Andromeda Breakthrough

CHAPTER ONE OUTLOOK UNSETTLED

The alarm signal buzzed quietly but insistently above Captain Pennington's head, a discreet echo of the bell jangling outside the guard room across the parade ground of the headquarters unit No. 173 Marine Commando.

Pennington groped for the bedlight switch and sat up. He stared uncomprehendingly at the vibrating clapper arm.

In every officer's room were these little buzzers. They were painted red; they existed for No. 1 alert. It was accepted that a No. 1 would in reality mean only one thing: notification of the seven minutes the ballistics people had worked out as the breathing space before World War Three came and went.

Captain Pennington heaved himself out of bed. He was conscious of running feet as the Marine Commandos observed their long-taught procedure. The bedside phone rang as he was struggling into his denims.

'Major Quadring,' came the abrupt, clipped voice. 'Sorry about the panic measures. Orders from Whitehall. It's not the big thing, so ease up. But it's bad enough. Thorness.

Major fire. Probably sabotage. Can't be sure that the trouble isn't sea-borne. Hence the S.O.S. to your boys.'

'Thorness!' Pennington repeated. 'But that's the kingpin-'

'Exactly. Save your mental reactions till later. Get over here within an hour. Four groups, with amphibians and frogmen, of course. I'll be at the gates to get you through.

Tell your men not to fool around. The guards here won't be waiting to ask questions.'

The phone clicked dead. Pennington checked his assault kit and ran from the officers barrack hut into a night of soft-falling snow. He could make out shadowy figures of the men already standing to by their trucks and amphibious vehicles, the engines ticking over. Not a light showed.

'Right,' he called loudly through the darkness. 'You'll be glad to know that this isn't it. Nor is it just a dummy run.

Some real bother at the rocket station down at Thorness. I know no more than you, though we're going because there's probably a sea job to do. You can, of course, use headlights.

I'll set the rate; we ought to average fifty. Keep the intercom channel open till I order otherwise. Carry on!'

A Land-Rover wheeled round and stopped beside him. He got in. Orders snapped out and the Marines got aboard their trucks. Pennington nodded to his driver and they roared through the gates.

They had a forty-five mile run from their base to the lonely promontory nosing into the Atlantic on which Thorness had been built as the nerve centre of Britain's rocket testing range. The whole area had been cleared of civilians, and the twisting, undulating road straightened and levelled for the articulated rocket carriers and fuel tankers. Pennington made the trip in precisely 55 minutes.

The main gates between the barbed-wire-festooned chain link fencing were shut. Guards with automatic guns stood under the floodlights. Dobermann Pincher dogs sat, immovable and alert, beside them. At the sound of the convoy Major Quadring came out of the concrete guard post with an N.C.O. Quadring was a lithe officer of middle-age, smartly dressed and unruffled. After a glimpse at the Commando identity marks on Pennington's vehicle he gave orders for the gates to be opened.

'Pull into the parking bay to the left,' he said as Pennington jumped down. 'Tell your chaps to relax, but to remain with the vehicles. Then come on in here. I'll put you in the picture. Over a cup of char - laced, of course.'

Beyond the floodlights at the entrance a double necklace of lamps edging the main road of the camp strung away into the misty night. The snow had stopped and what had fallen was melting into slush, so that the ground was dark, and the shapes of the camp buildings were dark, too, except where emergency lights were shining at windows.

Faintly inside the compound there was another smudge of light, where mobile lamps were trained on the main computer building, and a heavier pall - which was smoke - hung, smelling sulphurous, among the mist. Quadring led Pennington across the concrete into the guard hut.

Only in the light of the unshaded bulb of the guard room was it evident that Quadring was a worried man. His face was grey with fatigue and strain, and he tipped an over-liberal portion of rum into his own mug of tea.

'I'm sorry about a sortie on a night like this to this Godforsaken place. I think Whitehall and Highland Zone overdid it a bit with that No. 1 alarm and excursion, but then I'm only a simple soldier. They know better than I what's involved, though even to my un-technical mind this is a bloody business.'

He refused Pennington's offer of a cigarette and began ramming tobacco into a blackened pipe. 'The sea mist has closed in like a blanket down on the coastline. You drop from the station right into cotton wool. Not a damned inch in front of your nose. It'll lift with dawn, probably with rain or sleet. I tell you, it's a nice place.

'Someone or something attacked this place about four hours ago, and destroyed its brain. Which means, if my job here is as vital as they tell me, that old Lady Britannia is stripped of power, wealth, and about everything the politicians were banking on.'

Pennington looked at him sceptically. 'Frankly sir, you're over-dramatising things, aren't you ? I mean, everyone knows Thorness is a rocket testing base, and where they run the computers which made those I.B.M. interceptions such a wow. Surely the machines aren't unique. The Yanks and the rest of N.A.T.O .... '

'The machines were unique,' Quadring answered. 'If you commandeered every computer in commercial or Government use in the country they wouldn't amount to more than a cash register compared with the scientific toy that's now a tangled mess of valves and wires and smouldering insulation.

