The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  “Pat, I’m going upstairs in case there’s anyone else here. May even be a telephone line still working.”

  She nodded, curling up into the corner. She looked almost dead and Lanyon wondered whether the Wilsons had survived.

  The barracks was empty. Upstairs, the wind raced through the broken windows like a tornado, ripping the cupboards from the walls and piling the bedsteads into tangled heaps. He found an internal phone in one of the offices, but the line was dead. The station had obviously been abandoned days earlier.

  “Any luck?” Pat asked when he went down to the basement.

  He shook his head. “Looks as if we’re stuck here. There are some wrecked trucks in a bay on the other side of the parade square. If the wind dies down a little tomorrow I may be able to salvage something that’ll get us to Genoa.”

  “Do you think it will die down?”

  “Everybody keeps asking me that.” Lanyon hung his head for a moment. “It’s curious, but until I saw Charlesby lying in that ditch I didn’t feel all that concerned. In a way I was almost glad. So much of life in the States—and over here for that matter—could use a strong breath of fresh air. But I realize now that a garbage-disposal job of this size rakes away too much of the good along with the bad.”

  He grinned at her suddenly. She smiled back, eying him with a long steady gaze, one he felt no hesitation in returning. With her blue coat and clear white skin against the drab background of the basement wall, she reminded him of the madonna in the gilt frame over the altarpiece in the wrecked church. The woman’s hair had been black, but her robes had glowed with the same luminescent quality as Pat’s ash-blonde hair.

  Outside, the wind hurled itself across the dark swell of the land.

  ♦

  The hill had gone, obliterated beneath the gigantic jaws of the fleets of bulldozers, its matrix scooped out like the pulp of a fruit and carried away on the endless lines of trucks.

  Below the sweeping beams of powerful spotlights, their arcs cutting through the whirling dust, huge pylons were rooted into the black earth, then braced back by hundreds of steel hawsers. In the intervals between them vast steel sheets were erected, welded together to form a continuous windshield a hundred feet high.

  Even before the screen was complete the first graders were moving into the sheltered zone behind it, sinking their metal teeth into the bruised earth, leveling out a giant rectangle. Steel forms were shackled into place and scores of black-suited workers moved rapidly like frantic ants, pouring in thousands of gallons of concrete.

  As each layer annealed, the forms were unshackled and replaced further up the sloping flanks of the structure. First 10 feet, then 20 and 30 feet high, it rose steadily into the dark night.

  THREE

  Vortex over London

  Deborah Mason took the bundle of teletype dispatches off Andrew Symington’s desk, glanced quickly through them and asked, “Any hopeful news?”

  Symington shook his head slowly. Behind him the banks of teletypes—labeled Ankara, Bangkok, Copenhagen and so on through the alphabet—chattered away, churning out endless tapes. They almost filled the small newsroom, cramming the desks of the three-man staff over into a corner.

  “Still looks bad, Deborah. Up to 175 now and shows no signs of breaking.” He scrutinized her carefully, noting the lines of tension that webbed the corners of her eyes, gave her smooth, intelligent face a look of precocious maturity, although she was only twenty-five. Unlike most of the girls working at Central Operations Executive, she still kept herself trim and well-groomed. He reflected that the ascendancy of woman in the twentieth century made the possibility of an abrupt end to civilization seem infinitely remote; it was difficult to visualize a sleek young executive like Deborah Mason taking her place in the doomed lifeboats. She was much more the sort of girl who heard the faint SOS signals and organized the rescue operation.

  Which, of course, was exactly what she was doing at Central Operations Executive. With the slight difference that this time the whole world was in the last lifeboat. But with people like Deborah and Simon Marshall, the COE intelligence chief, working the pumps, there was a good chance of success.

