Andromeda Breakthrough afa-2

by Fred Hoyle

  Before Dawnay could reply Abu returned. He held the door open while the nurse brought Andre inside in her wheelchair. Fleming was accustomed to see the girl a little weaker, a little more wraithlike, every time he saw her. But he had not got used to the way she now glared at him, her eyes smouldering with resentment.

  'All right, nurse,' he said without looking at Andre, 'leave her. We'll call you when it's time to take her back.'

  The girl stood her ground. 'She should not be here, sir; I had just got her to sleep.'

  Abu interposed. 'Please be sure it's all right.'

  The nurse patted the rug around Andre's legs and reluctantly left. When the door had closed Andre asked what they wanted her for; she did little more than whisper, even that was jerky and hard to understand.

  'We need another formula from the computer,' Fleming explained. 'Another bacterium or perhaps a virus. It's got to kill the first one and then work the other way round. It would have to release nitrogen held in the water.'

  'And it would have to breed faster than the first one,'

  Dawnay added. 'It would be another tricky piece of biosynthesis, another life-creating process. For that I need a formula.'

  Andre had listened with almost horrifying intensity, looking from one to the other, hanging on every word.

  'But why?' she protested.

  Fleming lost his temper. 'For God's sake!' he shouted.

  Dawnay uttered a word of warning and with difficulty he calmed down. Then, crouching beside Andre, he slowly and patiently explained how the existing bacteria were changing the world's weather and making it impossible to breathe, the preliminary to complete destruction of all life. 'So we need just one small bug to start breeding on an even greater scale to counteract it,' he finished.

  Once more she shook her head. 'It is not possible,' she whispered.

  'Look,' he said urgently, 'if you can come up with one sort you can come up with another - and save us all.'

  Her big eyes looked back into his. Imperceptibly they softened, the hostility lessening. 'Save you?' she managed to say aloud. 'What about me?' She tried to move her hands over her breasts and touch her face. The effort was too much and she lay back.

  'If you had the strength - you'd try.' It was Dawnay who was begging her now.

  'I don't know.' She shook her head weakly. 'It would take too long.'

  Fleming looked over Andre's head at Dawnay. 'Would it?'

  he muttered.

  Involuntarily Dawnay glanced at the girl. 'I don't know,'

  she said. 'She's... ' She got a grip on herself. 'If you mean would I take too long with the actual lab work, that's another matter. There are still twenty-four hours in however many days we've got left, and I don't like sleeping much.'

  Both of them looked at Andre again. They were two people willing her to obey, to do the seemingly impossible.

  The ghost of a smile flickered over her mouth, and she nodded.

  Fleming turned to Abu. 'Get the nurse to take her back,'

  he said. 'She's the only ally we've got, poor kid. Tell the nurse to have her ready for duty at the computer at 9 tomorrow morning. Try to explain that we're not sadists. Tell her how necessary it is. Frighten her a bit if you like by hinting how she'll also die if she fails us.'

  Abu's persuasion - or intimidation - worked. The nurse obediently wheeled Andre into the computer block shortly after nine the next morning. The girl said her patient was too weak to move, and she would have to use the wheelchair to work while interpreting the screen.

  Only Fleming was present. Dawnay felt too little hope to be able to bear to watch, and Abu remained in the main office so that he could report any approach by Kaufman or the mysteriously silent Gamboul. One of the things which would have been disquieting, if Fleming had not been so preoccupied with a greater problem, was the way Intel seemed to be leaving them to their own devices.

  Andre put her hands unsteadily on the sensory controls.

  The computer had hummed to activity as soon as she entered the building. But the screen brightened very slowly. Its imagery was blurred, and even when Fleming pulled the curtains over the windows across the hall the pattern was almost indistinguishable. He watched Andre raise her head to the screen; he saw how she seemed to be gripping the controls as if they yielded some supply of strength. Her effort to concentrate was pathetic. Presently she relaxed her hold. Her body slumped and her head bowed to her breast.

  She began to talk thickly, sobs shaking her shoulders.

