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.