The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  Marshall took Deborah’s arm and led her out of the room into the corridor. They walked down the stairs to the ground floor. The building was equipped with its own generator but its power was inadequate to move the heavy elevator.

  All the windows they passed were securely boarded. Outside, ten-foot-thick walls of sandbags had been stacked up to the roof, roped into an impenetrable wall. As they neared the ground floor, however, Deborah felt the building shudder slightly as a massive draught of air struck it, stirring the foundations in their clay beds. The movement stabbed at her heart, and she stopped for a moment and leaned against Marshall. He put an arm around her shoulders, smiled reassuringly.

  “All right, Deborah?” His hand cupped the round swell of her shoulder through the jacket.

  “Just about. I’m afraid it startled me.”

  They moved down the steps, Marshall slowing his pace for her. The tremor continued as the building settled itself into new foundations.

  “Something big must have come down,” Marshall said. “Probably the Palace, or N°10 Downing Street.” He gave a light laugh.

  At the bottom of the steps there was a revolving door; heavy rubber flaps making the seal airtight. Inside the building the air was filtered, the suites of offices and the operations deck contained in a warm, noiseless world. Beyond the revolving doors, however, in the corridors leading to the transport bay and the service units, the air seeped in through the casing of sandbags, driven by the tremendous pressure of the wind outside, and through the glass panels of the revolving doors they could see the floor, thick with dust and grime, chilled by sudden gusts of air bursting through pressure points.

  Marshall put up his collar, led them briskly down the corridor to an orderly room by the rear exit, where he collected their driver. Five or six exhausted men in dirty khaki uniforms sat around a table drinking tea. Their faces looked pinched and sallow. For three weeks now no one had seen the sun; the dust clouds dimmed the streets, turned noon into a winter evening.

  Marshall’s driver, a small wiry corporal called Musgrave, unlocked a narrow panel door in the steel blast-proof bulkhead at the end of the corridor. Deborah and Marshall followed him into a low-ceilinged garage where three armored cars were parked. They were M53-pattern Bethlehems, square ten-ton vehicles with canted armored sides designed originally to deflect high-velocity shells and now ideal shielding for surface units moving about in the wind. Their 85 mm. guns had been removed, and in place of the original mounting six-inch-thick perspex window pieces had been fastened.

  After helping Deborah into the truck, Marshall followed, swinging himself up in two easy powerful movements. Musgrave tested the hatch, then climbed into the driver’s seat beside the engine and pulled the hatch over himself.

  He drove the car forward across the garage floor, and edged it up onto the wide steel plate of a hydraulically operated elevator shaft. Remote controlled from the car’s radio, the elevator rose slowly into the air on its single pylon, carrying the car upward into a narrow well in the roof of the garage. As it neared the top the roof retracted sideways, and the Bethlehem emerged into the rear courtyard, between Admiralty House and the Foreign Office Annex.

  Inside the cabin, Marshall sat on the edge of the padded metal seat, craning forward into the circular window. Deborah crouched behind him, switching on the radio channel to the Operations Room.

  They made their way into Trafalgar Square, turned up the west side toward the National Gallery. It was one o’clock but the air was dark and gray, the sky overcast. Only the continuously flickering tracerlike striations across the air gave any indication of the air stream’s enormous speed. They reached Canada House and the Cunard building on the west side of the square, and the walls of sandbags and the exposed cornices above flickered with the violent impact of the dust clouds.

  Nelson’s Column was down. Two weeks earlier, when the wind had reached 95mph, a crack which had passed unnoticed for 75 years suddenly revealed itself a third of the way up the shaft. The next day the upper section had toppled, the shattered cylindrical segments still lying where they had fallen among the four bronze lions.

  The square was deserted. Along the north side a tunnel of sandbags ran from the Haymarket and turned up into Charing Cross Road. Only military personnel and police used these covered runways; everyone else was indoors, refusing to venture out until the wind abated. The new office blocks along the Strand and the clubs along Pall Mall were heavily sandbagged and looked as if they had been abandoned by their occupants to sustain alone the terrors of some apocalyptic air raid. Most of the smaller office buildings had been left unprotected, however, and their windows had been stripped away, their floors and ceilings gutted.

