Hello America. J. G. Ballard

       1 The Golden Coast

      ‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’

      Later, when they beached the SS Apollo against the derelict Cunard pier at the lower tip of Manhattan, Wayne was to remember with some amusement how excited McNair had been as he burst into the sail locker. The chief engineer gesticulated wildly, his beard glowing like an overlit lantern.

      ‘Wayne, it’s everything we’ve dreamed of! Look at it just once, even if it blinds you!’

      He almost tipped Wayne from his hammock. Steadying himself against the metal ceiling, Wayne gazed at McNair’s inflamed beard. An eerie copper light filled the sail locker, surrounding him with bales of golden carpets, as if they had steamed into the eye of a radioactive hurricane.

      ‘McNair, wait! See Dr Ricci! You may be – !’

      But McNair had gone, ready to rouse the ship. Wayne listened to him shouting at the two startled stokers in the coal bunker. While he slept through the afternoon – he had come off the long night watch at eight that morning – the Apollo had anchored half a mile from the Brooklyn shore, presumably to give Professor Summers and the scientific members of the expedition time to test the atmosphere. Now they were ready to make way again and enter New York harbour, their first landfall after the voyage from Plymouth.

      Winches wheezed and grunted, the anchor chains dragged at the rusty bow plates. Wayne climbed from his hammock and dressed quickly, glancing into the cracked mirror that swung from the door. A golden face stared back at him, startled eyes under the blond thatch like a gawky angel’s. As he reached the deck a cloud of soot-flakes fell from the funnel and covered the glowing fore-sail with hundreds of fireflies. Crew and passengers crowded the rail, waiting impatiently while the antique engines of the Apollo, clearly exhausted by the seven-week voyage across the Atlantic, laboured against the slack coastal water.

      Annoyed with himself – already he was trembling with excitement like a child – Wayne looked out at the magnetic coast. An immense golden sheen lay over the Brooklyn shoreline, reflected from the silent quays and warehouses. The afternoon sun hung above the deserted Manhattan streets, adding its light to the glittering field below. For a moment Wayne almost believed that these long-silent avenues and expressways had carpeted themselves with the rarest treasures in preparation for just his visit.

      Behind the Apollo was the massive span of the Verrazano Narrows suspension bridge, long familiar to Wayne from the ancient slides in the Geographical Society library in Dublin. He had gazed for hours at the photographs, as he had at a thousand other images of America, but he was unprepared for the spectacular size and mysterious form of the bridge. In some way it had managed to exaggerate itself during the long century it had been forgotten by everyone else. Many of the vertical cables had snapped, and the huge, copper-hued structure, covered with rust and verdigris, resembled a recumbent harp that had played its last song to the indifferent sea.

      Wayne stared at the approaching city, again unable to reconcile the scene in front of him with the image of the Manhattan skyline he had day-dreamed over in the darkness of the library projection room. Dozens of towers rose through the afternoon light. Even at a distance of three miles the glass curtain-walling of these huge buildings glowed like bronze mirrors, as if the streets below them were stacked with bullion. Wayne could see the old Empire State Building, venerable patriarch of the city, the twin columns of the World Trade Center, and the 200-storey OPEC Tower which dominated Wall Street, its neon sign pointing towards Mecca. Together they formed the familiar skyline whose peaks and canyons Wayne knew by heart, and which now seemed transformed by this dream of gold.

      He listened to McNair shouting at the stokers through the engine-room portholes below him.

      ‘Good God, you’ll need more than your shovels! It must be six inches deep, blown all the way from the Appalachians!’

      Wayne laughed aloud at the golden shore, caught up by McNair’s excitement. Although only twenty-five, a mere four years older than Wayne, McNair liked to affect a distracted, world-weary manner, particularly when showing anyone round his detested engine-room, with its coal-fired boilers, bizarre pistons and connecting rods straight out of the nineteenth century. Still, McNair knew his stuff, and could make anything work. Give him a lever and he would move the world, if not the SS Apollo. Edison and Henry Ford would have been proud of him.

      And for all his strange humour, McNair had been the first to befriend Wayne after the young stowaway was found by Dr Ricci, shivering under the canvas awning of the captain’s gig two days out from Plymouth. It was McNair who had interceded with Captain Steiner, and moved Wayne’s hammock from the damp scullery behind the galley to the dark warmth of the sail-locker. Perhaps McNair saw in Wayne’s determination to reach the United States something of his own intense need to get away from a tired and candle-lit Europe with its interminable rationing and subsistence living, its total lack of any flair and opportunity.

      Nor was McNair alone in this – the Apollo carried an invisible cargo of dreams and private motives. As the funnel showered smuts on to their heads, the passengers on either side of Wayne were pointing silently to the golden coasts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Jersey shore, awed by this glittering welcome from a long-forsaken continent.

      Then Wayne heard little Orlowski, the expedition leader, calling impatiently to Captain Steiner for more steam. Orlowski’s voice had temporarily lost the American accent that had snaked in over his Kiev vowels during the voyage. Through his miniature pocket megaphone he bellowed:

      ‘Full ahead, Captain! We’re all waiting for you! Don’t change your mind now…’

      But Steiner, as always, was taking his own time. He stood in the centre of his bridge beside the helmsman, legs well apart, calmly contemplating the golden shore like an experienced traveller outstaring a mirage. A stocky, compact man with curiously sensitive hands, he was now in his mid-forties, and had served in the Israeli Navy for nearly twenty years. Keen chess-player who never gave away a move, amateur mathematician and expert navigator, he had intrigued Wayne from their first meeting, as he peered up from the overturned gig into the Captain’s wry gaze.

      Wayne was certain that Steiner, like everyone else on board the Apollo, harboured secret ambitions of his own. After his discovery in the rowing-boat, the Captain had ordered Wayne down to his cabin. As Steiner locked away Dr Ricci’s confiscated pistol in the safe, Wayne had glimpsed a neatly tied bundle of ancient