He climbed to the Upper Ward, and looked out from the cannon-platform terrace to the north. He could see the railway line and Princes Street, two great avenues stretching west to east, converging towards the odd structures on Calton Hill to the north-east. Between the rail line and Princes Street was the garden, that old drained loch. It was studded with trees, a little marred by a huge white marquee where — Henry had learned — a band played during the summer arts festival. Beyond that was the cluttered landscape of the New Town, with its sandstone monuments — the Scott Monument, his own Balmoral Hotel, the banks and insurance companies on George Street — jutting out of the forest of roofs, and beyond that, serene and calm, was the blue surface of the Firth of Forth, and the rocky northern coast.

The lights were coming on, and in Princes Street the crowds were starting to bustle out of the shops and offices and making their way home, their radiation-proofed smocks and ponchos bright, bustling human activity at the heart of the ancient city.

He felt as if he was somehow opening up, as if walls in his head were crumbling. He wasn’t used to feeling so engaged with humanity as this.

Maybe it was something to do with Jane.

This was Lilliput, small and crowded: a thousand years old, and beautiful. It seemed impossible that it should be under threat — a threat only he perceived.

Venus. The Moon rock anomalies. The Arthur’s Seat dust.

The pieces of the puzzle seemed to be moving around in his head, colliding, trying to find ways to fit. But the essence of the future was clear to him; the inexorable growth of that stuff on Arthur’s Seat would see to that.

Bad news.

Unless he, and those who worked with him, found a way to stop it.

“We have to, is all,” he said to himself. “If not us, who else?”

For a while longer he gazed out over Edinburgh’s bustle.

Then he began the walk back to the town, to meet Blue.

Henry had a little trouble meeting up with Blue Ishiguro, in the subterranean clamour of Waverley Station. Blue wasn’t much over five five and was skinny as a rake, so it was hard to spot him among all these heavy-set, overfed gaijin, as Henry always thought of Westerners when he was around Japanese.

But here Blue came at last, his pencil-thin frame all but overwhelmed by the giant, battered field rucksack he carried on his back, his button-small face split by a giant shit-eating grin.

Henry embraced Blue, and they went into a mock-boxing routine, what Blue, who had spent maybe too long in America, always called hoopin” and hollerin” mode.

Blue said, “It’s good to see you, man.”

“That’s the truth. Let’s get out of here.”