Hello America. J. G. Ballard
Wayne struck the rail with both fists. He laughed aloud as the sailors ran past him. He realised now what had been missing from the mental picture of New York harbour he had carried with him across the Atlantic.
‘Wayne, for heaven’s sake…’ Anne Summers tried to calm him. ‘You’re going to have to swim, you know.’
‘Liberty! Professor Summers, don’t you remember?’ Wayne pointed to the Jersey shore, where a rocky island stood in the main channel. Even now the remains of a classical pedestal could be seen. The Statue of Liberty!’
They stared into the water beside the Apollo. The lamp held aloft for generations of immigrants from the Old World had vanished, but the crown still remained around the figure’s head. One of its radiating spikes had left a ten-yard-long gash in the Apollo’s hull.
‘You’re right, Wayne. My God, though, we’re going down!’ Anne Summers looked round wildly, a hand to her blonde bun. ‘The equipment, Paul! What’s the matter with Steiner?’
The first rusty water foamed from the fore-mast pump-heads. Orlowski was screaming at the Captain, his plump index finger raised accusingly. But Steiner strolled in a leisurely way around the helm, a satisfied light in his eyes. He ignored the commissar and the pandemonium on the deck, his mouth relaxed as he spoke to the engine-room on the brass voice tube.
Below the stern the two-bladed propeller thwacked the water. A heavy black smoke billowed from the funnel. The Apollo made way, dipping cumbersomely through the waves. The cold pump-water raced across the deck to the scuppers, sluicing around Wayne’s ankles. Ricci and Anne Summers backed off, but Wayne stared down at the immense statue moving away from them. At the climax of the evacuation of America, under the personal control of President Brown, the Statue of Liberty had been lowered from her plinth and prepared for shipment to the new American colonies in Europe. In a sudden storm, however, the wooden lighter built to transport the statue had broken loose from its tugs, drifted free across the bay and lost its bows on the razor-sharp keel of a scuttled freighter. In the chaos that filled the final days of the evacuation the exact location of the statue had never been established, and she had been left to break up in the cold waters of the next century.
So already the expedition had made its first discovery!
From that moment, as the Apollo limped, bow decks awash, towards New York harbour, Wayne resolved to keep a diary of the extraordinary visions he would see in the following months, led by this image of his dead mother asleep below the waves. In all good time he would present his record to Dr Fleming, the once and future father whom he would find somewhere in America, waiting for him in the golden paradises of the west.
Landfall! At last the Apollo had negotiated the boom of wrecked ships in the entrance to the Hudson River and beached itself on a silt bank alongside the old Cunard pier. Lulled by the steady beat of the pumps, and the confidence that even if the Apollo foundered they could swim ashore, the crew and expedition members had fallen silent. When the Apollo buried its wounded bows in the wet silt everyone gathered at the rail, looking at the vivid quays in front of them, at the soundless city with its great towers and abandoned streets, a million empty windows lit by the afternoon sun.
Already they could see the dunes that filled the floors of these deserted canyons. The rolling sand lay ten feet deep, undisturbed by any footstep for almost a century, smoothed by the onshore winds and covered with a fine glaze of golden dust. For Wayne it seemed a magical carpet, a metallised dream from the fairy tales of his childhood. He held his breath as the ship settled into the mud under the falling tide, and prayed that the silence and calm aboard the Apollo would not give way to a sudden, greedy stampede.
There was more than enough for them all, gold beyond the dreams of Columbus, Cortez and the conquistadores. Wayne had a vision of the crew and passengers dressed in their coronation armour, he himself in gilded doublet and hose, Anne Summers in gleaming breastplates and skirt of gold leaf, Paul Ricci in a sinister black and gold armour, Steiner in a golden cape at the helm of a new gold-plated Apollo ready for its return voyage in triumph to Plymouth and the Old World…
The ship’s siren hooted, three long blasts that shattered Wayne’s ears. The sounds echoed among the silent skyscrapers, reverberated to and fro across Central Park, and were lost miles away in uptown Manhattan. Wayne clung to the faint echoes. In some way the harsh noise marked the real moment of their arrival, releasing them all from the voyage across the Atlantic, closing the past behind them as they prepared to step ashore. Like the immigrants of old, each had brought a small, precious baggage, a clutch of hopes and ambitions to be bartered against the possibilities of this new land.
McNair was thinking of gold. He stood on the forward docking bridge by the coal bunker hatchway, and wiped the black anthracite dust from his beard. He was looking up at the Cunard wharf, and at the very different dust that lay over the sunlit dunes. The sand was now an almost liquid bronze in the late afternoon. A desert sea had flowed through Manhattan and congealed around these huge towers. The ravages of a century’s hostile climate had split the Appalachians and sprung this ransom from their hidden lodes.
Already McNair was thinking hard, deciding how best they could gather in this golden crop. Rather than disturb the surface with spade and shovel or with a mechanised dragline, they needed a modified combine harvester, which they could then drive across the dunes, its specially slatted blades scooping up just the precious topsoil.
McNair stared back at the huge buildings, at the giant piers of the concrete expressways and overpasses. True, he had been surprised by the brute size of the suspension bridge across the narrows, and by the vast dimensions of the old United States and the Nimitz. But already McNair’s pugnacity had returned, and he had every intention of meeting this great continent on his own terms. The years of training at the marine engineering school in the Glasgow shipyards would not be wasted. The skills needed to resurrect this dormant giant, to wake its railroads, dams and bridges, its mines and industries, were very much those that lay in his own hands. The computer men and communications wizards could come later, when the basic clockwork was ticking soundly.
During the past century the small American colony in Scotland had almost been assimilated into the local community, but McNair had always known that he would one day return to the United States. He needed its size and scale to find his real talents, which he was certain were far beyond those of a mere ship’s engineer. He came from a family whose roots lay in the great technologies of America’s past – one of his ancestors had worked on the NASA team that put Neil Armstrong on the Moon.
When the vacancy on the Apollo was posted McNair had been serving as second engineer aboard a bulk coal carrier on the Murmansk-Newcastle run. No one else was interested, but McNair volunteered without thinking, even though he would not be part of the inland expedition. Now, having propelled the Apollo across the Atlantic, he was ready to step ashore and start things moving.
The gold was a lucky bonus, a signal to him to back his own obsessions to the end. The fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil, might have run out here, but America always had something unexpected up its sleeve. McNair cared nothing for the gold’s ornamental or monetary value, except in the eyes of others. With the gold they could buy coal, bauxite, timber and iron ore from the rag-tag nations in southern Africa and South America.
McNair gazed confidently at the empty city, reminding himself that the principal mission of the Apollo expedition was to investigate the small but significant increase in atmospheric radioactivity which had been detected over the American continent in recent years. Perhaps the core of one of the old nuclear power stations had begun to leak dangerously, or a decaying war-head in some forgotten weapons silo had reached critical mass. Whatever the reason, the possibilities excited him. He thought of the two physicists, Ricci and Anne Summers, heads lost among their Geiger counters. But if only they could harness that dormant nuclear power they