Ballard, J G - The Wind from Nowhere

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THE WIND FROM NOWHERE
by J.G. Ballard
Copyright 1962 by J.G. Ballard
Published by arrangement with the author's agent.
BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, JUNE 1962
CONTENTS
1 The Coming of the Dust
2 From the Submarine Pens
3 Vortex over London
4 The Corridors of Pain
5 The Scavengers
6 Death in a Bunker
7 The Gateways of the Whirlwind
8 The Tower of Hardoon
1
The Coming of the Dust
The dust came first.
Donald Maitland noticed it as he rode back in the taxi from London Airport, after waiting
a fruitless 48 hours for his PanAmerican flight to Montreal. For three days not a single aircraft
bad got off the ground. Weather conditions were freak and persistent--ten-tenths cloud and a
ceiling of 700 feet, coupled with unusual surface turbulence, savage crosswinds of almost
hurricane force that whipped across the runways and had already groundlooped two 707's on their
take-off runs. The great passenger terminus building and the clutter of steel huts behind it were
clogged with thousands of prospective passengers, slumped on their baggage in long straggling
queues, trying to make sense of the continuous crossfire of announcements and counter-
announcements.
Something about the build-up of confusion at the airport warned Maitland that it might be
another two or three days before he actually took his seat in an aircraft. He was well back in a
queue of about 300 people, and many of these were husbands standing in for their wives as well.
Finally, fed up and longing for a bath and a soft bed, he had picked up his two suitcases,
shouldered his way-through the melee of passengers and airport police to the car foyer, and
climbed into a taxi.
The ride back to London depressed him. It took half an hour to get out of the airport, and
then the Great West Road was a chain of jams. His departure from England, long pondered and
planned, culmination of endless heart-searching (not to speak of the professional difficulties
involved in switching his research fellowship at the Middlesex to the State Hospital at Vancouver)
had come to a dismal anticlimax, all the more irritating as he had given in to the rather
adolescent whim of walking out without telling Susan.
Not that she would have been particularly upset. At the beach house down at Worthing where
she was spending the summer, the news would probably have been nothing more than an excuse for
another party or another sports coupé, whichever seemed the most interesting. Still, Maitland
_had_ hoped that the final quiet letter of resignation with its Vancouver postmark might have
prompted at least a momentary feeling of pique, a few seconds of annoyance, on Susan's part. He
had hoped that even the most obtuse of her boy friends would detect it, and it would make them
realize that he was something more than her private joke figure.
Now, however, the pleasure of such a letter would have to be deferred. Anyway, Maitland
reflected, it was only a small part of the great feeling of release he had experienced since his
final decision to leave England. As the taxi edged through the Hounslow traffic, he looked out at
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the drab shopfronts and grimy areaways, the congested skyline against the dark low cloud like a
silhouette of hell. It was only 4 o'clock but already dusk was coming in, and most of the cars had
their lights on. The people on the pavements had turned up their collars against the hard gritty
wind which made the late June day seem more like early autumn.
Chin in one hand, Maitland leaned against the window, reading the flapping headlines on
the newspaper stands.
QUEEN MARY AGROUND NEAR CHERBOURG
High Winds Hamper Rescue Launches
A good number of would-be passengers who should have picked up the liner at Southampton
had been at the airport, Maitland remembered, but she had been over a week late on her live-day
crossing of the Atlantic, having met tremendous seas headwinds like a wall of steel. If they were
actually trying to take off passengers, it looked as if the great ship was in serious trouble.
The taxi window was slightly open at the top. In the angle between the pillar and the
ledge Maitland noticed that a pile of fine brown dust had collected, almost a quarter of an inch
thick at its deepest point. Idly, he picked up a few grains and rubbed them between his fingers.
Unlike the usual gray detritus of metropolitan London, the grains were sharp and crystalline, with
a distinctive red-brown coloring.
They reached Notting Hill, where the traffic stream slowed to move around a gang of
workmen dismembering a large elm that had come down in the wind. The dust lay thickly against the
curb stones, silting into the crevices in the low walls in front of the houses, so that the street
resembled the sandy bed of some dried-up mountain torrent.
At Lancaster Gate they turned into Hyde Park and drove siowly through the windswept trees
toward Knightsbridge. As they crossed the Serpentine he noticed that breakwaters had been erected
at the far end of the lake; white-topped waves a foot high broke against the wooden palisades,
throwing up the wreckage of one or two smashed rowing boats torn from the boathouse moorings on
the northside.
Maitland slid back the partition between himself and the driver when they passed through
the Duke of Edinburgh Gate. The wind rammed into his face, forcing him to shout.
"29 Lowndes Square! Looks as if you've been having some pretty rough weather here."
"Rough, I'll say!" the driver yelled back. "Just heard ITV's gone off the air. Crystal
Palace tower came down this morning. Supposed to be good for two hundred miles an hour."
Frowning sympathetically, Maitland paid him off when they stopped, and hurried across the
deserted pavement into the foyer of the apartment block.
