LITMIR.BIZ

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and went to follow Ted.

      She said, ‘You think this has something to do with the loss of the lines? The TV and gas and phone –’

      ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said mildly. ‘Can’t say how far underground it spreads, how far it has got.’

      ‘But if there are land slips going on, some kind of subsidence –’

      ‘You could get line breaks. Yes. There have been scientists up here, poking and prodding away. There’s an American chap my son works with … But they’re just recording, measuring. I think someone should be doing something. Taking it a bit more seriously.’

      They climbed around the crag. They were paralleling the edge of the funny dust, Morag saw. It made for a rough circle, she supposed, patches of it draped across the breast of the land. But the edge of the circle was rough and irregular; in some places necks of the dust and broken ground came snaking down the hillside, perhaps carried there by some slip or a fault in the basalt, and they had to descend to avoid it.

      Now, Morag heard singing. I Wish I Was A Spaceman / The Fastest Guy Alive … It sounded like a TV theme tune.

      ‘Good Christ,’ Ted said. ‘I haven’t heard that in thirty years.’

      ‘It sounds like kids’ TV.’

      ‘So it is, my dear. But long before your time.’

      They entered the Dry Dam and came on a line of people. They were dressed in some kind of purple uniform, and they were sitting in a loose circular arc that embraced the hillside, and they were singing.

       I’d Fly Around The Universe …

      They were mostly slim to the point of thinness. They didn’t seem cold, despite the paucity of their clothes, the keenness of the wind up here. They were singing with a happy-clappy gusto.

      There was a boy standing at the centre of the loose arc, age eighteen or so, skinny as a rake. When he saw Ted and Morag approaching he got to his feet, a little stiffly, and approached.

      ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘My name is Bran.’

      ‘Now then, Hamish,’ Ted said stiffly.

      Morag glanced at Ted. ‘You know this gentleman?’

      ‘Used to.’

      ‘Would you mind telling me what you’re doing up here, sir?’

      ‘Watching the Moonseed, of course,’ Bran-Hamish said.

      ‘The Moonseed?’

      ‘All this started just after that Moon rock was brought to the university. And Venus, of course. Fantastic, isn’t it? Two thousand years of waiting –’

      Morag walked forward. The members of the group, still singing, looked up at her. Before each of them there was a small cairn, of broken fragments of basalt. When she looked further up the slope, she saw broken ground, exposed silver dust, loose vegetation floating on the dust. Another pool. The smell of ozone was sharp.

      ‘Every morning we mark it with a cairn,’ Bran said. ‘And every morning it has come further down the slope.’

      ‘You’re a fruitcake,’ Ted said bluntly.

      ‘Maybe,’ Bran said amiably. ‘But at least we’re here. Where are the scientists, the TV crews, the coppers –’

      Morag thought she could answer that. She imagined her own desk sergeant fending off nutcase reports from dog-walkers, about an oddity no one could classify.

      Morag frowned, pointing up the slope. ‘Where are the other cairns? The ones from yesterday, and the day before.’

      ‘Gone,’ Bran said simply. ‘Consumed, every morning. Like your fry-up breakfasts, Ted.’

      Morag straightened her cap. ‘Sir, I think you’d be advised to come away from here.’

      Bran spread his hands. ‘Why? Are we breaking the law?’

      ‘No. And I can’t compel you to move.’

      ‘Well, then.’

      She pointed to the dust. ‘But it’s obviously not safe.’

      ‘We’ve never been safer. Not since the Romans came have we been so – close.’

      Ted pulled a face at Morag. ‘I told you. Fruitcake.’

      Bran-Hamish just laughed, and resumed his seat with the others.

      Morag and Ted walked away.

      ‘Well,’ Ted said. ‘Now you’ve seen it. What are you going to do?’

      Morag hesitated.

      She’d never faced anything like this before, in her brief police career.

      She’d had some emergency training, at police college and since joining the station, with the council’s emergency planning people. It had all been rather low-key, underfunded and routine. Britain was a small, stable island. Nothing much in the way of disasters ever happened.

      Morag had not been trained to handle the unexpected.

      ‘I can’t see this is any kind of criminal matter. And this isn’t yet an emergency.’

      ‘It isn’t? Are you sure? What if it keeps growing?’ He eyed the horizon. ‘You know, cats are smart animals,’ he said. ‘Sensitive. Sometimes they react before the rest of us when something is going wrong.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve not told Ruth, but I haven’t seen Willis for a couple of days either.’

      ‘Something going wrong? Like what?’

      There was a sound like subdued thunder.

      Morag and Ted exchanged a glance. Then they began to hurry back the way they had come, around the shoulder of the crag. The cultists came with them, running over the basalt outcrops in their thin slippers.

      They came around the brow of the hill. They stopped perhaps a hundred yards from St Anthony’s Chapel.

      The old ruin was sinking.

      The single large section of upright wall, two storeys high, was tipping sideways, visibly, a ruined Pisa. But even as it did so its base was sinking into the softened ground. Its upper structure, never designed for such treatment, was crumbling; great blocks of sandstone were breaking free, and went clattering down the wall’s sloping face, making the dull thunderous noise she had heard. One of the lower wall remnants, she saw, had already all but disappeared, its upper edge sinking below the closing dust as she watched.

      It was like watching some immense stone ship, holed, sink beneath the stony waves of this plug of lava.

      Around them, the cultists were jumping up and down, whooping and shouting.

      Morag shook her head. ‘What does it mean, Ted?’

      ‘I’ve no idea,’ Ted said grimly. ‘Ask these loonie buggers. I think it’s time you made a report, girlie.’

      ‘Yeah.’

      She lifted her lapel radio to her lips.

      10

      Jane showed up in the lab, a little before noon. Mike actually escorted her into the clean room area. The staff had got the clean room procedures beefed up a little by now, and so Jane was wearing the regulation white bunny suit and cloth trilby, blue plastic overshoes.

      ‘Hi.’

      Henry, with his hands inside a glove box, did a double take. ‘Oh. It’s you.’ He fumbled the petrological slide he was handling, and tried to pull his hands out of the arm-length rubber gloves; he fumbled that too.

      Her face didn’t crack a

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