We’re fragile, she thought. Everything is full, run to capacity, pared to the bone in the name of efficiency. The slightest disruption and everything freezes up.

The murky light of Venus was reflected from the roofs of the cars ahead of her, curved splashes of new light.

The wind changed, and blew in from the east, from Abbeyhill. There was a smell of burned meat. She could hear sirens. A helicopter flapped over her. She looked up. It was in camouflage green, Army or Navy.

Was this how it was starting? Was this the end of normality, of the routine of life? Would chaos and pain spread out from here, growing like the rock infection Henry had identified?

Her father would be able to cope with such conditions. That silent strength had always been an irritation to her, as she’d moved through adolescence and upwards. What use was a father who was a kind of heroic pillar? What could he do but intimidate her, make her aware of her own weakness?

But, she recognized, there were times when such strength was, simply, essential. Essential for survival.

The radio carried newsflashes. Incidents all over the eastern side of the city, fires and power outages and even collapsing buildings.

She shivered.

The receptionist at the lab didn’t know about Mike, and told her Henry hadn’t come in that morning. “But you might try the car park.”

The car park?

Jane suppressed her irritation, and went back outside.

In the car park, in one corner, she found a Portakabin, a squat cuboid, uncompromising yellow. A plastic packing case was being used as a step before the open door. A fat bundle of cables — power and data feeds, she supposed — snaked into the Portakabin from an open window in the main lab building.

She knocked on the frame of the open door. There was no reply. She stuck her head inside, shielding her eyes against the light. Henry was there, in the middle of clutter, with his back to her. He was sitting on a plastic chair, hunched over a workbench.

“Henry?”

He put down a soldering iron and turned around. “Hi.”

She stepped inside. It was like an electronic hobbyist’s den; there were circuit boards and soldering irons and oscilloscopes and meters of all kinds, scattered over the benches and the floor. On the bench where Henry had been working there was a gigantic parts rack, row on row of little plastic drawers containing banana plugs, wires, leads, clips, resistors, capacitors, transistors. The glowing screen of a laptop sat at the centre of the bench. And beside the bench there was a bizarre cairn of gear, a stepped pyramid of what looked like a car tyre inner tube topped by plastic plates and Styrofoam sheets and lengths of hose, all topped by a clutter of electronic gear.

There was a complex smell here, she thought: over-strong coffee, the ozone-rich stink of electronic equipment and burned solder. And Henry, of course, the warm scent she had so quickly gotten used to.

She said, “Have you seen Mike?”

“What?”

“Mike.”

“No. I—”

“Do you think he’s in the lab?”

“He hasn’t been around. What’s wrong?”

“He didn’t come home. Ted is worried.” She told him about the train crash. “I’m worried too.”

He stood up. “We’ll find him. I think I know where he is.”

She glanced around. “What the hell are you doing in here, Henry?”

“I’m building an STM. A scanning tunnelling microscope.” He looked at her. “It’s a device that uses quantum effects to… Well. The point is you can study individual atoms. You can move them, even.”

“Why? What for?”

“So I can study the Moon rock. Why else?”

“There must be STMs in the lab.”

“Dream on, baby. But I need one, so I have to fall back on good old Yankee can-do… This pile of tyres and Styrofoam is the shock absorber.” He grinned. “Low tech but effective. I scrounged a piezo to fix the needle to. I use a loudspeaker coil to move the needle in towards the sample.” He looked at her, to see if she was understanding. “A coil from a telephone headset. I can move my needle to an accuracy of less than an angstrom. That’s less than an atomic diameter. I can feel my way across the atoms on the surface of a sample, like working along a river bottom. I—”

“Henry,” she said, “why are you in the car park?”

“Because the liquefaction is coming.”

“The what?”

“The quicksand. Jane, it’s coming this way. Running through the old igneous structures in the bedrock. The only uncertainty is when it gets here. The lab block over there is a warren. I don’t want to get caught in that.”

“But the university people—”

“ — won’t listen. So I’m making my protest, out here. This way, I might persuade more people to take this seriously.” He stood up and held her shoulders. “Never mind. Let’s go find Mike.”

They considered taking her car, but the roads were impossible. The career types had gone to work, but now the survivalists in their laden 4WDs were mixed up now with the school run.

But still, Venus had set, and the light was a little more normal.

They walked, to Arthur’s Seat.

She studied him. She said, “Aren’t you freaked out too?”

“Sort of. This is spooky stuff. But the bigger part of me is—”

“Excited.”

“Yes.”

“By what? Nano-machines from the Moon? String theory? The end of the world?”

“Not really. Just about figuring stuff out. You were right. That’s the thrill.” He smiled. “Especially right now, when I have the excuse to skip the detail.”

She felt the urge to punch his smug face.

“How do you know where Mike will be?”

“I don’t. But I have a hunch.” He turned to her, evidently gauging her reaction. “You know, he’s kind of changed over the last few days.”

“I know,” she said. And I know why, she thought. Mike’s figured it out too.

They climbed the Seat. Henry stopped a couple of times to inspect the grass, which had turned, in places, brown and wiry: dead, poisoned somehow.

They reached the dust pools, a ragged garden of them a thousand yards across. The police had given up trying to tape off the perimeter, but there were many of them here, in their fluorescent emergency-yellow ponchos, patrolling. Jane saw how the officers, many of them very young, kept a wary eye over their shoulders on the advance of the quicksand.

Outside the ring of police officers she spotted a group of scientists working close to the quicksand perimeter, with handheld probes and white-box lab equipment and flickering laptop screens. They were wiring the Seat, in Blue’s term. A couple of them were preparing a small, turtle-shaped robot which looked as if it was going to be sent into the quicksand itself.

And there were TV and radio crews, with big fold-up antennae pointing at the sky. The tone of the broadcasts had abruptly changed, Jane thought; now that people had died, it seemed a great city was gathering itself in fear, and the earnest tones and body language of the reporters conveyed that, cartoon-style.

Around the broadcasters and scientists there was a broader ring of sight-seers, mostly teenagers and young adults. Some were studying the quicksand, or watching what the scientists were doing, or listening soberly to the news people. Others were just, it seemed to Jane, enjoying a novelty in the sunshine.

It was, in fact, crowded here. There was a lively mood. Like a Bank Holiday crowd.

It wasn’t hard to find the Egress Hatch encampment; it was at the centre of the densest knot of sight-seers. The cultists were sitting around in their pyjama uniforms in a rough circle, as close, it seemed, as the police would allow them to the quicksand puddle. At their centre was the leader, Bran. He had on a Madonna microphone headset, and was strolling easily before the quicksand, his words amplified by a bank of ghetto blasters. He looked for all the world like a stand-up comic, she thought. His audience was no passive congregation; they laughed and whooped as he spoke to them.