The apartment had been Susan's before their marriage seven years earlier, and she still
paid the rent, finding it useful as a pied a terre whenever she came up to London on a surprise
visit. To Maitland it was a godsend; his fellowship would have provided him with little more than
a cheap hotel room. (Research on petroleum distillates or a new insecticide would have brought
him, at 35, a senior executive's salary, but research into virus genetics--the basic mechanisms of
life itself--apparently merited little more than an undergraduate grant.) Sometimes, indeed, he
counted himself lucky that he was married to a rich neurotic--in a way, he had the best of both
worlds. Indirectly she and her circle of pleasure seekers made a bigger contribution to the
advancement of pure science than they realized.
"Good trip, Dr. Maitland?" the hall porter asked as he walked in. He was working away with
a long-handled broom, sweeping together the drifts of red dust that had blown in from the street
and clung to the walls below the radiator grilles.
"Fine, thanks," Maitland told him. He slid his suitcases into the elevator and dialed the
tenth floor, hoping that the porter would fail to notice the discrepancy on the indicator panel
over the arch. His apartment was on the ninth, but on his way to the airport he had optimistically
assumed that he would never see it again. He had sealed his two keys into an envelope and slipped
it through the mail slot for the weekly cleaner to find.
At the tenth floor he stepped out, and carried his suitcases along the narrow corridor
around the elevator shaft to a small service unit by the rear stairway. A window let out onto the
fire escape which crisscrossed down the rear wall of the building, at each angle giving access to
the kitchen door of one of the apartments.
Swinging out, Maitland pulled himself through the railings and made his way down to his
own landing. Like all fire escapes, this one was principally designed to prevent burglars from
gaining access up it, and only secondarily to facilitate occupants from escaping down it. Heavy
gates six feet high had been erected at each landing and by now had rusted solidly into their
casings. Maitland hunched himself against the harsh wind driving across the dark face of the
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block, watching the lights in the apartments above him, wrestling with the ancient spring bolt.
Nine floors below, the mews in the cobbled yard behind the block was deserted. Gusts of dustladen
air were billowing past the single lamp.
Finally dislodging the bolt, he stepped through and closed the gate behind him. A narrow
concrete balcony ringed the rear section of his apartment, and he walked past the darkened windows
to the lounge doors at its far end. A light coating of dust grated on the tiles below his feet,
and his face smarted from the impact of the countless minute crystals.
He had closed everything up before he left, but one of the French windows had never locked
securely since Bobby de Vet, an enormous South African footbalier who had doggedly trailed after
Susan during a tour live years earlier, had collapsed against it after a party.
Blessing de Vet for his foresight, Maitland bent down and slowly levered the bottom end of
the window off its broken hinge, then swung the whole frame out sufficiently to withdraw the catch
from its socket.
Opening the window, he stepped through into the lounge.
Before he had moved three paces, someone seized him tightly by the collar and pulled him
backward off balance. He dropped to his knees, and at the same time the lights went on, revealing
Susan with her hand on the wall switch by the door.
He tried to pull himself away from the figure behind him, craned up to see a broadly built
young man in a dinner jacket, with a wide grin on his face, squeezing his collar for all he was
worth.
Grunting painfully, Maitland sat down on the carpet. Susan came over to him, her black off-
the-shoulder dress rustling as she moved.
"Boo," she said loudly, her mouth forming a vivid red bud.
Annoyed for appearing so foolish, Maitland knocked away the hand still on his collar and
climbed to his feet.
"Why, if it isn't the prof!" the young man exclaimed. Maitland recognized him as Peter
Sylvester, a would-be racing driver. "Hope I didn't hurt you, Don."
Maitland straightened his jacket and tried to loosen his tie. The knot had shrunk
immovably to the size of a pea.
"Sorry to break my way in, Susan," he said. "Must have startled you. Lost my keys, I'm
afraid."
Susan smiled, then reached over to the phonograph and picked up the envelope that Maitland
had dropped through the mail slot.
"Oh, we found them for you, darling. When you started rattling the window we wondered who
it was, and you looked so huge and dangerous that Peter thought we'd better take no chances."
Sylvester sauntered past them and lay down in an armchair, chuckling to himself. Maitland
noticed a half-full decanter on the bar, half a dozen dirty glasses distributed around the room.
It looked as if Susan had been here only that day, at the most.
He had last seen her three weeks ago, when she had left her car to be cleaned in the
basement garage and had come up to the apartment to use the phone. As always she looked bright and
happy, undeterred by the monotony of the life she had chosen for herself. The only child of the
closing years of a wealthy shipping magnate, she had remained a schoolgirl until her middle
twenties.
Maitland had met her in the zone of transit between then and her present phase. At least,
he always complimented himself, he had lasted longer than any other of her beaux. Most of them
were tossed aside after a few weeks. For two or three years they had been reasonably happy, Susan
doing her best to understand something of Maitland's work. But gradually she discovered that the
trust fund provided by her father supplied her with a more interesting alternative, an unending
succession of parties, and Riviera week ends. Gradually he had seen less and less of her, and by
the time she went down to Worthing the rift had been complete.