  The unit, directly responsible to the Prime Minister, had been formed only two weeks previously. Staffed largely by War Office personnel, with a few communications specialists such as Symington recruited from the Air Ministry and industry, its job was to act as an intelligence section handling and sorting all incoming information, and also to serve as the executive agency of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Home Office. Its headquarters were situated in the old Admiralty buildings in Whitehall, a rambling network of stately boardrooms and tiny offices in the underground bunkers deep below Horseguards Parade. Here Symington spent most of the day and night, only getting back to his wife—who was expecting her baby within a fortnight at the outside—usually after she was asleep. Along with the wives and families of the other COE personnel, she was housed in the Park Lane Hotel, which had been taken over by the government. Symington saw her daily, and as one of the few employees not resident at the Admiralty he was able to verify personally the reports he spent all day preparing.

  TOKYO: 174mph. 99% of the city down. Explosive fires from Mitsubashi steelworks spreading over western suburbs. Casualties estimated at 15,000. Food and water adequate for three days. Government action confined to police patrols.

  ROME: 176mph. Municipal and office buildings still intact, but Vatican roofless, dome of St. Peter’s destroyed. Casualties: 2,000. Suburbs largely derelict. Refugees from rural areas flooding into city, catacombs requisitioned by government for relief and dormitories.

  NEW YORK: 175mph. All skyscrapers in Manhattan windowless and abandoned. TV aerial and tower of Empire State Building down. Statue of Liberty minus head and torch. Torrential seas breaking inshore as far as Central Park. City at standstill. Casualties: 500.

  VENICE: 176mph. City abandoned. Casualties: 2,000. Heavy seas have demolished Grand Canal palazzos. St. Mark’s Square under water, campanile down. All inhabitants on mainland.

  ARCHANGEL: 68mph. No casualties. Intact. Airfield and harbor closed.

  CAPE TOWN: 74mph. 4 casualties. Intact.

  SINGAPORE: 178mph. City abandoned. Government control nonexistent. Casualties: 25,000.

  Simon Marshall read carefully through the reports, chewed his lip for a moment and then gave them to Deborah to file.

  “Not so good, but not so bad either. Tokyo and Singapore, of course, are gone, but one can’t expect those cardboard jungles to stand up to winds above hurricane force. Pity about Venice.”

  A large powerful man of fifty, with a tough handsome face, strong arms and shoulders, Marshall filled the big office, sitting massively at his desk like an intelligent bear. He had built up COE in little more than two weeks, hiring and firing the necessary personnel single-handed, organizing a world-wide coverage of reporters, seizing the services of top meteorological, communications and electronics experts. COE now was one of the Western Hemisphere’s key nerve centers, keeping the Combined Chiefs of Staffs and the government as well informed as they could be.

  “Get home all right last night?” he asked Deborah.

  “Yes, thanks.” She glanced at her wrist watch. It was 10:57, three minutes before Marshall was to give his daily report to the Combined Chiefs, but he had already mastered the entire intelligence picture, was completely relaxed.

  As the minute hand of the clock moved on to 10:59, Marshall stood up and left his desk. The meeting took place in the cabinet room at the end of the corridor. As Deborah picked up Marshall’s briefcase, he took it from her with a smile, his hand pressing over hers as he held the handle. The other hand touched her waist, pushed her gently toward the door.

  “Time for our tête a tête,” he said. “Let’s see if we can give them something today to keep them happy.”

  The other members of the COE cabinet were taking their seats as they entered. There were five members, who reported to the Prime
Minister through Sir Charles Gort, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. A trim neat figure in pin-striped trousers and dark jacket, he was a professional civil servant, quiet but firmly spoken, never appearing to volunteer an opinion of his own but adept at reconciling contrary viewpoints.

  He waited for the others to settle down, and then turned to Dr. Lovatt Dickinson, Director of the Meteorological Office, a sandyhaired Scot in a brown tweed suit, who sat on his left.

  “Doctor, perhaps you’d be good enough to let us have the latest news on the weather front.”

  Dickinson sat forward, reading from a pad of blue Meteorological Office tabular memos.

