They did get away, the five of them, with a haphazard cartload of possessions and loaded weapons, making as little noise as they could as Bunty hauled the cart down the lane away from (and fortunately out of sight of) the farm. Tonia drove, Betty kept the children under cover behind piled bedding and Philip sat by the tailboard, rifle in hand. They had gone about three kilometres before the pursuers appeared behind them – two mounted men, one of them the man who had come to the farm before. Philip hid his rifle till they were within range and then brought down one of the horses with his first shot; the rider hit the road, either stunned or dead. The other man spurred forward, not pausing to unsling his rifle but firing with a revolver. Philip heard two bullets smack the tailboard before he got the second man in the chest. 'Pull up, Tonia!'
Tonia reined in and Philip jumped to the ground. The first man had been stunned and Philip had no compunction at all about shooting him through the head; the man was a murderer anyway, and no report of them must get back to the farm. He collected the dead men's weapons and ammunition, caught and mounted the surviving horse and rejoined the others.
They set off again, moving as fast as Bunty could manage and concentrating on finding unlikely routes to lose any other pursuers.
Mark was still in shock, but Finola, a fiercely intelligent child who had been aware of the possibility of disaster throughout the slaughter of the past few weeks, managed to tell them the story. She and Mark had been upstairs with 'Uncle John', Harry's aggressive younger brother, when the raiders swooped on the farm. Everyone else had been caught unprepared and unarmed in the kitchen or the yard and had been herded into the yard. John had loaded the rifle he always kept beside him, and motioned the children to keep quiet. Then, from the bedroom window, he had tried to shoot the raiders' leader. Somehow he had missed ('the man must have moved just as he fired – Uncle John was a good shot') and as he re-aimed he was shot dead himself. Whether the family tried to seize the opportunity to rush the raiders, or were shot down at once in cold blood, Finola did not know. She was busy dragging Mark into the loft and through the trap-door to the water-tank space under the roof. But as they ran, they heard the fusillade. There was a skylight by the tank and peering cautiously through it Finola had counted the bodies in the yard and realized that she and Mark were on their own – unless they could reach the cottage unobserved. She had kept her nerve astonishingly well, quietening Mark as the raiders searched the upstairs rooms and miraculously missed the little trap-door, creeping out when they had gone downstairs to search the outbuildings, finding her father's rifle and ammunition in the bedroom, leading Mark down the back stairs and hiding with him in the fruit bushes till the raiders were indoors" again. ('I'd have used the rifle if they'd found us,' she declared and Philip for one believed her.) Then they had slipped away through the orchard.
'You did marvellously, darling,' Betty told her. 'It was horrible, but you're safe now.'
Finola shook her head, gravely. 'Oh, no, we're not. None of us. Anything could happen any moment, couldn't it? Things are like that always, now. But I'm glad we're with you. Where are we going?'
17
Brenda liked Gareth Underwood. Not merely because he was clearly in love with her but because he really was a very nice young man. Both these facts were, she felt, out of character. Intelligence agents weren't supposed to be either emotionally vulnerable or nice. Sexual buccaneers maybe, in accordance with popular tradition – sweeping women off their feet with casual unconcern, but not politely, undemandingly adoring. Charming bastards maybe but not genuinely and transparently nice. She told herself, amused, that he must be a very incapable spy. Yet she knew he was not. He ranked high for his age in Beehive's Intelligence Section.
Gareth was responsible every Monday (when he was not on some nameless mission on Surface) for bringing Brenda the weekly Intelligence Digest for filing in her library's Top Secret Archive Room. The drill was laid down. He would bring the sealed envelope to her personally; they would go, together and alone, into the TSA Room and lock themselves in; they would then sit on opposite sides of the table and Brenda would open the envelope and sign for the contents before filing them. Today, as she locked the door from the inside, she couldn't resist the quip 'We can't go on meeting like this' – and felt slightly ashamed of herself, for Gareth, while laughing politely at her conventional little joke, actually blushed.
Brenda's security classification, of course, entitled her to read the Digest, and she always skimmed through it in front of Gareth before she filed it. She could have waited till he'd gone, but hell, the boy enjoyed the few minutes' privilege of looking at her, so why not let him? Besides, she could always ask him questions on it and she rather wickedly enjoyed seeing how far he was prepared to bend the rules in answering her.
Today, however, the first page of the Digest jolted her into seriousness.
‘I knew it was awful, Gareth, but I hadn't realized it was quite as awful as this.' She read out: ' "It is now possible, therefore, to estimate that the total surviving population of England, Wales and Scotland, on Surface, is about 620,000, with a maximum error of ten per cent either way. To this must be added the known total of 11,374 Beehive personnel."… Gareth, that's less than one per cent!'
'I know… At least the Madness is over. The survivors will survive. And multiply.'
'And if there'd been no Madness or practically none? If people had known about the vinegar masks weeks earlier – even days earlier?'
She should not have said that she knew, but Gareth did not freeze up as he might have done. 'I know, Brenda. That was… a terrible misjudgement, if you ask me this side of that locked door. But to be fair, you can't blame the Government altogether; they went on what the experts told them and the experts said a major Dust outbreak was unlikely.'
'Was "unlikely" a firm enough prediction to gamble on?… Oh, I'm not trying to trap you into dangerous thoughts. I'm just a bit stunned, that's all.'
'Aren't we all? And being safe down here, we've all got Guilt with a capital G nagging at us, so it's not enough to blame natural disaster.'
'I haven't noticed all that much sense of guilt,' Brenda said. 'Mostly it's "I'm all right, Jack".'
'Sometimes both – and that makes it worse… God, this isn't a dictatorship yet. We're still entitled to our own views on policy.'
Not a dictatorship? Brenda asked herself – can he really believe that? But she said no more than: 'Even Intelligence agents.'
He smiled. 'Even us.'
She read for a while in silence and then asked: 'There are things that don't even go into the Digest, aren't there? That don't go down on paper at all?'
'Well…' he said, cautiously. 'It's only Top Secret, after all. Which means it goes to quite a lot of people… What did you mean, anyway?'
She tapped the page in front of her. 'For instance – it mentions the witch-hunt thing. More than mentions, in fact – it names the areas where it's strongest and weakest -lists the kind of incident that's taking place, everything from a form of trial claiming to enforce the Order in Council, to straight lynchings – says where witches are reported to have consolidated themselves in static communities or defensive bands – even analyses how well the Crusader network has survived and how much influence it has. The only thing it doesn't give is Beehive's attitude.'
'To the Order in Council?' he asked, drily.
'Oh, come off it, Gareth. To the witch-hunt. To these impromptu "trials". To the lynchings. It doesn't say if Beehive agents – putting it baldly – are trying to cam? things down or stir them up.'