The cameras focused on the human misery, the scenes on the roads and assembly points and Rest Centres, improvised from schools and hospitals and leisure centres, most of them all but overwhelmed. People were crammed into whatever shelter could be found, bereft of their homes and belongings, lucky if they kept their families with them, stripped by the intrusive cameras of the last of their dignity.

It was impossible to believe he was looking at a Western city, Henry thought uneasily.

He needed to talk to Jane.

He used the hotel phone to try the contact number Chief Constable Romano had given him in Edinburgh, a direct line to the Police Casualty Bureau. It took a while to get through even so, and when he did there was no record, on the improvised database the young man on the other end was consulting, of Jane or her family.

But then, looking at the televised chaos of the evacuation, he wondered what percentage of the refugees had finished up on any kind of official record anyhow.

The Brits just weren’t ready for this.

Why should they be? Britain floated like a rocky raft in the stable centre of a tectonic plate. It should have happened to us, he thought. Americans. We’d have been ready.

Up to now, anyhow. In the long term, if the Moonseed could not be limited, no experience with disaster management was going to stave off the bad rain that was coming down on them all. Maybe his instinct to get to the centre of things, to figure out a way to propagate his bad news, was mistaken. Maybe it was all futile anyhow.

He should have stayed with Jane.

He called Blue Ishiguro. He got Blue’s mobile; Blue had evacuated himself, along with Marge Case and the rest of the department.

We are intending to continue our studies, Blue said. We will continue to go back in to the site as long as it remains stable.

“What about McDiarmid? Where the hell is he?”

Your esteemed leader. Nowhere to be seen. The smart money is that he long since decanted himself to London or maybe further afield.

“Asshole,” Henry said.

You never know how far a frog will jump until you punch him.

That got a laugh out of Henry.

Blue remained serious. Henry, we have nothing but bleak hypotheses here. Now that the Moonseed has got into the mantle, as it surely must have —

“Yeah.” Even now it must be breeding down there, in the slushy layers beneath the continents. Building its fat little superstring bombs.

Although we may contain the surface effects—

“Hell, we can’t even do that.”

It is difficult to see what can stop it.

“I know,” Henry said.

We can’t evacuate forever, Blue said. Eventually we will run out of planet.

The light in his window was fading. The end of the day. Eventually we will run out of planet.