  As they turned into Charing Cross Road Marshall noted that the Garrick Theatre had collapsed. The unsupported auditorium walls had caved in completely, and the arcs of the dress and upper circles now looked down onto a windswept pile of rubble. The lines of seats were being stripped away like dominoes. Marshall watched them explode off their moorings and cannonade out into the street, as if jerked away on the end of enormous hawsers, disintegrating as they flew.

  As they moved up Shaftesbury Avenue toward Holborn, Marshall waved Deborah forward and she joined him and rested her elbows on the traverse. In the dim light of the cabin she could see the strong edge of Marshall’s jaw and forehead illuminated in profile. For some reason he was undeterred by the immense force of the wind.

  He put his hand over hers. “Frightened, Deborah?”

  She moved her fingers, held his hand tightly. “I’m not just frightened, Simon. Staring out here—it’s like looking onto a city of hell. Everything’s so totally uncertain, and I’m sure this isn’t the end.”

  Searchlights played across Kingsway as they crossed the road, shone into the observation window and momentarily dazzled them. The Bethlehem halted at the intersection while Musgrave spoke to the command post dug into the mouth of Holborn Underground Station. Ahead, along Southampton Row, was a group of vehicles—three Centurion tanks, each pulling a steel trailer.

  Musgrave joined them, and together the column moved slowly up toward Russell Square. More vehicles were drawn up by the collapsed hotel, others were moving about in the square, their tracks flattening the tattered remains of the few bushes and shreds of wire fencing that still protruded from the beaten ground. Two Bethlehems with RN insignia were up on the edge of the pavement in front of the hotel, playing their searchlights onto the jumble of telescoped floors.

  They moved around the block to the windward side. Here a line of Centurion tanks was drawn up, sandbags piled between them, steel hoods mounted on their track guards locked end to end to form a windshield, giving the rescue squads digging their way into the basement sufficient protection to move around. Their success was hard to assess, but Marshall realized that few survivors could be expected. The heavy rescue rigs—all originally designed and built for World War III and now pulled out of their mothballs—needed more freedom of movement. There were huge draglines, mounted on tracks as high as a man, fitted with hinged booms that could reach between two telescoped floors. One of them was feeling its way tentatively below the buckled lintels of the second floor like a giant hand reaching into a deep pocket, but the wind sent it slamming from side to side, and the crew in their armored cab found it impossible to control.

  Musgrave drove the Bethlehem up onto the opposite pavement, and they edged past the line of vehicles to where a massive tractor, almost as big as a house, 60-foot-long steel booms jutting up from its front like the twin jibs of a sailing ship, was edging a circular steel escape shaft into position. The shaft pivoted between the booms. The lower end drove through a narrow window below the edge of the pavement, then powerful hydraulic rams extended it downward into the matrix of the ruin. Inside the shaft, rescue teams equipped with steel props would spread out across the basement, crawling along the foot-high space that was probably all that was left of the floor.

  Next to it were two more
tracked vehicles, fitted with conveyor belts that carried an endless stream of rubble away from the ruin and dumped them onto the roadway behind. Some of the fragments of masonry were six feet long—massive blocks of fractured concrete that weighed half a ton.

  “If there’s anyone alive in there they’ll find them,” Marshall said to Deborah. Just then the Bethlehem slid into reverse and backed suddenly, throwing them against the traverse. Marshall swore, holding his left elbow, the arm paralyzed for a moment. Deborah had struck her forehead against the steel rim. She pushed herself away and Marshall was about to go to her aid when he heard Musgrave jabber excitedly over the intercom.

  “Look out, sir! The conveyor’s going over!”

  Marshall leaped to the window. The wind had caught one of the two conveyors, swung the 30-foot-high escalator around like a balsawood dummy. The huge vehicle swiveled helplessly. Its tracks tautened as the twin diesels pulled, and the driver backed the whole unit away from the ruin, trying to regain its balance. Moving in a sharp arc, it backed straight toward the opposite pavement, where the Bethlehem had stalled with its rear wheels jammed against the steps of one of the houses.

