I put the suitcases on the metal bed. Judith walked into the kitchen and Quinton began to open the empty case.

'It's in here?'

I took the two packets of $100 bills from my jacket. When I had handed them to him, I said: 'The suitcase is for the... remains. Is it big enough?'

Quinton peered at me through the ruby light, as if baffled by our presence there. 'You could have spared yourself the trouble. They've been up there a long time, Mr Groves. After the impact' for some reason, he cast a lewd eye in Judith's direction 'there might be enough for a chess set.'

When he had gone, I went into the kitchen. Judith stood by the stove, hands on a carton of canned food. She was staring through the window at the metal salvage, refuse of the sky that still carried Robert Hamilton in its rusty centrifuge. For a moment, I had the feeling that the entire landscape of the earth was covered with rubbish and that here, at Cape Kennedy, we had found its source.

I held her shoulders. 'Judith, is there any point in this? Why don't we go back to Tampa? I could drive here in ten days' time when it's all over , She turned from me, her hands rubbing the suede where I had marked it. 'Philip, I want to be here no matter how unpleasant. Can't you understand?'

At midnight, when I finished making a small meal for us, she was standing on the concrete wall of the settling tank. The three relic hunters sitting on their car seats watched her without moving, scarred hands like flames in the darkness.

At three o'clock that morning, as we lay awake on the narrow bed, Valentina Prokrovna came down from the sky. Enthroned on a bier of burning aluminium three hundred yards wide, she soared past on her final orbit. When I went out into the night air, the relic hunters had gone. From the rim of the settling tank, I watched them race away among the dunes, leaping like hares over the tyres and wire.

I went back to the cabin. 'Judith, she's coming down. Do you want to watch?'

Her blonde hair tied within a white towel, Judith lay on the bed, staring at the cracked plasterboard ceiling. Shortly after four o'clock, as I sat beside her, a phosphorescent light filled the hollow. There was the distant sound of explosions, muffled by the high wall of the dunes. Lights flared, followed by the noise of engines and sirens.

At dawn the relic hunters returned, hands wrapped in makeshift bandages, dragging their booty with them.

After this melancholy rehearsal, Judith entered a period of sudden and unexpected activity. As if preparing the cabin for some visitor, she rehung the curtains and swept out the two rooms with meticulous care, even bringing herself to ask Quinton for a bottle of cleanser. For hours she sat at the dressing table, brushing and shaping her hair, trying out first one style and then another. I watched her feel the hollows of her cheeks, searching for the contours of a face that had vanished twenty years ago. As she spoke about Robert Hamilton, she almost seemed worried that she would appear old to him. At other times, she referred to Robert as if he were a child, the son she and I had never been able to conceive since her miscarriage. These different roles followed one another like scenes in some private psychodrama. However, without knowing it, for years Judith and I had used Robert Hamilton for our own reasons. Waiting for him to land, and well aware that after this Judith would have no one to turn to except myself, I said nothing.

Meanwhile, the relic hunters worked on the fragments of Valentina Prokrovna's capsule: the blistered heat shield, the chassis of the radiotelemetry unit and several cans of film that recorded her collision and act of death (these, if still intact, would fetch the highest prices, films of horrific and dreamlike violence played in the underground cinemas of Los Angeles, London and Moscow). Passing the next cabin, I saw a tattered silver spacesuit spreadeagled on two automobile seats. Quinton and the relic hunters knelt beside it, their arms deep inside the legs and sleeves, gazing at me with the rapt and sensitive eyes of jewellers.

An hour before dawn, I was awakened by the sound of engines along the beach. In the darkness, the three relic hunters crouched by the settling tank, their pinched faces lit by the headlamps. A long convoy of trucks and halftracks was moving into the launching ground. Soldiers jumped down from the tailboards, unloading tents and supplies.

'What are they doing?' I asked Quinton. 'Are they looking for us?'

