The door was half off its hinges, with loose bricks and tiles heaped up against it. In the distance, sirens wailed.
Winston scrambled over the rubble. “Mum. Mum! Thelma, the house is shaken to bits.”
“Where will your mother be?”
“It’s the small hours. She’d have been asleep, in the bedroom upstairs.”
“Winston, the roof’s gone. There is no upstairs.”
“Oh no, oh God—”
“Now take it easy. Think, Winston. Where was the bedroom?”
“Over the parlour. Through here.” He forced his way through heaps of plaster and timber. “Mum? Are you here?
Her voice was faint. “Winston? That you? Ee, man, what’s going on? Are the Jerries starting up again?”
“Mum, are you hurt?”
“Well, me leg got squashed. Good news is it’s me wooden one. And me bed came right through the ceiling. Soft landing, like. Always was a lucky bugger, me.”
Thelma said, “We’re going to get you out of here.”
Hope laughed. “How? On that motorbike, like Mods and Rockers? I don’t think so.”
Winston said, “Thelma, if you want to get back to the base, leave us—”
“Absolutely not. We’re going to take her with us, leg or no leg. We just need to work out how.”
Tremayne led Jones and Clare back to the computer centre. “All right, Jones, it’s your show. Where do we start?”
Jones glanced around. “Look, we want to get all the seismic data you have, fed through your main processor here, and plotted up as graphical displays on these screens. Clare, you know where the tapes are, you can help too.”
Tremayne said, “Suppose you tell me what kind of ‘graphical display’ you want.”
“A section of the Earth. Deep as you like—all the way to the core if you can. I want to be able to see where these disturbances you’ve been tracking are travelling.”
“That’s asking a lot. We’re only one observing point here; we need triangulation.”
“That’s what I’m hoping to get from Thelma’s data, among other things. But we can squeeze a lot out of this data set with a bit of ingenuity.”
Tremayne rubbed his chin and looked absent; he was obviously a man who relished a scientific puzzle. “Hmm. I suppose we could look for signal attenuation. Reflections from the mantle layers. That the sort of thing?”
“Precisely—”
Crowne bustled in. “Professor Tremayne, Doctor Jones. We’ve had some input from outside. The comms are still patchy. Newcastle’s been hit bad. Massive earthquakes and aftershocks, as far as the Cheviot hills. The geologists can’t make any sense of it.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jones said.
Tremayne said, “And further afield?”
“There are trouble spots all over—tremors, quakes, even volcanism. All over the world, I mean.”
Jones said, “Where, exactly? Show me, man. Clare, bring over that world map.”
“Bring the tapes, fetch the map, make a cup of tea. Just remember you’re still under arrest, Doctor Jones.”
“Now, now, Constable Clare.”
Crowne took the map and used a thick black pen to mark locations. “You have these sites across the continental US, here, here, here. And across western Europe, the south as far as Turkey, and in Australia, Japan—”
Jones said, “Well, there’s no obvious correlation with any patterns of seismic activity I know about. Tremayne?”
“I’m afraid it’s rather obvious to me. Major?”
Crowne said, “Doctor Jones, these are Project Hades emplacements. Like this one.”
“More buried bombs. Well, well. There’s your correlation, Tremayne!”
Tremayne stared. “Good Lord—now I don’t know what to believe.”
“Then let’s get on with this data analysis and wash away all your doubt.”
Buck Grady was waiting behind the wheel of the truck. Phillips climbed up beside him. “Right, let’s get going, Sergeant.”
Buck started the engine. “Yes, sir.” The truck pulled away. “You sure this is going to be enough, just the two of us?”
“I think so. Things are quiet for the moment and my men are getting a bit of shuteye. Leave them to it. Who knows what we’ll have to deal with in the morning? Besides this is just a quick in-and-out to retrieve those two civilians.”
“Turning into a long night, though, Captain Phillips.”
“You can say that again.”
“Here, take another smoke.”
“Thanks. Your Yankee drags are disgusting, though.”
“I’ll try to come better equipped next time. You have family yourself, Captain?”
“The missus and two little girls. Down in Sussex, a long way from the action here. I tried calling, but the lines are down. What about you?”
“Just my fiancée, in Long Beach, California. They say there’s problems out there too.”
“Really?”
“The scuttlebutt is this volcano stuff is bubbling up all over. But I haven’t had a chance to make a call.”
“Well, we’ll try to fix that when we get back from the city.”
“I’d appreciate that. Not that I’m worried. Tina is a take-it-on-the-chin kind of kid.”
“Hmm. Should think she’d have to be, attached to a chap like you.”
“Yeah, you got a point there. Hey, what’s that red glow up ahead? Sunrise, you think?”
“I’m afraid not, Sergeant. That’s Newcastle burning. See if you can get a bit more ummph out of this old banger.”
The engine roared and the truck surged ahead.
Winston said, “All right, Mum, let me get you lifted into this.”
“You’re joking me. That’s a bairn’s pram!”
Thelma smiled. “Well, now it’s a custom-built sidecar, Mrs. Stubbins. And we’ve strapped it onto the bike quite firmly with these broom handles—see? Anyway you’re small enough to fit in.”
“Oh, am I? Just as well I’ve left me other leg behind, isn’t it? Winston, you can go and raid old Porky Harris’s garden shed.”
“What for?”
“He keeps a can of petrol in there for his bubble car. He’s off on holiday at the minute, he won’t mind.”
Thelma said, “That’s very sensible, Mrs. Stubbins.”
“And while he’s out of the way, Thelma, you can give me a hand to the khazi. Best to spare the lad’s blushes. Come on. We only ever had an outside bog and with any luck it’s still standing. You lead the way, I’ll hop along after.”
After an hour’s work, Jones, Tremayne, and Clare made their way back to the command centre.
Godwin paced, glowering over his operators’ shoulders. “Still wasting time, gentlemen?”
Jones ignored him. “I think we’ve squeezed just about as much out of these fragments of data as we’re going to manage. Now we’re going to look at the results. Ready, Tremayne?”
“I have the computer output patched through to here.”
“Just remember—all of you,” Jones said, gazing around at them. “Open your eyes—and your mind.” He threw a switch. A cathode-ray monitor powered up with a heavy clunk.
Clare peered at the display. “It’s a big circle. Is that the Earth? Looks like a radar display. But what are those flying shapes?”
“This is the anatomy of the planet, Clare. A world within a world. This is the core. Here you can see the layers of the mantle surrounding it.”
“Where’s the crust, the continents?”
“Too thin to see on this projection. Remember, Clare—all the world you know is just a shell.”
“And those shapes, washing to and fro. What’s that, static? Echoes?”
Tremayne leaned to see. “They seem to be rising up from the surface of the core. Like rockets launching.”
Jones said, “That’s a very apt comparison, Tremayne. See how they sail all the way to the surface—I mean, our surface—and sniff around a bit before falling back. Of course this is a very time-accelerated view.”