The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  Maitland watched it settling toward the carpet, filtering through the yellow light like mist in a cloud chamber. “I wouldn’t worry, Susan,” he said. “It’ll blow over.” He gave her a weak smile and walked to the door. She followed him for a moment and then stopped, watching him silently. As he turned the handle he realized that be had already begun to forget her, his mind withdrawing all contact with hers, erasing all memories.

  “See you some time,” he managed to say. Then he waved and stepped into the corridor, closing the door on a last glimpse of her stroking back her long hair, her eyes turning to the bar.

  Collecting his suitcases from the service room on the floor above, be took the elevator down to the foyer and asked the porter to order a taxi. The streets outside were empty, the red dust lying thickly on the grass in the square, a foot deep against the walls at the far end. The trees switched and quivered under the impact of the wind, and small twigs and branches littered the roadway. While the taxi was coming he phoned London Airport, and after a long wait was told that all flights had been indefinitely suspended. Tickets were being refunded at booking offices and new bookings could only be made from a date to be announced later.

  Maitland had changed all but a few pound notes into Canadian dollars. Rather than go to the trouble of changing it back again, he arranged to spend the next day or two until he could book a passage on one of the transatlantic liners with a close friend called Andrew Symington, an electronics engineer who worked for the Air Ministry.

  Symington and his wife lived in a small house in Swiss Cottage. As the taxi made its way slowly through the traffic in Park Lane—the east wind had turned the side streets into corridors of highpressure air that rammed against the stream of cars, forcing them down to a cautious fifteen or twenty miles an hour—Maitland pictured the ribbing the Symingtons would give him when they discovered that his long-expected departure for Canada had been abruptly postponed.

  Andrew had warned him not to abandon his years of work at the Middlesex simply to escape from Susan and his sense of failure in having become involved with her. Maitland lay back in his seat, looking at the reflection of himself in the plate glass behind the driver, trying to decide how far Andrew had been right. Physiognomically he certainly appeared to be the exact opposite of the emotionally-motivated cycloid personality. Tall, and slightly stooped, his face was thin and firm, with steady eyes and a strong jaw. If anything he was probably overresolute, too inflexible, a victim of his own rational temperament, viewing himself with the logic he applied in his own laboratory. How far this had made him happy was hard to decide…

  Horns sounded ahead of them and cars were slowing down in both traffic lanes. A moment later a brilliant catherine wheel of flickering light fell directly out of the air into the roadway in front of them.

  Braking sharply, the driver pulled up without warning, and Maitland pitched forward against the glass pane, bruising his jaw viciously. As he stumbled back into the seat, face clasped in his hands, a vivid cascade of sparks played over the hood of the taxi. A line of power cables had come down in the wind and were arcing onto the vehicle, the gusts venting from one of the side streets tossing them into the air and then flinging them back onto the hood.

  Panicking, the driver opened his door. Before he could steady himself the wind caught the door and wrenched it back, dragging him out onto the road. He stumbled to his feet by the front wheel, tripping over the long flaps of his overcoat. The sparking cables whipped down onto the hood and flailed across him like an enormous phosphorescent lash.

  Still holding his face, Maitland leaped out of the cabin and jumped back onto the pavement, watching the cables flick backward and forward across the vehicle. The traffic had stopped, and a small crowd gathered among the stalled cars, watching at a safe distance as the thousands of sparks cataracted across the roadway and showered down over the twitching body of the driver.

  An hour later, when he reached the Symingtons’, the bruise on Maitland’s jaw had completely stiffened the left side of his face. Soothing it with an icebag, he sat in an armchair in the lounge, sipping whiskey and listening to the steady drumming of the wind on the wooden shutters across the windows.

  “Poor devil. God knows if I’m supposed to attend the inquest. I should be on a boat within a couple of days.”

  “Doubt if you will,” Symington said. “There’s nothing on the Atlantic at present. The Queen Elizabeth and the United States both turned back for New York today when they were only fifty miles out. This morning a big supertanker went down in the channel and we couldn’t get a single rescue ship or plane to it.”