  Before they collided the conveyor driver saw the Bethlehem in his rear mirror and retroversed the tracks, the great steel cleats stabbing through the surface of the roadway, locking in a sudden spasm. Immediately the 20 grab buckets swung back and inverted, tipping their contents into the roadway below.

  A fragment of masonry 15 feet long, a virtually intact section of balcony, fell straight onto the hood of the Bethlehem. The car slammed down onto its front axle, rear wheels bouncing off the pavement. Arms shielding his head, Marshall was hurled around the cabin. Deborah knocked off her feet. When the car finally steadied he bent down over Deborah and helped her off the floor onto the seat.

  The front suspension of the Bethlehem had collapsed and the floor tilted downward. Marshall leaned over, peered through the window, and saw the long slab of concrete which straddled the hood, its lower edge penetrating the driver’s hatchway.

  “Musgrave!” Marshall bellowed into the intercom. “Musgrave! Are you all right, man?”

  He dropped the mike, bent down under the traverse and wrenched back the radio set, hammering on the hinged panel that sealed off the cabin from the driver’s compartment. Musgrave had locked it from his side. Marshall tore at the edges of the panel, managed to pull the one-eighth inch plate back off its louvers. Through the crack he could see the hunched form of the driver. He had slipped off his seat, was stuffed head down into the narrow interval below the driving columns.

  Marshall pulled himself to his feet, climbed up onto the edge of the traverse and unlocked the hatch bars. Deborah jumped up and tried to hold him back, but he shouldered her off and punched the hatch sections up into the air. Air whirled into the cabin, gusts of stinging dust carried down from the ruined hotel. Hesitating for a moment, Marshall heaved himself up into the air, head and trunk out of the hatch.

  Immediately the wind caught him and jackknifed him over the edge of the turret. For a few seconds he hung there, pinned by the wind stream, then pulled himself downward and spilled onto the ground, driven back against the underside of the chassis. The wind drove under his coat, splitting it down his back and then stripping the two sections off his arms like a piece of rotten cotton ripped in two. He watched them blow away, then dragged himself along the side of the car, hand over hand, by the camouflage-netting hasps riveted along the bottom of the chassis.

  A continuous shower of stones drove over him, slashing red welts across his hands and neck. The tall houses facing the hotel deflected the wind slightly and he managed to reach the hood of the Bethlehem. Anchoring himself between the tire and hood, he stretched out painfully to the concrete beam, bunching every muscle as he strained against its massive weight. Through the swirling half light the huge rescue vehicles loomed over the hotel like arinored mastodons feeding on an enormous corpse.

  He pressed against the beam, hopelessly trying to lift it, his eyes blacking out momentarily, then slumped down against the tire just as two Centurions approached the Bethlehem, their steel shutters extended. They swung around the car, locked shields and drove in together, immediately lifting the wind stream off Marshall. A third tractor, an armored bulldozer, backed up to the Bethlehem and swung its ram over the cabin and down onto the hood. Expertly retroversing his tracks, the driver flipped the concrete beam off the Bethlehem, then drove off.

  Marshall tried to climb up onto the hood, but his leg and back muscles were useless. Two men in vinyl uniforms leaped down from the Centurions. One swarmed up onto the car, opened the driver’s hatch and slid inside. The other took Marshall by the arm, helped him up onto the turret and into the cabin.

  While Marshall sat back limply against the radio, the man ran expert fingers over him, wiping the welts across his face with an antiseptic sponge he pulled from his first-aid kit. Finally he propped Marshall’s swollen hands on his knees and turned to Deborah, who knelt beside Marshall, trying to clean his face with her handkerchief.

  “Relax, he’s in one piece.” He pointed to the radio. “Get me channel four, will you? We’ll give you a tow back. One of the front tires is flat.”

  While Deborah fumbled at the console he looked down at Marshall, lolling against the cabin wall, his great head like a weathered rock, shoulders flexing as he gasped for air. A network of fine blue veins webbed his cheeks and forehead, giving the powerful lines of his face a steelly sheen.

