Doomsday 1999

PAUL MacTYRE

OFFSPRING OF ATOMIC CATASTROPHE

What were those mutated specks, whose strange swarm cut one section of humanity off from another? That they were important, Angus the hunter, had no doubt, but that only posed another more personal question. Why could he, alone among men, walk among them in safety?

DOOMSDAY, 1999, poses some hard-to-answer questions for the days to come. Writing in New Worlds, Leslie Flood, the well-known British reviewer, described it as, "a skillful blend of superior mainstream writing, dramatic action worthy of a John Buchan, a knowledgeably described background, and an original science-fictional concept... Very convincing as well as entertaining."

PAUL MacTYRE was born in 1924 and spent his childhood in the empty lands of the northern Highlands of Scotland. He went to school in Edinburgh, came south to Oxford and returned to his home country where he now lives.

He is a university lecturer in medieval history. Fiction-writing, he considers is a serious business—and he finds it a first-class stimulus to his own research interests. He is married, has three children, enjoys fishing and is deeply interested in films.

ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y.

doomsday, 1999

Copyright 1962, by R. J. Adam Published in Great Britain under the title, Midge. All Rights Reserved

The characters in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any living person.

Printed in U.S.A.

CHAPTER ONE

As usual, the midges were dancing just before sunset. They were thickest along the river, beside the wrecked helicopter. From the top of the hill Angus could watch them swirling outwards. The spirals were bigger and denser than he had ever seen them before. Upstream they stretched as far as the birch woods on the western skyline; downstream they crossed the water and twisted into the marshes around the two Chinese forts.

He picked up his rifle from the side of the boulder and looked back to the north. The first flecks of snow were parachuting down on the wind. Westwards the sun was sliding behind the birch trees. In half an hour it would be dark. He shivered and pulled his cap down over his ears. Time to be going. There was one chance in a million that a Guard patrol would be about; one in fifty that a stray midge might find him as it made for home. The strays were dangerous, for they didn't always recognize him. He remembered the corpses with their burned necks.

Once across the crest of the hill he broke into a trot, rifle at the trail. The track home ran along the foot of the hill, and he wanted to reach it before the light went. There was a hind carcass to be carried home, if the buzzards hadn't found where he had left it under a pile of stones just across the little burn that lay between him and the track. That carcass was important. The quota had to be handed in tomorrow, and they needed one more beast to make it up.

The frozen ground jarred his feet through the deerskin moccasins, and the cold seeped up his legs. He slid down the last bank and came to the burn. It was solid ice, as it had been for the last six weeks. The shattered floes were piled high in the air, jagged saw edges turned towards him. He ran down-stream, making for the level stretch just above the falls. When he reached it, he paused. For the first time, the midges were dancing across the ice.

He stood still and let the spiral sweep around him. There was a brushing of uncountable wings across his face, a faint tingling sensation, and then the singing just as he had heard it so often before. The swarm had recognized him. He walked out on to the ice and across to the track beyond. The midges fell away from him, and the snow flurried out of the blackening sky.

The hind was safe. He pulled it on to his shoulders, tied the legs roughly in front, and went on more slowly. If he was unlucky, there would be a Guard patrol lying up at the house overnight. If he was wildly unlucky, they might take the rifle from him. Unlikely, but it had happened before. There were men in the western hills who could use a bow and arrow, men who had dogs that could pull down a running stag. But he had only the rifle, and without it he would starve. Worse than that, he would have to stop being a hunter, and that meant going down out of the hills into one of the Guard camps. In another year it wouldn't matter, for there would be no ammunition left—at least, no ammunition for anyone but the Guards. But until then he was a hunter, and as long as he was a hunter he could keep out of the camps.

He shifted the beast on his shoulders and followed the path up the valley into a tangle of low hills. From civilization to chaos was a short step in the dark—shorter than the mile between him and home—and the last inch along it would bring him to the camps. And after the camps, when the food finally ran out—what? This sort of end had never been on the cards in the old days. The bomb, yes; revolution, counterrevolution, dictatorship, yes; but not old-fashioned war, with tanks and planes and trenches, not the slow inexorable slide into shabbiness and disrepair; not the Guards; and certainly not the midges.

The Chinese had pushed the world over the edge. That was clear enough, ten years after. They had never used the bomb. They had kept the temperature of collapse so low that no one had realized what was happening—not until it was too late, not until civilization was irretrievably on fire. Then, a dying imperialism, they had flooded aimlessly into the emptying ruins of the rest of the world, like a trapped conger eel threshing its way over the sands where the fishermen had thrown it. For all he knew, there was still a Chinese empire. Sometimes he saw groups of soldiers on the south side of the river, eyeing the midges from a safe distance. Sometimes helicopters, old and patched and sick-sounding, hovered above the grey forts. At night he sometimes heard plane engines passing overhead, flying north. But, if there still was a Chinese empire, it could be like nothing he remembered. The great armies were dead: British, Russian, American, Chinese, they were all gone from his world. The looters and the gangs were gone too. Nothing left but the camps and the Guards: and the midges. And it had only taken ten years.

Calum came out from the stable and helped him put the hind in the slaughter-house. Thankfully he straightened his back, and leaned against the wall while Calum locked the heavy bolts on the door.

"That makes the thirty we need," Calum said. "Any trouble?"

"No." He was tired and unwilling to talk. But the old resentments were there, as usual. "I hope whoever eats the brutes enjoys them."

Calum grunted agreement. It was the hunters' favourite grumble. The people in the camps didn't get the venison to eat; there was no evidence that they ever got any meat at all to eat. Perhaps the Guards were the lucky ones. Somehow it would be less of a grievance if there was nothing but the Guards, no one else to take the deer-toll, the price he and Calum and the others paid for being allowed to have their rifles and go on being hunters. He knew what the Guards looked like, with their patched overalls and green shoulder flashes, their machine-guns and their bullying officers; a warlord's private army, something the Chinese ought to know plenty about. But what if there were warlords?

He emptied the magazine of the rifle and put the bullets into his pocket. Without speaking, he walked with ("alum round the end of the stable. Light shone through the chinks in the shutters on the kitchen window, and he could hear the voices of the other hunters. Calum rapped thrice on the door. There were footsteps, and then the door-bolts were drawn back. They went into the passage. Behind them the bolts slammed shut again. He laid his rifle against the wall, and peeled off his deerskin jerkin. Then he walked along the passage towards the light flickering under the door. Behind him Calum clattered noisily. Calum was lucky; he still had a pair of boots left. There wasn't another pair in the house. Behind Calum came a third figure, the man who had opened the door to them. In the half-dark he couldn't see whether it was Ian or Lachie.

He pushed the door open. The heat and the light in the kitchen rushed round him, making his eyes water. He stood still for a moment, surfacing. On the table, a single open oil lamp was burning with a smoky flame, well turned-down. In the fireplace peats glowed, and a pot simmered gently. Above the lintel he could see the line of bullet holes where a Russian had once aimed too high. Round the walls, four rough wooden benches, with a heap of deerskins and dirty blankets on each. On one of them Ian was sitting staring at the fire. Half a dozen wooden chairs, mostly with their backs broken; a battered dresser with two pans and a stack of tin plates and mugs lying on top of it. And not very much else. But a good deal more than the poor devils in the camps had, at that.

Lachie slammed the door and pushed past him to the fireplace. He took one of the mugs and a plate from the dresser, and opened the pot. He filled the plate with a thin stew from the pot and shoved it across the table.

"There you are, Angus," he said. His left eyelid was twitching, as usual.

Angus sat down, eyeing the stew. He was tired, tired past the point of being hungry. But he had learned enough to eat when he had the chance. Tomorrow the Guards would come for the levy, and food would be scarce after that. He began to eat.

Calum, lanky, gangling, restless, sat down at the other side of the table and drummed his fingers along the edge. Angus ignored him. Calum had a good deal to learn yet; he had to learn not to be curious, and he had to learn not to be hopeful Angus felt the weariness soak through his bones—ten years of weariness behind him, and a wilderness of weariness in front of him. He looked at the sharp lines of Calum's cheekbones, hoping without much conviction that the boy wouldn't have too hard an education.

Calum got up and walked over to the dresser. Lachie glared at him, then lay down on his bench and closed his eyes. There was a pile of tattered magazines lying in a corner of the dresser. Calum picked one up and spread it out close to the lamp. No one spoke. In the silence Angus heard the sound of his own jaws as he finished the last scrap of meat on his plate. He pushed the plate away from him, stretched out his legs, and let his arms fall limp at his side.

Ian sat up and swung his feet on to the floor. As he leaned forward to put on his moccasins the lamplight picked out the flecks of grey in his black hair and the deep mahogany line of his neck. By compensation it smoothed out the fine lines of weariness in his hunter's face, leaving only a thin-drawn intensity. Only when he looked up would Angus see his eyes, and be reminded once again that Ian was his leader—and leader by undisputed right.

"Did you get a beast, Angus?" Ian asked.

"Yes. An old hind, down by the burn. She's in the slaughter-house now."

"We'll get her cleaned and skinned in the morning, before the Guards come. There's just time."

"They'll have ponies, I expect" said Lachie from his bunk. "I hope they'll not take either of ours to help them out."

"It'll be ponies all right," said Ian. "The road will be difficult with the snow and anyway I wouldn't be surprised if they've run out of petrol at last."

Angus sat still and listened. This was the one time in the day when there was time to talk, time to forget what lay outside the grey stone walls of the house. But somehow they never did forget it. Always the talk circled round and back; the deer, the Guards, the end of the petrol, of the ammunition, of the food. And they were the hunters, the one free people in the new age of shabbiness. He tried to imagine what life was like in the camps and failed; failed even to imagine what it was like to be a Guard, bullying and bullied at once, always being ordered about and always driving the camp people harder to make up for it. If the hunters were so obsessed with their own narrow horizons, what of the men and women in the camps, starved, beaten-up, overworked, dying by twos and threes every night? Concentration camps —that was what they had once been called; and they were concentration camps still, only now there was nothing outside them.

Calum turned over a page of his magazine and grunted.

"Out from Grimachory Lodge, on 18th October, Colonel Anthony Smith, two stags." He read.

Angus got up abruptly and walked to the door. Out from Grimachory, Colonel Anthony Smith. And now this was Grimachory, where four hunters lived and slept and killed for the Guards. No papers now to report that he, Angus, had killed a hind on a March evening down beside the burn. No Colonel Smith to read about it, either; Anthony Smith was dead, blown up with his tank by a Russian battery on the sands of Dunnet Bay. Lucky Smith, luckier than those who had survived into the new world of the camps and the Chinese.

Ian looked narrowly at Calum. Angus opened the door and slipped out into the passage. He knew what Ian was going to say. For Ian had been Smith's stalker, had hunted Grimachory deer for a dozen seasons with him, had been there when the Colonel died. But for Ian, Angus would have died himself. He wondered wryly at the twist of fate that had brought Ian the stalker and Angus the one-time television actor back to Grimachory, back to a half-gutted lodge where nothing but a dog-eared paper reminded them that once Anthony Smith had stalked and drank and made love there. He stubbed his toes against the boarded-up opening where the staircase had once been and swore softly. Turning left, he put out his hand, loosened the bolts of the outside door, and stepped into the night The coldness of the air swept round him and slashed at his face. He pulled the door shut behind him and stood with his back against it. A narrow moon was shining; in its light he could see intermittent snowflakes hurtling down and around the walls of the house, driven by the north wind. The silence was absolute. He let himself sink into it Here was something that hadn't changed in the ten years' catastrophe, something that had been the same when Anthony Smith had come to Grimachory—the silence of the hills at night.

In the stable one of the dogs stirred and growled in its sleep. A pony shifted in its stall, hooves clattering against the wood. Then silence again. A voice came through it—Ian, remembering once again the old days. Lachie and Calum would be listening. Strip off the centuries, and it was for a moment the old life again—the night of the hunters, the proud men of the clan who listened to their bards and storytellers, drank their whisky and fought over their women. But only for a moment; now there were no bards, hardly any whisky, no women except the permitted camp-women—and to go near them meant an extra toll in stags first and then a visit to the medical hut. Few hunters went; the toll was too heavy, and the medicine too suspect Instead they stayed in their lodges and camps and quarreled more sharply than they might have done.

He shivered in the night air, and turned to go back inside. At the last second he stopped. Somewhere a tiny sound was flawing the silence. He listened. The sound grew stronger, a distant humming that slowly grew into a throbbing beat. For an instant he thought of the midges. Were they spiraling up through the snow, following the burn towards the lodge? He shivered again, and not from the cold this time. Once the midges had been a nuisance, nothing more, tiny demons that bit and were brushed away with an irritated but unfearing hand. Now they were the spirals, that made the long searing burns along dead men's necks. Then he relaxed. The midges would not touch him, and he had heard the sound before. It was the noise of a helicopter engine.

He waited. The throbbing came closer, sweeping up against the wind. Automatically he identified its source—a twin-engine heavy Chinese cargo helicopter. Not that aircraft identification had much significance for him now. The last British machine he had seen was the wreck round which the midge spirals clustered, and apart from the occasional Chinese machines at the forts there might be no other helicopters left in the world, for all that he knew. Plenty of wrecks, just as there were plenty of mined tanks and lorries and trains and radar stations and houses and villages; plenty of skeletons too. But nothing more than that.

Sometimes—not often, but more than just occasionally— the Chinese planes came overhead, making a wide sweep around the midges, then disappearing north-eastwards toward the plains where the camps lay. At night, always; he had never seen a helicopter north of the river in the daytime. This must be another. Half-interested, he wondered why he had never seen one flying southwards. Probably the route was a circular one, for reconnaissance, or intimidation of the natives. He felt a new sympathy for half a hundred frontier tribes, if they still existed on the fringes of the settled world. More probably there was nothing left but fringes—and the Chinese.

The helicopter droned nearer, passed over the lodge, and went on towards the north. It wasn't following the usual route, he noticed; and it was lower than usual. He listened more carefully. The engine beat was harsher than he ever heard it before. One more piece of patched-up machinery was faltering towards its end.

The sound died away, and the cold reasserted itself. He opened the door, and went back into the house.

The flame from the single lamp was burning low in the kitchen. Ian picked up an armful of peats from the hearth and stacked them carefully round the glowing heart of the fire.

"That's all the oil we have until we get more from Camp Three," he said. "Time we went to sleep."

Calum pitched the magazine into a corner, stood up and stretched himself. He was young, no more than eighteen—too young to remember much of the times before the Guards; but not, Angus thought, too young to be aware that things had been different. The rest of the four carried memory round their necks, and would carry it until they died. They had learned not to be restless; Calum was just beginning to learn.

"What sort of a man was this Smith, anyway?" he asked over his shoulder, as he arranged his blankets.

"That's enough about Smith," Ian growled angrily, glancing across at Angus as he spoke.

Angus knew what he meant, and was grateful. Not that it mattered now. It hadn't mattered for a long time. Anthony Smith was ten years dead, and Deirdre was dead too. No need now to shy away from the memories of that golden autumn in Grimachory before the armies came. No point in trying to remember how Deirdre had looked, what she had worn, what she had said. And certainly no point in remembering that Deirdre had been Smith's wife and his own mistress. Two of the three were dead, and he was as good as dead himself. All of which Ian knew and kept to himself, for, Angus guessed, he had been quietly in love with Deirdre too.

Red-haired Lachie, with his sharp fox's face mounted incongruously on his barrel of a body, took down the one oil lantern from a hook on the wall, and lit it from the lamp. Yawning, he opened the door, lurched off to make a last check of the outbuildings. Angus, watching, wasn't fooled. He knew that on the hill Lachie could outwalk and outlast him— probably outfight him too, if it came to that. For all that, he didn't like Lachie, didn't trust him.

Calum, his face red with resentment, took up his rifle and followed Lachie through the door. Ian watched him go, a slow smile in his eyes.

"He's not a bad one," he said as Calum closed the door.

Angus nodded.

Ian tapped a stray peat into place. Without looking up, he went on speaking.

"That was a long time ago—twelve years come this autumn. I remember you had just come back from America, and the Colonel was on leave from somewhere in Germany. Forty-five stags we shot that year, and every one clean killed. Do you think Calum will ever understand what it was like?"

"I don't think so," Angus replied. "I don't remember very clearly myself. And it's all best forgotten—with all the rest of the past. Did I tell you the midges are coming up the burn? I walked into them tonight."

He had changed the subject too abruptly, he knew. Men who lived by hunting had always looked backwards over their shoulders, remembering their youth and their forerunners. It was no repayment to Ian to pull him back so brutally into the present.

Still, Ian was interested.

"Are they now? I was wondering about them while we were waiting for you to come back. That means they'll be here before long. The Guards won't like that very much."

"You know, Ian," Angus said, "these midges are the one new thing that's come out of all this bloody mess. All the rest is just wreckage, but the midges are new, and they scare me."

"And me," said Ian softly. "I can remember—and so can you—what midges used to be like. I've come in from the hay-field on a summer evening, half-sick from their bites. I've seen myself hardly being able to put up your rod on the riverside, what with needing three hands to brush them off. But midges in March, in swarms, and burning instead of biting. Why shouldn't we be scared? I'd rather live in one of the camps than be a stranger walking into one of the swarms."

"When did you first see them?" Angus asked.

"A day before you did. And that's nine years ago last summer. It was after the helicopter crashed."

Angus nodded slowly, remembering that summer, remembering the Russian tanks nosing round the lodge, the machine-guns, the broken regiments shuffling past in the darkness, the smell of death. The helicopter had been shot down by a Russian gun. Three weeks later, when the battle had eddied northwards, Ian had taken him down to the river flats, an obscure suspicion in his eyes. There they had found four dead men, two civilians and two in Canadian uniforms. All were savagely burnt. It looked, he recalled, very like the effects of radiation. But it hadn't been an atomic war, simply a war of sweat and blood and high-explosive like other wars, and the most urgent thing had been to bury the bodies. There was quite enough danger from typhus and cholera and a dozen other horrors without worrying about bombs that had never been used. So they had buried the bodies, a hundred yards from the broken helicopter.

They had never been able to approach the machine any more closely. That was what had been worrying Ian. Angus, remembering, saw himself walking slowly up towards the fuselage, under the sharp line of shadow cast by the single undamaged rotor blade—saw himself stopping as the first thin spiral of midges wove its way in and out of the broken windows, their first faint singing prickling his ears. And that was nine years ago. Now the spirals were five miles long, and they flew in snowstorms. Uncounted millions of insects, singing and dancing to the command of some unguessable compulsion—immensely long, immensely flexible, living rotor blades.

He nodded again.

"At a guess, I imagine there was something radioactive in the helicopter," he said. "That might explain the Canadian uniforms, and why the plane was flying west when it was shot down. But what happened after that—"

Ian's look signalled silence. The front door was opening again. Angus knew why he must stop. Lachie was older than Calum, but his imagination had died in the struggle to keep alive; only a residual toughness that came from years spent in empty places kept him amongst the ranks of the hunters. He hunted well, shot his quotas, and once in a while paid his extra tolls and visited the camp-women. So far, to his credit, he had kept his hands off Calum. Fear of Ian, possibly, or respect for the sharp anxiety with which he guarded Calum; at any rate, Lachie left Calum alone. To him and to Calum the midges were simply a problem, no less and no more, on a level with the packs of wild dogs that had been such a feature of the first five years of the catastrophe, before the Great Winter had killed them almost all off. Only Ian shared with Angus the awareness that since the midges nothing could ever be quite the same again.

Lachie came into the kitchen hurriedly.

"There's some sort of a plane flying about," he said.

Ian followed Angus to the outer door and listened. Calum was standing motionless, his head cocked against the swirling wind. A faint drone grew louder, came overhead in a climax of noise, then receded. In the stable a dog barked in fear, and a pony stamped and whinnied. The plane was low in the air, its engines harsh and frightened-sounding. It was the one Angus had heard before, flying north; now it was making for the west.

"These damned Chinese, I expect," Ian said. "It sounds lost," said Lachie.

"Well leave it to the Guards," Ian retorted with decision. "If it does come down they'll be after the crew tomorrow, and we're better out of that"

He was speaking sense, Angus knew. Between the Guards and the Chinese there was, if not real warfare, certainly border skirmishing and hatred. Down in the camps the loudspeakers—when they spoke at all—sang one song only: work, work, work, to keep alive and to gather strength to fight the Chinese once again. Sometimes he wondered why the Chinese didn't take the hint and finish the Guards off once and for all. The midges made no distinction between Guards and Chinese, but the midges did not yet cover the whole frontier, even if every month saw them stretching further. Perhaps the Chinese were at full stretch; perhaps they were no stronger than the Guards, and frightened themselves.

The drone of the helicopter died away to the west.

"Everything locked?" Ian asked.

"Yes," Lachie replied. "The dogs are pretty restless, I'm thinking."

"Good enough," said Ian. "We'll get a warning if anything happens in the night. I don't think we need put out a watch in the stable. There won't be anyone who can help it moving in this snow."

He swung the door to, and waited whilst the others filed in. Then he locked it, and ran the heavy metal bolts home. Angus picked up his rifle from the corner where he had left it when he came home. There was one job left to do before he went to sleep. The others went to their bunks, pulling off their heavy jackets and moccasins. Calum's boots clattered to the stone floor. Ian went across to the table and picked up the lamp.

"Wait a minute," Angus said. "I've got to get some gun-oil and my cleaning kit."

"You could have done that before, damn you," Ian said heavily. "There isn't oil to spare, as you well know."

"All right, all right," Angus retorted. "Just give me time to get the stuff down and I'll clean the rifle by the fire."

He went across the room and lifted down the precious bottle of gun-oil from the high shelf where it lived. Then he picked up his cleaning rod and a handful of rags.

"Right you are, you can put it out now," he said to Ian.

Ian blew softly, and darkness fell round the kitchen. A sudden gust of wind swept across the roof, and the peats in the fireplace flared up. Angus heard Ian padding across to his bunk. He picked his way round the end of the table, and sat down with his rifle in front of the fire.

After a while his eyes attuned themselves to the dim light from the peats. As quietly as possible he slipped out the rifle-bolt, cleaned and oiled it, tested the magazine action, and ran a rod through the barrel. Turning the open breech towards the fire, he watched the red glow dance on the polished steel. Satisfied, he laid the rifle on the table, and untied his deerskin jerkin. He was tired, but unready for sleep. Elbows on his knees, he stared at the fire, and let his mind go empty. The others were sleeping already; he could hear their breathing slip deeper and deeper into relaxation. Only Calum was restless, and Angus felt a sharp stab of compassion. What sort of a world was Calum growing up in? Come to that, what was there in the world for any of them now? He felt empty, drained.

A peat fell softly into the red embers, and the fire hissed softly for a second. The wind eddied and died. He sat still and listened. Yes, he was right. In the silence he could hear, far away, the drone of the plane.

It came nearer, louder. But this time there was a difference. It was slower, rougher, more uncertain. Without disturbing the others, he pushed some bullets into the magazine of his rifle, and quietly closed the breech. Then he buttoned up his jerkin, laced up his moccasins, and fetched down the lantern from its hook. That done, he stood by the table and waited.

The plane was in real trouble. He diagnosed the situation: one engine had gone, the other was labouring to keep the machine in the air. He thought of the crew, lost in a silent sea of snow, with under them an unknown land and unknown enemies, and shivered. Better to be in the camps than out in that helicopter.

The drone came nearer and nearer. He went across to Ian's bunk and shook him gently. At once the old stalker sat up, hands reaching for his rifle. Angus spoke quietly in his ear.

"The plane's coming back. And it's going to come down soon."

Ian said nothing, but pulled on his moccasins and his jacket. The drone grew louder still. Calum stirred uneasily in his bunk. Finger to his lips, Ian stood motionless. There was a last roar of a desperate engine, a dull thud, then silence. Calum rolled over again and breathed deeply.

Silently Ian went across to the other side of the room and bent over Lachie and Calum in turn.

"Asleep," he whispered to Angus. "What's best to do? I made it not far away to the east."

"Wait," Angus said. "There's not much hope for them, if they don't know the country, and with the snow still coming down. And I don't think it would do us any good to go rescuing Chinese, what with the Guards due tomorrow."

Ian nodded.

"Fair enough. But we'd better be ready for trouble. They might fall over us—that is, if any of them have survived."

"I'll stay up for a couple of hours, and then give you a call. No need for more than one. The dogs will let us know if anyone comes near."

"Good. I'll take over from you. The clock set?"

Angus reached up and took down the metal alarm clock from above the fireplace. Time was not important any more, except on occasions like this. Every thirty days the Guards came to collect the deer; every sixty days the hunters went down to Camp Three, ten miles away, and collected their ammunition and whatever extra stores the Guards' storekeeper allowed them. The days were marked off with pencil on the kitchen walls. Angus knew that in daylight he would have been able to see fifty-five lines of strokes; fifty-five months since the Guards had taken over, and the hunters had become their dependents. Every morning Ian added another stroke; the present line was twenty-nine strokes long—tomorrow the Guards would be coming for the deer. Tomorrow, too, was a day for visiting Camp Three.

He wound up the clock and set it at twelve o'clock. What the real time was he had no idea, but when the hands reached two o'clock he would waken Ian.

"That's it," he said. "You go back to sleep."

Ian grunted, and walked back to his bunk. In five minutes he was asleep again, and Angus was alone with the clock and the fire. A wrist watch would have made less noise, would have hammered less relentlessly at the doors of the empty future, but he had no wrist watch. They were lucky to have a clock at all. The Russians had been great collectors of watches, and the Guards had finished off the job. His own was long ago smashed.

The clock hammered on. He tried to thrust the ticking out of his mind, watching the peats glow and crumble. The wind rose and fell, fumbling at the loose slates of the roof and round the edges of the wooden window shutters, where the glass had long ago been broken. A quarter of an hour passed, then half an hour. Twice Angus found himself blinking, his head slumping forward on his chest. Three quarters of an hour. The wind was building up in force, the lulls falling shorter and shorter. A full blizzard, almost. The shutters rattled, then rattled again, louder, more insistently. He huddled closer over the fire, imagining the cold outside. The poor devils in the helicopter would be in real trouble now, if any of them were still alive.

Then he jerked upwards, suddenly watchful. The shutter was rattling—rattling rhythmically. Someone—or something —was outside, trying to get in.

Noiselessly he reached for the lantern, lit it from the fire, and turned the flame as low as it would go. He picked up the rifle and tiptoed across the room. The rattling continued. He shook Ian awake, and gestured towards the window. Ian asked no questions, but pushed on his moccasins, and loaded his rifle. Angus opened the door and let himself into the passage. Long ago they had worked out a plan for such a situation, and he knew exactly what he was going to do. He went into the passage, directly opposite the outer door, and turned the flame up high. With infinite caution he released the door-bolts; now only the key held it closed. He looked back into the room. Ian had awakened Lachie, and the two were standing with rifles raised, covering him. He turned the key in the outer door, and slipped back inside the kitchen with his rifle.

For a long minute the door stayed shut. Then the wind came more strongly, caught the front of the house, and sent the door flying open. It crashed against the wall, bounced back, and came to rest, quivering with every fresh gust. The lantern flame danced and flickered, throwing wild patterns along the passage walls. Through the open door a stray snow-flake slid delicately towards the floor.

The three men in the kitchen stayed motionless, watching the doorway. Angus silently counted to a hundred, two hundred, three hundred. The rattling at the window had stopped; far away he could hear a dog whining. His left forearm began to ache under the weight of the rifle. Five hundred, six hundred. The doorway was suddenly filled with movement. A single figure lurched into view. Angus had a quick impression of a tired, grey face ringed with snow, of a revolver coming up to aim. Then, quite slowly, the figure fell forwards on the floor and lay still.

CHAPTER TWO

"You will take me to see the Colonel of Camp Three," said Major Liu.

It was a command, not a request. Angus felt the weight of the pistol in his jerkin pocket, and was reassured. For Major Liu was someone to be reckoned with. He stood beside the window, the thin dawn light flooding over his shoulder, and looked into the room. A Chinese, an officer, a woman; this was going to take some handling.

Ian was doing the talking. He was leaning against the side of the fireplace, cleaning his rifle, and looking up from time to time at the small, dark figure sitting at the table. Calum and Lachie stood in the background.

Angus knew what the three others were thinking. Chinese were enemies, to be killed on sight. If the Guards found them sheltering a Chinese officer, things would be awkward; and the Guards would be at Grimachory in a few hours. There was more to it than that, though. He knew what the Guards would do with this particular Chinese officer. Women were scarce down in the Camps, and the Guards had never been delicate people. So where did he stand—where did all four of them stand? Ian, Lachie, Calum, himself—what did this stranger of the snowstorm mean for them?

She had almost died when she came into the house. He had knocked Lachie's rifle up himself. That was before they had known that she was a woman. What now? Lachie wouldn't want to shoot her now. Lachie needed women, needed them enough to go down to the Camp and buy one of the permitted women, the women whom even the Guards left alone. Lachie would want this woman, was wanting her already.

