Thank you, Professor.' The Prime Minister rose to his feet, brushed flecks of dust from his suit. He still had to maintain the image he had created as the best-dressed man in Britain, according to a recent media poll. He had the job of inspiring hope and confidence however he felt personally. 'We'll let you get on with your work—If there are any significant developments please notify me immediately. In the meantime we have an urgent cabinet meeting upstairs.'

A crisis meeting. Eight government ministers all looking to Caldecott to come up with the answer because that was what he had been elected for. Another Churchill, except that World War II was a skirmish compared to this.

Large-scale wall-maps showed every town, village and hamlet in Britain. Red drawing-pins denoted areas which were known to have suffered heavy casualties. Blue pins showed where there were pockets of survivors trying to maintain law and order, fighting for a return to normality. There were an awful lot of blank spaces awaiting a red or a blue pin.

And the Russians still had not come. They weren't in any hurry, there was no hurry. Next week, next month, next year, it would all be the same.

'Let us take the major cities first.' Caldecott used his wooden pointer, was reminded of those far-off days when he had lectured at Oxford; golden days which would never come again. You were lucky if you were left to indulge in nostalgia. 'London, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, the pattern is much the same. Wild mobs are on the rampage, their only interest being food and , . . rape!' He shuddered. The food targets seem to be basically butchers' shops and abattoirs, whole carcasses being lorn apart, the meat devoured raw. Their hunger appeased, the men turn to women, any women with whom to satisfy a carnal desire. The remnants of our law-keeping forces are stretched beyond their limits, outnumbered by thousands to one. Our only hope is to withdraw them totally to a place of safety and plan a definite strategy. We cannot win back the cities at present so we must abandon them.'

Murmurs, not dissent, but horror. Men who were accustomed to facing up to unpleasant truths found themselves backing off.

There are survivors.' Caldecott's voice quavered slightly. "Somehow we must communicate with them, reorganise them if our country is not to be annihilated by mob rule, the law of primitive Man, for our enemy is our own kind, our own people robbed of their minds, reverted to their ancestors by a cruel and unscrupulous foe. Almost every means of communication has now failed.' Don't ask me right now how we are going to reorganise because I don't know. It might be an impossibility. 'At the moment we are waiting upon Professor Reitze and his team of scientists. They are working the clock round to find a way to combat this vile and despicable means of war.'

Silence.

There wasn't anything else left to say, nothing to argue about, a government that was suddenly devoid of politics, their only manifesto one of survival. They could only wait.

Reitze checked through his notes again after the PM and the Defence Minister had left. A hint of a worried frown, his forehead creased and smoothing out, Reitze becoming his old emotionless self again. It wasn't an act, this was how he was, what made him tick. If he died tomorrow he wouldn't know anything about it so what was the use of worrying? Slight concern that perhaps they had overlooked something somewhere, something just too obvious. They would check again. And again. But he had to admit that it was a hopeless task; not conceding defeat, just accepting facts. That was the hardest part of all, admitting that you were beaten.

He lit another Camel, pressed the buzzer on his desk. A few seconds later a sliding door opened and another white-coated scientist entered, A younger man than Reitze, tall and fair-haired, eyes red-rimmed as though he hadn't slept in the last thirty-six hours, just the odd catnap on the couch in the rest-room adjoining the lab.

'Brian,' Reitze looked up, almost smiled but not quite, 'we're gonna name this one the Evolution Bug. I don't reckon we can come up with anything else now. We've just gotta check in case we missed something, but I think we've gone as far as we can go and I'll have to tell them that soon. The ultimate in mutation. If we had lived in the Stone Age that's how we would have been, immune to diseases which would destroy mankind today and these throwbacks are just the same. Immune to anything we can give them because their body cells will resist everything. Evolution is the only answer, civilisation will have to start all over again! In a million years' time they'll be finding skeletons and scratching their heads, wondering how the hell civilisation reached its peak and went back again. I'm wondering whether those who have escaped can survive, even the bastards who started all this. We will be the ones without body resistance, diseases developing which modern medicine has never come across.'

'I see.' Brian Newman nodded. 'As a matter of fact that occurred to me but I kept it to myself.'

'We'll have to do just that. There's no point in panicking everybody and if we're right there's not a goddamn thing you or I or anybody else can do about it. In the meantime we just keep on working, hoping. And if you're a praying man, pray.'

Reports came in slowly over the next few days. The Continent had suffered badly, West Germany, France and Italy in chaos. Switzerland seemed to have fared better than most due to government legislation that all new houses had to be fitted with fall-out shelters. No warning except that strange and terrible things were befalling the French and Italians so the Swiss had dived for cover.

Nothing at all from the eastern-bloc countries. No communications. They might have been wiped out, they might be lurking safely below ground. There was no way of telling. The Kremlin was silent.

Rankine studied the large-scale maps in the operations room. The number of pins was increasing hourly, most of them red ones. The majority of survivors in remote rural parts had no way of contacting the authorities, probably did not even realise that anybody except themselves had survived. They would be fighting their own battles, rabbits living in warrens, isolated pockets of sanity until madness prevailed.

Fires were going unchecked, raging through towns and cities. The injured suffered and died agonising deaths because there was nobody to help them. But there was a pattern of behaviour amongst the new semi-human race. Like rats leaving doomed ships, they fled the built-up areas. Buildings were foreign to their nature, their in-born fear of anything beyond their basic understanding driving them out to the few wild places that remained in Britain.

The first step of a new evolution was beginning.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JACKIE QUINN followed where the man she knew as Kuz led. Through the night, along a main road, not knowing what it was or why it was there, making detours when they approached a village or hamlet.

In their wake came some twenty or thirty men and women, some of whom had started the journey with them from First Terrace, others they had picked up on the way. From the mists of time civilisation has always bowed to leaders, sought the security of another's decisions. And Kuz was one of those leaders.

They travelled at a fast walking pace, not slowing, not showing any signs of tiredness, and when dawn came they saw the rolling range of hills beyond. Kuz changed direction slightly, heading towards those bracken-covered slopes, and Jackie sensed the eagerness of the others, experienced the feeling herself; that of a traveller returning from a very long journey, weary, but on sighting his home in the distance is at once refreshed, hastening his arrival, that last mile seemingly ten, a mirage that you thought you would never reach.