Andromeda Breakthrough

CHAPTER TWELVE CLEAR SKY

THE Prime Minister received the emergency committee in his private study on the first floor of 10 Downing Street.

Although he had insisted on the fact being kept secret, he had been in bed for two days. His doctors diagnosed the trouble as cardiac asthma, which was as good a description as any for the strain felt by everyone of more than middle age as breathing became more and more difficult. The news of Dawnay's miracle in Azaran had now reached Whitehall, but its effects were still unfelt.

However, he insisted on rising to greet the Minister of Science and Osborne when they arrived.

'Glad you made it,' he wheezed. 'Are things still bad?'

'A nightmare, sir,' said the Minister. 'All the low ground beyond Hammersmith is flooded; the roads are under water.'

He began coughing.

'It's no good for us, this business,' said the Prime Minister.

'We'll be the first to succumb. Which will solve many a political problem. We shall soon have the youngest cabinet in history, called The Survivors.'

The Minister of Science managed a polite laugh. 'One worrying matter, sir, is that London Airport is flooded out.

Gatwick's been unserviceable for some time, of course. And Civil Aviation isn't too happy about Hurn. I'd like your authority to get the R.A.F. to clear Lyneham for a priority landing. With at least two helicopters standing by for a run direct to us here. Hyde Park is still fairly clear despite the feeding centres and casualty stations.'

'This means you have more news, Bertie,' said the Prime Minister. 'I do wish you could restrain your sense of melodrama.'

'We've picked up a signal from Azaran sir,' Osborne interposed. 'Professor Neilson's on his way. He and Professor Dawnay have taken over from a Herr Kaufman, who we believe was involved in the security leak at Thorness.'

'Quite so, Osborne,' said the Prime Minister with an amused smile. That was an old wound now and, like Osborne's other wounds, it was healing over and being forgotten.

Osborne had more than redeemed himself since then.

'Thorness. But the anti-bacterium?'

'He's bringing all he can carry, sir. Not much because of the flight difficulties these days, but enough to distribute to about a thousand breeding centres.'

'Through the international organisation?'

'Yes, said the Minister of Science. 'I may say, Prime Minister, that the will to co-operate has been magnificent.

Japan suggested moving every oil tanker still afloat into mid-ocean, straddling marine currents like the Gulf Stream. The Soviet Union has completely cleared five state chemical plants. Fifty per cent of the United States oil refineries are now cleaned and waiting. Here the Royal Engineers expect to have every gasometer on the coast patched up and ready by Saturday; the dairy and petroleum firms have had all their road tankers commandeered and marshalled at the various centres we decided on.'

'Good,' wheezed the Prime Minister. 'Let's hope, dear boy, that it's happening in time for some of us. You will want to confer with Neilson, of course, when he gets here. Afterwards, send him round here. I shall want to discuss his plans.

Then a broadcast, the people deserve a few words of encouragement and hope.'

But it was not until the following night that the Prime Minister felt justified in telling the world that hope was returning. Throughout the previous twenty-four hours there had been frantic activity. The thousand activated test tubes Neilson brought seemed pathetically few when allocation began. A hundred of them were first distributed to British breeding centres. To save time the chemists concerned were briefed verbally by Neilson. Multi-language instructions were then prepared while Army Signals contacted all nations concerned to report details of samples and estimated time of arrival.

The R.A.F. and the United States Air Force handled transportation. A little slice of history was made as a U.S.

long-range reconnaissance jet dropped towards Moscow's military airfield with Russian fighters doing welcoming victory rolls around her.

In a gesture to the almost unknown man who had had the titular responsibility of saving the world thrust upon him the Prime Minister insisted that the broadcast should open with the statement by the President of Azaran.

The radio link was difficult and tenuous, but over most of the globe it held.

'For many centuries we of Azaran have been considered a backward people,' came the soft sing-song tones of the President. 'But now, if we can bring salvation to the rest of the world it will be our privilege and joy. Already over our own country the weather is improving, and the air once more satisfies our lungs. This, we pray and believe, will spread to all the stricken peoples of the earth.'

