# The Concentration City by James Graham Ballard

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"The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. "Look," he began to explain sympathetically, "you can't get out of time, can you? Subjectively it's a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you'll never be able to stop that clock"- he pointed to the one on the desk-"or make it run backward. In exactly the same way you can't get out of the City."
"The analogy doesn't hold," M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the streets outside. "All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?"
"It's always been here," the surgeon said. "Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it."
"The first bricks were laid by someone," M. insisted. "There was the Foundation."
"A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don't try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can't have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it, and even more difficult, where they came from?"
"There must be free space somewhere," M. said doggedly. "The City must have bounds."
"Why?" the surgeon asked. "It can't be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you're trying to believe?"
M. sank back limply. "No"
The surgeon watched M silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. "This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You're caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven't misinterpreted something you've heard about the Wall?"
M. looked up. "Which wall?"
The surgeon nodded to himself. "Some advanced opinion maintains that there's a wall around the City, through which it's impossible to penetrate. I don't pretend to understand the theory myself. It's far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they've confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all direction without limits.""
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The Concentration City (1957). James Graham Ballard. The Complete Short Stories