  Fleming bent over her. 'I can't follow them,' he heard her say. 'Take me away from it.' And then she added, as if to herself, 'I don't want to die.'

  The nurse came forward, pushing Fleming away. 'She has done enough; too much, you must not ask... ' Abruptly she grasped the chair and wheeled Andre away from the screen.

  Fleming refused to move out of the way. 'Andre,' he said quietly, 'none of us wants to die, but we all will, unless some miracle starts sucking the air back out of the sea.'

  She raised her head with an effort. 'You will die together.

  I'll die alone.' He put out his hand to comfort her, touching hers. She moved her arm away. 'Don't touch me,' she whispered.

  'I must seem horrible to you.'

  'No!' he said urgently. 'You have always seemed beautiful to me. Ever since.., ever since we ran away from Thorness.

  But try to think, please! Only you can help us now. I don't even know what this is doing. Is the power still with Gamboul?'

  He indicated the mass of the computer ranged all around him and she nodded her head. 'Then why does she never come here?' he demanded.

  Andre remained quiet, gathering her strength. 'There is no need. She has seen the message. The computer has set her on a path. She will not turn back. Nor will she come here.

  She needs no more. I could not show her anything. I can hardly see it any more.' Her eyes looked askance towards the blank screen. 'I will come back when I have rested.'

  Without asking permission, the nurse started to push the chair away. Fleming did not stop her this time. He watched them disappear through the exit doors and for a full minute he remained where he was, in the heavy silence of the deserted building.

  Suddenly he jumped. The output printer was working. It clicked rapidly, then stopped. Once more it started. This time the keys moved slowly but they kept on. He went to the section and took hold of the short length of paper already typed.

  'Pretty ropey,' he decided as he looked through it, 'but some sort of biological data, all right.'

  He went to tell Dawnay. It was a triviality in itself - this preliminary analysis. But in its inference it was tremendous.

  It showed that after all Andre would help, and maybe Dawnay could still achieve a miracle - if they had time.

  As he stepped out of doors the fury of the wind swept over him, making him stagger. He began panting, and there was no help in the gulps of air he took. With head down and body leaning into a dry, suffocating gale, he plodded through the swirling sand to the laboratory doors. His zest and optimism had gone. Time was something they couldn't buy.

  Three thousand miles away dawn was breaking over London - a London stricken with disaster. A few tin-hatted policemen stood in the middle of the wider streets well away from the buildings. The jangle of an ambulance bell occasionally penetrated the howling of the wind. Lights burned weakly on the first floor of the Ministry of Science building from the few windows which had not been blown out and boarded.

  The grey light of early morning accentuated the weariness of the four men sitting around the littered table. For several hours they had not contributed a constructive idea. Discussion had really become argument, the futile criticism of over-exhausted men.

  Neilson, normally reticent and co-operative, had given way to exasperation when Osborne and the Prime Minister's secretary launched into an interminable argument about departmental responsibility and finance for the expanded activity agreed upon the previous evening.

  'You have
a wonderful talent here,' observed Neilson, 'for plodding through routine while the heavens are falling.'

  'We're tired, Professor Neilson,' said the Minister sharply.

  'We can only do what we feel is best.'

  'I'm sorry,' Neilson said.

  The Prime Minister's secretary reached for a cigarette, found the packet empty, and hurled it into a corner. 'There's no power over half the country, and the rest is under water, or snowed up or blown down. People are dying faster than the army can bury them. If you could only give us some sort of forecast how long it's going on.'

  Neilson was on the point of answering when a secretary came in, tip-toeing to Osborne.

  'Something urgent for you, sir,' he said. 'Brought by a despatch rider from London airport.'

  Osborne took the buff-coloured envelope and slit it open. With deliberate slowness he unfolded the flimsy paper, and read it.

  At last he looked up. 'It's from Azaran,' he said, 'from Madeleine Dawnay.' He handed it to the Minister.