  “Well, Sir Charles, I can’t say that I’ve anything very hopeful to report. The wind speed is now 175 miles per hour, an increase of 4.89 miles per hour over the speed recorded at 10 A.M. yesterday, maintaining the average daily increase of five miles per hour that we’ve seen over the last three weeks. The humidity shows a slight increase, to be accounted for by the passage of these enormous air volumes over the disturbed ocean surfaces. We’ve done our best to make high-altitude observations, but you’ll appreciate that launching a balloon in this wind, let alone keeping track of it, is well nigh impossible. However, the weather ship Northern Survey off the coast of Greenland, where the wind speed is down to a mere 85mph, has reported data indicating, as one would expect, that the velocity of the global air stream declines with decreasing density, and that at 45,000 feet the air speed is approximately 45mph at the equator and 30mph over this latitude.”

  Dickinson momentarily lost his sequence, and while he shuffled the memos Gort cut in smoothly.

  “Thank you, Doctor. But boiling it all down, what prospects are there of the wind system’s actually subsiding?”

  Dickinson shook his head dourly. “I’d like to be optimistic, Sir Charles, but I’ve every suspicion that it’s got some way to go yet before it spends itself. We’re witnessing a meteorological phenomenon of unprecedented magnitude, a global cyclone accelerating at a uniform rate, exhibiting all the signs distinguishing highly stable aerodynamic systems. The wind mass now has tremendous momentum, and the inertial forces alone will prevent a sudden abatement. Theoretically there are no reasons why it should not continue to revolve at high speeds indefinitely, and become the prevailing planetary system similar to the revolving clouds of gas that produce the rings of Saturn. To date the weather systems on this planet have always been dictated by the oceanic drifts, but it’s obvious now that far stronger influences are at work. Exactly what, any of you are free to speculate. Recently our monitors have detected unusually high levels of cosmic radiation. All electromagnetic wave forms have mass—perhaps a vast tangential stream of cosmic radiation exploded from the sun during the solar eclipse a month ago, struck the earth on one exposed hemisphere, and its gravitational drag might have set in motion the huge cyclone revolving round the earth’s axis at this moment.”

  Dickinson looked around the table and smiled somberly. “Or again, maybe it’s the deliberate act of an outraged Providence, determined to sweep man and his pestilence from the surface of this once green earth. Who can say?”

  Gort pursed his lips, eying Dickinson with dry amusement. “Well, let’s sincerely hope not, Doctor. We simply haven’t got a big enough budget for that sort of emergency. Summing up, then, it looks as if we were optimistic a week ago when we assumed, quite naturally, that the wind would exhaust itself once it reached hurricane force. We can expect it to continue, if not indefinitely, at least for a considerable period, perhaps another month. Could we now have a report of the present position as assessed by the intelligence section?”

  Marshall sat forward, the eyes of the other men at the table turning toward him.

  “Recapping for a moment, Sir Charles, it’s exactly eight days since London first began to experience winds of over 120 miles an hour, greater than any previously recorded, and certainly well beyond anything the architects of this city designed for. Bearing that in mind, I’m sure you’ll be proud to hear that our great capital city is holding together with remarkable tenacity.” Marshall glanced around the table, letting the impact of this homily sink in, then continued in a slightly more factual tone:

  “Taking London first, although almost all activity in the commercial and industrial sense has ceased for the time being, the majority of people are getting by without too much difficulty. Most of them have managed to board up their houses, secure their roofs, and lay in adequate stocks of food and water. Casualties have been low—2,000—and many of these were elderly people who were probably frightened to death, quite literally, rather than injured by falling masonry.”

  Marshall glanced through his notes. “Abroad, in Europe and North America, the picture is pretty much the same. They’ve all battened down the hatches and are ready to ride out the storm. Scandinavia and northern Russia, of course, are outside the main wind belt and life seems to be going on much as usual. They’re equipped for hurricane-force winds as a matter of course.” Marshall smiled his big craggy smile. “I think we can probably stand another 20 or 30mph without any real damage.”

  Major-General Harris, a small man in a spic-and-span uniform, nodded briskly.

