Andromeda Breakthrough Read online

  Her voice tailed away. Fleming felt a stab of real alarm; he knew that she had been on the point of saying more.

  He went closer to her. 'What else have you done, Andre? What else? At least be honest with me.'

  Her manner changed. She moved her head, pushed the hair from her face. She tried to smile at him. 'I have seen what is the purpose of the message from out there.'

  He fought down the feeling of primitive terror that was sending the blood pounding in his temples. 'You've what?'

  he whispered.

  'It's hard to explain,' she said uneasily. 'I'm a bad translator.

  But I know it's all right. We must put ourselves in the hands of the people who will protect us.'

  He let the words sink in, grappling with the fact that once again he had lost a battle. In his over-confidence he had believed he had persuaded Andre to do as he believed right, to make the computer her slave. But she was quietly stating that she wanted to serve 'people who would protect us'. People, she called them - this intelligence across the time-space of the universe - as if they were her brothers.

  Before he could find words she sat up, smiling and confident despite the difficulty of the physical movement.

  'Now I have seen the message I understand,' she said.

  'You are frightened because you know only that the computer can have power over us; not why it has.'

  'You are what I'm frightened of,' he said. 'Now the computer's been doctored, the only way the message can enforce its will is through you. That's why I want you to get away from it! Live while you can, peacefully!'

  She shook her head. 'You think it's evil,' she protested. 'It isn't. It's giving us a solution, a power. If you are to survive you need that power. All that is happening in the country is only a symptom of what's happening all over the world. It's unimportant. We can take it all out of their hands and use as we want!'

  He marvelled at her faith and feared her assurance; it was as if she pitied his limited imagination.

  Abruptly she fell back on the sofa. The enthusiasm was spent; all it left was a frail, rather timorous young girl. 'It drains me,' she whispered. 'It takes all my strength. It will kill me even quicker than you thought.'

  'Then leave it alone!'

  She passed her forearm wearily over her head and gripped the back of the head-rest. 'I can't,' she said. 'I've something to do before I die. But I can't do it alone.' Her lower lip trembled and she began to cry.

  He crouched down and put his arm protectively around her waist. 'If I'm to help; if I'm to trust you, you must tell me. In words - simple words - what is the real core of the message?'

  For a time she lay with her eyes closed. Fleming did not interrupt her reverie. Then she gave a slight shudder and tried to move. He helped her sit up.

  'You must take me to the console,' she said. 'I don't think I can explain in words. But I can show you.'

  He helped her to stand and held her by the arm as she walked with jerky, staggering steps the short distance to the computer building. Once inside, she seemed as usual to draw on hidden strength. She needed no assistance to sit before the sensory panel. Almost instantly the machine began operating, the master screen producing the familiar pattern of wave forms which the output printer translated into figures.

  Fleming stood behind her as she gazed enthralled at the interminable pattern. 'It's the high speed information between the equation groups which contains the real message,'

  she said. 'It tells about the planet from which the data came.'

  Fleming watched the screen. He could identify the wave forms which were the electronic versions of figures, but the occasional surges of angular blobs of light which intervened were meaningless to him. He had always imagined them to be the normal pick-up by the sensitive selenium cells of stray currents in the machine's framework.

  'What does all this gibberish tell you?' he asked.

  Andre's eyes never left the screen while she began to explain.

  'That it has been through all this. It knows what must happen, what has happened in other planets where intelligences have only developed as far as yours. You endlessly repeat a pattern until it wipes itself out.'

  'Or the world gets too hot and does the job for us?' he suggested.

  Andre nodded. 'Life of a biological creature begins very simply.' She talked slowly as if paraphrasing a complicated mass of information. 'But after a few thousand centuries it all becomes so complicated that the human animal can no longer cope. One crack - a war perhaps - and the whole fabric crashes down. Millions are killed or die off. Very few survive.'

  'Who start again,' he finished for her.

  She swung round to look straight at him. 'In about one hundred and thirty years from now there will be a war. Your civilisation will be destroyed. It's all exactly predictable. So can the period before recovery be calculated. Just over a thousand years. The cycle will then repeat itself. Unless something better happens.'

  'As has happened on some planet in Andromeda?'

  'Yes,' she replied. 'The species changed, adapted itself in time. Now it can intervene for earth people.'

  He had to take his eyes off her; off the dazzling, ever-faster moving patterns on the screen. He felt sick at the way she talked about 'earth people' as if she was some alien creature.

  He walked down the aisle, the whole length of the computer, and back again. Its cloying warmth reached out to him despite the air conditioning. Then he made his decision.

  'All right,' he said firmly. 'Let's try to learn from it. Let's discover what we can and then tell people so they can decide what they think best.'

  She made a gesture of impatience. 'That's not enough,' she said. 'We've got to take power. That's how we're meant to use the message to help us. Not to destroy the people here but to help them, and in the end they will hand the power over to us. It's all been calculated.'

  The simple directness of her faith exasperated him because he knew it was an emotion too strong for him to destroy.

  Nevertheless, he determined to fight it.

