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 ex hausted 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 childhood4
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 350 mph 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. "O.K. 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 clays 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 overcrowding 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.