  “How long has the wind kept up now?” Dora Symington asked. She was a plump, dark-haired girl, expecting her first baby.

  “About a fortnight,” Symington said. He smiled warmly at his wife. “Don’t worry, though, it won’t go on forever.”

  “Well, I hope not,” his wife said. “I can’t even get out for a walk, Donald. And everything seems so dirty.”

  “This dust, yes,” Maitland agreed. “It’s all rather curious.”

  Symington nodded, watching the windows pensively. He was ten years older than Maitland, a small balding man with a wide round cranium and intelligent eyes.

  When they had chatted together for about half an hour he helped his wife up to bed and then came down to Maitland, closing the doors and wedging them with pieces of felt.

  “Dora’s getting near her time,” he told Maitland. “It’s a pity all this excitement has come up.”

  With Dora gone, Maitland realized how bare the room seemed, and noticed that all the Symingtons’ glassware and ornaments, as well as an entire wall of books, had been packed away.

  “You two moving house?” he asked, pointing to the empty shelves.

  Symington shook his head. “No, just taking a few precautions. Dora left the bedroom window slightly open this morning and a flying mirror damn near guillotined her. If the wind gets much stronger some really big things are going to start moving.”

  Something about Symington’s tone caught Maitland’s attention.

  “Do they expect it to get much stronger?” he asked.

  “Well, as a matter of interest it’s increasing by about five miles an hour each day. Of course it won’t go on increasing indefinitely at that rate or we’ll all be blown off the face of the earth—quite literally—but one can’t be certain it’ll begin to subside just when our particular patience has been exhausted.” He filled his glass with whiskey, tipped in some water and then sat down facing Maitland, examining the bruise on his jaw. The dark swelling reached from his chin cleft up past the cheekbone to his temple.

  Maitland nodded, listening to the rhythmic batter of the shutters above the steady drone of the wind. He realized that he had been too preoccupied with his abortive attempt to escape from England to more than notice the existence of the wind. At the airport he had regarded it as merely one facet of the weather, waiting, with the typical impatient optimism of every traveler, for it to die down and let him get on with the important business of boarding his aircraft.

  “What do the weather experts think has caused it?” he asked.

  “None of them seems to know. It certainly has some unusual features. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but it doesn’t let up, even momentarily.” He tilted his head toward the window behind him and Maitland listened to the steady unvarying whine passing through the maze of rooftops and chimneys.

  He nodded to Symington. “What’s its speed now?”

  “About fifty-five. Quite brisk, really. It’s amazing that these old places can hold together even at that. I wouldn’t like to be in Tokyo or Bangkok, though.”

  Maitland looked up. “Do you mean they’re having the same trouble?”

  Symington nodded. “Same trouble, same wind. That’s another curious thing about it. As far as we can make out, the wind force is increasing at the same rate all over the world. It’s at its highest—about sixty miles an hour—at the equator, an
d diminishing gradually with latitude. In other words, it’s almost as if a complete shell of solid air, with its axis at the poles, were revolving around the globe. There may be one or two minor variations where local prevailing winds overlay the global system, but its direction is constantly westward.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s catch the ten o’clock news. Should be on now.”

  He switched on a portable radio, waited until the chimes had ended and then turned up the volume.

  “…widespread havoc is reported from many parts of the world, particularly in the Far East and the Pacific, where tens of thousands are homeless. Winds of up to hurricane force have flattened entire towns and villages, causing heavy flooding and hampering the efforts of rescue workers. Our correspondent in New Delhi has stated that the Indian government is to introduce a number of relief measures…For the fourth day in succession shipping has been at a standstill…No news has yet been received of any survivors of the 65,000-ton tanker Onassis Flyer, which capsized in heavy seas in the channel early this morning…”

  Symington switched the set off, drummed his fingers lightly on the table. “Hurricane is a slight exaggeration. A hundred miles an hour is a devastating speed. No relief work at all is possible; people are too busy trying to find a hole in the ground.”