A resourceful radio station operator had dug up a recording of the Azarani national anthem. Its plaintive discord surged out and faded.

Then the Prime Minister made his historic broadcast, from London. 'Strains of a newly synthesised bacterium, which we have received from Azaran, can be the means of banishing the evil which has inflicted itself on mankind. With the help of the scientists, in whose hands our fate now lies, the governments of all nations are doing all they can. Already strains of the bacterium are being bred in the United Kingdom and pumped into the sea. First batches have arrived in the laboratories of our sister nations in the crusade against annihilation. More are coming from Azaran and will be distributed as fast as is humanly possible. With a concerted effort in every quarter of the globe we may hope the content of the sea will change, and we will breathe our native air again.'

The Prime Minister leaned back in his chair, exhausted.

Speaking had been a great effort and he rested while translations of his speech were broadcast in the five working languages of the United Nations. Then he called for his car.

He turned to the officials gathered around him and spoke in a voice which was hardly more than a whisper. 'I would like to see, gentlemen, if those promises I've made are reasonable.

They tell me there's a breeding plant down at the London docks.'

A police car escorted the Prime Minister's limousine through the darkened City past Tower Bridge. It nosed a way through piles of debris, detouring round many a barricaded street, until it pulled up on an old shabby wharf.

A sullen drizzle was falling, a respite from the interminable storms and gales. Two raincoated men were standing at the water's edge, watching a man in a police launch. They started when they recognised the bent elderly man beside them as the Prime Minister.

'We're testing for nitrogen content, sir,' one of the men explained. 'Anti-bacteria were pumped into this water six hours ago.'

'How's it doing?' asked the Prime Minister.

'Fine, sir. Come and look.'

In the headlight of the police launch the filthy river water looked black and sullen. But while they watched a bubble formed and burst. Nearby two more bubbles formed.

'It's happening right across the river, sir. Been noticeable for the last two and a half hours. It's the nitrogen being released as the new bacterium kills off the old one.'

Another car drew up on the wharf. Osborne, alerted by the Premier's P.A., had brought Neilson to the site. The Prime Minister greeted them quietly with a smile and a half-raised hand.

'The cure is not, I hope, as bad as the disease,' he enquired of the American.

Neilson shook his head. 'No sir. The anti-bacterium does not survive the conditions it creates; Professor Dawnay has tested this fact very thoroughly. It has only one enemy, one source of food, the bacteria emerging from Thorness. Once it has exhausted the supply of those it languishes and dies itself.'

'Just as an antibiotic destroys germs and then is itself destroyed,' put in Osborne.

'Except that in this case we think that the end will be more complete - '

The Prime Minister interrupted Neilson with another smile. 'I see you have it under control.'

He stood a little longer, watching the bubbles come and go. 'Thank God! Thank God!' he whispered as he returned to his car.

Conditions in Azaran were completely transformed within twenty-four hours of Neilson's arrival in Britain. Aircraft from a dozen nations flew in scientists and technicians to help Dawnay and to organise transportation and communications.

A U.N. stand-by force was put on call but, by the President's wish, was only to enter Azaran in the event of a threat from Intel. Dawnay had engineered herself complete freedom.

But the whole entity of Intel was collapsing quietly and completely. The N.K.V.D., Interpol, and the F.B.I., working together on the report which Neilson had taken to London, raided and closed the main offices in Vienna and in Zurich and Hong Kong; and the names revealed in the documents they captured caused consternation in a dozen chancelleries.

By general agreement among the great powers, no pressure was brought to force dismissal and arrest, but all the consortium's trading licences were withdrawn. There were a couple of suicides and a whole series of resignations on health grounds, hardly noticed in the world-wide drama of retreat from chaos, and what was left came rapidly to a standstill, leaving empty trading posts all over the world without credentials or trade, and useless unclaimed millions in safe deposits in Swiss banks. In Azaran, the main centre of anti-bacteria production and the computer which had evolved it were left respectively in the hands of Madeleine Dawnay and her associate, John Fleming, who had both become world-famous characters overnight.