Nor does the rocket side matter all that much.'

Pennington drained his rum and tea, easing himself on the hard wooden chair. 'Of course, I've heard some pretty bizarre accounts of the sidelines here,' he said with a grin.

'It's pub gossip. That sort of thing was bound to start rumours.'

'But nothing as good as the truth,' Quadring said. 'I've had an okay from G.D.1 to put you vaguely in the picture.

Your boozing pals in the bar parlour haven't burbled anything about the Dawnay Experiment in their cups, have they ?'

'The Dawnay Experiment?' Pennington repeated. 'No sir.'

'I'd never have believed my security was so good,' the Major grinned.

He relit his pipe and sucked gratefully at it a while.

'This Dawnay woman's a sort of de-sexed biochemical genius from Edinburgh, though I admit I found her pleasant person before she fell ill, through some infection from her own work, poor old girl. And so far as I can understand it, the computer helped her to synthesise chromosomes, which you no doubt learned when you were told about the birds and the bees being the seeds of life.

'She obviously hadn't much of a clue as to what it was all about, beyond the fact that the formulae spewed from the computer made sense. But the upshot was a human embryo.'

'Human ?'

'That's what they say. I agree it's a nice point. It grew like fun - or rather she did, for the organs of sex were there - and in four months she was 5 ft 7 ins tall and weighed 123 lb. The report is good on pointless and harmless facts.'

Pennington tried to look amused. 'Was this zombie, robot, or whatever she was, still in some sort of enlarged test tube, fixed in a clamp, or what?'

'Not a zombie by any means,' Quadrlng retorted. 'They called her human, because she looked human, behaved like a human, had human intelligence and human physical abilities. Though not, I gather, human instincts or emotions until she was taught them. In fact a rather pretty girl. I know. I've met her dozens of times.'

'The people who know about all this and have to look after her must have a feeling of revulsion,' Pennington said thoughtfully. 'I mean, a thing produced in a lab... '

'Don't kid yourself, and don't just take my word for it.

Everyone accepts her as an attractive girl. But a very special girl. Dawnay built her, but she was only the artisan. The design came from the computer, and it saw to it that she was tailor-made for its purpose. She absorbs knowledge from the computer, and the machine needs her to programme it, or rather, did do so.'

'Did?'

'She's gone.'

'You mean she's disappeared?'

Quadring looked into the dark congealed mess in the bowl of his pipe. 'That's exactly what I do mean.'

Pennington laughed, a little too loudly. 'Perhaps she didn't exist! I mean, I don't think one can really believe in a manufactured human being with a mental rapport with a computer.'

'We service types aren't paid to think,' said Quadring.

'Right now our job is to find her, and whoever destroyed the computer. It could hardly have been an outside job. It was done too expertly and quickly. The building was burning nicely by the time the patrols called me and had bashed through the locked doors and plied their extinguishers. Anyway, there wasn't a lot of point. The computer had been well and truly damaged with an axe before the arson. Security checks have told us one thing so far: the girl - she's called Andre, after Andromeda, the star or whatever it is that's alleged to have transmitted the dope for the computer - is missing, along, with a scientist named John Fleming.'

'Anything known about him ?'

'He's marked with a query on the files.' Nothing definite.

But he's the usual sort of bright young genius who thinks he knows better than the Establishment. The story is that he'd fallen for the girl. And she sort, of depended on him for advice the computer didn't or wouldn't give. They were certainly always together - at work and off it.'

'So they might be together now?'

'Exactly. At first light, if the mist clears, you and your boys start looking. Some half-asleep guard down at the jetty thinks he saw a man and a woman get in a boat and head out to sea just before the alarm siren started.'

'They could have landed anywhere along the coast by now,' Pennington said.

'Not in that boat. It's known it hadn't more than a gallon of petrol. It's just a little outboard effort for pottering along the promontory to check the defences. They'd make one of the islets off the coast, no farther.'

'What about a rendezvous out at sea?'

Quadring glanced at his companion. 'A snatch by our old friend a Foreign Power?' He shrugged. 'It could be. The Navy got the alarm along with you. Destroyers and aircraft by now will have started combing the Western approaches and away up North for two innocent-looking fishing trawlers and blatantly neutral tramps. But our radar watch would have picked up anything bigger than a rowing boat.

'My bet is they'll find nothing. Maybe you won't either.

But with this sort of weather a little open boat isn't exactly healthy. The island makes the best of some poor bets.'

Quadring stood up and looked through the window.

'Time to get moving,' he said. 'And I've a tricky report to write on my incompetence to date.'

