Andromeda Breakthrough Read online

  'I phoned to say I hope you're in the pink as it leaves me at present,' he said lightly. More slowly and distinctly he went on, 'but I'm worried about one health matter. What does one do for burns? You are so expert on them. Not for me, you understand.'

  For a second or two he thought she had hung up. But eventually she said quietly. 'Where?'

  'Oban. Solo by B.E.A. I shan't have too much time before I must catch a return plane.'

  'You're a fool,' she said calmly. 'But as soon as I can. In the airport building.'

  His flight took barely twenty minutes. He had to wait nearly an hour before Dawnay arrived. He saw her get out of a taxi while he stood looking out of the window in the men's lavatory. He noticed a second car behind hers, and he waited to see who alighted from it. There were three passengers: a middle-aged couple and a small boy, with a couple of suitcases. So that was all right. She hadn't been followed.

  He walked leisurely into the foyer and studied a travel poster.

  'You're mad to come,' he heard her whisper behind him.

  'But I've got the stuff.'

  He half turned round and nodded to a hot drink machine in a deserted corner. They walked over to it.

  'Tea, coffee, or cocoa?' he asked, handing her a drinking carton, while he fished in his pocket for coins.

  'It all tastes the same,' she smiled. She took the carton and at the same time passed a little white cardboard box to him.

  He slipped it in his pocket before he pushed the coin into the slot.

  'Thanks,' he said. 'It's the healing enzyme this time, I hope. Not the one that nearly polished you off.'

  Dawnay sipped her drink and made a wry face. 'They call it coffee .... Yes, this lot is all right, I'll guarantee that. It's the original formula the computer gave when she was burned the first time. You remember how perfectly it worked. Sepsis overcome in hours;' renewal of the nerve fibrils and lymphatics complete in under three days. How is she?'

  Fleming got himself a drink. 'Not too bad, except for her hands. I must get back. I don't want a dead girl on the premises.'

  She glanced at him, amused. 'So you think of her as a girl now, do you? But you were mad to come here,' she repeated.

  'I don't know exactly what's doing back at the station, but the search is certainly still on.'

  He glanced at his watch. 'Got to be going,' he apologised.

  'And thanks for the stuff. Talking about madness, you're pretty crazy to be doing this for me; I'm an enemy, or didn't you know?'

  'No, I didn't,' she answered. 'As for doing it for you, I'm doing it for her. She's mine too, don't forget. I made her!'

  They walked together towards the departure bay when the public address system announced the flight for Skye and Lewis.

  'I don't expect I'll be seeing you again,' she said. 'I've been offered a new job. No point in staying at Thorness now this Andromeda project is over. It should be quite an experience, new faces, new tasks.'

  'Where?' he asked.

  'In the Middle East, one of those places all sand and oil, but little else.'

  Fleming wasn't particularly interested. 'Best of luck,' he said vaguely. He impulsively bent down and kissed her on the cheek. She seemed girlishly pleased.

  Fleming passed through the doors to the airport apron.

  There seemed to be only four or five other passengers - all entirely innocent looking.

  He was unaware of a middle-aged man, discreet in black homburg and tweed overcoat, who had been standing beside the magazine kiosk, reading The Times. He lowered the paper when Fleming handed his ticket to the B.E.A. girl for checking. Once Fleming had passed from the building the man hurried towards the road exit. The chauffeur in the car parked there immediately started the engine....

  CHAPTER THREE

  GALE WARNING

  Fleming did not get back to the island until late that evening. He had to wait until darkness before he dared launch the boat which he had heaved up on to the shingle in a small inlet of the loch. The rain poured down remorselessly all the way back, but he was in high spirits and drove the little boat full out. The speed wasn't much, but the noise was considerable. He was so excited about getting back that he did not care whether any search vessels were around to hear him and investigate.

  He burst into the cottage with a yell of greeting. Preen was sitting talking to Andre. Her appearance alarmed Fleming.