The atmosphere of super-efficiency and the constant flattery bestowed on Dawnay and himself repelled Fleming. He wanted no part of it; nor, indeed, was there anything for him usefully to do. He avoided the eager, enthusiastic groups who gathered in the makeshift canteen. He evaded invitations to parties which were soon organised in Baleb.

Soon after he had seen Kaufman into Interpol's custody, Fleming had suffered an experience which he found he could not dismiss from his mind. He had collected the handful of personal things in Abu's desk and driven to Lemka's village, glad that an officer of the President's personal staff had gone earlier to break the news of Abu's death to her.

It was very quiet inside the ruined courtyard of the house.

A line of washing fluttered in the wind. The baby's cot stood in the shade of a crumbling wall. A spiral of smoke eddied away from a cluster of faggots in a makeshift grate. He called and waited until Lemka appeared at the shattered doorway at the sound of footsteps.

'I came to say -' Fleming began.

'Do not tell me that you are sorry,' she interrupted, moving to the clothes line and keeping her face averted. 'And do not tell me it was not your fault.'

'I didn't want to involve your husband,' he muttered.

She turned round angrily. 'You involved us all.'

'I liked him, you know. Very much. I came to see what I could do,' he pleaded.

She was fighting back her tears. 'You've done enough.

You've saved the world - from your own muddle. So now you think it is all right. How can you - all of you - be so arrogant? You don't believe in God. You don't accept life as His gift. You want to change it because you think you're greater than God.'

'I tried to stop... ' His voice trailed away.

'You tried, and we suffer. The girl - your girl - was right when she said you condemn us. Why don't you go back and listen to her?'

'She is dying.'

'You kill her too?' She looked at him more with pity than with hatred. He could not answer. He laid the little parcel of Abu's possessions at the foot of the child's cot and walked away.

Back at the compound, he stole like an interloper by a roundabout route to his own quarters. He took out the computer print-out and his own calculations from a drawer and began studying them.

He had put them away when Dawnay had refused to help him, because he felt that he could not possibly do them himself.

He simply did not know enough bio-chemistry. For what seemed a lifetime he had avoided Andre's room, because he could no longer face the fact of her dying, and by now he had given up all hope of Dawnay having the time, energy, or will to be able to help him.

Dawnay now was installed in the executive block, at the centre of a quickly-spun web of radio and cable communications, directing and advising struggling scientists all round the world. He did not know how she managed it, or whether she ever slept; he didn't even see her.

He sat in his little room and stared glumly at the mass of figures. Then he opened a fresh bottle of whisky and started to try to make head or tail of them. It was close on midnight when he walked a little unsteadily across the deserted clearing to the laboratory.

With the experimental work over, the master breeding tanks had been transferred to the executive building where there was room for the regiments of assistants Dawnay could now direct. The laboratory where it had all begun was neat and lifeless. He groped for a switch. The light came on.

Most of the circuits had been restored during the previous day.

Hardly knowing from what recesses of memory of his student days they came, or how much was inspired by the neat Scotch, he began to find the facts he needed arranging themselves in his mind. Slowly and laboriously, and a little drunkenly, he started to make a chemical synthesis out of the mass of calculation he had written down.

His own training kept him roughly on the right path, but he ruefully had to face the fact that the ordinary, plebeian routine of practical chemistry was really beyond him. He lacked patience and accuracy; but obstinacy, and the memory of Lemka's pitying eyes, drove him on. He did not notice that morning sunlight was outshining the bare electric bulbs, nor did he hear the door open.

'What a hell of a mess!' said Dawnay's voice. 'Look at my laboratory. What do you think you're doing?'

He dropped off the high stool at the bench and stretched.

'Hello, Madeleine,' he said. 'I've been trying to synthesise this thing for Andre. Most of the main chain seems to have jelled. But the side chains are all to hell.'