There was an almost imperceptible lifting of the blackness of the sky when Pennington walked across to the parking lot.

The men were smoking and talking in undertones. Pennington told them briefly that a couple of suspected saboteurs, a man and a girl, were believed to have escaped by boat either to land farther up the coast or on one of the islands in the vicinity.

'They're wanted alive - not dead,' he finished. 'So no rough stuff. They're not believed to be armed, and there's no real reason why they should be unpleasant. The girl is - er a particularly vital witness. We'll get down to the jetty and arrange sweep and search routine from there.'

They had to hang around at the water's edge for another half hour for daylight. The mist began slowly to lift like a vast curtain, exposing first the grey sullen sea and then, a couple of miles out, the lower slopes of the nearest island with patches of snow still smudged against the northern sides.

Their landing was an anti-climax. Pennington was in the leading amphibian when he saw the figure of a man standing motionless on the shingle beach of the island. He didn't move when the vehicle lumbered out of the water and pulled up beside him.

'My name's Fleming,' he muttered. 'I expected you.'

He was a tallish, well-built man in his early thirties with a handsome but haggard face. His hair was wet and matted with sand, and his clothes torn and muddy. He stood quite still, as if exhausted.

'You must consider yourself under arrest,' Pennington said. 'And the girl who came with you?'

Fleming continued to stare out to sea. 'I lost contact with her when I was looking for shelter. She wandered off. There are footmarks. They end at a cave entrance. There's a deep pool inside.'

'She - she's killed herself?' Pennington demanded, mystified.

Fleming rounded on him. 'They killed her. The whole damned circus which used her.' He became calmer. 'She was hurt, badly hurt. If she slipped into that water she wouldn't have had a chance. Her hands - well, her hands were -'

'We'll dive in the pool; drag it,' said Pennington.

Fleming looked at him with something like pity. 'You do that,' he said. 'Your bosses will demand their pound of flesh, drowned if they can't have it alive.'

Pennington called to a Marine. 'Take Dr Fleming back to the mainland. Hand him over to Major Quadring. Tell the Major we're staying here to search the island.'

The direct line between Thorness and the Ministry of Science in Whitehall had been busy since the news of the disaster to the computer had been flashed to the duty officer just after midnight. :

The Minister himself had arrived at his office at the unheard-of hour of 9 a.m. He used a side door in case some observant reporter got the idea of a crisis. Rather to his annoyance, he found his Personal and Private Secretary, Brian Fothergill, already there, looking his usual calm and elegant self.

'Good morning, Minister,' he said affably. 'A nasty morning.

The roads were quite icy.'

'To hell with the icy roads,' the Minister muttered pettishly.

'What I want is some information about this Thorness business. Defence woke me at five. I didn't worry the P.M.

for an hour. He took it badly, very badly. He's arranging a Cabinet for eleven. We must have useful material for him, Fothergill. If not a solution. I suppose we're still in as much of a fog as that bloody place in the Highland mists? Fothergill delicately laid a neatly typed sheet of quarto on the Minister's desk. 'Not completely, sir,' he murmured, 'as you will gather from this precis of the position. It's a preliminary, of course, all that I've been able to compile in the' - he glanced at his wafer-thin wrist watch - 'seventy-five minutes since I inaugurated an investigation.'

'For God's sake,' snapped the Minister irritably, 'drop that ghastly jargon. What you mean is that you've been nagging everyone for something to put down here. I hope you got the whole crew out of their beds.'

The Minister read quickly through the report. 'Good, good,' he nodded, 'as far as it goes. Which actually means bad, bad. Not your fault, Brian,' he added hurriedly. 'You are to be congratulated on the energy with which you have gone round in circles. But there are features of interest.'

He re-read the report.

'The computer's gone. The girl's gone. The months of recording of the Andromeda equations by the radio-telescope at Bouldershaw Fell have gone. Somebody named Fleming whom I recall as an untidy and self-opinionated upstart has gone too. He gave me the impression when I met him that he drank. Which probably means he womanises too. I suspect that there's the usual tawdry sexual undercurrent in this debacle. However, that's a matter for M.I.6 and their confreres at the Yard. They must find them. More interesting is this note that our colleague Osborne visited Thorness yesterday evening.'

He looked up and glanced blandly at Fothergill. 'Where is Osborne? Missing, I presume?'

Fothergill permitted himself a moment's hesitation before he replied. 'No, sir, I have located him. He caught the overnight sleeper which arrived at Euston half an hour ago. I took it upon myself to request his immediate presence here in your name.'

'Quite right. And I'll put him through the hoop. These civil servants in the permanent jobs think themselves unanswerable to anyone.' The Minister cleared his throat. He realised he was infringing convention in openly criticising the Department's Permanent Under Secretary to a junior.

'That will be all, Fothergill, for the moment. Show Osborne in as soon as he arrives. And don't let me be late for that 11 o'clock Cabinet. I shall need you at 10.30 to take my memorandum.'