  Her face, even in the lamplight, was almost putty coloured. But at the sight of him she stood up and stumbled across to him, throwing herself against him, her arms held high to protect her swollen hands.

  'Easy, easy,' he whispered to her, clasping her gently. 'I've got the repair kit. You'll soon be okay.' Over her head he grinned at Preen. 'Everything in order. Not arrested or even questioned. And I didn't tell anyone about you.'

  Preen was visibly relieved. 'I'll get you something to eat while you do whatever you can with her hands... An ointment, is it?'

  'I suppose you could call it that,' Fleming agreed, helping Andre to the sofa. 'But a special kind. The only good thing I know of that came out of our inter-galactical tuition. But the less you know about that the better, in case your honest soul should ever be taxed by our lords and masters. You can take it from me that your forebodings about a pretty corpse are over.'

  He took the little box from his pocket. 'Enzymes - a glorious little ferment of living cells, all ready and willing to build anew.'

  Preen shook his head, bewildered. He went to the kitchen and opened yet another tin of soup. Fleming began immediately on the treatment.

  The almost transparent jelly-like material spread quickly when it came in contact with Andre's unnaturally hot, mutilated flesh.

  She watched him carefully, without any vestige of a memory that it was she who had programmed the computer to produce the formula, or had interpreted the stream of figures on the output recorders.

  Fleming removed her shoes and carefully tucked a blanket around her, placing her hands on a folded towel. 'Sleep if you can, my pretty,' he murmured. 'The pain will ease, slowly but steadily. And in the morning. No pain. You'll see?

  She wriggled lower on the sofa and smiled at him like a trusting child. Obediently she closed her eyes.

  All the way back to Thorness, Madeleine Dawnay brooded on the offer of a job in Azaran. Essentially a lonely woman, she had always immersed herself in work as an anodyne for the sub-conscious unhappiness she felt about her lack of sociability and attractiveness. Her synthesis of living cells, culminating in the development of a female organism which vied with, and in some ways surpassed, natural womanhood had been a triumph which she believed justified her life and held out entrancing promise for the future.

  Then came the burns she suffered from the computer and the terrible mistake in the compounding of the healing enzyme formula so that the injections destroyed instead of constructed. Not only did this experience show her the dangers of believing that the half-understood equations from the computer were benign and valuable, but the hovering of death had frightened her more than she would have believed possible.

  It was wonderful, of course, to discover that the fault in the enzyme had been entirely in human minds, and that the formula was literally the gift of life. But there remained the nagging suspicion that John Fleming was right. The intelligence which actuated the computer was not impersonal and objective. It had its own purposes, and they did not seem to include the welfare of man.

  In any case all the work was over. The glittering prospect of building a scientific technocracy for Britain had evaporated in the smoke from the computer building. She even felt relieved that the great binary code which had reached them out of space, and on which it was all built, had gone up too.

  She would be glad to get away from it all, to return to ordinary research.

  Azaran appealed to her idealism and her curiosity. Here was a little country, temporarily and superficially wealthy on its subterranean E1 Dorado of oil, but poverty-stricken in the basic needs of fertile lan
d and adequate food for its people.

  As soon as she got back to Thorness, she asked for leave to visit the Foreign Office and set off at once for London.

  The minor official in the Middle East Department was inclined to dismiss Azaran as a comic opera state. He described the President as a man of dying fire. The revolution which had put him in power and ousted the dynastic ruler just after the war had been a bloodless affair of little international consequence. The President had hastily assured the British oil interests that he would maintain agreements provided some slight adjustment of the royalty arrangement could be made. This was done after the usual haggling. The President had announced that the revenue would be used to improve the lot of his people.

  The desert would blossom through irrigation. Schools would be built. Roads would open up trade. Hospitals would stamp out the diseases which killed one child in five and cut the expectation of life to thirty-two years. The schools, the roads, and the hospitals had gone up. But the desert remained desert, and now the oil was giving out.