  'You two had better see this together,' the Minister said to Neilson and the Prime Minister's secretary. 'It will save time. the Cabinet must be informed right away, of course.' He waited impatiently while the two men read the note. 'Any proposals, Neilson?' he asked.

  Neilson nodded. 'Can you get me to Azaran - today?' he demanded.

  CHAPTER TEN

  VORTEX

  THE four-engined aircraft cruised to the apron, slewed round and stopped. Electric trolleys moved forward to unload the cargo. The crew, tired from a non-stop flight from London during which they had never topped 6,000 feet and had been buffeted for seven hours without respite, clambered down the ladder and made their way to the flight office. A uniformed Arab and a bullet-headed European greeted them perfunctorily as the Captain handed over the aircraft papers.

  The European flicked through them and passed them to the Arab, and then extended his pudgy hand for the crew's personal documents. He let the Captain go through immediately, but when he looked up at the next two men standing before him he referred again to the papers in his hand.

  'Who is this?' he asked in German. The two air crew members looked blankly at him. He repeated his question in halting Arabic.

  Yusel, Lemka's cousin, the younger of the two, smiled ingratiatingly. 'My second navigator. He not understand Arabic or the language you use first.'

  The Intel man scowled. 'I've not been notified of any change in crew plans. Why are you carrying a second navigator?'

  Yusel explained. 'For route familiarisation. We have to fly so low; no air pressure up top.'

  Not really satisfied, the Intel man re-read the documents.

  When he could find no fault in them, he threw them across the desk. Yusel picked them up and led his companion into the crew room where they got out of their flying kit. His companion was Neilson.

  'That's the worst over,' Yusel told him. 'Now I'll take you to my cousin's house. It'll be quite safe. Her husband, Doctor Abu Zeki, will contact you as soon as he can.'

  Neilson nodded. 'The sooner the better.'

  Yusel drove him to Abu's home and then returned to Baleb. It was late afternoon when he got to the cafe, and he had to wait an hour before his cousin arrived. When he did come Abu Zeki had the furtive air of a man who knows he is watched. Quietly, over two bottles of locally-made Azarani Cola, Yusel told him about Neilson's arrival.

  'He wants to see Doctor Fleming and Professor Dawnay,'

  he finished.

  Abu Zeki glanced anxiously around the bare little cafe.

  'I don't know if they can both get away,' he said. 'But I will tell him.'

  As soon as he heard that Neilson senior was safely in the country, Fleming decided to throw caution to the winds and go and see him. He told Dawnay to be ready to leave as soon as it was dark, if she was willing to take the risk.

  The weather helped them. A violent storm broke with nightfall, sheet lightning illuminating the sky and short bursts of rain lashing the buildings and swirling sand. The guards crept, frightened and shivering, into any shelter they could find. Fleming and Dawnay plodded through the cascades of rain without once being challenged.

  The drive was appalling, Abu's little car slithering in the thick scum of mud on the desert sand. But the rain had been local. After forty minutes they were driving on dry terrain, the storm providing an accompaniment of reverberating thunder and almost continuous flashes of lightning.

  Fleming felt a sense of quite unreasonable relief when Lemka opened the door and he saw Neilson standing behind her. The American's wordless greeting, the way he gripped his hand, was absurdly reassuring.

  To Dawnay, Neilson was someone who signified a gleam of hope that she had refused to admit existed, but she was still not sure why he had come. They both sat quietly, suppressing their excitement, while the big calm man ate his way methodically through a bunch of grapes and told them what had been happening in London. They learnt for the first time how Osborne had survived the shooting at their country-house prison, how Neilson had been called in to 'head a probe into this weather thing', as he put it, and how they also had put two and two together and traced the source to Thorness. And how they had then come to a dead stop until they had received the message from Dawnay.

  'Is there really any hope?' he asked her.

  'About as much as a grain of sand in a desert.'

  She pushed aside the little tray on which Lemka had set Neilson's supper and spread out the bundle of papers she had crammed into the waistband of her skirt.

