to the responsibility. La Gioconda might be quite a handful. Do you know that at one time the doors of Covent Garden, La Scala and the Met were closed to her? They said Callas had temperament, but she was a girl guide compared with Gioconda. Tell me, how is she? Eating enough?’ Mangon held up his coke bottle. ‘Snow? That’s tough. But how does she afford it?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Dammit, I’ve got to leave. Clean this place out thoroughly, will you. It gives me a headache just listening to myself think.’ He started to pick up the dictaphone but Mangon was scribbling rapidly on his pad. Give Madame Gioconda a job. Alto read the note, then gave it back to Mangon, puzzled. ‘Where? In this apartment?’ Mangon shook his head. ‘Do you mean at V.C.? Singing?’ When Mangon began to nod vigorously he looked up at the ceiling with a despairing groan. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mangon, the last vocalist sang at Video City over ten years ago. No audience would stand for it. If I even suggested such an idea they’d tear my contract into a thousand pieces.’ He shuddered, only half-playfully. ‘I don’t know about you, Mangon, but I’ve got my ulcer to support.’ He made his way to the staircase, but Mangon intercepted him, pencil flashing across the wrist-pad. Please. Madame Gioconda will start blackmail soon. She is desperate. Must sing again. Could arrange make-believe programme in research studios. Closed circuit. Alto folded the note carefully, left the dictaphone on the staircase and walked slowly back to the window. ‘This blackmail. Are you absolutely sure? Who, though, do you know?’ Mangon nodded, but looked away. ‘Okay, I won’t press you. LeGrande, probably, eh?’ Mangon turned round in surprise, then gave an elaborate parody of a shrug. ‘Hector LeGrande. Obvious guess. But there are no secrets there, it’s all on open file. I suppose she’s just threatening to make enough of an exhibition of herself to block his governorship.’ Alto pursed his lips. He loathed LeGrande, not merely for having bribed him into a way of life he could never renounce, but also because, once having exploited his weakness, LeGrande never hesitated to remind Alto of it, treating him and his music with contempt. If Madame Gioconda’s blackmail had the slightest hope of success he would have been only too happy, but he knew LeGrande would destroy her, probably take Mangon too. Suddenly he felt a paradoxical sense of loyalty for Madame Gioconda. He looked at Mangon, waiting patiently, big spaniel eyes wide with hope. ‘The idea of a closed circuit programme is insane. Even if we went to all the trouble of staging it she wouldn’t be satisfied. She doesn’t want to sing, she wants to be a star. It’s the trappings of stardom she misses – the cheering galleries, the piles of bouquets, the green room parties. I could arrange a half-hour session on closed circuit with some trainee technicians – a few straight selections from Tosca and Butterfly, say, with even a sonic piano accompaniment, I’d be glad to play it myself – but I can’t provide the gossip columns and theatre reviews. What would happen when she found out?’ She wants to SING. Alto reached out and patted Mangon on the shoulder. ‘Good for you. All right, then, I’ll think about it. God knows how we’d arrange it. We’d have to tell her that she’ll be making a surprise guest appearance on one of the big shows – that’ll explain the absence of any programme announcement and we’ll be able to keep her in an isolated studio. Stress the importance of surprise, to prevent her from contacting the newspapers … Where are you going?’ Mangon reached the staircase, picked up the dictaphone and returned to Alto with it. He grinned happily, his jaw working wildly as he struggled to speak. Strangled sounds quavered in his throat. Touched, Alto turned away from him and sat down. ‘Okay, Mangon,’ he snapped brusquely, ‘you can get on with your job. Remember, I haven’t promised anything.’ He flicked on the dictaphone, then began: ‘Memo 11: Ray …’ THREE It was just after four o’clock when Mangon braked the sound truck in the alley behind the derelict station. Overhead the traffic hammered along the flyover, dinning down on to the cobbled walls. He had been trying to finish his rounds early enough to bring Madame Gioconda the big news before her headaches began. He had swept out the Oratory in an hour, whirled through a couple of movie theatres, the Museum of Abstract Art, and a dozen private calls in half his usual time, driven by his almost overwhelming joy at having won a promise of help from Ray Alto. He ran through the foyer, already fumbling at his wrist-pad. For the first time in many years he really regretted his muteness, his inability to tell Madame Gioconda orally of his triumph that morning. Studio 2 was in darkness, the rows of seats and litter of old programmes and ice-cream cartons reflected dimly in the single light masked by the tall flats. His feet slipped in some shattered plaster fallen from the ceiling and he was out of breath when he clambered up on to the stage and swung round the nearest flat. Madame Gioconda had gone! The stage was deserted, the couch a rumpled mess, a clutter of cold saucepans on the stove. The wardrobe door was open, dresses wrenched outwards off their hangers. For a moment Mangon panicked, unable to visualize why she should have left, immediately assuming that she had discovered his plot with Alto. Then he realized that never before had he visited the studio until midnight at the earliest, and that Madame Gioconda had merely gone out to the supermarket. He smiled at his own