The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  Lanyon looked across at Luigi, massaging his painful neck with one hand. Dimly he remembered the huge distraught Italian in the damaged church, hurling the debris off the pews like a maddened bull.

  Patricia stumbled across to him and he put his arm around her, pressed her head into his shoulder.

  “Steve, are you all right?” she gasped. “Who are they? What are they going to do with us?”

  Lanyon pulled himself together, managed to smile back at Luigi. He spoke to the interpreter, a small thin-faced man with a striped shirt.

  “Sure, I remember him. Tell him I’m just about in one piece, but I could use some water.” While the thin-faced man interpreted, Lanyon patted Patricia’s shoulder. “We ran into him in a small town on the way out of Genoa. His family were trapped in a church. We helped get them out.”

  Luigi nodded to the interpreter, gestured them all across the storeroom to the door. Slowly they made their way out, avoiding the body of the gunman lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood. Luigi picked up the Mauser, rammed it into his belt next to Lanyon’s ·45. They entered the corridor, then turned off through a small doorway into a narrow low-ceilinged room where a single light burned low over a bare wooden table. Inset into the Walls were four bunks, the bedding rumpled and filthy.

  One of the men snapped off the corridor lights and closed the door behind them, but Lanyon noticed a small printing press on the trolley outside.

  Luigi pulled up a chair by the table and Lanyon lowered himself slowly into it, Patricia sitting down on the edge of the bed behind him. Luigi barked at the two men; one slipped outside and returned a moment later with a jug full of water, and the little interpreter rooted along the shelf over the fireplace and produced a grimy glass. Luigi took it, pulled the cork out of a bottle of chianti, poured some into the glass and passed it across to Patricia, then pushed the bottle over to Lanyon.

  Lanyon swabbed down his face and neck, then tore one pocket off his shirt and pasted it over the wound on his forehead. Slightly refreshed, he sat back and put his hand reassuringly on Patricia’s knee, squeezed her thigh.

  First tipping the neck of the bottle toward Luigi, he filled his mouth with the harsh bitter wine, then passed it back across the table.

  Luigi pulled up a chair and sat down. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Ship? You?” He spoke to the interpreter, who was clearing the jug of water.

  “Luigi asks if you go back for your ship?”

  Lanyon nodded. “Trying to. How can we get there—the submarine base? You know any covered roads?”

  The interpreter translated this for Luigi, and the two men looked at each other silently for a moment. Then Luigi frowned and muttered something.

  “Very strong wind,” the interpreter explained. “Can’t move on the streets now. Big hotels, houses—” he snapped his fingers ‘—all going bang!

  Lanyon glanced at his watch. It was 2:35. Soon it would be dark; movement would be impossible until the next morning.

  “What about everything in the storeroom?” he asked curtly. “How did you get it up here? You were carrying something big in just now.”

  There was a lengthy consultation, during which the interpreter shrugged repeatedly and Luigi appeared to be trying to make up his mind.

  Lanyon spoke to Patricia over his shoulder. “They must be looting the warehouses and stores around here. Presumably looting is now punishable by death. I suppose he’s afraid we’ll report him to the military governor.”

  The other man, older, with a dry wizened face and a cropped skull, joined in the conversation, throwing sharp reminders across the table at Luigi, who was fingering his gun belt uneasily. Finally he appeared to come to a decision. He rapped something out and they all fell silent.

  Luigi smiled slowly at Lanyon, relaxing perceptibly, then leaned forward and pulled a crumpled bundle of paper out of his hip pocket. Carefully his big workman’s fingers pried the pages open, and he spread out a battered map of the city, streets ringed crudely with penciled circles, marked into a series of zones.

  The interpreter pulled up a chair and pointed to the map. “We take you,” he said to Lanyon after he and Luigi had muttered softly to each other. “But, er, you know—” he made a gesture around the eyes, placing the tips of his fingers together over the bridge of his nose.

  “Blindfold?” Lanyon suggested.

  “Si, blindfold.” The interpreter smiled, then elaborated slowly. “And blindfold afterward, you understand? All blindfold.”

