Omega (43 page)

'What?'

'Car, or van
...
Over there, beyond the wood.'

'Oh Christ - yes!' Jack snatched up his rifle. 'It can only be them. Tell the women - I'll see to the kids. Then firing positions, quick. They'll be coming from the wood, there's no other way.'

They only just made it before the firing started. Prone behind a bush, Philip was firing every time he saw muzzle-smoke; the raiders could not have expected them to be armed, because two or three of them had emerged from the trees, firing as they came, and had only run back when they met the answering fire. Philip thought Tonia had got one, but could not be sure; the man had fallen out of sight into a dip in the ground.

After the first exchange, both sides seemed to have found cover, because the firing settled down to sporadic sniping
with
no observable hits. Stalemate, Philip thought; someone's going to have to make a rush and it'll
have
to be them because we can't leave the kids.

When the rush came, Philip's heart sank for an instant; four men, and the two wingers had light machine-guns. We shan't have a hope, unless we get them
now.
...
He fired at the man on his right, and missed, dropping his head flat as a burst zipped over him.

This is it. Oh, Betty, my darling
...

There was a sudden crescendo in the firing, which puzzled Philip though he had no time to analyse why. He aimed again at the wing machine-gunner but somebody else got him first; he flung up his hands and crumpled half a second before Philip pulled the trigger. Without pause, he changed targets, and got a man himself. Then he realized what had puzzled him: too
many
rifles
...

The firing stopped.

In the silence, he could hear one of the women whimpering in smothered pain. Tonia? Sue? He would have known if it were Betty. . . .
Why
had the firing stopped?

A girl's voice called from the wood: 'Are you all right down there?'

For a moment the defenders were all too astonished to answer. The girl's voice came again: 'You're safe. They're all dead. We're coming out and so can you.'

Philip could hardly believe his eyes. From the edge of the wood, holding rifles above their heads to show they came in peace, six girls walked out in line abreast. All of them looked like teenagers and one couldn't have been older than twelve or thirteen.

Jack came to his senses first. 'Come on down,' he called. 'My wife's got a flesh wound, otherwise we're all right. And thanks for your help, whoever you are!'

Round the relit camp-fire - for it was a chilly morning -the schoolgirl Amazons told their story. 'Once we'd dealt with Beaver and got the van and the guns, it was easy, really,' Doreen said. 'We knew what the plan was, so we just came up behind them through the wood, and as they started advancing we got them. At least, we got the three you hadn't got. One of you hit Fatso before we opened fire, then I think it was you who got Jake while we were all firing.... I'm sorry we didn't start a minute earlier. Then maybe you' - to Sue - 'wouldn't have got hit.'

Sue patted her bandaged arm. 'Not to worry, it was only a nick. It hurt like hell for the first minute but it's fine now. . . . Thank
God you came at all. We'd all
be dead, otherwise.'

'Oh, I don't know. You were doing fine. Th
ey only
thought there'd be the thre
e of you and they didn't expect
you to be armed Will you stay here now?'

Jack said: 'Not Sue and me and Clive, anyway. We've got a sort of hunch about the Welsh mountains. . . Phil? Betty? Tonia?'

'If the girls agree, I think we'll stick with you,' Philip said, and Betty and Tonia nodded. 'But what about Doreen and her lot? I don't know how much petrol they've got left, but we could pack them in our wagons somehow when it runs out.'

'Thanks, but we've got to get back to sc
hool,' Doree
n told him.

Jack began to laugh, helplessly, and soon even the girls were laughing, too. 'I suppose that did
sound rather surrealist,' Dore
en admitted, 'but we do have to. There's only two staff and twelve girls left to keep the vegetable garden going, and that. Besides, they'll be worried sick about us.'

'Doreen,' Miriam said, 'would you mind if I opted out and went with them? I'm t
he oldest, and I only came back
this term for more "A" Levels, so what's the point now? You can manage without me and I'm getting wanderlust.'

Doreen looked doubtful. 'Woodbury Croft's your only home, now. The Welsh mountains seem a long way away, somehow.'

Miriam smiled slightly and shrugged. 'A long way from where?'

Doreen was silent, obviously still uncertain. Sue looked at Miriam and said: 'There are four bunks in our caravan. You'll be welcome if you want to come. Eh, Jack?'

'Of course she will. . . . The old question, isn't it?' he said to Miriam.
'Voahin zoll ish gehn?'

Miriam looked surprised but pleased. 'You don't look Jewish.'

'Only a quarter, but my grandmother's English was never very good.'

'Well, Miriam?' Sue asked encouragingly.

'Thank you very much. I'd love to come with you.'

'That's settled then. . . . Are you
sure
the rest of you want to go back to your school?'

'Oh, yes, we must,' Doreen said. 'We've got to get all these guns to them, haven't we? Then it can't happen again.'

19

Beehive claustrophobia had become a familiar affliction. According to the Health Department Digests reaching Brenda's desk, it was serious to the point of incapacity for work in 0.19 per cent of the London Beehive personnel, sufficiently marked to require drug treatment in a further 2.803 per cent, and estimated to affect about one in five of the remainder 'mildly' - though the Digest admitted this last category was practically impossible to define.

Brenda was beginning to wonder just where on the scale she herself fitted.