stupidity and sat down on the couch to wait for her, sighing with relief. As vivid as if they had been daubed in letters ten feet deep, the words leapt out from the walls, nearly deafening him with their force. ‘You grotesque old witch, you must be insane! You ever threaten me again and I’ll have you destroyed! LISTEN, you pathetic –’ Mangon spun round helplessly, trying to screen his ears. The words must have been hurled out in a paroxysm of abuse, they were only an hour old, vicious sonic scars slashed across the immaculately swept walls. His first thought was to rush out for the sonovac and sweep the walls clear before Madame Gioconda returned. Then it dawned on him that she had already heard the original of the echoes – in the background he could just detect the muffled rhythms and intonations of her voice. All too exactly, he could identify the man’s voice. He had heard it many times before, raging in the same ruthless tirades, when deputizing for one of the sound-sweeps, he had swept out the main boardroom at Video City. Hector LeGrande! So Madame Gioconda had been more desperate than he thought. The bottom drawer of the dressing table lay on the floor, its contents upended. Propped against the mirror was an old silver portrait frame, dull and verdigrised, some cotton wool and a tin of cleansing fluid next to it. The photograph was one of LeGrande, taken twenty years earlier. She must have known LeGrande was coming and had searched out the old portrait, probably regretting the threat of blackmail. But the sentiment had not been shared. Mangon walked round the stage, his heart knotting with rage, filling his ears with LeGrande’s taunts. He picked up the portrait, pressed it between his palms, and suddenly smashed it across the edge of the dressing table. ‘Mangon!’ The cry riveted him to the air. He dropped what was left of the frame, saw Madame Gioconda step quietly from behind one of the flats. ‘Mangon, please,’ she protested gently. ‘You frighten me.’ She sidled past him towards the bed, dismantling an enormous purple hat. ‘And do clean up all that glass, or I shall cut my feet.’ She spoke drowsily and moved in a relaxed, sluggish way that Mangon first assumed indicated acute shock. Then she drew from her handbag six white vials and lined them up carefully on the bedside table. These were her favourite confectionery – so LeGrande had sweetened the pill with another cheque. Mangon began to scoop the glass together with his feet, at the same time trying to collect his wits. The sounds of LeGrande’s abuse dinned the air, and he broke away and ran off to fetch the sonovac. Madame Gioconda was sitting on the edge of the bed when he returned, dreamily dusting a small bottle of bourbon which had followed the cocaine vials out of the handbag. She hummed to herself melodically and stroked one of the feathers in her hat. ‘Mangon,’ she called when he had almost finished. ‘Come here.’ Mangon put down the sonovac and went across to her. She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly very steady. ‘Mangon, why did you break Hector’s picture?’ She held up a piece of the frame. ‘Tell me.’ Mangon hesitated, then scribbled on his pad: I am sorry. I adore you very much. He said such foul things to you. Madame Gioconda glanced at the note, then gazed back thoughtfully at Mangon. ‘Were you hiding here when Hector came?’ Mangon shook his head categorically. He started to write on his pad but Madame Gioconda restrained him. ‘That’s all right, dear. I thought not.’ She looked around the stage for a moment, listening carefully. ‘Mangon, when you came in could you hear what Mr LeGrande said?’ Mangon nodded. His eyes flickered to the obscene phrases on the walls and he began to frown. He still felt LeGrande’s presence and his attempt to humiliate Madame Gioconda. Madame Gioconda pointed around them. ‘And you can actually hear what he said even now? How remarkable. Mangon, you have a wondrous talent.’ I am sorry you have to suffer so much. Madame Gioconda smiled at this. ‘We all have our crosses to bear. I have a feeling you may be able to lighten mine considerably.’ She patted the bed beside her. ‘Do sit down, you must be tired.’ When he was settled she went on, ‘I’m very interested, Mangon. Do you mean you can distinguish entire phrases and sentences in the sounds you sweep? You can hear complete conversations hours after they have taken place?’ Something about Madame Gioconda’s curiosity made Mangon hesitate. His talent, so far as he knew, was unique, and he was not so na?ve as to fail to appreciate its potentialities. It had developed in his late adolescence and so far he had resisted any temptation to abuse it. He had never revealed the talent to anyone, knowing that if he did his days as a sound-sweeper would be over. Madame Gioconda was watching him, an expectant smile on her lips. Her thoughts, of course, were solely of revenge. Mangon listened again to the walls, focused on the abuse screaming out into the air. Not complete conversations. Long fragments, up to twenty syllables. Depending on resonances and matrix. Tell no one. I will help you have revenge on LeGrande. Madame Gioconda squeezed Mangon’s hand. She was about to reach for the bourbon bottle when Mangon suddenly remembered the point of his visit. He leapt off the bed and started frantically scribbling on his wrist-pad. He tore off the first sheet and pressed it into her startled hands, then filled three more, describing his encounter with the musical director at V.C., the latter’s interest in Madame Gioconda and the conditional promise to arrange her guest appearance. In view of LeGrande’s hostility he stressed the need for absolute secrecy. He waited happily while Madame Gioconda read quickly through the notes, tracing out Mangon’s child-like script with a long scarlet fingernail. When she finished he nodded his head rapidly and gestured triumphantly in the air. Bemused, Madame Gioconda gazed uncomprehendingly at the notes. Then she reached out and pulled Mangon to her, taking his big faun-like head in her jewelled hands and pressing it to her lap. ‘My dear child, how much I need you. You must never leave me now.’ As she stroked Mangon’s hair her eyes roved questingly around the walls. The miracle happened shortly before eleven o’clock the next morning. After breakfast, sprawled across Madame Gioconda’s bed with her scrapbooks, an old gramophone salvaged by Mangon from one of the studios playing operatic selections, they had decided to drive out to the stockades – the sound-sweeps left for the city at nine and they would be able to examine the sonic dumps unmolested. Having spent so much time with Madame Gioconda and immersed himself so deeply in her world, Mangon was eager now to introduce Madame Gioconda to his. The stockades, bleak though they might be, were all he had to show her. For Mangon, Madame Gioconda had now become the entire universe, a source of certainty and wonder as potent as the sun. Behind him his past life fell away like the discarded chrysalis of a brilliant butterfly, the grey years of his childhood at the orphanage dissolving into the magical kaleidoscope that revolved around him. As she talked and murmured affectionately to him, the drab flats and props in the studio seemed as brightly coloured and meaningful as the landscape of a mescalin fantasy, the air tingling with a thousand vivid echoes of her voice. They set off down F Street at ten, soon left behind the dingy warehouses and abandoned tenements that had enclosed Madame Gioconda for so long. Squeezed together in the driving-cab of the sound truck they looked an incongruous pair – the gangling Mangon, in zip-fronted yellow plastic jacket and yellow peaked cap, at the wheel, dwarfed by the vast flamboyant Madame Gioconda, wearing a parrot-green cartwheel hat and veil, her huge creamy breast glittering with pearls, gold stars and jewelled crescents, a small selection of the orders that had showered upon her in her heyday. She had breakfasted well, on one of the vials and a tooth-glass of bourbon. As they left the city she gazed out amiably at the fields stretching away from the highway, and trilled out a light recitative from Figaro. Mangon listened to her happily, glad to see her in such good form. Determined to spend every possible minute with Madame Gioconda, he had decided to abandon his calls for the day, if not for the next week and month. With her he at last felt completely secure. The pressure of her hand and the warm swell of her shoulder made him feel confident and invigorated, all the more proud that he was able to help her back to fame. He tapped on the windshield as they swung off the highway on to the narrow dirt track that led towards the stockades. Here and there among the dunes they could see the low ruined outbuildings of the old explosives plant, the white galvanized iron roof of one of the sound-sweep’s cabins. Desolate and unfrequented, the dunes ran on for miles. They passed the remains of a gateway that had collapsed to one side of the road; originally a continuous fence ringed the stockade, but no one had any reason for wanting to penetrate it. A place of strange echoes and festering silences, overhung by a gloomy miasma of a million compacted sounds, it remained remote and haunted, the graveyard of countless private babels. The first of the sonic dumps appeared two or three hundred yards away on their right. This was reserved for aircraft sounds swept from the city’s streets and municipal buildings, and was a tightly packed collection of sound-absorbent baffles covering several acres. The baffles were slightly larger than those in the other stockades; twenty feet high and fifteen wide, each supported by heavy wooden props, they faced each other in a random labyrinth of alleyways, like a store lot of advertisement hoardings. Only the top two or three feet were visible above the dunes, but the charged air hit Mangon like a hammer, a pounding niagara of airliners blaring down the glideway, the piercing whistle of jets jockeying at take-off, the ceaseless mind-sapping roar that hangs like a vast umbrella over any metropolitan complex. All around, odd sounds shaken loose from the stockades were beginning to reach them. Over the entire area, fed from the dumps below, hung an unbroken phonic high, invisible but nonetheless as tangible and menacing as an enormous black thundercloud. Occasionally, when super-saturation was reached after one of the summer holiday periods, the sonic pressure fields would split and discharge, venting back into the stockades a nightmarish cataract of noise, raining on to the sound-sweeps not only the howling of cats and dogs, but the multi-lunged tumult of cars, express trains, fairgrounds and aircraft, the cacophonic musique concr?te of civilization. To Mangon the sounds reaching them, though scaled higher in the register, were still distinct, but Madame Gioconda could hear nothing and felt only an overpowering sense of depression and irritation. The air seemed to grate and rasp. Mangon noticed her beginning to frown and hold her hand to her forehead. He wound up his window and indicated to her to do the same. He switched on the sonovac mounted under the dashboard and let it drain the discordancies out of the sealed