  Lanyon nodded. Luigi was watching narrowly, sizing him up.

  “Looks as if they’re happy,” Lanyon said to Patricia.

  “How can they take us, though?” she asked.

  Lanyon shrugged. “Cellars, basements, underground tunnels. An old city like Genoa must be honeycombed with secret passageways. I suppose this monastery had one down to the city for the benefit of the monks on Saturday night in the bad old days. They’ve been moving some pretty big stuff in so I should think we’re in luck. The only problem is how to get into the base itself once we reach the downtown section of the city. We’ll just have to pray we’ll be able to pick up transport somewhere. There isn’t a hope of our covering even five yards out in the open on our own.”

  He watched the big Italian tracing a route on the map, then spoke to the interpreter.

  “Tell me, is his wife O.K.? She was in the church.”

  When the interpreter nodded, he added: “Tell Luigi I’m sorry about the shooting in here.”

  The interpreter grinned, began to chuckle to himself.

  “That’s O.K.,” he said. “More for us, eh?”

  Single file, Luigi leading with the interpreter, followed by Lanyon and Patricia, the third man in the rear, they entered the passageway running down from the monastery.

  This had been cut straight through the soft chalk of the cliff, and ran for about a mile, linking together three churches with the monastery. Six feet high and about a yard across, it was just wide enough for the trolley, but the effort of moving it uphill must have been enormous. How far below the surface they were Lanyon found it difficult to estimate. They emerged into the crypt of the nearest church and for the first time could hear the wind drumming past overhead, its deep all-pervading whine singing through the angles in the shattered ruins. Then the tunnel sank belowground again and the sounds were lost.

  Gradually Lanyon noticed that the air had begun to come to life in the passageway. Odd shifts of wind edged past, periodically sudden gusts of grit billowed into their faces, and Luigi would stop and switch off his torch. However, it was obvious he was more afraid of the military authorities than of the wind.

  “What speed is it now?” Lanyon asked the interpreter as they crouched down during one of the pauses, waiting for Luigi to return from reconnoitering ahead.

  “Three hundred kilometers,” the man replied. “Maybe more.”

  Lanyon jerked a finger upward. “What about Genoa? People all right?”

  The interpreter laughed shortly. He spread his hands out sideways in a quick movement. “All phht,” he said. “Gone with the wind. Everything blown down. Luigi save things—radios, jukeboxes, you know, TV’s. All for tomorrow.”

  Lanyon smiled to himself at the man’s naïveté and superoptimism in assuming that when the wind subsided their stock of TV sets and washing machines would make easily negotiable currency. About the only thing that would be of any immediate use was the printing press. After this holocaust the reassembling bureaucracies of the world would have their presses working night and day churning out paper to fill the vacuum left by the wind.

  The second church had collapsed into its crypt and a detour supported by small girders had been driven through the piles of masonry. Now the wind filled the tunnel, blowing straight through at a steady 10 or 15 miles per hour. They had reached the midtown section of the city and the passageway took advantage of the old city wall, running along beside it for half a mile as it curved down into the center of modern Ge
noa toward the harbor. The floor was slick with moisture and twice he and Patricia slipped onto their hands.

  The passageway opened out into the middle of a maze of tomblike vaults, abandoned wine cellars somewhere off the main square. Ancient stairways, deep dips worn down their centers, spiraled away to upper galleries. Luigi pulled out his map and he and the interpreter began to confer, pointing in various directions around them.

  Lanyon went over to them. He indicated the vaulted ceiling, and said: “Why don’t we get up to the street, see if we can spot a military transport?”

  Luigi shook his head slowly with a grim smile, and spoke to the interpreter, who took Lanyon’s arm and led him up a ramp to the gallery above. They climbed a further staircase, leaving Patricia and two men in a small circle of light far below, then moved along a ledge across the massive blocks of the city wall. Ahead of them was a foot-wide arrow slit. The interpreter gestured Lanyon over to it and he craned up and saw that a thick piece of perspex had been fitted into the hole, affording a view over the entire city.

