The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #99, October 1960) opens with Powers reflecting on the suicide of his colleague Whitby, and the strange grooves the dead man cut on the floor of an empty swimming pool:
An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons. Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket. After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half-filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution. p. 91
This is just the first piece of strangeness that we are introduced to in this story, and we soon learn that Powers is one of a number of people who are beginning to sleep for increasing periods of time (a number of “terminals” are already in permanent comas). We also are introduced to an ex-patient of Powers’ called Kaldren who, after a recent operation, never sleeps at all, and who intermittently stalks Powers to pass on a series of decreasing numbers (the first one we see is 96,688,365,498,721, scribbled in the dust on the windscreen of his car). Kaldren also has a girlfriend called Coma (quite apt given the situation with Powers and the other narcoma sufferers).
There is more of this kind of thing when Powers spots a creature trapped at the bottom of the empty swimming pool, a frog that has grown a lead carapace, one of a number of organisms that have started growing shells for radiological protection. Later on, when Powers shows Coma round Whitby’s laboratory, we see even odder creatures (an intelligent chimp, a mutated anemone, etc.), specimens that have been irradiated to switch on their “silent pair” genes, in the belief that that this will trigger a massive move up the evolutionary slope.
This is all intriguing stuff, but many of these ideas are never fully realised, and the remainder of the story focuses on Powers’ decreasing periods of wakefulness, as well as his creation of a mandala (presumably similar to Whitby’s design) on a target at an Air Force weapons range. During this period Powers also visits Kaldren’s house, and we learn about the latter’s bizarre preoccupations which, among other things, include the series of decreasing numbers mentioned previously. We discover that they are being received from deep space, and may be a countdown to the end of the Universe.
The final section (spoiler) sees Powers irradiate the laboratory specimens and himself with the X-ray machine. When he goes outside afterwards he can sense the age of the landscape and then, when he reaches the mandala, he tunes into the “time-song” of the stars above him:
Like an endless river, so broad that its banks were below the horizons, it flowed steadily towards him, a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them. Moving slowly, the forward direction of its majestic current almost imperceptible, Powers knew that its source was the source of the cosmos itself. As it passed him, he felt its massive magnetic pull, let himself be drawn into it, borne gently on its powerful back. Quietly it carried him away, and he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. Around him the outlines of the hills and the lake had faded, but the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes, illuminating the broad surface of the stream. Watching it constantly, he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel sweeping him onward, beyond hope now but at rest, down the broadening reaches of the river of eternity. p. 121
This is a story that has some striking ideas and impressive passages, but they never really click into place—other than in Ballard’s head,1 I guess, or perhaps as some sort of entropic tone-poem. So an ambitious piece then, but not an entirely satisfying one.
I’d also add in passing that I think this work presages the likes of The Terminal Beach and his other “concentrated” stories, in that it presents a number of core images or obsessions unconnected (or largely unconnected) by conventional narrative links.
*** (Good). 12,700 words. Story link.
1. Although I generally admire Ballard’s writing (and would put The Kindness of Women on my top five novels list), I occasionally get the feeling I’m reading about the obsessions of a psychiatric patient.