Elements in a quantal world:
The terminal beach.
The terminal bunker.
The blocks.
The landscape is coded.
Entry points into the futurélevels in a spinal landscape =zones of significant time.
This precarious existence continued for the following weeks. As he walked out to the blocks one evening, he again saw his wife and son, standing among the dunes below a solitary tower, their faces watching him calmly. He realized that they had followed him across the island from their former haunt among the dried-up lakes. Once again he saw the beckoning light, and he decided to continue his exploration of the island.
Half a mile further along the atoll he found a group of four submarine pens, built over an inlet, now drained, which wound through the dunes from the sea. The pens still contained several feet of water, filled with strange luminescent fish and plants. A warning light winked at intervals from a metal tower. The remains of the substantial camp, only recently vacated, stood on the concrete pier outside. Greedily Traven heaped his sledge with the provisions stacked inside one of the metal shacks. With this change of diet the beriberi receded, and during the next days he returned to the camp. It appeared to be the site of a biological expedition. In a field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried jukebox, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions for the charts. Thus embroidered, they took on many layers of cryptic associations.)
August 5. Found the man Traven. A sad derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this, or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him ....
He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project—unstated—but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island ... In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing.
August 6. He has the eyes of the possessed. I would guess that he is neither the first, not the last, to visit the island.
—Dr. C. Osborne: Eniwetok Diary
With the exhaustion of his supplies, Traven remained within the perimeter of the blocks almost continuously, conserving what strength remained to him to walk slowly down their empty corridors. The infection in his right foot made it difficult for him to replenish his supplies from the stores left by the biologists, and as his strength ebbed he found progressively less incentive to make his way out of the blocks. The system of megaliths now provided a complete substitute for those functions of his mind which gave to it its sense of the sustained rational order of time and space, his awareness kindled from levels above those of his present nervous system (if the autonomic system is dominated by the past, the cerebrospinal reaches toward the future). Without the blocks his sense of reality shrank to little more than the few square inches of sand beneath his feet.
On one of his last ventures into the maze, he spent all night and much of the following morning in a futile attempt to escape. Dragging himself from one rectangle of shadow to another, his leg as heavy as a club and apparently inflamed to the knee, he realized that he must soon find an equivalent for the blocks or he would end his life within them, trapped within this self-constructed mausoleum as surely as the retinue of Pharaoh.
He was sitting exhausted somewhere within the center of the system, the faceless lines of the tomb booths receding from him, when the sky was slowly divided by the drone of a light aircraft. This passed overhead, and then, five minutes later, returned. Seizing his opportunity, Traven struggled to his feet and made his exit from the blocks, his head raised to follow the glistening exhaust trail.
As he lay down in the bunker he dimly heard the aircraft return and carry out an inspection of the site.
“Who are you?” A small sandy-haired man was peering down at him with a severe expression, then put away a syringe in his valise. “Do you realize you’re on your last legs?”
“Traven ... I’ve had some sort of accident. I’m glad you flew over.”
“I’m sure you are. Why didn’t you use our emergency radio? Anyway, we’ll call the Navy and have you picked up.”
“No ...” Traven sat up on one elbow and felt weakly in his hip pocket. “I have a pass somewhere. I’m carrying out research.”
“Into what?” The question assumed a complete understanding of Traven’s motives. Traven lay in the shade beside the bunker, and drank weakly from a canteen as Dr. Osborne dressed his foot.
“You’ve also been stealing our stores.”
Traven shook his head. Fifty yards away the blue and white Cessna stood on the concrete apron like a large dragonfly. “I didn’t realize you were coming back.”
“You must be in a trance.”
The young woman at the controls of the aircraft climbed from the cockpit and walked over to them, glancing at the gray bunkers and blocks. She seemed unaware of or uninterested in the decrepit figure of Traven. Osborne spoke to her over his shoulder, and after a downward glance at Traven she went back to the aircraft. As she turned Traven rose involuntarily, recognizing the child in the photograph he had pinned to the wall. Then he remembered that the magazine could not have been more than four or five years old.
The engine of the aircraft started. It turned onto one of the roadways and took off into the wind.
The young woman drove over by jeep that afternoon with a small camp bed and a canvas awning. During the intervening hours Traven had slept, and woke refreshed when Osborne returned from his scrutiny of the surrounding dunes.
“What are you doing here?” the young woman asked as she secured one of the guy ropes to the bunker.
“I’m searching for my wife and son,” Traven said.
“They’re on this island?” Surprised, but taking the reply at face value, she looked around her. “Here?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
After inspecting the bunker, Osborne joined them. “The child in the photograph. Is she your daughter?”
“No.” Traven tried to explain. “She’s adopted me.”
Unable to make sense of his replies, but accepting his assurances that he would leave the island, Osborne and the young woman returned to their camp. Each day Osborne returned to change the dressing, driven by the young woman, who seemed to grasp the role cast for her by Traven in his private mythology. Osborne, when he learned of Traven’s previous career as a military pilot, assumed that he was a latter-day martyr left high and dry by the moratorium on thermonuclear tests.
“A guilt complex isn’t an indiscriminate supply of moral sanctions. I think you may be overstretching yours.”