'Damn all and quite right too. All we can guess is that something pretty nasty's on its way, which is why Beehive Amber was ordered. Come Beehive Red; and we'll know it's any day now. Of course the public don't know the score or all hell'd break loose.'

'Then why was that one day's report leaked?'

'I've already agreed with you – because it was convenient. An extra nasty rumble down under, happening to coincide with the witches' shindig. Jackpot.'

'But was it extra nasty – or just average on the curve of increasing nastiness?'

'For God's sake, what's the difference? We should worry, down here!'

'Oh, no difference, I guess. I just wish to hell I weren't down here.'

'What are you – suicidal? Be your age, Tonia.'

Tonia shrugged and said no more. A minute or two later she was aware of Gene watching her, assessing her. She shuddered inwardly; his eyes seemed cold, alien, almost reptilian. They were no longer the eyes of the Gene Macallister she had worked with – and for all his limitations liked – for two years. Tonia decided she must be very, very careful.

At first, Betty Summers had found it hard to adjust to the total blackness of their Beehive cell when they went to bed and switched the light off. At home there had always been the friendly neon glow of London's night sky filtering through the curtains, with now and then a moon fighting splendidly to outshine it. True, she had liked even better the velvet nights of their occasional deep-country holidays – star-dusted, moon-etched, or merely making a subtle difference between the grey square of window and the greyer walls. But always something, however faintly discernible, to give reality to the world around her. Here there was nothing; darkness made even more absolute by the multicoloured scintillae, the writhing tapestry, of her own optic nerves. Reality was Philip beside her, their two bodies, the bedding where it touched their skin; only her mind, not her senses, could put out tendrils to what lay beyond. The solitary tiny message still reaching her from that outer world – the whisper of the air-conditioning -even that was strangely personal because it was the one thing in Beehive that was Philip's responsibility. Their isolation was complete.

But as the days and nights passed she had first come to terms with it and then found herself welcoming it. She had, instinctively, little trust in their concrete fortress, no affinity with the dimly apprehended thinking of those who ruled it and no certainty of what lay ahead. All she had was a fierce, new-found determination to survive if survival were even slenderly possible – and her love for Philip around which that determination orbited. And so she learned to draw strength from their nightly cocoon of blackness; it fed in her an almost mystic sense of invulnerability. She was intelligent enough to realize it might be illusory – but wise enough, too, to cherish it as a spiritual armour which equipped them better to achieve survival.

Intuitively, their pillow-talk was always whispered. Betty had wondered, in this security-ridden complex, whether the living quarters were bugged; but Philip, whose work entitled him to detailed plans of the structure and was giving him a daily more intimate practical knowledge of it, assured her that they were not. All the same, she felt driven to reinforce her cocoon-image by whispering and Philip, without remarking on it, followed her lead.

Tonight, her arm across him and her chin in his shoulder, she murmured: 'What's wrong, Phil? You're fretting about something.'

'Not really.'

'Come on, darling.'

He paused, then: 'Oh, just this seismological report thing. It's a con trick, Betty. I'm one of the people who has to see them every day, remember. That one yesterday – I'm damn sure it was deliberately leaked out of context to stir things up against the witches.'

'That figures. The whole witch-hunt's been a con trick, darling.'

Philip was surprised. 'How do you know?'

'Of course it has. And it's working down here, too.'

T haven't heard people talking about it, all that much.'

'Probably not. The people you meet all day are as busy as you are. None of you has much time for anything but shop.'

'We have some social life – in the Mess and that, with the wives around.'

'Wives are different when you're not around. The rules of the game change.'

'I didn't think you mixed with them much on your own. In fact, I've been worrying about your being lonely.'

'Open University keeps me quite busy. I'm catching up on my studies with no house to look after.'

'All the same, don't leave yourself without any friends.'

It was Betty's turn to pause before she said: 'It's my own choice, darling. I don't exactly get on with them.'

'Why not? You got on with all sorts of neighbours at home.'

'That was before.'

'Before what?'

'What we were talking about. When I said it was working down here.'

'The witch-hunt? Oh, but surely that's not all they talk about. And you're not a witch!'

'No, darling, I'm not a witch. But neither will I sip scotch with the girls while we howl for the witches' scalps.

I won't even pay lip-service to intolerance – and in the past few days it's reached the stage where even saying nothing won't get you by. You join in or you're ostracized. In words of one syllable, my darling – I won't, so I am.'

'Oh, God, love -I didn't realize!'

'I didn't tell you because you had plenty on your plate -and I'm happy when you're here and busy studying when you're not. But since you're worrying about the same thing from a different angle, we might as well compare notes.'

'The bitches,' Philip muttered.

'Oh, don't blame them too much – they're just swimming with the tide and worrying about their place in the pecking order. If you want to get angry, think about the people who started the tide and are keeping it going.'

'I work for them, unfortunately.'

'Now don't you start feeling guilty. All you do is feed 'em clean air.'

'Which is more than they deserve.'

'Probably,' she laughed.

It struck Philip that Betty laughing in a whisper was irresistibly sexy, and he began kissing her. She responded and they were swept away by a sudden mutual passion, neither having to woo the other, both plunging simultaneously into a little tornado of longing and gratification that left them exhausted and silent, clinging to each other in the blackness.

As they were drifting into sleep, Betty said unexpectedly: 'We'll make out, darling. We'll get through this thing.'

'But how?'

'I don't know,' Betty told him. 'Yet.'

Miss Smith and Eileen had managed for a while, in spite of everything, to make the most of their holiday. Petrol could still be bought, the weather was fine, and although the news did nothing to calm their forebodings, there seemed to be no reason for them as yet to go to ground or even to take up their prudently planned position near the geographical centre of the island. So they had continued to wander, visiting favourite places, swimming, sunbathing, and (Miss Smith's unspoken aim) restoring the shocked Eileen to something resembling normality. Eileen was certainly much better; she smiled more, her dark curls were springy again and the contrast between her browning body and her white bikini-protected triangles was almost Mediterranean. To only one thing was she neurotically vulnerable – any mention of man-inflicted violent death; about that she had none of a nurse's stoicism but betrayed immediate distress, however academic the discussion or however distant the news. It was as though, Miss Smith thought, she was still haunted by the chasm which had opened at her feet during her time at the Banwell Emergency Unit – the dread that 'One day soon, one of us is going to kill one of them'. She had never repeated that confession, though she did not avoid discussion of the Unit and its significance. Miss Smith sensed that buried inside her, thrust impulsively below the threshold of awareness, was the unfaceable knowledge that 'us' had included herself, Eileen. One day, Miss Smith knew, that guilt would have to be exorcised; but not yet – and meanwhile anything that approached its defences produced the telltale distress. Even the one occasion when Miss Smith got out her.22 and shot a rabbit for dinner had plunged Eileen into a trembling silence and for all her operating-theatre experience she had had to go for a walk while Miss Smith skinned it, though she had regained control of herself sufficiently to eat it once it was cooked and thus less recognizable. Miss Smith decided hunting could wait till it became really necessary.