But would he risk his own skin for her, or for any woman? And Calum? Again Angus felt the stab of compassion for a young man growing up in a world of Guards and Chinese and midges. Calum wouldn't know what he felt, for he had never been near a camp-woman, had never known even the equivocal affection of another hunter. Ian, a foster-father in an age-old Highland tradition, had seen to that. But Calum wouldn't be for letting her die, wouldn't be for handing her over to the Guards.

Angus glanced at Ian. Ian—the cautious, clear-headed, decisive man with memories, remembering how in the past another woman had come to Grimachory and set three men against each other. What was he thinking now?

And what about himself? Angus watched Major Liu, impassive in her high-necked tunic. The blackness of her hair was startling. Her eyes and her hands, he saw, were steady. Yet only an hour before she had wakened, wrapped in blankets in front of the fire—had wakened in a room with four men. The night before these men had stripped her and warmed her and saved her life. She had wakened, dressed in front of them all, eaten their food, and told them what she wanted. And she expected to be obeyed. Where did he stand now?

Ian, who carried the ultimate burden of Grimachory, was looking at him. Angus pretended not to notice; what he wanted was time to think, time to reach an attitude of cold reason. But he knew there would never be enough time. He looked at the fire and remembered. Once, in the grey light before a September sunrise, Deirdre and he had sat in front of that same fire. Sleepless, he had come downstairs to raid the whisky bottle, to find her watching the first light coming up from the east. He had filled two glasses, and sat down beside her. Nothing had been said; he hadn't kissed her, hadn't touched her. But the next afternoon they had met down the burn-side and there, among the birches beneath the falls, it had all begun.

The memory chilled him. Did he want to start over again? That was twelve years ago. Now he wasn't a man of importance, and there wasn't a world to be important in. The opportunity was a mere illusion. This wasn't Deirdre, it was a Chinese officer. He saw Lachie's narrow eyes, and slapped the thought down. Whatever they did, they must run no risks. Grimachory was a little world, and nothing must break it; above all, not a woman—that would be foolish.

So what to do with her? He listened to Ian.

Ian was incredulous.

"Do you know, Major," he said slowly, "that you are outside Chinese-occupied territory? This is the country of the Green Guards. The only Camp Three we know is one run by them, six miles away, but I don't imagine that is the camp you mean."

Liu was impatient, drumming her fingers on the table. "Good. That is where I want to go."

"But do you know that the Guards hate the Chinese, and kill any whom they catch?"

"Of course. Our soldiers kill the Guards too. But the Colonel of Camp Three will not kill me. That is why I have to see him."

"Why?" Ian's voice was hardening.

"That is my business, not yours." The flat, formal English heightened the illusion that she was in control of the room. "If you help me to meet the Colonel, you will be rewarded."

"Were you in the helicopter that flew over here last night?" Ian tried a new approach.

"Yes." She was giving nothing away.

"Alone?" Angus broke in.

Liu looked away from Ian and stared at him for the first time. When she spoke her voice was harsher. "No. There are three men still there."

"Who?"

"My Colonel, and two airmen."

"Why did you come here alone?"

"To look for the Commander of Camp Three."

"Why not one of the men?"

She looked impatient.

"Because the two airmen were slightly hurt, and Colonel Cheng could not leave his cargo."

Angus nodded slowly. A Chinese plane, with an important cargo, and an appointment with Camp Three. He needed time to work out the implications.

"You were lucky." It was Ian speaking again.

"Possibly. But I have walked through snowstorms before. And the plane came down beside a road. I simply followed the road. The wind was strong, but the snow was nothing."

That explained something. The helicopter was lying somewhere on the road to Camp Three. The woman had been a good deal more lucky than she realized, to have come down on the only road within miles. If she had landed to the west of Grimachory, in the higher hills, or to the south, among the midges, she wouldn't have been sitting at the table in the morning sunlight.

"Shall we go out and fetch your companions back here?" Ian was speaking.

"No." Liu's voice was decisive. They are in no danger. The cockpit was not broken, the heating is still working, and they have some food. They will be safe until I can find the Colonel. Now, you must take me to him."

"Time enough," Ian said. "If you want to get yourself killed, we won't stop you."

Looking at Lachie's fox face, Angus wasn't quite so certain. There might be trouble yet. Ian wanted her away; he mightn't believe her story that the Colonel would help her, but he still wanted her away. The story was unlikely, certainly. But there must be something pretty important about the helicopter to make her leave it at night and take her chance of finding someone alive at the end of the road. Something pretty important, too, to make her so anxious to keep them away from the machine. And the Colonel was in some way involved. The mystery had its interest. Ten years ago he might have been prepared to try to work it out. Now it was too dangerous, too irrelevant; he had learned that lesson. More important to get the woman off their hands. But that, he realized, wasn't what Lachie was thinking.

Liu stood up and walked to the window. Angus stood back to let her pass. She stared out in silence for a moment, then swung round.

"That thing down beside the river, beyond your stable— what is it?"

Angus came up to her elbow and looked. He was aware of her nearness, obscurely exasperated by her uniform, glad of the pistol in his pocket as he felt Lachie's eyes on his back He looked, then shrugged.

"That? Only the midges dancing."

He had never seen a spiral so close to the house; it was less than a quarter of a mile away. But it was important not to show surprise; and he certainly didn't want to let the woman know what only he and Ian knew—that men could pass through the spirals and live. Better to see what Major Liu gave away herself.

"Midges? You mean the burning insects?" she said. "That is bad. I must get to the Colonel as soon as I can."

She spoke calmly, but her eyes kept straying back to the window. So the Chinese were as scared of the midges as the Guards. That might be worth knowing.

Liu turned away from the window and faced Ian again. She had clearly identified him as the leader.

"I want to go to find the Colonel," she said flatly. "Show me the way and I will go myself. But I must have my pistol back first."

Nobody spoke for a moment. Angus held his face as impassive as he could and stared at each of the others in turn. He had picked up the pistol when they dragged Liu's unconscious body from the front door. He was pretty certain none of the others had noticed him. That meant that they would all be suspecting each other. He felt bitterly that he was taking the first step in splitting the pack, then put the thought behind him. Better he should have the gun than Lachie, whatever the woman might be thinking about them all. Momentarily he wondered why he should feel worried about what she was thinking.

"The gun is nothing," Ian said at last. "But we will take you on the road to Camp Three. It's not very difficult. You must simply retrace your route last night. Your plane is between us and the Camp. And on the road we will meet some Guards coming here to collect deer-meat. Perhaps it will be as well if we are with you when you meet them." She smiled briefly, sardonically.

"Quite. I think I understand. But then I am still wondering why four men with rifles should want to take my pistol from me."

Her command of the situation was complete. Angus thought angrily. Even Lachie could feel it, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, his eyes never leaving Liu.

"We've been warned often enough by the Guards to take care of any armed Chinese we find," said Ian. He paused, then came to a decision. "We'll take you back now, but there are things to be done first. Calum, you'll stay here and skin that hind. Angus, and you, Lachie, come with us. Better take rifles, and some food, just in case it's needed at the helicopter."

He laid his rifle on the table, and picked up his jerkin, then watched the others whilst they organized themselves. He did not, Angus noticed, leave Lachie alone with Liu.

Half a mile east of Grimachory the road began to climb a long, rolling hill. Over the crest, Angus knew, there was a high, open moor, where the snow often drifted thick. But, due to some angle of the ground, the road up the slope was never blocked. If it had been, Major Liu would never have reached the lodge. Once across the moor, the road dropped down to lower ground; there, on the bank of a river, lay the squalid miseries of Camp Three, where a thousand people lived and worked and died under the machine-guns of the Guards.

Liu walked in front of the three men, her high boots thrusting against the intermittent patches of deep snow. Behind her, the men's moccasins swished gently through the loose powdered snow on the rock-hard frozen road. The sun was climbing slowly in a blue sky; a small, cold wind was swinging between north and north-east. There was complete silence except for the sound of their feet.

Out of the corner of his eye Angus could see the midge spirals down by the burn. Ahead, two ravens flapped slowly across the skyline. Birds sometimes died in the spirals as well as men; he had seen an eagle keel over and crash to earth when it brushed against a swarm. Guards had died, Chinese had died too. Only he and Ian could come and go in the midge lands, hearing the singing and feeling the brush of the insects' wings. He wondered whether other hunters were immune also, whether the western people, who had no rifles and used bows and arrows and spears, could enter the swarms too. Certainly he knew from the Guards who collected Grimachory levy that the other hunters still worked. But he had never met them on the hill. Each group kept rigidly to its own ground, husbanded its own deer herds, and kept out of the way of trouble. The land was large enough for all the hunters who were left now.

He let his thoughts race on, his eyes watching Liu trudge on up the first slopes of the hill. What would happen if the midges went on spreading? Already they covered far more ground than they had done even a year ago; in one night they had come a quarter of a mile up the Grimachory valley, and that in the middle of winter. The pace was increasing, increasing very quickly. His imagination saw a time when there was nothing but midges—no animals, no men, only trees and rocks and heather and midges. It wouldn't be an inappropriate ending.

He pulled his thoughts back to the present. There was something wrong. He probed into his own uneasiness, isolated it; the process made him no happier. He didn't want Liu to go to Camp Three, didn't want her to go to the Colonel, that small, hard-eyed weasel of a man, ruling his two hundred Guards and one thousand serfs with precise and frightening confidence. She was sure enough of her reception—too sure. There was some hidden factor in the situation, something he didn't know, but for all that he didn't want her to go to the Camp. Why? Was he falling into the same pit as Lachie, whose eyes were still hungrily stripping her as he loped along the road?

Angus thrust the question hard into the back of his mind. It wasn't as simple as that. A woman at Grimachory would awaken too many old memories. Besides, there were too many men to fight over her. No, he was simply curious to find out more about the hidden factor; he wanted to see the helicopter, to see her meet the Colonel himself, to see how she was received. Grimachory had been disturbed, and he wanted to find out why. Besides, he had her pistol, and she might need it yet.

Up the slope Liu's pace slackened. She was tough, amazingly tough, to turn out again so quickly after her struggle the night before, but the pace was beginning to tell. They were an incongruous group, Angus thought—the woman in her flying jacket and high officer's boots, the three men in sheepskin jerkins and ragged trousers—a missionary reclaiming three lost souls, a warder dragging back three runaway prisoners. Only there weren't any missionaries, or any prisons, any more.

The crest of the hill was close, another fifty yards on. From sheer habit Angus put on speed and passed Liu. Skylines were dangerous, to be approached cautiously and crossed unobtrusively. A thick snowdrift lay just under the summit, where the road cut through a shallow rock outcrop. Angus left the road and skirted the edge of the drift until he could look out on to the open moor. Then he stopped. After a long pause he turned and waved the others on. They came up to his shoulder, panting slightly in the still air, and looked.

Five hundred yards away the helicopter was sprawled across the road, its rotors crumpled and twisted. The cabin, apparently undamaged, lay belly-down on the road, its door pointing towards Grimachory. As they watched, a single figure climbed out and walked round the machine, a revolver in his hand.

"Colonel Cheng," Liu said quietly. "I must see that he is all right."

She started to walk on. Angus caught her wrist and pulled her back into the shelter of the rock.

"Wait a little," he said. "Just look over there."

Liu followed his pointing arm. On the eastern rim of the moor there was a glint of movement. They stood still and waited. Gradually the glint changed, took form and solidity, revealed itself as a cavalcade of men and ponies, strung out along the road, moving steadily westwards.

Ian screwed up his eyes, shielding his face from the sun with one hand. He was uneasy.

"Too many," he said finally. "There are twice as many ponies as usual, and far too many men."

"They know about the helicopter," Lachie said quickly. "That's why they've brought so many."

Angus watched Lachie, watched his face harden. He knew how the red-haired man's mind was working, weighing up the danger from the Guards against the chance of keeping Liu at Grimachory. For the moment fear was winning.

Ian stiffened suddenly, and pointed.

"Look there, Angus. That's the Colonel in front—the one with the white fur cap."

Ian was right. Angus could make out the stocky figure of the Colonel, riding a gaunt dun-colored pony, his two bodyguards walking at his stirrups. He had seen the Colonel often enough not to mistake him now. He was even less likely to underrate him.

Behind the Colonel the Guards straggled along the road-some riding the ill-conditioned ponies, others walking, but all unquestionably tough and ready for action. Angus had seen them in action sufficiently to know that the confusion of uniforms, the apparent lack of discipline, were deceptive. What mattered were the green shoulder flashes and the clean machine-guns and rifles.

Angus let his eye run along the column. A dozen or more of the Guards were familiar faces to him, men who had come before to collect the meat from Grimachory. A tall, blond giant with a dirty patch over one eye—Angus had first seen him as a guard at a Russian prisoner cage in Orkney; a negro, flotsam of an American expeditionary force that had never got beyond the Caithness beaches; and there were others. What he hadn't seen before was the small man, dressed completely in white, riding on the next pony behind the Colonel.

He switched his attention back to the helicopter. Cheng had spotted the Guards. He was standing behind the tail boom.

"Does your Colonel Cheng know the Colonel by sight?" Angus whispered to Liu.

She gave him a cold glance. "Of course. He has been to Camp Three before."

She made another move to cross the ridge. Lachie swung the muzzle of his rifle round and clicked back the breech-bolt. Liu stepped back, slipping between Angus and Ian. Lachie licked his lips and smiled thinly.

The Guards were perhaps a quarter of a mile from the helicopter. Cheng, apparently satisfied by what he saw, pushed the revolver into a pocket of his flying-jacket, and stepped out into the open.

A voice floated out over the moor. The Guards halted. Another command, and men ran out to right and left of the Colonel's pony, making a half-circle with its horns enclosing the helicopter. Others closed in on the Colonel. Another command, and the whole group began to move forward. Liu drew in her breath sharply. The picture was unmistakably threatening.

Cheng stood still, watching. Then he raised one hand above his head. He was holding a package in it. Slowly he began to walk down the road towards the Colonel. The Guards halted. A pony stirred restlessly, saddle leathers creaking. Nothing moved except the single figure.

Three feet from the Colonel's pony, Cheng halted and lowered his hand. He held the package forward. The Colonel made a small sign with his left hand. There was a single shot, and Cheng crumpled on to the snow.

Liu stood still, her face frozen. Another sign, and two Guards ran forward to the helicopter. They pulled open the cabin door and climbed in. There were two more shots, then silence. One of the Guards came to the cabin door and waved.

All at once the scene erupted into activity. The Colonel roared a string of orders. Men rushed to the machine, the ponies lumbering behind them. The cargo hatches were burst open. A pile of packing cases were thrown out and loaded on to the ponies. Inside five minutes the whole operation was complete. All the time the Colonel kept up a running fire of instructions, glancing frequently at the sky as he did so.

Then the convoy was reforming. The four on the hillside came to life again. Angus found himself gripping Liu's shoulder.

"Some of them will be coming on to the lodge for the meat," Ian whispered. "What are we going to do now?"

Angus looked at his companions' faces. What Lachie was going to do was clear enough. Fear had won. Lachie wanted the woman, but the Guards were too near, and he wanted a whole skin more. Lachie was for taking her up to the helicopter. With the realization Angus' grip on Liu's shoulder tightened, till he felt her stir under the pain. He looked at Ian. Ian was unhappy; he was looking at the snow, digging his rifle-butt into it, but he was determined. Ian had never wanted her to stay; now he felt ashamed, but he was making himself be brutal.

Without looking up, Ian spoke again.

"You can go to see the Colonel as you wanted, Major. I'm sorry, but—cover him, Lachie."

Angus heard the two rifle-bolts pulled back, saw the two muzzles turn towards him. Liu leaned against him, her body rigid. Lachie moved forward, pulled Angus's rifle from his hand and stood back beside Ian.

"Take out the bolt," Ian said to Lachie.

Lachie obeyed, putting his own rifle on the ground to do so. Ian watched Angus narrowly.

"I'm sorry for you, too, Angus, but it's better this way. We can't risk having her with us, not when the Colonel is about."

He lowered his rifle and glanced over the crest of the hill.

"They've finished loading, and the first ponies are off back along the road," he said. "Now I'll take you to the Col—"

He broke off, staring at the pistol in Angus's hand.

"Drop your rifle, Ian," Angus said. "You stand back beside him, Lachie."

The scene had a dreamlike quality. Just over the hill fifty armed men went about their business, unaware of what was happening. The three rifles lay against the snow, blue-grey against the white. At a gesture from Angus Liu picked them up, took out the two remaining bolts, and slipped all three bolts into Angus's pocket. He picked up his own rifle and slung it on his shoulder, then took hold of her hand and backed away down the hill, his eyes always on the other two.

"Do you still want to go to the Colonel?" he asked her. "No."

"Then we'd better get out of sight quickly. Come on."

He turned and ran, dragging her with him. She stumbled, recovered and ran beside him. Behind he could hear Lachie running to the top of the hill, shouting. He risked a glance. Ian was standing still, watching them go. Then he turned back and gave all his attention to the road.

They went down the hill in a confusion of running and slipping, slithering into and out of snowdrifts. Ahead Grimachory stood in the sunshine, remote and infinitely desirable. Angus felt a momentary pang; he was throwing away his own small world. For what?

Something spurted in the snow beside them; the sound of a shot followed it, rolling across the hillside. The Guards were on the crest. But already they had reached the bottom of the hill. He left the road, and rushed Liu along a narrow path twisting in and out of the peat hillocks, but always dropping southwards towards the burn-side. Other shots followed them, and the sound of running feet. He didn't dare look back again. Ahead the sound of the falls began to rise up to meet him. Once in the gorge below the falls they might have a chance.

Liu slipped and fell. He hauled her to her feet, and they went on. She was limping, but she said nothing. He put out all his strength, wondering dully as he did so just why he was running away, feeling the rifle heavy on his back.

The running feet were closer. There was a shout just as he rounded a bend in the path and saw the frozen river beneath him. He stopped, wiping the sweat from his eyes. Round the corner came the tall blond Guard, a machine-pistol in his hand. He saw Angus and shouted again. Angus fired once, twice; the blond man slid sideways off the path and rolled slowly down the hillside. Then Angus was running again, Liu holding his hand.

They came to the river bank, at the flat ground just above the falls. Angus turned downstream, pulling Liu down the steep slope where the path zigzagged alongside the falls. Ahead he could see the birch trees. Absurdly, he thought of Deirdre. There were more shouts, some shots; then they were amongst the trees.

Something brushed against his face. He stood still, his hands gripping Liu's arms.

"Don't move at all," he said.

The tingling was beginning. He let it flow over him, holding her hands tightly, willing her to realize what was happening. The singing rose to a biting pitch, passed beyond his hearing. Far away he heard a shout, a shot, a scream; then silence.

Slowly he opened his eyes. Liu was looking at him, her face working convulsively. He tried to smile, and felt his skin smart at the effort.

"All right now," he said. "The midges have taken over."

CHAPTER THREE

An hour later and half a mile away, Angus relaxed. He slid the rifle off his shoulder and sat down on a fallen tree-trunk. Liu squatted beside him, her head between her hands. Angus took the rifle-bolt from his pocket and slipped it into place. He held the pistol out to Liu. She looked at his face before slowly taking the gun.

"You trust me?" her voice was questioning.

Angus shrugged.

"I've got to. Why else would I be here?" She looked down at her feet. "Are we safe?" she asked.

"Safe enough. No Guard will come here, and as long as we don't show ourselves before nightfall there's no chance of any trouble. The Guards will simply have assumed that we're dead, like the man who ran into the midges when chasing us. The only trouble is, we haven't any food."

He put the problem aside. There were ways of answering it, and he would have to put his mind to them before night came. But it was only noon, going by the sun. Time enough to think about food when the Guards were out of the way. Meanwhile there were questions he meant to ask.

"The Colonel didn't give Cheng much of a welcome," he said casually.

Liu nodded, the pistol hanging in her hand.

"Not quite what you expected, I imagine," he went on.

She nodded again, avoiding his eyes. Careful, Angus told himself. He remembered enough from ancient handbooks on psychological warfare to know that it was the oldest error in the game to imagine that any Chinese was imperturbable, unemotional, always under perfect control. What was going on inside Liu's head was something he couldn't even guess at. The urge to stop probing, to let her alone, was strong. He thrust it aside. If he was going to make himself an outlaw, then he could at least know why.

"What was in the helicopter?" he asked, and gave her no time to reply. "No, let me tell you. There was some sort of cargo that the Guards wanted, that they knew was on its way. That's why the Colonel was out. And Cheng expected— you expected too—that you would be well received. In fact, this was some sort of delivery flight Your people are giving the Guards something. It's sent by plane, at night. That's interesting. I'm not forgetting that officially the guards and the Chinese shoot each other on sight. There's a deal going on behind the scenes. What do you give them? Arms, I'd be inclined to guess. But you don't give them for nothing, not if I know anything of you. So what's the other side of the deal? People don't pay cash nowadays. What do the Guards give you?"

"Got it all worked out, haven't you?" Liu said. He noticed with surprise that her English was fluent not formal any more. "And you're perfectly right. We were carrying a load of rifles, machine-guns and ammunition to Camp Three. Something went wrong with the instruments, and then the plane got caught in the snowstorm. That's why I was anxious to find the Colonel, and why Colonel Cheng wouldn't leave the helicopter. It's not the first time I've been on one of these trips. But it's the first time any of our people have been shot I must go back and let my headquarters know."

The picture was clear enough. Angus was angry, angry that even in its dying spasms the old world that he had known should go on playing the same old dirty games. War, hatred, propaganda—still going strong. And behind it all deals and double-crossing. He thought of the half-starved inhabitants of Camp Three, scratching desperately to raise enough food to keep themselves and their Guards alive. What did it all matter, if the arms that kept them down were supplied by the very people the Guards told them to hate and kill? Cheng had been well served; thieves' honour hadn't been enough to save him. And here he was himself, risking a bullet in the neck to keep one of the arms-traders alive.

He said as much, bitterly. Liu reacted violently, scrambling to her feet to glare down at him. A stray midge hovered near her hair. She put out a hand to brush it away, then checked herself in time.

"That's a simple story. I've heard about you hunters, and what I've seen today only confirms what I've been told. You are the free men, the people who can stand outside the problems that matter. You don't have to worry about how people are to go on living. You don't have to wonder whether you will get your throats cut in the night, whether you will wake up to find murder and rape and torture winning because you haven't enough bullets to stop them. You don't—"

"That's enough." Angus was standing too. "Law, order-do you know what they mean here? Have you ever seen inside one of the camps? Do you know what this wonderful Camp Three is like? Men and women living in broken-down huts, with rags to wear, next to nothing to eat, dying in their twos and threes every night, working till they drop so that a couple of hundred Guards can eat well? Have you any idea of the degradation? Do you understand why Lachie was so anxious to keep you? Because all the women are in the camps, because he can only get one by buying her from the Guards for an hour? And do you understand why in the end he wanted to hand you over to the Guards? Because the Guards shoot whom they want to. That's what passes for law and order—and you tell me I'm lucky because I don't have to worry about keeping it going. It's the same old confidence trick all over again. Man is dying, out on his feet, and you want me to worry about the thugs who are trying to finish him off. You remind me of the Russians who tried to indoctrinate me when I was a prisoner in Orkney. All you want is obedience, and the only obedience that pleases your kind is the obedience of a corpse."

He stopped, running a band through his hair, and feeling his face slowly break into a grin. Twelve years were dissolving away; he was an actor again, facing the cameras, putting all of himself into his part. He realized he was dripping with sweat.

Liu smiled with her eyes; but her mouth remained set hard.

"Now you listen," she said. "I've been in Britain for three years now. I don't expect I shall ever go back to China again. As far as I know, none of our troops here have been relieved in the last eighteen months. Supplies are beginning to run short. There aren't many helicopters left; to save petrol we don't use trucks any more. We're a frontier garrison, put where we are because frontiers need guarding, because an army has to be used somehow. That's our problem. Our rulers conquered the world, and they've found the world is too big a problem for them. We're not allowed to tell the ordinary troops what we know, but I'm going to tell you. The Chinese Empire has fallen to pieces. It's gone rotten at the core, and the poison is spreading out. Soon it will be reaching the frontiers, and the armies will be affected. We're guarding an emptiness, hoping against hope that somehow things will turn for the better, one day soon. I don't think they will; the rot's gone too far."

She paused for breath.

"Your English is good," Angus said irrelevantly. He surprised himself looking at the line of her neck against the drab collar of her tunic.

"It ought to be. I was trained for my job, and I've patched up chaos in Sydney and New England before I came here. I'm a skilled administrator—and here I am running arms to your beloved Green Guards. Do you think I would do it if I didn't know that it's the only way to hang on to something? Anyone who keeps order, if it's only with guns and whips and starvation, is doing something worth while."

"What are things like on your side of the river?" Angus asked.

"A little better than here. There is a little more food, and our camps are rather better run. Oh, yes"—she went on, seeing his surprise—"we've got camps too. But we try to make the food go round fairly, and we still manage to do something about diseases. That's why it's worth our while to do business with the Guards. Every load of arms is paid for with a load of medical supplies—or at least it was until today. That's the really serious point. It's a pity that Colonel Cheng died, but it will be a lot more serious if I can't get back to report."

Angus was incredulous.

"I don't believe that the Guards have anything to give you in that line," he said. "I know the sort of people they are, the sort who have always been prison guards. They will survive as long as they have weapons, and you're helping them to get these weapons. But the only medical service they have is kept strictly for themselves—except for a sort of ritual the men go through before they are allowed to have women. Anyway, where could the Guards get these medical supplies?"

"You don't know as much as you think," Liu interrupted. "Did you notice the short man in a white coat who was riding behind the Colonel this morning?"

Angus nodded.

"He's the man who matters. He—and the others like him. Every time we send a flight over a man in a white coat meets it and hands over the medicines. He's the real power, as far as we have been able to make out. The Colonel makes a lot of noise, but he takes his orders from the white-coats. We've never been able to find out anything about them."

This was news. For five years the Guards had been the one power to be reckoned with. To be told now that they had masters disconcerted Angus. It made the waters murkier still.

"Why did you help me?" Liu's voice broke into his puzzlement.

"Difficult to say. I'm not a Lachie," he said wryly, thinking of twelve years before amongst these same birch trees, "but I won't pretend that I'm trying to be a hero. Let's say I had a rush of decency to the head."

She seemed content to let the point pass. He picked up the rifle and worked the bolt neck and forward, to hide his embarrassment. It was a relief to turn to more immediate problems.

"What do you want to do now?" he asked. "Get back across the river if I can," she replied. "Is that possible?"

"Yes, I can get you to the river, and if the frost holds the ice should be hard enough to cross on—that is, if you get on well enough with the midges."

Her eyes widened, her hand went up to her face.

"The midges. I had forgotten about them. But, but-we are in the middle of them here. Why are we still alive? I have never known anyone dare go near them, but you walk through them. How?"

"I don't know," Angus said. "There's a mystery of some sort about these midges. What do your people know about them?"

"Not very much," said Liu. "We can't go near them, for fear of the burning. When our troops first came to the river we tried to wipe out the midges, just as we used to try to kill off the flies in China. But too many people got burned, so we stopped. We do know, though, that they stretch almost the whole way from the west coast to the east. There is no way past them to the west of here, and downriver to the sea is the only part of the frontier where we haven't found them. But they are moving downstream each year."

Angus nodded. It added something to his knowledge. There were more of the midges than he had imagined. That meant that quite possibly there were other people, other hunters perhaps, who could go amongst them like Ian and himself. More important, the scale of the whole affair shook him. Not a single colony of monstrosities, but a twenty-five-mile-long barrier, of unknown depth, and with inhabitants to be counted in hundreds of millions. He tried to remember some figures a scientist had once told him, but gave up. The magnitude was too great. And—where the midges moved other living things were burned and died. The Guards weren't very powerful in comparison. It meant—

He jerked his attention back. Liu was shaking his sleeve.

"Are you listening?" she demanded.

"I'm sorry," Angus said. "I was thinking about the midges. What did you say?"

"How can you go amongst them? What's the secret?"

"I don't know," he said lamely. "Ian and I have always been able to do it. We were here when the midges started to change, and we've never stopped moving about the swarms. You're the only person who knows this. We've never told anyone else, just in case it might be useful one day."

"I see. You said you could get me to the river. Will you do it if I ask you?"

Her voice was hesitant.

"Of course," Angus said. "Why do you ask?" She took a long time to reply.

"Because I think I have misjudged you. I'm asking you to help me to get back to my people, people who run camps and do the things that you hate. And to help me you've already killed a Guard and run away from your own friends."

Angus gave up trying to work it out It was easier to be flippant.

"I used to be a television star," he said, "and one of my best parts was that of the knight errant Leave it at that Now, we'd better make plans."

