J. G. Ballard The Terminal Beach

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experience. All the events
I describe were witnessed by myself during the recent, almost tragic visit to
the Florida Everglades arranged by the
United States government for the scientific attaches in
Washington. The only facts I was not able to verify are the details of Charles
Foster Marquand's life which I obtained from Captain Shelley, the late chief
of police at Maynard, and although he was a biased and untrustworthy witness I
feel that in this single case he was almost certainly accurate.
How much longer remains b]'ore all of us, wherever we are, become expert
authorities upon the exact nature of the
Hubble Effect is still open to conjecture. As I write, here within the safety
and peace of the garden of the British
Embassy at Puerto Rico, I see a report in today's New rork
Times that the whole of the Florida peninsula, with the exception of a single
highway to Tampa, has been closed and that to date some three million of the
state's inhabitants have been resettled in other parts of the United States.
But apart from the estimated losses in real estate values and hotel revenues
('Oh, Miami,' I cannot help saying to myself, 75
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'you city of a thousand cathedrals to the rainbow sun') the news of this
extraordinary human migration seems to have prompted little comment. Such is
mankind's innate optimism, our conviction that we can survive any deluge or
cataclysm, that we unconsciously dismiss the momentous events in Florida with
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a shrug, confident that some means will be found to avert the crisis when it
comes.
And yet it now seems obvious that the real crisis is long past. Tucked away on
a back page of the same New 'ork
Times is a short report of the sighting of another 'double galaxy' by
observers at the Hubble Institute on Mount
Palomar. The news is summarized in less than a dozen lines and without
comment, although the implication is inescapable that yet another focal area
has been set up somewhere on the earth's surface, perhaps in the temple-filled
jungles of
Cambodia or the haunted amber forests of the Chilean highland. But it is only
a year since the Mount Palomar astronomers identified the first double galaxy
in the constellation
Andromeda, the great oblate diadem that is probably the most beautiful object
in the universe, the island galaxy of M 3 I.
Although these sightings by now seem commonplace, and at least half a dozen
'double constellations' can be picked from the night sky on any evening of the
week, four months ago when the party of scientific attaches landed at Miami
Airport on a conducted tour of the stricken area there was still widespread
ignorance of what the Hubble Effect (as the phenomenon had been christened in
the Western Hemisphere and the English-speaking world) actually involved.
Apart from a handful of forestry workers and biologists from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, few qualified observers had witnessed the
phenomenon and there were implausible stories in the newspapers of the forest
'crystallizing'
and everything 'turning into coloured glass'.
One unfortunate consequence of the Hubble Effect is that it is virtually
impossible to photograph anything transformed by it. As any reader of
scientific journals knows, glassware is extremely difficult to reproduce, and
even blocks of the highest screen on the best quality art papers - let alone
the
76
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.txt coarse blocks used on newsprint - have failed to reproduce the brilliant
multi-faceted lattices of the Hubble Effect, with their myriads of interior
prisms, as anything More than a vague blur like half-melted snow.
Perhaps in retaliation, the newspapers had begun to suggest that the secrecy
which surrounded the affected area in the Everglades - then no More than three
or four acres of forest to the north-east of Maynard - was being deliberately
imposed by the administration, and a clamour was raised about the rights of
inspection and the unseen horrors con-eealed from the public. It so happened
that the focal area discovered by Professor Auguste LePage in Madagascar in
the Matarre Valley, far into the hinterland of the island was about 5o miles [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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