  'There's water,' the official went on; 'a French company sank artesian wells. To the north there's a subterranean lake with more water than the oil deposits to the south. Trouble is the surface. Not even sand; mostly stones and rock. You can irrigate it but it won't grow crops.'

  'The erosion of several thousand years can't be put right with a bit of water,' said Dawnay quietly. 'There'd be no official objection to my going?'

  'None,' the official said, 'so far as the F.O. is concerned, that is. We're anxious to maintain our friendly relations with these people. They're a small nation, but any friends are valuable nowadays. The terms of your engagement are naturally not officially our pidgin. You'd be interviewed by Colonel Salim, the ambassador here. He's a slippery customer, though probably it's largely Arab love of intrigue. Anyway, he's probably just the go-between for the President.'

  Dawnay left the interview, her mind made up. She would take the job if the terms were reasonable. A taxi deposited her at the Azaran Embassy fifteen minutes later.

  She was ushered into Salim's office without delay. Rather to her surprise, he seemed to know all about her career and he discussed her work with considerable intelligence. More or less as an afterthought he mentioned the salary. It was fantastically large and he heard her slight gasp.

  'By British standards the income is high,' he smiled, 'but this is Azaran, and one commodity/we have in plenty at present is money. The Europeans - doctors, engineers, and so on - who work for us need some compensation for absence from their homeland and the fact that of necessity the job is not for life. In your case we had in mind a contract for five years, renewable by mutual arrangement.

  'But it's the work which would interest you. We are an ancient nation stepping late into the twentieth century, Miss Dawnay. Eighty per cent of our food has to be imported. We need to have a programme of vision and scientific validity to make our country as fertile as it is rich.' He hesitated. 'For reasons that will become clear shortly this will become more and more vital for our future, even for our very existence.'

  Dawnay hardly heard his final words. The old excitement about a problem of nature which challenged the ingenuity of the mind had taken hold of her.

  'Colonel Salim,' she said quietly, 'I'll be proud to help. I am free to go as soon as you wish.' She smiled a little ruefully.

  'As you may know from what seems to be a comprehensive survey of my background, I have no private ties, no relatives, to hold me here. And for reasons I can't go into, my recent work is now completed.'

  Salim gave her a large, warm smile. 'I shall telephone my President immediately,' he said. 'I know he will be deeply grateful. Meantime, there are the usual international formalities to be seen to - inoculations, vaccination, passport, and so forth. Shall we say the day after tomorrow - about 10 a.m. - to complete the arrangements? I can then discuss the actual time of your departure.'

  Dawnay agreed. The decision made, she was anxious to be gone. She telephoned Thorness and had her batwoman pack her few belongings and put the cases on the train. Ruefully she told herself that apart from a mass of books in her old room at Edinburgh University she owned nothing else in the world. Nor was there a close friend to whom she had to say goodbye.

  She went shopping the following morning, getting a Knightsbridge department store to fit her out with tropical kit. She reduced the salesgirl to despair by approving the first offer of everything she was shown. It was all done in a couple of hours. The store agreed to deliver the purchases, packed in cases, to London Airport when instructed.

  Next morning she found a doctor and had her inoculations.

  They made her a little feverish and she rested in her hotel room that afternoon and evening. Promptly at 10 a.m.

  on the following day she presented herself at the Azaran Embassy.

  Salim greeted her courteously, but he was ill at ease, half listening to a powerful short-wave radio from which, amid considerable static, a stream of Arabic spluttered quietly.

  'Splendid, Professor Dawnay,' he said eventually, after glancing cursorily at the passport and inoculation certificates.

  'Here are your visa and air tickets. I have provisionally booked you on the 9.45 flight the day after tomorrow. Will that be suitable?'

  Before she could reply he sprang up, rushing to the radio and turning up the volume. He listened attentively for a couple of minutes and then snapped off the switch.

  'That was the announcement of our freedom,' he said dreamily.

  'But you are free!' Dawnay looked at him in surprise.

