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iron Lance of Light impaling her belly, lay the Sabbat Queen, staring upwards; their lovely Joy, their friend.
    Dan pulled Moira away, roughly. Through her tears, she saw John, berserk in his torn golden kilt, a burning log in his hand, leap crazily between two motor-cycles and run to his dead wife. Standing over her, he flung the log at the engine of a passing cycle.
    Machine and rider burst into flame, colliding with the next, which swerved aside and then fell. The hemmed-in crowd saw, and copied; all at once the hunters became the hunted, trying to escape a shower of blazing missiles.
    Dan almost swept Moira off her feet, hustling her over the edge of the plateau away from the horror.
    There was one more earth tremor as the five of them stumbled down the path towards their car. But it was slight, and stunned by all that had happened, they barely noticed it.
    3
    It was obvious from the London papers (there were no Manchester or Glasgow editions all day, till power had been restored) that the geologists and seismologists either could not or would not explain what had happened; and even those who were brave enough not to take refuge in incomprehensible jargon, contradicted each other. The disturbance, whatever it was, must lie deep; because a chain of shocks that ran from Merseyside into Wales, and then obliquely across the Cotswolds and Chiltern s to the North Downs, made no kind of sense in terms of surface structure; any well-e ducated layman could see that. In Scotland, of course, the tremor that smashed the canal locks all along the Great Glen, and caused serious fires in Fort William, Invergarry, Fort Augustus and Inverness, was more understandable. On the subject of that ruler-straight primordial fracture, the nature of which was clear from any child's atlas, the experts pontificated at length to cover their vagueness over the rest.
    Reports from the continent were equally puzzling. Most dramatic was the breach in Holland's Ijsselmeer dyke, through which the North Sea was pouring to inundate thousands of hectares of hard-won polder. But this, geologically speaking, was a mere incident in the strange network of tremors that stretched from Portugal to the Caspian, and south-west (more conventionally) into the Balkans and Turkey.
    Deaths in the circumstances were remarkably few, in Britain at least. Fourteen people had died and six were missing in the collapse of a Salford block of flats; nine had drowned in a capsized pleasure craft on Loch Linnhe; and five had been killed by an exploding gas-main at Reading. Apart from these, no single British incident (the first day's reports suggested) had killed more than two. The total ranged from sixty-seven in The Times to 103 in the Sun . The continental figures were higher, though still very tentative; but in the trauma of home disaster, foreign deaths were statistics not people.
    Disaster it was, of course - all the headlines said so. But as the hours passed and the fires were doused and the telephone panic by anxious relatives had abated a little, the usual defence mechanisms began to work. Those with problems were busy coping with them, those unaffected were busy congratulating themselves and a kind of eerie calm seemed to prevail. It was helped by the quite uncharacteristic promptness and efficiency of the emergency relief services - which aroused the curiosity of some of the more observant citizens, though this curiosity was for some reason not reflected by the media.
    The media also avoided reporting the fact that three of Britain's eight Mohowatt electrodes were out of action, their conductors having been fractured by the tremors at a considerable depth. Fortunately two of the couples were still working and recently redundant conventional power stations could be brought back into service (again with uncharacteristic speed), so the Central Electricity Generating Board did not find it necessary to be publicly specific about the damage.
    Practically the only reference (and