Miss Oladini thought this was it, she was going to die.

‘Please be quiet, sweetheart,’ said a voice in her ear.

‘My name is Wilfred Mott, and I don’t want to hurt you.’

He moved his hand away from her face, and Miss Oladini pulled away. She looked at the man, old, but not weak, clearly. His eyes burned with intelligence, but there was nothing threatening.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked bravely.

‘My granddaughter was here last night. She told me about things going on here. I’m looking for the Doctor.’

‘Granddaughter? Redhead?’

‘That’s Donna. You must be Miss Oladini? She thought you were dead, she’ll be so pleased you’re OK.’

Miss Oladini wasn’t sure about this. Those people that had attacked her could know all this. But would they know about…?

‘How did Donna get away?’

‘On a bike. Was it yours? She left it near a police station somewhere. South Woodham Ferrers, that was it.’

He smiled at her. ‘She got home so late last night and I’d been waiting up. She told me everything that happened, and after I got her off to sleep I decided to check on this place myself.’

Miss Oladini frowned at him. ‘You didn’t believe her?’

‘Course I did! Donna doesn’t make things up. But I wanted to find the Doctor and keep Donna safe at the same time. She’d been through enough. So I left her sleeping and crept out of the house this morning.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Right now she’ll have worked that out and be creating merry hell, I reckon.’

Miss Oladini still wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t seem to have the zombie-ish approach of the rest of the people here. ‘You’re looking for a doctor? Which one? They’re all doctors and professors here.’

‘He came with Donna. Tall bloke, daft hair. Talks a lot of rubbish.’

‘Sums up most of the Copernicus workers, frankly, Mr Mott.’

‘Wilf. And no, he doesn’t work here. He was asked to come here by a Professor Melville. That’s why he and Donna turned up so late.’

‘I spent most of last night hiding and being blown up, I didn’t see Donna till we escaped. No idea if there was anyone with her at all. Sorry.’

Wilf seemed to deflate. ‘Oh. I was so sure he’d be here.

I think he’s the only one who can save us from all that Madam Delphi stuff we just had to listen to.’

‘Why’d you think that?’

‘It’s the sort of thing he does. Save us.’

‘Some sort of vicar is he?’

Wilf laughed. ‘No, no, not at all. So, where is everybody, then?’

Miss Oladini shrugged and explained she was thinking of getting away.

‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ Wilf said. ‘If we don’t find my friend, I’ll drive you back home, how’s that?’

Miss Oladini weighed up her options, and then agreed.

There was, after all, no other way home as easy as this.

And Wilf Mott didn’t seem to be very threatening.

She led him down the stairs, through the shattered French windows and out into the back garden, pointing over at the radio telescope, explaining that was what the whole place was about.

Wilf nodded. ‘That face in the sky, that was made up of stars, right? I reckon that observatory thing is where the Doctor would be.’

Miss Oladini shivered and pulled her coats tighter around her. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want

to go back there.’

‘Why not?’

But Miss Oladini couldn’t explain. There was just something about it, something about the way the telescope had always seemed a safe place to work but now…

Wilf gripped her shoulder. ‘All right, you wait here and I’ll pop over and see if the Doctor’s there. Won’t be long.’

Miss Oladini watched as he wandered off. She shivered again. For one brief moment she had felt safe with this strange old man, and now she was alone again, she…

She caught up with him in seconds. ‘Entrance, this way,’ she said.

He smiled at her. ‘Good for you, girl,’ he said. ‘Didn’t fancy going in alone. To be honest.’

They smiled at each other.

‘So, Donna’s your granddaughter, then?’ Miss Oladini said. ‘Glad she got away.’

‘Me too. Be lost without her. Family’s an important thing to keep a hold of.’

Miss Oladini considered this. ‘I don’t know where my family are,’ she said. ‘Probably back in Nigeria.’

‘How come you lost touch?’

She smiled. ‘Oh, you know how it is, came to the UK

for university, lost my status, stayed hidden here, signed on to the agency to find me work under a false name, usual stuff.’

‘That’s very brave of you,’ Wilf said. ‘Risky, too, working here.’

‘Right under the government’s nose,’ she replied.

‘Easiest way to disappear off the radar is to hide in plain

sight. That’s what my dad said last time I spoke to him.’

Wilf agreed. ‘Used to say that about spies, during the war,’ he said. ‘Best way to infiltrate was to be seen, so no one got suspicious. Just become a member of society.’

‘That’s what I did. Look where it’s got me. Frightened for my life.’

Wilf winked at her. ‘You’ll be all right.’

They were at the door of the radio telescope. It was slightly ajar and they crept in.

Professor Melville was dead. There was no doubting that, his neck was at such a strange angle, and although Miss Oladini had never seen anyone dead before, she just knew it. Her hand was over her mouth, stifling the cry in her throat. Wilf checked the poor man for a pulse, but gently lifted his hand away.

It looked like he had been working at the guidance systems for the array when he’d died. When he’d been killed, Miss Oladini thought. After all, people didn’t break their own necks.

Wilf was climbing up the small ladder that led to the upper deck, where the telescope itself was housed. It wasn’t an old-fashioned tubular telescope, but a series of computers arrayed across the room, linked to the radio dish on top of the building.

That had always disappointed Miss Oladini when she first came to work for the poor Professor. Somehow a giant telescope seemed more romantic than a computer bank.

She glanced back at his body, eyes staring open at the ceiling, and thought about his old mother. And his cat.

And how scared she’d been of him the last time she had seen him. And now all she could think about was his cat.

And she began to cry for the first time since everything had gone wrong.

*

Donna punched at the radio buttons until she got a station.

She didn’t want music, she wanted news. It wasn’t hard to find. All over the globe, massive beams of light had struck down, and been surrounded by people. Some observers were saying they were terrorists guarding a bomb site, some thought they were religious fanatics guarding something holy and special. Others reckoned it was aliens, coming to get those who had claimed to have been abducted and then returned with microchips in their heads over the last fifty years. The strange message from ‘Madam Delphi’, which everyone assumed was just an internet hacker trying to be funny, had started that one off…

‘Irony is,’ she said to the radio, ‘that’s the one that might be right!’

There didn’t seem to be too many casualties but no one could get near the people actually guarding the craters.

Britain, America, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, New Zealand, Africa, Greenland, nowhere was untouched.

There seemed to be no connection between the people gathering to guard those craters: different ages, sexes, politics, backgrounds.

‘Wonder if the Poles got attacked,’ she mumbled after

listening to the reports for a bit longer as they drove past the Tower of London.

‘There was a mention of one in Germany,’ Lukas said.

Donna smiled. ‘I didn’t mean Poles in Poland, I meant the North or South Poles.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yeah, it probably does. They seem to be heavily populated areas, rather than desolate. So there’s something significant about that.’