Dawnay ran an expert eye over his work amid the litter spread across bench and desks. 'I'm not surprised,' she exclaimed. 'You've achieved a glorious mess. Better leave it to me.'

'I thought you hadn't time. I thought you were too busy setting the world to rights.'

She ignored what he was saying and went on looking at the equations he had written down.

'Admittedly,' she said slowly, 'if there's a chemical deficiency in her blood or endocrine glands there must be a chemical answer, but we can't know whether this is it.'

'It has to be, doesn't it?' he suggested. 'Our electronic boss says so.'

She considered for a time. 'Why do you want to do this, John?' she enquired. 'You've always been afraid of her.

Always wanted her out of the way.'

'Now I want her to live!'

She eyed him speculatively, a smile hovering around her mouth. 'Because you're a scientist and you want to know what the message is really all about? You can't bear to think that Gamboul knew and you don't? That's really the reason, isn't it?'

'You've some funny old ideas,' he smiled.

'Maybe,' she answered, 'maybe.' She reached for an overall on the wall hook. 'Go and get some breakfast, John.

Then come back here. I'll have some work for you to do.'

The two of them worked in perfect, almost instinctive co-operation, carefully avoiding any kind of moral or emotional argument. They were like enemies who were forced to live in the same cell. They talked of nothing but the enormous complication of the job, and for ten solid days, and most of the nights, they carried on. Messages about the world-wide improvements in barometric pressure, news bulletins reporting a noticeable lessening of wind violence, were just noted and then forgotten.

Because of her own forebodings or failure, Dawnay did not even tell Fleming that even before the checking was complete she had started injections on Andre. The ethics did not bother her. Andre's life was hovering near its end in any case.

Fleming still avoided the girl's sick room. He told himself that he would not see her until he could give her hope. He knew Dawnay was visiting her regularly, but he deliberately refrained from asking how she was.

And Dawnay, noting the slow improvement in her patient, hardly dared to believe that she had succeeded. Only when the doctor came and made prolonged and successful tests of muscular reflexes did she admit even to herself that the near-impossible had happened.

It was Andre herself who settled the matter. 'I am getting well,' she said one morning as she waited for another injection.

'You have saved my life.'

'You have saved yourself,' Dawnay said gently. You and John and the computer calculations.'

'What will he do now - now that I'm to go on?' Andre asked.

'I don't know.' Dawnay had wondered so much herself that she had been awaiting and dreading this question. 'He's divided. One part wants to go on. The other is frightened.

We're all like that. But fear doesn't entirely stop us going forward.'

'And I stand for going forward?' Andre asked.

'For much more. Down here on our cosy little earth we used to think we were protected from the outside by sheer distance. Now we see that intelligence - pure, raw intelligence - can cross great gulfs of space and threaten us.'

'You still think of me as a threat from outside?'

'No,' Dawnay answered. 'No, I don't.'

Andre smiled. 'Thank you for that. Can't I see him soon?'

'You're strong enough to get-up,' Dawnay agreed. 'He should see you. Yes,' she went on after a pause. 'We'll go together when you can walk.'

One evening the following week Fleming went back to the computer block. Partly to ease his conscience, and partly because he needed some fairly unskilled help, he had invited Yusel to work on the computer. The salary was good, which would help Lamka and the child.

When Dawnay found them there, the Arab excused himself and she was left alone with Fleming.

'John,' she said, 'Andre's here.'

'Where ?'

'Outside.' She smiled a little grimly at Fleming's amazement.

'She's cured, John. We've done it. She'll be all right now.'

At first she thought he was not going to say anything at all. Then he asked, in a hurt voice. 'Why couldn't you have told me?'

'I wasn't sure which way it was going.'

He stared at her with amazement. 'So you've repaired her, and the first thing you do is to bring her here - back to the machine! It's all so easy, so planned, just as if we're being used.' He turned away with a frown. 'How can we go on competing with her, with this ?'