  Maitland closed his eyes, listened to the drumming of the shutters. Away in the distance somewhere a car horn sounded. London seemed massive and secure, a vast immovable citadel of brick and mortar compared with the flimsy bamboo cities of the Pacific seaboard.

  Symington went off into his study, came back a few moments later with a rack of testtubes. He put it down on the table and Maitland sat forward to examine the tubes. There were half a dozen in all, neatly labeled and annotated. They each contained the same red-brown dust that Maitland had seen everywhere for the past few days. In the first tube there was a quarter of an inch, in the others progressively more, until the last tube held almost three inches.

  Reading the labels, Maitland saw that they were dated. “I’ve been measuring the daily dust fall,” Symington explained. “There’s a rain meter in the garden.”

  Maitland held up the tube on the right. “Nearly ten cc’s,” he remarked. “Pretty heavy.” He raised the tube up to the light, shook the crystals from side to side. “What are they? Looks almost like sand, but where the hell’s it come from?”

  Symington smiled somberly. “Not from the south coast, anyway. Quite a long way off. Out of curiosity I asked one of the soil chemists at the Ministry to analyze a sample. Apparently this is loess, the fine crystalline topsoil found on the alluvial plains of Tibet and Northern China. We haven’t heard any news from there recently, and I’m not surprised. If the same concentrations of dust are falling all over the northern hemisphere, it means that something like fifty million tons of soil has been carted all the way across the Middle East and Europe and dumped on the British Isles alone, equal to the top two feet of our country’s entire surface.”

  Symington paced over to the window, then swung around on Maitland, his face tired and drawn. “Donald, I have to admit it; I’m worried. Do you realize what the inertial drag is of such a mass? It should have stopped the wind in its tracks. God, if it can move the whole of Tibet without even a shrug, it can move anything.”

  The telephone in the hall rang. Excusing himself, Symington stepped out of the lounge. He closed the door behind him without bothering to replace the strips of felt, and the constant pressure pulses caused by the wind striking the shutters finally jolted the door off its catch.

  Through the narrow opening Maitland caught:

  “…I thought we were supposed to be taking over the old RAF field at Tern Hill. The H-bomb bays there are over fifteen feet thick, and connected by underground bunkers. What? Well, tell the Minister that the minimum accommodation required for one person for a period longer than a month is three thousand cubic feet. If he crams thousands of people into those underground platforms they’ll soon go mad—”

  Symington came back and closed the door, then stared pensively at the floor.

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t help overhearing some of that,” Maitland said. “Surely the government isn’t taking emergency measures already?”

  Symington eyed Maitland thoughtfully for a few seconds before he replied. “No, not exactly. Just a few precautionary moves. There are people in the War Office whose job is to stay permanently three jumps ahead of the politicians. If the wind goes on increasing, say to hurricane force, there’ll be a tremendous outcry in the House of Commons if we haven’t prepared at least a handful of deep shelters. As long as one tenth of one per cent of the population are catered for, everybody’s happy.” He paused bleakly for a moment. “But God help the other 99.9.”

  ♦

  Windborne, the sound of engines murmured below the hill crest.

  For a moment they echoed and reverberated in the air-stream moving rapidly across the cold earth, then abruptly, 200 yards away, the horizon rose into the sky as the long lines of vehicles lumbered forward. Like gigantic robots assembling for some futuristic land battle, the vast graders and tournadozers, walking draglines and supertractors edged slowly toward each other. They moved in two opposing lines, each composed of 50 vehicles, wheels as tall as houses, their broad tracks ten feet wide.

  High above them, behind the hydraulic rams and metal grabs, their drivers sat almost motionless at their controls, swaying in their seats as the vehicles rolled through dips in the green turf. Clouds of exhaust poured from the vehicles’ stacks, swept away by the dark wind, the throb of their engines filling the air with menacing thunder.

  When the opposing lines were 200 yards from each other their flanks turned at right angles to form a huge square, and the entire assembly ground to a halt.

