World Tetralogy 4 - The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard

Author:J. G. Ballard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-20T09:14:51+00:00

8 The summer house

For an hour they moved along the fossilized stream. Ventress remained in the lead, the shotgun held warily in front of him, his movements neat and deliberate, while Sanders limped behind. Now and then they passed a power-cruiser embedded in the crust, or a vitrified crocodile reared upwards and grimaced at them soundlessly, its mouth choked with jewels as it shifted in a fault of colored glass.

Always Ventress was on the lookout for Thorensen. Which of them was searching for the other, Sanders could not discover, nor the subject of their blood feud. Although Thorensen had twice attacked him, Ventress almost seemed to be encouraging Thorensen, deliberately exposing himself as if trying to trap the mineowner.

"Can't we get back to Mont Royal?" Dr. Sanders shouted, his voice echoing among the vaults. "We're going deeper into the forest."

"The town is cut off, my dear Sanders. Don't worry, I'll take you there in due course."

Ventress leapt nimbly over a fissure in the surface of the stream. Below the mass of dissolving crystals, a thin stream of fluid rilled down a buried channel.

Led by this white-suited figure with his preoccupied gaze, they moved on through the forest, sometimes in complete circles, as if Ventress were familiarizing himself with the topography of his jeweled twilight world. Whenever Dr. Sanders sat down to rest on one of the vitrified trunks and brushed away the crystals forming on the soles of his shoes, despite their constant movement, Ventress would wait impatiently, watching Sanders with ruminative eyes as if deciding whether to abandon him to the forest. The air was always icy, the dark shadows closing and unfolding around them.

Then, as they pressed on into the forest, leaving the stream in the hope of joining the river lower down its course, they came across the wreck of the crashed helicopter.

At first, as they passed the aircraft lying like an emblazoned fossil in a small hollow to the left of their path, Dr. Sanders failed to recognize it. Ventress stopped. With a somber expression he pointed to the huge machine, and Sanders remembered the helicopter plunging into the forest half a mile from the inspection site. The four twisted blades, veined and frosted like the wings of a giant dragonfly, had already been overgrown by the trellises of crystals hanging downwards from the near-by trees. The fuselage of the craft, partly buried in the ground, had blossomed into an enormous translucent jewel, in whose solid depths, like emblematic knights mounted in the base of a medieval ring stone, the two pilots sat frozen at their controls. Their silver helmets gave off an endless fountain of light.

"You won't help them now." A rictus of pain twisted Ventress's mouth. Averting his face, he began to move away. "Come on, Sanders, or you'll soon be like them. The forest is changing all the time."

"Wait!" Sanders climbed over the fossilized undergrowth, kicking away pieces of the glass-like foliage. He pulled himself around the dome of the cockpit canopy. "Ventress!

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