cabin. Madame Gioconda relaxed in the sudden blissful silence. A little further on, when they passed another stockade set closer to the road, she turned to Mangon and began to say something to him. Suddenly she jerked violently in alarm, her hat toppling. Her voice had frozen! Her mouth and lips moved frantically, but no sounds emerged. For a moment she was paralysed. Clutching her throat desperately, she filled her lungs and screamed. A faint squeak piped out of her cavernous throat, and Mangon swung round in alarm to see her gibbering apoplectically, pointing helplessly to her throat. He stared at her bewildered, then doubled over the wheel in a convulsion of silent laughter, slapping his thigh and thumping the dashboard. He pointed to the sonovac, then reached down and turned up the volume. ‘… aaauuuoooh,’ Madame Gioconda heard herself groan. She grasped her hat and secured it. ‘Mangon, what a dirty trick, you should have warned me.’ Mangon grinned. The discordant sounds coming from the stockades began to fill the cabin again, and he turned down the volume. Gleefully, he scribbled on his wrist-pad: Now you know what it is like! Madame Gioconda opened her mouth to reply, then stopped in time, hiccuped and took his arm affectionately. FOUR Mangon slowed down as they approached a side road. Two hundred yards away on their left a small pink-washed cabin stood on a dune overlooking one of the stockades. They drove up to it, turned into a circular concrete apron below the cabin and backed up against one of the unloading bays, a battery of red-painted hydrants equipped with manifold gauges and release pipes running off into the stockade. This was only twenty feet away at its nearest point, a forest of door-shaped baffles facing each other in winding corridors, like a set from a surrealist film. As she climbed down from the truck Madame Gioconda expected the same massive wave of depression and overload that she had felt from the stockade of aircraft noises, but instead the air seemed brittle and frenetic, darting with sudden flashes of tension and exhilaration. As they walked up to the cabin Mangon explained: Party noises – company for me. The twenty or thirty baffles nearest the cabin he reserved for those screening him from the miscellaneous chatter that filled the rest of the stockade. When he woke in the mornings he would listen to the laughter and small talk, enjoy the gossip and wisecracks as much as if he had been at the parties himself. The cabin was a single room with a large window overlooking the stockade, well insulated from the hubbub below. Madame Gioconda showed only a cursory interest in Mangon’s meagre belongings, and after a few general remarks came to the point and went over to the window. She opened it slightly, listened experimentally to the stream of atmospheric shifts that crowded past her. She pointed to the cabin on the far side of the stockade. ‘Mangon, whose is that?’ Gallagher’s. My partner. He sweeps City Hall, University, V.C., big mansions on 5th and A. Working now. Madame Gioconda nodded and surveyed the stockade with interest. ‘How fascinating. It’s like a zoo. All that talk, talk, talk. And you can hear it all.’ She snapped back her bracelets with swift decisive flicks of the wrist. Mangon sat down on the bed. The cabin seemed small and dingy, and he was saddened by Madame Gioconda’s disinterest. Having brought her all the way out to the dumps he wondered how he was going to keep her amused. Fortunately the stockade intrigued her. When she suggested a stroll through it he was only too glad to oblige. Down at the unloading bay he demonstrated how he emptied the tanker, clipping the exhaust leads to the hydrant, regulating the pressure through the manifold and then pumping the sound away into the stockade. Most of the stockade was in a continuous state of uproar, sounding something like a crowd in a football stadium, and as he led her out among the baffles he picked their way carefully through the quieter aisles. Around them voices chattered and whined fretfully, fragments of conversation drifted aimlessly over the air. Somewhere a woman pleaded in thin nervous tones, a man grumbled to himself, another swore angrily, a baby bellowed. Behind it all was the steady background murmur of countless TV programmes, the easy patter of announcers, the endless monotones of race-track commentators, the shrieking audiences of quiz shows, all pitched an octave up the scale so that they sounded an eerie parody of themselves. A shot rang out in the next aisle, followed by screams and shouting. Although she heard nothing, the pressure pulse made Madame Gioconda stop. ‘Mangon, wait. Don’t be in so much of a hurry. Tell me what they’re saying.’ Mangon selected a baffle and listened carefully. The sounds appeared to come from an apartment over a launderette. A battery of washing machines chuntered to themselves, a cash register slammed interminably, there was a dim almost subthreshold echo of 60-cycle hum from an SP record-player. He shook his head, waved Madame Gioconda on. ‘Mangon, what did they say?’ she pestered him. He stopped again, sharpened his ears and waited. This time he was more lucky, an over-emotional female voice was gasping ‘… but if he finds you here he’ll kill you, he’ll kill us both, what shall we do …’ He started to scribble down this outpouring, Madame Gioconda craning breathlessly over his shoulder, then recognized its source and screwed up the note. ‘Mangon, for heaven’s sake, what was it? Don’t throw it away! Tell me!’ She tried to climb under the wooden superstructure of the baffle to recover the note, but Mangon restrained her and quickly scribbled another message. Adam and Eve. Sorry. ‘What, the film? Oh, how ridiculous! Well, come on, try again.’ Eager to make amends, Mangon picked the next baffle, one of a group serving the staff married quarters of the University. Always a difficult job to keep clean, he struck paydirt almost at once. ‘… my God, there’s Bartok all over the place, that damned Steiner woman, I’ll swear she’s sleeping with her …’ Mangon took it all down, passing the sheets to Madame Gioconda as soon as he covered them. Squinting hard at his crabbed handwriting, she gobbled them eagerly, disappointed when, after half a dozen, he lost the thread and stopped. ‘Go on, Mangon, what’s the matter?’ She let the notes fall to the ground. ‘Difficult, isn’t it. We’ll have to teach you shorthand.’ They reached the baffles Mangon had just filled from the previous day’s rounds. Listening carefully he heard Paul Merrill’s voice: ‘… month’s Transonics claims that … the entire city will come down like Jericho.’ He wondered if he could persuade Madame Gioconda to wait for fifteen minutes, when he would be able to repeat a few carefully edited fragments from Alto’s promise to arrange her guest appearance, but she seemed eager to move deeper into the stockade. ‘You said your friend Gallagher sweeps out Video City, Mangon. Where would that be?’ Hector LeGrande. Of course, Mangon realized, why had he been so obtuse. This was the chance to pay the man back. He pointed to an area a few aisles away. They climbed between the baffles, Mangon helping Madame Gioconda over the beams and props, steering her full skirt and wide hat brim away from splinters and rusted metalwork. The task of finding LeGrande was simple. Even before the baffles were in sight Mangon could hear the hard, unyielding bite of the tycoon’s voice, dominating every other sound from the Video City area. Gallagher in fact swept only the senior dozen or so executive suites at V.C., chiefly to relieve their occupants of the distasteful echoes of LeGrande’s voice. Mangon steered their way among these, searching for LeGrande’s master suite, where anything of a really confidential nature took place. There were about twenty baffles, throwing off an unending chorus of ‘Yes, H.L.’, ‘Thanks, H.L.’, ‘Brilliant, H.L.’ Two or three seemed strangely quiet, and he drew Madame Gioconda over to them. This was LeGrande with his personal secretary and PA. He took out his pencil and focused carefully. ‘… of Third National Bank, transfer two million to private holding and threaten claim for stock depreciation … redraft escape clauses, including non-liability purchase benefits …’ Madame Gioconda tapped his arm but he gestured her away. Most of the baffle appeared to be taken up by dubious financial dealings, but nothing that would really hurt LeGrande if revealed. Then he heard – ‘… Bermuda Hilton. Private Island, with anchorage, have the beach cleaned up, last time the water was full of fish … I don’t care, poison them, hang some nets out … Imogene will fly in from Idlewild as Mrs Edna Burgess, warn Customs to stay away …’ ‘… call Cartiers, something for the Contessa, 17 carats say, ceiling of ten thousand. No, make it eight thousand …’ ‘… hat-check girl at the Tropicabana. Usual dossier …’ Mangon scribbled furiously, but LeGrande was speaking at rapid dictation speed and he could get down only a few fragments. Madame Gioconda barely deciphered his handwriting, and became more and more frustrated as her appetite was whetted. Finally she flung away the notes in a fury of exasperation. ‘This is absurd, you’re missing everything!’ she cried. She pounded on one of the baffles, then broke down and began to sob angrily. ‘Oh God, God, God, how ridiculous! Help me, I’m going insane …’ Mangon hurried across to her, put his arms round her shoulders to support her. She pushed him away irritably, railing at herself to discharge her impatience. ‘It’s useless, Mangon, it’s stupid of me, I was a fool –’ ‘STOP!’ The cry split the air like the blade of a guillotine. They both straightened, stared at each other blankly. Mangon put his fingers slowly to his lips, then reached out tremulously and put his hands in Madame Gioconda’s. Somewhere within him a tremendous tension had begun to dissolve. ‘Stop,’ he said again in a rough but quiet voice. ‘Don’t cry. I’ll help you.’ Madame Gioconda gaped at him with amazement. Then she let out a tremendous whoop of triumph. ‘Mangon, you can talk! You’ve got your voice back! It’s absolutely astounding! Say something, quickly, for heaven’s sake!’ Mangon felt his mouth again, ran his fingers rapidly over his throat. He began to tremble with excitement, his face brightened, he jumped up and down like a child. ‘I can talk,’ he repeated wonderingly. His voice was gruff, then seesawed into a treble. ‘I can talk,’ he said louder, controlling its pitch. ‘I can talk, I can talk, I can talk!’ He flung his head back, let out an ear-shattering shout. ‘I CAN TALK! HEAR ME!’ He ripped the wrist-pad off his sleeve, hurled it away over the baffles. Madame Gioconda backed away, laughing agreeably. ‘We can hear you, Mangon. Dear me, how sweet.’ She watched Mangon thoughtfully as he cavorted happily in the narrow interval between the aisles. ‘Now don’t tire yourself out or you’ll lose it again.’ Mangon danced over to her, seized her shoulders and squeezed them tightly. He suddenly realized that he knew no diminutive or Christian name for her. ‘Madame Gioconda,’ he said earnestly, stumbling over the syllables, the words that were so simple yet so enormously complex to pronounce. ‘You gave me back my voice. Anything you want –’ He broke off, stuttering happily, laughing through his tears. Suddenly he buried his head in her shoulder, exhausted by his discovery, and cried gratefully, ‘It’s a wonderful voice.’ Madame Gioconda steadied him maternally. ‘Yes, Mangon,’ she said, her eyes on the discarded notes lying in the dust. ‘You’ve got a wonderful voice, all right.’ Sotto voce, she added: ‘But your hearing is even more wonderful.’ Paul Merrill switched off the SP player, sat down on the arm of the sofa and watched Mangon quizzically. ‘Strange. You know, my guess is that it was psychosomatic.’ Mangon grinned. ‘Psychosemantic,’ he repeated, garbling the word half-deliberately. ‘Clever. You can do amazing things with words. They help to crystallize the truth.’ Merrill groaned playfully. ‘God, you sit there, you drink your coke, you philosophize. Don’t you realize you’re supposed to stand quietly in a corner, positively dumb with gratitude? Now you’re even ramming your puns down my throat. Never mind, tell me again how it happened.’ ‘Once a pun a time –’ Mangon ducked the magazine Merrill flung at him, let out a loud ‘Ol?!’ For the last two weeks he had been en f?te. Every day he and Madame Gioconda followed the same routine; after breakfast at the studio they drove out to the stockade, spent two or three hours compiling their confidential file on LeGrande, lunched at the cabin and then drove back to the city, Mangon going off on his rounds while Madame Gioconda slept until he returned shortly before midnight. For Mangon their existence was idyllic; not only was he rediscovering himself in terms of the complex spectra and patterns of speech – a completely new category of existence – but at the same time his relationship with Madame Gioconda revealed areas of sympathy, affection and understanding that he had never previously seen. If he sometimes felt that he was too preoccupied with his side of their relationship and the extraordinary benefits it had brought him, at least Madame Gioconda had been equally well served. Her headaches and mysterious phantoms had gone, she had cleaned up the studio and begun to salvage a little dignity and self-confidence, which made her single-minded sense of ambition seem less obsessive. Psychologically, she needed Mangon less now than he needed her, and he was sensible to restrain his high spirits and give her plenty of attention. During the first week Mangon’s incessant chatter had been rather wearing, and once, on their way to the stockade, she had switched on the sonovac in the driving-cab and left Mangon mouthing silently at the air like a stranded fish. He had taken the hint. ‘What about the sound-sweeping?’ Merrill asked. ‘Will you give it up?’ Mangon shrugged. ‘It’s my talent, but living at the stockade, let in at back doors, cleaning up the verbal garbage – it’s a degraded job. I want to help Madame Gioconda. She will need a secretary when she starts to go on tour.’ Merrill shook his head warily. ‘You’re awfully sure there’s going to be a sonic revival, Mangon. Every sign is against it.’ ‘They have not heard Madame Gioconda sing. Believe me, I know the power and wonder of the human voice. Ultrasonic music is great for atmosphere, but it has no content. It can’t express ideas, only emotions.’ ‘What happened to that closed circuit programme you and Ray were going to put on for her?’ ‘It – fell through,’ Mangon lied. The circuits Madame Gioconda would perform on would be open to the world. He had told them nothing of the visits to the stockade, of his power to read the baffles, of the accumulating file on LeGrande. Soon Madame Gioconda would strike. Above them in the hallway a door slammed, someone stormed through into the apartment in a tempest, kicking a chair against a wall. It was Alto. He raced down the staircase into the lounge, jaw tense, fingers flexing angrily. ‘Paul, don’t interrupt me until I’ve finished,’ he snapped, racing past without looking at them. ‘You’ll be out of a job but I warn you, if you don’t back me up one hundred per cent I’ll shoot you. That goes for you too, Mangon, I need you in on this.’ He whirled over to the window, bolted out the traffic noises below, then swung back and watched them steadily, feet planted firmly in the carpet. For the first time in the three years Mangon had known him he looked aggressive and confident. ‘Headline,’ he announced. ‘The Gioconda is to sing again! Incredible and terrifying though the prospect may seem, exactly two weeks from now the live, uncensored voice of the Gioconda will go out coast to coast on all three V.C. radio channels. Surprised, Mangon? It’s no secret, they’re printing the bills right now. Eight-thirty to nine-thirty, right up on the peak, even if they have to give the time away.’ Merrill sat forward. ‘Bully for her. If LeGrande wants to drive the whole ship into the ground, why worry?’ Alto punched the sofa viciously. ‘Because you and I are going to be on board! Didn’t you hear me? Eight-thirty, a fortnight today! We have a programme on then. Well, guess who our guest star is?’ Merrill struggled to make sense of this. ‘Wait a minute, Ray. You mean she’s actually going to appear – she’s going to sing – in the middle of Opus Zero?’ Alto nodded grimly. Merrill threw up his hands and slumped back. ‘It’s crazy, she can’t. Who says she will?’ ‘Who do you think? The great LeGrande.’ Alto turned to Mangon. ‘She must have raked up some real dirt to frighten him into this. I can hardly believe it.’ ‘But why on Opus Zero?’ Merrill pressed. ‘Let’s switch the premi?re to the week after.’ ‘Paul, you’re missing the point. Let me fill you in. Sometime yesterday Madame Gioconda paid a private call on LeGrande. Something she told him persuaded him that it would be absolutely wonderful for her to have a whole hour to herself on one of the feature music programmes, singing a few old-fashioned songs from the old-fashioned shows, with a full-scale ultrasonic backing. Eager to give her a completely free hand he even asked her which of the regular programmes she’d like. Well, as the last show she appeared on ten years ago was cancelled to make way for Ray Alto’s Total Symphony you can guess which one she picked.’ Merrill nodded. ‘It all fits together. We’re broadcasting from the concert studio. A single ultrasonic symphony, no station breaks, not even a commentary. Your first world premi?re in three years. There’ll be a big invited audience. White tie, something like the old days. Revenge is sweet.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Hell, all that work.’ Alto snapped: ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be wasted. Why should we pay the bill for LeGrande? This symphony is the one piece of serious music I’ve written since I joined V.C. and it isn’t going to be ruined.’ He went over to Mangon, sat down next to him. ‘This afternoon I went down to the rehearsal studios. They’d found an ancient sonic grand somewhere and one of the old-timers was accompanying her. Mangon, it’s ten years since she sang last. If she’d practised for two or three hours a day she might have preserved her voice, but you sweep her radio station, you know she hasn’t sung a note. She’s an old woman now. What time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.’ He paused, watching Mangon searchingly. ‘I hate to say it, Mangon, but it sounded like a cat being strangled.’ You lie, Mangon thought icily. You are simply so ignorant, your taste in music is so debased, that you are unable to recognize real genius when you see it. He looked at Alto with contempt, sorry for the man, with his absurd silent symphonies. He felt like shouting: I know what silence is! The voice of the Gioconda is a stream of gold, molten and pure, she will find it again as I found mine. However, something about Alto’s manner warned him to wait. He said: ‘I understand.’ Then: ‘What do you want me to do?’ Alto patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good boy. Believe me, you’ll be helping her in the long run. What I propose will save all of us from looking foolish. We’ve got to stand up to LeGrande, even if it means a one-way ticket out of V.C. Okay, Paul?’ Merrill nodded firmly and he went on: ‘Orchestra will continue as scheduled. According to the programme Madame Gioconda will be singing to an accompaniment by Opus Zero, but that means nothing and there’ll be no connection at any point. In fact she won’t turn up until the night itself. She’ll stand well down-stage on a special platform, and the only microphone will be an aerial about twenty feet diagonally above her. It will be live – but her voice will never reach it. Because you, Mangon, will be in the cue-box directly in front of her, with the most powerful sonovac we can lay our hands on. As soon as she opens her mouth you’ll let her have it. She’ll be at least ten feet away from you so she’ll hear herself and won’t suspect what is happening.’ ‘What about the audience?’ Merrill asked. ‘They’ll be listening to my symphony, enjoying a neurophonic experience of sufficient beauty and power, I hope, to distract them from the sight of a blowzy prima donna gesturing to herself in a cocaine fog. They’ll probably think she’s conducting. Remember, they may be expecting her to sing but how many people still know what the word really means? Most of them will assume it’s ultrasonic.’ ‘And LeGrande?’ ‘He’ll be in Bermuda. Business conference.’ FIVE Madame Gioconda was sitting before her dressing-table mirror, painting on a face like a Hallowe’en mask. Beside her the gramophone played scratchy sonic selections from Traviata. The stage was still a disorganized jumble, but there was now an air of purpose about it. Making his way through the flats, Mangon walked up to her quietly and kissed her bare shoulder. She stood up with a flourish, an enormous monument of a woman in a magnificent black silk dress sparkling with thousands of sequins. ‘Thank you, Mangon,’ she sang out when he complimented her. She swirled off to a hat-box on the bed, pulled out a huge peacock feather and stabbed it into her hair. Mangon had come round at six, several hours before usual; over the past two days he had felt increasingly uneasy. He was convinced that Alto was in error, and yet logic was firmly on his side. Could Madame Gioconda’s voice have preserved itself? Her spoken voice, unless she was being particularly sweet, was harsh and uneven, recently even more so. He assumed that with only a week to her performance nervousness was making her irritable. Again she was going out, as she had done almost every night. With whom, she never explained; probably to the theatre restaurants, to renew contacts with agents and managers. He would have liked to go with her, but he felt out of place on this plane of Madame Gioconda’s existence. ‘Mangon, I won’t be back until very late,’ she warned him. ‘You look rather tired and pasty. You’d better go home and get some sleep.’ Mangon noticed he was still wearing his yellow peaked cap. Unconsciously he must already have known he would not be spending the night there. ‘Do you want to go to the stockade tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Hmmmh … I don’t think so. It gives me rather a headache. Let’s leave it for a day or two.’ She turned on him with a tremendous smile, her eyes glittering with sudden affection. ‘Goodbye, Mangon, it’s been wonderful to see you.’ She bent down and pressed her cheek maternally to his, engulfing him in a heady wave of powder and perfume. In an instant all his doubts and worries evaporated, he looked forward to seeing her the next day, certain that they would spend the future together. For half an hour after she had gone he wandered around the deserted sound stage, going through his memories. Then he made his way out to the alley and drove back to the stockade. As the day of Madame Gioconda’s performance drew closer Mangon’s anxieties mounted. Twice he had been down to the concert studio at Video City, had rehearsed with Alto his entry beneath the stage to the cue-box, a small compartment off the corridor used by the electronics engineers. They had checked the power points, borrowed a sonovac from the services section – a heavy duty model used for shielding VIPs and commentators at airports – and mounted its nozzle in the cue-hood. Alto stood on the platform erected for Madame Gioconda, shouted at the top of his voice at Merrill sitting in the third row of the stalls. ‘Hear anything?’ he called afterwards. Merrill shook his head. ‘Nothing, no vibration at all.’ Down below Mangon flicked the release toggle, vented a long-drawn-out ‘Fiivvveeee! … Foouuurrr! … Thrreeeee! … Twooooo! … Onnneeee …!’ ‘Good enough,’ Alto decided. Chicago-style, they hid the sonovac in a triple-bass case, stored it in Alto’s office. ‘Do you want to hear her sing, Mangon?’ Alto asked. ‘She should be rehearsing now.’ Mangon hesitated, then declined. ‘It’s tragic that she’s unable to realize the truth herself,’ Alto commented. ‘Her mind must be fixed fifteen or twenty years in the past, when she sang her greatest roles at La Scala. That’s the voice she hears, the voice she’ll probably always hear.’ Mangon pondered this. Once he tried to ask Madame Gioconda how her practice sessions were going, but she was moving into a different zone and answered with some grandiose remark. He was seeing less and less of her, whenever he visited the station she was either about to go out or else tired and eager to be rid of him. Their trips to the stockade had ceased. All this he accepted as inevitable; after the performance, he assured himself, after her triumph, she would come back to him. He noticed, however, that he was beginning to stutter. On the final afternoon, a few hours before the performance that evening, Mangon drove down to F Street for what was to be the last time. He had not seen Madame Gioconda the previous day and he wanted to be with her and give her any encouragement she needed. As he turned into the alley he was surprised to see two large removal vans parked outside the station entrance. Four or five men were carrying out pieces of furniture and the great scenic flats from the sound stage. Mangon ran over to them. One of the vans was full; he recognized all Madame Gioconda’s possessions – the rococo wardrobe and dressing table, the couch, the huge Desdemona bed, up-ended and wrapped in corrugated paper – as he looked at it he felt that a section of himself had been torn from him and rammed away callously. In the bright daylight the peeling threadbare flats had lost all illusion of reality; with them Mangon’s whole relationship with Madame Gioconda seemed to have been dismantled. The last of the workmen came out with a gold cushion under his arm, tossed it into the second van. The foreman sealed the doors and waved on the driver. ‘W … wh … where are you going?’ Mangon asked him urgently. The foreman looked him up and down. ‘You’re the sweeper, are you?’ He jerked a thumb towards the station. ‘The old girl said there was a message for you in there. Couldn’t see one myself.’ Mangon left him and ran into the foyer and up the stairway towards Studio 2. The removers had torn down the blinds and a grey light was flooding into the dusty auditorium. Without the flats the stage looked exposed and derelict. He raced down the aisle, wondering why Madame Gioconda had decided to leave without telling him. The stage had been stripped. The music stands had been kicked over, the stove lay on its side with two or three old pans around it, underfoot there was a miscellaneous litter of paper, ash and empty vials. Mangon searched around for the message, probably pinned to one of the partitions. Then he heard it screaming at him from the walls, violent and concise. ‘GO AWAY YOU UGLY CHILD! NEVER TRY TO SEE ME AGAIN!’ He shrank back, involuntarily tried to shout as the walls seemed to fall in on him, but his throat had frozen. As he entered the corridor below the stage shortly before eight-twenty, Mangon could hear the sounds of the audience arriving and making their way to their seats. The studio was almost full, a hubbub of well-heeled chatter. Lights flashed on and off in the corridor, and oblique atmospheric shifts cut through the air as the players on the stage tuned their instruments. Mangon slid past the technicians manning the neurophonic rigs which supplied the orchestra, trying to make the enormous triple-bass case as inconspicuous as possible. They were all busy checking the relays and circuits, and he reached the cue-box and slipped through the door unnoticed. The box was almost in darkness, a few rays of coloured light filtering through the pink and white petals of the chrysanthemums stacked over the hood. He bolted the door, then opened the case, lifted out the sonovac and clipped the snout into the canister. Leaning forward, with his hands he pushed a small aperture among the flowers. 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