  “Good to hear you say that, Marshall. Morale isn’t as high as it could be. Too much negative talk around.”

  Vice-Admiral Saunders, sitting next to him, nodded agreement.

  “I hope your information is right, though, Marshall. One of the Americans told me this morning that Venice was a complete writeoff.”

  “Exaggeration,” Marshall said easily. “My latest report a few minutes ago was that there had been heavy flooding, but no serious damage.”

  The admiral nodded, glad to be reassured. Marshall continued with his survey. Deborah sat just behind him, listening to the steady confident tone. With the exception of Gort, who remained neutral, the three other members of the committee were inclined to be pessimistic and depressed, expecting the worst and misinterpreting the news to serve their unconscious acceptance of disaster. General Harris and Vice-Admiral Saunders were typical of the sort of serviceman in the saddle at the beginning of a war. They had the Dunkirk mentality, had already been defeated and were getting ready to make a triumph out of it, counting up the endless casualty lists, the catalogues of disaster and destruction, as if these were a measure of their courage and competence.

  Marshall, Deborah realized, was the necessary counterforce on the team. Although he might be overoptimistic, this was deliberate, the sort of Churchillian policy that would keep people head-up into the wind, doing everything to defend themselves, rather than running helplessly before it. She listened half consciously to Marshall, feeling his confidence surge through her.

  On the way back to Marshall’s office after the meeting closed, they met Symington, carrying a teletype memo in his hand.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid, sir. The old Russell Square Hotel collapsed suddenly about half an hour ago. Some of the piles drove straight through the sub-soil into the Piccadilly Line platforms directly below. First estimates are that about two hundred were killed in the Russell basement and about twice that number again in the station.”

  Marshall took the tape and stared at it blindly for several moments, bunching his fist and drumming it against his forehead.

  “Deborah, get this out to all casualty units straight away! About four hundred were down in the station, you say, Andrew? For God’s sake, what were they doing there? Don’t tell me they were waiting for a train.”

  Symington gestured with one hand. “I suppose they were sheltering there, the way they did in World War II.”

  In a burst of exasperation, Marshall shouted: “But that’s just what we don’t want them to do! They should have been above ground, strengthening their own homes, not just abandoning them and cowering away like a lot of sheep.”

  Symington smiled wanly. “Properties in the Bloomsbury and Russell Square area are pretty decrepit. High Victorian terraced houses ready for demolition. People
there live in single rooms—”

  “I don’t care where they live!” Marshall cut in. “There are eight million people in this city and they’ve got to stand up and face this wind together. Once they start thinking of themselves and a warm hole to hide in the whole damn place will blow away.”

  He swung through into his office. “Call transport,” he snapped at Deborah. “Tell them to get a car ready. We’ll go out and have a look at this ourselves.”

  He pulled a heavy trench coat off the door, climbed into it while Deborah hurried over to the phone. As he strode off down the corridor she followed, slipping into her own coat.

  The operations deck was on the second floor of the Admiralty building, a honeycomb of small partitioned offices off the narrow high-ceilinged corridors. They passed the overseas news section, made their way through into a wide office which was the UK news reception unit. There were a dozen teletypes taping down an endless stream of information from the major provincial capitals, TV screens flickering with pictures broadcast from mobile transmitter units all over London, and a trio of operators in direct touch with the Met. Office.

  “What are the latest casualties at Russell Square?” Marshall asked a young lieutenant sitting at a desk in front of a TV set, watching the screen as he talked rapidly into a boom mike jutting from his shoulder.

  “Heavy, I’m afraid, sir. At least four hundred dead. The station access platforms are in pitch darkness, and they’re waiting for the RASC unit at Liverpool Street Station to move their generator down.”

  The screen was blurred and indistinct, but Marshall could make out the stabbing beams of searchlights playing over the ragged silhouette of the collapsed hotel. Its ten stories had concertinaed to the equivalent of three; many of the windows and balconies were apparently intact, but closer inspection revealed that the floors were separated by an interval of only three or four feet instead of the usual 12.