Fothergill faded noiselessly away. The Minister had time to ascertain a few more facts before Osborne was announced.

As a senior civil servant the Under Secretary was permitted, even encouraged, to keep in personal contact with the Thorness project. But why this visit on the previous day? And why, as the Thorness guard room record book showed, had he signed in a visitor, name not given?

The thought of some espionage scandal directly affecting the Ministry of Science built up his fury to a zenith by the time Osborne entered immediately after he had knocked.

The Minister glowered at him. 'Who was this chap you took to Thorness with you?' he asked without preamble.

'An assistant,' Osborne answered shortly.

The Minister was determined to keep his temper if he could. 'Why did you take him?' he demanded. 'What did you need an assistant for on this nocturnal visit?'

Osborne seemed to discover something of tremendous interest on the Minister's desk. 'It is essential for him to be in the picture,' he murmured.

The Minister got up from his chair and crossed to the window. He felt uneasy at the calmness of this man, and knew that there would be little chance of getting at the truth unless he could disturb his calm. Right now the only person in danger of losing his temper was himself.

'He didn't leave a bomb, I suppose?'

He knew it was the wrong approach. Whatever unethical views Osborne might hold, he wasn't the kind to help in violence. 'All right, of course he didn't,' he went on hastily.

'But you know what this means, don't you?'

He moved from the window and confronted Osborne.

'We've lost our national capital, all of it. The computer's gone. The girl's gone. Even the original message which the Bouldershaw telescope picked up has gone. There's no chance of starting again. From being a first class power, with the know-how for unassailable defence plus all the potential for industrial supremacy we're now relegated to a second-rate power; third-rate in fact.'

Osborne turned his gaze from the desk and looked mildly at his inquisitor. His silence infuriated the Minister still more .

'Once in a million years,' he pointed out, 'or probably longer, a planet gets a Christmas present from another planet. And what does some dam' fool do? They go and burn it.'

Once again he crossed to the window and looked down on the traffic in Whitehall.

'Were they fools?'

Osborne's comment was not more than a murmured question.

'We'll be back on American aid by the end of the year,'

the Minister retorted.

'At least America's a boss you can understand,' Osborne suggested. 'This Andromeda information we had to take on its face value. The results seemed splendid. But who understood what it was all about? From somewhere in that dying and half-dead spiral nebula of Andromeda comes a briefing that makes no sense to anyone but a computer - and a freak girl; and maybe one honest-to-God human scientist.'

'You mean Fleming,' the Minister said.

Osborne ignored him. 'Given that an intelligence in some recess of space sends us a stream of technical data which enables us obediently to make an anthropomorphic creature to run its machine, who's honestly going to believe that the whole business is for our benefit and not theirs?'

The Minister lighted a cigarette. He could not help but be a little impressed with the argument. 'Is that what Fleming thought?' he asked.

'That it was an attempted take-over? Yes. I'm not saying he did blow the computer to pieces, but if he did I for one don't blame him. I thank God it didn't fall into anyone else's hands.'

The Minister was a simple-minded man. He disliked arguments about ethics. People were better off when they only did what they were told. 'My country right or wrong, my mother drunk or sober' was a motto he had heard when he was a boy. He thought it rather good.

'Whose side are you on, Osborne?'

Osborne gave him a bland smile. 'The losing one, usually, Minister.'

His chief snorted in disgust. 'I had hoped you would have had something useful to contribute. I was wrong. Perhaps Geers has bestirred himself enough to discover what the hell's been going on at the place he's supposed to be the director of.'

The Minister switched on his intercom and told a secretary to get Thorness on the line. Osborne took it as a gesture of dismissal. He walked slowly from the office. He was privately rather surprised that he was still a free man. Never before in his precisely-planned and sedate career as a civil servant had he allowed his feelings to colour his sense of duty. Yet, in view of what had happened, he felt no regret whatever. He had, in fact, helped Fleming, and he was only concerned that no one should be able to prove it.

As he returned down the corridor to his own office he permitted himself a smile of amusement at a mental picture of Geers on this morning of crisis.

Geers was a careerist. As Director of Thorness he was the fair-haired glory boy of the Ministries of Defence and Science. He had adroitly swung over to enthusiasm for the Dawnay Experiment after several days of obstinate obstruction in favour of rocketry. Geers was a man who knew which side his bread was buttered. He had virtually achieved the pleasurable miracle of having it buttered on both sides.

But away up in Scotland Geers was now presenting the picture of a victimised and harassed autocrat. Despite the frantic messages to his quarters during the night he had dressed as slowly and as carefully as usual, his shirt collar uncomfortably stiff and his tie pulled tight into a small neat knot. But the impression of dignified pomposity which he considered essential for a key man in the nation's scientific technocracy was marred by the hunted look in his tired eyes behind their glasses, the black sheen of an inadequate shave, and the nervous tautness of his mouth.

