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
