“I know.”
“You go on as though nothing had happened.” It was difficult to understand what he said. “But he’s dead. He won’t come back any more.”
“We’ve all heard, Dr. Fleming.”
He swayed another pace into the room. “What you doing here?”
“This is private. Will you please go?” She got up and advanced grimly towards him. He stood blinking at her, the smile fading from his face.
“He was my oldest friend. He was a fool, but he was my—”
“Dr. Fleming,” she said quietly. “Will you go, or do I call the guards?”
He looked at her for a moment, as if trying to see her through mist, then shrugged and shuffled out. She followed him to the door and locked it behind him.
“We can do without that,” she said to Christine.
Fleming found his way back to his hut, took an unfinished bottle of whisky from his desk drawer and poured it down the sink. Then he fell on to his bed and slept for twenty-four hours. The following evening he shaved and bathed and started to pack.
The new experiment grew fantastically. Within a few hours Dawnay had to transfer it from its microscope slide to a small nutrient bath, and the following morning it had to be moved into a larger bath. It continued to double itself during the whole of the day that Fleming slept, and by the evening Dawnay was forced to appeal for help to Geers, who took over the problem with a proprietary air and caused his workshop wing to build a deep, electrically-heated tank with a drip-feed channel into its open top and an inspection window in the middle of its front panel. Towards dawn the new creature was lifted by four assistants from its outgrown bath and placed in the tank.
In its new environment it grew to about the size of a sheep and then stopped. It seemed perfectly healthy and harmless, but it was not pretty.
Reinhart came to a decision that morning and went to see Dawnay. She was in her laboratory still, checking the feed control at the top of the tank. He hovered around until she had finished.
“Is it still alive?”
“And kicking.” Apart from looking pale and taut around the eyes and mouth, she showed no sign of tiredness. “A day and a half since it was a smear on a slide: I told you there was no reason an organism shouldn’t grow as fast as you like if you can get enough food into it.”
“But it’s stopped growing now?” Reinhart peered respectfully into the inspection port, through which he could see a dark form moving in the murk of the tank.
“It seems to have a pre-determined size and shape,” Dawnay said, picking up a set of X-rays and handing them to him. “There’s nothing much to see from there. There’s no bone formation. It’s like a great jelly, but it’s got this eye and some sort of cortex—which looks like a very complicated nerve ganglia.”
“No other features?” Reinhart held up the X-rays and squinted at them.
“Possibly some rudimentary attempt at a pair of legs, though you could hardly call them more than a division of tissue.”
Reinhart put down the plates and frowned.
“How does it feed?”
“Takes it in through the skin. It lives in nutrient fluid and absorbs straight into its body cells. Very simple, very efficient.”
“And the computer?”
Dawnay looked surprised.
“What about the computer?”
“Has it reacted at all?”
“How could it?”
“I don’t know.” Reinhart frowned at her anxiously. “Has it?”
“No. It’s been entirely quiet.”
The Professor walked into the computer control room and back again, his head down, his gaze on his neat shoecaps as they twinkled before him. It was as yet early morning and very quiet. He clasped his hands behind him and spoke without looking up at Dawnay.
“I want Fleming back on this.”
Dawnay did not answer for a moment, then she said: “It’s perfectly under control.”
“Whose control?”
“Mine.”
He looked up at her with an effort.
“We’re on borrowed time, Madeleine. The people here want us out.”
“In the middle of this?”
“No. The Ministry have fought for that, but we’ve got to work as a team and show results.”
“Good grief! Aren’t those results?” Dawnay pointed a short, bony finger at the tank. “We’re in the middle of the biggest thing of the century—we’re making life!”
“I know,” Reinhart said, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. “But where is it taking us?”
“We’ve a lot to find out.”
“And we can’t afford any more accidents.”
“I can manage.”
“You’re not on your own, Madeleine.” Reinhart spoke with a kind of soft tenseness. “We’re all involved in this.”
“I can manage,” she repeated.
“You can’t divorce it from its origin—from the computer.”
“Of course I can’t. But Christine understands the computer, and I have her.”
“She understands the basic arithmetic, but there’s a higher logic, or so I think. Only Fleming understands that.”
“I’m not having John Fleming reeling in here, breaking up my work and my equipment.” Dawnay’s voice rose.
Reinhart regarded her quietly. He was still tense, but with a determination which had carried him a long way.
“We can’t all do what we want entirely.” He spoke so brusquely that Dawnay looked at him again in surprise. “I’m still in charge of this programme—just. And I will be so long as we work as a team and make sense. That means having Fleming here.”
“Drunk or sober?”
“Good God, Madeleine, if we can’t trust each other, who can we trust?”
Dawnay was about to protest, and then stopped.
“All right. So long as he behaves himself and sticks to his own side of the job.”
“Thank you, my dear.” Reinhart smiled.
When he left the laboratory he went straight to Geers.
“But Fleming has notified me that he’s leaving,” Geers said. “I’ve just sent Miss Adamson over to the computer to make sure he doesn’t deliver a parting shot.”
Fleming, however, was not at the computer. Judy stood in the control room, hesitating, when Dawnay came out to her.
“Hallo. Want to see Cyclops?”
“Why do you call it Cyclops?”
“Because of his physical characteristics.” Dawnay seemed completely relaxed. “Don’t they educate girls nowadays? Come along, he’s in here.”
“Must I?”
“Not interested?”
“Yes, but—”
Judy felt dazed. She had not taken in the progress of the experiment. For the past two days she had thought of almost nothing but Fleming and Bridger and her own hopeless position, and so far as she had any image at all of Dawnay’s creation, it was microscopic and unrelated to her own life. She followed the older woman through into the laboratory without thinking and without expecting anything.
The tank confused her slightly. It was something she had not reckoned with.
“Look inside,” said Dawnay.
Judy looked down in through the open top of the big tank, quite unprepared for what she was going to see. The creature was not unlike an elongated jellyfish, without limbs or tentacles but with a vague sort of bifurcation at one end and an enlargement that might be a head at the other. It floated in liquid, a twitching, quivering mass of protoplasm, its surface greeny-yellow, slimy and glistening. And in the middle of what might be its head was set—huge, lidless and colourless—an eye.
Judy felt violently sick and then panic-stricken. She turned away retching and stared at Dawnay as if she too were something in a nightmare, then she clamped her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.
She ran straight across the compound to Fleming’s hut, flung the door open and went inside.