'That depends on you,' Dawnay replied. 'I can't help you.

My job here is finished. I'm flying home tomorrow.'

'You can't!' he exclaimed.

'You wanted her well,' she reminded him, but he looked at her and through at a ghost.

'You can't leave me like this,' he implored. 'Not with her here.'

She had never before seen him plead for help. 'Look, John,' she said kindly. 'You're not a child that hides behind its mother's skirts. You're supposed to be a scientist. Andre didn't use you or me. It was we who turned the world upside down. It was Andre who saved it.' She moved to the door, beckoning to the waiting girl. 'I'll see you before I go.'

Andre walked quickly towards Fleming, stopping before him and smiling like a happy schoolgirl. She was still thin and pale, and her eyes looked very big above her high, sharp cheek-bones; but she no longer looked ill. She was alive and vibrant, with a kind of fined-down beauty which touched him in spite of himself.

'I can hardly believe that you're like this,' he said.

'You're not glad?'

'Of course I'm glad.'

'Are you afraid of me?'

'So long as you're a puppet, a mechanical doll.'

Colour suffused her cheeks and she tossed her hair away from her face. 'And you're not? You still think of yourself as a divine, unique creation. Three thousand millions of you on this earth alone. They - we - are all puppets, dancing on strings.'

'Let's dance then.' He kept his hands in his pockets, his body motionless.

'I will do whatever you wish,' she told him. 'All I know is one certain thing. We cannot go separate ways.'

He put out his hand and brushed it against hers. 'Then let's leave here,' he said. He turned and looked at the grey bulk of the computer. 'After we've destroyed this. We'll make a real job of it this time. Then we'll find somewhere with peace, like that island we were on with old what's-his-name - Preen.'

'All right,' she said. 'We will do as you want. I have often told you that. But have you thought? Have you really thought? Do you think we'd be allowed to live in peace any more than Preen was? The only safe place for us is here. If we accept this and its protection we accept what is planned.'

'Planned! That damned word. And what is planned?'

'What you want. It will be done here and in the rest of the world.'

'I'm afraid I'm not cut out to be a dictator.'

'The only possible sort of dictator is someone who is not cut out for it,' she said. 'Someone who knows.'

'Knows what?' he asked.

She took hold of his arm and began to lead him across to the observation bay of the computer.

'I'll show you what I showed Mm'selle Gamboul,' she said.

'Stand close beside me.'

Obediently he stood by the panel and brought in the phase switches as she called the numbers. She sat down, alert and expectant, with a hand on his.

The computer began to purr. Relays snicked into operation, the screen glowed. Like a film coming into focus the shadows grew smaller and sharper as they took form and perspective.

'It looks like the moon,' Fleming murmured. 'Dead mountains, dust-filled valleys.'

'It isn't,' Andre whispered, without looking away from the screen. 'It isn't the moon. It's the planet from which the message came.'

'You mean they're showing us themselves?' Fleming stared at the bizarre shadows and reflections. 'The lighting's completely weird.'

'Because of the source,' she explained, 'the light from their sun is blue.'

She concentrated on the tube and the picture began to shift. The scenery moved horizontally at increasing speed until the screen became a blur of dazzling light. Again the scene slowed down and became stationary. There was a terrible stillness about it this time, the absolute rigidity of timeless age.

An enormous plain stretched into the background where it merged with the dark sky. In the foreground stood monstrous elongated shapes, placed haphazardly and apparently half buried in the level, soft-looking surface.

Fleming felt the skin on the back of his neck prickling.

'My God,' he whispered, 'what are they?'

'They are the ones,' said Andre. 'The ones who sent it.

The ones I'm suppose to be like.'

'But they're lifeless.' He corrected himself. 'They're immobile.'

She nodded, her eyes wide and fixed on the screen. 'Of course,' she said. 'Really big brains cannot move around any more than this computer. There's no need.'

'The surface of them seems solid. How do they see?'

