The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  Marshall turned the fine angle around the shaft and to his surprise found it empty. The emergency door was slightly open; a narrow strip of light crossed the corridor.

  Stepping over to it, Marshall peered through.

  The room was empty. Dull reflections of the TV screens swung slowly to and fro across the ceiling, but Crighton and the girl had gone.

  Suddenly, from the main corridor, two shots roared out heavily, followed by a sharp cry of terror, and then, an agonizing second later, by a third shot. The sounds stunned the air. Flashes of light reflected off the glass panels of the open doorway.

  Wrenching open the emergency door, Marshall kicked back a table carrying two of the TV sets, ran quickly across the room.

  Crighton and the girl lay together in the corridor, Crighton face downward with his head tilted against the wall, hands raised in front of him. The girl was crumpled untidily behind him, unkempt hair over her face, her skirt around her waist.

  Beyond them, waiting for Marshall by the staircase, stood the black figure of Kroll, the automatic jutting from his hand.

  “Thanks for covering me,” he said thickly. He pointed to the office near the stairway. “I was in there. Thought they’d try to make a dash for it when they heard you go around the side.”

  The drab air of the bunker was stained with sharp sweet fumes that stung Marshall’s eyes. He bent down over the bodies, checked them carefully. A damp strip of handkerchief was clenched in the girl’s hand like a dead flower. For a long moment he stared at it, then gradually became aware of Kroll’s boots two or three feet away from him.

  He started to get up, then saw the automatic in Kroll’s hand, leveled at his face. The heavy barrel followed him unwaveringly. Kroll’s head was low between his shoulders, his eyes hidden behind the visor of his helmet.

  Marshall felt his courage ebbing. “What’s happening, Kroll?” he managed to say in a steady voice. He moved toward Kroll, who stepped back and let him pass, training the ·45 on Marshall’s head.

  “Sorry, Marshall,” he said flatly. “R.H.”

  “What? Hardoon?” Marshall hesitated, estimating the distance to the stairway. Kroll was a few paces behind him. So Hardoon had decided to dispense with him, now that Marshall had served his purpose! He should have realized this when Kroll had been sent to collect them. “Don’t be crazy,” he said. “You must have your wires crossed.”

  When he was six feet from the stairway he suddenly dived forward, swerving from side to side, and managed to put his left hand on the stair rail.

  Aiming carefully, Kroll shot him twice, first in the back, the impact of the bullet lifting Marshall onto the bottom step and knocking him off his feet, the second shot into his stomach as he toppled around, his great body uncontrollable, his arms swinging like windmills. He stumbled past Kroll, spun heavily against the wall and crashed downward into a corner.

  He was about ten feet from Kroll, who waited quietly until the narrow stream of blood meandering across the concrete floor finally reached his feet, then made his way quickly up the staircase.

  “Simon!”

  The girl was crouched behind the door, fingers over her face. As she saw Kroll she screamed and backed away from him, almost tripping over the recumbent figure of Andrew Symington, half conscious on the floor by the sofa.

  Kroll jerked the ·45 back into his jacket, then stepped over to Deborah, cornering her behind the desk.

  “Where is he?” she shouted at him. “Simon? What have you—”

  Kroll knocked her against the wall with the back of his hand, forced her to the floor.

  “Shut up!” he snarled. “Crazy yapping!”

  He listened carefully to the sounds shifting around the bunker, kicking the girl sharply with his boot when her blubbering interrupted him, then picked up the phone.

  As he waited he looked down at Deborah, and his right hand edged back toward the ·45. His fingers flexed around the heavy butt, drawing it out.

  He searched for the back of Deborah’s neck, then noticed the auburn curls tipping forward over her head. They were soft and wispy, more delicate than anything Kroll had ever seen. Like a huge bull entranced by a butterfly, he watched them, fascinated, feeling his blood thicken, ignoring the voice on the phone.

  His hand relaxed and withdrew from his jacket.

  “All set,” he said slowly into the phone. “Just one of them.” He glanced down at Deborah. “I’ll be about ten minutes.”