Lying in the frozen grass beside the burn, he watched for the light to go on in the kitchen at Grimachory, two hundred yards away. The sun was lipping the horizon. Twenty-four hours before he had been coming home with a hind on his shoulders, and life had been running in the old accustomed channel. Now he was adrift, swirling down an unknown stream between dark and featureless banks. Grimachory was two hundred yards away in space, but an infinity distant in time.

If Ian didn't come out soon, he would have to take a chance and go up to the door. That would be risky; there might be Guards in the house, and there was always Lachie. He had already seen Lachie and Calum coming and going about the steading, but there had been no sign of Ian. He needed Ian. Ian could give him food, enough to see the two of them safe for two days whilst they waited their chance to cross the river. In return, he could give Ian the two rifle-bolts that still lay heavy in his pocket. That was important; without the bolts Ian and Lachie would be helpless, and when the next collection day came round they would be bound for the camps. He was walking out on his friends, but he didn't want to destroy them as well.

He inched his way closer to the house, glancing from time to time at the road to Camp Three. It was getting late for patrols to be out; still, there was always the chance of trouble, particularly as long as the Guards thought there was a chance of a Chinese officer still being alive. The Colonel had banked on killing off all the helicopter crew at once, and collecting a cargo of arms without having to give anything in return. Easy enough afterwards to say that everyone had been killed in the crash—and no chance of being contradicted, with the helicopter radio broken. Therefore he would be anxious to get his hands on Liu. The best hope was that the Guards would assume that the midges had got the fugitives—and that depended on Ian giving nothing away. Which was, even more than the need for food, why Angus was shivering on the hardpacked snow in the pony pasture beneath the windows of Grimachory.

The stable door opened and Calum came out, a bucket in his hand. Angus watched him cross slowly to the house. He noticed, uneasily, that Calum stopped at the comer of the house and looked up the road. It mightn't mean anything; but again it might mean that the Guards were still near. He hoped that Liu would stay under cover. He had left her with the pistol in a gully just above the falls, where he could get back to her more quickly than in the birch-wood. She was still inside the midges' territory, but only just; the thin spiral that they had seen near the lodge in the morning had retreated as the sun went down.

Calum shut the house door, the slam of the bolts echoing dully across the snow. Angus felt the cold soak through his jerkin; he worked his stiffening fingers inside his rough leather mittens. If Ian didn't appear soon he would have to go to the house himself.

But Ian did come. Angus saw the first glimmer of light from the edges of the shuttered window, and began to give up hope. He was just testing his rifle-bolt and slipping a bullet into the breech, when he heard the door-bolts again. This time it was Ian. He stood for an instant framed in the flickering glow of the doorway; then he was out into the gathering shadows, moving so quickly that Angus had to strain his eyes to follow him.

Ian passed in front of the stable, never once showing himself against the skyline. Angus found himself admiring the man's hillcraft, the art of a man who had hunted all his life. Then he concentrated on trying to keep Ian in sight. He was pretty certain that Ian was looking for him. There was no other conceivable reason why the older man should be wandering about in the open at this time. It was important that he should be able to see Ian before Ian saw him; he had a rifle, but there were other weapons than rifles.

He was almost too slow. It was only the squawk of a hunting owl, soaring away in fright from so monstrous a prey, that gave him his bearings. Even so, Ian was standing a couple of paces from his shoulder before he had time to draw the rifle-bolt back.

"Is that you, Angus?" Ian called softly.

"Yes. Stay where you are. I've got a rifle."

"More than I have, thanks to you. I guessed you'd hang around until dark. They think you're dead, but the Colonel isn't too sure. He's a clever man, Angus."

"I know that as well as you do. What's he done to you and Lachie?"

"Nothing yet. I think he's using us as ground bait to catch you and the Chinese woman."

"Which means—?"

"That as soon as we see you we're to signal. There are twenty Guards waiting up near the helicopter."

"How are you going to signal?"

"The Colonel gave Lachie a torch. He's to flash it three times."

That showed just how seriously the Colonel took the business, Angus thought. Torches were rarities, and batteries for them prizes beyond all price.

"I see. He trusts Lachie more than you, eh? And will he flash it?"

"I won't try to stop him if he does. Is this why you came back?"

There was a dull thud as Ian swung something soft on to the ground at Angus's feet. Angus remained still, watching Ian's hands.

"What's in it?"

"Meal and meat. If you've got your tinder you'll be able to live off what's in that sack for three or four days. I've put in a couple of mugs too. Now you'd better get off. I'm going back to the house."

Ian's voice was level, controlled, but Angus could sense what lay behind it—cold fury at the loss of his rifle-bolt, regret at losing an old companion, determination to keep Grimachory in existence. For an instant Angus wanted to give up, to pitch his rifle at Ian's feet, to wipe out everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Then he thought of Liu, alone in a frozen land with the midges. He put his hand in his pocket and took out the two rifle-bolts.

"Thank you, Ian," he said. "Here's something to repay you. You can tell the Guards you found them lying beside the river."

He pushed the bolts into Ian's hand, gripped his shoulder tightly, then turned and ran. Behind him he could hear Ian's slow footsteps as he went back towards the house, making no attempt to conceal himself now.

It was slow going in the dark. Angus put on the best speed he could, but the rifle and the food sack hampered him, and before long he found himself walking instead of running. As he went he watched the black mass of the hillside. As soon as Lachie saw the bolts he would know what had happened. If he flashed the warning sign, and if the Guards were enterprising enough, there might be trouble ahead. Not that he blamed Lachie; he was making all the trouble himself, and he deserved what he got. But he didn't want Liu to be left alone.

Away to his left a pinpoint of light flared briefly in the darkness. Lachie had given the signal.

Shouts came floating on the wind. Now there were three or four lights on the hillside, stringing out and twisting downwards, always moving closer. He began to run again, carrying the rifle in his right hand. The lights were appreciably lower now. He tried to judge the distance. If the Guards were trying to cut him off, they would have to leave the road very soon. There: the first light was changing direction, closing on him much more rapidly. The second followed, then the third. It was going to be a close call.

Ahead the burn swept round the base of a bluff, ice-floes piled high against the black rock of the hill-face. His path cut sharply upwards above the frozen water, bringing him out against the dark skyline. Cursing under his breath, he saw the first glimmer of moonlight. Someone shouted; the Guards had spotted him. There were a couple of shots, nowhere near the mark. Then he was plunging down the far side of the bluff, making for the long straight above the falls.

He slid on to the level ice, the sack bumping wildly against his shoulders. Behind him a light came over the crest of the rise; there was more shouting. He raced down the surface of the river, sliding and stumbling on the glass-smooth ice. He was almost in safety, almost back to Liu. Already he could feel the first stirrings of the midges. He forced himself to slow down, risking a shot in the back, whilst the midges brushed round him.

Miraculously, no shots came. The Guards must have remembered what had happened the last time they had come to the burn. They were being cautious.

The gully where he had left Liu loomed up on his right, a blacker gash in the darkness of the hillside. He climbed off the ice, and slithered his way up into the shelter of the ravine. Behind him the last light cut off suddenly as he rounded a boulder. At least he was out of the direct line of fire. But it was important to find Liu and to get out of the ravine whilst it was still dark. He didn't want to be trapped there in the morning, an easy target for a long range shot.

The gully steepened. Soon he was scrabbling for a handhold. He began to feel anxious. In the dark it was difficult to judge distances, but he had the impression he should have come on Liu already. He went on, the tension increasing with every step. The gully narrowed, became almost perpendicular, then vanished. He was out on the open hillside. Far below he could see the Guards' lights moving aimlessly. Liu was gone.

A solitary midge sang beside his right ear; abruptly he realized that he was out of the protection of the swarm. He climbed carefully down into the ravine again, testing every step before he put his full weight on it. No point in giving his position away. But worry for Liu pushed everything else out of his conscious thoughts. It wasn't conceivable that he had lost her, after throwing so much else away for her.

Back in the shelter of the gully, he sensed the midges spiraling past, blanketing his thoughts. He stood still, listening to the singing, trying to work out a plan to find Liu. It became more and more difficult to concentrate. The singing was rising in pitch, building up to an intensity he had never known before. He found his own lips moving crazily, his throat trying to follow the cadences of the singing. But Liu Liu-

"Here. Here. Hurry."

Her voice. But not her voice. He whirled round, expecting to find her at his elbow. There was nothing there. Yet it had been her voice, low, controlled, but urgent. She was in some sort of danger. She wanted him to come. But she wasn't there.

"This way. Hurry. Hurry."

Now she was anxious. The danger was nearer. He found himself going down the gully, rifle at the ready. And always the voice that wasn't a voice, the voice that sounded inside his own head, calling to him, pulling his feet down to the river and out across the ice. He couldn't have changed direction if he had wanted to. A homing beam, he thought wildly; nothing to do but follow. "Quick, oh quick. Qu—"

The voice rose to a crescendo. Sheer fear cut into him, tightening his muscles, drying his throat. She was in real danger now. He was running along the ice, up the further bank and into the dark hillside. A light flashed in front of him.

"They've got me. Come. Come."

He looked wildly around, saw the light receding. Not safe to fire. He pointed the rifle one way, then another. He threw his anxiety into the night air, willing her to answer, to show herself. If he could hear her in this impossible way, could she hear him? She had to be rescued; and he was the only person who could save her.

There was a swishing noise, an incredibly high-pitched humming in his ears, a sharp chorus of shrieks, and then silence. The light ahead was still, a long beam pointing irrelevantly into the darkness of the sky.

He heard Liu's voice—her real voice this time—calling to him.

"Angus. Angus."

Slowly he walked forwards towards the light. She was lying where she had fallen, her hands tied roughly behind her back, a long bruise on her face catching the edge of the torch beam. He bent down, untied the rope, and hauled her to her feet. She leaned against him, panting, one hand reaching out for his. He held on to her tightly, feeling her hair brush across his face.

"What happened?" Her voice was low, frightened.

He picked up the torch and flashed it towards the ground. Around her lay bodies—a dozen at least, every one with the green shoulder-flash of a Guard. He let go of her hand, and prodded the nearest Guard with his foot. The man rolled over, sightless eyes staring at the black sky. Angus prodded again. Across the man's neck ran a great burnt weal. Silently he walked over to the next body, then to another, and another. At last he straightened up and looked slowly at her.

"Dead-every one dead," he said. "The midges have burned them."

CHAPTER FOUR

Where the burn joined the frontier river there were waterlogged flats, once meadow pasture, now covered with a tangle of alders. The railway line to the south had crossed the river just above the junction; three of its piers still stood, but the iron girders had been blown up early in the Russian campaign, and the flimsy wooden replacements had long since followed them. There was no line either, only the grass-grown embankment leading up to the bridge, and the burned-out station buildings. Upstream from the bridge a tangle of wrecked masonry and rusted metal marked a forgotten rearguard action. Once there had been a farmsteading there; he had known the farmer, sister's son to his own stepfather. He remembered the fact without pleasure. If he had any relations still alive he would be surprised to hear it. He had left the hill country because of his stepfather and gone south to the cities and to the glittering, precarious life of an actor. Not that his stepfather had been cruel to him; not that he had resented his mother taking a new husband. The situation had been neither Freudian nor fairy-tale. He had simply found himself swept into a new clan, a new world of farmers and lawyers and country-town politicians; and he had got out. It was, he thought as he cautiously inspected the landscape before crossing the exposed railway embankment, an omen worth remembering. Here he was again, running away from another clan towards something unknown. But this time there wouldn't be television lights and trips to New York.

The river was running deep and strong between the broken piers of the old bridge. The ice-floes at the mouth of the swollen Grimachory burn washed backwards and forwards under its force. From time to time the current swept one of them away; inside seconds it was out of sight on its way to the eastern sea. No chance of crossing here. He shook his head slowly to Liu. They ran across the embankment, slithered down the far side, and scuttled under the cover of the alders.

It was late afternoon. The weather was still bright and cold, the wind light from the north. They had come down the burn, one long side of a triangle, to meet the river. Now he planned to work back up the other long side to the midge swarms around the ruined helicopter. Across the open hill the journey would have taken under an hour. But that would have been dangerous, out of the shelter of the swarms and exposed to the Guards and Lachie. Of the two, Lachie was probably the more dangerous, for he knew the hills. Angus didn't want to meet him.

So far they had been lucky. But the trip was only half over. There remained the tricky business of following the river valley back upstream, always open to an enemy on the hillside above. The Chinese were a possible danger too. Back from the south bank he could make out a blockhouse, one of the long chain of posts with which the Chinese guarded their frontier. It was beyond rifle-shot, but he didn't want to be seen all the same. Somewhere they would have to cross the river, and it would be better to do it without spectators on either bank. He was relying on the upper reaches being frozen over—and, he thought grimly as they stumbled through the maze of alder trunks, the gamble had to come off. At most they had food for three nights in the open; one was already past, another would have to go before they reached a crossing-place, and the margin of safety was small.

The midges were around them, singing all the time. By now he had got past being surprised by their presence. The only safe ground for the two of them was midge territory; once that was accepted, surprise ceased to be relevant. Still, the implications remained. The midges were vastly important; possibly the most important thing that had happened to life on earth since the first man had walked erect It was disturbing, even if ironically appropriate, to think that they might be living in the first days of a new, unimaginably portentous, revolution. If dinosaurs had had brains, Angus thought, they would have felt like this.

He said as much to Liu as they rounded the skeletons of a convoy of heavy guns, wrecked by bombing where they had halted in the shadow of a fir plantation. Liu, scrambling over the lip of a frozen crater, said nothing in reply. Her uniform was showing signs of the long, punishing march; she walked with less resilience, driving herself to keep at Angus's heels. She was only half with him, her face closed-up and secret, battling with some complex inner tension.

It had been the same ever since the death of the Guards. He had got no clear story from her to explain why she had not stayed in the gully during his expedition to the lodge. From the moment they had found the bodies with their great weals where the midges had burnt them she had broken contact with him. It had been like living with a sleepwalker. The recollection of the night still chilled him. He had used his knife to cut deep into the heather, shaking the snow out of the stalks and piling them up into a great banked circle, inside which he had made a rough mattress from more heather. He had lifted her inside, climbed in beside her himself, and pulled the heather over until only their faces showed to the night sky. And there, insulated from the frost, they had huddled together in an uneasy half-sleep, his arms around her whilst she twisted and moaned, and the midges sang endlessly overhead.

In the morning he got up quickly before the sky began to lighten, and made a fire with dead bracken and leaves. Hurrying, he melted some snow, boiled the water, and made a rough porridge. Before the sun was up he had doused the fire, anxious not to let the smoke show against the day sky. Then he roused Liu and forced her to eat. Since then they had been picking their way along the burn-side. From time to time he chewed some of the raw venison that Ian had given him. Liu refused to eat anything. She was completely amenable, completely determined to keep with him—but completely remote and withdrawn.

Now, with the first chill of the evening hanging over the river, they were passing the ruins of the farm. Angus recognized the garden walls, and an old cherry tree, blasted and dying. He changed his mind about looking for shelter for the night amongst the remains of the buildings. Grimachory, still half-standing, had been one thing. This annihilation of what he had once known was something else, something not to be borne.

He walked on westwards across the neck of a wide loop of the river, angling towards the birch-woods that ran beneath the hills on its northern bank. It would be colder amongst the trees, exposed to the night mists that were beginning to curl along the water. He wanted to get as high as possible, without leaving the shelter of the midges, and without showing himself and Liu to any watcher on the southern bank. She was, he could see, almost out on her feet with fatigue. Not, he thought with a sudden anger, what should be happening to her.

They came to the first trees, misshapen and stunted under their loads of dead lichen and snow. In their shelter, the wind dropped away entirely. Footsteps sounded leaden, choked in the white stillness. The snow lay thicker here, where the wind had no chance to drive it into drifts. Angus was aware that he was unbearably weary. Liu must be in a much worse state.

The thought made him hurry. He struck up the hillside, to where the trees thinned out, and patches of heather began to appear. He stopped in the lee of a great moss-grown rock. Before he had unslung the food sack and his rifle, Liu buckled at the knees and fell forwards on to the snow.

As quickly as he could, he made a small fire. Cutting heather was easier here, for the frost had bitten less deeply than by the Grimachory burn. Even so, he had to spend some time before he had gathered enough. By then Liu was hard asleep. He hesitated before rousing her. But it was vitally important that she should take some food and get warm before she slept. If she didn't, he saw himself having to carry her in the morning. So, reluctantly, he wakened her, made her eat, then packed her into the heather cocoon and climbed in himself. This time exhaustion did its work. Almost at once she fell asleep and lay still.

Angus, his body weary but his mind racing, stared up at the stars for a long time before he slept. He wakened just before the dawn. The quiet was intense, deeper and harder than anything he had ever experienced. Far above the Plough sparkled with an insufferable brightness. The heather was brittle with cold. Beside him Liu stirred uneasily. For an instant her body pressed against his side, then relaxed. He tried to wipe his mind clear and let sleep take over again, but the effort was useless.

The midges; that was it. Very faintly under the stillness he could feel, rather than hear, a distant singing. Distant, yet at the same time close. Almost as if his own blood was singing. The thought was disturbing. The midges had been down by the river for years, and he had taken them for granted. But what had happened now? There were new aspects, sinister yet immensely significant He had been able to take Liu under the shelter of the swarm, though she never previously dared go near the midges. Yet within a few minutes she was able to move through them without difficulty. She had never panicked; he had only once seen her begin to brush the insects away, and then she had checked herself immediately. Or had she done it herself? Slowly he was beginning to wonder, to doubt whether either he or Liu really controlled what was happening. And then the ambush. He felt a new, interior chill, matching the cold of the night outside. A frond of heather, overladen with frost, snapped suddenly and fell across his forehead. He let it lie. What about last night? The question forced itself on him insistently. What had happened?

Set the facts in order, then try to add them up; that was what he had to do. So: Liu had left her hiding place—perhaps to look for him, perhaps because some Guard had spotted her. He had been unable to find her, until he had heard her voice, had followed it back to her like an aircraft homing on a beacon. But—had she called out? Had he really heard her voice? Again he was uneasy. It had been her voice calling from inside him. Telepathy? Extra-sensory perception of some kind? The midges? He remembered the dead Guards. Too much of a coincidence that all twenty should have blundered into the midges at once, should all have been burned inside a few seconds—for he was quite sure the patrol had died almost simultaneously. He had to face it; the midges had transmitted Liu's thoughts to him, the midges had defended her suddenly and dreadfully; he recalled his own anxiety as he had hunted for her.

It began to make sense. After all, the midges were something new, something outside human knowledge. Swarms of locusts, plagues of grasshoppers, ancient enemies of man, a parallel and terrifying world; was this simply one more product of the insect kingdom? But locusts had never been telepaths, locusts had never sought out men and killed them deliberately. Men had died when the locusts devoured their food. Now men were dying because they fought other men inside the midges' territory. What did that mean?

Intelligence? A new intelligence, a new kind of mind-not a crowd of separate intelligences, fighting, hating, loving, but one intelligence: the swarm, not the individual midges. Was that what was happening? And himself and Liu. Where did they fit in? Why were they accepted? Were they the only ones? Were there standards of admission—a club for "friends of the midges"? What had he got to give in return?

That was far enough. He began to be scared by his own imagination. He struggled up on to one elbow, and looked out of the heather mound. There was enough to worry about without chasing this sort of shadow. The facts, after all, didn't go so very far. Granted, the midges had killed the Guards; granted, he had found Liu again in a way that couldn't be explained rationally. But that was as far as it went. Time to think of other things-how to get across the river, what he was going to do himself after he had taken Liu to safety. These, he told himself, were the important things—far more important than the endless singing in his blood.

He climbed out of the heather. The dawn was coming up, and it was time to be moving. When he had cooked the food he shook Liu. She woke readily enough, obviously less tired than she had been the previous morning. She took the mug of porridge, and then a second. It was reassuring that when he turned back from dousing the fire she was combing her hair. The day before had been different. Whatever she was thinking now, she wasn't under the pressure that had made her an automaton for twenty-four hours. Was she acclimatized now, accepting the midges? Leaning against the rock, he waited for her to finish. She was suddenly desirable. This is where I ought to make the first real move—place, timing, motive, all are right. And that, he told himself bitterly, is the curse of being an actor. This is going to be a difficult enough job without letting sex get into it.

Liu's comb stopped in mid-stroke. She turned her head slowly and looked at him.

"You're quite right," she said, "sex won't help just now."

Angus stared at her.

"I didn't speak," he said.

"No. But that is what you were thinking. Or some of it. You were also thinking that it was a good thing that I was combing my hair. And—"

Angus pressed back hard against the rock.

"Which means," he broke in, "that I was right. There's some sort of thought transmission going on, and these midges have something to do with it. That's how I was able to rescue you from the Guards."

Liu looked surprised.

"Of course. I thought that was obvious. When it all happened I was terrified, and even yesterday morning it didn't make sense. But by last night, after a whole day of listening, it all came clear. Don't you hear my thoughts too?"

Angus shook his head.

"I haven't tried," he said. "I suppose I've been too busy finding the way to think of much else."

"Strange," Liu said. "I don't have to try. That's why I didn't speak much yesterday. I could hear what you were thinking—at least, whenever you were thinking of me, or anything connected with me. It must have been something to do with the singing."

"I can hear the singing, but I can't hear you."

"Stand still, then, and listen," Liu said.

Angus stood still. When he moved again his face was white.

"Yes," he said. "I could hear you."

Liu was matter-of-fact about it. Angus felt a stab of jealousy. He was the one who had brought her to the midges; without him she would never have come under their shelter. Now she was closer to them than he was. He didn't look forward to the rest of the journey; it was one thing guarding his tongue, another controlling his thoughts, trying not to notice the way her hair fell across her face, trying not to remember how she had looked when he stripped her and warmed her in front of the Grimachory fire.

"Exactly," Liu put her comb away and stood up. "It's not as easy as just keeping your mouth shut. But it works both ways. As far as I can guess, there's some physical change involved too. Feel your pulse. It's probably beating at getting on for twice its normal rate."

Angus scuffed at the embers of the fire. Again it was the implications that worried him. How could the midges be stopped? If they weren't stopped, what was going to happen to the people in their path? On the other hand, the midges had helped him, had saved Liu's life. For that they rated higher than the Guards. A problem in morals, then. Man or midge—which was the more humane?

Liu was impatient now.

"Come on," she said. "I must get back to my own side of the river. Whatever all this means, I want out of it. It's interesting listening to your thoughts, but it's not quite so pleasant thinking that if these insects spread, tile only human beings left will be either telepaths or burnt corpses. I think I like my own sort of society rather better than that. Come on."

Around midday they came within sight of the wrecked British helicopter. The ice, Angus was relieved to notice, had closed in over the river, so that only a narrow channel of water was left open. With luck they would find a crossing-place soon. Meanwhile he kept close to the hillside, as far away as possible from the great spirals around the helicopter.

Liu didn't try to linger. He was glad for that. The singing was noticeably stronger as they neared the wreck; his pulse was even faster than it had been in the morning. He felt uneasy, anxious to be away from the midges as soon as he could, but underneath there was a deeper, nagging fear of what would happen to them on the southern bank. He wasn't as convinced as Liu that it was a wise thing to do. He knew enough about people in authority to suspect that her superiors might not be all that anxious to see her back. And he didn't want Liu to be hurt.

He checked his thoughts, glancing over his shoulder at Liu as he did so. If she had been listening, she gave no sign. Her whole attention was given to the spirals as they looped and swirled through the thin winter sunlight. This was the heart of the midge swarm, the key to the whole situation. And it was unapproachable. Angus knew that much instinctively. Or were the midges telling him? At any rate, he stayed on the edge until the wreck was out of sight downstream. Only then did he risk leaving the hillside.

Out on the level ground beside the river more familiar anxieties returned. This was the sort of problem he had been facing for years—the eternal problem of seeing without being seen, of getting somewhere in safety when every rock or tree might conceal an enemy. The midges were more closely confined here. The hill came within a couple of hundred yards of the river, and rose steeply with only a narrow belt of trees along its base. The midges had made no attempt to climb out on to the open face of the hill. Instead, the main spirals moved on the southern bank, where the hills lay more than a mile away from the river.

As a crossing-place, the spot had obvious advantages. For the first time, the ice covered the whole width of the river-only for fifty yards, before tumbling rapids allowed the water to run clear again, but still enough to allow a crossing, if they were prepared to scramble over the rough floes. But anyone crossing was wide open to observation, and worse, from the hillside. He hoped the Guards hadn't been persistent enough to send out a patrol.

He turned to Liu and pointed to the ice-floes. She nodded. Angus hesitated for a second, then shrugged his shoulders. It was the best chance they would get. The only trouble was that he wasn't sure that he wanted to cross.

The nearer they came to the water the slower their advance became. The river had been out over its banks earlier in the winter, and the sodden ground had since frozen rock-hard and glassy. Slipping and stumbling, they worked their way to the bank and looked down. There was a drop of ten feet or more, then a row of jagged shoes of ice, pressed hard against the side by the force of the current. It wasn't an encouraging sight Angus stood for a moment, looking in both directions for a more promising starting point.

There was a sharp crack from the hillside behind him, and something spattered into the snow a couple of feet away. He clutched Liu by the shoulder, and launched himself over, throwing his weight hard backwards against the gravel face of the bank. A protruding stone stabbed his shoulder blades, the edge of an ice-floe rasped along his ribs; then they were down, sprawled in an untidy heap amongst the ice.

Liu sat up and brushed the ice from her clothes; shaken but unhurt.

"Someone shot at us," Angus said unnecessarily. His mind was busy working out the prospects ahead. The river was a good thirty yards wide. They could move upstream or downstream a short distance, but the whole stretch was inside the sights of the unknown enemy on the hill. Angus wasn't so sure that he was in fact unknown. The shot had come from a stalking rifle, to judge by the sound; that probably meant Lachie.

He looked carefully at the ice in front of them. It would give little or no cover, therefore the essential was speed. He chose the easiest-looking route through the floes, at least it was impossible to go in a straight too, which would make the sniper's job slightly more difficult.

Liu listened carefully as he pointed out the route.

"You go first," Angus said, "and keep moving, but try to vary your pace. If you get over, you should be able to find cover in the bed of that little creek just opposite here. After that you'll be able to get to your fort without too much trouble. It can't be more than two miles away."

"Are you going back?" she asked.

"No. I'll come straight behind you. But you'd better know what to do if he gets me."

"Yes, of course," Liu said quietly.

She pulled his head down and kissed him on the lips. Then, before he had a chance to react, she turned and ran.

Half a dozen paces out from the bank, and they were in full view of the sniper on the hill. Liu moved delicately in front of him, now slowing, now speeding up, but always picking her footholds cleanly. He ran behind her, head down, trying to keep between her and the hillside. Ten yards, twenty, twenty-five; the ice stretched endlessly ahead, further than he had guessed. It was a relief to hear another crack, to see splinters fly from the surface of the ice in front of Liu. There was barely time for a third shot. Liu had realized it too; she ran much more quickly, up off the river, scrambling in the thin snow on the far bank. Angus noticed with momentary terror that she would have to climb over a narrow ridge before she could reach the shelter of the creek. But before the terror had time to do more than start, Liu was over the ridge and out of his sight. Instinctively he turned away and ran on inland. The second shot struck some protruding stone, and whined madly away at a tangent. Then he was on the bank of the stream himself, and dropping over, rolling headlong into a snowdrift.

Liu crawled up the bed of the stream, and knelt on hands and knees beside the drift, waiting for him to recover. He sat up, brushing snow from his face, and grinned at her. She grinned back. An enormous feeling of complicity swamped him, and with it a release. Nothing was ever going to be quite the same again. She was going back to her own people, and he was taking her. That was going to be a new start. His earlier fears about her likely reception dissolved away. Across the river things were going to be different.

He stood up and peered cautiously over the bank. He wanted to see who had been shooting, though the chances of the sniper showing himself were remote. The river was inside range of the top of the hill, so it was most likely that the man was firing from the skyline. Angus showed himself a shade higher up the bank. The crack of the rifle was almost instantaneous. He flopped down beside Liu, rubbing snow from his eyes. Too good a marksman to be anyone but a hunter— the last shot had kicked less than two yards away. It was time to get out of range.

He crouched down and signed to Liu to follow him up the bed of the creek. They had gone less than twenty yards when he stopped suddenly, holding up his hand.

"What's that?" he said.

There was a new sound, an unusual sound. Not the wind, not the crackling of ice, but a long, low whistling, coming from the marshes ahead.

Liu gripped his arm.

"Chinese troops. I've heard our frontier patrols whistle like that to keep contact. I'm nearly back. Come on."

She pulled him after her, running at full speed. Angus let her get ahead. The whistling hadn't sounded very near, and in any case she would have to slow down soon. He risked another look over the bank. The river was already receding behind them. Another hundred yards and they would be out of range of the unseen enemy on the northern shore.