Now she was thirty-two, and he had recently noticed a less pleasant note intruding into
her personality. Dark-haired and petite, her skin was still as clear and white as it had been ten
years earlier, but the angles of her face had begun to show, her eyes were now more sombre. She
was less confident, a little sharper, the boy friend of the moment was kept more on his toes,
thrown out just those few days sooner. What Maitland really feared was that she might suddenly
decide to return to him and set up again the ghastly ménage of the months before she had finally
left him--a period of endless bickering and pain.
"Good to see you again, Susan," he said, kissing her on the cheek. "I thought you were
staying down at Worthing."
"We were," Susan said, "but it's getting so windy. The sea's coming in right over the
beach and it's a bore listening to that din all the time." She wandered around the lounge, looking
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at the bookshelves. Uneasily, Maitland realized that she might notice the gaps in the shelves
where he had pulled down his reference books and packed them away. The phonograph was Susan's and
he had left that, but most of his own records he had sent on by sea. Luckily, these she never
played.
"Tremendous seas along the front," Sylvester chimed in. "All the big hotels are shut.
Sandbags in the windows. Reminds me of the Dieppe raid."
Maitland nodded, thinking to himself: I bet you were never at Dieppe. Then again, maybe
you were. I suppose it takes nerve of some sort even to be a bad racing driver.
He was wondering how to make his exit when Susan turned around, a sheet of typewritten
paper in her hand. He had just identified the familiar red-printed heading when she said:
"What about you, Donald? Where have you been?"
Maitland gestured lightly with one hand. "Nothing very interesting. Short conference I
read a paper to."
Susan nodded. "In Canada?" she asked quietly.
Sylvester stood up and ambled over to the door, picking the decanter off the bar on his
way. "I'll leave you two to get to know each other better." He winked broadly at Maitland.
Susan waited until he had gone. "I found this in the kitchen. It appears to be from
Canadian Pacific. Seven pieces of unaccompanied baggage en route to Vancouver." She glanced at
Maitland. "Followed, presumably, by an unaccompanied husband?"
She sat down on an arm of the sofa. "I gather this is a one-way trip, Donald."
"Do you really mind?" Maitland asked.
"No, I'm just curious. I suppose all this was planned with a great deal of care? You
didn't just resign from the Middlesex and go and buy yourself a ticket. There's a job for you in
Vancouver?"
Maitland nodded. "At the State Hospital. I've transferred my fellowship. Believe me,
Susan, I've thought it over pretty carefully. Anyway, forgive my saying so, but the decision
doesn't affect you very much, does it?"
"Not an iota. Don't worry, I'm not trying to stop you. I couldn't give a damn, frankly.
It's you I'm thinking about, Donald, not me. I feel responsible for you, crazy as that sounds. I'm
wondering whether I should let you go. You see, Donald, you're letting me get in the way of your
work, aren't you?"
Maitland shrugged. "In a sense, yes. What of it, though?"
Suddenly there was a slam of smashing glass and the French window burst open. A violent
gust of wind ballooned the curtains back to the ceiling, knocking over a standard lamp and
throwing a brilliant whirl of light along the walls. The force drove Maitland across the carpet.
Outside there was the clatter and rattle of a score of dustbins, the banging of windows and doors.
Maitland stepped forward, pushed back the curtains, and wrested the window shut. The wind leaned
on it heavily, apparently coming from due east with almost gale force, bending the lower half of
the frame clear of the hinges. He moved the sideboard across the doors, then set the standard lamp
back on its base.
Susan was standing near the alcove by the bookcase, her face tense, anxiously fingering
one of the empty glasses.
"It was like this at Worthing," she said quietly. "Some of the panes in the sun deck over
the beach blew in and the wind just exploded. What do you think it means?"
"Nothing. It's the sort 0f freak weather you find in mid-Atlantic six months of the year."
He remembered the sun lounge over the beach, a bubble of glass panes that formed one end of the
large twin-leveled room that was virtually the entire villa. "You're lucky you weren't hit by
flying glass. What did you do about the broken panes?"
Susan shrugged. "We didn't do anything. That was the trouble. Two blew out, and then
suddenly about ten more. Before we could move the wind was blowing straight through like a
tornado."
"What about Sylvester?" Maitland asked sardonically. "Couldn't he pump up his broad
shoulders and shield you from the tempest?"
"Donald, you don't understand." Susan walked over to him. She seemed to have forgotten
their previous dialogue. "It was absolutely terrifying. It's not as bad up here in town, but along
the coast-- the seas are coming right over the front, the beach road out to the villa isn't there
any more. That's why we couldn't get anyone to come and help us. There are pieces of concrete the
size of this room moving in and out on the tide. Peter had to get one of the farmers to tow us
across, the field with his tractor."
Maitland looked at his watch. It was 6 o'clock, time for him to be on his way if he were
to find a hotel for the night--though it looked as if most London hotels would be filled up.
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"Strange," he commented. He started to move for the door but Susan intercepted him, her
face strained and flat, her long dark hair pushed back off her forehead, showing her narrow temple
bones. "Donald, please. Don't go yet. I'm worried about it. And there's all this dust."
