'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 land 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?'