He rounded a corner and saw Liu standing, waiting for him. The reason was obvious enough. Just ahead of her a spiral of midges lay across her path.

"Go on," he called out. "They won't hurt you."

She shook her head, reluctant to move. Angus felt an instant of anger which vanished at once in annoyance with himself. Liu was looking for her own kind, not for the midges. She was across the river, back to guns and uniforms and camps, back to the familiar battle with disease and disorder. The midges had been the essential go-betweens, but now they were already something in the past for her. His pleasure of a few moments earlier began to ebb away.

He took Liu's arm and walked on, into the familiar singing. The insects closed round them. He slipped his hand down to Liu's wrist and felt her pulse; it was accelerating sharply. So was his own. Clearly being with the midges had complex side-effects. As on several occasions in the past he felt a sudden rush of affection for them. After all, he told himself, he wouldn't still be alive if it wasn't for them. Nor would Liu. No reason why she should be frightened of them.

"Am I frightened of them?" Liu asked.

Angus was angry with himself for forgetting. Telepathy again, now that they were back with the swarm. He must be on guard, must try to shut down his thoughts, musn't—

Liu jabbed him hard in the ribs, interrupting his panic. She put her finger to her lips and walked on. He stared for a second, then realized what she meant. No point in talking, when they could hold a telepathic conversation. It was only a question of timing, of knowing when to listen and when to transmit. Strange to have a two-way radio inside himself; strange, but in the end perhaps more satisfactory than talking. Words always had their own complications.

"No, I'm not frightened of them really," Liu's voice came to him. Was it her voice, or his own inner ear picking up and recording her thoughts? Did telepathy involve something like a microphone? He floundered, then checked himself. That sort of speculation was a luxury.

"Stop it and listen," Liu went on. "I know you were angry when you found out that I could do this better than you can. I wasn't angry with you, for I could understand why you should feel that. But this is different. I don't want any mistake now. I'm almost back, and it's important that I should get back. There's a lot of work to be done, and people are more important than midges—"

She wrinkled up her face, then clapped her hands over her ears in mock dismay as Angus opened his mouth to speak, realized that it wasn't necessary, and closed it again. But she grew serious as she walked on. Angus let his thoughts flow out.

"I'm not so sure about that. For ten years now people haven't mattered very much. That's why they've died off by the million. Or rather, been killed off—for we've killed all of them, whether they ended up with bullets inside them, or bubonic plague, or simply famine. What makes you think we've any right to call ourselves more important than the midges? They're new. We're old and we've had our chance. Go back and see what happens. I don't think it's going to be so very different from Camp Three and the other side."

"Wrong, wrong," her thoughts cut in. "You'll see. Just because the Guards tried to kill me and broke their agreement with us, that doesn't mean that my people are going to do the same. We may be conquerors, but we're honest ones, and we've got a sense of responsibility. I want to get away from these midges because they're a danger to our survival, not because I'm frightened of them. I want to leave them alone; I want them to leave us alone. The idea of being tied to an insect swarm isn't attractive. It makes me feel less human."

Angus made no attempt to answer, concentrating on blanking out his thoughts. For himself, he wasn't by any means so sure. But he wasn't going to stop her.

The whistling ahead was nearer now. It came from three sides. They must almost be out of the midge territory; indeed, he could see the swarm thinning out around them. Acting on impulse, he stopped and unslung his rifle. He slipped it into the food sack, now almost empty, and hid the package under a pile of loose stones on one side of the rapidly-narrowing watercourse. Amongst the midges the rifle would be safe, and if he ever got away from the Chinese, it should be possible to retrieve it. Liu watched him without speaking. He probed for her thoughts, but made no contact.

Very soon the midges dropped away completely. Now they were emerging on to the open plain. Half a mile away the first hills began; beyond to the south-west, they ran up to a range of high mountains, white from head to foot in deep snow; to the south-east the peaks were lower, gradually diminishing in height towards the sea. Against the foothills to the east Angus could see the rays of the falling sun catching the walls of the Chinese fort. Liu saw the fort also. She pointed, and turned towards it. Unhappy, Angus followed her.

They had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards when he realized that they were being watched. He swung round. Behind them, moving silently over the snow-covered grass, a line of soldiers in Chinese uniform was following at a respectful distance. As he looked, one of the soldiers whistled. Ahead another line rose from the ground, rifles held ready. He looked at Liu.

"There you are," he said. "Your own people are looking for you."

Liu said nothing, but gripped his arm tightly. He could feel her puzzlement. He looked more closely at the soldiers ahead. They weren't lowering their rifles, though Liu's uniform must have been clearly visible to them. And in the middle of the line stood a group of officers. Clearly, they were expected. He hoped that the welcome was going to come up to Liu's expectations. One thing only reassured him; a single midge was hovering close behind her head.

CHAPTER FIVE

"No, major," the General said. "You are not going back to base." He spoke in English, his eyes flickering from Liu to Angus and back again. Angus watched him narrowly. The General was small, precise, unemotional; he gave the impression of having unlimited time to spare. But he was under strain. His hands were restless, and a vein was throbbing steadily in his left temple. Too little sleep, too few people to trust—and now something big to worry about. It must be big, to have brought the Chinese Commander-in-Chief to this frontier fort. Angus let his hands slip down his thighs, pushed hard against the canvas-backed chair, and fought to keep awake in the stuffy, overheated room.

Beside him Liu sat stiffly upright. Impossible to tell what she was thinking. The General was making the running now. The two orderlies behind him stood motionless, machine-pistols hanging loosely in their hands. Out of the corner of his eye Angus could see a signals officer sitting at a radio set under the window. Beyond the window, he knew, there was a map pinned to the wall, bristling with arrows and pins. Like a dozen other command posts out of the dead past. For a moment he was faintly surprised not to be wearing uniform, not to feel the old, comfortable weight of service boots on his feet. Then he saw the General's tired, flat face, and remembered where he was. At least they had let him sit down. But it would be safer not to turn round to look at the map.

The General was expecting a reply. The silence lengthened out into minutes. Angus tucked his legs under the chair and gripped his knees with his hands. The General picked up a pencil from the table and began to tap it against the fingernails of his right hand. Left-handed, Angus noticed irrelevantly.

Finally Liu spoke. She too used English now. When they had first been brought into the fort the conversation had all been in Chinese. Liu had made a long report, the General had asked half a dozen questions, Liu had answered shortly. Now, the General had switched into English. Not, assuredly, just to show that he knew the language.

"Why?" Liu asked flatly.

The Genera] took his time about replying. He noticed Angus watching his hands, and dropped them below the edge of the table before speaking.

"For various reasons, Major. There is no helicopter that can be spared to take you. Also, you must have a medical examination before you leave here. You have been in contact with people beyond the river, and the rules are strict about that."

Liu nodded.

"That will take very little time," she said. "And can I then get back to my work?"

The question came out sharply. The General had been expecting it. He looked straight at Liu.

"Possibly. There are one or two things you can both tell us first. Captain!"

The signals officer swung round in his chair.

"Yes, General?"

"Take notes. I am going to ask some questions."

Angus shifted his weight in his chair. He didn't dare look at Liu. This was going to be the critical point. The shift into English had been for his benefit. Now the General was going to check the two stories. And, because Liu had reported in Chinese, he had no idea what she had already said.

The General was speaking again. Angus jerked into attention.

"Tell me," the General was asking him, "how you found this officer, and what happened to her companions."

Not safe to take any chances. Angus told the story carefully, leaving nothing out. He stopped at the point where they had first escaped into the midges. No point in saying too much about what happened after that, if the General would let it rest there.

It looked at first as if the General was going to let it rest "Good," he said. "That agrees with what Major Liu has told me. You were very wise. The penalty for harming a Chinese soldier is death. Did you know that?"

"No," Angus said. "Why should I? I don't live in occupied territory."

"Quite," the General was relaxed now. "But you know very well that the penalty for killing one of your own Guards is the same. So we can assume that you have a correct view of authority. Which is just as well."

He paused and let his hands fall on to the table. Angus stared at them, and waited.

"What happened then?" The question came quietly.

Angus took his time. The officer's pencil moved quickly, then stopped. Angus could see it poised above the coarse yellow paper.

"There was some trouble," he said at last. "I went back to Grimachory and stole a rifle. I must have been followed, for some Guards turned up and chased us. We were lucky to dodge them in the dark."

"Go on." The voice was expressionless.

"There's not much else to say. We got down to the river and followed it until we found ice hard enough to cross on. Someone fired at us as we got over. Then your men collected us."

Now he had committed himself. If Liu had said more than that, then he was trapped.

"I see," said the General. He stood up abruptly and walked to the window. Outside Angus could see the last of the evening sunlight slanting across the fort compound. It seemed much more than three hours since they had crossed the river.

The General pulled the window open. It still had glass panes, Angus noticed. But then the Chinese were probably in rather better shape than the Guards. For an instant he imagined that he saw an insect fluttering past the line of the window-sill. Only for an instant. Then the General slammed the window shut and turned back into the room. He took his revolver from its holster and held it delicately in his left hand. A sentence in Chinese—and the two guards and the officer saluted, and went out.

The General looked thoughtfully at Angus, then at Liu. His thumb played with the safety catch of the revolver.

"I take my own precautions," he said to Angus. "Perhaps you will say rather more now that we are alone."

This time Angus shot a glance at Liu. She turned her head slightly to see him, and smiled briefly.

"There is a penalty for that also," the General said.

"You do me too much honour," said Angus. But that wouldn't do; he had to play the simple peasant, not the ham actor in a romantic lead. He forced a sheepish grin on to his face.

The General smiled too. A tired smile.

"Have it your way," he said. "It doesn't matter. What does matter is this. You came through these insects on your way here. Neither of you is hurt. Every one of our men who has ever gone near them has died unpleasantly. Have you any explanation?"

Angus shook his head without looking at Liu. So he had guessed right. She hadn't said anything about the midges.

"I haven't," he told the General. "They didn't attack us. That's all."

The General tapped on the table with his gun barrel. "Yet they killed a dozen Guards who were chasing you?" Angus stiffened.

"What do you mean?" he asked. The General was peremptory.

"None of that. You know perfectly well. I have a radio signal here reporting what happened. It is from the Colonel at what you call Camp Three."

He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket with his right hand and ran it lightly against his lips.

"Does the Colonel explain why his men shot Colonel Cheng?" It was Liu who spoke.

"That doesn't matter." The General was impatient. "That was a risk we had to take. But Camp Three is worried about the midges, and so am I. Come on now. What's the explanation?"

Before Angus could speak Liu was on her feet, looking down at the General. He clicked back his safety catch. Liu waved the revolver away and stared straight at her superior officer.

Suddenly the General looked very old and tired.

"You will have to tell us some more first, General," she said. "You realize that I was very lucky not to be raped or shot by your friend the Colonel and his soldiers? You realize that I thought I was simply carrying out a business operation, delivering arms and collecting medicines? I'm not so sure about that now. First you can tell me just what this flight was all about. Then perhaps we can tell you something."

The General laid the revolver down on the table in front of him. Liu sat down in her chair again, watching him carefully.

"It was a business operation, just as you thought," the General said, coming to decision. "You were delivering arms and bringing medicines back. At least, that is what ought to have happened. It—"

"You mean," Angus broke in, "that you have been giving these Guards the weapons that keep them in power? Have you ever seen Camp Three. I'd rather be dead than live there."

"I can imagine what Camp Three is like," said the General. "We've got our own camps, though I think we run them rather better. But don't you realize that without camps there would be nothing but starvation, with probably plague thrown in? That's what we used to have in China before the Revolution. I'd rather have camps. That way what food there is can be shared. That way diseases can be checked. That way you may get Guards, but you don't get twenty sets of looters in one night. Would you like me to tell you what Glasgow was like when we took over?"

Angus shook his head. He hadn't seen Glasgow, but he had been lucky to get out of Aberdeen alive. The General was speaking a kind of sense. But there was a flaw in it all somewhere, if only he could find it. It was some consolation to see that Liu wasn't liking it very much either. Three days ago she wouldn't have been so worried.

"One thing I want to know," Liu said. The General turned back to her.

"Yes?" he said.

"I understand why we were giving the Guards arms. We couldn't get across the river, and they couldn't either, except on a very small stretch where we both have plenty of troops. If we ever do get across, it will be preferable to find some sort of organization still working. So the arms make some sort of sense. But why do we have to get medicines from the Guards? What have they got that we can't supply for ourselves?"

She was moving fast, Angus thought. He had asked her very similar questions, and she had brushed them aside. Now she was beginning to wonder.

The General took his time before replying. He picked up the revolver, then laid it down again.

"They have one thing," he said at last. "I'll tell you what it is in a moment. But first something else. There are about half a million Chinese troops in Britain. The last report from occupation headquarters in England estimated the surviving native population at around ten million. That was ten months ago."

"These reports should come through every month," Liu said. "I saw one less than six weeks ago."

The General nodded.

"Yes. You saw one. I invented it."

"Which means—?" Liu let the question die in the air.

"Precisely. We haven't had proper communications south of the Forth for the best part of a year. We haven't had any replacement troops since last August, and the last convoy of supplies came through in September. As far as we can gather, there is bubonic plague in northern England, and some sort of revolt has been going on all winter. We're on our own— with enough arms to last for five years; nothing like enough petrol even for a year; and food for about a quarter of the last estimated Scottish population."

Angus watched the man, saw the consciousness of defeat slip through the clipped words, and felt an improbable wave of sympathy.

"Do you know any history?" the General asked him suddenly.

"Perhaps. Depends what sort of history. Why?"

"Have you ever wondered what a Roman legion commander felt like when he lost touch with Rome, when the transports stopped sailing and the barbarians began to gather along Hadrian's Wall? We had a Wall too, in China, long ago. Now I'm beginning to realize what walls are for."

"They don't work," Angus said shortly.

"I expect you're right," the General replied, without heat.

"Get back to the point," said Liu. She was less shaken than Angus had expected. She must have had her own premonition of what was going to happen. This was one way an empire could die. His own father had been a District Officer in British India. Lucky man; his empire had died in a dawn, even if it was only a false dawn. This was twilight now.

"What have the Guards got to give us?" Liu was asking.

"Drugs of various sorts. We actually have reasonable stocks of most of them, though we can't manufacture any more. The Guards have a factory still working. And there is one drug that we can only get from them—this one."

He pulled a small bottle out of his pocket and unstoppered it. Three oval saffron pills rolled on to the table.

"I've seen these before," Angus said. "The Camp medical officers issue them."

He stopped short, but the General took him up at once.

"Have you ever taken one of them yourself?" the General asked.

"Once," Angus said, and left it at that. He didn't want to remember, didn't want to let Liu know that once he had gone down with Lachie to Camp Three on a hot autumn afternoon, had drawn the lodge supplies and loaded them on to a pony—and then had gone to the medical hut. He didn't want to be reminded of that, and of the dead, hopeless face of the woman he had been allocated. That had been once. He had never gone back again.

"So you know what they are?" the General persisted.

"I was never told," Angus replied.

"But you can guess?"

"You tell us," Liu exclaimed. "What are these pills for, and why do we need to get supplies of them?"

"A very effective, long-lasting, anti-conception device," the General said evenly. "They have a remarkable effect on male fertility. So we issue them as widely as possible in our own camps, and to our soldiers. We don't explain their purpose, of course, but we find it is remarkable how readily people will take pills. Remember, incidentally, that we have food for about one person in four."

He picked up the revolver and walked back to the window. In the gathering darkness there were flickering lights in the compound. From the gateway came the sound of the guard being relieved.

Angus watched Liu's reaction. For himself, there was little surprise left. All government was dirty. In cold blood, what was happening made sense. Guards and Chinese alike were playing with the people they ruled, playing a tricky game of survival with the fives of thousands of human beings, Perhaps they were right. Forty million and more had already died in Britain in ten years. It made sense to adjust the population to the food supply. Ironical, too. If the Chinese had known of the saffron pills thirty years earlier, the world might still have been alive. But now: conspiracy, and power politics. The General might be an honest man; Angus thought that he probably was. It didn't make the story any cleaner.

He felt sorry for Liu. To spend years holding off chaos, to believe that running the camps and sharing the food between all the clamouring mouths made sense, was justice as well as Marxist orthodoxy—and now to find that she had been trading bullets against genocide. How was she going to take this?

"General?" Liu's voice was questioning. "Yes?"

"Why can't I go back to base?"

For the first time the General was embarrassed. He didn't reply.

"Tell me." Liu's voice was insistent.

The midges," the General said finally. "The Colonel—or someone else over there—is worried about you and the midges. He wants to know about them."

"And you want me to tell him?"

"Exactly."

"Why should I? No—I'll tell you. Because you can't afford to complain about Colonel Cheng. Because you've got to forget about the arms cargo that was stolen from us. Because these pills put you in their power. Isn't that it?"

"Only up to a point," the General said. "Just remember that none of us are going to get home. What is happening here is also happening all over the world, even in China itself. There isn't any home any more. All I can do—all we can do— is to keep things going as best we can. That's why you've got to help me."

"I don't believe the Guards have got a drug factory working," Angus said. "I've seen these people close up. Without arms they would be helpless. And they certainly don't have the brains to run a factory."

"Have you ever been to the place they call Headquarters?" the General retorted.

"No. Is it any different from Camp Three?"

"Different, yes. Just how different is something I would very much like to know. We know that the drugs come from there."

To Angus Headquarters was a name only. He had never met anyone who had been there. The Guards at Camp Three knew nothing of it but the name. Sometimes they were switched from Camp Three to Camp Four or Camp Five.

There had been at one time a Camp Two, until typhus cleaned it out. But Headquarters was something different.

"Men in white coats," he said on a sudden inspiration.

"Yes," the General replied. "Men in white coats. We had an agent once who tried to get into Headquarters. He disappeared after sending one report. Men in white coats, electric fences, workshops, and an atomic reactor. That's all we know. But these men in white coats are interested in the midges and in you. It would be best if you helped them."

"Best for you, that is," said Angus.

"Best for everyone. Best for mankind, civilization, or whatever you like to call it."

Liu lifted her head and stared at the General. He shifted a little in his chair.

"Time," Liu said. "I want time. I never knew about these pills."

"You can have a little time. Till tomorrow morning. There will be a helicopter coming then to fly you to Camp Three, unless you are prepared to talk to me first."

He walked to the door, opened it, and signalled to his body-guard to come in.

It was cold in the morning. Angus grunted and slid back under the coarse cotton blankets. He lay on his back and stared up at the whitewashed ceiling. A spider's web was hanging from the broken electric flex; he could see the dust clinging to the strands. If he looked harder he might see the spider; if it was still alive, that was. He frowned with the effort of concentration.

He drew his fingers along the line of Liu's cheekbone. She stirred in her sleep, then rolled over against him, her arm sliding across his ribs. He let his hand slip down her spine, and lay completely still whilst her warmth crept around him. After a little he fell asleep again.

Waking was a reluctant business. The woman was Deirdre. But Deirdre was dead. So this woman was dead. And he was dead too. But his name wasn't Anthony Smith. He wasn't dead. He lay still, shamming sleep, shamming death. Slowly, unwillingly, he came alive. She was heavy against his shoulder. Very gently he shifted, letting her head slide into the crook of his armpit. He looked down at her. She was Liu; not Deirdre. Not a dead world; only a dying world.

This was something. He hoped Liu wasn't going to feel ashamed when she awoke. Almost as strongly, he hoped she wasn't going to expect too much from him. Dependence again; something he had never expected to happen. But what next?

What had happened wasn't surprising, after all. In fact, surprising that it hadn't happened before. The pressure to mutual involvement had been strong. Most other men would have taken her long before this. Because he hadn't, she had naturally been grateful to him. So it had happened this way. But what next?

The General wasn't a fool, either. Penalty for sleeping with a member of the Occupation Forces, death. Penalty for a member of the Occupation Forces sleeping with a native— what? So he had put them both into the one prison room, thoughtfully provided with a large bed, and waited. Angus looked for the peephole in the door, and found it. Not that that mattered; the evidence would be clear enough when the first guard came in.

The morning was advancing. Outside the window he heard a crow croaking as it flapped slowly past. Time to get up. No, not this day. He wouldn't get up, he would lie there and wait for a guard to come in and find Liu asleep beside him. If that was the way the General wanted it, he could have it that way.

It wasn't a Guard who came. It was the General himself. He didn't look as if he had slept much, and his eyes were hard. Angus lay still and watched him. The General came to the foot of the bed, pencil in hand, and tapped on the black metal bedrail. Angus said nothing, but continued to stare at him. Liu was awake now; he could feel the change in her breathing, could feel her pressing closer against him.

The General turned away and walked to the window. He pulled it up, and let the cold outside air flood into the room.

The noise disturbed the crow. Angus saw it lumber into the air and flap clumsily on to the wall at the far side of the compound. He glanced towards the door, caught the glint of a pistol, and looked back at the General. Liu's hand slid into his and pressed it hard.

The helicopter will be here in an hour," the General said. "Are you going to tell me about these midges?"

"If you get out of here we can get dressed," said Liu. There was a note of confidence in her voice. "Come back and ask your question again when we call you."

She rolled over and closed her eyes. The vein in the General's temple throbbed dangerously. Angus stifled a laugh before it had time to grow. The General ought to be in control of the situation; not many commanding officers were lucky enough to catch their subordinates in quite so obvious a position. But he wasn't in control. He was going to do what Liu told him. Was face involved? Looking at the General, Angus thought that it probably was.

The door slammed, a bolt slid home. Liu sat up in the bed and swept her hair back from her forehead. Devastatingly, he realized just how deeply he was involved. She mattered more than anything else had ever done. The awareness made him feel vulnerable. There was very little time left.

He got out of bed quickly, pulled the window shut, and dressed in silence. When he was finished he turned and looked at Liu in her uniform. She smiled at him and held out her hands. Suddenly her confidence disappeared and she was in his arms, her face hidden against his shoulder.

"I didn't know about these pills. I didn't know," she said in a whisper.

"Does that matter?" he said.

"Yes. I didn't believe you when you said my people were no different from the Guards. But you were right."

She pushed away from him and looked straight at his eyes.

"We've got to get away from here," she said.

So there it was. He had spent days bringing her back to her own people. Now, inside twenty-four hours, they were going to be on the run again. He was glad. One interview with the General had been enough. If this was what being human had come to mean, then he wanted nothing to do with it. Genocide was genocide, whether it was the Chinese or the Guards who practised it. That was something that the General, that honourable man, the last of the proconsuls, would never be able to see. Keeping the pumps going, and throwing the passengers overboard one by one, he was hoping to steer the hulk into a safe harbour. But there weren't any harbours left. Suddenly Angus was sure of that. America, Africa, Asia, Australia, everywhere the same thing was happening. Some hulks would sink sooner than others, but sooner or later they were all going to slide beneath the surface. Not being a race of mermen, mankind would go with the hulks. And there were no tame dolphins left.

Or weren't there? The General was frightened—but not because his ship was sinking. He was frightened of the midges. That meant something. He had told lies himself, Liu had told lies also, to protect the midges. The idea, in cold blood, was ridiculous. But that was what they had done. Was this the dolphin?

"Of course we will get away," he said to Liu. "But tell me one thing first. When the General talked to you in Chinese, what did you tell him about the midges?"

"As little as I could," she replied.

"So he doesn't know about the thought-transmission, or how they rescued you from the Guards?" So far, so good.

"We won't tell him anything today," he said. "He'd better send us off in the helicopter—if he isn't bluffing. There might be a chance to get clear during the flight. Certainly, it wouldn't be easy to get out of this fort."

"Yes," Liu said slowly. "If we don't answer him, he will send us to Camp Three. We are dangerous, and he would like us away. But I know my own people. It will mean losing face. After we are gone he will probably shoot himself."

"No matter." Any sympathy Angus had ever felt for the General had disappeared. He was about to go to the door and call the General in when a thought came to him. He took Liu by the wrist and pulled her across to the window. Outside half a dozen soldiers were cleaning a mortar. He opened the window and looked out. The crow, indignant at being disturbed, croaked once in protest. Angus stood still and waited, remembering what he had seen the night before. Liu looked up at him curiously, but said nothing.

He -forced his hands to stay steady. It was a long shot, but he was completely confident. Suddenly he tensed. He had been right. Then Liu stiffened beside him. She had seen it too.

The midge floated in the wind along the face of the building, now rising, now falling. It passed above them, reached the end of the wall checked, and began to work back. As his eyes became accustomed to the clear morning light, Angus realized that it was only one of a number of the insects. There was a thin screen of midges all round the compound—more than a mile from their normal frontier. The coincidence was too great. The midges were looking for Liu and himself. There were dolphins afloat now.

The midge came closer, drifted in through the open window, and circled round them. Deliberately Angus projected his thoughts towards Liu, listening all the time for the singing in his blood. One midge was far too few; this was no swarm. But it was a contact. Let the midges realize that they were there, and things might begin to happen.

All at once the midge swept out of the window again. Liu relaxed, and squeezed his arm.

"I heard you—very faintly, but it was you," she said.

There were steps in the corridor outside. Then a knock at the door.

"Wait," Angus shouted, as he pulled the window down. He stepped back into the room and watched. In the corridor the General was pacing up and down. A weapon-belt snapped. There was another knock, louder this time. Angus paid no attention, his eyes fixed on the window. Then he sighed with relief. There were half a dozen midges outside the cracked glass.

"That's it," he said, then turned and opened the door. "We'll talk to you now, General," he said.

The helicopter came in over the compound wall, a shortsighted bird peering nervously for possible enemies on the ground. It checked, hovered, then dropped to the ground. The engine cut out, and the rotors swished gradually to a halt. The crow, evidently accustomed to such competitors, dropped back to his perch on the wall.

"Look at this map," the General said, turning to the office wall. "I have one more thing to show you. After that, if you won't answer me, I have no option but to put you in that helicopter and send you under escort to Camp Three, where you are expected."

He traced a heavy line on the map with his pencil.

"That, as you know, is the frontier. You probably also know that, because of the midges, we can only get right up to it on one short stretch near the east coast. What you probably do not know is the exact size of the midge swarms. Look at this."

His pencil worked quickly across the map.

"There. We don't know what happens more than five miles beyond the frontier, but there is the pattern. See for yourselves."

It was clear enough. Looking at it, Angus wondered if the metaphor of the dolphin was the right one. For the swarms clearly knew what they were about. Westwards from the fort they were never less than half a mile thick, and sometimes four times as much. Not only that, but they had begun to move northwards. At least half a dozen broad swathes branched out from the main line; one of these swept round in a circle to rejoin the chief swarm, but the others disappeared out of the five-mile limit without meeting.

"You see that one?" the General asked, pointing to one line running northwards. Angus took the point at once. It was exactly the line an invading army would have taken, up a long valley and over a sharp pass to the headwaters of another river. A sensible line—but not the line of least resistance. Angus began to realize why the General was so worried.

"Are you frightened of the midges?" he asked.

"Of course," the General replied. "We can't go near the swarms. We can't get around them. We daren't fly over them, at least in daylight, at under a thousand feet. And we don't know how to kill them. Bombs aren't much use, we have no poison gas, and the flame-throwers are out of fuel. In the last year they have just about doubled in spread. And, if the noises your friends over the river are making mean anything, it's even worse on their side."

"How serious?" Angus said.

"Very serious. If they increase at this new rate, we'll be pulling out of the whole frontier area inside eight months. For myself, I think the rate is going to increase. Flash-point used to be the word, I believe. That point is pretty near."

"How long could you last if the midges don't spread any more?" Angus asked.

The General shrugged.

"Five years, my staff say. I'm a bit more optimistic. If we can hang on for three, I think the situation could stabilize. We could survive—not very many, but enough."

That was it. The hard point of offence was uncovered. The General thought that he could get away with it. He was going to make a new slave world, and keep it alive. Man's unconquerable spirit—or was it? More probably, the old delusion of grandeur. God knew how many Generals were hoping for the same thing in how many corners of the dying world. Anger took hold of Angus, knotting his stomach muscles. He strained to keep his face impassive.

The General noticed nothing; he was deep in his private dream.

"Take your choice," he said. "You know something about the brutes. You can move among them. Tell me about it, tell me what we can do to stop them. Or get into that helicopter and go north. You'll end up at Headquarters, and my information is that they know how to make people talk there. You would do better to tell me. If you do, you can keep my charming subordinate. If last night means anything, that should please you. Also, you can help to save the human race. No, I'm not being melodramatic. It's as simple as that. One way or another you're going to talk. If you talk to me, you can stay with her. If you don't, you go north alone, and she goes into one of our camps."

It was impossible to tell, from the General's face, what he was thinking. His speech should have been an appeal, and a threat at once, but it had sounded like a policeman's report. Liu might well be right; suicide could be the next step. Angus found he didn't care. The night before he had felt some sympathy for the General, an honest soldier trying to do his duty. Now it was intolerable that the man should pretend to play Pandarus to Liu's Cressida.