  Directly below were the ragged remains of some building which had collapsed, exposing this section of the city wall. The rectangular outlines of the foundations suggested that it had been a multistoried office block, but almost nothing of it was left.

  Beyond it Genoa stretched toward the sea a mile away.

  To Lanyon it appeared to be undergoing a massive artillery bombardment. On all sides the remains of houses and shops were collapsing, exploding in clouds of debris and rubble that vanished in a few seconds, swept out toward the sea on the endless conveyor of the air stream. The scene reminded Lanyon of World War II Berlin, a vast desert of gutted ruins, isolated walls that ran up five or six stories, buildings stripped to their steel superstructures, streets that had vanished under the piles of masonry, leaving a dead land as shapeless and amorphous as a slag heap.

  To the southwest, half a mile away, an enormous blur of spray hung over the port area, for once obscuring the ceiling of red-brown dust that had covered them for the last week. Lanyon could just make out the square roofs of the naval base, revealed now that the intervening buildings had come down, but the pens themselves were too low to be visible.

  The interpreter called to him, and left the window and made his way down to the others below. Suddenly Lanyon began to doubt whether they could possibly reach the pens. It was plain that no surface transport was moving around, and the tunnels would never extend as far as the dock area, let alone below the boundary of the base.

  Patricia was watching him anxiously and he gave her an encouraging smile. Together they moved after Luigi as he climbed down a narrow spiral stairway that led off one of the side tunnels. Here the stonework was of more recent origin. The steps were less worn, and a hand rail of extruded piping had been fitted. Lanyon was wondering where the stairway led when Luigi reached a door at the bottom and wrenched it back.

  Immediately a gust of foul air drove up into their faces.

  They had entered the sewers. Hands shielding their mouths, they stepped out of the stairway into a narrow stone landing that overlooked the sewer, a long cavern 15 feet in diameter that wound away from them. It had almost run dry, but a narrow stream of fluid a few inches deep trickled along the bottom of the course, its surface rippled by the air driving across it.

  Flashing his torch, Luigi examined the roof and the arching semicircle of damp brickwork, dented here and there by the impact of the buildings collapsing above. They began to move along the ledge. A hundred yards ahead they crossed a small bridge that took them through a narrow archway into a parallel sewer, which divided and curved westward toward the harbor. Smaller branch sewers joined it, but most of the way they were able to stay on the ledge, only twice having to get down into the course itself to surmount an obstruction.

  The sewer was widening almost the size of a subway tunnel. Trying to guess where they were being led, Lanyon suddenly noticed a second odor, sharp and tangy, overlaying that of the sewer. Brine! They were nearing the sea. Then he remembered that, as he berthed the Terrapin, he had seen the vents of half a dozen sewer pipes just below the harbor wall some two hundred yards from the sub-pens. A long concrete breakwater, topped with double wave barriers and guard towers, had reached out into the harbor, separating the pens from the rest of the basin. He racked his brains wondering how they could surmount it.

  “Steve! Look out!”

  He stopped and glanced back at Patricia, who was pointing into the tunnel ahead. Luigi and the others had halted, watching a powerful torrent of water sweep through the tunnel, sluicing in from the sea outside. It swilled past, ten feet deep, only a few inches from the ledge on which they were standing, and then slowly slacked off and was sucked out again.

  “Looks as if something just caved in and let the sea back for a moment,” Lanyon told Patricia. “These sewers are slightly below water level, but with luck the wind will have lowered the surface enough for us to get out.”

  The speed of the air moving past them increased sharply. They rounded a bend and suddenly saw daylight 50 yards ahead, the ragged end of the sewer mouth. Beyond, the sea rose up like a range of massive gray mountains, flecked with huge whitecaps, driving offshore into the distant blur of spray.

  Cautiously they edged toward the sewer’s mouth, Luigi waving them on. Ten yards or so of brickwork had collapsed, recessing the mouth below the overhanging ledge of the jetty above. The heavy caissons of the concrete pier rooted down through the now exposed mud flats. Luigi pointed to the right toward the sub-pens, and Lanyon saw that the breakwater had been smashed and lay on its side in huge battered sections a hundred yards out in the harbor.

