Читать книгу Hello America - J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester, Robert MacFarlane - Страница 11

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 whole of Manhattan had been transformed into a set for the ultimate western. Prickly pear flourished in the second-floor windows of banks and finance houses, yucca and mesquite shaded the doorways of airline offices and travel agents.

At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, Wayne paused to catch his breath from the effort of climbing the sand-hills. As he leaned against the dusty eyes of a traffic light there was a sudden armoured flicker from the half-submerged neon display on a building twenty feet behind him. From the shadows emerged a small but plainly venomous lizard—a gila monster inspecting the blundering young man as possible prey.

Wayne kicked the fine sand into its face and set off at a run. On all sides was a secret but rich desert life. Scorpions twitched like nervous executives in the windows of the old advertising agencies. A sidewinder basking in a publisher’s doorway paused to observe Wayne approach and then uncoiled itself in the shadows, waiting patiently among the desks like a merciless editor. Rattlesnakes rested in the burrow-weed on the window-sills of theatrical agents, clicking their rattles at Wayne as if dismissing him from a painful audition.

Wayne pressed on towards Central Park. Already he could see the hundreds of giant cacti that stood in ranks down the length of the park, transforming this once green rectangle into a desert replica of itself, a red ochre wilderness shipped from Arizona and lowered down from the sky. Drenched in sweat, he looked round wistfully for one of the water hydrants that were part of the folklore of summer New York. At intervals, following the routes of the subway system, the sea had seeped in through storm-drains and sewers. Groves of miniature tamarisks and creosote bushes sprang from the underground car-parks of the great hotels, salt grass and paloverde choked the sand-filled concourse of Rockefeller Plaza.

Searching for something to drink, Wayne turned back along Fifth Avenue. He climbed a shallow dune and stepped through an open window into the second floor of a huge department store. Sand lay in drifts among the suites of furniture and barbecue equipment. A tableau family of well-dressed mannequins sat around a dining-room table, gazing politely at the waxwork meal laid in front of them, oblivious of the fine sand, the dust of past time, that covered their faces and shoulders.

Deciding to return to the Apollo, Wayne set off down the Avenue, picking his way among the cooler hollows and saddles. Already he felt slightly disappointed, as if someone had reached New York just before him and stolen his dream. Besides, there was something macabre about this empty metropolis overrun by sand. The ancient desert cities of Egypt and Babylonia were safely distanced from them by the span of millennia. But for all its rusting neon signs, the New York around him seemed preserved in limbo, its vast buildings abandoned only the previous day.

Pausing to rest again, Wayne stepped into the second floor of a large office block, a long shadowy promenade on which hundreds of desks stood in lines, each with a telephone and typewriter, as if occupied at night by a phantom regiment of secretaries. Thinking of the Fleming expedition, he lifted one of the receivers, almost expecting to hear the warning voice of his long-lost father, urging him back to the safety of Europe.

Light flared in the street outside. As Wayne hid behind the window pillar a golden figure appeared on the crest of the nearest dune, a creature with gilded arms and blazing beard. It gazed around like a deranged animal, kicking at the dust.

‘McNair!’ Wayne leapt through the window and ran forward. ‘McNair, it’s all right!’

The engineer was covered with the bright sand. An almost metallic film had caked itself into the mud on his beard, shirt and trousers. He greeted Wayne with a weary wave.

‘Hello, Wayne, what do you think of America? Find any gold, by the way? We were going to be rich, load the Apollo with a cargo of El Dorados, trade the damned stuff in for a few machine tools and a lick of paint. It’s rust, Wayne, the rust of a hundred years…’

Wayne pointed to the western horizon. ‘McNair, we can still find gold, and silver. There’s the whole of America over there.’

‘Good for you.’ A cracked golden smile parted McNair’s lips. ‘We’ll fit the Apollo with wheels and sail her to the Rockies.’

He gave an ironic salute to a man on horseback, braided cap over his sunglasses, who had appeared from behind the giant cactus at the street junction beside them. ‘Did you hear that, Captain Steiner? Are you ready to cast off? We’re setting sail for the gold coast, westwards on the first tide…’

With a wild lunge he kicked up a spray of sand, then nodded at the eventless blue sky and silent streets, ready to attack anything that moved.

Steiner approached at a leisurely pace, gently urging his black mare up the slope. His dark face was expressionless behind the sunglasses. Looking up at him, Wayne reflected that for all his nautical gear Steiner seemed more at home on his horse than on the bridge of the Apollo. The heat and the desert light, the unsettled mare churning the hot sand with a nervous hoof, the great cactus at the Captain’s shoulder, together made Steiner resemble some plainsman of the Old West.

‘This tide won’t ebb, McNair – not for a million years, anyway. Let’s get back to the ship. Help him, Wayne.’

A coiled rope hung from his saddle. Had he been stalking McNair through the dusty streets, waiting to lasso and truss the engineer like a wayward steer overexcited by its own shadow? As they returned to the Apollo, Wayne watched the Captain with renewed respect. Groups of sailors were making their way back, some drunk on looted whiskey, kicking their overstuffed suitcases. One man dragged by its artificial hair a fibre-glass mannequin of a naked woman, a department store dummy of a kind unknown for years in clothes-rationed Europe. Orlowski waited at the Cunard pier, amicably fanning his face with a newly acquired Stetson. Ricci was complaining in a bad-tempered way at Anne Summers, who struggled gamely through the sand, one hand on her unravelling bun, this slipping granny knot that would let loose her concealed American self.

Secure on his horse, Steiner moved behind them all, waiting until they were safely aboard, as if about to abandon them there and set off alone across the inland sea of the empty continent.