The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  ♦

  Maitland watched as the acetylene torch cut neatly through the steel buttress over the driving cabin. The whole section slipped slightly, and he helped the two mechanics raise it over the hood and put it down on the floor of the garage. Musgrave’s body was still lying bunched up below the dashboard. He leaned over the wheel and felt for the pulse, then signaled the other two to lift it out.

  They carried the driver over to a bench, stretched him out. A guard came out of the radio-control booth and walked over to Maitland. He was a tough, hard-faced man of indeterminate background, wearing the same black uniform as all Marshall’s personnel. Maitland wondered how large his private army was. The three members he had seen were obviously recruited independently; there were no service or rank tags on their shoulders and they treated the Bethlehem and himself as intruders.

  “There’s a big navy crawler on its way down from Hampstead,” the guard told Maitland curtly. “They’ll tow you back to the Green Park base.”

  Maitland nodded. He felt suddenly tired and looked around for somewhere to sit. The one bench was occupied by Musgrave’s body, so he squatted down on the floor against a ventilator shaft, listening to the wind drumming in the street outside. Now and then the blades of the fan stopped and reversed as a pressure pulse drove down the shaft, then picked up and sped on again.

  Apart from the Bethlehem there was only one other vehicle in the basement, a long double-tracked armored trailer being loaded by two guards from a freight lift. They brought up an endless succession of wooden crates, some loaded into the lift so rapidly that their lids were still waiting to be nailed down.

  Out of curiosity, Maitland wandered over to the carrier when the guards had gone down in the lift. He assumed the crates would be full of expensive furniture and tableware, and looked under one of the loose lids.

  Packed into the crates were six 3½ trench mortars, their wide green barrels thick with protective grease.

  The mortars were War Department issues, but there was no clearance seal on the sides of the crate listing their destination and authority. Turning the lid over, Maitland saw that it had been stamped in black dye: “Breathing apparatus. Hardoon Tower.”

  Most of the other cases were sealed, stamped variously with markings that identified them as oxyacetylene cylinders, trenching equipment, flares and pit props. Another open case, marked “Denims. Hardoon Tower.” contained a neatly stowed collection of the black uniforms he had seen Marshall’s men wearing. Hardoon Tower, Maitland pondered. He repeated the name to himself, trying to identify it, then remembered a newspaper profile he had read years earlier about the eccentric multimillionaire who owned vast construction interests and had built an elaborate underground bunker city on his estate near London at the height of the cold war.

  “O.K., Doctor?”

  He swung round to see the big tough-faced guard who had arranged his transport step slowly across the floor, arms swinging loosely at his sides. Whether he was armed was hard to tell, but his battledress jacket could have hidden a weapon.

  Maitland tapped the case full of trench mortars. “Just looking at this—breathing apparatus. Unusual design.”

  The guard scowled. “That’s a useful piece of equipment, Doctor. Very versatile. Let’s go, then.” As Maitland walked back across the basement the guard pivoted on one heel and followed close to his shoulder.

  “What’s Marshall trying to do?” Maitland asked amiably. “Start a war?”

  The guard watched Maitland thoughtfully. “Don’t know what we might start. But let’s not get too worried about it, Doctor. Sit down over there and take your pulse or something.”

  They wrapped Musgrave in a polythene shroud and lowered him into the turret of the Bethlehem. Maitland climbed in and wedged the body below the traverse, belting it down with the seat straps.

  When he tried to get out he found that someone was sitting on the hatch, his feet obscuring the plexiglass window. For a moment he wondered whether to force it, then decided to take the hint. A few minutes later the navy crawler arrived and backed down the ramp. He felt it hook up to the Bethlehem, then move forward up into the street.

  Powerful gusts of wind drove at the car, kicking it around. He gripped the traverse, swaying from side to side as the cabin plunged and bucked.

  All around him, in the streets outside, he could hear the sounds of falling masonry.