Meanwhile, it was important to get outside. There was going to be one chance only.

"Get the helicopter ready," he said shortly to the General.

The General tapped his pencil on the map, his face grey. Then he got to his feet.

"Very well, if that is your last word. Guards!"

Three soldiers came in. The General spat out some orders in Chinese. One soldier ran out, the remaining two fell in on either side of Angus and Liu.

"Take them out," the General said. "She can watch him go."

The helicopter was waiting in the compound, two helmeted figures standing beside it. Around the walls some twenty soldiers were ranged, rifles at the ready. Silently the General led the way. He half-raised a hand to brush his neck, then let it fall away again.

Out on the compound, Angus stopped and bent down to fasten the thongs of his moccasin. Seconds might count now. Looking up, he saw the crow on its perch, swaying as the wind ruffled its feathers. Then, slowly and with dignity, the bird keeled over and toppled to the ground at the feet of one of the soldiers. Startled, the man took a half-step forward. His rifle slipped out of his hands, his knees slowly crumpled, and he fell forwards on his face.

The General saw what was happening. He shouted a furious command, and men began to run towards the body. Angus ignored them and concentrated on the compound wall Yes, they were coming. He could see the air darkening as the midges swept in. He stood absolutely still, waiting. The brush across the neck, the tingling, the singing in the blood— they must come now.

They did come. He felt Liu's relief stab into his mind. Harshly he beat it down, forced his own thoughts over it. Wait, wait, now. The two guards were on the ground, the familiar weals across their necks. He had a pistol in his hand, and Liu had one too. Ten strides, and the helicopter crew were staring down the gun barrels.

Too late, the General wheeled round. Angus shouted at him.

"Put it down. Put that gun down. One move and all of your men will be dead."

His eyes on the Chinese, Angus hurled his thoughts into the gathering swarm of midges, felt the singing grow to a crescendo, then lost it as it moved beyond his comprehension. All round the compound he could see the troops standing motionless, faces strained and white with disbelief. It was a still from some tumultuous film, caught and petrified for an endless instant. And in front of it all the General, watching his last hope disappear.

But it was time to get out now. He turned towards the gate. Liu's method cut into his mind, stopped him in his tracks.

"The helicopter. I can fly it," she signalled.

Angus forced himself to go slowly, to project a warning to watch whilst the swarm retreated to the walls. From the two pilots he took a sheaf of maps and two packets of emergency rations. In the dead guards' pockets he found spare ammunition and a precious box of matches. And all the time, Liu, pistol in hand, watched the General intently.

Now it was all done. Liu climbed into the cabin. He followed her, and squatted in the open door, where he could still cover the General. The engine coughed, caught, and settled down to a steady roar. The rotor blades began to turn, the helicopter bucked against its brakes. Then, all at once, it was in the air, clawing for height as the walls came nearer. Angus felt the wind tear at him. He put the pistol in his pocket and pulled the door shut. The General was still standing motionless in the middle of the compound, his uniform pressed flat against his body by the wind. Angus saluted him.

Then the helicopter was over the wall, and climbing quickly. He tried to send his thoughts to Liu, failed, and realized that they were out of reach of the swarm. Staggering across the cabin, he shouted in her ear. There was something he wanted to know. Liu looked up, nodded, and swung the plane round in a wide circle, back over the walls of the fort.

Peering down, Angus saw what he was looking for. A small figure lay down on the open ground. Even from three hundred feet up he could see the glint of the sunlight on the pistol lying beside it.

CHAPTER SIX

At the third attempt it became clear that the midges didn't want him to go on. He climbed slowly back up the river bank. At the top he stopped and squatted on his haunches, panting. It was early afternoon, and he was back at the crossing-place of the day before. He could see the fort away to the east. There might be soldiers out after them; it was possible, but not very likely. For a moment he wondered what effect the General's death would have. But that was unimportant now. Another General would take over, perhaps; perhaps there wasn't anyone else, perhaps he and Liu had helped to kill the last man between the Chinese and chaos. It didn't matter very much. There was only one thing south of the river that he wanted. And the midges didn't want him to have it.

A mile away upstream the helicopter was crouching between the river and the hill. It was too far away, he told himself. Liu had a pistol, and she could take the machine off the ground inside half a minute if she had to. But it was still too far away. That was his own fault. When he had realized that there was nowhere nearer to set the plane down without cutting a merry-go-round of death through the midges, he ought to have given up his idea.

But he hadn't. That was as near a joke as anything he had known in years. He had wanted to go back for his rifle. As soon as they cleared the wall of the fort he knew that he wanted the rifle. Two machine-pistols and ammunition-belts weren't enough. He wanted his own stalking rifle. He had lived too long with it; it was more part of him than even Liu was. That hurt. He could see it hurting her too, though she said nothing. But it hurt him more, as he lost the battle. The world he lived in was one where he needed his rifle, where he had even to take the risk of leaving Liu alone whilst he went back for it. This, he thought wryly, was how a knight must have felt when he lost his sword; only then there had been the rules of chivalry to tell him what to do.

He looked across the river. The midges were spiralling over the ice. As he watched an outlying swathe came within a few feet of his face. They were much nearer the river than they had been on the previous day. And he knew what would happen if he went down to the water again and tried to cross. They would close in on him, the singing would begin, would build up to a pitch that was sheer physical agony to hear— and there it would stop, stabbing at his ears, driving him back. Once he was back on the bank, it would stop, the spirals would open out, and there would be a clear path before him up the slope and away from the water. The conclusion was inescapable. The midges didn't want him to cross.

Why? He stood up and began to walk towards the hill. Out on the flats he was too conspicuous, too easy a target. He hadn't forgotten the shots when they had crossed the day before. If he wasn't going to get the rifle, then he would have to make do with the machine-pistol he was carrying. And it was high time to get back to Liu. Out of range of the midges there could only be danger, wherever they tried to hide. He was angry with himself for a wild-goose chase, angry because he had left Liu alone, angry with the Chinese, with the Guards; but he was puzzled too.

Why couldn't he cross? In a world turned savage, where the only values left were those of the hunter and prison guard, it was difficult to be curious; often enough it was dangerous too. But the midges demanded curiosity. There was too much evidence piling up for him to go on ignoring it. As he turned upstream towards the helicopter he tried to assemble the facts. It was a long time since he had thought so hard. First: the midges could kill, and normally did. Second: they didn't kill everyone: that must be deliberate, and permanent—there had been too many times when he and Liu could have been killed. Third: the midges could induce telepathic contact. Fourth: it was possible to attract their attention; he had made contact at the fort—without that there would have been no escape. Fifth: what he had just learned —they had a highly effective way of stopping him from doing what he wanted to do.

Taken all together, that amounted to quite a lot. Put it beside what the General had said, and it came to a great deal more. The midges were even more important than he had imagined two days ago. They represented something with higher capacities than man, in some ways at least. And they weren't simply a replacement for man. This wasn't a case of the dinosaur having to bow itself reluctantly out. The midges were selective in their dealings with men. And they could give men an ability which had been often guessed at, often lied about—telepathy. What else, he wondered uneasily, could they do?

More seriously still, what was he to do about them? The dinosaur had to learn to live with the ape, if he wasn't to go under. Suddenly and sharply, Angus realized that he was living on a razor-edge of history. The thought wasn't comforting. To be a contact-man between the human and the inhuman was ludicrous and horrifying at the same time. But the evidence was too strong. There were going to be points of decision ahead. Already he was taking them. Escaping from the fort had been necessary, but it involved getting help, involved going somewhere else. The midges had helped him to get out; he had accepted their help, looked for it. That was one step along the road. But where to go next? That wasn't so clear.

He was half-way back to the helicopter now. Another two hundred yards and he would be in sight of it. He quickened his pace, all at once desperate to see Liu again. That was something different; she was in his blood now, and he knew very well just how demanding his blood would be. What did she think now? She had had no hesitation about leaving her own people once she had realized what they were doing. But did she grasp all the implications?

He was hurrying, anxious to get back, to get the plane into the air and away from the dangerous river bank. In his hurry he failed to see the rifles until it was too late. The familiar sound of a breech-bolt clicking back halted him in his tracks.

"Don't move." The voice was Lachie's. Twenty-yards up the hillside, Lachie and Calum stood behind a couple of birch trees, rifles trained on him.

He stood motionless, staring at them. Lachie glared back at him, his eyes never leaving Angus's face.

"Co and take his gun, Calum," he said.

Calum came cautiously forward, taking care not to get in Lachie's line of fire. Angus knew that there was one thing that he must do. At all costs he must warn Liu. One shot would be enough. Her orders were precise, and she would obey them. One shot, and she was to take off at once. In his pocket he had a red signal flare from the helicopter, to be used as a sign that it was safe to come back to pick him up. It didn't seem such a good arrangement now.

Cautiously he eased off the safety catch of the pistol. He let the muzzle drop, until it was pointing at the ground, his eyes always on Lachie. Lachie was the real danger. Calum came nearer, circling wide round his right shoulder, leaving Lachie's aim clear. He passed out of sight. Angus could hear him moving softly over the frozen moss underfoot. He forced himself not to turn his head. Always Lachie had to be watched. There was going to be a single opportunity to give the warning, as Calum closed in. Angus braced the webbing sling of the pistol round his left hand, let his right index finger move fractionally towards the trigger.

Calum came up quickly behind him, breathing hard. He reached out to take the pistol. Angus took the strain with his left arm, pulled the trigger once, then dropped to his knees as the spent bullet struck a stone and whined away amongst the trees. As he had hoped, Lachie did not risk a shot. Behind him Calum swore thickly as he staggered backwards. Angus fell full length and rolled over, the pistol striking against his ribs as he did. Then he was up on his feet, trying to get Calum between himself and Lachie's rifle. He took two strides, heard Lachie shout, then felt himself hurled forwards by a smashing blow on the back of his head. He clawed at the ground, found he couldn't make his legs move, then toppled over into blackness as Calum's full weight crashed into the small of his back.

He opened his eyes, grunted in pain as the light hit them, then let his eyelids flop down again. For a long time he lay still, reluctant to face what lay waiting for him. But the ingrained habit of survival was strong, too strong for his weariness. After an age he began, cautiously, to explore his own body, flexing his muscles laboriously one by one, wincing at the agony of moving his neck, feeling the stiffness of his bruised ribs. He was in no state to do anything for himself. No chance to escape for the present, even if he knew where he had been taken.

He opened his eyes for a second time, and forced them to stay open. For an instant the surroundings were unfamiliar. But only for an instant. The bullet marks in the ceiling above his head were unmistakable. He was back in the kitchen at Grimachory.

Carefully he turned his head. Through the window he could see the far hillside half in shadow. It was almost nightfall. Where was Liu? Had they captured her too? The thought hit brutally at his tiredness, forcing him to struggle up on to one elbow, only to fall back again.

There was a movement at the far end of the room, beside the fire. Then footsteps. Lachie came up and stood looking down at him. His face was closed, unfriendly—tribesman looking at renegade, inquisitioner at heretic. Angus realized at one bound the implications of what had happened. He had turned on his own kind, and now they were going to have their revenge.

The door opened. Calum, Angus supposed. But it wasn't Calum. It was Ian. He came up to Lachie's shoulder and looked silently at Angus where he lay on what had once been his own bunk. Another closed face. And this time it mattered. Lachie was an irrelevance—neurotically suspicious, half-way in cunning to the beasts he hunted, driven by sexual pressures that he didn't understand. If I were to analyse him, Angus thought—then stopped himself. Psychoanalysis was the last luxury to try to call back out of the ruins. More to the point to remember that he had broken the laws of the tribe, and that he was going to have to suffer for it. Ian, who had trusted him, would see to that. To see Ian's closed face, the face of his judge, the face of the man he had let down, was a punishment in itself.

"Has the plane gone away?" It was Lachie speaking to Ian.

"I think so. It went off to the west, and I haven't heard its engine for over half an hour."

Angus relaxed. So Liu had got away. Not just that. She knew where he was. She had tailed the hunters back to Grimachory, unable to do anything to rescue him. But she knew where he was, and the night was coming on. At least until tomorrow she was safe, whatever was going to happen to him. And, if he was alive tomorrow, there was still the unknown factor of the midges.

He wasn't sure that he would still be alive. Ian had helped him once; he was unlikely to run the risk again. There had never been a killing at Grimachory before, but he knew of at least two hunters belonging to other packs who had been shot by their own companions for breaking unwritten rules. In his case the offence was worse. He had done his best to have his friends shot out of hand by the Guards. They had been lucky to escape, luckier still to avoid being drafted into one of the camps. Also, he had taken away a rifle and lost it, the ultimate offence of all. Presumably they were waiting for Calum to appear before dealing with him; when Calum came there would be a pack court, a verdict, an execution. That was how he would have done it himself, if he was in charge. Only in that way could the pack be kept alive. If Ian was as good a leader as the Chinese General that was what he was going to do. That was what was left of civilization, and that was how it had to be kept going.

Ian leaned down and shook him, not roughly. Angus opened his eyes and stared up at him.

"I'm back, I see," he said.

"I'd be happier if you weren't," Ian replied. "Why did you come back across the river? And why alone?"

So that was it. Angus felt a wave of relief. His capture had been a stroke of luck for the hunters, apparently, nothing more. But he had to know. So he said nothing, waiting for Ian to go on.

But it was Lachie who spoke, spitting out his words with concentrated hate.

"You were lucky to get away without me shooting you and that woman," Lachie said. "Another shot and I'd have got the range right But today you were just too easy. Why did you come wandering up the river like that? You were as big a target as a cow."

Angus lifted one arm slowly, and ran his fingers through his hair. He had to play this carefully. Not much chance of getting away himself, but he had to cover Liu's tracks if he possibly could.

"I didn't reckon on meeting anyone," he said. "I suppose I was so relieved at getting away from the Chinese."

"Where's the woman?" The mixture of hope and hate in Lachie's voice wasn't pretty.

"I took her to the fort across the river. The Chinese wanted me to stay, so I grabbed one of their guns and got away."

"Why?" It was Ian speaking now.

"Because I didn't much like what I saw. They thought I could tell them about the Guards. Got quite nasty when I said I didn't know anything. I didn't much fancy what looked like happening next, so I got out, just as I said."

"Where's your rifle?" It was the most important question Ian could ask.

"The Chinese took it. That's why I took one of their pistols in exchange."

There was silence, then Ian got to his feet and walked away out of sight towards the fire. Angus closed his eyes again and let his body go limp. As far so good. Obviously he hadn't been seen getting out of the helicopter, or on his way down to the river. Lachie and Calum must have come on the scene just as he was leaving the river. He was angry with himself for having let his guard down; but at least he had not involved Liu so far.

"What was that helicopter doing?" Lachie spat the words suddenly, jerking Angus awake.

"What helicopter?" he said drowsily, pretending to be half asleep.

"The one that was on our bank of the river. It took off just about the time Calum hit you. Do you know anything about it?"

Lachie was clearly suspicious.

"There was a Chinese one about earlier in the day, when I was south of the river," Angus said cautiously. "Perhaps it was the same one."

"Maybe. I hope there's nothing more to it than that. I didn't like the way it hung around us on the way back here. Any of your Chinese friends in it?"

"I don't have any Chinese friends," Angus said, as evenly as the throbbing in his head would allow.

Lachie grunted, then let the subject drop. He turned away towards the fire, flinging a last remark over his shoulder.

"If you haven't noticed, your feet are tethered, so don't imagine you can get away. You'll stay there until Calum gets back tomorrow."

"Why wait for him?" Angus said. "If you're going to shoot me go on and get it over."

"We're not going to shoot you," Lachie snarled. "We ought to, and I'd be glad to do the shooting. But he"-he gestured at Ian—"says no. And he's the leader."

It was unexpected. Unreasonably, Angus felt apprehensive. Not to be shot for deserting—which was just what he had done—was more than unlikely; it was incredible. Unless—

"What are you going to do with me?" he called to Ian, his head suddenly icily clear.

Ian said nothing for a moment. He stood looking down at the fire, his back to Angus. When he turned round his eyes were tired.

"You're being collected tomorrow by the Guards. Calum went down to Camp Three this afternoon to tell them, and he'll bring them back on the morning. That's why you were carried back here from the river. You ought to have been shot. You had your chance to come back, and you didn't take it. But the Guards want you, and we aren't going to take any chances. Two new hunters, and a load of supplies and ammunition. That's what you're worth to us if we hand you over. So I'm handing you over in the morning."

He turned away and went out of the kitchen, his face carefully hidden from Angus as he passed.

"Now you shut up and he quiet," Lachie said viciously, pushing Angus back on to his bunk. "We'll have a watch on you all night, and we won't make the mistake of shooting you if you make a move. I don't know why the Guards should want you so much, but they're going to get you."

Angus slept badly. The pain in his head was easing off, but his ribs ached cruelly where Calum had fallen on them. The bunk was hard, and he had only a single skin to cover himself with. For long spells he lay awake, looking at the flickering pattern of the peat fire against the ceiling, eyeing the rifle on the table and the hunched shoulders of the man on watch.

Ian said nothing during his watches, and Angus had nothing to say to him. The betrayal had been too complete. There was no way of explaining it, no way of saying to Ian that Liu was more important than anyone else in the world, no way of making him understand that the midges were more to be trusted than men. Ian had been his leader; he had deserted Ian. And that was all there was to it.

Lachie was more ready to talk. And there was something Lachie wanted to know. He slapped Angus awake to ask him, went on slapping his face when he refused to answer. In the end, pitying the man rather than hating him, Angus told him a little. Yes, he had slept with Liu; not by force, but because they had both wanted it. The first statement Lachie could understand; to him it explained all that Angus had done. But he couldn't believe that Angus had waited to be asked. That made nonsense of Lachie's world, and its values. Angus, his face stinging from Lachie's slaps, saw the last of his illusions about Grimachory stripped away. In the long run, it was an artificial thing, and a world built on such things was a doomed one. What was left when a civilization collapsed wasn't primitive virtue; it was something a good deal nastier than that. Once he had thought of Grimachory as the only refuge in a vicious world. Now, as he moved one stage further into disillusion, he realized that there weren't any refuges any more.

It was a relief when the morning came and he was able to get up and stretch his stiffened muscles. There was no chance to make any move to the door. One or the other of the hunters was always on the watch, rifle loaded and ready. Lachie stood over him while he splashed ice-cold water over his face and ate the mug of porridge that Ian silently put on the table before him. The hunters were uneasy, constantly at the window on the look out for the expected Guards, listening all the time for the sound of the helicopter. Angus hoped that Liu would wait until the sun was well up before flying again; even more, he hoped she would be able to find out what had happened to him. For now, after the long night, he knew that there was no refuge for either of them except with the other—and with the midges.

The sound of motors cut into the silence in the kitchen. Ian's chair scraped on the stone floor as he got to his feet and ran to the window.

"Here they are, Lachie," he said. "Two trucks. I can see the Colonel in the first one."

"Trucks, is it?" Lachie said. "They must want this man pretty badly. There hasn't been a truck here in the last three years."

Angus was surprised. Top priority—that was what he was. Top priority, not to the Colonel, who was probably as puzzled as Lachie, but to the men in white coats at Headquarters. He assumed there would be one of the men in white in the expedition. No chances would be taken. Liu would have to move fast if she hoped to do anything for him now. She wouldn't know anything about the trucks, for the only time she had seen a Guard convoy it had contained ponies only. By using precious petrol the Guards could get him away and out of her reach before she realized what was happening. He swore at himself for not having told her that there were lorries at Camp Three; he had known the fact well enough himself.

The lorries drew up outside the lodge with a screech, their worn-out engines smoking violently in the cold morning air. Armed Guards jumped down, and Calum with them. The Colonel climbed slowly out of the cab of the leading machine. With Ian leading the way and Lachie prodding a rifle into his back, Angus found himself forced along the passage and out into the daylight. As he stood blinking he was seized by a pair of Guards, his hands were bound behind his back, and he was thrown into the back of a truck. Three Guards climbed in beside him, each carrying a pistol. He was propped against some old sacking, back to the cab, with one Guard on each side of him and the third squatting against the tailboard facing him.

The Colonel stood watching the operation. When it was finished he nodded with satisfaction, then stiffened to attention. Another man, small, spectacled, dressed entirely in white, walked into view. The Colonel spoke rapidly to him, gesturing towards the truck and the lodge. The small man listened silently, then snapped out a string of orders in a low-pitched voice; Angus could make out nothing of what he said. The Colonel saluted and walked away. The small man looked at Angus a moment, then followed the Colonel. Angus could sense the Guards beside him relaxing with relief.

The two trucks began to move slowly, swinging round in a wide circle to return by the road to Camp Three. Angus, in the leading truck, saw the front of the lodge come into view. The three hunters were standing at the door, watching the convoy depart.

A machine-gun chattered abruptly, stopped, then spoke again briefly. Rigid, the rope cutting into his wrists as he strained in horror, Angus saw Calum and Lachie crumple forwards. Ian tried to bring his rifle up to aim, staggered as a bullet hit him, then fell backwards against the door. Again he tried to rise, and failed. The rifle dropped out of his hands, and he fell across it and lay still. Beside Angus one of the Guards laughed. Then the truck was on the road to Camp Three, and the bodies were out of sight as the corner of the lodge cut them off. Angus, shivering violently, lurched against the Guard who had laughed. Swearing, the man pushed him upright and went on laughing.

By the time the trucks were out of sight over the skyline the buzzards were on the scene. Circling high above, a pair of the great birds watched for movement on the ground. Finding none, they came lower and lower. In the stable a pony whinnied. The buzzards climbed away and resumed their watch. After a little while they came down again. With a swish of pinions the male bird landed lightly on the bare ground in front of the lodge. Warily, he moved towards the three bodies at the door. There was a low moan from the tangled heap. The buzzard stood still, beady eye bright with menace. Then he called hoarsely to his mate. She followed him to the ground. Together, they moved jerkily across the gravel, beaks thrust forward towards the expected jeal.

Far away there was a droning in the sky. At first the birds paid no attention. The female, taking the lead, hopped on to the first carcass and began to attack it. The male, more apprehensive, suddenly took to the air again, calling urgently to his mate as he did so. She answered him angrily. He called again, a new note of alarm in his voice. This time the female paid attention. At first clumsily, then with increasing ease, the two flapped away. Out of the sky another, a much larger bird came swooping. The buzzards, acknowledging superior strength, flew off frustrated. The helicopter, rotor threshing the air, let itself down on to the frozen surface of the meadow. Its engine cut out, and silence closed in again, broken only by another moan from the heap of bodies.

CHAPTER SEVEN

This was a part of Camp Three Angus had never seen before. Outside the wooden palisade there were long rows of decaying wooden huts, with sagging roofs and everywhere the sour, unhappy smell of too many people living in too small a space. It had once, he remembered, been a prisoner cage. The barbed wire was still standing, and the concrete machine-gun posts; but there was no longer any water in the rusting pipes. The endless chain of women trudging up from the stream that ran along the rear of the camp perimeter made that clear; each carried a bucket, some two—stream to cistern, back to stream, stream to cistern, all under the eyes of the Guards, all in the near-freezing east wind. Angus had seen it all before, on his monthly visits for supplies. There was the gate-house with sentries lounging beside the rusted metal gates. There was the supply store, with rather more Guards around it. There was the medical hut, and beyond it the long low range of the women's block. He had seen it all often enough; it didn't look any better than he remembered it.

But inside the palisade was different. For a start getting inside wasn't simple. The trucks rolled up to the high wooden gate, where six Guards with automatic pistols were very much on the alert. The Colonel jumped out, walked up to the gate, and beat on it with his fist. Angus, his back to the palisade, could see nothing of what followed. The pain in his wrists from the rope took most of his attention. He was bruised and sore from the bumping of the rough road, and his head was beginning to throb again. But he heard the gates being swung back, saw his Guards straightening themselves, and noticed how they fell silent as the trucks started forward again and passed into the enclosure. It was obviously a place where they rarely came, and then only on sufferance.

He was still recalling what the General had said about the men in white coats when the truck came to a halt. The Colonel hurried into sight and snapped an order. His ropes were cut and he was pushed out on to the ground. He stumbled forward as he landed, his ankles refusing to carry his weight, his arms still numb. He was still kneeling, panting, when the trucks started up again and disappeared through the gateway. Then, with a dull thud, the gates were in place again, and the squalor of the camp was cut off from his sight.

Men were standing over him, looking down silently at him. Slowly he raised his head and looked around. At first sight the resemblance to the Chinese fort was striking. There were the same wall platforms, the same sentries' posts, the same pounded square of bare earth in the centre, the same solid blocks of buildings to one side, their backs against the wall. The Chinese had built in stone, the Guards in wood; that was all the difference. He was inside again, and this time it would take a good deal more to get him out.

Then he began to notice things. It was like the Chinese fort, certainly; but there were differences. Along one wall stood a line of machines—two trucks, in much better condition than those that had fetched him from the Grimachory; a lightweight self-propelled rocket launcher—Russian, he guessed; an anti-aircraft gun; even an armoured car. All seemed to be in working order. The buildings, too, were different. On one side, what was evidently a barracks, freshly painted and trim. Beside it, a small stone hut, its windows and door heavily bolted and barred; the armoury, obviously. Outside, a sentry—a Guard with a difference; he wore battledress, new battledress, and his shoulder-flashes were white, not green. The inner fortress had its own garrison. This wasn't the headquarters of an occupying army. It was the citadel of a palace guard.

Slowly Angus got to his feet, curiosity overcoming the weakness of his legs. He turned round to see the remainder of the enclosure. His eyes met those of the Colonel, standing directly in front of him. Beside the Colonel, giving him instructions, was the small man in the white coat. Behind stood a file of the white-flashed Guards. But Angus paid no attention to the foreground. What interested him lay behind—a wireless mast, a radar scanner turning on a high metal post, sentries everywhere, and another stone building. He concentrated on the building. Here, if anywhere, was the nerve centre. From here the whole shabby concentration camp system was operated. It was normal, unexceptional, with glass in all the windows, and flower-beds in front of the doorway. It was the first lived-in, cared-for, house Angus had seen in ten years; at the sight of it, anger gripped him. Here was the new aristocracy, the new elite, putting down its roots behind the safety of its high walls. He thought of Ian lying dead at Grimachory door; he thought of the General, who had tried to use his power to kill a people, but not so that he could grow flowers. The General had been ready to kill himself, and Angus liked him the better for it. But these people—

His eye went beyond the stone building, into the furthest corner of the enclosure. More buildings, women's quarters this time. Here there was laughter, children playing—well-dressed children, children who wouldn't feel the sharp edge of the east wind like the poor devils in the camp outside—and comfortable women sitting at the windows of warm rooms. Guards' women in one wing—married quarters, obviously. And other women in a wing apart. The men in white coats were apparently not celibate.

The Colonel saluted, turned on his heel, and walked to the gate. The sentry on duty came to attention, pulled a heavy lever, and slid back a moving panel, big enough to let a single man pass outside. The Colonel stepped through, the sentry moved the lever back, and Angus saw his last link with the world that he knew disappear.

Take him to the questioning room," the white-coat said to the file of Guards, and Angus found himself being marched up the steps and into the building with the flowerbeds in front of it.

Inside, his first impression was that he had stepped back ten years. Glass doors, notice boards, long tables with strange instruments and machines lining them—and everything clean and antiseptic, scoured and polished. Only, there was nobody working at the long tables. If this was a laboratory, it was a dead one. The thought chilled him. What sort of people had their hands on him? Had the General been right when he called them scientists, when he spoke of atomic reactors? This looked more like a museum—or was it a temple? Men in white coats: caretakers or priests? That was the nastiest thought he had yet had.

Religion, in any organized form, hadn't survived once the crash came. For a while there had been a rash of crazy substitutes. Men had announced the arrival of the Second Coming, in a variety of hysterical forms; they had preached a dozen unlikely Oriental and African mutations of Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. He had once met a Zen colony in an abandoned canning factory; a few miles away on the coast there had been a group of ritual cannibals whom he had helped to shoot down. But that had all been a long time ago. Now there was, so far as he knew, no living Church. There were Christians. Ian had been one. So too, he imagined, there were still Taoists amongst the Chinese soldiers. But organized religion was dead in the rubble of civilization. Or was it?

As the Guards led him through first one, then another glass door, to halt finally at the end of a long passage in front of another door, this time a metal one, Angus wondered. The General had obviously know nothing about this inner fortress. And he had been anxious to know more about Headquarters. Headquarters must be the nerve centre of these white-coats, a larger version of this stockaded camp. Had the General hoped that they might get away again and bring him back the information he needed? Possibly; but Angus was inclined to believe that the General's panic over the midges had been genuine. Whatever his new captors thought, the General took the midges seriously, seriously enough to kill himself when his prisoners escaped. That was the measure of what they were up against. Angus found himself listening for the helicopter. He was relieved when he could hear nothing.