  As the minutes passed only the wind could be heard, rolling and whining through the sharp metal angles of the machines. Then a small broad figure in a dark coat strode rapidly from the windward line of vehicles toward the center of the arena. Here he paused, his head bared, revealing a massive domed forehead, small hard eyes and callous mouth. He turned his face to the wind, raising his head slightly, so that his heavy jaw pointed into it like the iron-clad prow of an ancient dreadnought.

  Surrounded by the long lines of machines, he stood looking beyond them, the wind dragging at the flaps of his coat, his eyes questing through the low storm clouds that fled past as if trying to escape his gaze.

  Glancing at his watch, he raised his arm, clenched his fist above his head and then dropped it sharply.

  With a roar of racing clutches and exhausts, the huge vehicles snapped into motion. Tracks skating in the soft earth, wheels spinning, they plunged and jostled, the long lines breaking into a mass of slamming metal.

  As they moved away to their tasks the iron-faced man stood silently, ignoring them, his eyes still searching the wind.

  TWO

  From the Submarine Pens

  FROM: ADMIRAL HAMILTON, CIC U.S. SIXTH FLEET, USS EISENHOWER, TUNIS.

  TO: COMMANDER LANYON, USS TERRAPIN, GENOA

  GENERAL VAN DAMM NOW IN U.S. MILITARY HOSPITAL, NICE. MULTIPLE SPINAL FRACTURES. COLLECT TROOP CARRIER FROM NATO TRANSPORT POOL, GENOA. EXPECTED WIND SPEED: 85 KNOTS.

  Crouched down in the well of the conning tower, Lanyon scanned the message, then nodded to the sailor, who saluted and disappeared below.

  Twenty feet above him the concrete roof of the submarine pen was slick with moisture which dripped steadily into the choppy water below. The steel gates of the pen had been closed, but the sea outside pounded against the heavy grilles. It drove high swells along the 300-foot length of the pen which rode the Terrapin up and down on its moorings and then slapped against the far wall, sending clouds of spray into the air over the submarine’s stern.

  Lanyon waited until the last of the moorings had been completed, then waved briefly to the portmaster, a blond-haired lieutenant in the concrete control cage jutting out from the wall ten feet ahead. Lowering himself throu
gh the hatch, he climbed down the companionway into the control room, swung around the periscope well and made his way to his cabin.

  He sat down on his bunk and slowly loosened his collar, adjusting himself to the rhythmic rise and fall of the submarine. After the three-day crossing of the Mediterranean, at a steady, comfortable 20 fathoms, the surface felt like a switchback. His instructions were to make one trial surfacing en route, in a sheltered cove off the west coast of Sicily. But even before the conning tower broke surface the Terrapin took on a 30-degree yaw and was hit by tremendous seas that almost stood it on its stern. They had stayed down until reaching the comparatively sheltered waters of the submarine base at Genoa, but even there had a difficult job negotiating the wreckstrewn limbs of the double breakwater.

  What it was like topside Lanyon hated to imagine. Tunis, where all that was left of the Sixth Fleet was bottled up, had been a complete shambles. Vast seas were breaking over the harbor area, sending two-foot waves down streets 300 yards inshore, slamming at the big 95,000 ton carrier Eisenhower and the two cruisers moored against the piers. When he had last seen the Eisenhower she had taken on a 25-degree list and the constant 50-foot rise and fail had begun to rip huge pieces of concrete from the sides of the pier.

  Genoa, sheltered a little by the hills and the land mass of the peninsula, seemed to be quieter. With luck, Lanyon hoped, the military here would have their pants on, instead of running around like a lot of startled baboons, frightening themselves with their own noise.

  Lanyon tossed his cap onto the desk and stretched out on the bunk. As a submariner he felt (irrationally, he knew) that the wind was everybody else’s problem. At thirty-eight he had served in submarines for over fifteen years, ever since he left Annapolis, and the traditional self-sufficiency of the service was now part of him. A sparse, lean six-footer, to strangers he appeared withdrawn and moody, but he had long ago found that a detached viewpoint left him with more freedom to maneuver.