Hello America. J. G. Ballard
the fall-out vectors in the North American airstream emanated from somewhere south of the Great Lakes – Cincinnati and Cleveland. Curiously, although she had not confided this to Ricci, the isotopes involved were barium and lanthanum, those released by old-fashioned atomic weapons, the war-heads of tactical artillery shells, for example. Perhaps the corrosion of a century had cut its way into one of the old nuclear arsenals.
Meanwhile she would rigorously carry out the thrice-daily seismographic and radiation measurements, keep an eye on Ricci (far too slapdash, and clearly prepared to steal any credit), and protect her immaculate white skin from this barbarous sun. Why had she volunteered in the first place? – leaving the small but comfortable flatlet in Spandau; her attractive if earnest lover, a middle-aged pharmacologist at the State Veterinary Collective; the extra meat ration once a month. But despite all these, she needed to breathe, to extend herself, even to dream. Avoiding Steiner’s eyes, she looked up at the huge, raw buildings, with their brute strength. She knew that she had come to the last place on earth, where dreams could still take wing.
As for Captain Steiner, he stood alone on his bridge, pressing his tired back against the spokes of the helm. Out of curiosity he had been watching the behaviour of his crew and passengers, trying to guess how they would react in the next few minutes. It had been a long voyage, a confidence trick of a special kind, with many risky decisions to be made. But he had beached the leaking Apollo as planned on the silt bank beside the Cunard pier, in the very space once occupied by the great Queens. Here she would sit long enough for him to carry out the rest of his private quest.
Steiner steadied the slight shaking in his hands, remembering the final dash across the harbour. Fortunately the submerged statue had not been moved by the currents. She lay line astern of the Nimitz, exactly as described by the senile survey ship captain in Genoa whom Steiner had spent so many shore-leaves patiently plying with grappa. He thought of his own long years of service in the Israeli Navy, patrolling the mill-pond Mediterranean for OPEC corsairs. Despite the steep Atlantic seas ahead, he had really been preparing himself, not for the open ocean, but for the open land. For the silent desert of the American continent, so unlike the high-rise-infested landscape of Israel, Jordan and Sinai.
He began to empty his mind of everything but the terrain beyond the gates of the city, the open doors at the ends of the long avenues that led out into the deserted continent, a land as great as any ocean, on which he himself would soon navigate, this descendant of Phoenix and Pasadena physicians who had always secretly regretted not being sired by plainsmen and astronauts. Now he had returned to his own country, where he would soon ride again, one foot on the stirrup of the land, the other with luck on space itself.
Everyone was going ashore, leaving him behind! Surprised by the rush to disembark, Wayne found his hands clamped to the rail, as if Orlowski had crept up behind him with a pair of handcuffs. A sudden excitement had overtaken the crew and expedition members alike, a long-pent need to throw themselves on to American soil. One moment they were all staring at the grey skyscrapers and deserted streets, and the next there was a mad stampede for the gangway. Sailors abandoned the pumps, dashed to the fo’c’sle and emerged with duffel bags and empty suitcases, eager to ransack every store in town.
Only Orlowski turned his back to the shore. He stamped on the deck, bellowing through his pocket megaphone at the Captain. ‘Steiner! Call your men back! Can’t you control your crew? Captain!’
But Steiner leaned amiably against the helm, like a tolerant gondolier watching a party of easily excited tourists leave his craft.
McNair was the first ashore. He climbed the fore-mast shrouds, let out some barbarous Scots-American war-cry, and leapt on to the silt bank below. He sank to his thighs in the wet mud, struggled free and strode up the oozing slope. Everyone on the gangway watched him, waiting to see if anything happened. He reached the deck of the rusting Cunard pier, then ran towards the first of the great golden dunes that spilled over the riverside streets. Wayne saw his mud-stained arms send up a spray of gilded dust as he bent down and seized the bright sand. His golden figure disappeared over the crest of the dune, muffled voice echoing among the office blocks.
Within minutes the crew had laid a temporary catwalk of life-rafts and decking planks across the silt bank, and set off towards the city, waving their suitcases at each other. Behind them followed the expedition members, while Steiner watched from the bridge of the abandoned Apollo. Orlowski took the lead, solar topee protecting his bald head. Now that they had left the ship his good humour had returned, but he glanced at the Geiger counter in Paul Ricci’s hand, as if he half-expected the silent streets to be ticking with radioactivity.
‘Extraordinary,’ he confided, ‘I feel like Columbus. By rights the natives should appear now, bearing traditional gifts of hamburgers and comic books. Are we quite safe?’
Anne Summers did her best to reassure the commissar. ‘Dear Orlowski, do relax. There are no natives, and no trace of radioactivity within a hundred miles. Your chief danger is colliding into a parked car.’
Ricci knelt in the fine sand. He scooped up a handful of grains, his quick eyes following the footprints which McNair had left across the dune.
‘It’s remarkable, Anne. Even from here it looks like gold. An analysis might be worth making—I’d like to reserve the spectrometer for an hour tonight.’
Wayne followed at their heels, eager to get away. He looked back at Steiner, who waved him ahead, pointing towards the city. The Captain’s complex motives unsettled him. As Anne Summers paused to shake the sand from her shoes, he darted between her and Ricci.
‘Wayne!’ Orlowski caught his arm. ‘Don’t touch anything! You’re a stowaway, remember. You’ve no official status in this hemisphere.’
Laughing, Wayne pulled away from him. For the first time he felt on equal terms. ‘Gregor, come on! There’s the whole of America here.’
He sprinted ahead to the great dunes which spilled from the riverside streets across the dock basin. The bright sand came towards him, its warm flank glittering in the sunlight, a golden breast on to which he threw himself happily.
For the next heady but confusing hours they carried out their first foray into the empty city. As Wayne trudged down the airless, dune-filled canyon that had once been Seventh Avenue, he soon discovered that if any streets in America were paved with gold it was not here in Manhattan. The golden carpet that seemed to cover the city with a treasure beyond the dreams of the conquistadores had been a complete illusion. As he listened to the distant shouts of the sailors, and the breaking plate glass of bars and stores, he realised that he was surrounded by a wilderness of sand, a harsh bronze dust heated by a relentless sun.
He was standing in the ash pit of a huge solar furnace. Wayne felt sorry for McNair, but the illusion had served its purpose, left a striking memory in all their minds of their first sighting of America. At the same time, the golden glare around him was a sharp reminder of all his own misapprehensions. Wayne had expected to find the streets lined with brightly gleaming cars, those Fords, Buicks and Chryslers whose extravagant styling he had studied in the old magazines, symbols of the speed and style of the United States and archetypal villains of the energy crisis.
But the dunes were at least ten feet deep, reaching up to the second floors of the office buildings. Half the Appalachians had been destroyed by the sun to yield this deluge of rock and dust. Street signs and traffic lights protruded from the sand, a rusty metallic flora, old telephone lines trailed waist-high, marking out a labyrinth of pedestrian catwalks. Here and there, in the hollows between the dunes, were the glass doors of bars and jewellery stores, dark grottoes like subterranean caves.
Wayne plodded along Broadway, past the silent hotels and theatre façades. In the centre of Times Square a giant saguaro cactus raised its thirty-foot arms into the overheatedair, an imposing sentinel guarding the entrance to a desert nature reserve. Clumps of sage-brush hung from the rusting neon signs, as if the