  She impatiently flattened out the creases. 'These are most of the figures for the D.N.A. helix,' she began. 'The computer has worked out what I think you'll agree is a feasible analysis. So far as I can judge, it's a potential bacterium. But the molecular structure is one thing. Getting the components and synthesising them another, but it might, possibly, produce the anti-bacterium we need.'

  Neilson studied the figures. 'And this is the work of the machine Jan built?'

  She nodded.

  'I can't help wondering...' A tremor made his words tail off.

  Fleming was sitting beside the cot, absent-mindedly revolving a toy suspended for the child's amusement. 'What would have happened if your son had stayed,' he finished.

  Neilson turned to him. 'They shot him in cold blood,' he said. 'In front of our eyes. If I could find the man....'

  'I can't tell you who pulled the trigger,' Fleming said. 'But I know who told him to. A man named Kaufman, who is "looking after" us here.'

  'I should like to meet him,' said Neilson.

  'Maybe you will.'

  Dawnay began gathering the papers together. 'At least your son's death was quick,' she said with compassion.

  'Which is more than ours will be. Unless these work.' She stuffed the papers back in her skirt band. 'There's a lot more to come if only the girl can get it for us.'

  'How is she?' Neilson asked.

  Dawnay looked down at the baby; the child was wide awake, smiling at the sight of so many faces around him.

  'She was an artificial sort of life,' she muttered. 'Not like... '

  She turned abruptly away from the baby. 'There's some constituent lacking in her blood; something I didn't know about and something the computer didn't allow for.'

  'Can't she get some help from the machine for herself?'

  Neilson asked.

  'No time,' Fleming replied. 'She might have done, I suppose, but there was this anti-bacterium job. She elected to work on it .... '

  Neilson eyed Fleming speculatively. 'That was a hard decision,'

  he said.

  Fleming paused to light a cigarette. He inhaled deeply.

  'Yes,' he said at last. 'It was a hard thing, as you say.'

  Fleming rose and turned away from the others. He crossed to the window and stared out into the night. Hastily, to ease the tension, Dawnay began asking if Neilson wanted copies of the computer data. Neilson shook his head. He explained that the only practical thing would be a test
tube of the anti-bacterium.

  'If the girl can complete the analysis,' he started, but Fleming interrupted.

  'Shush!' They stared at him. 'Lemka's coming.'

  Lemka, who had been keeping watch on the road, came running across the courtyard to the house. They could hear her sandals on the rough paving.

  'We're watched all the time,' Dawnay said. 'We thought we'd given them the slip tonight.'

  Lemka burst into the room, her eyes large and round with excitement. 'They're coming,' she exclaimed. 'Soldiers. A whole truck load!'

  All of them stood motionless for a few seconds. Then Dawnay took the papers she had put in her waistband. 'Hide these,' she said, thrusting them into Lemka's hand. 'Your husband can pick them up later and give them back.'

  Lemka took them and turned to Neilson. 'My mother's room,' she said firmly. 'They won't go in there.'

  'I hope you're right,' he smiled as he followed her.

  There was a knock on the door, not violent or very loud.

  Lemka emerged from the rear room and opened the door. A corporal saluted and spoke in Arabic; two soldiers stood beside him. Their guns were still slung on their shoulders.

  'He says they have come to fetch you and Dr Fleming,'

  Lemka interpreted, addressing Dawnay.

  'Tell them we'll come right away,' Dawnay said, with what she hoped was a bright but casual smile. 'We'll be all right, so don't worry. But you'll have to find a safer place for Dr Neilson. We'll keep in touch somehow.'

  Lemka extended her hand and clasped Dawnay's affectionately.

  'My cousin will think of something. We had better not talk more, or the soldiers will suspect us.'

  One soldier insisted on coming in the car, and the corporal made signs to Fleming to drive close behind the army truck.

  The weather had cleared a little, the wind blowing strongly but steadily.

  Back in the compound the computer block was a blaze of light. Two soldiers took over from the escort and led Fleming and Dawnay into the building. Kaufman was sitting at a desk in the office, his face a mask of suppressed anger. Abu was standing uneasily to one side.