Not that it meant much. The thick walls of the building would deaden most sounds outside. But he didn't want Liu to get too near. There were too many machine-guns about— not to mention the rocket launcher and the anti-aircraft gun.

The leader of his escort took a key from his pocket and opened the metal door. He gestured Angus to go in, then followed him through the door.

It was a small room, with a fantastically high ceiling. His first impression was that the architect had made some ludicrous mistake, that the room had somehow been built in the wrong dimension. It was like being in a liner in a heavy sea, with levels changing so quickly that floor and wall became inextricably confused. Then he realized that there was no mistake. This was the questioning room, built to break a man's spirit as quickly as possible. High walls, small glazed windows far above his reach, heavy electric lights set close to the ceiling, no movable furniture at all—only a single stool bolted to the floor and a low table beside it. It was a room calculated to deflate self-confidence.

The Guard took a quick look round, then went back to the door.

"You are to wait here until the Station Officer comes," he said to Angus. "Food will be brought to you. There is no need to shout. Nobody will hear you."

He went out and shut the door behind him. The key grated in the lock. Then the immense musty silence closed in.

Liu stood up and put the pistol back in the holster. A small trickle of blood ran out of the corner of Ian's mouth. She turned away, nauseated by what she had done. It had been a kindness, certainly, the last service one human could give another. He had been terribly injured when she found him, his back broken by a bullet and two ugly holes in his stomach. He had been going to die. All she had done was to let him die without too much pain. Yet she could not bear to look at his body. It was unthinkable, too, that she should shoot the two ponies in the stable, as she had planned to do. Instead, she loosened their halters, pulled down the barrier that kept them from the hay-store, and left them to their own devices. If they were sensible, they would stay near the stable; if not, the buzzards would have another meal before long.

It hurt her that she couldn't bury the three dead men. But the ground was bone-hard, and she had no spade. In any case, better to leave as few signs of her visit as possible. She hoped no one would notice the helicopter's wheel-marks on the meadow before more snow came to cover them.

Now it was time to go. She climbed into the machine and sat motionless in front of the controls. There was a decision to take. To find Ian still alive and able to talk had been a huge stroke of luck. Now at least she knew where Angus had been taken. That was the first step. But what to do now? Camp Three was impenetrable—and behind Camp Three lay Headquarters. That was where Angus would end up. What to do?

Abruptly she came to a decision. She pressed the starter button, and took the helicopter slowly up from the meadow. Once clear of the house, she let the tail swing round and opened the throttle. The helicopter gathered speed, heading to the south, back towards the river.

"I want to go to Headquarters," Angus said. The man facing him was momentarily disconcerted. "To Headquarters? Why do you want to go there?"

"To see someone more important than you," Angus said shortly.

The Station Officer was large, comfortable. His glasses sparkled with a friendliness that even his unfortunate smudge of moustache couldn't remove entirely. His voice was unambiguously North Country, full of the echoes of a dozen dead Lancashire towns. He wore his white coat with a casual air. But there was no mistaking the authority in his manner.

He looked pained for a second, then smiled.

"Of course. I am only a Station Officer. You want to see the Director himself. We can talk about that afterwards. Meanwhile, I suggest you come and have a meal with the rest of us. This room is hardly the most comfortable we have to offer you. Come along."

He rapped on the door of the questioning room. The Guard outside unlocked the door. He stood rigidly to attention as the Station Officer came out, Angus at his heels, and followed them at three paces' distance as they walked down the corridor.

Angus was moderately well pleased with himself. The interview had gone better than he had hoped. No violence, no threats. The white-coats were obviously anxious to get him to co-operate. He had no illusions about this. He could play his one card once only. At Headquarters, face to face with this mysterious Director, there would be no more excuses for delaying. And then he expected to find himself being questioned in rather different circumstances.

But so far all was going well, and every hour gained gave Liu a better chance to do something. The Station Officer had handled the interview carefully, apologizing for the force used, hinting delicately at the advantages and rewards of co-operation. About Liu and the helicopter he said nothing, though Angus was certain that Calum must have reported the presence of the machine.

Angus said little, sat still on his metal stool and listened. It was a persuasive performance, and listening was almost a pleasure. But it didn't take matters very much further. Very little was given away, and Angus found himself as much in the dark as ever about his new captors. It took some restraint not to ask questions, but he managed it.

Except once. There was one question he had to ask.

"Why were my friends shot this morning?"

The Station Officer was polite, but vague. He hadn't known that they were shot. He hadn't given any orders. And then he said one thing which brought Angus sharply awake.

"In any case, you must ask the Colonel of the Camp about that. We have nothing to do with what happens outside. We are scientists, not administrators."

Angus recalled this remark as he followed the Station Officer along the corridor. Either the man was lying, flatly and deliberately, or the confidence trick went very deep. Impossible to believe that the Guards did exactly what they wanted. The respect they had shown when handing him over was proof enough of that. For the Station Officer to class the white-coats as scientists was too much of a simplification. He glanced in passing through a plate-glass door. To get hold of the glass itself had been an achievement. To use it to build a half-laboratory, half-police headquarters was something that needed explaining—particularly as the laboratory through the doors had a distinctly, uninhabited look, for all its tidiness and polish. He wasn't at the bottom of the situation yet.

Inside the dining-room the Station Officer was a careful host. He introduced Angus to each of the half dozen white-coats who were standing around the long table. Ill at ease in the dark grey suit that the Station Officer had provided for him, Angus shook hands with each in turn, listened to the mixture of accents—London and Liverpool and Glasgow— and tried to persuade himself it was all real. The meal was good, far better than the food the Chinese had given him. There was even a bottle of wine, something whose taste he had almost forgotten. It obviously wasn't a novelty at the white-coat's table. He watched them eating, drinking, talking, and thought of the hopeless serfs outside, in their leaking, freezing huts. It was the ultimate absurdity.

He wondered again at the white-coats' resources. Somehow they had got into their hands enough relics of the past to give them effective control of their little world. They were clever enough, too, to keep out of sight, using their power behind the shield of the Guards. If the General had been correct, they had some very powerful weapons. They had an atomic reactor, and they had the saffron pills. No wonder the Chinese had been prepared to trade precious arms and ammunition to them. They had realized that, in the long run, power lay with the white-coats.

The conversation was uneasy whenever it flowed near him. The pale-faced young man on his left was ready enough to talk about the cricket net he had fitted up against the stockade wall. His views on the weather, too, were as inexhaustible as those of most of his race and class; grammar school and technical college, Angus diagnosed—he probably flew model aeroplanes in his spare time. But what was his job?

"Do you ever go outside?" Angus asked him suddenly.

The question was clearly unexpected, even unwelcome.

"Only when I go to Headquarters," the man replied. "Why else should I go outside?"

"I was wondering," Angus said truthfully. "What do you do here?"

The pale-faced man was taken aback He looked hurriedly across at the Station Officer for support. The Station Officer nodded slightly.

"We carry out experiments," the young man said. A vestal virgin explaining that she guarded the sacred flame would have used the same tones. Experiments were very important things, obviously.

"In the laboratories I saw on my way to this room?" Angus asked.

"Yes. In the laboratories."

"There was nobody working there when I came here," Angus said, flicking at his wineglass with his fingernail.

"This is the wrong season," the young man blurted out, then stopped. Angus realized that the whole table was listening to the conversation. He looked from face to face. Fat faces, lean faces, moustaches, spectacles, even a single beard. Scientists' faces? Perhaps. But he would be very surprised if any of them had conducted a real experiment in the last year. They reminded him more of a comfortable group of clergymen.

The silence was uneasy. The Station Officer sensed it quickly. He pushed his chair back and stood up. The other white-coats followed his lead with obvious relief. Angus watched them filing out of the room. Once in the corridor, their voices rose; there was laughter—too loud. He moved towards the door. The Station Officer raised a hand to stop him, and gestured towards a chair. Taking a packet of cigarettes from his pocket he tossed one to Angus, then dropped into a chair himself. He saw Angus look at the cigarette with curiosity.

"Yes," he said. "We still have some of these. I'll let you have a packet tonight."

He leaned back and blew smoke into the air.

"You're curious about us, I see," he went on. "No harm in that. But you mustn't expect to get very many answers. You're not one of us, and the younger men won't talk much to anyone outside the circle. It's not surprising."

"Are you really scientists?" Angus asked despite himself. He didn't like the Station Officer, he decided. The moustache was an affront.

"Of course. And it's a lucky thing that there are enough of us left, if the world is going to get back on its feet again."

"Rockets and machine-guns help, I imagine," Angus said.

"You mean to be ironical, no doubt But you're quite right They do help. But not against midges. Now—"

He broke off and pressed a switch. Concealed electric lighting came on, cutting across the long shadows of the late afternoon. The Station Officer picked up a bronze bell from the table and rang it thrice. A door opened, and a young woman came in. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, her lips full. She drew heavy curtains across the window, shutting out the fading light. From a cupboard she took a heavy decanter and two glasses and laid them on the table. Then she went out again.

The Station Officer watched her go. As the door closed he picked up the decanter. "Attractive," he said.

Angus took the point. The bait was being spread before him.

"You were going to say something about the midges," he countered.

"Yes. The midges." The Station Officer accepted the gambit. "As you know, we hope to learn something about them from you. Now, it's natural you should want to go to Headquarters. Most people have heard of it Some very wild stories get around. You'll find the Director very interested in what you have to say. But are you sure it's necessary for you to make the journey? The Director is a very old friend of mine, and I can easily radio your information to him. After all, there may be attractions in staying with us here."

So that was it, Angus thought. A would-be dictator trying to cut the ground from under the feet of his master. Scientists! Whatever else they were, these people were power politicians, struggling to hold every possible card. Compared to them, the Chinese General was a good man. He had won his battles, he had tried to patch up the mess that was left over. But these scientists wanted to make the mess worse, wanted to use it to build up their little empires on men's bones. Sharply and physically, he wanted to get out of the palisade, out of this charmed circle with its evil spells, its false normality sprawling across an abyss of misery outside. And, overwhelmingly, he wanted Liu.

But he had to play the game carefully. He had to find out the whole picture. That meant that he had to get to Headquarters. Therefore, he would have to play the Station Officer delicately. The man had orders to send Angus to Headquarters: that was already clear. But he would make every attempt to prevent it. Therefore, Angus must avoid committing himself—or rather, he must only do it in front of others. The Station Officer wouldn't risk holding him if anyone else knew that he wanted to go to Headquarters. But the others were gone. He must wait for another chance of meeting them; then, and only then, would he be safe to show his hand. What he would find at Headquarters he couldn't begin to guess. But it had become immensely important to find out—important for himself, for Liu, for the midges, perhaps for all mankind.

"What do you mean by attractions?" he asked the Station Officer.

The Station Officer tapped the ash off his cigarette and smiled blandly.

"You're enjoying some of them now. Food is quite an important one, after all. And there are others."

He stood up and walked to the door. Angus emptied his glass and began to get to his feet. He was hardly out of his chair when the sound of machine-gun fire cut through the silence.

He looked questioningly at the Station Officer. The latter was unperturbed.

"Nothing serious," he said. "The Guards keep good discipline. Now come along to the common-room for a while. We can offer you a hand of bridge, if you play the game. In the morning we can talk again."

Liu was back at Grimachory. She pushed the door of the kitchen open and flashed her torch round the room. Nothing had been touched. The fire was still glowing feebly, the mugs still stood on the table, the blankets lay where they had been thrown in the morning. She shut the door behind her, lit the lamp, and put a handful of peats on the fire. She unpacked some of her emergency rations and cooked a meal. When she had finished she sat staring at the fire for a long while. At last she got up, gathered the skins together and lay down to sleep on Angus's bunk.

Outside the door the three bodies lay stiff and frozen. Twenty yards away the helicopter squatted like a monstrous bird. And all around, ceaselessly moving, a spiral of nudges circled the house and the machine.

Angus sat on the edge of his bed and looked round the room he had been given. He went to the window, drew up the blind, then lowered it again. There were bars across the glass. He tried the door handle and found it locked. He might be a guest, as the Station Officer had politely suggested, but he wasn't a trusted guest.

He stripped off his clothes, enjoying the unaccustomed sting of hot water and put on the pyjamas that had been provided. The feeling of unreality grew stronger every minute. He tried to recall all that had happened, tried to put together a picture of this fantastic community. It didn't make sense, to find the values of a college common-room in the middle of desolation. Records, tape recorders, books, fine silver, a grand piano—the loot, he suspected, of half a dozen counties. And the white-coats? The men who had run Nazi concentration camps, he had once read somewhere, had been very like this—just as polite, just as self-assured, just as invincibly bourgeois. In each case, the gulf between appearance and reality was limitless. But this time there were no liberators to put their fists through the hermetically-sealed covers and let sanity in. None, that was, if he couldn't do it himself.

There was a knock on the door. The young woman he had seen before came in, carrying a tray with a glass on it. Behind her the door was pulled shut; he heard the key turn in the lock. The Station Officer was trying hard. The woman set the tray down and handed him the glass. He took it without looking directly at her. She was the old medieval offering, the last gift to round off the guest's day. He wasn't surprised to see a phial of the saffron pills on the bedside table.

He finished his drink. Then, without looking at the woman, he turned his face to the wall and slept. But when he awoke in the darkness of midnight she was sitting submissively in the chair, waiting for him. And, because she might say too much to the Station Officer, because he was lonely and wretched, because he had been dreaming of a Headquarters huge as the sky, full of white-coated men with no faces, he took her into bed and made love to her before falling headlong into sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Station Officer was giving nothing away. That was the trouble about wanting to be a dictator. Until the moment was on you, nothing to do but play your hand mechanically—and all the time watch everyone else, suspect everyone else, nerve yourself for the sudden clutch at power, not knowing whether you wouldn't end up grabbing empty air. If you were that sort, it was probably a relief to make the attempt, even a relief to feel the pistol at the nape of your neck and know that you had failed. It wasn't the public action that was decisive. Somewhere, long before the daylight got near the whole affair, a crucial point had to be reached, a decisive step taken. And here he was, making one would-be dictator face his crisis. Angus stubbed out his cigarette and settled back to enjoy the sport. It stopped him thinking about the Camp outside.

The same girl came round the table and refilled his cup with black, steaming coffee. Another impossibility; these people must have got their hands on an enormous stores dump. He saw the Station Officer's eyes flicker from the woman's face to his own. No point in feeling sorry for her. Whatever happened to her inside this palisade was paradise compared with what lay outside. But he found himself hoping that the Station Officer treated her well. From what had happened the night before, he was inclined to doubt it.

To his left, the small, spectacled white-coat who had been at Grimachory got to his feet and walked across to the window. It was another clear, hard morning, with high clouds scudding in from the north-east. Across the compound two white-flashed Guards were busy on the engine of the armoured car. In the dust at their feet half a dozen children were fighting an intricate private battle of their own. He could hear their shouts faintly through the thick glass.

He looked round the room again. There were still four of the white-coats sitting at the table. It wouldn't be safe to wait much longer. Left alone with the Station Officer, things would be more difficult. It was time now to force the man up to the last fence, make him take the decisive step and show himself as a would-be Dictator—if he had the guts.

There were small beads of sweat standing out on the Station Officer's forehead, but he was in full control of himself. He eyed Angus steadily. A chair scraped. One of the others was getting ready to go. There wasn't any more time to waste. Angus picked up another cigarette and lit it. "Do I go to see the Director today?" he asked. At once there was tension in the room. The Station Officer showed it less than his subordinates. But the sweat on his forehead glistened. The room was very hot and still.

"It can be arranged," the Station Officer said after a long pause. He looked round the company as he spoke. Angus followed his glance. Reverent faces, most of them, faces of men suddenly reminded of their allegiance to a reassuring yet faintly terrifying father-figure. These were no scientists thinking of their leader; they were sharers in a mystery.

But not quite all of them. No mystery about the spectacled man by the window. He was watching the Station Officer closely, fingers drumming on the window-sill all the time. He knew what was happening. Was he the Director's spy? Did he have hopes of his own? Did he want the Station Officer's woman? Angus gave up guessing. In a community like this there were bound to be cross-currents that no outsider could track. That was why he was going to get away with his game. Nobody in the room, not even the Station Officer, was going to risk trying to stop him seeing the Director. The web of suspicion and fear was too complex for that. He began to look forward to Headquarters. There at least he would meet someone who held all the threads.

He got to his feet and looked directly at the Station Officer.

"I'd like you to do that," he said. "The Director will be glad to see me."

The man at the window stopped drumming and straightened himself up. The crisis was over. The Station Officer knew it too. He became crisp and competent again.

"Very well," he said. "I'll make the arrangements now. Smith"—he gestured to one of the silent white-coats—"Go to the wireless-room and contact Headquarters. And send for the Colonel."

The young man hurried off. Angus let his breath out slowly. He noticed that the tip of his cigarette was heavy with ash. He tried to get it to an ash-tray, failed, and watched the dust tumble to the floor.

When he looked up again the Station Officer was standing beside him, his face expressionless.

"Come to my office," the Station Officer said. "I must organize your trip for you."

Angus followed him silently.

An hour later he was standing on the steps of the office building, outside the heavy glass doors, waiting. The two trucks he had seen the night before were drawn up one behind the other, engines running. A Guard was climbing through the driver's hatch of the armoured car. There were even a couple of motor cyclists standing by their machines. He was going to travel in style to Headquarters.

He peered up at the sky and watched the clouds race across the sharp line of the palisade. A machine-gunner, perched on a platform at the wall-head, stamped his feet and ducked his head out of the wind. Down below someone shouted harshly; the gunner jerked sharply upright and began to watch the horizon again.

Angus let his eyes travel round the whole circle of the palisade. There were four machine-guns, all of them manned. Each gun platform had a small searchlight mounted on it. A dozen armed Guards were waiting outside the barracks door.

No chances were being taken. But then no chances could ever be taken, with the starving camp outside and the small, warm, comfortable world inside.

The Station Officer came through the doors, followed by the man called Smith.

"Right. Sound the siren," he said.

Smith went back inside the door. In a few seconds a siren began to wail above their heads. Angus had heard the sound often enough. This time there were no bombers to worry about, no shelter to run to, but the noise was as menacing as it ever had been. At once there was the sound of running feet, and a squad of Guards poured out of the barracks, buckling on equipment as they came. The Station Officer watched them fall in beside the trucks.

"You will be on your way in five minutes," he said to Angus. "We're giving you a proper escort, you see. Do you still want to go? I can wireless your information from here to Headquarters."

He looked past Angus as he spoke, his eyes moving restlessly round the enclosure. When Smith pushed the glass doors open and came out again Angus noticed that the Station Officer turned quickly to glare at him. Still hoping, still not prepared to take the decisive step. Whoever was going to be dictator, it wasn't this man, Angus told himself.

Outside the stockade gate a truck pulled up sharply with a whine of brakes. A voice shouted. The Guard on duty at the gate shouted back, waited for a reply, then opened the small wicket gate. The Colonel came in, crossed the parade ground, and stood to attention at the foot of the office steps. Behind him the gate slammed shut again.

"Colonel," the Station Officer began in a flat voice, "this man is to be taken to Headquarters. I am sending you in charge of the escort. You will take these two trucks and the armoured car, and two cyclists. Follow the usual road. There will be men from Headquarters waiting for you at the Green Face. The passenger will travel in the second truck beside you, with the armoured car following. Take care of him. The Director wants—"

At the wall-head a machine-gun began to chatter. The sound was laconic, almost conversational. Another joined in. Angus heard a shout beyond the wall, then a long, high wail that broke off suddenly. The machine-guns stopped. In the stillness that followed a child laughed as it ran to its mother at the door of the women's quarters. Angus shivered, for all the warmth of the sheepskin jacket the Station Officer had given him.

"You see, it might be safer to stay here."

He realized the Station Officer was talking to him.

"Meaning what?" he retorted.

"Just that some of the people in the Camp are inclined to be violent. It might be dangerous to go outside that wall."

Angus was angry. The man might at least realize that he had had his chance and had let it go. It would have been easy enough to make sure that this unwanted guest never got to Headquarters. Little men were usually ready enough to use knives, even if they were too scared to shoot. So he must be too important to be shot. The Station Officer didn't want him to go to Headquarters, because that would give the Director more power. But the Station Officer didn't dare kill him, because he had knowledge that mattered to all the men in the white coats. In the long run, it was the midges that counted. Without them, Liu's life and his own were irrelevant. The only trouble was that he had no idea himself how to answer the questions that worried the white-coats. He knew what he had seen and experienced, but its significance was still beyond him.

Remembering Liu hurt him, for it made him remember also the night that bad just passed, and the silent, unresisting girl lying beside him in the darkness. It made him impatient, anxious to be away, anxious to find what was waiting for him at Headquarters. There he might find some reality. Camp Three was only a nightmare, a hallucination peopled by waxwork figures. Scientists who never carried out experiments because the season wasn't right, an aspiring dictator who never dared dictate, temple women and temple children inside their sanctuary wall He wanted away from it all. There was a faint droning in his ears. He turned away, not trusting himself to speak.

The Station Officer shrugged, and turned to the Colonel.

"Any questions?" he asked.

"When do we meet the Headquarters' escort, sir?" said the Colonel.

The Station Officer looked at his watch.

"You have two hours to get to the Green Face," he said.

The droning was louder. Angus scuffed his foot along the concrete step, hoping nobody was watching his face. The violence of his own anger frightened him. Only, the droning wasn't inside him. It was far away, but coming nearer. And there was activity on the wall. One of the Guards was shouting. The machine-guns swivelled round, pointing upwards. Half a dozen Guards ran to the ugly anti-aircraft gun, uncovered its breech, and released the traverse.

Angus came alive with a desperate urgency. He knew what was making the noise. Somewhere outside the wall Liu was piloting the helicopter, looking for him. She mustn't come near the stockade. The Guards mustn't shoot her. He must stop them. He turned to the Station Officer and shook his arm savagely.

"Tell them not to shoot," he said.

The Station Officer pulled his arm away, and grinned with his mouth.

"No. No. I'm not giving any orders. These men shoot at sight. So I'm afraid your Chinese girl-friend is in for a surprise."

"What do you know about that?" Angus snarled.

"Enough. A pity General Tsin is dead. His staff-officer was speaking to me on the radio last night, while you were enjoying yourself. He said quite a lot, but the only thing that matters to you is that he was quite clear that you were the person to tell us about the midges. As far as the Chinese are concerned Major Liu is expendable. My Guards will be quite glad of the firing practise. They haven't had a plane to shoot at for three years."

Angus went down the steps on to the hard gravel parade ground and looked up at the sky. One of the Guards shouted at him. He paid no attention. The gun-crew were at their posts, and the long probe of the barrel was quartering the sky, nosing out the sound, preparing to spit shells at it. He felt empty, defeated, guilty. He should never have left Liu, should never have let her come back across the river into his own private hell. Better to have played ball with the dead General. Better-Suddenly the helicopter's note changed, rose sharply. At the same time, the machine-gunners on the walls were chattering again. But they weren't firing upwards. The gunners were aiming at a target on the ground. More shouts, more Guards tumbling out of the barracks. Someone—it was the Colonel—pushed into him, making him stumble. In his misery, he dropped to one knee and stayed there, his hands on the ground. Liu had crashed, and now the Guards would get her.

The firing began to slacken. As the echoes bounced from side to side of the stockade, then died away, he listened for the helicopter. There was nothing to be heard. He got to his feet slowly and rubbed the dirt from his hands.

The Colonel's voice came from somewhere above him. Angus looked up. The Colonel was standing on one of the machine-gun platforms, a pair of binoculars to his eyes. As he looked, he shouted a string of orders. The sentry at the gate swung over his lever, and at least twenty of the white-flashed Guards went out through the wicket, which clashed shut behind them.

The Colonel watched for a little longer, then closed his binoculars with a snap and climbed down the ladder to the ground with an air of satisfaction. He walked briskly across to the office steps and saluted the Station Officer.

"More trouble down by Hut Seven, sir," he said. "The Guards are after them now. No danger to the wall, as far as I can see."

"Casualties?"

"One Guard stabbed. The machine-gunner saw it happening, so he opened fire. There are about a dozen dead down there now."

"What about that helicopter?"

"The pilot must have seen the fighting, and sheered off. It's several miles away to the west now." The Station Officer was disappointed.

"A pity. But it's time you were away, if you're to be at the Green Face on time. Is it safe to start?"

"It will be shortly, sir. I'm waiting for a messenger to report."

The Colonel saluted again and went over to the gate. Angus pushed his momentary happiness aside and tried to get into the picture. Liu was safe for the present, and the Station Officer was worried. There was sweat on his forehead again, and he was in a hurry to get Angus out of Camp Three. The occasional bursts of fire outside wasn't helping.

"What's the trouble?" Angus asked.

"Internal security," the Station Officer replied with an effort at unconcern. "It happens quite frequently. There are some pretty rough elements in the camp, and they aren't always sensible enough to see that the Guards are doing their best."

"So the Guards shoot them?"

"Naturally. We have enough to do without allowing riots. What do you expect?"

Angus said nothing. He was certain that this wasn't usual. There was too much tension behind the Station Officer's voice, the Colonel was too impatient down by the gate. Had some hint of his own presence in the stockade leaked out? Were his captors afraid that he might be rescued? Were they simply scared for their own skins?

The Station Officer read his thoughts.

"If you're thinking these people want to help you, then forget it. They might eat you, they would certainly kill you. You're too well-fed, too well-dressed, to please them. So don't imagine that you could be their liberator, or anything like that"

He paused for a second. Angus could see the colour mounting in his face.

"You're a bloody fool," the Station Officer went on. "If you talk to the Director, then you can just about save yourself. I'd advise you to talk to him. I couldn't deal with you myself last night, for I can't always do what I want. But you'd better not hold out on him. Don't you realize that this is all there is left, that our people and the Guards are the only bit of civilization to hold on to? You've got a good deal to answer for already. Don't make it any more."

He broke off abruptly, his face working. The compound of fear of frustration was as nasty as anything Angus had ever seen.

"So that's why you issue everyone in the camps with these damned orange pills," he said. "You are civilization. So you think you can keep it that way by sterilizing what's left of the human race. I'd rather—"

The Station Officer slapped him across the face, twice. The sound brought the Colonel round sharply on his heel. Angus could feel the eyes of every Guard in the compound boring in on him.

"Say that again, and any louder, and you'll have a bullet in your back, orders or no orders," the Station Officer said softly. "These pills are too important for you to spread rumours about them. You won't find a single man, Guard or anyone else, who doesn't know that without them we'd have cholera, plague and half a dozen other epidemics round our necks. And you start saying that! Colonel! Get that convoy away now. Never mind about the messenger. Get the gates open and start up."

Then he was away through the glass door, and Angus was left alone with the Guards and the sound of the truck engines starting up.

An hour and a half out, they reached the watershed. The truck laboured up the last rise and came to a halt, its radiator steaming.

The Colonel climbed heavily down on to the snow and stamped his feet. Angus, glad to escape from the stale oil fumes in the cab, followed him. Behind, the second truck drew up and switched off. From far below came the sound of the armoured car grinding its way up the hillside. The two motor-cyclists had long since abandoned their machines, wrecked by the punishing pace over the shattered, shell-pitted road.

Angus knew where he was. Behind him, to the south, the hills fell away to the sodden peat-lands where, somewhere over the horizon, Camp Three lay. To east and west of the pass the mountains reached up, their dead heather and stiff bleached grass streaked with snow where the wind had not swept it clear. The peak on his right hand was an old friend—the Old Bear, Seanabelste in the old language. He had climbed it more than once, had shot a stag in a corrie far up under the central dome. That was a long time ago. He had never been on the Bear's back in winter, though he had often watched the snowstorms spill over its crest. Now, if he looked at a certain angle, he could see nothing but the white beauty of the Bear's wintry pelt, and forget everything nearer. It was easier not to remember how once he had stood on this same pass with Anthony Smith on an October evening, a dead stag lying at their feet, waiting and watching for Deirdre to come up the hill in the Land-Rover.

Northwards the road tumbled down the pass in a series of hairpin beds, into the deep trench of a river valley. At the bottom, twelve hundred feet below, he could see where ft dipped into the water, beside the ruins" of a stone bridge. On the other bank it reappeared, turning right to run through rowan trees beside the river as it twisted and looped under the flank of the Bear. Down there was the Green Face, a great slash of grass and moss across the face of the mountain. He had never been further, but the river, he knew, ran northwards to the sea. And there, somewhere between the Bear and the distant blue edge of the land, lay Headquarters.

It was cold on the pass. The thin wind from the northeast danced across the short heather, stirring up tiny trails of snow from the drifts along the roadside. The road was coated with ice. The convoy had been lucky to get through, Angus thought. Headquarters must want to see him very badly to risk their vehicles in such conditions.