  He turned to her. 'Political freedom is a matter of paper ideals. Real freedom is a matter of business. We have at last broken off our ties with your country; we have renounced all our oil and trade agreements.' He indicated the radio. 'That is what you heard.' He smiled at her again. 'You can see why we need the right people to help us. I shall be returning to Azaran myself as soon as diplomatic affairs are cleared up here. We want to remain on friendly terms with Britain; with all countries. But we need to be independent in the best sense of the word. 'So you will help us.'

  Dawnay felt slightly disturbed at this sudden turn of events. Throughout her career she had studiously avoided politics, believing that scientists were above party and national factions, their duty being to the welfare of mankind.

  'I hope I can do something,' she murmured politely.

  Salim did not appear to be listening. He began frowning over the documents she had handed to him. 'No yellow fever inoculation?' he queried. 'Surely you were notified that it's necessary?'

  'I don't think so,' she replied. 'But I can have it done today.'

  He stood up and smiled ingratiatingly. 'I can do better than that. It so happens that the embassy doctor is here this morning.'

  He pressed a switch on his intercom. 'Ask Miss Gamboul if she can manage another yellow fever inoculation,' he told a secretary.

  There was a pause and then a man's voice replied that Miss Gamboul could do so. :

  Again the sense of misgiving prodded Dawnay's brain. For a moment she could not identify the reason. Then she found it. A woman doctor was not usually described as Miss. She dismissed the suspicion as trivial, putting it down to Salim's incomplete knowledge of English.

  While they awaited the doctor's arrival he came round and leaned against the desk, close to Dawnay. 'Tell me about a colleague of yours, a Dr John Fleming. I believe he worked with you at that Scottish research station. Is he still there?'

  'I can't say,' she answered shortly.

  'I heard one report that he was dead.'

  'I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about him.' Her tone was all he needed to tell him that Fleming was alive, but he did not react to it. He looked up instead at the opening door.

  'Ah, Miss Gamboul!'

  A woman in a white coat had entered without knocking.

  She was dark-haired and rather attractive and - one could put it no closer than that - somewhere in her thirties. She had a f
lawless skin, and a good brow above fine dark eyes; but she did not look in the least like a doctor. Even in her white coat she gave an impression of sensuousness and haute couture; Dawnay felt sure that she was more used to being called Mademoiselle than Miss.

  And yet there was a surprising degree of professional intelligence and seriousness in her face. Dawnay did not like the hardness in her eyes nor the thin red-pencilled line of her mouth, but most of all Dawnay did not like people to be enigmatic. She noticed that the nails on the hand which clutched a napkin-covered white dish from which the base of a hypodermic protruded were varnished bright red and the ends were pointed. Dawnay glanced automatically at her own stubby, close-cut nails. Neither doctors nor scientists, she felt, should allow themselves such unhygienic luxuries as long nails and lacquer.

  'Now, Professor Dawnay, which arm would you like punctured?'

  Her voice was business-like; she had a strong French accent, Dawnay realised with satisfaction.

  Stifling her instant dislike of the woman, she said she would prefer to be injected in the right arm. She removed her coat and pushed up the sleeve of her blouse.

  Mademoiselle Gambout dabbed her upper arm with a wad of spirit-soaked cotton wool. Dawnay looked away when the needle went in. It was badly done and the clumsy jab made her wince.

  Salim had not moved away. He watched the inoculation as if fascinated. He began to talk rapidly. 'You'll have every facility for your work when you get to our capital, which is called Baleb. We have recently completed building the laboratories. Anything you need...'

  His voice seemed to thicken, and his swarthy face, looking down at her still bared arm, became hazy.

  She tried to fight off the sense of dizziness.

  'Can - can I have a glass of water?' she faltered. 'I can't be as fit yet as I thought... '

  Her head slumped forward. She felt the hardness of the rim of a glass pressed against her lips and she drank some water: Her vision cleared a little, and she saw the red fingernails around the glass.