was no one to talk to; even Abu had disappeared into the executive building, in answer to a summons from Gamboul. Guards were patrolling everywhere. Before breakfast they had forbidden Fleming to approach the sick quarters where Andre lay. The best he had managed was to insist on seeing the nurse who had come out and reported that her patient was a little worse, but was sleeping.
He sat a long time over a late breakfast, ignoring the coarse brown bread, fruit and olives they always served, and drinking cup after cup of sweet, thick coffee.
Then he strolled across to Dawnay's laboratory. The guards eyed him suspiciously but did not prevent him from entering the building.
Dawnay was busy at a laboratory bench. She greeted him absent-mindedly and did not react very much to his worried talk about Andre.
'There's nothing we can do for her,' she muttered. She paused and then picked up one of a row of large test tubes.
'I'd like you to look at these, John,' she said.
He glanced at the one in her hand. It was full of a semitransparent, greyish fluid which clung to the glass when she shook it. The other tubes seemed to be identical.
'What are they?' he asked.
'Sea water samples they got for me.' She gave a short laugh. 'I must admit that Intel are efficient. They wouldn't let me go and take my own specimens, but they did much more than I asked. Not only are these from the Persian Gulf, which I wanted, but they've had samples flown in from the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean and even the Western Atlantic. So that there should be samples from other areas for comparison, I suppose.'
'And is there anything to compare?' he asked.
She shook the tube vigorously. The fluid inside went completely opaque.
'See?' she said. 'Now, normal sea water should be like this one. You'll see it's clear.' She handed him another test tube.
Fleming picked up some of the other tubes. They all went opaque when he shook them. 'Sure Kaufman didn't fool you and get them all from the same place?' he grinned.
She shook her head. 'Not he. He got his orders from Intel, not from me. You know what he's like. If they told him to fetch water from the Antarctic he'd get it. But I want you to watch what happens when this milky sea water mixes with the clear sample.'
She took a clean test tube, poured in some of the clear water and then added two minute drops of the opaque fluid.
The milky droplets dissolved and disappeared. Dawnay damped the tube in a holder with a light reflector behind it.
'Now watch,' she said.
Slowly the water clouded near the bottom of the tube; the cloudiness spread upwards until the water was as opaque as the others.
'I wonder how the fish like it,' murmured Fleming. 'Any idea what it is?'
'A bacterium,' she said. 'Come over here.'
He followed her to the table where she switched on a light and focused a microscope. 'Look at this slide,' she told him.
Fleming peered into the microscope, adjusted the focus, and gave a low whistle. A globular organism was palpitating; as he watched, it divided and swelled. Thirty seconds later the division was repeated. He straightened up from the microscope. 'Know where it comes from?'
Dawnay made no reply. She picked up a slide from a small cabinet and slid it into a second microscope. 'This one's dead.
It conforms to no bacterium group I've heard of. It's a very simple organism, as you'll see if you look at this one which I've stained. It doesn't appear to have more than one remarkable property - the ability to reproduce fantastically. If it wasn't shut in the test tubes - ' She hesitated. 'If it had the whole ocean in which to breed .... ' Again she stopped.
Fleming walked back to the bench, thoughtfully looking at the neatly labelled test tubes. 'The areas marked on these specimens,' he said, 'rather coincide with those I keep hearing in the B.B.C. shipping forecasts and weather reports storms, gales, and so forth.'
'Yes,' she agreed, 'and one of them we know quite well. A very rich mixture.'
She lifted a test tube labelled 'Minch' gingerly, as if she were half afraid of it. 'The channel between Scotland and the Hebrides.'
'With Thorness on the east side,' he finished for her. 'So what?'
'It must have all started somewhere,' she said. 'In the originating area it would have a higher density of bacteria than the more newly infected zones.'
He stared at her. 'You've no proof for saying that this one from the Minch .... '
She shook her head. No. All these samples were populated to capacity when I got them. There's no telling the percentage of bacteria when they were drawn from the sea.
To make a proper check I'd have to get accurate and localised storm centre reports and then make on-the- spot checks of sea water samples in the same zones. There just might emerge a correlation between these little beasts and the weather.'
'Or again you might not,' he said with a rather badly-contrived heartiness. 'Look here, Madeleine, we don't want to get too imaginative or maudlin about all this. Collate the data, sift out the facts, draw the inferences - that's the routine. And incarcerated here we haven't got a chance of doing much, though I guess you can do a break-up on the bacterial structure.
'But it's pretty obvious, the smart way they got you all this ocean, that Intel have some notions along your lines - that the weather is more than naturally upset. My guess is that you can put in a chit for samples from here to Timbuktu, or at least wherever there's a bit of sea, and the resourceful Kaufman will send off his minions with their little buckets and bottles to get them for you. All you can do to inject some sense and order into the sources you need is for us to glue our ears to the B.B.C. bulletins.'
They agreed that one or other of them should try to listen in to every bulletin and weather report, making notes of the areas mentioned.
There was no dearth of information. The midday bulletin gave priority to weather news. The first hurricanes ever recorded in Britain had caused death and destruction on a major scale from Penzance to Wick. The electric grid had broken down because of smashed pylons. Huge areas of Lancashire and East Anglia were flooded. The Air Ministry could hold out no hope of improvement. The barometric pressure remained the lowest ever known outside tropical areas.
Fleming and Dawnay heard that bulletin together. Neither had any need to write down the details, and neither felt inclined to talk about it. But when a boisterous gust of wind abruptly surged in from the desert, whirling up little spirals of sand and making a clatter as open doors banged and windows crashed, they both felt the burden of something sinister with more force than the distant wavering voices from London had caused. The wind was hot and dry, but Dawnay shivered as it buffeted her.
Fleming moved the tuning dial on the short-wave set, searching for more news. Words, music, and more words flicked in and faded - meaningless to occidental ears. Then he found what he was looking for: the Voice of America.
A beat record clamoured abruptly to its close and the announcer came on with his station identification. The news which followed had no political significance. As in London, ideologies and flag-waving had been shelved. The news was solely of the weather.
'The United States Weather Bureau,' said the newsreader, 'today gave warning of further gales approaching the Eastern seaboard of the United States. They are expected to be on a similar scale to those which swept across Western Europe during the night. American scientists are speaking of a shift of the world weather patterns comparable to those at the beginning of the Ice Age ...'
Fleming snapped off the switch. Dawnay got up. 'I'll be in the lab if you have any ideas,' she said.
More or less deliberately they avoided one another in the next couple of days. They both felt completely helpless, but they listened meticulously to every bulletin, noting down the areas where the storms were worst.
The wind scale figures were the best guide. On the third morning, after the early morning bulletin had