The Colonel was uneasy. He unslung his binoculars and began to search the valley ahead. All the way from Camp Three he had been preoccupied and silent, opening his mouth only to order the driver to go faster. Clearly he wanted to get back to his base as soon as possible. Angus could understand why. The Camp had been peaceful enough when they left, but the smoking huts, the long lines of Guards moving through the fields, the scurrying figures scattering away from them, all spelt trouble. If there wasn't a full-scale mutiny going on, it was something very near to one. It was no time for the Colonel to leave his post.

Now, perched on this wind-swept notch in the hills, the Colonel was even more anxious. He was looking for something. When he found it, the relief in his face was evident. The Guards, huddled in the lee of the trucks, followed his pointing arm with satisfaction. Angus looked hard. Far away, beyond the ford, a line of black dots was moving along the road. It was the convoy from Headquarters.

The armoured car came slowly into sight over the last ridge and crunched to a stop beside the trucks. When its engine coughed into silence the quietness was overwhelming. Nothing moved on the hill, nothing moved in the sky but the whisper of the frozen wind. The little knot of men and the battered machines were alone. Angus looked up at the snows on the Bear's back and waited.

The Colonel was in a hurry now. He shouted across to the driver of the armoured car, then gestured the whole party back to their machines. He was half into his own seat when he suddenly stopped and jammed the binoculars to his eyes. Angus followed the direction of his gaze—southwards, back along the long fall of the hillside up which they had climbed. He looked hard, but could see nothing. The Colonel was seeing something, though—something that made him swear out loud and climb aboard quickly. A command to the driver, and the engine was alive again. Then they were accelerating away round the first bend, down towards the Green Face.

It was a hair-raising descent. The Colonel was in a hurry, and he pushed his driver to the limit of safety. Behind, as they slithered round a succession of sharp curves, Angus caught glimpses of the other machines following at the same pace. Whatever the Colonel had seen, its effect had been to make him desperately anxious to meet the other convoy as quickly as he could. Uneasily, Angus suspected that he knew what it was.

It was a relief to see the floor of the valley coming up to meet the truck, to feel the angle of the descent levelling out. Ahead, on the far side of the ford, the men from Headquarters were waiting. A bigger group, this. Four trucks, each with a machine-gun mounted on the roof of its cab, two armoured cars and, supremely unlikely but real none the less, a grey painted saloon car.

There was no time to look closer. The truck squealed to a standstill and the Colonel jumped out, motioning to Angus to stay in his seat. A quick conversation, and then the vehicles on the far bank were scattering into the cover of the trees. Through the windscreen Angus could see the machine-guns being prepared, could see the turrets of the armoured cars traversing to cover the pass. Their own armoured car, its gun already moving round, edged off the road into the lee of a boulder. The line of the pass was sharp and distinct. Impossible for anything bigger than a man to cross it without being spotted. Whatever was following them would walk into a trap.

He waited and listened. At first he could hear nothing but the river. Then, faintly at first, but unmistakable for all that, the beat of an aeroplane engine. The Colonel heard it too.

Another order, and the breech-blocks slid back. The noise came nearer. Craning his neck, Angus watched the skyline.

The helicopter came hesitantly over the ridge. Angus slid across the seat, legs thrust forward to slide through the open door. He had no idea about the next move, but it was important to get out into the open and give some sort of signal. He pushed through the door and dropped—to find himself looking at the Colonel's pistol.

"Stand still," the Colonel said, and moved round to cover Angus from behind. Helpless, Angus obeyed. There was nothing he could do to aid Liu.

Suddenly, as if reassured by what it saw, the helicopter leaped the ridge and came quickly downhill, rotors whirling. The Colonel raised his hand, watching. Five hundred yards, four hundred, three hundred: the helicopter was making straight for the river. It would pass between the two groups of vehicles. Two hundred: the Colonel let his hand fall.

There was no escape. Abruptly the helicopter's engine cut out, the great blades keeled over, and the machine slid across the face of the river. One wheel cut into a patch of white ice, then caught against a boulder. There was a sound of tearing metal, a dull, heavy thud, then silence. Angus found himself looking at the crumpled tip of a rotor blade less than twenty yards from where he was standing. Beyond it, the cabin lay on its side, glass smashed, a trail of petrol trickling out on to the heather. Through the broken glass, he could see Liu lying across the controls. He looked at the Colonel, then ran to the plane and climbed through the cabin door. The Colonel, revolver still raised, watched him without speaking.

Liu was alive. She raised her head as he reached her side, then got slowly to her feet. He helped her to the ground. As he straightened up the Colonel gestured towards the truck.

"Over the river", he said. "You're expected."

Angus looked round. The Guards were standing in a semicircle, watching them. He looked up, and saw the sunlight glinting on the summit of the Bear. Liu leaned against him, her eyes fixed on the wrecked helicopter. He took her arm and turned towards the truck. His foot was on the step when his neck began to tingle. When the truck jolted into the water, he was still unravelling the short concentrated message that swept into his brain. Its implications slowly took shape. The midges were at the Green Face. They knew where he was being taken. And, most important of all, an alliance had been struck, conclusively.

CHAPTER NINE

"In here," said the Director. He pushed the heavy metal door open and waved Angus inside. Another wave halted his bodyguard, two Guards with machine-pistols. They took up position on either side of the door. Anyone coming up the long approach corridor would be in their sight all the way.

Inside the door everything was quiet Angus found himself standing at the head of a long flight of steps. On each side of the steps were tiers of seats, running down to an open floor. There were no windows, only small port lights high up on the side walls. But it was the end of the room that caught his attention. A heavy black curtain hung from ceiling to floor. For a moment Angus was puzzled by its appearance. Then he realized that between him and the curtain there was a wall of glass.

The Director saw his surprise and smiled.

"Not our making," he said. "This room was a demonstration theatre once. We found the glass wall when we took over. It has its uses, so we let it stay."

"What's behind the curtains?" Angus asked, obscurely disturbed.

"You'll see. But can I go back to what we were discussing on the way here? You called me a witch-doctor, I think? On the whole I prefer high-priest. There always have been high-priests, and on the whole they have lived longer and done less damage than politicians or generals. Yes, high-priest. I like it better than witch-doctor."

Angus nodded without speaking. The point could have been argued, but be was prepared to let it go. The serious business had hardly begun yet.

Headquarters was a formidable place. The General had been right about that. Freshly-painted huts, concrete roads, trim lawns, scurrying trolleys, dozens of white-coats. It was a factory, not a labour camp.

The appearance, he knew, was not wholly accurate. On the journey in from the Green Face they had passed through a double ring of steel fences, with gun-towers every hundred yards. There had been many Guards about, and in the distance he had seen cultivated fields and a double of the workers' settlement at Camp Three. For all that, the contrast was striking. This was no frightened warlord's citadel. It was modern—the word made him grin without smiling. The place was the only modern thing left in Scotland, perhaps in the world. And that made it a complete anachronism. The modern world was ten years dead, all but this outrageous fossil.

He gave the Director his full attention. For the Director was formidable too. He had the General's strength—and other things besides. There was an awkward gleam behind the rimless spectacles, a line of harshness round the small, full mouth, a rigidity under the epicene, carefully groomed profile. Angus looked at him closely, recognizing the symptoms. There was another layer to the man. Scientist or whatever else he had been, he had fallen in love with his own image, had floated away into a remote and unreal world where wishes were power. Angus had seen too many of the type before; the television studios had been full of them.

What worried him, though, was that there was still another layer. Top-level administrator, yes; public oracle and private god, yes: but what else? For there was something else, and without it the whole picture was meaningless. Men like the Station Officer could never have created this organization, could never have dreamed of it. This man, with his careful Standard English, with his shambling, awkward body and the head of a slightly overblown minor Roman Emperor, held the secret. The organization was his work, and only he could give Angus the clues to understand it.

Because he knew that he had something to give the Director, Angus risked a question. "What makes all this tick?" The Director let the question pass.

"Our intelligence is reasonably good," he said. "We have some idea of your past. But that's not important. What interests us about you has all happened in the last few days. We'll talk about that later. And about your charming Chinese friend. She's perfectly safe now, by the way. I asked my own doctor to have a look at her, and he reports that she wasn't hurt at all when her helicopter crashed."

"When can I see her?" Angus broke in.

"Soon, I hope. That depends on you, not me. But you asked me to explain my organization here. Oddly enough, that is a real pleasure. You see, I have never been able to tell anyone before."

His lips smiled, but not his eyes. Angus doubted whether he shared the Director's pleasure. If he was being told everything, the presumption was that he wouldn't have a chance to use the information. And that meant—

"Power, you see, is the key," the Director went on, "and that is where I have been lucky. Ten years ago I was in charge of a technical section at this plant. When the first trouble came—the first Russian invasion—we lost most of our personnel. I only just managed to keep in hiding myself, with a few others. But the Russians were never here long enough to do more than kidnap some of the chief scientists. Nor were the Americans who chased them out Nor our own returning forces. Nor, for that matter, the second Russian expedition, nor the second American, nor even the Chinese. I gather you fought in these parts yourself. You will remember just now quickly the point of no return arrived, when things fell apart and the looting began. There again we were lucky. We had electric power, thanks to that,"—he nodded towards the reactor—"and we had a large food dump that the Americans flew in before the Chinese wiped them out. Not to mention quite a respectable collection of weapons. So we sat tight and kept things going."

"What does 'we' mean?" Angus asked.

"Four scientists, some fifty technicians and administrative staff, and about a hundred security guards."

"And now?"

"You've seen Camp Three. We have four other camps like it. They aren't very efficient as collective farms go, but at least we are getting near the point where we can grow enough food for the remaining population. If all goes well, we should be at equilibrium in another two years—which is more than the Chinese will be."

Angus could guess how the equilibrium would be reached. The death rate in the camps must be staggeringly high. And there were the orange pills. He felt, unwillingly, the beginnings of respect for the Director. Putting the organization together had been an enormous achievement. He said as much. The Director accepted the praise without embarrassment.

"It wasn't so very difficult," he said. "By the time the Chinese settled down to permanent occupation we were already finding our feet. It didn't take them long to realize that there were certain advantages in leaving us alone. In fact, they gave us the arms we needed to start expanding and recruiting more Guards—"

"I know why they did that," Angus interrupted. "You had something to offer them in exchange."

"General Tsin told you that, I suppose. Ironical, really. These pills were developed just before the balloon finally went up. I've been told that the British Government actually tried to do a deal with the Chinese about them. I suppose they imagined that the Chinese wanted to cut down their birth rate. If they had, then things might have turned out rather differently. Still Tsin was keen enough to get his hands on a supply of them, once he had to keep the occupation in working order. So we did a deal. Arms for us, pills for him to keep the population pressures down. And, as a result, we were able to expand, and get the other camps going."

"You must have a very large supply of the pills," Angus said.

"We make them. The process is simple, given a good electricity supply—which is one of the advantages of that reactor out there—and two pieces of equipment which we managed to keep hidden. Raw materials are easy. Heather and seaweed are the main ones, and there's more than enough of them around here. One of the other three scientists knew enough to set the machinery up, and since then we've never looked back."

Angus stared at the Director. Old suspicions had been correct, then. It was genocide, or something very close to genocide. He thought about the stockade at Camp Three and the little privileged world inside it. They probably didn't make lampshades out of the skin of their dead victims. If so, that was just about the only thing that made them different from Nazi concentration camp bosses.

He was still puzzled, though, by the laboratory and the pseudo-scientists. Somewhere there was a confidence trick going on.

"Your scientists don't seem to do much science," he said. The Director laughed.

"I'm a high-priest, remember. I've got lots of lesser priests, but I haven't got lots of scientists. That's the oldest piece of human psychology—respect for the uniform of learning. The people in the camps think these men are scientists. The Guards think they are scientists. They even think it themselves. Wonderful what a white coat can do. You'll find a laboratory in every camp. Once a year I visit each of them, and there is a great ceremonial session. I think that the experiments we do then used to be done by sixth-form boys at school. So don't think these men are scientists, even that delightful Station Officer at Camp Three. I presume he tried to bribe you to tell him the whole story, by the way. But he's not a scientist. He's just like the rest, comforting himself by following a ritual that he doesn't understand. Don't underestimate what has happened in the last ten years. Now ritual is what matters, and having a set of medicine-men, witchdoctors, priests, or whatever you like to call them."

Angus stared at him, appalled. It made sense. Ritual, reliance on the man who could work the mysteries. It had been coming to that long before the crash, he realized. Reliance on the expert on the television screen, reliance on the politician, reliance on the scientist who promised a new heaven and a new earth—less disease, fewer wars, more machines, more chromium, more happiness. And what had happened? Simply, that Wells had been proved wrong. Given the chance, with everything else in collapse, science had failed to grow up. Instead it had become magic.

The chief magician walked down the steps towards the black curtain. The electric light outlined his forehead and one whole side of his face, thrusting the rest into shadow. And at once Angus was reassured. There would be a chance. Vanity was the key. This was a man who could be relied upon to make a mistake, to look at his audience instead of his enemy, to lower his guard. Gone soft, perhaps; too sure of his control of his world. Wait, watch, take the chance when it came. But, first, find out more—find out where Liu was, find out what the Director knew about the midges, plan an escape.

The Director went to the centre of the glass wall, slid a panel open, and pushed the black curtains aside. Angus followed him, to find himself in a cold, white world of lights and glass and metal. It was a control-room. There were dials, banks of indicators and levers, rows of control panels. Two white-coats moved through the maze, taking readings, flicking switches. Directly opposite the black curtain was another wall of glass. Through it the steel globe of an atomic reactor glistened in the afternoon sunlight. He was standing, Angus realized, at the heart of Headquarters. This was the magician's cave. And the chief magician was standing beside him.

The Director was expansive.

"This is the nerve-centre," he said, his eyes filled with a hard glitter. "From here we control the electrical circuits from the generators, the intercommunication system, and just about everything else. It's also the remote control station for the reactor."

"So these men control the reactor?" Angus asked.

"Not completely. I am the only person who knows enough to do that at present,"—the Director hesitated fractionally over the last words—"though they do a good deal of the routine work. They have orders to report to me if anything goes wrong. It never does, in fact Even when the Russians were fighting on the beach half a dozen miles away we had no trouble. I did once have to get back in a hurry from Camp Four, but that was a false alarm. Normally I can send orders by radio, and these men can press the appropriate buttons. The whole thing is beautifully planned. I can shut off the whole electrical supply by using that board over there,"—gestured at a red-painted instrument panel—"and I can do pretty well everything to the reactor from the black one in the centre."

"What can't you do?" Angus was at once alert "One thing only." The Director paused, his eyes glittering again. The fuel rods in the reactor core have to be switched over regularly. The remote control for that particular job packed up before we got ourselves properly organized."

"So what do you do now?"

The Director pointed to a corner of the room, close to the outer door. There Angus saw what he took at first sight to be a suit of medieval armour. He looked closer, and realized that it was lead-protected clothing.

"I wear that," the Director said. The control can be operated manually from inside the reactor building. I'm due to do it tomorrow, unless—"

He let the sentence die in the air.

"And if you don't?" Angus asked.

"Point of no return. No, not what you think. The reactor simply stops functioning. No electricity, no power for the trucks, no power for the machines synthesizing the orange pills, no power for the refrigerating plant at the food store, no power for the electric fence. Nothing. Call it the sacred flame, if you like."

Angus walked past the instrument panels, up to the glass wall It was double thickness, he noticed. In the centre were a pair of doors, arranged to form an air-lock He opened the inner door, and stepped into the lock. He was about to turn the heavy handle controlling the outer door when he was gripped roughly by the shoulder and pulled back. It was one of the white-coated men, his face rigid with horror and anger. Caught off balance, Angus slid backwards, ending up full length on the hard rubber floor. The man slammed the inner door shut, and stood with his back against it.

The Director hauled Angus to his feet. He looked pleased.

"Unwise," he said. "These men are the guardians of the reactor, and they are liable to resent anyone tampering with the doors. In any case, you would be liable to get a fatal dose of radiation if you went outside. No one goes any nearer to the reactor than the end of this room, except me, and-"

Again the sentence was unfinished. Something in the Director's tone made Angus tense. He looked slowly round the room. The significance of the curtains and the seats beyond rushed up to hit him. He went cold inside. Only the thought of Liu, of the absolute, imperative importance of rescuing her, made him keep his hands from the Director's throat. Chief magician, yes; but high-priest too. And this was his temple. Without being told, Angus knew, beyond any possible doubt, that other people went through these doors. And they didn't wear the lead suit. They didn't wear it because they were sacrifices, ritual offerings.

It all made sense—crazy, perverted sense, but sense all the same. Bring people up to expect too much from politicians, and in the end they rebelled, abdicated responsibility, and found themselves a human god to follow. Auschwitz, Belsen, and a dozen others made that clear. Bring them up to worship science and scientists, and what? When the illusion vanished, when civilization gave way at the seams, what did people do? Revert, go back, dig up older, darker values—values of the tribe, of the lone wolf, of the strong man frightened of the dark. And if some scientists should survive, knowing enough, determined or unbalanced enough to play on fear and ignorance and despair, then what more likely than that they should become the new gods. And then? Close their ranks, shut the doors on newer, saner science, build up around themselves the half-satisfying, half-terrifying ritual of the old religions. Now he knew what Cortez must have felt amongst the Aztecs.

He had chosen wrongly, Angus told himself bitterly. General Tsin had been a more honest man than anyone in this nightmare, and he had made the General kill himself. He had chosen wrongly all along the line. Better to have stayed with the Chinese, to have helped them in their hopeless battle with chaos, disease, hunger. Better, even, to have accepted the Station Officer's bribes. The Station Officer was far less formidable than the Director. It would have been easy to do a deal with him, trading Liu's safety for the information the Station Officer wanted. It would have been easy, eventually, to break him. Now it was too late. He was at Headquarters, the General was dead, and the Station Officer was far away.

He swung round on his heel, clutching for a straw.

"You said there were four scientists here?"

"Yes."

"Who are the other three?" The Director shrugged.

"They're dead. In various ways. An atomic physicist, a very distinguished one"—the name he mentioned made Angus blink—"a metallurgist, and a chemist. He was the man who got the pill machinery working, incidentally. Of course, we all taught each other a good deal. So you might say that I am all of them. At least, I know more about their subjects than anyone eke today."

"I see," Angus said slowly. "And this organization succeeds just because you know enough. You have no problems. You are the master-mind. You—"

He stopped himself abruptly. But the Director showed no signs of surprise.

"Yes," he said. "But I do have some problems. Or rather, one problem. Come on."

He turned and pushed his way through the black curtain. As they walked up the steps towards the waiting Guards outside the door Angus asked one more question.

"What sort of a scientist are you yourself?"

"A scientist of human nature," the Director said briefly.

"A psychiatrist. So come and see your Chinese friend."

The room was a replica of the questioning room at Camp Three. The Director shut the door behind Angus and motioned him forward.

Liu was there. She was sitting on a low stool between two Guards, under the glare of the single, big unshaded light. She sat quietly, eyes closed, head swaying slightly from side to side. Then one of the Guards tapped her forearm with a rubber truncheon, and she jolted awake, staring straight ahead with unfocusing eyes. All the time there was the soft, creeping paralysis of the Director's voice coming from a loudspeaker set high on the wall.

Angus found that his hands were clenched tight. He forced himself to slacken them. There were bright red weals across the palms, and a fleck of blood where one fingernail had torn the flesh. Automatically he rubbed at the blood. He had to keep control. Hold on. Hold on. He willed his arms to fall to his sides, and allowed his head to slip very slightly forward.

It was the light that helped. It brought back his training as an actor, brought back the brightness and heat of the television set, gave him enough control to play the vital part. He stood still, registering defeat, letting the Director watch him.

Timing was the thing. Play the scene for too long, and the effect would be lost. He waited as long as he possibly could before speaking.

"What are you doing to her?" he asked.

"That depends on you." The Director leaned against the wall and looked benign.

"What do you want me to do?" Angus asked.

"In a moment." The Director glanced at the two motionless Guards and ignored the question. "Let me tell you what is going to happen to this girl first."

Angus shot a glance at Liu. She gave no sign of having noticed his entry.

"Carry on," he said, despair flattening his voice.

"By tomorrow she will be ready to say anything, do anything that I tell her. It doesn't need much force." His eyes flickered away from Angus's face for an instant, sought and found something beyond him.

"What will you make her do?" Angus asked. He knew the answer almost before he spoke. All the clues were there.

"Send her across to the reactor to operate the fuel-changing controls," the Director said. "The operation is quite simple. There will be no difficulty in making her understand what to do."

"And then?"

"In the present state of medical knowledge—or should I say ignorance?—leukemia, and a rather painful death."

"You want a sacrifice?"

"Exactly. I knew you would be an intelligent man. A sacrifice, with a proper ritual and a full audience. You will be there too. I saw you looking round the control room. You know why these seats are there."

Angus found his hand bleeding again. Mechanically he sucked the blood away. Black magic, megalomania, psychology all mixed together. This was the ultimate craziness. Give the Director feathers and an obsidian knife, and he could be one of Montezuma's priests, tearing the living hearts from his victims. Up from darkness and fear, back down to deeper darkness and blacker fear—unless he could stop it. Better they should all die than that this should go on.

"If I help you, what then?" he forced himself to ask, turning to look at the two Guards as he did so.

The Director took the hint. He pressed a button on the wall beside the door, and the loudspeaker went dead.

"Outside, you two," he said shortly. "I will look after this myself for a while. You can go off duty. And tell my bodyguard to come back in half an hour and wait outside. I'll call them in when I need them."

The Guards saluted, and turned to leave. The nearer one hesitated.

"What is it, man?" the Director snapped.

"Are you armed, sir?" the man asked nervously. "I can leave you my gun if you want." The Director tapped his pocket.

"I have this. It's all I need. Lock the door on the outside when you leave."

So that was that. Angus watched the Guards go, listened to the key turning in the lock. For half an hour he was alone with the Director—alone, for Liu didn't count as long as she was in this room. Half an hour to find a way out. After that it would be too late. He had to go on acting, go on bluffing, until he saw the narrowest hint of a chance. He put his hands up to his face. It was ham, outrageous ham, he told himself, but he had to play it that way.

The Director walked across to Angus, patted him lightly on the shoulder, then reached behind him. When he brought his hand back there was a flask in it. That meant that there must be a shelf of some kind on the wall behind his head. Angus forced himself not to look. The Director unscrewed the flask, poured some of the contents into the cap, and handed it to Angus. Whisky, strong, clean whisky. Angus drank it slowly before raising his head. Then he looked at the Director.

"If I help you," he said, "what then?"

For the first time the Director hesitated before speaking.

"No bribes. I can guess how the Station Officer at Camp Three tried to get you. He has quite a belief in the desirability of women, and various other comforts. I know a bit more. You don't want just any woman. You want this woman. That's why you got her away from the Camp Three Guards, and from the Chinese. Help me, and she comes back to you. I can use both of you. There aren't very many intelligent people here. You've more sense in your head than any of them, and you're prepared to act. Help me, and I'll train you. I won't live for ever, and there isn't anyone to take my place. You could be my successor. You could be the ruler of the last piece of civilization. Don't make any mistake about that. And don't count on the Chinese. Since Tsin shot himself his troops have been fighting among themselves, and there have been a couple of camp riots. They've been off the air for the last twelve hours. Inside a month they won't have any organization left, and inside a year most people on their side of the river will be dead. This is civilization. Here. I've kept it alive. Help me, and I'll give it to you."

His voice cut out suddenly. The silence was sharp and startling, broken only by his rapid breathing. Angus measured the distance, calculating, making himself wait Not yet. Not yet. But soon.

"How can I help?" he asked.

"Tell me about the midges. They haunt me. Have you any idea of the size of the problem they could become? Think of it, man. Millions upon millions of midges, more midges than locusts, and not just every seventh year. Then something happens. A helicopter crashes, carrying a load of uranium isotopes. These insects change, alter, stop having simple reflexes and instincts, develop brains. That's what may have happened, that's what is haunting me. I know that they now breed all the year round, that they aren't affected by frost and snow. I know that they can kill men by something that looks like a cross between a bite and a burn. I know that they are spreading, that the frontier is pretty well completely sealed off by them. That worries the Chinese, and it worries my Guard commanders. But you're more intelligent than they are. You must understand what I'm trying to say. What happens—not just to you, not just to me—but what happens to Man if these insects become intelligent?"

His hands were on Angus's shoulders, shaking him, forcing him to look up.

"Have you evidence that they are doing that?" Angus asked.

"You are the evidence. And you know it."

The Director slackened his grip, let his hand he loosely on Angus's shoulder. It was an opportunity. Angus let it pass. He must find out just how much the Director knew. He knew that the midges had harboured Angus, that they had killed the Guards who had chased him. But did he know any more? Did he know about the telepathy? Had the midges which had followed the helicopter to the Green Face been spotted? What had Liu told under questioning? Angus was sweating slightly. He felt cold. For, in his way, the Director was right. This was a challenge to the human race. This was something that had been guessed at, written about, by a thousand writers—an intelligence different from man's, perhaps superior to it, but certainly alien. And, ironically, it was an intelligence that man had created. He remembered the dead men in the helicopter beside the river, and the midges spiralling over them. The problem was of man's own making. Now he had to meet the bill.

The Director began to speak again, quietly.

"I know that you are able to go amongst the midges. The man Ian, who led you hunters and was shot by the Guards, could go too. You must know something. You must have something to give them in return. I've got to believe that. All the evidence suggests that these insects are intelligent. The Chinese suspected that. I know it I know too that if they aren't stopped they will soon have our camps cut off from each other. That hasn't happened by chance. The men who chased you weren't killed by chance, either. What have you got that the midges want?"

"If I tell you, how will that help?" Angus said slowly.

"It can make it a lot easier to dispose of them. A want is a weakness. The girl is your weakness. That's why you are going to do what I ask. What is the midges' weakness?"

"Have you got a weakness yourself?" Angus countered.

The Director looked past him, smiling faintly.

"Patience. That's my weakness. But don't try it too far. I could dispose of these midges tomorrow. Three small atom bombs would clear out the main concentrations. But there could be complications. I don't want my organization to run any risks, and we don't have a meteorological service any more. To use the bombs I've got to have a week of northerly winds. So far my patience has won. It won't win much longer—unless you tell me what I want to know."

Angus played for time. Patience wasn't the Director's only weakness. Lack of patience might be a more promising one, from Angus's point of view. Could he rouse the man, make him drop his guard from exasperation? It was running a risk, but it had to be done.

All at once he knew how it could be done—by telling the truth. Again a whole series of disconnected episodes slipped into place. He knew what he had given the midges.

"What will you do if I tell you?" he asked.

"Use it. Use it. These insects have got to be destroyed. The future of the human race depends on it—and I'm not saying that just to frighten you. And I'll give you the succession here. You can save mankind—and give yourself the chance to lead it."

Lead mankind into deeper darkness, Angus thought bitterly. The choice wasn't an honest one. He could save man by using the weapons that had brought him to the edge of destruction. He could buy the right to be chief witch-doctor himself. Or so the Director thought. The man was making the primary mistake of judging everything and everybody by his own values, the values of an educated ape. Perhaps that was what mankind deserved. If so, the error was so immense that it made up his mind for him.

"Right," he said, straightening up, "I'll tell you what I gave the midges. I'll tell you why I can go among them."

The Director sighed with relief. His hands slipped off Angus's shoulders. Angus could see the beads of sweat along the line of his jawbone. He picked up his whisky and sipped at it. Then he spoke, balancing the cap of the flask carefully in his right hand.

"Kindness," he said. "Nothing but kindness. That's all you have to give them."

The Director's face contorted. He swallowed once, twice, trying to speak. His hand went towards his pocket. Angus threw the remains of the whisky into his face. The Director's head went back, hands rubbing at his eyes. Before he could recover Angus had thrust his knee savagely into his groin. The Director doubled up in agony. Angus hit him once across the back of his neck, and the Director grunted and slumped to the floor. Angus was just in time to catch his body as he fell.

CHAPTER TEN

The Director would be unconscious for five minutes at least, Angus reckoned. He knew what he wanted to do with these five minutes. Quickly he searched the Director's pockets, collecting his pistol and his cigarette lighter. He noticed with satisfaction that the pistol had a silencer fitted to the barrel, and stuffed the weapon in his own pocket.

Then he stood up and turned to look behind him. If his guess was correct, there would be a shelf there, and something on it. There was. He took down the small leather-covered case and opened it carefully. That one glance of the Director's had been clue enough, and he wasn't surprised at what he found inside—a hypodermic syringe and a phial half full of a yellow liquid.

Drugs. Truth drugs, drugs to lessen resistance, drugs to stimulate suggestibility and obedience. Every security service had been developing them furiously in the last years before the crash. There must be enormous stocks rotting away all over the world, relics of an apparatus of tyranny that had vanished everywhere. Everywhere, that was, except at Headquarters. And now, because he had once been an actor, and because the Director was a megalomaniac who took unnecessary risks, he could turn this drug on its own master.