Maitland watched it settling toward the carpet, filtering through the yellow light like
mist in a cloud chamber. "I wouldn't worry, Susan," he said. "It'll blow over." He gave her a weak
smile and walked to the door. She followed him for a moment and then stopped, watching him
silently. As he turned the handle he realized that be bad already begun to forget her, his mind
withdrawing all contact with hers, erasing all memories.
"See you some time," he managed to say. Then he waved and stepped into the corridor,
closing the door on a last glimpse of her stroking back her long hair, her eyes turning to the
bar.
Collecting his suitcases from the service room on the floor above, be took the elevator
down to the foyer and asked the porter to order a taxi. The streets outside were empty, the red
dust lying thickly on the grass in the square, a foot deep against the walls at the far end. The
trees switched and quivered under the impact of the wind, and small twigs and branches littered
the roadway. While the taxi was coming he phoned London Airport, and after a long wait was told
that all flights had been indefinitely suspended. Tickets were being refunded at booking offices
and new bookings could only be made from a date to be announced later.
Maitland had changed all but a few pound notes into Canadian dollars. Rather than go to
the trouble of changing it back again, he arranged to spend the next day or two until he could
book a passage on one of the transatlantic liners with a close friend called Andrew Symington, an
electronics engineer who worked for the Air Ministry.
Symington and his wife lived in a small house in Swiss Cottage. As the taxi made its way
slowly through the traffic in Park Lane-- the east wind had turned the side streets into corridors
of highpressure air that rammed against the stream of cars, forcing them down to a cautious
fifteen or twenty miles an hour--Maitland pictured the siy ribbing the Symingtons would give him
when they discovered that his long-expected departure for Canada had been abruptly postponed.
Andrew had warned him not to abandon his years of work at the Middlesex simply to escape
from Susan and his sense of failure in having become involved with her. Maitland lay back in his
seat, looking at the reflection of himself in the plate glass behind the driver, trying to decide
how far Andrew had been right. Physiognomically he certainly appeared to be the exact opposite of
the emotionally-motivated cycloid personality. Tall, and slightly stooped, his face was thin and
firm, with steady eyes and a strong jaw. If anything he was probably overresolute, too inflexible,
a victim of his own rational temperament, viewing himself with the logic he applied in his own
laboratory. How far this had made him happy was hard to decide. . . .
Horns sounded ahead of them and cars were slowing down in both traffic lanes. A moment
later a brilliant catherine wheel of ffickering light fell directly out of the air into the
roadway in front of them.
Braking sharply, the driver pulled up without warning, and Maitland pitched forward
against the glass pane, bruising his jaw viciously. As he stumbled back into the seat, face
clasped in his hands, a vivid cascade of sparks played over the hood of the taxi. A line of power
cables had come down in the wind and were arcing onto the vehicle, the gusts venting from one of
the side streets tossing them into the air and then flinging them back onto the hood.
Panicking, the driver opened his door. Before he could steady himself the wind caught the
door and wrenched it back, dragging him out onto the road. He stumbled to his feet by the front
wheel, tripping over the long flaps of his overcoat. The sparking cables whipped down onto the
hood and flailed across him like an enormous phosphorescent lash.
Still holding his face, Maitland leaped out of the cabin and jumped back onto the
pavement, watching the cables flick backward and forward across the vehicle. The traffic had
stopped, and a small crowd gathered among the stalled cars, watching at a safe distance as the
thousands of sparks cataracted across the roadway and showered down over the twitching body of the
driver.
An hour later, when he reached the Symingtons', the bruise on Maitland's jaw had
completely stiffened the left side of his face. Soothing it with an icebag, he sat in an armchair
in the lounge, sipping whiskey and listening to the steady drumming of the wind on the wooden
shutters across the windows.
"Poor devil. God knows if I'm supposed to attend the inquest. I should be on a boat within
a couple of days."
"Doubt if you will," Symington said. "There's nothing on the Atlantic at present. The
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_Queen Elizabeth_ and the _United States_ both turned back for New York today when they were only
fifty miles out. This morning a big supertanker went down in the channel and we couldn't get a
single rescue ship or plane to it."
"How long has the wind kept up now?" Dora Symington asked. She was a plump, dark-haired
girl, expecting her first baby.
"About a fortnight," Symington said. He smiled warmly at his wife. "Don't worry, though,
it won't go on forever."
"Well, I hope not," his wife said. "I can't even get out for a walk, Donald. And
everything seems so dirty."
"This dust, yes," Maitland agreed. "It's all rather curious."
Symington nodded, watching the windows pensively. He was ten years older than Maitland, a
small balding man with a wide round cranium and intelligent eyes.
When they had chatted together for about half an hour he helped his wife up to bed and
then came down to Maitland, closing the doors and wedging them with pieces of felt.
"Dora's getting near her time," he told Maitland. "It's a pity all this excitement has
come up."
