Ballard, J G - The Terminal Beach

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Penguin Books

The Terminal Beach

j. 13. Ballard was born in Shanghai of English parents

in I93O and lived there until he was fifteen. During the

war he was interned by the Japanese in a civilian

prison camp. He was repatriated in 946, and after

leaving school read medicine at King's College,

Cambridge. His first science fiction story was published

in I956. From the start he pioneered a new form of

science fiction, and was the originator of the so-called

'New Wave' that challenged the American science

fiction of the 95os. He believes that science fiction is

the authentic literature of the Twentieth Century.

His books published in Penguim are The Drought,

The Drowned Worm and The Wind From Nowhere.

His other books include Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition.

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j. G. Ballard

The Terminal Beach

Penguin Books

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Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworttb

Middesex, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

Victoria, Australia

First published by Victor Gollancz x96

Published in Penguin Books x 966

Reprinted 974

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Hunt Bamard Printing Ltd, Aylebury, Bucks

Set in Monotype Baskerville

This book is sold subject to the condition that

it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without

the publisher's prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it ia

published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the

subsequent purchaser

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Contents

A Question of Reentry

The Drowned Giant

End-Game '

The Illuminated Man

The Reptile Enclosure

x 07

The Delta at Sunset

x x 9

The Terminal Beach

Deep End

The Volcano Dances

Billennium

The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon

The Lost Leonardo

2o4

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A Question of Reentry

All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally

pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed,

and by three o'clock had covered some seventy-five miles.

Fifty yards away, on either side of the patrol launch, the high

wall's of the jungle river rose over the water, the unbroken

massif of the mato grosso which swept across the Amazonas

from Campos Buros to the delta of the Orinoco. Despite their

progress - they had set off from the telegraph station at Tres

Buritis at seven o'clock that morning- the river showed no inclination

to narrow or alter its volume. Sombre and unchanging,

the forest followed its course, the aerial canopy

shutting off the sunlight and cloaking the water along the

banks with a black velvet sheen. Now and then the channel

would widen into a flat expanse of what appeared to be

stationary water, the slow oily swells which disturbed its surface

transforming it into a sluggish mirror of the distant, enigmatic

sky, the islands of rotten baha logs refracted by the

layers of haze like the drifting archipelagos of a dream. Then

the channel would narrow again and the cooling jungle

darkness enveloped the launch.

Although for the first few hours Connolly had joined Captain

Pereira at the rail, he had become bored with the endless

green banks of the forest sliding past them, and since noon

had remained in the cabin, pretending to study the trajectory

maps. The time might pass More slowly there, but at least it

was cooler and less depressing. The fan hummed and pivoted,

and the clicking of the cutwater and the whispering plaint of

the current past the gliding hull soothed the slight headache

induced by the tepid beer he and Pereira Had shared after

lunch.

This first encounter with the jungle had disappointed

Connolly. His previous experience had been confined to the

Dredging Project at Lake Maracaibo, where the only forests

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consisted of the abandoned oil rigs built out into the water.

Their rusting h, lks, and the huge draglines and pontoons of

the dredging teams, were fauna of a man-made species. In

the Amazonian jungle he had expected to see the full variety

Of nature in its richest and most colourful outpouring, but

instead it was nothing More than a moribund tree-level

swamp, unweeded and overgrown, if anything More dead

than alive, an example of bad husbandry on a continental

scale. The margins of the river were rarely well-defined; except

where enough rotting trunks had gathered to form a firm

parapet, there were no formal banks, and the shallows ran off

among the undergrowth for a hundred yards, irrigating huge

areas of vegetation that were already drowning in moisture.

Counolly had tried to convey his disenchantment to

Pereira, who now sat under the awning on the deck, placidly

smoking a cheroot, partly to repay the captain for his polite

contempt for Connolly and everything his mission implied.

Like all the officers of the Native Protection Missions whom

Counolly had met, first in Venezuela and now in Brazil,

Pereira maintained a proprietary outlook towards the jungle

and its mystique, which would not be breached by any

number of fresh-faced investigators in their crisp drill uniforms.

