Omega (2 page)

Professor Bernard Arklow
, of the International Seismolo
gical Centre at Newbury, Berkshire, worried about neither of these. In fact he worried about very little, being completely wrapped up in his own subject; the standing joke among his more worldly wise colleagues was that old Arklow's ivory tower was the only known structure which would stand up even to his own beloved earthquakes.

He was all the more surprised, therefore, when the outer world impinged on him abruptly. He had been becoming increasingly excited by the implications of certain statistics, from the seismologists of the world, which it was his happy function to collate; and when the time came to prepare his
annual departmental report for the year 2002-3, ready to communicate his provisional conclusions, in his usual scholarly preamble to that report.

Translated into everyday language, those conclusion were that over the past year increasingly abnormal movements and correspondingly abnormal stresses had been arising in the handful of giant plates which composed the Earth's crust. These stresses would continue to build up, the Professor convincingly showed, and would produce seismic phenomena - in short, earthquakes - not only along the classic earthquake zones where the edges of the plates met but within the area of each plate itself.

When he had completed and submitted his report, the Professor sat back contentedly. He looked forward to its inclusion in the Centre's overall report and to the impact it would have on his fellow-specialists. They would be furious at not having realized it first," but on the facts, they would be obliged to admit he was right.

No one could have been more astonished than the Professor when, three days after the typescript had left his desk, he received a summons to Whitehall - from a very high personage indeed.

He returned to Newbury the following day looking, for once in his life, subdued.

PART ONE

Nemesis

'My dear General,' the Permanent Secretary said impatiently, 'it's no good looking to the Prime Minister. He hasn't the remotest idea of the seriousness of the situation. As long as the balance of payments is improving -which it is at the moment, for a combination of seasonal and one-off reasons - he can concentrate on the things that matter to him. Exploiting differences within his own Party to his own advantage, and scoring points off the Opposition.'

There was silence between the four of them for a while. Down Whitehall Big Ben boomed the three-quarters. As its echoes sank into the murmur of the traffic beyond the tall windows, General Mullard shook his head. 'It's a terrifying thought, Harley, that the Government of our country. ..'

Harley snorted. 'I am tempted to r
eply, with Shaw's Undershaft: "I
am the Government of your country." Or to be more accurate,
we.
The Civil Service - and don't imagine for a moment that I speak only for the Treasury...'

'I don't,' the General said drily.

'Quite. The Civil Service, the Services, industry, and
the TUC. Of which we four - let's be frank about it -are the key minds in the key positions.'

'I doubt if ICI would agree with you about
me,'
Lord Stayne laughed.

'Come off it, Joe,' the TUC man said. 'ICI know the facts of life, whatever they
wish
they were. When you pipe, they dance - especially if I'm playing the drum. Same with the General here. He's not the top brass but he's the key brass. Thompson's a figurehead. No, Harley's right. So let's talk about realities.'

'Thank you, Sir Walter,' Harley nodded. 'And if - or rather, when - Situation Beehive arises, those realities will become even sharper.'

There was another brief silence, which General Mullard broke with the question: 'How long?'

'One month, six months - the seismologists can't be sure. They're all agreed that Pr
ofessor Arklow's deductions are
correct. The facts are no longer in dispute. Only the time factor is.'

'And the magnitude?'

'Only roughly predictable. But serious enough for the Official Secrets Act, with trimmings, to have been clapped on the Newbury staff as soon as the Professor set the cat among the pigeons.'

'Tricky, I'd have thought? The Centre is international.'

‘
Very tricky, in theory. But in practice we got rapid cooperation from other Governments. Once they read Arklow's report - even ahead of their own experts' confirmation - they were as concerned as we were not to create public panic. So foreigners attached to the Centre had their own Embassies down on them at the same time.' He smiled thinly. 'However cumbersome the diplomatic machine may appear, there
are
means of short-circuiting it when danger, and common interest, are self-evident.'

'I should hope so,' the General said, 'or my profession would be a lot busier.
...
By the way, what's being, done about the theory that the Mohowatt stations are causing the crust disturbances?'

'Oh, for God's sake,' Lord Stayne snorted. 'Old wives' tales!'

'You're scarcely impartial, with millions invested in them,' the General pointed out. 'And Sir Walter has thousands of his members' jobs at stake.'

'All the same,' Harley told him, 'I agree with Stayne. There
is
no evidence to link the two. Only the kind of
post ergo propter
argument one expects from the more sensationally minded of our environmentalists - and fortunately Arklow's report is not available to them, or we'd have some real red herrings to deal with. . . . The remote possibility of some such link existing is being investigated, of course,' he continued blandly, 'but meanwhile it would be extremely premature, and highly disruptive, to envisage any modification of the Mohowatt programme. All the interested governments are agreed on this.'

'Oh, well. . . . But to get back to the earthquakes . . .'

'We prefer to call them "seismic abnormalities".'

The General gave a short bark of a laugh. 'As Sir Walter said - let's talk about realities, within these four walls.'

'Very well. Earthquakes.'

'Will Beehive stand up to them, I wonder? So deep underground?'

Lord Stayne said, 'Surely,' and Sir Walter humphed in agreement.

Harley inclined his head. 'They should know. After all, they built it, virtually - they and their predecessors. And on the best possible advice.
...
In fact, of course, the picture has changed with Arklow's evidence. Beehive is likely to suffer
some
damage. But remember, the codename Beehive is an over-simplification. It's really a complex of hives, well dispersed over the country, with everything that matters reduplicated. As long as there's anything of Britain left to control, there'll be enough of Beehive left to take control of it when the worst is over and the time is ripe. . . . Which is why - I need hardly say this -you gentlemen must be continuously careful about the quality and preparedness of your key men at the regional hives.'