With Dora gone, Maitland realized how bare the room seemed, and noticed that all the
Symingtons' glassware and ornaments, as well as an entire wall of books, had been packed away.
"You two moving house?" he asked, pointing to the empty shelves.
Symington shook his head. "No, just taking a few precautions. Dora left the bedroom window
slightly open this morning and a flying mirror damn near guillotined her. If the wind gets much
stronger some really big things are going to start moving."
Something about Symington's tone caught Maitland's attention.
"Do they expect it to get much stronger?" he asked.
"Well, as a matter of interest it's increasing by about five miles an hour each day. Of
course it won't go on increasing indefinitely at that rate or we'll all be blown off the face of
the earth--quite literally--but one can't be certain it'll begin to subside just when our
particular patience has been exhausted." He filled his glass with whiskey, tipped in some water
and then sat down facing Maitland, examining the bruise on his jaw. The dark swelling reached from
his chin cleft up past the cheekbone to his temple.
Maitland nodded, listening to the rhythmic batter of the shutters above the steady drone
of the wind. He realized that he had been too preoccupied with his abortive attempt to escape from
England to more than notice the existence of the wind. At the airport he had regarded it as merely
one facet of the weather, waiting, with the typical impatient optimism of every traveler, for it
to die down and let him get on with the important business of boarding his aircraft.
"What do the weather experts think has caused it?" he asked.
"None of them seems to know. It certainly has some unusual features. I don't know whether
you've noticed, but it doesn't let up, even momentarily." He tilted his head toward the window
behind him and Maitland listened to the steady unvarying whine passing through the maze of
rooftops and chimneys.
He nodded to Symington. "What's its speed now?"
"About fifty-five. Quite brisk, really. It's amazing that these old places can hold
together even at that. I wouldn't like to be in Tokyo or Bangkok, though."
Maitland looked up. "Do you mean they're having the same trouble?"
Symington nodded. "Same trouble, same wind. That's another curious thing about it. As far
as we can make out, the wind force is increasing at the same rate all over the world. It's at its
highest-- about sixty miles an hour--at the equator, and diminishing gradually with latitude. In
other words, it's almost as if a complete shell of solid air, with its axis at the poles, were
revolving around the globe. There may be one or two minor variations where local prevailing winds
overlay the global system, but its direction is constantly westward." He looked at his watch.
"Let's catch the ten o'clock news. Should be on now."
He switched on a portable radio, waited until the chimes had ended and then turned up the
volume.
". . . widespread havoc is reported from many parts of the world, particularly in the Far
East and the Pacific, where tens of thousands are homeless. Winds of up to hurricane force have
flattened entire towns and villages, causing heavy flooding and hampering the efforts of rescue
workers. Our correspondent in New Delhi has stated that the Indian government is to introduce a
number of relief measures. . . . For the fourth day in succession shipping has been at a
standstill. . . . No news has yet been received of any survivors of the 65,000-ton tanker _Onassis
Flyer_, which capsized in heavy seas in the channel ear'y this morning. . . ."
Symington switched the set off, drummed his fingers lightly on the table. "Hurricane is a
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slight exaggeration. A hundred miles an hour is a devastating speed. No relief work at all is
possible; peopie are too busy trying to find a hole in the ground."
Maitland closed his eyes, listened to the drumming of the shutters. Away in the distance
somewhere a car horn sounded. London seemed massive and secure, a vast immovable citadel of brick
and mortar compared with the flimsy bamboo cities of the Pacific seaboard.
Symington went off into his study, came back a few moments later with a rack of testtubes.
He put it down on the table and Maitland sat forward to examine the tubes. There were half a dozen
in all, neatly labeled and annotated. They each contained the same red-brown dust that Maitland
had seen everywhere for the past few days. In the first tube there was a quarter of an inch, in
the others progressively more, until the last tube held almost three inches.
Reading the labels, Maitland saw that they were dated. "I've been measuring the daily dust
fall," Symington explained. "There's a rain meter in the garden."
Maitland held up the tube on the right. "Nearly ten cc.'s," he remarked. "Pretty heavy."
He raised the tube up to the light, shook the crystals from side to side. "What are they? Looks
almost like sand, but where the hell's it come from?"
Symington smiled somberly. "Not from the south coast, anyway. Quite a long way off. Out of
curiosity I asked one of the soil chemists at the Ministry to analyze a sample. Apparently this is
loess, the fine crystalline topsoil found on the alluvial plains of Tibet and Northern China. We
haven't heard any news from there recently, and I'm not surprised. If the same concentrations of
dust are falling all over the northern hemisphere, it means that something like fifty million tons
of soil has been carted all the way across the Middle East and Europe and dumped on the British
Isles alone, equal to the top two feet of our country's entire surface."
Symington paced over to the window, then swung around on Maitland, his face tired and
drawn. "Donald, I have to admit it; I'm worried. Do you realize what the inertial drag is of such
a mass? It should have stopped the wind in its tracks. God, if it can move the whole of Tibet
without even a shrug, it can move anything."