  FOUR

  The Corridors of Pain

  Three times, on the way hack to the Green Park depot, the car left the roadway. Caught by tremendous crosswinds that swung it about behind the Centurion like a hapless tail, the Bethlehem plunged across the pavement, almost tipping over onto its side.

  The streets were full of rubble and pieces of masonry, fragments of ornamented cornices from the older buildings, the remains of roof timbers strewn across the pavement, everywhere a heavy autumnlike fall of gray tiles.

  They reached the depot at Green Park which housed Combined Rescue Operations, and entered the long tunnel of concrete sandbags that led them into the covered transport pool. A dozen other vehicles, Centurions and Bethlehems with a couple of huge M5 Titan personnel carriers, were unloading and refueling. Three of them had RN insignia; the navy, to whom Maitland was attached, shared the depot, but all the personnel in the pool wore the same drab uniforms. They looked tired and dispirited, and Maitland found himself sharing their despair. As he climbed out of the Bethlehem he leaned for a few minutes against the car, trying to free himself of the muscle and mind numbing weariness from the buffeting he had received all day.

  He de-briefed himself quickly, then made his way toward the officers’ quarters where he shared a small cubicle with a navy surgeon called Avery. Eager for a full role in the emergency, particularly with the RAF playing no part, the navy had put together a scratch operations unit. With Andrew Symington’s help, Maifland had been assimilated with a minimum of formality. He had stayed with Andrew and his wife for a week, uselessly waiting for the wind to subside, and had been glad to be given a chance to do something positive.

  Maitland closed the door and sat down wearily on his bed, grunting to Avery, who was stretched out full length, his black wind suit unzipped.

  “Hello, Donald. What’s it like outside?”

  Maitland shrugged. “A slight east wind blowing up.” He took a cigarette from the silver case Avery passed to him. “I’ve been over at the Russell most of today. Not too pleasant. Looks like a foretaste of things to come. I hope everybody knows what they’re doing.”

  Avery grunted. “Of course they don’t. Reminds me of Mark Twain’s crack about the weather—everyone talks about it, but no one does anything.” He rolled over and switched on the portable radio standing on the floor below his bed. A fuzzy crackle sounded out eventually, almost drowned in the noise of people continually tramping up and down the corridor.

  Maitland lay back, listening to phrases from the news bulletins. The BBC was still transmitting on the Home Service, half-hourly news summaries interspersed with light music and an apparently endless stream of War Office orders and recommendations. So far the government appeared to be tacitly assuming that the wind would soon spend itself and that most people possessed sufficient food and water to survive unaided in their own homes. The majority of the troops were engaged in laying communications tunnels, repairing electricity lines and reinforcing their own installations.

  Avery switched the set off and sat up on one elbow for a moment, staring pensively at his wrist watch.

  “What’s the latest?” Maitland asked.

  Avery smiled somberly. “London Bridge is falling down,” he said quietly. “Wind speed’s up to 180. Listening between the lines, it sounds as if things are getting pretty bad. Colossal flooding along the south coast—most of Brighton sounds as if its been washed away. General chaos building up everywhere. What I want to know is, when are they going to start doing something?”

  “What can they do?”

  Avery gestured impatiently. �
�For God’s sake, you know what I mean, Donald. They’re going about this whole thing the wrong way, just telling people to stay indoors and hide under the staircase. What do they think this is—a zeppelin raid? They’re going to have the most fantastic casualties soon. Let alone a couple of typhoid and cholera epidemics.”

  Maitland nodded. He agreed with Avery but felt too tired to offer any comment.

  There was a familiar tattoo on the door, and Andrew Symington put his head in. He was off duty at eight, and came over in the communications tunnel across St. James’s Park to take his meals in the civilian mess at the depot before going over to the Park Lane Hotel. His wife’s baby had still not arrived, at least a fortnight overdue. Dora was unconsciously holding the child to herself.

  “We were just cursing these damn silly bulletins you people are putting out,” Avery said. “Are you trying to convince yourselves it’s a calm summer’s day?”