  “We leave you here,” the interpreter told him. “To the right, one hundred meters, you get into the dock. Then OK”

  Lanyon nodded, took Patricia’s arm. Leaning over the edge of the sewer, where the last of the seawater was dripping out, he lowered her down to the mud flat ten feet below, letting her drop when she was a few feet off the ground. She sank to her knees in the slimy ooze, paddled slowly through the mud toward the firmer ground under the sewer, supporting herself against the concrete pillars.

  Lanyon turned to Luigi, held his square hand firmly and patted his shoulder.

  The big man smiled back then pulled the ·45 out of his belt and passed it to Lanyon.

  Lanyon turned to the interpreter. “Tell him I’ll vote for him if he’ll run as next mayor of Genoa.”

  Luigi roared, slapped Lanyon on the shoulder and helped him down over the edge of the sewer.

  Lanyon dropped up to his thighs in the soft black mud, waved to the figures above for the last time and waded slowly between the pillars to where Patricia was sheltering on a narrow flat against the rear wall of the pier. He took her arm and they edged along the wall, straddling the tangle of twisted girders that were all that remained of the breakwater. Inside the submarine base they were still sheltered by the overhang of the pier, but the air roaring past sucked at them like a giant vacuum.

  They clung to the tangled seaweed fronds and barnacles encrusted to the pillars, and Lanyon pointed out the jutting roof of the first sub-pen 50 yards away. With a jolt of fear he realized that the receding sea had exposed the floor of the pen, and that although this would enable them to get into the pens it meant that there might be insufficient water to float out the Terrapin. Fortunately the sub was berthed in the farthest of the semicircle of pens, and the wind would be driving the sea across it.

  They reached the first pen and pulled themselves around the lip into the gateway, their feet gripping the concrete floor. Ahead of them the steel shutters towered up to the roof. They ran over to the grille, and through the slits Lanyon could see the stranded hull of one of the K-class subs, lying on its side in the dim gray light.

  The vanes of the grille were open, leaving two-foot gaps. Lanyon lifted Patricia up onto the lowest gap, and she clambered through into the great hall of the pen. Lanyon followed her and they ran under the towering underbell
y of the stranded submarine, its moorings snapped and hanging loose, conning tower tilted at a 45° angle.

  They reached the stairway to the cargo pier, climbed up past the submarine, and then turned into the corridor that led to the control deck at the far end of the pen.

  “Well, Pat, we’ve got this far,” Lanyon said, as they paused in the corridor to regain their breath. He pulled the torch from his jacket, switched it on.

  “Doesn’t look as if there’s anyone around, Steve. Do you think the Terrapin will still be here?”

  “God knows. If not, we’ll come back and sit the storm out in the big K-boat.”

  They reached the control deck, peered into the abandoned offices. The heavy concrete walls of the base were still holding without any difficulty, but somewhere a ventilator had collapsed and air poured through the vents, blowing the papers off the desks and shelves. Litter lay everywhere, drawers pulled out, water dispensers smashed, broken suitcases strewn about the floor.

  “Left in a hurry,” Lanyon commented. “Seems to me that this is a pretty good place to sit tight. Where the hell have they all gone?”

  They hurried along the dark communications corridor, crossing the control decks of the next three pens. As they passed the fifth the floor suddenly shifted slightly, and Lanyon tripped and collided with the wall.

  “Good God, don’t tell me it can move even this place! The sea must be breaking over the entrance to the pen, driving the whole unit back into the shore.”

  “Come on, Steve, let’s hurry,” Patricia said. She held onto his arm as they ran down the corridor. They stumbled into the last control deck, dived down the stairway into the cargo depot. As they reached the bottom the door out into the jetty opened, lights flooded on and two sailors peered round. They gaped at Lanyon and Patricia, clothes ripped to shreds, covered with thick mud up to their waists, Lanyon’s bruised face barely recognizable under his beard. Their hands moved to the revolvers in their holsters, and then one of them jumped to attention and snapped out a salute.