  'Every dictator in history has argued like that - to force people into actions for their own good,' he said. 'And I'm supposed to think that it will be all right if we help impose the will coming from somewhere in Andromeda through Intel or these people in Azaran or any other dirty little power-drunk agency you choose. It's ridiculous!'

  'That's only the means,' she said. 'What's important is the end.'

  He crashed his fist on the console desk, making her flinch.

  'No,' he shouted. 'I fought it before at Thorness, and I fought you at first - because the world must be free to make its own mistakes or save itself.' He looked at her with a mixture of remorse and fury. 'That's why I trusted you to handle this.'

  'I only did what was logical.'

  'I should have left you - left you to die,' he whispered.

  She turned back to the console. The screen had darkened, its aluminium coating grey and lifeless. 'I shall die very soon anyway,' she said.

  All his fears for her returned and he could only stand in silence with his hand on her shoulder. Neither of them moved. Then he heard the printer in the output bay tapping rapidly once more.

  He strode across and read the figures appearing on the steadily emerging roll. The equations were terribly familiar, taking him back to an afternoon at Thorness more than two years before.

  Mesmerised, he read the stream of figures which continued to emerge. He sensed that Andre had come across and was standing beside him.

  What is this?' he demanded.

  'Basic calculations for a missile interceptor,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice. 'Surely you remember the Thorness project? There are a few minor modifications in this one.'

  He whirled on her. 'Why have you programmed the machine for this?'

  'Abu Zeki wanted the calculations,' she said. 'They need means of defence. It's all part of the plan.'

  He ripped the paper from the ejector and crumpled it in his hand. 'For God's sake
, stop,' he begged her. 'I didn't save you to work for them, to obey every filthy order they give you. You still have freedom to choose what you'll do.'

  She made some reply, but the roar of jet engines screaming at high speed over the building drowned her words.

  'What?' he said when the racket had died away.

  'I said it's too late,' she repeated. 'I have chosen. It's already started.'

  Fleming turned away from her and walked quickly down the corridor to the main doors. The pallid heat struck him in the face as he ran into the open space clear of the buildings.

  The compound gates were closed. A light tank stood in front of them. On the main road a convoy of army lorries was roaring at high speed towards Baleb.

  Slowly he returned to the residential area, hoping to find Dawnay. He badly needed some kind of normality among all this madness.

  Dawnay wasn't in her room, and he went to her laboratory.

  A white-overalled Arab girl assistant was bending over a microscope.

  'Professor Dawnay?' she said in answer to his enquiry.

  'She is not here. She went to see the President half an hour ago,' she added calmly. 'Now there is revolution.'

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STORM CENTRE

  MADELEINE DAWNAY'S visit to the President was an impulsive action, resulting from an argument with Kaufman.

  The German was constantly roaming around the establishment, keeping himself informed of any tit-bit of information which might help to ingratiate himself with his superiors.

  Although all senior staff were in theory employees of the Azaranian Government, in practice it was Intel which made the decisions. Consequently Kaufman, as the senior Intel representative regularly available, was regarded as a liaison officer by the directors.

  Dawnay's bio-chemical experiments had progressed far enough for field-testing. Study of the terrain suggested that a coastal area near the Persian Gulf would be a good one. But she wanted to analyse the tidal strip to ascertain what effect wind and sea had had on the soil. On one of Kaufman's visits to her laboratory she asked for him to arrange transport for her to make a series of trips, imagining it would be a routine matter.

  The German immediately became suspicious. He demanded to know the reason, and her natural retort that he would not understand seemed to anger him.

  But Dawnay could be very obstinate when she chose. She insisted that if she was to carry out her work the arrangements must be made. Kaufman muttered that he would have to get a government permit.

  'Fine,' Dawnay said. 'You can jump in your car and get it right away, can't you ?'

  He frowned. 'At this moment, almost impossible.'

  This was more than Dawnay was inclined to take. She removed her overall and picked up her sun hat. 'If you enjoy putting up ridiculous obstacles then I'll see the President myself.'

  'I wouldn't count too much on the President,' he said, 'but by all means go if you want.' He went to the reception desk to call her a staff car. When it came he opened the door for her with a studied flourish.

  On the short journey to the Presidential palace Dawnay's anger seethed and she reminded herself of Fleming's pessimistic views on the whole set-up. She determined to discuss more than a trip to the coast with the President. After all, she told herself, he was head of State and if a challenge came Intel could no more win than mammoth oil companies in half a dozen little states had been able to do.

  The streets seemed very empty, although this did not particularly arouse her interest. She had visited the capital so rarely that she had no means of comparison.

  The car slowed at the palace gates until it was waved on by a lounging sentry. The man showed no interest in it.

  Dawnay alighted and passed through the doorless portico.

  A bearded Arab in native costume bowed and put his hands to his forehead in greeting. The palace was beautiful and very old, unspoiled by any attempt to repair the crescent arches or the filigree stonework with plaster.

