flange shut.
His eyes travelled upwards to the red button on the control panel. He was moving his hand to press it when Andre gently but firmly clasped his fingers.
'I'd rather that it wasn't you who did that,' she said. 'You see, I know it's a mistake. And I'd rather it wasn't yours.'
He let his arm drop and stepped away from the panel.
Andre bent over the operating desk and began writing on the memo pad clamped to one side.
'We'll leave a note,' she explained. 'But who for?'
He grinned happily. 'For Yusel.'
'Yes,' she agreed. 'Yusel. He'll start the input motor quite innocently when he sees this.' In big capitals she wrote Yusel's name. 'Now take me away please,' she whispered, 'if that's what you really want.'
He did not move as she came close to him. Then very lightly he bent his head and kissed her, full on the mouth.
As he felt her lips warm and full against his, he sensed suddenly her full humanity. All the fear and strain of the past months fell away from him and he was simply alone at last with the woman he wanted.
He withdrew his mouth gently from hers and held her away from him at arms' length, and smiled at her. When she smiled back the grey panels of the computer cabinets became dim, unimportant shadows. He laughed out loud and took one of her hands in his.
'Now, let's go. I can get Kaufman's car. There's a place I'd like you to see.'
She followed him unquestioningly. Outside it was dark and cool. The wind was just the night breeze of the desert.
No clouds marred the serenity of the pale, peaceful light from an almost full moon.
In the car she snuggled against him. He drove steadily along the route which held such memories for him. When he neared the mountains he drove off the road, anxious to avoid arousing the sleeping people in Lemka's village. He stopped the car in the shadow of a great boulder.
Hand in hand they clambered up a goat track, making for the white mass of the temple ruins. The air became colder.
Both of them panted with effort, and the blood tingled in their faces and hands.
In silence Fleming stopped when his feet were on the great flight of steps which led up to the ruined portico. He kept his grip firmly on Andre's hand, making her stop too.
'Why have we come here?' she whispered.
'To breathe,' he said, tilting his head back and inhaling deeply.
She looked upwards, too - into the vault of the sky, darkening at the edge of the mountain crest where the moonshine weakened. The Pole Star hung there like a brilliant lamp. Not far from it another star twinkled.
'Beta Cassiopeiae, it's called,' said Fleming, knowing that their minds were so attuned that there was no need to doubt that she was looking just where he was. 'A nicer name is the Lady in the Chair. Can you make out the shape?'
She laughed. 'No, I can't.' She continued looking upwards.
'But now I know why you brought me here. That glimmer between the Pole Star and your Chair Lady.'
'Yes,' he said, putting his arm protectively around her.
'Andromeda,' she whispered, 'my namesake.'
'The place where they are, the creatures without movement, without eyes; just with brains.' He deliberately turned his head away from the stars. 'It doesn't make sense. Think of the machine they made us build at Thorness. Remember what it did to you? Your hands?'
She nodded. 'I remember. But if it had been very reasonable, very wise, would you have opposed it?' She saw him shake his head. 'Then you'd have really fallen under its spell.
You and everybody else. Just like Mademoiselle Gamboul.'
'I suppose so.'
'Therefore what are you afraid of? By making it brutal and savage they forced you to take the control yourself.
That's why we changed the decision circuits in this Azaran model. And that was intended too. It was all predictable.'
'The nitrogen bug too?'
'Of course. That was to make absolutely sure that the control would be changed. That the decisions would not be the machine's.'
Fleming was almost convinced. 'But why run so close? It nearly did for us.'
'That was a miscalculation.'
'Don't kid yourself,' he grinned. 'That thing never made a mistake.'
'They made just one; they hadn't reckoned on someone like you. They never thought that the first computer would be destroyed, only that it would be changed. If you hadn't done what you did that night in Scotland the marine bacteria could have been coped with much sooner.'
'You've no proof,' he protested lamely.
'I do know,' she said softly. 'I know you destroyed the only means of saving everything. At least that's what would have happened if your friend Bridger hadn't sold the design to Intel.'
He was delighted with that. 'Good old Denis,' he exclaimed.
'They ought to bury him in Westminster Abbey.'
He turned and put his hands on her shoulders. 'And you, what was your purpose? To establish it here in a position of absolute power?'
'No. My job was to find someone who would understand how to use it.' She fingered the button on his coat. 'You wouldn't trust me. And yet - you expected a breakthrough into new knowledge.'
Abruptly she stepped away.
'This is it, John. It's in your hands now.'
'And you?' he asked, keeping his distance.
'I'm in your hands too.'
'But what are you?'
She came back to him. 'Flesh and blood,' she said happily.
'Dawnay's mixture.'
He put his hands on either side of her face and tilted it so that the waning moon shone full on her. 'It's the nearest thing to a miracle I've ever seen,' he said.
They turned and walked down the mountain path, hand in hand. 'I remember the night the message first came through,' Fleming said thoughtfully. 'I started burbling about a New Renaissance. I was a bit tight. Old Bridger wasn't so cocky about it as I was. He said, 'When all the railings are down you have to have something to hang on to.'
His arm went round her waist, pulling her body close against his. 'I'd better get used to hanging on to you, hadn't I?'
She smiled up at him, but she was not quite content.
'And the message?' she asked.
They had reached level ground, and he quickened his pace, once again taking her hand and pulling her along as he took long strides towards the car.
'Where are we going now?' she asked.
He looked back to her and laughed out loud again.
'To save it!' He shouted so that the hillside rang with his voice. 'We've just about time to beat Yusel in to work. The new Renaissance begins in about an hour from now - if we get cracking.'
He bundled Andre into the car. After he had walked round to the driving seat he paused for a second, looking up to the sky, already paling with the false dawn. The stars were going out. Very dimly, between the Lady in the Chair and the Pole Star he could make out the hazy light of the great Andromeda galaxy across the immensity of space.