  Lurching painfully, Marshall dragged himself into the darkened communications room, heaved up onto his feet and then slumped into a chair in front of the radio transmitter. For a few minutes he coughed uncontrollably, fighting for air, his body drowning in the enormous lake of ice which filled his chest. As he rolled helplessly from side to side his eyes stared at the blood eddying across the floor below the chair. The trail led back into the corridor, past the two bodies to the stairway. How many hours had elapsed since he had first set out for the transmitter he could no longer remember, but the sight of the bodies revived him momentarily, making him realize that his great strength was ebbing rapidly, and he leaned forward on his elbows and began to switch on the set.

  Around him the bunker was silent. The ventilator system had been turned off and the air was stale and motionless, still stained by the acrid fumes of the cordite. Along the wall behind him the teletypes were at last quiet, the sole sounds provided by the low hum of the TV sets. Only two of the screens showed a picture, their reflections swinging left and right across the dark ceiling.

  Fumbling helplessly, Marshall paused to steady himself, trying to conserve what little air he could force into his lungs. The wound through his chest wall felt as wide as a lance blade, each breath turning it between his shattered ribs.

  Half an hour later, when he had almost gone, the set came alive between his fingers. Seizing the microphone with both hands, he rammed it to his lips, began to speak into it carefully, doggedly repeating his message over and over again, heedless of the replies interrupting him from the other end, until its meaning had gone and it became an insane gabble.

  When he had finally finished, his voice a whisper, he let the microphone fall through his fingers to the floor, then jerked his chair slightly and faced the TV screens. Only one picture was being transmitted now, a white blur of flickering dust that crossed the screen from left to right, unvarying in its speed and direction.

  The focus of his eyes fading, Marshall lay back, watching it blindly. His gray handsome face was almost in repose, the skin hollowing around his eyes and temples, draining his lips. Unaware of his own breathing, he felt himself sink down toward the bottom of the ice lake. Around him the stale air grew steadily colder. A few sounds shifted somewhere above in the empty bunker, echoing down the silent ventilator shafts and through the deserted corridors of his end.

  SEVEN

  The Gateways of the Whirlwind

  “How is he?”

  “Not too bad. Mild concussion, hairline fracture above the right ear. Second-degree burns to the palms and soles.”

  “He’ll pull through, though?”

  “Oh, yes. If we do, he will.”

  The voices drifted away. Donald Maitland stirred pleasantly, half asleep, almost enjoying the sensation of drowsy warmth coupled with a slight nausea. Now and then the voices would return. Sometimes he could only hear the rise and fall of their tones as they moved among the patients; at other times, when they discussed his own case, standing over him, he could hear them plainly.

  He was on the mend, at least. Turning lazily, he tried to make himself comfortable, tried to feel the stiff caress of crisp sheets against his face.

  Yet he could never find them. Whenever he searched, the bed and pillow were hard and unyielding as he realized his hands were in plaster casts.

  He wished he could wake. Then sleep would come again, numbing the pain in his head and across his shoulders, dulling the nausea that made him want to vomit.

  “Looks a lot better. Don’t yo
u agree?”

  “No doubt about it. But those burns are a little worrying. How the hell did he get them?”

  “Forget exactly. I think he was trapped in the boiler room at a generating station. They may be carbide burns…”

  Their voices moved away as consciousness returned, paused and then faded. Maitland stretched and flexed his legs, pressed his feet against the foot of the bed.

  Burns?

  How? He remembered being trapped in the Underground station at Knightsbridge. Had he been transferred to another hospital center, perhaps had his identity confused?

  The voices drifted beside him, murmuring over another patient. Maitland felt cold, his head pounded. He wanted to call them, tell them they were overconfident.

  They moved off slowly, their voices lost in the sounds of some enormous fan.

  Burns?

  With an effort, he opened his eyes, slowly moved his head.

  He was blind!

  He sat up and groped at the bed around him, half expecting them to come back, to feel restraining hands press him back onto the pillow, hear the first words of consolation.