He sat at his vast stainless steel desk, bereft of papers, but festooned with telephones, and glared at the visitors he had summoned - Fleming and Dawnay.

Madeleine Dawnay sat in the one easy chair near the window.

Her rather mannish face was parchment yellow and her eyes were dull with fatigue and illness. She had pulled her dressing gown tightly round her emaciated body, missing the even warmth of the sick bay. Gratefully she sipped from a cup of coffee Geers' secretary had brought her.

Her eyes moved thoughtfully from Geers to Fleming, who lolled against the office partition. She said nothing, despite the glance of appeal Geers made to her.

'I've got the whole of Whitehall round my neck,' Geers said plaintively. 'The Minister of Defence is on the blower every five minutes, and half the senior staff at Science are badgering me, and I don't even know what happened.'

Dawnay put her coffee carefully on the window sill. The slight physical action seemed an effort. 'I don't know what's happened either,' she said quietly.

'Osborne arrived at the station just after ten. With someone else. The public relations girl took them to the computer room. God knows why, but then I'm only the Director here.

Afterwards, when Osborne and his guest had booked out, the duty operator locked up for the night.'

'And Osborne went back to London?' Fleming looked better now; he had had a shave and a bath, and his usual casual slacks and wool shirt and sweater were at least moderately clean. He seemed now more despondent than tired, but there were strain marks around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.

'Yes,' said Geers. 'No one else went in to the computer block after that, except the girl, Andromeda. After she'd been there some time the guard corporal thought he smelt burning. He went into the main control room and found the place a perfect shambles and full of smoke.'

'And where was Andre?' Dawnay asked.

'Got out through the emergency exit, according to the corporal. Anyway, she or someone dropped a glove. A man's glove.'

He turned and looked at Fleming, suddenly displaying a leather gauntlet taken from the desk drawer. 'Yours?'

Fleming did not trouble to look.

'So you know it all,' Geers said. 'Only two people know, you and the girl. The girl's dead.'

Fleming nodded. With maddening slowness he repeated: 'The girl's dead. So that's that.'

'Not quite,' said Geers angrily. 'You have some questions to answer. You're the only person, Fleming, who wanted the computer destroyed. You always have. I can tell you that your security file is full of instances when you've shot off your mouth about it. In that I'm glad to say you're unique.

Others have a better sense of loyalty, more vision.'

Dawnay protested. 'I think some of us were beginning to have doubts.'

Geers turned and stared at her unbelievingly. He was about to speak when the intercom buzzed.

'Major Quadring is here, sir,' came his secretary's voice.

'He has the Marine Commando report on the island search.'

'Right,' Geers told her. 'I'll see him in his office.'

He rose and crossed to the door. 'You're to stay here, Fleming,' he ordered. Less brusquely he told Dawnay that he would try not to keep her much longer.

When the door closed Fleming moved across the office and stood close to Dawnay, looking out of the window.

'He's no business to drag you into all this,' he said. 'You're not well enough yet.'

She laughed shortly. 'I'm all right. I'm a tough old bird. I must be, or I wouldn't be here. Bu tell me, John, what really happened? You did it, didn't you?'

He kept on looking out of the window. 'You don't want to be saddled with this.'

'I don't,' she agreed, 'but as I'm involved whether I like it or not I'll just say that you can trust me if you want to trust anyone. Osborne must have smuggled you in. Then you and the girl destroyed it.'

'The girl's dead.'

There was a break in his voice which surprised her. In her experience John Fleming easily got emotional about principles, ideals, wrongs. But seldom about people.

'Anyway,' she said quietly. 'There's no one, no one, to give evidence against you.'

Before he could answer Geers returned. He was grim but pleased with himself. Major Quadring had brought useful information.

Deliberately he took time to seat himself at his desk before he spoke.

'Right, Fleming; right,' he barked.

'Right what?' enquired Fleming lazily.

'What happened when you got to the island?'

Fleming ambled around the desk. 'Why ask me when obviously the snoops have told you? But I'll confirm what they have undoubtedly said. We got into the caves and I lost her. They're big caves. We had no torch. She blundered into a dead-end with a deep pool. That was it. Poor bloody kid.'

Dawnay noted the break in his voice again. 'I thought you held Andre wasn't human,' she observed.

'Human enough to drown.'

'Are you sure she fell in?' Geers asked suspiciously.

'Of course I'm sure,' Fleming snapped. 'Quadring told you that they'd found the bandages off her hands, didn't he? Or was that one bit of his smug little report he forgot to give? Or were those jolly Marines so dumb they didn't think them worth picking up ?'

Geers studied Fleming in silence, taking his time so that he could be certain of noting any reaction. 'I have news for you, Fleming, if it is news in your case. They've both dived and dragged the pool. There's no body.'

