The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard

Author:J. G. Ballard
Language: spa
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: 2014

The Subliminal Man

“The signs, Doctor! Have you seen the signs?”

Frowning with annoyance, Dr. Franklin quickened his pace and hurried down the hospital steps toward the line of parked cars. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of a man in ragged sandals and lime-stained jeans waving to him from the far side of the drive, then break into a run when he saw Franklin try to evade him.

“Dr. Franklin! The signs!”

Head down, Franklin swerved around an elderly couple approaching the outpatients department. His car was over a hundred yards away. Too tired to start running himself, he waited for the young man to catch him up.

“All right, Hathaway, what is it this time?” he snapped irritably. “I’m getting sick of you hanging around here all day.”

Hathaway lurched to a halt in front of him, uncut black hair like an awning over his eyes. He brushed it back with a clawlike hand and turned on a wild smile, obviously glad to see Franklin and oblivious of the latter’s hostility.

“I’ve been trying to reach you at night, Doctor, but your wife always puts the phone down on me,” he explained without a hint of rancor, as if well-used to this kind of snub. “And I didn’t want to look for you inside the Clinic.” They were standing by a privet hedge that shielded them from the lower windows of the main administrative block, but Franklin’s regular rendezvous with Hathaway and his strange messianic cries had already been the subject of amused comment.

Franklin began to say: “I appreciate that—” but Hathaway brushed this aside. “Forget it, Doctor, there are more important things happening now. They’ve started to build the first big signs! Over a hundred feet high, on the traffic islands just outside town. They’ll soon have all the approach roads covered. When they do we might as well stop thinking.”

“Your trouble is that you’re thinking too much,” Franklin told him. “You’ve been rambling about these signs for weeks now. Tell me, have you actually seen one signaling?”

Hathaway tore a handful of leaves from the hedge, exasperated by this irrelevancy. “Of course I haven’t, that’s the whole point, Doctor.” He dropped his voice as a group of nurses walked past, watching him uneasily out of the corners of their eyes. “The construction gangs were out again last night, laying huge power cables. You’ll see them on the way home. Everything’s nearly ready now.”

“They’re traffic signs,” Franklin explained patiently. “The flyover has just been completed. Hathaway, for God’s sake relax. Try to think of Dora and the child.”

“I am thinking of them!” Hathaway’s voice rose to a controlled scream. “Those cables were forty-thousand-volt lines, Doctor, with terrific switch-gear. The trucks were loaded with enormous metal scaffolds. Tomorrow they’ll start lifting them up all over the city, they’ll block off half the sky! What do you think Dora will be like after six months of that? We’ve got to stop them, Doctor, they’re trying to transistorize our brains!”

Embarrassed by Hathaway’s high-pitched shouting, Franklin had momentarily lost his sense of direction and helplessly searched the sea of cars for his own.

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