The Inferno by Fred Hoyle

Author:Fred Hoyle [Hoyle, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781473210905
Amazon: B00YN3E07O
Publisher: Gateway
Published: 2015-06-24T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

THE INFERNO

Madeleine was waiting at Inverness, not at Kyle as Cameron had expected. She had a pleased little-girl expression, so evidently something favourable had happened. It turned out to be the new Range-Rover, which they’d had on order for some months. Cameron looked it over carefully. It was ironic the thing should have been delivered now. Examining the extensive rear of the vehicle he had an idea, obvious really. He and Madeleine went to the Royal Hibernian Bank, where they drew a considerable sum from their account. Then they toured the Inverness shops buying a multitude of stores, until the rear of the Rover was chock-a-block with stuff. Finally, Cameron drove through side streets towards the harbour, to the company which delivered gas into Kintail. He found a driver and tipped him five pounds, with another five to follow, if the fellow would deliver not one big cylinder but a whole lorry load of cylinders. Cameron insisted on the delivery that day, not the next day, or the day after, which was the reason for the big tip, he explained.

They started the drive from Inverness to Glen Shiel, much as they had done a month earlier. Was it only a month? A kaleidoscope of faces swam through Cameron’s brain—Fielding, Mallinson, Nygaard, Almond and his chaps, the Prime Minister. It all seemed oddly unreal. The reality lay in Glen Shiel and in the events which the next few days would bring.

‘Is it serious?’ Madeleine asked.

‘Yes, we’ll have to stay indoors, because of radiation from the sky. That’s why I bought all these stores.’

‘There are fires everywhere in the south. It was on the news this morning.’

‘The south?’

‘Not the south of England, the southern hemisphere, and in places like California.’

‘How has it been happening?’

‘Fires in the sky. I expect they’ll have pictures of it by this evening.’

Cameron relapsed into silence while Madeleine drove. He pretended to be dozing off, so that he could think. Fires in the sky meant a lot of energy simply had to be hitting the top of the atmosphere. By a lot he meant something comparable—so far as energy was concerned—with ordinary sunlight. He hadn’t thought much about the early stages of it. He’d been concerned all the time about the grimmer prospect of atmospheric stripping. But there would be great storms all right, powerfully electric. Like thunderstorms but on a bigger scale. And it would get very hot. He began to worry about the wooden roof of their house.

There are many streams from the Mam Ratagan ridge down to Loch Duich. One of them ran close by Cameron’s house. As soon as he and Madeleine reached home Cameron went off to study the stream, feeling it would be absurd for the house to burn with so much water rushing past it. But without heavy machinery there was curiously little he could do. So after a quick lunch he decided on a different tack. Wearing a metal helmet now, two of which he’d bought in Inverness, he rigged up a length of flexible piping from the kitchen water tap to the roof of the house.

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