'Eyes would be useless. The blue light would destroy all tissue and nerve fibre as you know them. They see by other means, just as their other senses are different from those people' - she hesitated - 'people like us - have developed.'

The picture began to crumble. Sections detached themselves and spun off the screen. Quickly everything faded.

'Is that all there is?' Fleming felt deprived of something.

Andre turned her face to him. It glistened with perspiration; her eyes were enormous, the pupils distended. 'Yes,'

she smiled. 'That's all. They are the ones. They wanted us to see their planet. They believed it would be enough. Perhaps as a warning. Perhaps to show what time brings and how to survive. How we could do the same.'

Fleming glanced back at the dark screen. To him those shapes still stood clear and definite in their piteous immobility against the glass. 'No,' he said.

'Is it so much worse than the human race?' she asked him.

'Which lives and reproduces the works and struggles by animal instinct. That's all human beings are - animals who spend their time competing for existence, keeping their bodies alive. And when the earth gets too crowded there is a holocaust and the survivors begin the cycle over again, and the brain never develops.'

'Oh no?'

'Not really. Not fast enough. By the time the earth becomes no longer fit to live on, the human race will still be little struggling animals who die out.'

'Unless we change?'

She nodded. 'The brain from out there can guide us, and we can guide others. So long as we keep hold of the authority it gives us.'

'And impose what it wants us to on the rest of the world?'

'We can only start to point a possible way,' Andre answered. 'It will be millions of years before the earth -'

'We haven't the right,' he said.

'To use knowledge of what could be?' They argued for a long while, but in the end she said, 'All right, then you're quite clear in your mind? You want to destroy all this?' She waved an expressive hand along the machine.

'Yes,' he said firmly. 'That's what I want.'

She got up and crossed to the record cabinets. From the rear of a drawer she took a small roll of film and held it out to him.

What's that?' he demanded, refusing to touch it.

'It's a roll of input negative. It writes zeros throughout the whole of the memory section. The computer has no will to stop it now. Feed this film in and in a few minutes it will be nothing but a mass of metal and glass.'

He followed her to the programming console. He watched her slip the film on the spool holder and snap the flange shut.

His eyes travelled upwards to the red button on the control panel. He was moving his hand to press it when Andre gently but firmly clasped his fingers.

'I'd rather that it wasn't you who did that,' she said. 'You see, I know it's a mistake. And I'd rather it wasn't yours.'

He let his arm drop and stepped away from the panel.

Andre bent over the operating desk and began writing on the memo pad clamped to one side.

'We'll leave a note,' she explained. 'But who for?'

He grinned happily. 'For Yusel.'

'Yes,' she agreed. 'Yusel. He'll start the input motor quite innocently when he sees this.' In big capitals she wrote Yusel's name. 'Now take me away please,' she whispered, 'if that's what you really want.'

He did not move as she came close to him. Then very lightly he bent his head and kissed her, full on the mouth.

As he felt her lips warm and full against his, he sensed suddenly her full humanity. All the fear and strain of the past months fell away from him and he was simply alone at last with the woman he wanted.

He withdrew his mouth gently from hers and held her away from him at arms' length, and smiled at her. When she smiled back the grey panels of the computer cabinets became dim, unimportant shadows. He laughed out loud and took one of her hands in his.

'Now, let's go. I can get Kaufman's car. There's a place I'd like you to see.'

She followed him unquestioningly. Outside it was dark and cool. The wind was just the night breeze of the desert.

No clouds marred the serenity of the pale, peaceful light from an almost full moon.

In the car she snuggled against him. He drove steadily along the route which held such memories for him. When he neared the mountains he drove off the road, anxious to avoid arousing the sleeping people in Lemka's village. He stopped the car in the shadow of a great boulder.

Hand in hand they clambered up a goat track, making for the white mass of the temple ruins. The air became colder.

Both of them panted with effort, and the blood tingled in their faces and hands.

In silence Fleming stopped when his feet were on the great flight of steps which led up to the ruined portico. He kept his grip firmly on Andre's hand, making her stop too.

