J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World

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! There's a man here!"

Together they climbed down into the floor of the hollow below the starboard side of the helicopter. Stretched out over the serpentine roots of a giant oak, across which he had been trying to drag himself, was the crystallized body of a man in military uniform. His chest and shoulders were covered by a huge cuirass of jeweled plates, the arms enclosed in the same gauntlet of annealed prisms that Sanders had seen on the man dragged from the river at Port Matarre.

"Ventress, it's the army captain! Radek!" Sanders gazed into the visor that covered the man's head, now an immense sapphire carved in the shape of a conquistador's helmet. Refracted through the prisms that had efiloresced from the man's face, his features seemed to overlay one another in a dozen different planes, but Dr. Sanders could still recognize the weak-chinned face of Captain Radek, the physician in the army medical corps who had first taken him to the inspection site. He realized that Radek had gone back after all, probably searching for Sanders when he failed to emerge from the forest, and instead had found the two pilots in the helicopter.

Now rainbows glowed in the dead man's eyes.

"Ventress!" Sanders remembered the drowned man in the harbor at Port Matarre. He pressed his hands against the crystal breast-plate, trying to detect any signs of warmth within. "He's still alive inside this, help me to get him out of here!" When Ventress stood up, shaking his head over the glittering body, Sanders shouted: "Ventress, I know this man!"

Gripping his shotgun, Ventress began to climb out of the hollow. "Sanders, you're wasting your time." He shook his head, his eyes roving between the trees around them. "Leave him there, he's made his own peace."

Pushing past him, Sanders straddled the crystalline body and tried to lift it from the hollow. The weight of the body was enormous, and he could barely move one of the arms. Part of the head and shoulder, and the entire length of the right arm, had annealed themselves to the crystal outgrowths from the base of the oak. As Sanders began to kick at the winding roots, trying to free the body, Ventress shouted in warning. Wrenching at the body, Sanders managed to jerk it free. Several pieces of the crystal sheath fell from the face and shoulders.

With a cry Ventress jumped down into the hollow. He held Sanders's arm tightly. "For God's sake-!" he began, but when Sanders pushed him aside he gave up and turned away.

After a pause, his small bitter eyes watching Sanders, he stepped forward and helped him lift the jeweled body from the hollow.

A hundred yards ahead they reached the bank of the stream. The tributary had expanded into a channel some ten yards in width. In the center the fossilized crust was only a few inches thin, and they could see the running water below. Leaving Radek's glistening body on the bank, where it lay with arms outstretched, slowly deliquescing, Dr. Sanders snapped a large bough off one of the trees and began to break the crust over the water. As he drove the branch downwards the crystals fractured easily, and within a few minutes he had opened a circular aperture three or four yards wide. He dragged the branch over to the bank where Radek lay. Bending down, he lifted the body on to the branch and lashed Radek's shoulders to it with his belt. With luck the timber would support Radek's head above the water long enough for him to regain consciousness as the crystals dissolved in the moving current.

Ventress made no comment, but continued to watch Sanders with his bitter eyes. Propping his shotgun against a tree, he helped Sanders carry the body to the aperture above the water. Each holding one end of the bough, they lowered Radek feet-first into the water. The stream moved quickly and they watched the body swirl away down the white tunnel. The washed crystals on Radek's arms and legs glimmered below the water, his half-submerged head resting on the bough. Dr. Sanders limped across to the bank. He sat down on the marbled sand, picking at the sharp needles that pierced his palms and fingers. "There's a chance, that's all, but worth taking," he said. Ventress was standing a few feet away from him. "They'll be watching downriver, perhaps they'll see him."

Ventress walked up to Sanders. His small body was held stiffly, his bearded chin tucked in. The muscles of his bony face moved his mouth soundlessly, as if he were composing his reply with great care. He said: "Sanders, you were too late. One day you'll know what you took away from that man."

Dr. Sanders looked up. "What do you mean?" Irritably, he snapped: "Ventress, I owed that man something."

Ventress ignored this. "Just remember, Doctor-if you ever find me like that, _leave me_. Do you understand?"

They moved off through the forest, neither speaking to the other, Sanders sometimes failing fifty yards behind Ventress. Several times he thought Ventress had abandoned him, but always the white-suited figure, his hair and shoulders covered with a fine fur of frost, appeared into view before him. Although exasperated by Ventress's callousness and lack of sympathy for Radek, Sanders sensed that there might be some other explanation for his behavior.