He turned to the desk, and pulled the Britain map towards him. “Look. Here’s Edinburgh, Right now, we think the outbreak is around two months old, and it’s maybe four miles across. In another couple of months it will be out as far as here.” He stabbed at a point twenty miles to the east of Edinburgh. “What’s this? Some kind of nuclear plant?”

“Torness,” said Bhide quietly.

“Okay. A few weeks after that, it will reach here.” An urban sprawl at the western end of the Midland Valley, Glasgow. “And you won’t get the slow burn you had in Edinburgh. It will sweep over the city in a day.” He studied them. “Somewhere about then, it’s going to be moving faster than most people can walk. After that it will dig through the crust and—”

“Dear God,” said Holland. “What about the rest of Britain? North England — even London—”

Henry shrugged. “The projections are chancy. And we have to expect more incidents as it eats into old magmatic structures — dead volcanoes, weaknesses in the crust — and, given time, the Moonseed will attack the crust itself. The ocean floor is about five miles thick; the Moonseed will take a few weeks to get through that and down to the asthenosphere. The continental crust is more like fifty miles thick—”

“What happens then?”

Henry looked for the right expressions. “The scale of the irruptions is going to increase.”

“Beyond anything we’ve yet seen?”

“Beyond anything in recorded history.”

Fames withdrew to his window, and the sunlight streaming in there silhouetted him, masking even his posture.

Holland said briskly, “So how can we stop this thing?”

“We don’t know. We’re trying to find a way. It can be inhibited. The Moonseed has to form, umm, certain crystalline structures before it can spread effectively. If you disrupt those structures, we think it can be slowed down.”

Holland looked confused. “What do you mean, disrupt?”

“Mechanically. Break it up. Bomb it.”

“Nuclear weapons? We couldn’t sanction—”

“No,” said Henry firmly. “The radiation from a nuke would probably feed it more than inhibit it. Carpet-bomb the infection sites with conventional weapons. Water helps.”

“Water?”

“Under high pressure. Flood it wherever you can. The earlier you can catch a new infection site the better your chance of disrupting its growth, we think.”

“You think?” snapped Holland. “Damn it, man, don’t you know?”

“No, sir, I don’t. At Edinburgh we did some lab tests but we didn’t have time to test any of this in the field.”

“But at least we can slow it down.”

“I think so. You can buy some time.”

Holland said, “What about further afield? Beyond the sea. Ireland, the continent—”

“We think it will be inhibited by the ocean. The Moonseed likes dry rocks and sunlight. But it will migrate eventually, even if it has to go through the mantle.”