  He picked up something large and angular, heavy in his hand.

  A brick!

  He nestled it between his knees. What was this doing in bed with him? His fingers groped at its rough surface, pulling away pieces of fine mortar. He looked around, hoping to attract their attention, but their voices had vanished: the ward was silent. Exhausted suddenly, he dropped the brick, lay back limply. Instantly the voices returned.

  “How did the grafts come along?”

  “Very well, all in all. We’ll take his arms out of the cradle tomorrow…”

  Maitland smiled to himself. Perhaps they were in darkness, unable to see that his hands were under the sheet. He flexed his fingers, picked another object off the bed. A torch. Instinctively, he switched it on. The beam filled his tiny cubicle, illuminating piles of shattered bricks on either side of him, a concrete beam two feet broad running across his knees, supporting a large sign.

  Huge letters ran along it. They read: CLEARANCE SALE. For a moment Maitland stared at it, sitting upright, tracing the letters with his fingers. Then, abruptly assembling his mind again, he shone the torch around himself. So he was not in a hospital as he had imagined, but still trapped in the tunnel. The voices, the diagnoses, the warm bed, had all been products of fantasy, wish fulfillments summoned by his exhausted body. His head throbbed. Maitland shone the torch at his hands, kneading the broken skin. He was half surprised to see that they were not badly burned, and wondered why his mind should have produced this curious piece of circumstantial detail. Perhaps he bad remembered a case history of one of his former patients. Looking around him, he searched for some possible exit, but the narrow space in which he lay seemed completely sealed. Exhausted, he lay back, still shining the torch.

  “I think we can move him out tomorrow. How do you feel?”

  “Pretty good, thank you, sir. I’m very grateful to you. Any news about the wind?”

  The voices had returned. Even the patient had now joined in. Too tired to understand why these delusions should persist so powerfully even when he was fully conscious, Maitland lay back, rotating his head to find a more comfortable position. He listened interestedly to the voices, the first hallucinatory agents he had ever encountered, his mind automatically analyzing them. Moving his head, he noticed that a wide circular shaft about two feet in diameter formed part of his pillow. It moved diagonally downward at an angle of about 30°, and he found he could hear the voices more clearly when his left ear was pressed against the shaft. Abruptly he sat up, pulling himself roughly onto his knees. Clearing away as much of the loose masonry as he could, he examined the shaft, pressing his ear against it. In the majority of positions he could hear nothing, but, by some acoustical freak, in a small area of a few square inches the voices were clearly magnified. Obviously the ventilator shaft, now disused, led down into the station only a few yards below, and was reflecting the voices of the doctors moving about their patients, particularly a burnt power-station worker whose cot was directly below the mouth of the shaft. The galvanized iron plating was only an eighth of an inch thick, but there was nothing in the rubble around him which he could use to cut it. He pounded on it with his fists, shouted against it, pressing his ear to the focal area to hear any answering call. He hanged it tirelessly with a brick, to no avail. Finally he picked up the torch, carefully selected the focal area and began to tap patiently with it, whenever he heard the doctors below, the ‘shave-and-a-haircut, shampoo’ rhythm of childhood.

  Two hours later, several eternities after the battery had exhausted itself, he heard an answering shout below.

  ♦

  After 6 o’clock the lounge would begin to fill. One of the stewards behind the bar switched on the phonograph and turned up the recessed lighting, masking the thin cream-and-chartreuse paint on the fresh concrete, and so the transformation of a recreation bunker 150 feet below USAF Brandon Hall into a Mayfair cocktail lounge would be acceptably complete.

  Donald Maitland never ceased to wonder at the effectiveness of the illusion. Here at least was a small oasis of illusion. Beyond the lounge, with its chromium bar and red leather, its tinsel and plastic lighting, were service sections as bleak as anything in the Seigfried Line, but as the uniformed officers and their wives and the senior civilians began to make their way in there was little hint of the 350mph gales at present ravaging the world.

