evangelical way.'
He looked down at Lemka and smiled. 'Remember how we mentioned St Paul?'
Lemka nodded.
'The intelligence is a sort of missionary in space,' he continued.
'When it finds life which responds, it converts it; takes it over. It's tried before, maybe over several million years on different worlds - maybe with success - and now it's tried here, through the girl Andromeda, for what she calls our own good. That's one thing.'
'And the other?'
'Where it finds an intellect hostile to it, it destroys it and possibly substitutes something else. That's what's happening now, because we fought. Or rather, because I fought. And lost.' His voice faltered. 'That's why, Lemka, you might say that I've condemned the whole human race.'
'Not yet,' she whispered.
'No,' he agreed, 'not quite yet. There's just a chance that Professor Dawnay will have something for your cousin.'
It was early morning when Fleming got back to the compound.
He simply drove openly through the main gates under the flood lamps, waving cheerfully to the sentry. The man grinned back. It was clear that so far as the Western people were concerned the guards were instructed to stop them getting out, not to prevent them coming in.
Fleming waited till the working day had begun before he went to see Dawnay. Whatever they put in the message it had to be terse, factual and conveying something more than an appeal for help.
Abu Zeki was in the laboratory with Dawnay. He looked relieved to see Fleming but said nothing.
Dawnay was bending over a big tank she had had installed below the low long window. The glass top was screwed down.
Several robber tubes and wires passed through seals in the top. They were connected to recording instruments, one of which Fleming recognised as a barograph. In the bottom were two or three inches of an opaque fluid.
She greeted him perfunctorily. 'No luck with Andre,' she said, busy with notes on the instrument recordings. 'She was trying to be helpful, I think, but she hasn't the will to do much. Still, I got some of the data I wanted, thanks to Abu.'
'Found anything?' Fleming asked.
'Not much. I now know what it does.' She removed a test tube clamped vertically with its mouth over one of the tubes from the tank. 'It absorbs nitrogen. You'd find less than 3 per cent in this sample from the air just above water surface. It also takes up some oxygen, not much - but see for yourself.'
She turned to a filing cabinet and withdrew an untidy sheaf of papers. 'Just glance over those formulae, will you, John? Tell me if you've seen anything like them before.'
He studied the data in silence. 'I said it looked familiar. It still does.' He handed the papers back.
'It's another synthesis,' she murmured.
He was really alarmed. 'Not another one starting?' he exclaimed.
'No,' she reassured him. 'We worked back to this a long way. Yesterday evening I was on familiar stuff. It came out of the computer at Thorness - oh, it must have been more than a year ago, when I began the D.N.A. synthesis.'
'It's part of that?' he asked in a low voice. 'Part of the programme which constructed the girl ?'
'No. It came up quite separately.' Dawnay was firm about it. 'I based an experiment on it; one had to at that stage when we were still groping in the dark, really,' She moved to the tank and looked with despair down at the opaque, sullen fluid at the bottom.
'I actually made some of these bacteria.'
'What happened to them?'
She answered with an obvious effort. 'They seemed harmless, pointless, Another failure. I kept them in a whole range of cultures for a week. They did not die, but they did not develop. Just multiplied. So the tubes were washed out and sterilised.'
He started towards her. 'Don't you realise... ?'
'Of course I do,' she said sharply. 'The bacteria went down the sink, into the drain, from the drain to the sewer, and into the sea.'
'Which is precisely what that bloody machine intended should happen! But an ounce or so is the most it can have been. It can't have spread the way it has.'
'Not impossible,' she said. 'I've tried to fix the date more or less exactly when I abandoned that line of research. It's an academic point really. But I'm certain it is a year ago at least. With this tank fixed up I have been able to calculate the rate of growth. It's fantastic. No virus or bacteria so far known has a rate even comparable to it. And now the buildup's greater. You can envisage the sort of progression now that it's invaded all the main oceans.'
'How long,' he asked, 'will it take... ?'
She looked up at him. 'Possibly another year. Probably less. All sea water will then reach maximum saturation.'
Fleming studied the wall-graph which recorded hour by hour the nitrogen content in the air of the tank. 'It does nothing but absorb nitrogen and some oxygen?' he asked.
'Not so far as I've discovered,' she replied. 'But the sea normally absorbs nitrogen very, very slowly. Plankton and so on. Any artificial fertiliser manufacturing plant takes out in a week as much as the sea absorbs in a year. It hasn't mattered. There's plenty. But this bacteria could easily absorb all the nitrogen in the world's atmosphere. That's what's happening now. It's bringing down air pressure. In the end there'll be no nitrogen and therefore no plants.
When the pressure really drops off the scale there won't be any way for us to absorb oxygen, and then there'll be no more animals.'
'Unless - ' Fleming began.
'There's no unless.'
Fleming glanced at Abu Zeki, standing quiet and expectant in the background. 'Madeleine,' he said, 'thanks to Abu there's a chance of us getting a letter to London.'
She showed little interest. 'To say what?' she demanded.
'What it is.'
'There's no point.' She shrugged. 'But all right, if you wish. It will be a gesture, though it's too late.' She bent once more over the tank, staring down into the fluid. 'The girl was right,' she muttered. 'The computer made life. This time it's made death. So far as we're concerned that's Finis - doom in that water.'
'We'll write, all the same,' Fleming insisted. 'Lemka's cousin is ready to take the risk. Keep it short but put in every fact you know.' His voice was decisive. It stirred Dawnay a little out of her despair.
'All right, John,' she agreed.
Abu smiled, 'I'll wait till the note is ready, Professor,' he told Dawnay. 'I'll go into town for a meal. It's my normal practice. My cousin goes to the same cafe.'
Fleming moved to the door. 'Good luck, both of you,' he said with forced cheerfulness. 'Maybe we can all meet back here later this evening?'
He strode out into the hot wind, making for his own quarters.
He was glad to be by himself. It was difficult for him to play the role of optimist. And he wanted time to think.
He always thought best by himself, with a bottle of Scotch by his side.
He sent an orderly to the comissariat for a new bottle.
The boy returned in five minutes. Intel did not stint the creature comforts, the mental and spiritual dope, for its prisoners.
He skipped dinner and so he was a little drunk when he returned to the laboratory. The wind was as wild as ever, and it was already dark. There had not even been the usual brief twilight. Abu was already there with Dawnay. 'I saw my cousin,' he told Fleming. 'He took the note. I don't know, of course, how he got on at the airport, but I heard the transport take off on schedule. Just on an hour back.'