The old man cupped a scarred hand over his eyes. 'It's the Army,' he said uncertainly. 'Manoeuvres, maybe. They haven't been here before like this.'

'What about Hamilton?' I gripped his bony arm. 'Are you sure '

He pushed me away with a show of nervous temper. 'We'll get him first. Don't worry, he'll be coming sooner than they think.'

Two nights later, as Quinton prophesied, Robert Hamilton began his final descent. From the dunes near the settling tanks, we watched him emerge from the stars on his last run. Reflected in the windows of the buried cars, a thousand images of the capsule flared in the saw grass around us. Behind the satellite, a wide fan of silver spray opened in a phantom wake.

In the Army encampment by the gantries, there was a surge of activity. A blaze of headlamps crossed the concrete lanes. Since the arrival of these military units, it had become plain to me, if not to Quinton, that far from being on manoeuvres, they were preparing for the landing of Robert Hamilton's capsule. A dozen halftracks had been churning around the dunes, setting fire to the abandoned cabins and crushing the old car bodies. Platoons of soldiers were repairing the perimeter fence and replacing the sections of metalled road that the relic hunters had dismantled.

Shortly after midnight, at an elevation of fortytwo degrees in the northwest, betwen Lyra and Hercules, Robert Hamilton appeared for the last time. As Judith stood up and shouted into the night air, an immense blade of light cleft the sky. The expanding corona sped towards us like a gigantic signal flare, illuminating every fragment of the landscape.

'Mrs Groves!' Quinton darted after Judith and pulled her down into the grass as she ran towards the approaching satellite. Three hundred yards away, the silhouette of a halftrack stood out on an isolated dune, its feeble spotlights drowned by the glare.

With a low metallic sigh, the burning capsule of the dead astronaut soared over our heads, the vaporizing metal pouring from its hull. A few seconds later, as I shielded my eyes, an explosion of detonating sand rose from the ground behind me. A curtain of dust lifted into the darkening air like a vast spectre of powdered bone. The sounds of the impact rolled across the dunes. Near the launching gantries, fires flickered where fragments of the capsule had landed. A pall of phosphorescing gas hung in the air, particles within it beading and winking.

Judith had gone, running after the relic hunters through the swerving spotlights. When I caught up with them, the last fires of the explosion were dying among the gantries. The capsule had landed near the old Atlas launching pads, forming a shallow crater fifty yards in diameter. The slopes were scattered with glowing particles, sparkling like fading eyes. Judith ran distraughtly up and down, searching the fragments of smouldering metal.

Someone struck my shoulder. Quinton and his men, hot ash on their scarred hands, ran past like a troop of madmen, eyes wild in the crazed night. As we darted away through the flaring spotlights, I looked back at the beach. The gantries were enveloped in a palesilver sheen that hovered there, and then moved away like a dying wraith over the sea.

At dawn, as the engines growled among the dunes, we collected the last remains of Robert Hamilton. The old man came into our cabin. As Judith watched from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel, he gave me a cardboard shoebox.

I held the box in my hands. 'Is this all you could get?'

'It's all there was. Look at them, if you want.'

'That's all right. We'll be leaving in half an hour.'

He shook his head. 'Not now. They're all around. If you move, they'll find us.'

He waited for me to open the shoebox, then grimaced and went out into the pale light.

We stayed for another four days, as the Army patrols searched the surrounding dunes. Day and night, the halftracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a halftrack and two jeeps came within four hundred yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.

During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoebox on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvagefilled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.

On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.

The shoebox was open. In the centre of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, grey flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.

She looked at me with puzzled eyes. 'They're black,' she said.

Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loudspeaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.

When they moved away, Judith said: 'We can go now.'

'In a little while, when it's clear. What about these?'

'Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn't matter.' She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.

Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoebox, scraping up Robert Hamilton's ash with a dessert spoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.

It was on the third day that we fell ill.

After a long, noisefilled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.

Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.

'Philip...' Judith swayed towards me. 'Do you feel What is it?'

