12

The Prime Minister, Dave Holland was told, was up on the roof garden.

So Holland had to wheeze his way up the stairs past the Strangers” Gallery, then through a fire door to the roof. His thick gut gurgled as he climbed, laden with a good dinner and a couple of beers, and he was wheezing and red-faced by the time he stood in the glow of the central skylights that illuminated the chamber of the House of Commons below.

He took a minute to recover himself, and he dabbed at his sweating face with a huge, discoloured handkerchief. The House was working, even so late, as the members forced through one package of emergency legislation after another.

He could see Bob Fames standing by the balustrade at the far end of the terrace, looking north. The Prime Minister was alone up here — save for the discreet presences, in the shadows of the garden, of his PPS, Pearson, and a couple of Special Branch men.

Holland knew the roof garden well. The view was spectacular, even so late at night. To his right he could see the Thames, the crammed pleasure boats like bubbles of light on the black stream of the river. There were a lot of boats, in fact, reflecting the mood that seemed to be sweeping the country, like a rerun of the millennium.

To his left he overlooked the tiled roof of Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster, mostly shadowed now. And before him was the tower of Big Ben, its carved sandstone fascias glowing golden in the light of the spots at its feet, and the big translucent clockface shining from within. The traffic of London sent a subdued, continuing roar into the air, a river in itself.

He’d often used this spectacular place, high above the seat of British sovereignty, to host functions — the cocktail party for MPs he held when he was running for the Party leadership against Fames, for instance — and for more private conjunctions, with two or three of the prettier research assistants who still flocked to the Commons, attracted like moths to the fat old drunks who worked here.

But tonight, it wasn’t the same.

The garden itself, the spectacular architecture beyond, were bloodied by the volcanic sky above, a dismal crimson glow that covered the stars all the way to the zenith. It was the curse of the Scots, he thought gloomily, entirely typical that their passing should be marked in such a melodramatic style, by the banishing of true midnight for everybody else.

The Big Ben clock tower looked full of air and light, he mused, as if it was some immense Gothic spaceship, fuelled and ready to go, ready to lift off from this sorry old world, and he wished it bloody well would, and take him with it.

He coughed and walked forward.

Fames didn’t turn. “Hello, David. Do you think—”

“What?”

“Do you think there’s a glow up there? To the north?”

Holland looked out over Whitehall, the Foreign Office and Treasury and Home Office: the great houses of the state, pompous as wedding cakes, and, as events had proved, just about as powerless.

Fames stared past it all, to the far north, looking for the glow.

The light of Scotland burning, Holland thought bleakly.

“No, I bloody well can’t see any such thing, Bob,” he said bluntly, “and even if I could it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“No,” Fames said. “I suppose not.”

Holland tried his best to project the bluff boyishness that — even if fake — had got him so far in life.

“Now then, Bob. The preparations are going well. We’re gearing up to receive a flood of evacuees in the south, from the most threatened areas. All the emergency powers are in place now, and the police and the military are being briefed on various contingencies. We’ve got the Green Goddesses out.” A fleet of emergency fire engines, dating from the war. “Those bloody things. We only have a thousand or so left operational. And they are so old now you can’t get spares, and the rubber parts have perished… Well. There’ve been a few oddities. The police have had to assign men to patrol church services, would you believe. Riots, by people locked out. They say it’s like managing football matches used to be.”

Fames didn’t react.

“Further out — well, the scientists are floundering, I think,” Holland said. “They don’t agree on what this Moonseed bugger is, or how fast it will spread, or whether it can be stopped. In the best case, perhaps we can contain it in Scotland. Perhaps it’s already contained, in fact. Somehow exhausted.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know. I suppose the next few days or weeks will tell. But if it can’t be contained, if it’s going to spread further—”

“Then what if it does? What do we do then?”

“Then we continue to make plans.”

“Plans?”

“We’ve already got the airports geared up.” Heathrow and Gatwick and Stansted and Manchester and Birmingham and Luton, all of Britain’s great terminals. “The air traffic boys confirm we can handle up to a million passengers a day. A 747 in the air every three minutes, packed to the gills.

“As to destinations, we can load as many as we like into Northern Ireland in the short term, of course. It’s going to be important to keep the ferry ports in Liverpool and Wales functioning as long as possible. The Scousers are organizing volunteer squads to break up any Moonseed infection, to keep the ports and roads open. Heroic. The bloody French are being no help at all, as you’d expect; they say we can take people out through the Chunnel, but they’ll be sent straight on somewhere else.

“All of the ports are ready, of course. We’re going to ask you to front an appeal to small-boat owners to come to the aid of the party.”

Fames, in profile, smiled. “Dunkirk in reverse.”

“That’s it. That’s exactly the note to strike. Spirit of the Blitz. I’m glad your instincts are still with us, Bob.”

But the flattery did nothing to disturb the ominous calm within which Fames seemed locked.

Holland went on, “But we’ll never be able to get everybody out. The chronically ill, the very old, perhaps. The awkward squad who just won’t move anyhow. The emergency planning boys estimate perhaps fifteen per cent could never be evacuated no matter how much time we have.”

“Fifteen per cent, of sixty million.”

Holland blustered on, “We’ve already moved the bulk of the gold reserves to Belfast. The Arts Council have pulled together a committee on works of art to be exported. There are architects who want to set up an archive somewhere of plans and photographs of the finer buildings.” He coughed, and glanced around, for eavesdroppers. “On your instruction we’re working on the Ireland option.”

“Ireland?”

“The military option. Invasion. It’s feasible, though diplomatically it would be—”

“Disastrous. We would be pariahs.”

Perhaps, Holland thought. But needs must. He didn’t want to say any more, even here.

“We’re setting up alternate seats of government, in Belfast and the Scillies. We have to think about moving ourselves, sooner rather than later… Bob, are you taking in all this?”

“Oh, yes,” Fames said. “Every word.” He stared into the north. “We’ve already lost so many lives. How many more?”

Holland hesitated.

“Just too big,” Fames said. “Just too bloody big. Sixty million. We can’t conceive of such a number. In our hearts, we’re all still in some Stone Age village, where everybody knows everybody else. Sixty million. It’s beyond us.

“And yet here they all are, Dave, all sixty million, crammed into this fragile little country of theirs, and all of them looking to me for guidance. Maybe there is no such thing as government.” He looked at his hands. “No such thing as power. Look at us. We couldn’t even manage the economy, if truth be told. And now, this plague from space, this natural disaster, has shown us up for what we are. Posturing puppets.”