On the whole, people had shown less resourcefulness and flexibility, less foresight, than a wild bird or animal would. Their basic survival instincts had been so dulled, so overlaid by mechanisms designed to serve secondary appetites, that they were totally unable to protect themselves. As Symington had implied, they were the helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survival, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly, that they had made gross assumptions about their own superiority.

Now they were paying the price for this, in truth reaping the whirlwind!

He listened to Symington complete the picture.

"A few navy units are operating bases around the Portsmouth and Plymouth areas-the defenses and arsenals there are tunneled deep underground, but in general military control is breaking down. Rescue operations are virtually over. There are a few army patrols with the crowds in the London Underground system, but how long they can keep command is anybody's guess."

Marshall nodded. He moved across to the bank of TV receivers. There were six of them, relaying pictures transmitted from automatic cameras mounted in sealed concrete towers that Marshall had had built at points all over London. The sets were labeled: Camden Hill, Westminster, Hampstead, Mile End Road, Battersea, Waterloo. The pictures flickered and were lashed with interference patterns, but the scenes they revealed were plain enough. The right-hand screen, labeled Mile End Road, was blank, and the corporal was adjusting the controls in an effort to get a picture.

Marshall studied one of the other screens, then tapped Crighton on the shoulder.

"I shouldn't bother." He indicated the Hampstead screen, pointed through the blur of dust swept off the shattered rooftops. The camera was traversing automatically from left to right in three-second sweeps; as it neared its leftward stop Marshall put his finger on the screen, pointing to a stub of gray concrete sticking up above the desolation several miles away on the horizon. As the duststorm cleared for a moment, revealing the rectangular outlines of the Mile End tower, they could see that a pile of debris lay across its waist, the remains of a ten-story building that had been carried bodily across the ground. The tower was still standing, but the camera turret, 50 feet above ground, had been snapped off.

Marshall switched off the set, then sat down in front of the screen covering the Westminster area. Its transmitting tower was mounted on a traffic island at the bottom of Whitehall only a few hundred yards from where they were sitting. It had been fitted with a 180° traverse, and was pointing up Whitehall toward Trafalgar Square. The road had disappeared below enormous mounds of rubble driven across the pavement from the shells of the ministries on the eastern side. The War Office and Ministry of Agriculture were down. Beyond them, the spires of Whitehall Court had vanished; only spurs of masonry were sticking up against the backdrop of the blackened sky.

The camera swung, following the battered remains of a doubledecker bus rolling across the rubble. Tossed over the ruins of the Foreign Office and Downing Street, it bounced off the remains of the Home Office portico and then was carried away across St. James's Park. Along the horizon were the low ragged outlines of the National Gallery and the clubs down Pall Mall, with here and there the gaunt rectangular outline of a hotel or office block.

Marshall watched the last moments of the Piccadilly Hotel. The intervening area, Haymarket and the south side of the Circus, was down, and the hotel was standing out alone above the tempest. The colonnade between the wings was still intact, but just as the camera moved across it two of the columns buckled and crashed back into the face of the hotel, driving tremendous rents through the wall. Instantly, before the camera had time to move away, the entire front of the hotel collapsed in an explosion of dust and masonry. One of the wings tipped over and then crashed to the ground, carrying with it the remains of a small office block that had sheltered behind it. The other wing rode high above the chaos like the bows of a greater liner breasting a vast sea, and then slipped and cascaded to the ground in a soundless avalanche.

As the camera swung full left onto the House of Parliament, Marshall saw heavy waves breaking among the ruins of the Lords. Driven into the estuary by the wind, powerful seas were flooding into the Thames and being carried up as far as Windsor, sweeping away the locks and spilling over the banks, where they completed the task of destruction started by the wind. The time-familiar river façade of Westminster had vanished, and high seas washed across the ragged lines of foundation stones, spilling over the supine remains of Big Ben, stripping the clock faces as they lay among the rubble in Palace Yard.

Suddenly the corporal jumped forward, pointing to the set receiving the Hammersmith picture.

"Sir! Quickly! They're trying to come out!"

They crowded around the set, watching the screen. The camera was mounted over Hammersmith Broadway. Directly below in the street, a hundred feet away from them, was the entrance to Hammersmith Underground. The tall office buildings in the street were down to their first stories, walls poking up through piles of rubble, but the entrance to the station had been fortified with a heavy concrete breastwork that jutted out into the roadway, three circular doors fitted into its domed roof.

These were open now, and emerging from them was a press of struggling people, fighting and pulling past each other in a frantic effort to escape from the station. The doorways were packed with them, some peering out hesitantly when they reached the entrance, then being propelled out into the open street by the pressure of the mob behind them.

Like petals torn from a wind-blown flower they detached themselves from the doorways, took a few helpless steps out into the street and were whipped off their feet and hurled across the road, bouncing head over heels like sacks of feathers that burst and disintegrated as they ripped into the ragged teeth of reinforcing bars protruding from the debris.

The camera swung away from the scene and pointed eastward into the face of the storm, the panorama obscured by the clouds of, flying stones that poured into the face of the camera like countless machine-gun tracers in a heavy bombardment.

Symington was sitting limply in his chair, grimly watching the screen. On the other side of the table Crighton and the Wren typist watched silently, their faces gray and pinched. Above them the light bulbs shook spasmodically as the bunker trembled, illuminating the thin dust falling from the ceiling. It drifted slowly across the room to the mouth of the ventilator shaft, where it swirled away.

The camera returned to the Underground station. The stream of people were still trying to get out, but somehow they had realized the futility of stepping straight into the wind and were trying to make their way along the protecting wall of the concrete breastwork. But no sooner had they gone 10 or 15 feet when they again felt the full undiminished force of the wind stream and were twisted helplessly from their hand holds and spun away into the air.

Marshall slammed one fist into the other. "What are they trying to do?" he shouted in exasperation. "Why don't the fools stay where they are, for God's sake?"

Symington shook his head slowly. "The tunnels must be flooded. The river's only half a mile away and water's probably pumping in under enormous pressure." He glanced up at Marshall, smiled bleakly. "Or maybe they're just worn out, terrified to the point where escape is the only possible solution, even if it's just escape to death."