'Blessed be. And please – think again…'

But John shook his head and Karen smiled unashamedly in Moira's face. Then they were gone.

10

For about ten days Britain was suspended in what looked, on the surface at least, like an uneasy calm. Sporadic attacks on witches continued but at least they did not seem to be intensifying and no more major incidents or burned houses were reported, either on the media or on Moira's telephone. The Crusade was recruiting fast. Ben Stoddart and Quentin White had become national figures, and the organization had launched its own weekly paper, The Hammer. Street corner and door-to-door sales of the paper were obviously absorbing some of the energies which might have gone to smashing windows, but The Hammer was also providing a new focus around which the Crusaders could build both their public presence and their intelligence network. It was clear that any respite was only temporary while the Crusade absorbed the influx of recruits and consolidated itself. The paper was a clever mixture of religious, intellectual, and sensationalist appeal, and its main strength was that it went virtually unanswered. Press, radio and television were becoming more and more reluctant to give any prominence to liberal viewpoints. The Times and the Guardian still retained some semblance of balance but as Dan sourly remarked: 'When it comes to building up mass hysteria, it's the populars that matter. Get them in action and you can let the posh dailies do the fig-leaf job. They're just preaching to the converted and bloody few of them at that. It's the "don't knows" who swing the balance – and "don't knows" don't read long sentences.'

'But how have the Government got the media doing as they're told so quickly?' Moira wondered. 'It's not natural – this is still England. They can't twist everybody's arm at once.'

'It must be something to do with the earthquakes,' Dan said. 'The establishment knows more than we do, that's obvious. And they're blackmailing the top brass of the media with it.'

If Dan had known more about Beehive than the vague rumours that were circulating, he could have answered Moira's question; and answered it precisely if he could have eavesdropped on the excellent lunch to which Harley was at that very moment entertaining the editor of the Daily Mirror in Beehive's Ministerial Mess. The Mirror had not, in Harley's view, been quite as understanding of the Government's attitude lately as he might have wished. Over the truite Jurassienne Harley was making it clear that for the editor ('and your charming wife, of course, my dear fellow') a safe berth underground once Beehive Red was ordered would be dependent upon such understanding.

The editor was a very experienced journalist but physically unheroic, and he loved his wife; and after all (he told himself) only a minor shift of emphasis was being asked for… The Mirror toed the line.

Of all this, Dan and Moira knew nothing. But they were in fact better informed than most of the public of the situation up and down the country because they were coming to be, informally and unexpectedly, a link in a growing Wiccan telephone network. They really owed this, indirectly, to Moira's parents who were now over twelve thousand kilometres away. Although Dan and Moira had not yet been publicly prominent in the witchcraft movement and had only been running their own small coven for three years, her parents had been very active and well-known; and so, since she was a child, everyone had also known Moira. Her father and mother had retired to New Zealand the year before to live with Moira's only brother (for which Moira, in the last weeks, had come to.be

grateful), and she seemed to have inherited their wide circle of contacts. Now, as these realized that she and Dan were still unmolested and contactable, they were coming more and more to use them as an information-exchange centre.

'I shall miss it when we take off,' Moira said. 'It's comforting to get some news at least – even if the news itself isn't very comforting. If you see what I mean.'

Dan did, and told her: 'We mustn't make any notes but let's try to remember as much as we can about all these people – where they were when we last heard and so on. If things break down, it might be very useful to have all that tucked inside our heads.'

Moira agreed, and from then on whichever of them took a call repeated all the details to the other while it was still fresh.

But Moira's was not the only network. Karen Morley, too, had her friends and she was a capable organizer.

Dr Stanley Friell, of the Banwell Emergency Unit, was a chemist not a physician. He had been attached to the Unit very early, as soon as its importance was realized, for although he was not yet thirty he was one of the most ingenious brains in his field. It was he who achieved the only success the Unit had been able to record so far – the discovery that the Dust, a complex and baffling assembly of organic molecules at least two of which were hitherto unknown, owed their disastrous interaction once they were absorbed into the human bloodstream to an alkaline catalyst which always accompanied them. Without this catalyst, they were harmless and the bloodstream broke them down almost at once. A simple gauze filter soaked in a mild acid – vinegar being ideal – neutralized the catalyst; so a breathing mask which anyone could make at home gave complete protection against the Dust. This information – and, indeed, the very existence of the Dust – had not yet been revealed to the public.

Dr Friell was indifferent to the public, for he was an elitist to the marrow of his bones. His passion, on which he had written one or two brilliant if esoteric monographs, was the history of occult chemistry up to and including the Middle Ages. He had.made up, and tried out on himself, every known recipe for the hallucinogenic 'flying ointment' of the old witches; had experimented with the 'sacred mushroom' amanita muscaria and others less well documented; and had clarified several uncertainties about the drugs and poisons believed to have been used by sorcery's blacker brethren. He had an iron constitution and a will to match, so he emerged unscathed and unaddicted from his carefully controlled trials of the drugs and hallucinogens, and the poisons he tested only on laboratory rats.

At first, his interest had been purely pharmaceutical but his researches into the strange world of the men and women who had once used these substances had brought him into contact with some of their modern counterparts, both reputable and disreputable, and he had been fascinated. He had toyed (though with him even 'toying' was an energetic and methodical process) with ritual magic of the Golden Dawn variety, rapidly attaining the grade of (3) = [8] Practicus in an easily overawed lodge. But although he was impressed by the system he found the ritual practice somewhat anaemic and transferred to one of the wholeheartedly sexual splinter groups of the Ordo Templi Orientis, where he had progressed to 70 Mystic Templar by the time he was summoned to Banwell. At the same time, out of curiosity, he had got himself initiated into an ex-Gardnerian coven of witches who had 'gone black'; privately he considered them ignorant dabblers but he maintained friendly contact with them as potentially useful. At least two of them he knew to be psychotic and he was very interested in the psychic power of insanity. He was a natural sensitive and had worked to develop the gift, and he could hardly help being aware of the psychic dynamite which lurked in the Banwell incurables.

As one of the top researchers at the Unit, Dr Friell belonged to the handful of staff who were necessarily permitted to come and go while the ordinary doctors, nurses, and domestics were confined to the premises (a restriction which had been even more rigorously enforced since the disappearance of Nurse Eileen Roberts). Early in August he had to drive to London for consultation with a particular specialist, and having an evening to spare after his meeting he spent it, discreetly covering his tracks, with the High Priestess and High Priest of the 'black' coven. It was from them that he learned a very interesting piece of information and was armed with a map reference and a password.