  “What’s the real news, Andrew?” Maitland pressed. “I got in half an hour ago and it sounded as if the Russell wasn’t the only place coming down.”

  “It isn’t,” Symington told him. His face looked drawn and tired. He lit a cigarette, inhaled quickly. “Everything I’ve heard indicates that we can expect the wind strength to go on increasing for several days more at least. Apparently localized areas of turbulence have to appear first, while the over-all wind strength continues to increase, and they’ve shown no signs of doing so. Whatever happens, it’s bound to go up another fifty at least.”

  Avery whistled. “Over 230! God Almighty.” He tapped the wooden wall partition which was springing backward and forward as air pressed its way past. “Do you think this place will stand it?”

  “This building probably will, even if it loses the roof, but already most of the domestic houses in the British Isles are starting to come down. Roofs are flying off, walls caving in—not all that many modern houses are fitted with basements. People are running out of food, trying to leave their homes to reach the aid stations. They’re being sucked out of their doorways before they know what’s hit them, carried half a mile within ten seconds.” Symington paused. “We aren’t getting much news in now from the States and western Europe, but you can imagine what the Far East looks like. Governmental control no longer exists. Most of the radio stations are just putting out weak local identification signals.”

  For half an hour they talked, then Symington left them and Maitland slipped off to sleep, still wearing his wind suit. He was vaguely aware of Avery’s getting up to go out on duty, then sank into a heavy restless sleep.

  Six hours later, as they listened to their briefing in one of the lecture rooms at the far end of the depot, the sounds of collapsing masonry thudded dimly in the distance. The walls shifted uneasily, as if one end of the depot were seized in the mandibles of some enormous insect. An outside wall carrying the stairway up to the roof at the windward end of the barracks had collapsed, dropping the stairway like a pile of plates. Luckily the internal walls that divided the stairway from the remainder of the barracks held long enough for them to extricate themselves and most of their luggage, but five minutes after they retreated to the adjacent building the barracks toppled in a whirling cloud of dust and exploding brickwork.

  The captain up on the dais raised his voice above the approaching rumble. “I’ll keep this short so we can get out before the place comes down on our necks. Wind speed’s up to 180, and frankly the overall situation is grim. The big job now is to move as many people as we can to underground shelters, and we’re pulling out of central London and setting up ten major command posts around the outer circular road. Ours is the U.S. Air Force base at Brandon Hall, near Kingston. The deep bunkers there should give us enough room to get a sick bay with about three hundred beds going. There’ll be a navy transport and rescue unit, and they’ll try to move people into all the deep shelters—railway tunnels, factory basements and so on—in the immediate area. It’s going to be pretty difficult. Some big new transports coming in from Woolwich are supposed to stand up to five-hundred-mile-an-hour gales, but even so we’ll only be able to move a small proportion of the people we find, and we’ll have to pick those who have food with them. Our own supplies are only good for about three weeks.”

  He paused and looked down at the rows of somber faces. “I hate to say it, but it looks as if casualties are going to be as high as fifty per cent.”

  Maitland repeated the figure to himself, trying to digest it. Impossible, he thought. Twenty-five million people? Surely they would cling to life somewhere, at the bottom of deep ditches, chewing old leaves and grass roots. He listened vaguely as the briefing continued, wondering if these preparations would soon prove as inadequate as the first had been.

  They shuffled out and took their places in one of the queues winding down the corridors to the transport pool, listening to the mounting rumble from the streets outside. Gusts of filthy air drove through, and the floorboards below Maitland’s feet were thick with dirt. The entire topsoil of the globe was being systematically loosened and windborne. The sky was black with dust.

  From the talk near him he filled in his impressions of the crisis. The government, centered in the War Office, were dug into their Whitehall bunkers, communicating by radio with the ring of command stations around London and with similar posts in the provinces. An estimated 1,000,000 men—the three armed services, national guard, civil defense and police—were directly controlled by the government and a good proportion of these were involved in organizing and preparing deep shelters wherever they existed. Only a small fraction, perhaps 200,000, were actually employed in rescue work.

