Overshadowing all New Dyfnant's self-help was the terrible knowledge of what had happened to Llanwddyn. The Vyrnwy river valley, only a kilometre or two downhill from New Dyfnant, was a roaring torrent, full of tumbling wreckage, uprooted trees, dead cattle, smashed cars and the occasional human body. By about ten o'clock, a widening fringe of littered mud showed that the first unimaginable rush from the burst dam was abating. The people of New Dyfnant, almost to a man, had relatives or friends in Llanwddyn or in houses scattered along the valley but there was no way of discovering their fate until the flood was a great deal lower which might be several days. Most of them, if they had survived at all and had been able to reach their vinegar masks, would have escaped the effect of the Dust, for New Dyfnant had spread the word as best they could to their neighbours. But the valley homes had been decimated and the survivors must be tragically few.

With telephones dead and roads flooded or fissured, New Dyfnant still had one almost bizarre point of contact with a few voices in the outside world. Geraint Lloyd, the schoolmaster, was an enthusiastic radio ham, and by common consent he was delegated to stay with his battery-powered equipment and find out what he could. It was little enough. National broadcasting systems throughout Europe seemed to have ceased altogether; Geraint picked up a whisper or two from farther afield but nothing comprehensible – the ether was wild with static beyond his experience. Some police and fire services were still on the air but were obviously doing whatever they could on a strictly local basis. National coordination, for the time being at least, seemed paralysed. Nowhere – at least within the limited range of police-car and similar transmitters – had escaped the disaster, that was clear. Those voices which spoke through respirators were unmistakable and sounded helpless, those without were understandably preoccupied with reporting and avoiding Dust outbreaks.

When he had gathered all he could from these frequencies (he made no attempt to speak to them – what was the point?), Geraint turned his attention to his fellow-hams. He managed Morse contact with three British, two Irish, a Pole, two Frenchmen, a Romanian and a Moroccan – and briefly, during a lull in the static, with a ham in New Jersey. Quite a list in the circumstances, but all of them were obviously doing what he himself was – using their suddenly precious hobby to build up as wide a picture as possible. So their exchanges were brief before they passed on to look for another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.

There was no escaping it; the overall picture was cataclysmic. Everywhere that Geraint spoke to had suffered only marginally more or less than New Dyfnant. One thing he did learn; that Dublin, Bucharest and Warsaw had given the vinegar-mask warning in time for it to be useful, unlike London. (Belfast had done so too, within hours of Dublin – that would have been politically obligatory, Geraint realized, whatever London did. In any case, the two parts of Ireland had developed an increasing de facto federalism since the detente of the 1980s.)

His equipment was indeed going to be precious in the months to come. Only one problem; how was he going to recharge his batteries, if mains electricity became a thing of the past?

Brenda Pavitt saw both more, and less, of Reggie Harley as Beehive isolated itself from Surface. Less, in that he was busier, and could rarely spend an uninterrupted evening hour with her. More, in that he now came to her every night, however late he was working or however early he must be up. His need for her was self-centred and never expressed in words, but it was compulsive and Brenda, responding to it, came nearer to loving him in these days and nights than she ever had. She found herself becoming a little afraid of him. Within Beehive, he was moving rapidly into the position of a despot. Nobody called him the Chief Administrator any longer – simply the Chief; and nobody (Brenda sensed) doubted that if it came to a showdown of any kind, the Army under General Mullard was behind him, not to mention Security, which was his own creation and officered by his own appointees.

Brenda, increasingly his intimate sounding-board -though she knew his frankness even with her was selective -had more clues than most to the deviousness of which he was capable. She had been aware for some time that he was cultivating Professor Arklow to the point where he was better informed on the seismological probabilities than the Prime Minister and Cabinet – and she strongly suspected that it was due to Reggie's manoeuvring that Cabinet Ministers had been well dispersed around the regional Hives at the time when the earthquake struck. With the notoriously weak Premier thus isolated, it had been easy for Reggie to persuade him that national cohesion was best served by leaving his Ministers in the other Hives as his 'representatives', and so the Premier was even more firmly under Reggie's thumb.

Then there was the affair of Sir Walter Jennings. Brenda had never seen Reggie so angry as he had been that night, when Jennings had persuaded the Premier to make the vinegar-mask broadcast during his absence. (The US President, who had been hovering on the brink of it himself, agreed after a brief telephone conference to make his announcement simultaneously.) But Jennings, in his padded cell in Beehive's hospital, would never throw another spanner into anybody's works. He had been on Surface on the morning of the earthquake, trying to settle the London busmen's strike and he must have breathed Dust because three days later he was insane beyond all help. Beehive rumour was that his respirator had been faulty. In the whole of the Beehive staff there had been only three victims of 'faulty respirators', and Brenda knew better than to comment on the fact that the other two had also been individuals whom Reggie had found inconvenient… She was personally sorry about Jennings; he had been a regular and intelligent user of her library and she had liked him. But her loyalty was to Reggie and quite apart from her emotional involvement, she was realistic enough to know that survival in Beehive balanced on a knife-edge of loyalties.

It was almost funny, she thought, how Reggie's increasingly open behaviour as oriental despot was nowhere more sultan-like than in his attitude to her. She was his mistress, and far from going through the motions of hiding it, he was now treating her as such in public and expecting everyone to accord her the appropriate respect. It was a measure of the awe in which he was held that people had caught on quickly. She was beginning to understand how Madame Pompadour must have felt.

At some of his manoeuvres, she could only guess, though shrewdly. But as far as facts were concerned, Reggie kept her better informed than most of the Beehive department heads. On the whole, they were given facts on a 'need-to-know' basis; only Reggie, his chosen lieutenants and Brenda had a complete picture. It was, apparently, part of her function as mistress to share his burden of knowledge. He seemed almost impatient to keep her up to date.

His midnight summing-up of that first terrible day had been typical – as concise as though he had been dictating it to a secretary.

'London Beehive's practically undamaged; we've lost about two thousand square metres under Hampstead Heath – but only twelve people killed there, it was still thinly occupied – and a few corridors will have to be reconstructed. About the same at Edinburgh and Norwich, though Norwich is pretty small. Birmingham and Bristol have been virtually wiped out. Cardiff, Manchester, Leeds, Carlisle and Glasgow have all survived and will continue to be operational but they've all lost a third to a half of their personnel… On the whole, satisfactory. We were prepared for worse. Beehive, as the governing machinery of this country, has come through the earthquake and has isolated itself from Surface, except for the necessary Intelligence contacts. Our provisional estimate is that this isolation will be maintained for a year to eighteen months. By then, conditions on Surface will have stabilized themselves on a primitive level. Meanwhile Beehive will have been observing, planning, and training its personnel to a high pitch of efficiency. When we emerge, we will be able to take complete and virtually immediate control.