  A little incongruously, the old Arab picked up a house telephone fixed to the wall behind a pillar. After some murmured words he returned to Dawnay and said in halting English that his master would see her.

  A little negro boy tripped down the stairs, greeted her with a dazzling smile and in his soft soprano voice asked her to follow him. They went to the first floor and along a labyrinth of passages, silent with age-long peace. The boy knocked on big double doors and threw them open.

  The president advanced towards Dawnay, his hand extended.

  His creased face, she thought, was that of a very old man - older than she knew he actually was. But his eyes were bright and intelligent, and he was meticulously neat and tidy, his beard trimmed short, and his large sensitive fingers soft and gentle when they shook hands. The jarring note was his Western dress - an old-fashioned though well-cut tweed jacket and breeches of the kind English aristocrats wore on weekends fifty years before. Dawnay envisaged some London tailor carefully repeating a bespoke order originally given in the spacious age of pre-1914.

  His courtesy was as genteely old-fashioned as his appearance.

  Delighted to be entertaining an English lady, he explained that he had been looking through his film slides and hoped she would be interested in seeing some of them.

  'Photography is my hobby,' he said. 'A way to have mementoes of my country - it's people, its valuable archaeological and historical features, and of course the improvements which, with Allah's help, I have been able to make.'

  The negro boy was already standing beside the projector.

  At a nod from his master he switched off the ceiling lights and began the screening. Dawnay hid her impatience and made polite and appropriate remarks as her host carefully explained each picture. The show ended at last. The boy switched on the lights and was told to leave.

  The President took a chair facing her and folded his arms in his lap. 'And now, why did you want to see me?' he asked.

  Urgently Dawnay recited the words she had been rehearsing to herself as she watched the slides. She hoped she was cogent, objective, and fair. She told him of the origin of the computer design, of the bio-chemical experiments which culminated in the creation of the girl, and finally of the reasons why Fleming had contrived the destruction of the machine in Scotland.

  The President was quiet for some moments when she had finished. 'I have only your word for all this,' he said quietly.

  'It is, as you will understand, somewhat difficult to accept, or, perhaps I should say, understand.'

  'I'm sorry it can't be made more clear, your excellency. We don't understand a great deal of it ourselves. Dr Fleming has always suspected its purpose.'

  'And do you?'

  She pondered on her reply. 'I think there are right ways and wrong ways of using it,' she eventually said.

  He darted a glance at her. 'And we are using it in the wrong way?'

  'Not you, but Intel.'

  'We are in their hands,' he sighed, like a weary old man.

  'This is a difficult time.'

  He stood up and crossed to the window, pulling the heavy draperies aside and letting an almost blinding shaft of sunlight into the dim room. For a time he looked out on the city which dropped away below the palace. 'When one is in my position, a government has to show results or it does not survive. Intel gives results.'

  He returned to the middle of the room but remained standing.

  'I am a moderate,' he smiled. 'There are factions here which are fiery, youthful, impatient. They are also powerful.

  I need all the help I can get to retain the people's loyalty.'

  The door had opened, and the little negro boy had appeared.

  In his hand he held a telephone. He plugged it into a wall jack and then stood before the President, holding the instrument free of the cradle. The President took the phone and listened. He said a few words in Arabic and then gave the phone back to the boy.

  He walked across the room and stood once more before the window. A soft
thud, a long way off, sent a tiny vibration through the old building. It was followed by the harsh reverberation of automatic fire. The President pulled the curtain back across the window and looked at his guest.

  'I do not think, Professor, that I shall be in a position to help you. The telephone call was from Colonel Salim, an efficient and ambitious of officer.' He paused to listen to the distant rumble of heavy engines and the racket of caterpillar tracks which rapidly grew in volume on the roadway below the palace. 'That, I imagine, is the proof of what he told me.'

  Only half understanding, Dawnay stood up and hesitantly moved to the door, thanking him for his patience in listening.

  She remembered too late that she had not asked for a permit to visit the coast.

  'Goodbye, Professor,' the old man said. He did not look at her. He had sat down, very erect, very still, in an old-fashioned high backed chair. Dawnay had the impression of a king who had only his dignity left to sustain him.

  The negro boy was standing in the passage outside. His eyes were big with fear or perhaps excitement. He almost ran in his anxiety to escort her to the courtyard.

  The car she had come in had gone. Instead, two soldiers came across and stood on either side of her. They motioned with their guns that she was to wait near the doorway. Presently an army scout car came to a halt beyond the portico.

  The soldiers jerked their heads to show she was to enter it.

  A young officer saluted her. 'We take you back, Miss,' he said in halting English.

  The driver had frequently to pull out of the way as mobile columns roared towards Baleb. There were a few half-tracks and some light tanks. Their crews were in war kit but they were standing in their vehicles. They obviously did not expect serious shooting.

  The gates to the Intel compound were open but an armoured car was stationed outside, and there were groups of helmeted troops everywhere. Dawnay was driven straight to her quarters, where more guards were patrolling. The young officer who had accompanied her indicated courteously but firmly that she was to remain in her room until further orders.