  Maitland speculated shrewdly that preparations were now in hand for a final retreat of the COE inner core—government and service chiefs, with a few people such as Marshall—to some secret bastion where survival could be assured for a good deal longer. He had tried to report his discovery at Marshall’s Park Lane house, but the senior officers at the depot were too busy to listen to him, and anyway had no authority outside the unit. Besides, Hardoon, with his army of construction workers and fleets of equipment, might well be working for the government.

  When he finally slung his suitcase up into one of the half-tracked personnel carriers and climbed in after it, there were only a dozen men left in the depot.

  The troop carrier was shunted up against one of the Centurions, the two jibs locked together. Both vehicles were loaded with concrete slabs three feet long and 18 inches thick, canted to exaggerate the original slope of the armor plate and provide the minimum wind resistance.

  Maitland settled himself among the kitbags and suitcases and peered out through the narrow glass window, an inch-high slit just behind his head. Only two others were with him; an RAF flight sergeant and a young signals corporal.

  After a long wait the engines roared out and they edged forward up the exit ramp. As they neared the end of the ramp the horizontal door was retracted and the 180mph airstream moving across the flat parade ground lifted the carrier out like an enormous hand, slewing it around under a hail of fist-sized stones. The driver gunned the engine and pulled them back on course, and with the Centurion pulling ahead they moved toward the gateway and then through into Green Park. Maitland looked out at the darkened slopes. Stumps of trees stuck up through the turfless soil, littered with stones, gravel and miscellaneous debris that piled up against the embankment walls like refuse in an abandoned municipal dump.

  They stopped just past Hyde Park Corner in the entrance to Knightsbridge. Maitland pressed his face to the window slit, looked out at the dim outlines of the office blocks and apartment buildings in the darkness. All of them were shaking perceptibly, heavy tremors jolting the roadway under the carrier. The roofs had been stripped away and Maitland could see the sky through the open top-floor windows. Many of the upper floors had fallen in. All the small shops and boutiques had been completely gutted, their plate glass smashed, interiors cleaned out to the last hatpin and hair curler.

  Swinging to
the right of the roadway, on the way dislodging the shell of a Jaguar that had trapped itself in a shopfront and now skittered off ahead of them, they avoided the debris piled across their path and pressed on toward the Brompton Road. As they passed Lowndes Square Maitland craned to look up at his apartment house, counting the floors to his own apartment. The building was still intact, but all its lights were out. As they moved on he wondered what had happened to Susan.

  Harrod’s department store lay in ruins, brownstone facing tiles lying thickly across the roadway, the wind picking like a thousand vultures at the tangle of girders and masonry, detaching fragments of furniture and tattered drapery and carrying them away in its fleeting clasp.

  Shaking his head ruefully, Maitland left the window and searched for his cigarettes. He was taking out the pack when the half-track braked sharply. For a moment it hesitated and then began to tip backward and rolled slowly down a shallow incline that had opened in the roadway under the rear section of the vehicle.

  Above the din of the wind Maitland could hear the driver shouting into his radio. He felt the Centurion throw its engine into a lower gear, trying to pull them out of the subsidence. The weight of the carrier had apparently caved in a shallow sewer traversing the road. Tilting at a ten-degree angle, the carrier’s tracks raced and skated. Gradually it slid helplessly down the incline, pulling the Centurion after it. Finally it rooted itself immovably. The driver raced his engine, flogging the gears like a maniac, while the Centurion jerked and thrust helplessly. Then both engines stopped, and for a few minutes the drivers bellowed into their microphones.

  Through the window Maitland could see the sides of a six-footdeep ditch. Behind was the ragged edge of the asphalt roadway, ahead the massive outline of the tank, its rear track wheels still on the road.

  The driver opened his communicating door and came swarming aft, furious with what had happened, waving his arms and shouting: “Off, off, off! Don’t sit here like a lot of helpless sheep.”