He rolled up the Director's sleeve and pressed home the plunger of the syringe. The Director stirred and moaned, then lay silent again. Another step taken. It might be hours before the man revived again, but Angus was inclined to doubt it. The newer drugs were all swift-acting, for security men had never been able to wait long.

He turned to Liu. She was still sitting on the stool, her head slumped forward. Angry with his own thoughtlessness, he reached for the light switches beside the door. His first choice was wrong. The light went out completely, leaving him groping in the sudden darkness. He tried again. This time the light was softer and the glare was gone. He found the flask and refilled the cap. He had to hold it to Liu's lips, and most of the whisky dribbled out of her mouth, but the sting of the spirit did its work. Her eyes flickered and opened. She shivered violently. All at once she focused, her face creased with fear, and she looked wildly round the room. Then she saw Angus, and the fear ebbed away. He put an arm round her shoulders and held on tightly. She began to cry silently, her shoulders heaving.

At last she looked up at him and smiled. He poured out more whisky and made her drink again. She saw the Director lying on the floor, and her eyes widened.

"Who's that?" she asked.

"The head of the whole affair," Angus answered grimly.

"What are you going to do with him?"

"Kill him. In a particular way. But first he is going to help us to get out of here."

"The midges are down by the river. Can we get to them?"

"Good girl," Angus said. "I rather thought that you would have fixed that. They must be good at map-reading."

He caught himself giggling at his own joke, and pulled up short. Time enough to relax when they had got away. No time now even to think about the implications of the midges being just outside Headquarters, twenty miles from where he had last seen them at the Green Face. No time to stop to work out the significance of his own answer to the Director. Time only to get away.

"Can you walk now?" he asked Liu.

She nodded.

"I'll manage. It's not the first time I've been questioned under lights. I know how to keep control. They hadn't used any drugs on me before you came in, luckily."

Angus smiled, but he felt considerably less happy inside. After several hours' questioning Liu could hardly be fit for much, whatever she might say. Could she last out until he had done what he meant to do? He glanced quickly at her. Her face was withdrawn, preoccupied. He suddenly realized that it was not exhaustion that was troubling her. He was going to kill the Director, and she was tired and afraid of more killings. This was something new, something more to be worked out and understood.

But not now. He unstrapped the Director's watch from his wrist and looked at it. They had been alone for just over twenty minutes. In less than ten minutes the bodyguard would be back on duty. After that the next step would have to be attempted.

Meanwhile there was something to be done. He punched the button he had seen the Director use, and the loudspeaker crackled and came alive. The Director's voice began to flow softly out over the Director's motionless body. Angus didn't listen to the words. He took the Director by the shoulders and propped him up against the wall. It was important that the man should come round. It would make the business of getting out of the questioning room a lot easier if the Director could be forced to call the Guards in himself. Take them by surprise, and there would be a chance of escape. Easy enough then to get out of the room, climb through one of the corridor windows, and run for the river. He took the pistol from his pocket and checked the magazine. It must be close to nightfall now. But he knew, even as he put the pistol back in his pocket, that it wasn't going to be a simple question of escaping and running. There was something he meant to do first.

He poured the last of the whisky out of the flask and forced it down the Director's throat, watching his face carefully. This was crucial. The Director must recover consciousness soon. Angus hoped that the combination of whisky and the drug wouldn't be lethal. But the chance had to be taken.

A minute went by, then another. He squatted down and began to slap the Director's face lightly, first one cheek, then the other. The Director groaned and stirred. Angus went back on his heels and waited. The Director's eyes opened, his hands pushed against the wall, and he tried to climb to his feet. Angus helped him. Swaying slightly, the Director stood in the middle of the room. At close sight, he was obviously drugged or drunk. Therefore, no one must see him closely.

"Listen to me," Angus said.

The Director's eyes swivelled round. Angus realized, with a shiver, that the man had been listening to his own voice over the loudspeaker—listening without understanding who was speaking. He was as near as nothing to a walking corpse. But he wouldn't stay that way. It was important to take the chance the drug had given.

He looked straight at the Director.

"When I tell you, you will call for the Guards outside the door to come into this room. Do you understand that?"

"Yes." The voice was the Director's, but it was empty and flat.

"After that, when I tell you, you will lead us to the control-room. Do you understand that?"

"Yes."

Angus looked at Liu, then steeled himself to give the third instruction. Kill or be killed: that was how it now stood, and Liu couldn't escape it. But why did killing worry her so much now? She had seen enough of it before, without looking as unhappy as she did now. Avoiding her eyes, he gave the third instruction. The Director acknowledged it.

He looked at his watch. The bodyguard would be on duty now, outside the heavy metal door. Time to get moving. He switched the light on to full brightness again, and made Liu sit on the stool, her back to the door. A last look round the room, a final check of his pistol, and he was ready. He went to the wall behind the door, where he could cover the Guards when they entered.

"Call the Guards," he ordered the Director.

It was easier than he had hoped. The Director turned to the door, rapped thrice on it, and shouted "Guard". Angus had half-expected some elaborate communication system. But then, he realized, there wasn't much need for precautions of that sort. Prisoners brought into this room didn't escape. They had nowhere to escape to. This time it was going to be different.

A key grated in the lock, the door swung open, and the Guards came in. One of them never knew that anything was wrong. Angus shot him through the back before he had finished saluting the Director. The second Guard was a shade quicker, but not quick enough. He had his pistol half-up when the bullet hit him.

The key was still in the lock. Angus pulled it out and pushed the door shut. He looked at the two dead Guards. Now he was a killer in his own right Perhaps that was symbolic. But Guards had to take their chance. The taller of the pair lay on his back, blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth. Angus took his pistol and handed it to Liu. She took it without speaking, but her eyes were bleak and unhappy.

He stripped off the smaller Guard's jacket and made Liu put it on. If they got away it would be cold outside, and her flying-jacket had been taken away from her. He unhooked a torch from the taller Guard's belt, threw a last look round the room, then signed to the Director.

"Take us to the control-room now," he said.

The Director turned and pulled the door open. Angus motioned Liu to follow him. He didn't look at her face. Explanations would have to wait until he had finished what he meant to do.

The control-room door was fifty yards away, at the end of the corridor. A green light shone above it. The corridor was lined with windows on either side. It was a covered approach, obviously, and the control-room must stand separately from the main buildings. That might make things easier. Through the left-hand windows Angus could see the last streaks of daylight fading in the sky. That gave him his bearings. The river must lie to his right, for they had crossed to its western bank at the Green Face. But how far? And what lay between? He looked out of the right-hand windows. Three hundred yards away there was a line of long, low buildings, windowless and deserted: storehouses, probably. As he watched, two Guards moved in front of the buildings, rifles slung over their shoulders. He followed them with his eyes. Patrols would be an added complication.

As they passed the second of the buildings the Guards turned away, then disappeared between it and the next. He looked more closely, and saw a concrete roadway. There must be a way through. He walked on down the corridor. The last window gave him the view that he wanted. The Guards were going eastwards, away from the control-room. They were passing a concrete apron, where a mechanic was filling up a truck with petrol. And beyond them, less than a mile away, he could see a line of sand dunes that must mark the river. In the foreground there was a high fence. He thought he could make out a gate, but the light was bad.

There was their road, then. Not a very good one, and the chance of getting away wouldn't be more than an outside one—but that was the way they would have to go. He touched Liu's hand, then spoke to the Director.

"Now, go in. We will follow you."

The Director pushed the door open, and walked in without hesitating. The great black curtain stared across the rows of empty seats, soaking up the low-pitched glow of a single guide-light inside the door. Angus signed to Liu. She dropped behind, moving to one side of the door, where anyone entering would be unlikely to see her at first glance. He smiled at her, and touched the bulge where his pistol lay hidden. Her answering smile faded away, but he saw her hand slip into her pocket and grip her own pistol.

Beyond the curtain everything was bright and clean. The reactor glistened beyond the glass wall, its plates catching the last flicker of daylight. Far away something moved. For a second Angus stared, then recognized what he was seeing. A long skein of geese was crossing the sky. Another ten minutes, and they would have been completely hidden by the dark.

A single white-coat was standing beside the control panels, writing in a log book. He looked up briefly, saw the Director, then turned back to his dials. As he followed the Director, Angus noted the position of the red electrical panel. There was a heavy switch mounted in the centre. One of his targets was identified.

Something in the Director's appearance caught the white-coat's attention. Angus saw a look of bewilderment cross his face, followed by sheer panic. The man had identified the Director's condition. But it was too late. He turned, reaching for a button on his writing desk. In two strides Angus was beside him, pistol in hand. He hit twice with the butt, aiming precisely. The white-coat keeled over and collapsed across his own chair. The Director stood motionless, watching.

Breathing hard, Angus straightened up. It would have been easier to shoot. But Liu had had enough of shooting. The whole venture was so crazy, so unlikely to succeed, that he was ready to indulge her, ready to risk leaving the white-coat alive.

"Now go ahead," he said to the Director, and repeated the third order he had given in the questioning room.

The Director walked forward steadily. He went to the airlock, opened the inner door and walked through. Angus heard the soft swish as the door came to rest against the rubber floor. The Director pulled the lever controlling the outer door and stepped outside. This was the final retribution, and nobody, not even Liu, was going to stop it. The one man who knew how to manage the reactor was going to kill himself by the method he had devised for sacrificing others. The Director was going to die, unpleasantly, and the reactor would die with him.

The Director was ten yards outside the door, now. Angus held his pistol ready. In a few moments the escape would have to begin. He saw the Director's suit of lead clothing against the wall. It looked empty, meaningless.

The Director was half-way to the door in the reactor's side. A counter on one of the panels began to tick violently. Angus ignored it. A light flashed on. The Director went on walking towards the reactor. The counter raced. All at once, a siren began to blare. The echoes bounced from wall to wall, filling the control-room with a tidal wave of noise.

The Director stopped. One hand went up to his forehead, and his head shook from side to side. Perhaps the effect of the drug was wearing off. Perhaps the sound of the siren had triggered off some reaction too strong for the drug to subdue. Whatever the reason, the Director was coming alive. Angus saw him take two steps backwards, his legs rigid with horror. Then he turned and ran, his mouth open, his eyes staring. He reached the door, heaved frantically at the lever, and staggered into the air-lock. He saw Angus, and his face contorted. Pushing the inner door open, he ran into the control-room. As he came, Angus shot him twice. Even so, he had to stand aside as the momentum of the run brought the crumpling body right across the floor to the foot of the red panel. One hand clutched at Angus's foot. The fingers ground across the floor then slowly relaxed. The Director was dead.

Blood is blood, and killing is killing, whatever way you do it, Angus thought. I meant to kill him horribly. Instead I had to shoot him. One way or the other, I am a man of blood. It is time that stopped.

He heard Liu calling to him from beyond the curtain. He shook himself awake. The siren had stopped, and the echoes were slowly dying away. He could hear distant shouting. Time to get away, to save blood instead of spilling it. He took the torch from his pocket and switched it on. Then he pulled the red switch. At once everything was dark. In the light of the torch he hammered at the switch with the butt of his revolver, battering it out of shape. He pulled the back of the panel open, and ripped recklessly at the wires inside.

When he had finished there was shouting all around, and the sound of hurrying feet. Somewhere a rifle cracked twice. Nerves were bad at Headquarters, he thought with relief. So much the better for their chances of getting away.

He ran through the curtain and up the steps to where Liu stood beside the door. Her hand reached out for his and held it tight. He switched off the torch, and stood silent, listening.

There were running steps in the corridor outside. He held Liu still and brought his pistol up. Feet outside the door, a glint of light underneath it. Then the door was open and three of the white-coats were running down the aisle between the empty seats, a torch beam cutting ahead of them. They reached the curtain, and plunged through. Gently, Angus opened the door and eased Liu through it into the darkness outside. He was halfway through himself when there was a shout. The torch beam swung round, caught him, passed on, then swept back to hold him. There was a shot, a thud on the wood of the door frame.

But he was outside and his torch snapped on. He gripped Liu's hand and pulled her to the nearest window, smashing the glass with a sweep of his arm. The men in the control-room were pounding up the aisle towards the door. Liu scrambled through the hole in the glass and dropped to the black ground below. He climbed after her, let go, and hit the frozen grass with a thud that jarred his spine.

Then they were both on their feet and running. The night air was cold and clean. As he ran he could see the stars above his head, could see Orion wheeling in frozen calm. Liu was panting. He felt her stumble, and put his arm round her, hauling her on. There was a shot from the window behind. He put out his torch and pushed Liu against the wall of the nearest building. It was long range, too long for a pistol. The rifle he had left buried far away would have done the job. But he had to try with a pistol. He dropped to one knee, steadied himself, and fired three shots in quick succession. There was a tinkle of glass, a low, moaning scream, and the light in the window went out.

After that they went on more slowly, not daring to use the torch. There was noise in the main buildings of the camp, and from time to time shots. But amongst the storehouses there was only a black quietness. Angus knew what he was looking for, and after a while he found it—the truck he had seen being refuelled. The mechanic had apparently abandoned it when the lights went out. He helped Liu into the cab, saw that the ignition was working, then climbed out again.

With the brake off, he pushed the machine twenty yards towards the river.

Risking the torch for an instant, he located his other target—the petrol hose. He turned the nozzle. Petrol gushed over the concrete apron. He let it run, watching the stain spread out in a great pool. On the floor of the cab he found a bundle of oil-sodden rags. The noise in the camp was growing. Old scores were being settled in the cover of the dark, he suspected. He didn't rate the discipline of Headquarters high enough to believe that it could stand this emergency. Things would be worse too, if the news of the Director's death spread.

He went back to the truck and started the engine. He left it running, and picked up his handful of rags. A spurt of petrol from the hose, the Director's cigarette lighter, and they flared up. He tossed them on to the concrete just ahead of the spreading tide of petrol, then hurled himself into the truck.

They were accelerating fiercely away before he was properly seated. Even so, he was only just quick enough. The blast as the pool of petrol exploded caught them, searing and clutching. The truck lurched, and he fought to hold it on to the track. Then they were out of range, roaring into the reddening darkness, as the glare of the fire behind swamped the white light of the truck's headlights.

He had been right. There was a gate in the high boundary fence. Beside it stood a machine-gun tower, deserted. The fence Guards had left their posts. Angus accelerated and crashed the truck against the gates. There was a bump and they were through, the gate flapping emptily behind. He kept on at full speed. The concrete road came to an end, and they were on a sandy track between high dunes. Behind the redness grew intolerable. There was an enormous soft-voiced explosion, and the patter of debris all around. Appalled at his own success, Angus stopped the truck and looked behind him. The petrol dump had exploded. Flames were sweeping high in the sky, buildings were flickering with points of fire. Above it all the reactor gleamed bronze against the sky. Headquarters was dying.

He started the engine again, and drove on more slowly, watching the headlight beams carefully. In a few minutes he saw what he wanted to see. A thin spiral of midges floated into the light. He slowed the truck to a crawl. Liu opened her door and stood on the running-board, letting the insects sweep round her. After a moment she gestured to him to drive on.

When he stopped, a mile further on, where the river ran between the last of the dunes and out to the sea, she was already asleep. He pulled her gently across the cab, until her head was cradled in his arms. The pistol was heavy against his side. He pulled it out of his pocket and let it fall to the floor. Then he fell asleep himself.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At evening on the next day they reached the Green Face. Away to the north smoke from the burning Headquarters was still staining the sky. If anyone else had escaped from the fires and the chaos, Angus had seen nothing of them. It was easy enough to guess what had happened, with the arms store going the same way as the petrol dump, the Guards and the white-coats panicking in the darkness, and the labour camp exploding into rebellion. It wasn't pretty. There had been a dozen dead bodies piled against the boundary fence when they drove back from the river in the morning. Only two or three had midge burns; most had been shot, and one had been frightfully burned by fire—how he had dragged himself so far was a mystery.

The gate that they had charged the night before still lay open, but beyond the buildings were still burning. So they carried on up the river bank, bumping along a narrow cleared strip between the fence and the water. Half-way round the perimeter they came upon a Guard post. It was deserted. Angus shot the lock of the gate open, and went through. The living-hut behind the post was as empty as the machine-gun tower. With Liu's help he loaded the truck with rations and blankets and clothing from the living-hut. When he added a machine-gun and an armful of rifles from the armoury she looked unhappy. But Angus remembered the Colonel and his men at Camp Three; the weapons might be needed yet.

Picking their way round the edge of the fence, they at last reached the road to the south. And now, in the slanting rays of the evening sun, they were camped across the ford, be side the wreck of Liu's helicopter. High above, the snows on the face of the Bear were glinting rose-red against a clear sky. It was winter still. The night frost was beginning to settle on the ground. Angus could see a film of ice closing over the pools at the edge of the river, where the midges were spiralling backwards and forwards in their endless dance.

He sat still, listening to the river, and thinking of his last view of what had been Headquarters. Smoke-haze, desolation and destruction—and in the middle of it all the great sphere of the reactor, standing useless and grimy, already as archaic and incomprehensible as Stonehenge or the Sphinx. It had been a relief to turn away and drive south into the hills. He had a full petrol tank—the last petrol that would ever come out of Headquarters—and he had nowhere to drive to, but at least he could get away from the ruins that he had made.

Liu was busy with the blankets and a tarpaulin from the truck, rigging up a bed in the lee of the ruined bridge. When she had finished she slipped between the blankets and lay looking at him. He lingered a few moments, watching the line of sunlight retreat up the Bear's side. Slowly the red faded from the snow, and the sky darkened from blue to black. It grew colder. He shivered. Liu stretched out a hand and pulled him into the warmth of the blankets. He slid away down a long scree slope of weariness. He was dimly aware of looping his belt round his neck, so that the pistol hung free and ready to hand. But the last thing he saw before he fell asleep was the look of unhappiness still on Liu's face.

A long hour before the dawn he woke, stiff and restless. The air was still and dead, the sound of the river heavy and menacing. He knew that he would not go to sleep again, and began to probe for the reason. There was something wrong. He had done what he meant to do. Ian was avenged, the Director was dead. There would be no more concentration camps, no more Guards, no more genocide. He was a hero. He had destroyed a tyranny, and he deserved well for it. But Liu was unhappy. Why? He shifted carefully, trying not to disturb her, and went on wondering. Why was she unhappy? She knew what had happened to her own people; she could never go back to them. But she had made that choice long ago. She had seen him killing men, seen him burning and destroying. But she knew as well as he did that what he bad destroyed was evil. What was wrong, then?

He turned on his side and tried to relax his muscles, for he was tensed and shivering, despite the rough warmth of the blankets. There was a last hurdle to be crossed—and he did not know what it was.

Liu's hand slid into his and gripped him tightly. She had been awake all the time, he thought dully. But she did one thing only. He felt her other hand reach over, heard a tiny metallic noise, and knew that she had taken his pistol away.

"Why did you do that?" he asked. His voice sounded enormous in the darkness.

There was a long pause before Liu spoke.

"Why did the midges stop you getting your rifle back?" she said.

Angus was startled.

"I never told you that. How do you know about it? How-"

The explanation hit him suddenly.

"The midges told you," he continued, slowly.

Liu began to speak. He opened his mouth to interrupt, but something in her tone stopped him.

"When I first met the midges I was very frightened of them," she said. "I had always been told that they were malevolent and dangerous. But you were helping me, so I tried not to be afraid, because you seemed to trust them. Then they showed us how to pass thoughts without speaking, and I stopped being afraid. After they helped us to escape from the fort I knew that they were on our side, and I began to realize that they were much bigger and more important than I had imagined. Then you were captured, and I bad to get away with the helicopter myself. I saw what happened to your friends at Grimachory, for after the Guards were gone I went there. The man you called Ian was still alive, and he told me where you were being taken. I knew then that you would end up at Headquarters, so I had to decide what I was going to do."

"And you went back to the midges?"

"Yes. I went back to the river and went as near as I dared to that old wrecked helicopter. I sat still there and waited. I don't think you ever stayed still long enough to learn everything about the midges. Now I know more than you do. I know that they can transmit their own ideas to us, if we give them a chance. It's not just that they can help us to pass thoughts to each other. I don't fully understand what happens, but it seems as if whatever we think when in contact with them flows into their knowledge—and they all know at once what any single one finds out If we let it happen, the process can be two-way."

"Instantaneous communication, in fact," Angus said.

"Yes. But there's more to it than that I went to ask for their help. And I got it. That's why there were midges following my helicopter here, and why there were others waiting outside Headquarters. I didn't order them, and they didn't follow me out of curiosity. I asked for their help, and they gave it."

She stopped, and looked gravely at Angus. Light was beginning to filter down the sides of the Bear. Somewhere along the river a small bird was calling tentatively. He could just make out Liu's face, could see the seriousness in her eyes. He lay silent, her hand still as a stone inside his grip.

The implications were beginning to emerge. The midges had stopped him going to get his rifle. Now Liu was telling him that she could communicate with them. Beyond any doubt they had minds of their own, intelligence and purpose. They had helped her to try to rescue him. The Director's face, and his anxiety, came back sharply to Angus. The Director had been right His own vague suspicions had become certainties.

And—he had told the Director what he had given the midges in return. A want is a weakness, the Director had said. So he had told him that the midges wanted kindness. It had been half a guess, half an intuition. The Director hadn't believed him, and the Director had died as a direct result of not believing him. Did he believe himself? All at once he knew that the answer must be yes. There was nothing else he could have given to the midges. He had left the original swarm alone, he had never felt the same terror when they were near that both Lachie and Calum had shown. That must be why Ian had been accepted too, for he had been prepared to let the midges go their own way. The chemistry of fear might have something to do with the difference in reaction, and the ability of the midges to detect it. Whatever the explanation, those who tried to kill the midges, and those who were frightened of them, died. He himself was still alive. It was as simple as that. He stared back at Liu.

"I told the Director that the midges wanted kindness," he said.

"So they do," she replied. "If you had taken more time to listen to them you would have realized that sooner. We can't do more than kill the odd midge, but they don't like having to burn us. A single midge can burn once only, and in some way the act of burning affects all the midges, not just the single one concerned. That is why they didn't want you to get that rifle. They find it difficult to understand that men deliberately kill each other, because that makes for angry and frightened men—and angry and frightened men are dangerous to them."

"And that's why you were unhappy when I loaded the truck with arms yesterday, and why you've just taken my pistol away?"

He saw Liu nod, and then she was holding him tightly, her face buried in his shoulder.

"Yes, yes," she whispered. "There's been too much killing, and I'm frightened. I've done it myself. I shot Ian. It was all I could do for him, for he was dying and there were buzzards watching him. But there's too much killing. If we lose the midges because we kill each other, what is there left? Please, please, throw the guns away."

He pushed her off roughly, and rolled out of the blankets. Without looking back at Liu, he got to his feet and walked away along the river bank. He could accept the need to be kind to the midges, could reject the Director's hysterical eagerness to wipe them out, but to go further was too difficult The idea that man—or what was left of him—had to live on the midges' terms was impossible. The midges couldn't decide, must not be allowed to decide, whether he carried a gun or not. He kicked angrily at a stone, and listened to it roll into the water. There was a dull crash as the shallow ice cracked and split. He was uneasily aware that he was refusing at the last fence, that there was an element of pride in his reaction. He thrust the thought away, but it kept coming back. If he wasn't ready to accept the midges, then he had too heavy a load of responsibility, for he had destroyed the only force that could have stopped them. He had loaded the dice hopelessly against himself. For all that though, the fence was too high. He didn't want to take it.

He turned and went back to the truck. Liu was up and preparing breakfast. They ate in silence. The dawn was well up now, and the road south stood out on the slope ahead. Northwards there were only midges left. But he could still try southwards. He picked up the revolver and buckled on his belt.

Camp Three was as quiet as Headquarters had been. Only the smoke was missing. Angus drove past the empty fields, through the lines of huts, up to where the Guards had had their barracks. There had been fighting here. There were corpses in the roadway, Guards and camp people alike, and the barracks were burnt out. He drove on, knowing what he would find.

The stockade was down in two places. He stopped the truck in front of the gate and got out. Pistol in hand, he climbed through a gap in the wall. Inside was chaos. The armoured car was lying on its side, dead Guards sprawled around it. He recognized one of the bodies. It was the Colonel. Inside the main building the scene was the same. Nothing had been spared. The laboratories were a shambles, the stores had been ransacked, the furnishings were slashed and battered. He had, he realized, only just got out in time. The fighting he had seen beginning had turned into something too serious for the garrison to handle.

The Station Officer was lying across his office desk with his throat cut. In a bedroom he found the girl he had slept with. She was dead also.

Angus looked at her sombrely. This, he thought, is what man does to man. This is what the midges hate. Are they wrong? Am I any less a man if I accept their terms? This morning I was reluctant I wanted to keep my gun, wanted to go on being a god with thunderbolts in my hand. But I was wrong.

Too much death. He looked down at the girl's face. Indirectly, he had killed her, just as he had killed Ian and the General. Too much death. Deirdre was dead, and now this girl was dead too. In an instant of clarity, he saw his own weakness. A want is a weakness the Director had said. So what had he wanted? He had wanted to turn the clock back. Nothing he could do would ever make Deirdre come to life again. That he could accept. But could he accept that nothing could ever undo what he had done at Headquarters?

Liu came quietly up to his shoulder. In a movement at once of defeat and contrition and acceptance, he held out his hands to her. He had wanted to have her on his own terms, but she had been wiser than he was. She had understood what was happening.

To have to live with the midges, to have to stop killing— what did it really mean? Did it mean abdication? Did it mean going the way of the dinosaurs? Was a symbiosis impossible? With sudden certainty, he knew the answer. There had to be a symbiosis, bad to be an acceptance. Everything that had happened since Liu had first come through the door at Grimachory made that clear. Acceptance did not mean the end of mankind. It meant the end of the camps and the killings, but that was not the same thing. Not abdication—readjustment. Readjustment to a different world and a different environment. There would be difficulties, disappointments, whole generations of work, a slow climb back from the edge of the ultimate abyss. But there was a chance, and that was enough to be going on with.

Somewhere outside a voice was calling. He followed Liu back through the ruined hallway, through the smashed glass doors, and out into the open. The voice came again, from a great distance. They crossed the parade ground, stepping across the bent and twisted remains of the radar mast, and stood at the second breach in the wall, looking.

There were figures far away across the fields, near the river. Liu began to walk towards them. He followed, still trying to understand what be had to do. If only there was some way to demonstrate, to prove to himself that it would be no abdication. The fence was falling down, yet he still hesitated to step across it.

The figures were nearer now, near enough for him to make them out. There were perhaps forty of them—men, women, children. He recognized two of the children from the stockade, a handful of Guards, men and women from the labour huts. They stood in a huddled circle. Some of the men had rifles, but there was no firing. As he got closer he realized why. There was a spiral of midges all around the group.

The last hesitation fell away. He stepped in front of Liu, motioning to her to wait. Then, pistol held downwards, he walked steadily towards the midges. The people inside the circle watched him listlessly. When he was within a few feet of the outermost midges he stopped. Very slowly and deliberately he let the pistol fall to the ground, then walked on. At once he felt the old singing in his ears, the old tingling. But the midges opened a way for him, and he stepped through the ring.

The people inside were hungry and frightened. He spoke to them quietly. They stood silent making no movement at all. He turned to one of the Guards, a thin-faced, scarred man with a rifle in his hands. If he could only make this one man understand, make him put down his rifle, then the rest would be easy. He looked beyond the midges and saw Liu's face. After that it was easier.

At last the Guard's fingers relaxed. The rifle fell through them to the ground. There was a sigh from the whole group, then the sound of a dozen weapons falling. He turned towards Liu, waving the others to follow him. Walking slowly, because his followers were tired and weak from hunger, he led them through the midges to where Liu was standing. There were no burns, no screams, only the shuffle of feet on the frozen earth. Nobody spoke. They walked on towards the stockade and the truck. The midges made no move to follow.

At the truck he unloaded a sack of food, while Liu lit a fire from the broken timbers of the stockade and started to cook. The survivors sat or squatted around, watching and waiting. When the food was ready, and they were all eating, he picked up the sack and turned back to the truck.

Something fell out of the sack. He bent down and picked it up. It was a small carton. He opened it, and stood looking. It was filled with the saffron pills. He held them in his hand and looked across at Liu. She came and stood beside him, watching him.

He stood still. Something was happening. At first he was puzzled. Then he began to smile. Almost imperceptibly, but entirely decisively, spring had come. The east wind was gone, there was a new warmth in the sunshine, and he could see the melting ice beginning to drip off the sides of the stockade. Far away in the west the road to Grimachory was dancing in the moist, hazy air. The winter was past. Life was beginning again.

He looked at Liu, then back at the pills in his hand. With a single throw he tossed them all into the fire, and watched them burst in the flames. When he looked at Liu again she was crying, but her eyes were happy.