Hello America. J. G. Ballard
dreaming among her reaction columns and radiation counters. She had snapped out of the reverie soon enough, swearing at Wayne in a surprisingly guttural American which recalled McNair’s quiet comment that she had changed her name from Sommer half an hour before the Apollo sailed from Plymouth.
But now the serene, far-away look had returned. She leaned against Ricci’s arm, and even had time for a reassuring smile at Wayne.
‘Professor Summers, is gold dust dangerous to inhale?’ Wayne asked. ‘It could be radioactive.’
‘Gold, Wayne?’ She laughed knowingly at the glittering shore. ‘Don’t worry, I think the transmutation of metals takes rather more than strong sunlight…’
Yet something was amiss. For no clear reason Wayne backed away from the rail. Shielding his eyes from the glare, he crossed the deck and climbed the metal ladder to the roof of the stables. Below him the twenty mules and baggage horses stirred restlessly in their stalls, whinnying to each other through the shafts of overbright sunlight. Wayne steadied himself against the ventilator, trying to identify this curious presentiment of danger. After the long journey across the Atlantic, was he losing his nerve at the prospect of actually setting foot on America? He searched the rigging and the surrounding sea, peering through the smoke at the Brooklyn and Jersey shorelines.
Conspicuously, the only composed person aboard the Apollo was Captain Steiner. As everyone crowded the rail, cheering on the approaching land, Steiner stood beside the helmsman, binoculars fixed on a small patch of open water a hundred yards ahead of them. Checking their speed, he glanced at Wayne in an almost conspiratorial way. The Apollo was now racing like a twelve-metre sloop through the choppy water, the ancient steam engines ready to burst the decks. The horses staggered in their stalls, thrown about by the surging motion of the ship. Steiner had crammed every square foot of sail on to the yards, as if this cautious ocean-navigator had decided to end his voyage with a yachtsman’s flourish.
Already they were passing the first of the sunken refugee ships in the harbour. Dozens of the rusty hulks sat in the bay around the lower tip of Manhattan, masts and superstructures above the water, relics of the panic a century earlier when America had finally abandoned itself. In the mosaics of flaking paint that clung to the riddled funnels Wayne could make out the livery of long-forgotten lines-Cunard, Holland-America, P & O. Even the SS United States was there, lying on its side below the Battery, called out of its retirement at Coney Island to ferry tens of thousands of fleeing Americans as the cities emptied and the deserts crept eastwards across the continent. The mouth of the East River was blocked by a boom of sunken freighters, the last of a mournful fleet of vessels chartered from the world’s ports and then abandoned here when there was no fuel left to bunker them for the Atlantic voyage. New York harbour then had been a place of fear, exhaustion and despair. Wayne stared through the curtains of rainbowing spray that lifted off the starboard bow. The Apollo changed course to avoid the tilting flight-deck of the USS Nimitz. The huge nuclear-powered aircraft carrier had been scuttled here by its mutinous crew when they refused to fire on the thousands of small boats and makeshift rafts that jammed its harbour exit. Wayne remembered the photographs and grainy film strips of those last frantic days of the evacuation of America, when the latecomers, millions of them by then from the Middle West and the states around the Great Lakes, had arrived in New York. They moved through the streets of Manhattan, the sun and the desert only a few days behind them, to find that the last evacuation ships had left.
‘Captain Steiner! We’re there, Captain – you don’t need to break our necks…’ As a bow wave splashed across the deck Orlowski wiped his plump face on his sleeve. He called out again to the Captain, his voice lost in the drumming of the engines and the boom of the funnel, the cracking sails drenched with soot and spray.
But Steiner ignored the commissar. He swayed lightly on his sturdy legs, eyes fixed in an almost mesmerised way on the wreck-strewn water in front of them, a demented sea-captain in an opera. As the Apollo leapt through the spray, porpoising over the black, spit-flecked waves, Wayne clung to the ventilation shaft above the nervous horses. The afternoon sunlight glared down at them from the thousands of silent windows in the downtown office blocks, and off the almost liquid back of the gold dust gleaming in the streets. Suddenly it occurred to Wayne that perhaps the entire Fort Knox reserves lay on the quayside, abandoned there by the last army units before they could be shipped to Europe.
‘Captain Steiner – three fathoms!’
As the Apollo ran down the last of the water there was a shout from the two seamen trying to swing a plumb-line in the bows.
‘Captain – hard to port! There’s a reef!’
‘Astern, Captain! She’ll break her keel!’
‘Captain?’
Sailors were running in panic across the decks. A petty officer collided with Dr Ricci as he flinched from the rail. Professor Summers waved warningly to Steiner, while two midshipmen scrambled into the main-mast shrouds, trying to find safety in the sky.
The Apollo had lost momentum, its speed cut by half. The sails slackened, and in the silence Wayne heard only the smoke pounding from the hot funnel behind him. Then there was a low, jarring noise, as if an iron blade was scraping the hull. The ship gave a small shudder, leaning on its starboard side like an injured whale. Almost motionless in the water, it swung slowly in the wind as the propeller screwed a torrent of boiling foam around the stern.
Everyone rushed back to the rail. The horses staggered to their feet in the stables, and their nasal bleating rose above the noise of the engines. Wayne jumped down on to the deck and pushed between Ricci and Anne Summers. The sailors were shouting to each other and pointing to the water, but Wayne looked back at the Captain. As the helmsman picked himself off the deck, nursing his bruised knees, Steiner had matter-of-factly taken the wheel. The Apollo swung clockwise in the water, its sails limp in the calming air. Steiner stared at the great towers of Manhattan now less than half a mile away. It seemed to Wayne that the Captain had never looked happier. Had he made the long uncertain voyage across the Atlantic secretly determined to sink his ship these few hundred yards from their goal, so that they would all perish and he could plunder alone the treasures of this waiting land?
‘Wayne, lying down there, can you see?’ Wayne felt Anne Summers seize his arm. ‘There’s a sleeping mermaid!’
Wayne peered into the water. The Apollo’s propeller had stopped, and the mass of churning bubbles dissolved in the water that swilled against the hull. Lying on her back beside the ship, like its drowned bride, was the statue of an immense reclining woman. Almost as long as the Apollo, she rested on a bed of concrete blocks, the ruins of an underwater plinth. Her classical features were only a few feet below the surface. Washed by the waves, her grey face reminded Wayne of his dead mother’s when he gazed into her open coffin in the asylum mortuary.
‘Wayne, who is she?’ Anne Summers stared at the impassive face. A colony of lobsters had taken up residence in the woman’s nostrils. As they emerged from their domain, peering up at the dripping bulk of the Apollo, Anne held her handsome nose. ‘Wayne, she must be some kind of goddess…’
Paul Ricci squeezed between them. ‘A local marine deity,’ he suavely informed them. ‘The Americans of the eastern seaboard worshipped a pantheon of underwater creatures – you’ll remember Moby Dick, Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, even the great white shark affectionately christened “Jaws”.’
Anne Summers stared doubtfully at the statue. She moved her hand from Ricci’s. ‘Rather a fierce form of worship, Paul, not to mention a hazard to shipping.’ She added, as an afterthought: ‘I think we’re sinking.’
Sure enough, a clamour of shouts had begun.
‘Captain, we’re holed! We’re making water!’ The petty officer rounded up his sailors. ‘Get the forward pumps going,