The Wind From Nowhere

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 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 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 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.

"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 _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 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 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.