'Why have we come here?' she whispered.

'To breathe,' he said, tilting his head back and inhaling deeply.

She looked upwards, too - into the vault of the sky, darkening at the edge of the mountain crest where the moonshine weakened. The Pole Star hung there like a brilliant lamp. Not far from it another star twinkled.

'Beta Cassiopeiae, it's called,' said Fleming, knowing that their minds were so attuned that there was no need to doubt that she was looking just where he was. 'A nicer name is the Lady in the Chair. Can you make out the shape?'

She laughed. 'No, I can't.' She continued looking upwards.

'But now I know why you brought me here. That glimmer between the Pole Star and your Chair Lady.'

'Yes,' he said, putting his arm protectively around her.

'Andromeda,' she whispered, 'my namesake.'

'The place where they are, the creatures without movement, without eyes; just with brains.' He deliberately turned his head away from the stars. 'It doesn't make sense. Think of the machine they made us build at Thorness. Remember what it did to you? Your hands?'

She nodded. 'I remember. But if it had been very reasonable, very wise, would you have opposed it?' She saw him shake his head. 'Then you'd have really fallen under its spell.

You and everybody else. Just like Mademoiselle Gamboul.'

'I suppose so.'

'Therefore what are you afraid of? By making it brutal and savage they forced you to take the control yourself.

That's why we changed the decision circuits in this Azaran model. And that was intended too. It was all predictable.'

'The nitrogen bug too?'

'Of course. That was to make absolutely sure that the control would be changed. That the decisions would not be the machine's.'

Fleming was almost convinced. 'But why run so close? It nearly did for us.'

'That was a miscalculation.'

'Don't kid yourself,' he grinned. 'That thing never made a mistake.'

'They made just one; they hadn't reckoned on someone like you. They never thought that the first computer would be destroyed, only that it would be changed. If you hadn't done what you did that night in Scotland the marine bacteria could have been coped with much sooner.'

'You've no proof,' he protested lamely.

'I do know,' she said softly. 'I know you destroyed the only means of saving everything. At least that's what would have happened if your friend Bridger hadn't sold the design to Intel.'

He was delighted with that. 'Good old Denis,' he exclaimed.

'They ought to bury him in Westminster Abbey.'

He turned and put his hands on her shoulders. 'And you, what was your purpose? To establish it here in a position of absolute power?'

'No. My job was to find someone who would understand how to use it.' She fingered the button on his coat. 'You wouldn't trust me. And yet - you expected a breakthrough into new knowledge.'

Abruptly she stepped away.

'This is it, John. It's in your hands now.'

'And you?' he asked, keeping his distance.

'I'm in your hands too.'

'But what are you?'

She came back to him. 'Flesh and blood,' she said happily.

'Dawnay's mixture.'

He put his hands on either side of her face and tilted it so that the waning moon shone full on her. 'It's the nearest thing to a miracle I've ever seen,' he said.

They turned and walked down the mountain path, hand in hand. 'I remember the night the message first came through,' Fleming said thoughtfully. 'I started burbling about a New Renaissance. I was a bit tight. Old Bridger wasn't so cocky about it as I was. He said, 'When all the railings are down you have to have something to hang on to.'

His arm went round her waist, pulling her body close against his. 'I'd better get used to hanging on to you, hadn't I?'

She smiled up at him, but she was not quite content.

'And the message?' she asked.

They had reached level ground, and he quickened his pace, once again taking her hand and pulling her along as he took long strides towards the car.

'Where are we going now?' she asked.

He looked back to her and laughed out loud again.

'To save it!' He shouted so that the hillside rang with his voice. 'We've just about time to beat Yusel in to work. The new Renaissance begins in about an hour from now - if we get cracking.'

He bundled Andre into the car. After he had walked round to the driving seat he paused for a second, looking up to the sky, already paling with the false dawn. The stars were going out. Very dimly, between the Lady in the Chair and the Pole Star he could make out the hazy light of the great Andromeda galaxy across the immensity of space.

THE END