  His five days at Brandon Hall he had largely spent in the recreation lounge. Fortunately his injuries at Knightsbridge were comparatively minor, and half an hour from now, at 6:30 P.M., he would officially report for duty again.

  He watched Charles Avery carry their drinks over to the table, and stirred himself pleasantly. Americans were expert at providing the civilized amenities of life with a minimum of apparent effort or pomp, and in his five days at Brandon Hall he had begun to forget Susan’s tragic death and its implied judgment on himself.

  “Up to three-fifty,” Avery remarked somberly, trying to straighten the creases in his black battledress jacket with its surgeon’s insignia. “There’s damn little left up there now. How do you feel?”

  Maitland shrugged, listening to the low rhythm of a foxtrot be had last heard years earlier when he had taken Susan out to the Milroy. “OK I wouldn’t exactly say I was eager to get back into action, but I’m ready enough. It’s been pleasant down here. These five days have given me my first real chance in years to see myself calmly. Pity I’ve got to leave.”

  Avery nodded. “Frankly, I wouldn’t bother. There’s little you’ll be able to do to help. The Americans are still sending out a few vehicles, but in general everything’s closing down. Contact between separate units seem pretty limited and outside news is coming through very slowly.”

  “How’s London holding out?”

  Avery shook his head, peered into his glass. “London? It doesn’t exist. No more than New York, or Tokyo or Moscow. The TV monitor tower at Hammersmith just shows a sea of rubble. There’s not a single building standing.”

  “It’s amazing casualties are so light.”

  “I don’t know whether they are. My guess is that half a million people in London have been killed. As far as Tokyo or Bombay are concerned it’s anybody’s guess. At least fifty per cent, I should think. There’s a simple physical limit to how long an individual can stand up to a 350-mile-an-hour air stream. Thank God for the Underground system.”

  Maitland echoed this. After his rescue at Knightsbridge he had been astounded by the efficient organization that existed below street level, a sub-world of dark labyrinthine tunnels and shafts crowded with countless thousands of almost motionless beings, huddled together on the unlit platforms with their drab bundles of possessions, waiting patiently for the wind to subside, like the denizens of some vast gallery of the dead waiting for their resurrection.

  Where the others were Maitland could only guess. A fortunate aspect of the ove
rcrowding of most major cities and metropolitan complexes around the world was that expansion had forced construction to take place not only upward and outward, but downward as well. Thousands of inverted buildings hung from street level—car parks, underground cinemas, sub-basements and sub-sub-basements—which now provided tolerable shelter, sealed off from the ravaging wind by the collapsing structures above. Millions more must be clinging to life in these readymade bunkers, sandwiched in narrow angles between concrete ledges, their ears deafened by the roar above, completely out of contact with everyone else.

  What would happen when their supplies of food began to run out?

  “Six-fifteen, Donald,” Avery cut in. He finished his drink and sat forward, ready to leave. “I’m working at Casualty Intake from now on. The Americans are shipping most of their top brass over to their bases in Greenland—the wind’s about fifty miles an hour lower than here. Rumor has it that they’re converting some big underground ICBM shelters inside the Arctic Circle, and with luck a few useful Nato personnel may be invited along to do the rough work. From now on I’m going to keep my eyes open for some amenable two-star general with a sprained ankle to whom I can make myself indispensable as back-scratcher and houseboy. I advise you to do the same.”

  Maitland turned and looked curiously at Avery, was surprised to see that the surgeon was perfectly serious. “I admire your shrewdness,” he said quietly. “But I hope we can look after ourselves if we have to.”

  “Well, we can’t,” Avery scoffed. “Let’s face it, we haven’t really done so for a long time. I know it sounds despicable, but adaptability is the only real biological qualification for survival. At the moment a pretty grim form of natural selection is taking place, and frankly I want to be selected. Sneer at me if you wish—I willingly concede you that posthumous right.” He paused for a moment, waiting for Maitland to reply, but the latter sat staring bleakly into his glass, and Avery asked: “By the way, heard anything of Andrew Symington?”