Suddenly he jumped. The output printer was working. It clicked rapidly, then stopped. Once more it started. This time the keys moved slowly but they kept on. He went to the section and took hold of the short length of paper already typed.
'Pretty ropey,' he decided as he looked through it, 'but some sort of biological data, all right.'
He went to tell Dawnay. It was a triviality in itself - this preliminary analysis. But in its inference it was tremendous.
It showed that after all Andre would help, and maybe Dawnay could still achieve a miracle - if they had time.
As he stepped out of doors the fury of the wind swept over him, making him stagger. He began panting, and there was no help in the gulps of air he took. With head down and body leaning into a dry, suffocating gale, he plodded through the swirling sand to the laboratory doors. His zest and optimism had gone. Time was something they couldn't buy.
Three thousand miles away dawn was breaking over London - a London stricken with disaster. A few tin- hatted policemen stood in the middle of the wider streets well away from the buildings. The jangle of an ambulance bell occasionally penetrated the howling of the wind. Lights burned weakly on the first floor of the Ministry of Science building from the few windows which had not been blown out and boarded.
The grey light of early morning accentuated the weariness of the four men sitting around the littered table. For several hours they had not contributed a constructive idea. Discussion had really become argument, the futile criticism of over-exhausted men.
Neilson, normally reticent and co-operative, had given way to exasperation when Osborne and the Prime Minister's secretary launched into an interminable argument about departmental responsibility and finance for the expanded activity agreed upon the previous evening.
'You have a wonderful talent here,' observed Neilson, 'for plodding through routine while the heavens are falling.'
'We're tired, Professor Neilson,' said the Minister sharply.
'We can only do what we feel is best.'
'I'm sorry,' Neilson said.
The Prime Minister's secretary reached for a cigarette, found the packet empty, and hurled it into a corner. 'There's no power over half the country, and the rest is under water, or snowed up or blown down. People are dying faster than the army can bury them. If you could only give us some sort of forecast how long it's going on.'
Neilson was on the point of answering when a secretary came in, tip-toeing to Osborne.
'Something urgent for you, sir,' he said. 'Brought by a despatch rider from London airport.'
Osborne took the buff-coloured envelope and slit it open. With deliberate slowness he unfolded the flimsy paper, and read it.
At last he looked up. 'It's from Azaran,' he said, 'from Madeleine Dawnay.' He handed it to the Minister.
'You two had better see this together,' the Minister said to Neilson and the Prime Minister's secretary. 'It will save time. the Cabinet must be informed right away, of course.' He waited impatiently while the two men read the note. 'Any proposals, Neilson?' he asked.
Neilson nodded. 'Can you get me to Azaran - today?' he demanded.
CHAPTER TEN
VORTEX
THE four-engined aircraft cruised to the apron, slewed round and stopped. Electric trolleys moved forward to unload the cargo. The crew, tired from a non-stop flight from London during which they had never topped 6,000 feet and had been buffeted for seven hours without respite, clambered down the ladder and made their way to the flight office. A uniformed Arab and a bullet-headed European greeted them perfunctorily as the Captain handed over the aircraft papers.
The European flicked through them and passed them to the Arab, and then extended his pudgy hand for the crew's personal documents. He let the Captain go through immediately, but when he looked up at the next two men standing before him he referred again to the papers in his hand.
'Who is this?' he asked in German. The two air crew members looked blankly at him. He repeated his question in halting Arabic.
Yusel, Lemka's cousin, the younger of the two, smiled ingratiatingly. 'My second navigator. He not understand Arabic or the language you use first.'
The Intel man scowled. 'I've not been notified of any change in crew plans. Why are you carrying a second navigator?'
Yusel explained. 'For route familiarisation. We have to fly so low; no air pressure up top.'
Not really satisfied, the Intel man re-read the documents.
When he could find no fault in them, he threw them across the desk. Yusel picked them up and led his companion into the crew room where they got out of their flying kit. His companion was Neilson.
'That's the worst over,' Yusel told him. 'Now I'll take you to my cousin's house. It'll be quite safe. Her husband, Doctor Abu Zeki, will contact you as soon as he can.'
Neilson nodded. 'The sooner the better.'
Yusel drove him to Abu's home and then returned to Baleb. It was late afternoon when he got to the cafe, and he had to wait an hour before his cousin arrived. When he did come Abu Zeki had the furtive air of a man who knows he is watched. Quietly, over two bottles of locally-made Azarani Cola, Yusel told him about Neilson's arrival.
'He wants to see Doctor Fleming and Professor Dawnay,'
he finished.
Abu Zeki glanced anxiously around the bare little cafe.
'I don't know if they can both get away,' he said. 'But I will tell him.'
As soon as he heard that Neilson senior was safely in the country, Fleming decided to throw caution to the winds and go and see him. He told Dawnay to be ready to leave as soon as it was dark, if she was willing to take the risk.
The weather helped them. A violent storm broke with nightfall, sheet lightning illuminating the sky and short bursts of rain lashing the buildings and swirling sand. The guards crept, frightened and shivering, into any shelter they could find. Fleming and Dawnay plodded through the cascades of rain without once being challenged.
The drive was appalling, Abu's little car slithering in the thick scum of mud on the desert sand. But the rain had been local. After forty minutes they were driving on dry terrain, the storm providing an accompaniment of reverberating thunder and almost continuous flashes of lightning.
Fleming felt a sense of quite unreasonable relief when Lemka opened the door and he saw Neilson standing behind her. The American's wordless greeting, the way he gripped his hand, was absurdly reassuring.
To Dawnay, Neilson was someone who signified a gleam of hope that she had refused to admit existed, but she was still not sure why he had come. They both sat quietly, suppressing their excitement, while the big calm man ate his way methodically through a bunch of grapes and told them what had been happening in London. They learnt for the first time how Osborne had survived the shooting at their country-house prison, how Neilson had been called in to 'head a probe into this weather thing', as he put it, and how they also had put two and two together and traced the source to Thorness. And how they had then come to a dead stop until they had received the message from Dawnay.
'Is there really any hope?' he asked her.
'About as much as a grain of sand in a desert.'
She pushed aside the little tray on which Lemka had set Neilson's supper and spread out the bundle of papers she had crammed into the waistband of her skirt.
She impatiently flattened out the creases. 'These are most of the figures for the D.N.A. helix,' she began.
