As he backed away he saw someone approaching him along the ditch.

"Commander Lanyon!"

It was Patricia Olsen. She still wore the belted blue coat, scratched and muddied, and her blonde hair trailed around her head in a tangled mat.

He hurried along to her, took her arm and steadied her into a sitting position. She rolled her head weakly against his shoulder and glanced at the body.

"Charlesby?" When Lanyon nodded, she closed her eyes. "Poor devil. Where are the others?"

"You're the only one I've seen." Lanyon peered up at the sky. He felt exhausted and muscle weary, and he was sure that the wind was stronger than when they left the carrier an hour earlier. The air was full of large pieces of grit that flicked and stung at their faces like angry insects.

"We'd better get inside the barracks. Are you strong enough to make it?"

She nodded weakly. After a moment's rest they darted forward across the clipped turf to the building 50 yards away. Lanyon held her arm, and she was almost flung out of his grasp, but together they lurched over to the far end of the barracks and pulled themselves around the corner into the doorway.

At the rear of the entrance hall a stairway led below into the basement. They hurried down, tripping over the litter-strewn steps, and with luck found a more or less airtight room off the central corridor.

Patricia sat down weakly on an old bedstead and brushed her hair wearily off her face, drawing her coat over her long legs. Lanyon checked the window. Below ground level, it looked out onto the narrow well which ringed the building, but its shutters still held, though enough light filtered through for him to see around the room. There were a couple of bunks, two empty wall cupboards, and underfoot a collection of old movie magazines, discarded webbing and cigarette butts. Lanyon sat down on the bed next to her.

"Pat, I'm going upstairs in case there's anyone else here. May even be a telephone line still working."

She nodded, curling up into the corner. She looked almost dead and Lanyon wondered whether the Wilsons had survived.

The barracks was empty. Upstairs, the wind raced through the broken windows like a tornado, ripping the cupboards from the walls and piling the bedsteads into tangled heaps. He found an internal phone in one of the offices, but the line was dead. The station had obviously been abandoned days earlier.

"Any luck?" Pat asked when he went down to the basement.

He shook his head. "Looks as if we're stuck here. There are some wrecked trucks in a bay on the other side of the parade square. If the wind dies down a little tomorrow I may be able to salvage something that'll get us to Genoa."

"Do you think it _will_ die down?"

"Everybody keeps asking me that." Lanyon hung his head for a moment. "It's curious, but until I saw Charlesby lying in that ditch I didn't feel all that concerned. In a way I was almost glad. So much of life in the States-and over here for that matter-could use a strong breath of fresh air. But I realize now that a garbage-disposal job of this size rakes away too much of the good along with the bad."

He grinned at her suddenly. She smiled back, eying him with a long steady gaze, one he felt no hesitation in returning. With her blue coat and clear white skin against the drab background of the basement wall, she reminded him of the madonna in the gilt frame over the altarpiece in the wrecked church. The woman's hair had been black, but her robes had glowed with the same luminescent quality as Pat's ash-blonde hair.

Outside, the wind hurled itself across the dark swell of the land.

____________________

The hill had gone, obliterated beneath the gigantic jaws of the fleets of bulldozers, its matrix scooped out like the pulp of a fruit and carried away on the endless lines of trucks.

Below the sweeping beams of powerful spotlights, their arcs cutting through the whirling dust, huge pylons were rooted into the black earth, then braced back by hundreds of steel hawsers. In the intervals between them vast steel sheets were erected, welded together to form a continuous windshield a hundred feet high.

Even before the screen was complete the first graders were moving into the sheltered zone behind it, sinking their metal teeth into the bruised earth, leveling out a giant rectangle. Steel forms were shackled into place and scores of black-suited workers moved rapidly like frantic ants, pouring in thousands of gallons of concrete.

As each layer annealed, the forms were unshackled and replaced further up the sloping flanks of the structure. First 10 feet, then 20 and 30 feet high, it rose steadily into the dark night.

Deborah Mason took the bundle of teletype dispatches off Andrew Symington's desk, glanced quickly through them and asked, "Any hopeful news?"

Symington shook his head slowly. Behind him the banks of teletypes-labeled Ankara, Bangkok, Copenhagen and so on through the alphabet-chattered away, churning out endless tapes. They almost filled the small newsroom, cramming the desks of the threeman staff over into a corner.

"Still looks bad, Deborah. Up to 175 now and shows no signs of breaking." He scrutinized her carefully, noting the lines of tension that webbed the corners of her eyes, gave her smooth, intelligent face a look of precocious maturity, although she was only twenty-five. Unlike most of the girls working at Central Operations Executive, she still kept herself trim and well-groomed. He reflected that the ascendancy of woman in the twentieth century made the possibility of an abrupt end to civilization seem infinitely remote; it was difficult to visualize a sleek young executive like Deborah Mason taking her place in the doomed lifeboats. She was much more the sort of girl who heard the faint SOS signals and organized the rescue operation.

Which, of course, was exactly what she was doing at Central Operations Executive. With the slight difference that this time the whole world was in the last lifeboat. But with people like Deborah and Simon Marshall, the COE intelligence chief, working the pumps, there was a good chance of success.

The unit, directly responsible to the Prime Minister, had been formed only two weeks previously. Staffed largely by War Office personnel, with a few communications specialists such as Symington recruited from the Air Ministry and industry, its job was to act as an intelligence section handling and sorting all incoming information, and also to serve as the executive agency of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Home Office. Its headquarters were situated in the old Admiralty buildings in Whitehall, a rambling network of stately boardrooms and tiny offices in the underground bunkers deep below Horseguards Parade. Here Symington spent most of the day and night, only getting back to his wife-who was expecting her baby within a fortnight at the outside-usually after she was asleep. Along with the wives and families of the other COE personnel, she was housed in the Park Lane Hotel, which had been taken over by the government. Symington saw her daily, and as one of the few employees not resident at the Admiralty he was able to verify personally the reports he spent all day preparing.

TOKYO: 174 mph. 99% of the city down. Explosive fires from

Mitsubashi steelworks spreading over western suburbs.

Casualties estimated at 15,000. Food and water adequate for

three days. Government action confined to police patrols.

ROME: 176 mph. Municipal and office buildings still intact,

but Vatican roofless, dome of St. Peter's destroyed.

Casualties: 2,000. Suburbs largely derelict. Refugees from