There was no doubt about Fleming's surprise. 'She must be in there,' he shouted. 'I traced her into that part of the caves. They've not dragged properly. There's no other way out. I searched thoroughly.'

'So Quadring says,' Geers murmured. His briskness had gone. He had hoped to bluster a confession from Fleming.

But Fleming was obviously dumbfounded.

'She can't get off the island, and as it's been under constant survey since daylight that mean's she's somewhere in the caves. I'm going to look for myself. It's the only way to get things done in this damned situation.'

'I'll take you,' said Fleming firmly.

'No, that won't do,' Geers retorted. 'You're under arrest.'

'Only on your instructions.'

'Let him,' Dawnay interrupted. 'He knows the place. He wants to find Andre far more even than you.'

With bad grace Geers agreed and the two men went off to get into warm clothes and seaboots.

Fleming was authorised to draw torches and a high-pressure lamp, and to fuel an outboard motor boat. Within half an hour they were crossing the two miles of angry water to the island. Neither said a word on the trip. Geers sat hunched in the middle of the boat staring at the silhouette of the rocky islet rising out of the mist. Fleming sat at the stem holding the tiller.

He beached the boat on the shingle right opposite the mouth of the cave.

Geers waded through the surf while Fleming heaved the boat clear of deep water. They clambered through the steep shingle at high tide mark and moved to the mouth of the cave. Gulls wheeled and called at this invasion of their private kingdom, but the silence inside the cavern made a weird contrast to the screaming birds and the rhythmic hiss of the breaking waves.

'Sure this is the way you came?' Geers asked, moving cautiously forward in the wavering light of the lamp and Fleming's torch.

'Sure,' grunted Fleming. 'You automatically memorise this sort of thing just to make sure you don't forget the way out.'

He directed his beam of torchlight along a narrow sloping.

passage which curved to the right. 'There's the way to the chamber with the pool. You can see the Commando's footsteps in the sand.'

Geers began to move forward, shining the lamp on the disturbed sand. He stopped abruptly when he sensed that Fleming was not following. 'Where are you going?' he called.

Fleming was moving to the left. 'I'm taking a look down this passage. There's another pool in here too.'

'You think they dragged the wrong one?' Geers asked.

'No. Even Quadring and that Marine Officer aren't that stupid.'

Geers turned back. 'I don't know what your idea is, but I'm coming to see. We'll look at the other pool afterwards.'

The passage dropped steeply, and the aperture became smaller. Fleming crouched low and moved steadily ahead.

Geers, trying to keep up with him, caught his boot on a boulder and fell headlong. He grunted with pain as a jagged rock caught his shoulder.

Fleming turned and shone his torch on him. 'Hurt yourself? It's tricky if you haven't done much caving. Wait here while I take a look at the pool. I won't be long.'

Geers got up awkwardly and took a few steps back to the wider part of the passage. Fleming's footsteps echoed softly but clearly along the cave walls, getting fainter and fainter.

For a full minute there was the cold, dead silence of a lifeless world. Then, to his right in the direction of the main cavern, came the hard, clear sound of a stone moving across the rock face. It dropped with a dull plop into water. Geers froze into immobility, instinctively holding his breath.

Another stone fell into the water, and then the rasp of several pebbles.

Geers' reaction was a mixture of excitement and fear. The fear won. He dared not move by himself. He yelled for Fleming.

His voice was a falsetto, and the urgency brought Fleming back as fast as he could clamber up the slope.

'Hi' he said. 'What's up?'

'Didn't you hear anything? Find anything?' Geers demanded.

'It's a deep pool, like the other. I think it's just behind the rock face of the main cavern. When you get deep pools like these in cave holes they are sometimes connected at the base - like a U-tube. What goes in one may come out of the other.'

'But nothing has?'

Fleming shook his head.

'No, but a body could be caught at the bottom. They'd better drag the second pool as well.'

Geers shivered, though it was not as cold in the cave as outside. 'Not a nice death, even for a creature,' he muttered. More loudly he asked, 'Did you throw stones into the pool.

Fleming shone his torch on the other's face. 'No,' he answered. 'Why do you ask?'

At that moment there again came the faint noise of moving pebbles. In the echoing and re-echoing of the tiniest sound it was almost impossible to identify the direction of the noise.

'There it is again. The noise. Stones moving,' whispered Geers.

'Dislodged by me, and still not settled. It always happens.'

Geers wasn't satisfied. He moved a step or so along the right hand passage, the light from his lamp swinging along the sides of the pool cavern. The rocks were wet and grey, with here and there pyrites glistening as the light caught them.

Fleming also switched on his torch and the beam reached right across the pool where the rock face curved gently into a rounded surface at the edge of the water. In a recess the light caught and held a blob of white.

'What is it?' whispered Geers, clutching at his companion's arm.