The telephone in the hall rang. Excusing himself, Symington stepped out of the lounge. He
closed the door behind him without bothering to replace the strips of felt, and the constant
pressure pulses caused by the wind striking the shutters finally jolted the door off its catch.
Through the narrow opening Maitland caught:
". . . I thought we were supposed to be taking over the old RAP field at Tern Hill. The H-
bomb bays there are over fifteen feet thick, and connected by underground bunkers. What? Well,
tell the Minister that the minimum accommodation required for one person for a period longer than
a month is three thousand cubic feet. If he crams thousands of people into those underground
platforms they'll soon go mad--"
Symington came back and closed the door, then stared pensively at the floor.
"I'm afraid I couldn't help overhearing some of that," Maitland said. "Surely the
government isn't taking emergency measures already?"
Symington eyed Maitland thoughtfully for a few seconds before he replied. "No, not
exactly. Just a few precautionary moves. There are people in the War Office whose job is to stay
permanently three jumps ahead of the politicians. If the wind goes on increasing, say to hurricane
force, there'll be a tremendous outcry in the House of Commons if we haven't prepared at least a
handful of deep shelters. As long as one tenth of one per cent of the population are catered for,
everybody's happy." He paused bleakly for a moment. "But God help the other 99.9."
_______________
Windborne, the sound of engines murmured below the hill crest.
For a moment they echoed and reverberated in the air-stream moving rapidly across the cold
earth, then abruptly, 200 yards away, the horizon rose into the sky as the long lines of vehicles
lumbered forward. Like gigantic robots assembling for some futuristic land battle, the vast
graders and tournadozers, walking draglines and supertractors edged slowly toward each other. They
moved in two opposing lines, each composed of 50 vehicles, wheels as tall as houses, their broad
tracks ten feet wide.
High above them, behind the hydraulic rams and metal grabs, their drivers sat almost
motionless at their controls, swaying in their seats as the vehicles rolled through dips in the
green turf. Clouds of exhaust poured from the vehicles' stacks, swept away by the dark wind, the
throb of their engines filling the air with menacing thunder.
When the opposing lines were 200 yards from each other their flanks turned at right angles
to form a huge square, and the entire assembly ground to a halt.
As the minutes passed only the wind could be heard, rolling and whining through the sharp
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metal angles of the machines. Then a small broad figure in a dark coat strode rapidly from the
windward line of vehicles toward the center of the arena. Here he paused, his head bared,
revealing a massive domed forehead, small hard eyes and callous mouth. He turned his face to the
wind, raising his head slightly, so that his heavy jaw pointed into it like the iron-clad prow of
an ancient dreadnought.
Surrounded by the long lines of machines, he stood looking beyond them, the wind dragging
at the flaps of his coat, his eyes questing through the low storm clouds that fled past as if
trying to escape his gaze.
Glancing at his watch, he raised his arm, clenched his fist above his head and then
dropped it sharply.
With a roar of racing clutches and exhausts, the huge vehicles snapped into motion. Tracks
skating in the soft earth, wheels spinning, they plunged and jostled, the long lines breaking into
a mass of slamming metal.
As they moved away to their tasks the iron-faced man stood silently, ignoring them, his
eyes still searching the wind.
_______________
2
From the Submarine Pens
FROM: ADMIRAL HAMILTON, CIC U.S. SIXTH FLEET,
USS EISENHOWER, TUNIS. TO COMMANDER LAN-
YON, USS TERRAPIN, GENOA: GENERAL VAN DAMM
NOW IN U.S. MILITARY HOSPITAL, NICE. MULTIPLE
SPINAL FRACTURES. COLLECT TROOP CARRIER
FROM NATO TRANSPORT POOL, GENOA. EXPECTED
WIND SPEED: 85 KNOTS.
Crouched down in the well of the conning tower, Lanyon scanned the message, then nodded to
the sailor, who saluted and disappeared below.
Twenty feet above him the concrete roof of the submarine pen was slick with moisture which
dripped steadily into the choppy water below. The steel gates of the pen had been closed, but the
sea outside pounded against the heavy grilles. It drove high swells along the 300-foot length of
the pen which rode the _Terrapin_ up and down on its moorings and then slapped against the far
wall, sending clouds of spray into the air over the submarine's stern.
Lanyon waited until the last of the moorings had been completed, then waved briefly to the
portmaster, a blond-haired lieutenant in the concrete control cage jutting out from the wall ten
feet ahead. Lowering himself through the hatch, he climbed down the companionway into the control
room, swung around the periscope well and made his way to his cabin.
He sat down on his bunk and slowly loosened his collar, adjusting himself to the rhythmic
rise and fall of the submarine. After the three-day crossing of the Mediterranean, at a steady,
comfortable 20 fathoms, the surface felt like a switchback. His instructions were to make one
trial surfacing en route, in a sheltered cove off the west coast of Sicily. But even before the
conning tower broke surface the _Terrapin_ took on a 30-degree yaw and was hit by tremendous seas
that almost stood it on its stern. They had stayed down until reaching the comparatively sheltered
waters of the submarine base at Genoa, but even there had a difficult job negotiating the
wreckstrewn limbs of the double breakwater.