Captain Pereira had not been impressed by the us

flashes on Cormolly's shoulders with their orbital monogram,

nor by the high-level request for assistance cabled to the

Mission three weeks earlier from Brasilia. To Pcreira, ob-vionsly,

the office suites in the white towers at the capital

were as far away as New York, London or Babylon.

Superficially, the captain had been helpful enough, supervising

the crew as they stowed Connolly's monitoring equipment

iboard, checking his Smith & Wesson and exchanging

a pair of defective mosquito boots. As long as Connolly had

wanted to, he had conversed away amiably, pointing out

this and that feature of the landscape, identifying an unusual

bird or lizard on an overhead bough.

But his indifference to the real object of the mission - he

had given a barely perceptible nod when Connolly described

it - soon became obvious. It was this neutrality which irked

Connolly, implying that Pereira spent all his time ferrying

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uN investigators up and down the rivers after their confounded

lost space capsule like so many tourists in search

of some non-existent E1 Dorado. Above all there was the suggestion

that Cormolly and the hundreds of other investigators

deployed around the continent were being too persistent.

When all was said and done, Pereira implied, five years had

elapsed Since the returning lunar space-craft, the Goliath 7, had plummeted into the South

American land mass, and to

prolong the search indefinitely was simply bad form, even,

perhaps, necrophilic. There was not the faintest chance of

the pilot still being alive, so he should be decently forgotten,

given a statue outside a railway station or airport car park

and left to the pigeons.

Connolly would have been glad to explain the reasons for

the indefinite 'duration of the search, the overwhelming

moral reasons, apart from the political and technical ones.

He would have liked to point out that the lost astronaut,

Colonel Francis Spender, by accepting the immense risks of

the flight to and from the Moon, was owed the absolute discharge

of any assistance that could be given him. He would

have liked to remind Pereira that the successful landing on

the Moon, after some half-dozen fatal attempts,- at least

three of the luckless pilots were still orbiting the Moon in

their dead ships - was the culmination of an age-old ambition

with profound psychological implications for mankind,

and that the failure to find the astronaut after his return

might induce unassuageable feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

(If the sea was a symbol of the unconscious, was space

perhaps an image of unfettered time, and the anablity to

penetrate it a tragic exile to one of the limbos of eternity, a

symbolic death in life ?)

But Captain Pereira was not interested. Calmly inhaling

the scented aroma of his cheroot, he sat imperturbably at the

rail, surveying the fetid swamps that moved past them.

Shortly before noon, when they had covered some forty

miles, Cormolly pointed to the remains ora bamboo landing

stage elevated on high poles above the bank. A threadbare

rope bridge trailed off among the mangroves, and through

an embrasure in the forest they could see a small rearing

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where a clutter of abandoned adobe huts dissolved like refuse

heaps in the sunlight.

'Is this one of their camps ?'

Pereira shook his head. 'The Espirro tribe, closely related

to the Nambikwaras. Three years ago one of them carried

influenza back from the telegraph station, an epidemic broke

out, turned into a form of pulmonary edema, within forty-eight

hours three hundred Indians had died. The whole

group disintegrated, only about fifteen of the men and their

families are still alive. A great tragedy.'

They moved forward to the bridge and stood beside the tall

Negro helmsman as the two other members of the crew began

to shackle sections of fine wire mesh into a cage over the deck.

Pereira raised his binoculars and scanned the river ahead.

'Since the Espirros vacated the area the Nambas have

begun to forage down this far. We won't see any of them, but

it's as well to be on the safe side.'

'Do you mean they're hostile ?' Connolly asked.

'Not in a conscious sense. But the various groups which

comprise the Nambikwaras are permanently feuding with

each other, and this far from the settlement we might easily

be involved in an opportunist attack. Once we get to the

settlement we'll be all right - there's a sort of precarious

equilibrium there. But even so, have your wits about you. As

you'll see, they're as nervous as birds.'

'How does Ryker manage to keep out of their way ? Hasn't

he been here for years ?'

'About twelve.' Pereira sat down on the gunwale and eased

his peaked cap off his forehead. 'Ryker is something of a

special case. Temperamentally he's rather explosive - I

meant to warn you to handle him carefully, he might easily

whip up an incident- but he seems to have manoeuvred himself

into a position of authority with the tribe. In some ways

he's become an umpire, arbitrating in their various feuds.