She knew she was becoming increasingly restless. She had always been a quick and voracious reader, somehow managing to read the whole of four of five books, selected parts of a dozen others and a good many newspapers and periodicals, every week, however busy she was; and she had realized that recently a disproportionate amount of her reading was on natural history, gardening, travel and all the open-air subjects. Although national television had stopped, Beehive personnel were served with several hours a day of closed-circuit programmes from the film and videotape library, on two channels; and here, too, she found herself

switching to the same kind of material - even developing a quite uncharacteristic taste for horizon-galloping Westerns.

I must be getting concrete-cramp, she told herself in the current colloquialism. But she was'too self-aware to be able to pretend that that was the whole of it. She knew that her attitude to Reggie was undergoing a change and one which did no good to her self-esteem.

She had accepted, earlier on, that strong and capable command was necessary to the survival of Beehive as an effective organization and therefore (surely?) to the ultimate revival of Britain. And Reggie was, without any doubt, strong and capable. But she had been asking herself more and more lately the question which no dictatorship can ever answer:
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
- who guards the guardians? And if the 'guardian', the unchallenged dictator, was not quite sane . . . ? She had been able, so far, to thrust that terrible doubt away, to persuade herself that he knew what he was doing, at least better than anyone else would have done. To persuade herself, too, that even a benevolent dictator was dependent, in scientific matters, upon his expert advisers - and that the experts had been wrong about the Dust. And yet sometimes, in her occasional dark sleepless hours, oppressed almost beyond bearing by the knowledge that the majority of her fellow-countrymen were dead and that many of the survivors would succumb to the coming winter, she found the experts fading to rather insubstantial scapegoats and she was haunted by the guilt of the man asleep beside her. At best, he had made an unforgivable mistake by gambling on the experts' advice; and at worst . . .
No!
- from the other possibility she still shied away, but part of her knew it was there.

Did she love him? She no longer knew. She had believed so, in the first exciting weeks of the consolidation of Bcehive, watching with admiration and a semi-maternal pride the success with which he made himself the most powerful man in Britain. And she still used the word 'love' to herself in considering their relationship. Certainly her sexual need for him was stronger now than it had ever been, not only because power seemed to have sharpened his virility, but because in this complex of artefacts which was Beehive -without trees or grass or even pets, where Nature was represented by the occasional potted house-plants which individuals had remembered to bring, where earth and sky were concrete surface 2
.
35
metres apart - in this suffocatingly unnatural world, copulation seemed the only breakthrough of Nature, the one field where banished Pan could run goat-footed and free. Without it, Brenda felt she would have joined the Health Department's claustrophobia statistics.

For her erotic need she did not have to apologize to herself; it was genuine and, she knew, reciprocal. But what did humiliate her was the knowledge that she enjoyed the privileged status which (both practically and subtly) being Reggie's mistress gave her. That, too, was a weapon against claustrophobia because it gave her psychological and social elbow-room and she was not sure she could do without it. At the first sign of a fall from favour, the wolves - the would-be successors - would be at her throat.

There was no hint of any such fall at the moment; Reggie seemed to regard their liaison as permanent and exclusive and to trust her absolutely. She probably knew more of what was going on than anyone except Reggie himself, for it was his habit to hold some of his most confidential discussions - with General Mullard, for example, or with Intelligence agents he was briefing personally - in the privacy of his own quarters; and he never asked her to leave the room. He seemed almost to need her there, because on the one or two occasions when she had tried to slip out during such an interview, he had asked her to pour drinks, or drawn her unnecessarily into the conversation, as an obvious device to make her stay. She could sit quietly in her armchair and read, or play patience, or work out a chess problem, so long as she was
there.

That was how she came to witness his briefing of Gareth Underwood for the mission to Savernake Forest.

Reggie had not, recently, discussed the witch-hunt with her. He would mention this or that incident in it, but give no indication of his own attitude. She knew well enough that he had played a key-role in the launching of it and that Intelligence were actively involved in keeping it going - which he obviously could have stopped but had not. She had the impression that he was allowing it, and Beehive's involvement in it, to continue of its own impetus while he watched and brooded over it. That he was brooding over it, and in a new way, she knew from the books he was reading, for it was naturally she who brought him the books he wanted from the library. In the early stages of the witchhunt, he had read
Malleus Maleficarum,
Robbins'
Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology
and other works on the methods and psychology of the great persecution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But more recently he had been ordering books on magic itself by modern writers from Gardner, Crowley, Regardie and Valiente onwards, and reading them with a deep absorption quite unlike his usual rapid, note-taking scan. Brenda observed and wondered.

She also made a point of at least skimming through the books before she returned them and they made her uneasy, or to be more honest with herself, it was Reggie's interest in them which made her uneasy. She had no doubt in her own mind that, in one sense or another, magic 'worked';

as a very widely read librarian, she knew that the basic facts (if not the explanation) of telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, psychometry and other paranormal functions had been established beyond doubt. Parapsychology, over the past quarter-century, had become a respectable science - even if the attitude of other scientists to its findings had remained nervously ambivalent. Brenda recognized that paranormal abilities existed and could be trained and developed and used for good or ill, like any other natural gift, and Reggie's preoccupation with the subject disturbed her. What was he up to?

His briefing of Gareth Underwood did nothing to reassure her.

When she had poured drinks for the three of them (Gareth carefully addressing her as 'Miss Pavitt') Reggie came straight to the subject.