What it was like topside Lanyon hated to imagine. Tunis, where all that was left of the
Sixth Fleet was bottled up, had been a complete shambles. Vast seas were breaking over the harbor
area, sending two-foot waves down streets 300 yards inshore, slamming at the big 95,000 ton
carrier _Eisenhower_ and the two cruisers moored against the piers. When he had last seen the
_Eisenhower_ she had taken on a 25-degree list and the constant 50-foot rise and fail had begun to
rip huge pieces of concrete from the sides of the pier.
Genoa, sheltered a little by the hills and the land mass of the peninsula, seemed to be
quieter. With luck, Lanyon hoped, the military here would have their pants on, instead of running
around like a lot of startled baboons, frightening themselves with their own noise.
Lanyon tossed his cap onto the desk and stretched out on the bunk. As a submariner he felt
(irrationally, he knew) that the wind was everybody else's problem. At thirty-eight he had served
in submarines for over fifteen years, ever since he left Annapolis, and the traditional self-
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sufficiency of the service was now part of him. A sparse, lean six-footer, to strangers he
appeared withdrawn and moody, but he had long ago found that a detached viewpoint left him with
more freedom to maneuver.
So Van Damm was still alive. The captain who had laid on the _Terrapin_ had told Lanyon
confidentially that the general would almost certainly be dead by the time they reached Genoa, but
whether this was the truth or merely an astute piece of psychology--everybody else in the crew
seemed to have been fed the same story--Lanyon had no means of finding out. Certainly Van Damm had
been severely injured in the plane smash at Orly Airport, but at least he was lucky enough to be
alive. The five-man crew of the _Constellation_ and two of the general's aides had been killed
outright.
Now Van Damm had been brought south to Nice and the _Terrapin_ would have another shot at
rescuing him. Lanyon wondered whether it was worth it. Up to the time of his accident Van Damm had
been expected to declare himself the Democratic candidate in the coming election, but he wouldn't
be of much interest now to the party chiefs. However, presumably some debt of honor was being paid
off. After three years as NATO Supreme Commander, Van Damm was due anyway for retirement, and
probably the Pentagon was living up to its bargain with him when he had signed on.
There was a knock on the door and Lieutenant Matheson, Lanyon's number two, stuck his head
in.
"O.K., Steve?"
Lanyon swung his legs off the bunk. "Sure, come in."
Matheson looked slightly anxious, his plump face tense and uneven.
"I hear Van Damm is still holding on? Thought he was supposed to peg out by now."
Lanyon shrugged. The _Terrapin_ was a small J-class sub, and apart from himself Matheson
was the only officer aboard. What frightened him was that he might have to take on the job of
driving up to Nice and collecting Van Damm.
Lanyon smiled to himself. He liked Matheson, a pleasant boy with a relaxed sense of humor
that Lanyon appreciated. But Matheson was no hero.
"What's the programme now?" Matheson pressed. "It's a 250-mile run round the coast to
Nice, and God knows what it might be like. Don't you think it's worth trying to get in a little
closer? There's a deep anchorage at Monte Carlo."
Lanyon shook his head. "It's full of smashed-up yachts. I can't take the risk. Don't
worry, wind speed's only about ninety. It'll probably start slacking off today."
Matheson snorted unhappily. "That's what they've been saying for the last three weeks. I
think we'd be crazy to lose two or three men trying to rescue a stiff."
Lanyon let this pass, but in a quiet voice he said: "Van Damm isn't dead yet. He's done
his job, so I think we ought to do ours."
He stood up and pulled a heavy leather windbreaker from a hook on the bulkhead over the
desk, then buckled on a service .45 and glanced at himself in the mirror, straightening his
uniform.
After putting on his cap, he opened the door. "Let's go and see what's happening on deck."
They made their way up to the conning tower, crossed the gangway onto the narrow jetty on
the wall of the sub-pen. A stairway took them over the workshops into the control deck at the far
end of the pens.
There were a dozen pens in all, each with room for four submarines, but only three ships
were at their berths, fitting out for rescue missions similar to the _Terrapin's_.
All the windows they passed were bricked in, but even through three feet of concrete they
could hear the steady unvarying drone of the storm wind.
A sailor guided them to one of the offices in Combined Personnel H.Q. where Major Hendrix,
the liaison officer, greeted them and pulled up chairs.
The office was snug and comfortable, but something about Hendrix, the fatigue showing in
his face, the two buttons missing from his uniform jacket, warned Lanyon that he could expect to
find conditions less equable outside.
"Good to see you, Commander," Hendrix said hurriedly. A coupie of map wallets and a packet
of currency were on his desk and he pushed them forward. "Forgive me if I come straight to the
point, but the army is pulling out of Genoa today and I've got a million things to do." He glanced
up at the wall clock for a moment, then flipped on the intercom. "Sergeant, what are the latest
readings we've got?"
"A hundred fifteen and 265 degrees magnetic, sir."