How he does it I haven't discovered yet; it's quite uncharacteristic

of the Indians to regard a white man in that

way. However, he's useful to us, we might eventually set up a

mission here. Though that's next to impossible - we tried it

once and the Indians just moved 5oo miles away.'

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Connolly looked back at the derelict landing stage as it disappeared

around a bend, barely distinguishable from the

jungle, which was as dilapidated as this sole mournful

artifact.

'What on earth made Ryker come out here ?' He had heard

something in Brasilia of this strange figure, sometime

journalist and man of action, the self-proclaimed world

citizen who at the age o£forty-two, after a life spent venting

his spleen on civilization and its gimcrack gods, had suddeniy

,disappeared into the Amazonas and taken up residence

with one of the aboriginal tribes. Most latter-day

Gauguins were absconding confidence men or neurotics, but

Ryker seemedto be a genuine character in his own right, the

last of a rae off true individualists retreating before the

barbed-wire fences and regimentation of' twentieth century

life. But his chosen paradise seemed pretty scruffy and degenerate,

Counolly reflected, when one saw it at close quarters.

However, as long as the man could organize the Indians into

a few search parties he would serve his purpose. 'I can't

unde-rstand why Ryker should pick the Amazon basin. The

South Pacific yes, but from all I've heard - and you've confirmed

just now- the Indians appear to be a pretty diseased

and miserable lot, hardly the noble savage.'

Captain Pereira shrugged, looking away across the oily

water, his plump sallow f'aee motfied by the lace-like shadow

of the wire netting. He belched disereefiy to himself, and

then adjusted his holster belt. 'I don't know the South

Pacific, but I should guess it's also been oversentimentalized.

Ryker didn't come here for" scenic tour. I suppose the

Indians are diseased and, yes, reasonably miserable. Within

fifty years they'll probably have died out. But for the time

being they do represent a certain form of untamed, natural

existence, which after all made us what we are. The hazards

facing them are immense, and they survive.' He gave

Connolly a sly smile. 'But you must argue it out with Ryker.'

They lapsed into silence and sat by the rail, watching the

river unfurl itself. Exhausted and collapsing, the great trees

crowded the banks, the dying expiring among the living,

jostling each other aside as fi for a last despairing assault on

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the patrol boat and its passengers. For the next half an hour,

until they opened their lunch packs, Connolly searched the

tree-tops for the giant bifurcated parachute which should

have carried the capsule to earth. Virtually impermeable to

the atmosphere, it would still be visible, spreadeagled like an

enormous bird over the canopy of leaves. Then, after drinking

a can of Pereira's beer, he excused himself and went down

to the cabin.

The two steel cases containing the monitoring equipment

had been stowed under the chart table, and he pulled them

out and checked that the moisture-proof seals were still intact.

The chances of making visual contact with the capsule

were infinitesimal, but as long as it was intact it would continue

to transmit both a sonar and radio beacon, admittedly

over little More than twenty miles, but sufficient to identify

its whereabouts to anyone in the immediate neighbourhood.

However, the entire northern half of the South Americas had

been covered by successive aerial sweeps, and it seemed unlikely

that the beacons were still operating. The disappearance

of the capsule argued that it had sustained at least minor

damage, and by now the batteries would have been corroded

by the humid air.

Recently certain of the un Space Department agencies

had begun to circulate the unofficial view that Colonel

Spender had failed to select the correct attitude for reentry

and that the capsule had been vaporized on its final descent,

but Connolly guessed that this was merely an attempt to

pacify world opinion and prepare the way for the resumption

of the space programme. Not only the Lake Maracaibo

Dredging Project, but his own presence on the patrol boat,

indicated that the Department still believed Colonel Spender

to be alive, or at least to have survived the landing. His final

re-entry orbit should have brought him down into the landing

zone 5oo miles to the east of Trinidad, but the last radio

contact before the ionization layers around the capsule

severed transmission indicated that he had under-shot his'

trajectory and come down somewhere on the South American

land-mass along a line linking Lake Maracaibo with Brasilia.

Footsteps sounded down the companionway, and Captain

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Ballard, J G - The Terminal Beach

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