'The water.' I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. 'It must be fouled.'

'Can we leave?' She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. 'Philip, for God's sake I'm losing all my hair!'

Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.

Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked towards them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird's eyes.

Half an hour later, they were gone.

The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoebox held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gearchanges of the halftracks. The sounds from the loudspeakers drummed like fists on my head.

Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind. contaminated area.., evacuate.., radioactive...'

I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith's hands.

'Philip...' She looked up at me weakly. 'Give it back to me.'

Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached towards me like the claw of a cadaver.

I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. 'For God's sake, it's this! Don't you see why we're ill?'

'Philip where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you.'

'They've gone. They went yesterday, I told you.' I let the box fall on to the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. 'Quinton knew what was happening why the Army is here. They're trying to warn us.'

'What do you mean?' Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. 'Don't let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We'll come back later.'

'Judith!' I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. 'Don't you realize there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!' I pulled back the curtains from the window. 'My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn't ever be really sure..

'Philip...'

'Don't worry, I used him thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!'

There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A halftrack with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.

'Judith, before we go, tell me... I never asked you , Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.

As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.

1968.

The Comsat Angels When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV's science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteenyearold child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon's new series, which I was scripting, 'The Expanding Mind', about the role of communications satellites and dataprocessing devices in the socalled information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.

'Charles, you'll destroy the whole thing,' I protested across his desk that morning. 'These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they're being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?'

'He might be, James. Who can say?' Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. 'We're doing a programme about advanced communications systems if they have any justification at all, it's that they bring rare talents like this one to light.'

'Rubbish these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a crosschannel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.'

In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.

For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his socalled genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.

'Do you remember Minou Drouet?' I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. 'A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, "Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet."

'James, relax... Like all scientists, you can't bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let's wait until we see him. He might surprise us.'

He certainly did, though not as we expected.

Georges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau, on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals' house was an expensively built whitewalled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A welltended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and watermeadows.

Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from RadioTelevisionFranaise and a Mercedes with a ParisMatch sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharpfaced maid led us without ado towards the press conference. In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hotel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of thirtyfive with calm grey eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemnfaced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table.

Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three darksuited men the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institut Pascal, a centre of advanced study gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a shiny suit, and the boy's schoolmaster, a lanternjawed man hunched around his pipe.

Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment.

Georges Duval was then fourteen, a slimshouldered boy small for his age, selfcomposed in a grey flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his overlarge wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem.

Professor Leroux of the Sorbonne opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at thirteen, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges's career: reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam usually taken at fifteen or sixteen. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by eleven had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by twelve was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge.

While this familiar catalogue was being unfolded, Georges's eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft grey suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges's elder brother he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered that he had a very different role.

Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern what did he think of Vietnam, the spacerace, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigitte Bardot? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humour, stating that outside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle.

While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges's father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval was in the least educated, and the house, into which the widow and son had moved only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from the town.

As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: 'I notice you didn't ask any questions yourself.'

'The whole thing was a complete setup. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle.'

'Perhaps we were.'

'You think the General may be behind all this?'

'It's possible. Let's face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more difficult for him to go off and work for Du Pont or IBM.'

'But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I'll bet you that three years from now no one will even remember him.'

After we returned to London my curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Centre at White City I scanned the children on the pavement. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library.

As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteenyearold from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, ParisMatch and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the highschool principal, doting mother and the young genius himself, this time with a crewcut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.

And then what?

'That was nearly three years ago,' I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. 'What's he doing now?'

She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. 'Nothing. I suppose he's taking another degree at a university somewhere.'

'He's already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a fasterthanlight drive or a method of synthesizing life.'

'He's only seventeen. Wait until he's a little older.'

'Older? You've given me an idea. Let's go back to the beginning 1948.'

Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first postwar prodigy, a seventeenyearold Swedish youth whose pale, overlarge eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radiosources that a decade later were termed 'quasars'.

'A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He'll be, what?, thirtyseven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.'