Hendrix looked up at Lanyon. "A hundred fifteen miles an hour and virtually due east,
Commander. The troop carrier is waiting for you out in the transport bay. There are a navy driver
and a couple of orderlies from the sick bay here." He stood up and moved around his desk. "The
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coast road is still open, apparently, but watch out for collapsing buildings through the towns."
He looked at Matheson. "I take it the lieutenant will be going to pick up Van Damm, Commander."
Lanyon shook his head. "No, as a matter of fact I will be, Captain."
"Wait a minute, sir," Matheson started to cut in, but Lanyon waved him back.
"It's O.K., Paul. I'd like to have a look at the scenery."
Matheson made a further token protest, then said no more.
They made their way out to the transport bay, the sounds of the wind growing steadily
louder as they passed down the corridors. Revolving doors had been built into the exits, each
operated by a couple of men with powerful winches.
They picked up the driver and Lanyon turned to Matheson. "I'll call you in six hours'
time, when we make the border. Check with Hendrix here and let me know if anything comes in from
Tunis."
Zipping his jacket, he nodded to the driver and stepped through into the entry section of
the door. The men on the winch cranked it around and Lanyon stepped out into sharp daylight and a
vicious tornado of air that whirled past him, jockeying him across a narrow yard between two high
concrete buildings. Stinging clouds 0f grit and sand sang through the air, lashing at his face and
legs. Before he could grab it, his peaked cap sailed up into the air and shot away on a tremendous
updraught.
Holding tight to the map wallets, he lurched across to the troop carrier, a squat 12-
wheeler with sandbags strapped to the hood and over the windshield, and heavy steel shutters
welded to the window grilles.
Inside, two orderlies squatted down silently on a mattress. They were wearing one-piece
plastic suits fitted with hoods roped tightly around their faces, so that only their eyes and
mouths showed. Bulky goggles hung from their necks. Lanyon climbed over into the co-driver's seat
and waited for the driver to bolt up the doors. It was dim and cold inside the carrier, the sole
light coming from the wide periscope mirror mounted over the dashboard. The doors and control
pedals were taped with cotton wadding, but a steady stream of air whistled through the clutch and
brake housings, chilling Lanyon's legs.
He peered through the periscope. Directly ahead, straight into the wind, he could see down
a narrow asphalt roadway past a line of high buildings, the rear walls of the sub-pens. A quarter
of a mile away was what looked like the remains of a boundary fence, tilting posts from which
straggled a few strands of barbed wire. Beyond the boundary was a thick gray haze, blurred and
shimmering, a tremendous surface duststorm two or three hundred feet high, which headed straight
toward them and then passed overhead. Look ing up, he saw that it contained thousands of
miscellaneous objects--bits of paper and refuse, rooftiles, leaves, and fragments of glass--all
borne aloft on a huge sweeping tide of dust.
The driver took his seat, switched on the radio and spoke to Traffic Control. Receiving
his clearance, he gunned the engine and edged forward into the wind.
The carrier ground along at a steady ten miles an hour, passed the sub-pens and then
turned along the boundary road. As it pivoted, the whole vehicle tilted sideways, caught and held
by the tremendous power of the wind. No longer shielded by the sandbags, there was a continuous
clatter and rattle as scores of hard objects bounced off the sloping sides of the carrier, each
report as loud as a ricocheting bullet.
"Feels like a space ship going through a meteor shower," Lanyon commented.
The driver, a tough young Brookiyner called Goldman, nodded. "Yeah, there's some really
big stuff moving now, Commander."
Lanyon looked out through the periscope. This had a 90-degree traverse and afforded a
satisfactorily wide sweep of the road ahead. A quarter of a mile away were the gates into the base
and a cluster of single-story guard houses, half obscured by the low-lying dust cloud. On the
right were big two- and three-story blocks, fuel depots, with their underground tanks, windows
sand-bagged, exposed service plant swathed in canvas.
Genoa lay behind them to the south, hidden in the haze. They swung out through the gateway
and took the coast road that ran about half a mile inland, a wide concrete motorway cut into the
leeward side of the low hills reaching toward the mountain shield at Alassio. All the crops in the
adjacent fields had long been flattened, but the heavy stone farmhouses nestling in saddles
between the hills were still intact, their roofs weighed down with tiers of flagstones.
They passed through a succession of drab villages, windows boarded up against the storm,
alleyways jammed with the wrecks of old cars and farm implements. In the main square of Larghetto
a bus lay on its side, and headless statues stood over the empty fountains. The roof of the 14th-
century town hall had gone, but most of the buildings and houses they saw, despite their
superficially decrepit appearance, were well able to withstand the hurricane-force winds. They
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file:///F|/rah/J.%20G.%20Ballard/Ballard,%20J%20G%20-%20The%20Wind%20Fro\m%20Nowhere.txtTHEWINDFROMNOWHEREbyJ.G.BallardCopyright1962byJ.G.BallardPublishedbyarrangementwiththeauthor'sagent.BERKLEYMEDALLIONEDITION,JUNE1962CONTENTS1TheComingoftheDust2FromtheSubmarinePens3VortexoverLondon4TheCorridorsof...

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