'You, too,'
the General said pointedly. 'Of
course.'

'Let's talk about
now,'
Sir Walter suggested. 'Operation Beehive's cut and dried, ready for when the balloon goes up. We can trust each other to go on improving our own aspects of it. So let's not waste time. The first week after Beehive Red will be the crunch. If Beehive can establish an authoritative image then, it'll keep it. The real problem's
now
- the one month, or six months or whatever,
before
the balloon. How to prepare people without letting them know they're being prepared.'

'You have put your finger,' Harley said, with slightly pompous approval, 'on the real purpose of this meeting.'

Sir Walter grinned sardonically. 'And in view of the Hitlerian overtone of the only possible solution - the one that's on all our minds - you'd be much happier if I, good old Walter Jennings, the golden voice of organized labour, were the one to name it.'

'Since you put it that way' - Harley's smile was unabashed - 'yes.'

'You old fox.'

The other three went on looking at Jennings, waiting. Jennings, shrugged. 'AH right. I'll say it. We need a scapegoat. We need one urgently, to forestall any possibility that Mohowatt might become that scapegoat, which could be disastrous.'

*We need an identifiable category of
human
scapegoats,' Harley amplified. 'And there's one ready to hand, isn't there? The witchcraft movement.'

'It seems a shame,' the General said, with unexpected wistfulncss. 'They're a harmless enough lot. Rather endearing, some of them.'

'Not all of them, by any means. And have you any alternative?' When the General shook his head, Harley went on: 'They're tailor-made for it, you must realize. They've been a really widespread and public movement for only about twenty years, since the 1980s. By now there are at least a quarter of a million of them - though one can only estimate, since they have no formal national organization. They've been part of the scenery long enough for everybody to know who most of them are - but they're new enough as a mass phenomenon, and bizarre enough by conventional standards, to make millions of people uneasy.
Very
uneasy. I know they've behaved themselves remarkably well, in public-order terms - there's been localized trouble from teenage elements at one or two of their Festivals, and not even that for some years. But under the surface their very existence touches on some terrifyingly atavistic emotions. Trigger those off...'

He left the sentence unfinished,, hanging in the air.

After a while Lord Stayne said: 'This will require very careful planning if it's not to get out of hand.'

'That shouldn't be difficult.'

‘
What had you in mind? You've obviously given thought to it already.'

'A little curtain-raiser to test public response,' Harley said. 'A little - er - "spontaneous" provocation and over-reaction, to be followed up with some inspired comment in
the media. And so on..
..
There isn't much time to waste, but fortunately they've a Festival coming up.'

Stayne nodded. 'The Midsummer Solstice.'

'Thank God Beltane's over,' Jennings said. 'It's got altogether too tangled up with May Day. And that I
might
have found embarrassing.'

'With regard to your "spontaneous" provocation, Harley,' General Mullard asked thoughtfully. 'How little is "little"?'

2

All over Bell Beacon the small fires were being lit and the scent of woodsmoke hung in the almost motionless air. Moira estimated that there must be at least a hundred covens spread out over the three-hectare plateau which sloped gently southwards from the northern summit. Not over the whole of it, of course; the space around the still unlit Great Fire in the centre had been left well clear for the Ring Dance; and besides, once
that
was ablaze, too close would be too hot.

The Beacon really was an ideal plac
e for a Sabbat, Moira thought.
The little plateau was almost perfectly flat, the short downland' grass was like a lawn and there were no bushes or trees which might catch fire. The slope was too slight for even a candlestick to show a noticeable tilt, yet it was enough to give appropriate dignity to the summit itself, the northern hump a few metres across on which the Great Altar stood.

Bell Beacon rose a good hundred metres above the surrounding countryside, and from its summit in daylight one could look down not only on much of Buckinghamshire in which it stood, but eastwards into Middlesex and southwards across the Thames into Berkshire and Surrey. Yet except at the northern face, which ended the ridge, it was not precipitous and could easily be climbed on foot. On normal summer days cars would drive up here by the long slanting road, but not tonight. Ever since the Beacon had started to be used openly for the local mass Sabbats (Moira, twenty-seven now, had been brought to one of the earliest by her parents as a little girl) custom had established that cars be parked out of sight below Gresham Wood and the footpath used for the last half-kilometre. There were still latecomers winding up it now, in the twilight, and spreading out to find spaces for their own individual coven Circles, calling cheerful 'Blessed be!' greetings to friends as they threaded their way among the Circles already established.

Each Circle was marked by a ring of white cord laid on the grass, of a diameter still referred to by the traditional measure
of nine feet but produced - as
every efficient High Priestess knew by heart - by a circumferential cord of 8.62 metres. Most covens, like Moira's, kept a special 8.62-metre ring ready spliced for public Festivals. Since the Craft had become open and widespread (the historic Glastonbury Beltane of 1983 was generally accepted as the turning-point) many new conventions had evolved naturally. One of these was that it was selfish, and therefore bad manners, to have an individual Circle larger than nine feet at a mass Festival, however large your coven. In any case, covens which grew beyond
the equally traditional thirtee
n-member maximum, without hiving off, were looked at askance by their neighbours and hints would be dropped; Craft opinion strongly favoured the small, personalized, autonomous group, feeling that oversize covens ran the risk of a change of nature.