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ideological overtones in all this. But then he heard Mandrake’s voice on the London local radio, recorded from one of the Ministry public meetings organized in a different region each week. And the speech was harmless and undistinguished: a flat exposition of the need for local loyalties and ordered towns, mingled with an undisguised appeal for votes. An election was due in a few months’ time, and Mandrake was deputy leader of the party now.
    Gradually Queston’s mind stopped fidgeting over the Minister. The ordinary course of life was not affected, after all. Politics had never engaged him. He sometimes wondered whether anything, except his work, had ever engaged him at all. He had never known his parents; had he really yet known anyone else? With all events, with all people, it was as it always was with women; he could enter them often enough, but never feel himself involved in their existence. He was always the observer; the man outside, looking in.
    And the only thing that seemed of importance to him now, still, was the fate of his few obscure Brazilians: the people of the caves. He took little note of the growing hysteria in London’s newspaper headlines, that played ideally to the cosy isolationism of Mandrake and his party; he felt nothing but a fatalistic boredom over the chance of Russia and America reviving their latent antipathy on the surface of the moon, or of China invading the farthest Soviet states. Instead he looked only inside his own mind, at the nightmare ideas that played to and fro howling to be put into coherent shape. He had to be alone, for a long time now, to write what he must write about the power of the caves.
    He came very near to being convinced that the nightmare could never find any real major shape. If two separate things had not happened, before he submerged himself in the writing of his book, he might never have realized the dangers growing all round him; or the extent to which the harmless politician Mandrake was involved.
     
    He drove to Winchester, to see a local estate agent recommended by the London firm. When he came back two days later, he knew that he had found the place where he would go to work. It was a small, remote cottage on the Hampshire estate that had become the Wessex National Park; a cottage built originally, the agent knowledgeably told him, for the head keeper. ‘Only there’s not much to keep nowadays, ha-ha.’
    It was two miles from the nearest village, and half a mile from the nearest road; a rough track led to it, and there was no telephone. It had an overgrown garden, with roses and brambles twining in a thicket that rapped thinly against the small leaded windows; and an orchard of ancient dwarflike trees rustled at the back. There was running water, but no electricity or gas; one room below, and a ladder-staircase leading to two others above. Standing alone at the back door—he ducked his head to go through—Queston sniffed the thick sweetness of long grass, lime-trees, honeysuckle, and felt satisfaction as the silence isolated him.
    He ordered furniture in Winchester the next day. On his way back to London in the whining Lagonda, he stopped for a sandwich in Alton. It was unchanged from the small, uneventful town that he dimly remembered; there were few people in the pub.
    Standing cheerfully munching at the bar, his hand cupped round the first pint of beer he had drunk in England for a decade, he became aware of the voices of two people on the other side of a black pillar beam. A man and a woman; he could not see their faces, only two hands holding glasses on the bar. The man’s curved easily round a whisky; the woman’s fingers fiddled nervously with the stem of a glass holding what he guessed to begin. It was a very large gin. The hand took it suddenly out of sight, and when it reappeared half the drink was gone.
    It was the slight hysterical rise in her voice which caught his attention.
    ‘I told him it was a stupid idea. I never wanted to leave