Fleming shook off Geers' hand and moved forward. The torch beam probed into the crevice.

'What is it?' Geers repeated urgently.

'Her, of course. Give me a hand to get her out.'

Fleming eased forward, cautiously seeking a foothold on the slimy rock. Geers did not follow.

'At least play the light so I can see,' Fleming shouted angrily.

When he reached Andre he thought she was dead. Her dress was saturated and clinging to her body. She felt stone cold as Fleming put his hands under the waist and shoulders to half-lift half-drag her back.

Difficult as the job was, he realised how little she weighed, how fragile this man-made femina sapiens was.

Gently he laid her on the dry sand at Geers' feet, leaning against the rock face while he gasped for air. Geers stood transfixed.

'Is she - ?' he whispered, placing the lamp on the ground so it illuminated the girl's face. She looked like the death-figure of a young goddess, slim and fair and palely beautiful.

Fleming squatted down and pulled up an eyelid. The blue iris seemed sightless. There was no visible contraction as the light caught it. He groped on the ice-cold wrist for the sign of pulsation. There was a tremor of movement. He could not be sure whether it was in his own fingers or proof that Andre still lived.

'I'm not a doctor, so I can't be sure. But I think there's a flicker. She once said she had a better constructed heart than humans.'

Fleming once more put his hands under her shoulders and pulled her to a sitting position. When the upper part of her body was upright her head fell forward. And she moaned.

'She is alive,' shouted Geers exultantly.

'Just.' With his free hand Fleming fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a flask.

'Try a drop of the hard stuff, duckie,' he said. With his teeth he unscrewed the cap.

'You shouldn't force her to drink alcohol. It's a fallacy that - '

'To hell with your boy scouts' first aid rules! Here, my sweet,' he murmured to the girl, 'it's the real McCoy.'

He let a few drops of whisky seep through Andre's pale, clenched lips.

Not daring to move, both men waited for the reaction. It came gradually. The lips relaxed and parted a little. The tongue tip emerged and moved across them.

Fleming gently brushed the matted blonde hair from her face. He was rewarded by a momentary flickering of the eyelids.

'That's it,' he murmured close to her ear. 'Now try to swallow a mouthful.' He forced the mouth of the flask between her lips and against her teeth, tipping in a spoonful of spirit.

Andre gulped, spluttered, and then swallowed it. Fleming could feel her body relaxing against his encircling arm.

'How did she get here?' Geers demanded.

'There must be a siphon between the two pools. She'd sink on one side and come up on the other. God knows how she managed to hang on the side and pull herself up. Not with those injuries.'

He nodded towards Andre's hands, lying close together in her lap. They were grotesquely swollen and discoloured, the bloated whiteness of the back and knuckles contrasting horribly with the seared flesh of the fingers where the computer had burnt them.

Geers shuddered. 'Can we carry her out of here?' he asked doubtfully. 'We must get her to the mainland as soon as we can. Then perhaps we'll find out the truth about this business.'

The impatience in Geers' tone infuriated Fleming. 'Give it a rest, can't you? The girl's half dead and all you can think of is putting her in thumbscrews.'

He believed that Andre half understood what was being.

said. Her body tautened in his arms and she made a pathetic attempt to shift away.

Awkwardly Fleming struggled out of his duffle coat without releasing his hold on her and draped it around her shoulders. 'You're okay,' he reassured her. 'It's all over now.

We'll go away for a nice long holiday. You know who I am, don't you?'

Her clouded eyes opened wider and stared at his face. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

He felt ridiculously pleased. 'Fine! I'm going to lift you up. Keep your hands just where they are and they won't get rubbed. Here we go!'

Geers made no attempt to help. He watched Fleming grasp Andre and lift her like a baby, shifting the weight until he had her held securely, her head against his shoulder.

Satisfied that they were leaving at last, Geers bent down to pick up the torch. Fleming was just behind him. With a quick shove from his boot he sent Geers sprawling. Then he kicked the lamp away. There was a tinkle of glass as it hit the rock-face and the light went out.

Fleming laughed aloud. 'Hold tight, darling, we're taking off,' he whispered to Andre. Half crouching to avoid bumping the cave roof, he loped ahead helped by the fitful, jerking light from his own torch. Geers' wails of fright and fury echoed behind him.

Fleming reached the cave entrance with no more than one bad bump on his shoulder. There was a stretch of thirty yards to the boat. He noted with satisfaction that the tide had turned and the stern was already afloat.

He was wading in deep water before Geers stumbled from the cave entrance, bawling Fleming's name and alternately threatening punishment and appealing for him to wait.

Fleming lowered Andre into the bottom of the boat. She groaned pitifully as her hand struck a rowlock.

