“…See [19,20] for details of the contact model. Just as the percolation model on a lattice may be generalised to the socalled random-cluster model (see [12]), so may the continuum percolation model be extended to a continuum random-cluster model. We shall work here mostly on a bounded box rather than the whole space Z × R. Let a, b ∈ Z, s, t ∈ R satisfy a ≤ b, s ≤ t, and write Λ = [a, b] × [s, t] for the box {a, a + 1, .…”