  Deborah selected the channel, passed the mike across.

  “Maitland here. Marshall is OK I’ll ride back with him just in case he tries to climb out again. How’s the driver? Sorry about him…Can you get him out? All right, then, seal him in and they can cut him loose later.”

  Maitland reached up and secured the hatch, then sat back against the traverse and pulled off his helmet and goggles. Marshall leaned forward weakly, elbows on his knees, feeling the swollen veins across his face.

  “Air bruises,” Maitland told him. “Minute haemorrhages. They’ll be all over your back and chest. Take a few days to clear.”

  He smiled at them as Deborah crouched down beside Marshall, putting her arm around his shoulders, and smoothed his hair back with her small hands.

  They reached Marshall’s house in Park Lane in half an hour, towed by one of the Centurions. High steel gates let them into a small covered courtyard where two of Marshall’s guards disconnected the tank and then rolled the Bethlehem down a long ramp into the basement. Maitland helped Marshall out of the turret. The big man had begun to recover. He limped slowly across the concrete floor, the sole of one of his shoes flapping, holding the remnants of his suit around him, his hand taking Deborah’s arm.

  As they waited for the elevator he turned to Maitland, gave him a craggy smile.

  “Thanks, Doctor. It was stupid of me, but the poor devil was dying only a couple of feet away, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help him.”

  One of the guards opened the doors and they stepped through and were carried up to Marshall’s suite on the first floor. All the windows had been bricked in. From the street Marshall’s house appeared to be imitation Georgian, slender lintels over high narrow windows, but the façade was skin deep, slung on a heavy steel superstructure that carried the wind easily. The air in the suite was quiet and filtered, hanging motionlessly over the purple carpeting—one of the few private oases that still existed in London.

  They entered Marshall’s drawing room, a two-level room with a circular black glass staircase. Below, an open log fire burned in a massive fireplace, throwing a soft flickering glow onto the semicircular couch in front of it, reflecting off the black tiles and the lines of silver trophies in their cases against the wall. The room was expensively and carefully furnished, with a strong masculine taste. There were abstract statuettes; heavy sporting rifles clipped to the walls, their black barrels glinting; a small winged bull rearing from a dark corner, its hooded eyes blind and menacing. Altogeth
er the effect was powerful, a perfect image of Marshall’s own personality, intense and somehow disturbing.

  Marshall slumped down onto the sofa, leaving the lights off. Deborah watched him for a moment, then slipped out of her coat and went over to the cocktail cabinet. She poured whiskey into a glass, then splashed in soda and brought the drink over to Marshall, sitting down on the sofa next to him.

  He took it from her, then reached out and put his hand on her thigh. Tucking her legs under her, she moved close to him and began to stroke his cheek and forehead with her fingertips, feeling the fine tracery of contused veins.

  “I’m sorry about Musgrave,” she said. Marshall’s hand rested in her lap, warm and strong. She took the glass from him and sipped at it, feeling the hot fiery liquid burn down her throat, brilliant and stimulating.

  “Poor devil,” Marshall commented. “Those Bethlehems are useless; the armor is too thin to hold a falling building.” To himself he added: “Hardoon will want something tougher.”

  “Who?” Deborah asked. She had come across the name somewhere else before. “Who’s Hardoon?”

  Marshall waved airily. “Just one of the people I’m dealing with.” He took his eyes off the fire and looked up at Deborah. Her face was only a few inches from his own, her eyes wide and steady, an expectant smile on her full lips.

  “You were saying something about the Bethlehems,” she said quietly, massaging his cheeks with the knuckle of her forefinger.

  Marshall smiled admiringly. Cool passionate lover, he thought. I must try to remember to take you with me.

  “Yes, we need something heavier. The wind’s going to blow a lot harder.”

  As he spoke Deborah moved her face against his, then brushed her lips softly across his forehead, murmuring to herself.

  Reflectively, Marshall finished his drink, then put it down and took her in both arms.