Fleming crouched over the motor. If only the damned thing would fire first time. Outboard engines were temperamental until they got heated up. He forced himself methodically to check choke and fuel control before he wrenched at the starter cord. He whipped it out with all his strength. The engine fired with a staccato burst of noise, spluttered, and then settled into a steady rhythm.

With a kick over the side that filled his boot with sea water Fleming pushed off stern first. A couple of yards and there was room to veer. He gave the engine full throttle and the boat swung seawards. Geers was standing impotently up to his knees in water, shaking his arms and burbling incoherent imprecations. Fleming didn't trouble to turn round to look at him.

The sea was pretty calm while the island protected it from the ocean swell. He grabbed the chance to check the petrol reserve and to wrap his coat more tightly around Andre. She was either asleep or had lapsed into unconsciousness again.

The boat moved crabwise because of the current running through the narrows between' the island and the mainland.

On this course he was merely making a return trip right up to the jetty at Thorness.

His headlong flight had been without much reason. His objective had simply been to get Andre away from Geers and all that he represented in cold, efficient care and ruthless questioning.

Now he had time to think up a plan. But not much time.

The sea was getting perceptibly rougher. They were hitting a swell. Foam frothed here and there on the crescents of the heaving water ahead. He made up his mind.

He turned the rudder to port and headed straight into the current. Emergency made his memory crystal clear. He could see this grey, misty waste of angry water as it was in the rare calm of a summer's day. He remembered the haphazard pattern of shoals, rocks, and islets which had made the area forbidden territory to any sailor except a few crab fishermen even before the Admiralty cordoned it off as a rocket range.

Fleming was not unduly worried about crashing the boat.

It wasn't capable of more than ten knots and was as manoeuvrable as a coracle. Though the half-hearted light of a winter's day was already lessening he felt sure that the noise of breaking waves and the swirl of foam would give him all the warning he needed of danger.

What he wanted was something a bit larger than a collection of rocks where maybe a long-deserted crofter's cottage or bird-watcher's eyrie existed. Such places were built to resist wind and cold; they were as strong as the rocks from which they were made. They would give him a breathing space while he thought out the next move. Not for the first time in his life he half-regretted acting precipitately.

A flurry of sleet hit him in the face. The gust of wind which accompanied it shook the boat, and a little water burst over the side, wetting Andre's face. She cried out and lifted her hand to brush away her matted hair. The touch of her hand on her forehead made her moan again.

Fleming opened the throttle still more. There was no point in conserving petrol. He had got to get her out of the boat before the storm grew worse or before nightfall. He wasn't certain which would come first.

For a full hour he sped northwards, straining his eyes and ears for a sign of land. There was nothing but the howl of the increasing wind and the expanse of the spume-flecked sea.

Then, unmistakably, he heard the uneven roar of water crashing on to rocks and shingle. The sea became less broken, turning into a sullen, greenish swell. Beyond the broken mist a dark grey bulk loomed up - much darker than the twilight grey of the sky.

He throttled down and veered to starboard. With the currents and sporadic gale-force winds he had no real idea where he was. He had no intention, even now, of landing on the mainland, right into the arms of some official or meek and law-abiding citizen.

He steered a course a generous forty feet from the breaking waves. He tried to tell himself that he recognised the coast as one of the islands he had visited for recreation back in the summer, but he knew it was just self-persuasion. In such conditions all these islands looked much the same. All he could be certain of was that it was an island, a small one.

Many gulls, disturbed by the noise of the boat as they settled down to roost for the night, wheeled around, with their piteous calling. Gulls preferred islands.

The rock face sloped abruptly downwards at the point where the boat veered round until it was almost east of the land. Where the rocks met the water was a tiny beach, or rather a steep stretch of rounded stones, not more than twenty feet wide.

Without hesitation Fleming steered straight for it, running the boat half out of the water. There was a vicious jerk and the sound of tearing timber. The lower section of the boat had been stove in.

Fleming jumped over the side, feeling for a foothold. Then he caught hold of Andre and lifted her out. He laid her gently down on the stones above the water line and returned to the boat. He manhandled it round until it pointed seawards.

Water was gurgling in fast. Tying the tiller midway, he set the throttle at full. The boat shot crazily away, the nose already down and the thrashing screw almost out of the water. He did not wait to see the boat go under; he lifted Andre once more and clambered as fast as he could to the higher ground beyond the stones.

There was a distinct track where the ground provided some shallow soil where coarse grass and stunted heather struggled to live.

Fleming was not surprised about this. He had expected it.

For just at the moment the boat had swung towards the beach he had seen a dull yellow light a few hundred yards behind and above the landfall.

From the track the light had shape. It was a narrow vertical chink between some patterned curtains.

He did not care who lived there. Coastguard, radar operator, rocket trajectory observer, recluse. The main thing was to get warmth and help for the girl. She was now as lifeless in his arms as when he had first grabbed hold of her at the edge of the cavern pool.