'What?'
'I don't know exactly,' he said thoughtfully. 'I only hope what I think it is is wrong.'
As if to contradict him, six jet fighters abruptly screamed across the sky, climbing fast from the airfield. They watched the machines become dots in the blueness of the shimmering canopy of sky. Dawnay wiped her face. 'I'd better talk to the doctor, John. You have a word with Andre. Be gentle with her.'
He knocked softly on Andre's door, waiting for an answer, almost dreading to go in. A pretty little Arab nurse came and opened the door, silently standing aside to permit him to enter.
Andre was sitting beside the austere iron bedstead, wearing a housecoat. The brightly coloured flowers of the pattern accentuated her extreme pallor. She was leaning back with her head turned sideways so that her long fair hair hung across her cheek. Fleming guessed that she had been crying.
The nurse brought a small, hard chair, and Fleming sat down.
'Andre; Andromeda,' he murmured. 'There may be some answer.' He saw the hair move as she gave a slight shake of the head. 'We've done so much together,' he insisted.
He put his fingers gently on her chin and pulled her face round. She reacted weakly, jerking away and covering her face with her hands. 'Don't!' she begged. 'Do you think I want to die? That it's nice to know I'm doing what you want? To end existence just like you ended the existence of the other computer?'
The words hurt him badly. 'It's not what I want,' he said, trying to keep his voice under control. 'I'm frightened for you. And sorry for what I've done. I want to get you away from here, and all it means.'
'Away?' she repeated, wonderingly. 'But why? I've done what Dawnay asked; she has her data. And I've done what you asked; I've changed the computer's decision circuits...'
Her voice tailed away. Fleming felt a stab of real alarm; he knew that she had been on the point of saying more.
He went closer to her. 'What else have you done, Andre? What else? At least be honest with me.'
Her manner changed. She moved her head, pushed the hair from her face. She tried to smile at him. 'I have seen what is the purpose of the message from out there.'
He fought down the feeling of primitive terror that was sending the blood pounding in his temples. 'You've what?'
he whispered.
'It's hard to explain,' she said uneasily. 'I'm a bad translator.
But I know it's all right. We must put ourselves in the hands of the people who will protect us.'
He let the words sink in, grappling with the fact that once again he had lost a battle. In his over-confidence he had believed he had persuaded Andre to do as he believed right, to make the computer her slave. But she was quietly stating that she wanted to serve 'people who would protect us'. People, she called them - this intelligence across the time-space of the universe - as if they were her brothers.
Before he could find words she sat up, smiling and confident despite the difficulty of the physical movement.
'Now I have seen the message I understand,' she said.
'You are frightened because you know only that the computer can have power over us; not why it has.'
'You are what I'm frightened of,' he said. 'Now the computer's been doctored, the only way the message can enforce its will is through you. That's why I want you to get away from it! Live while you can, peacefully!'
She shook her head. 'You think it's evil,' she protested. 'It isn't. It's giving us a solution, a power. If you are to survive you need that power. All that is happening in the country is only a symptom of what's happening all over the world. It's unimportant. We can take it all out of their hands and use as we want!'
He marvelled at her faith and feared her assurance; it was as if she pitied his limited imagination.
Abruptly she fell back on the sofa. The enthusiasm was spent; all it left was a frail, rather timorous young girl. 'It drains me,' she whispered. 'It takes all my strength. It will kill me even quicker than you thought.'
'Then leave it alone!'
She passed her forearm wearily over her head and gripped the back of the head-rest. 'I can't,' she said. 'I've something to do before I die. But I can't do it alone.' Her lower lip trembled and she began to cry.
He crouched down and put his arm protectively around her waist. 'If I'm to help; if I'm to trust you, you must tell me. In words - simple words - what is the real core of the message?'
For a time she lay with her eyes closed. Fleming did not interrupt her reverie. Then she gave a slight shudder and tried to move. He helped her sit up.
'You must take me to the console,' she said. 'I don't think I can explain in words. But I can show you.'
He helped her to stand and held her by the arm as she walked with jerky, staggering steps the short distance to the computer building. Once inside, she seemed as usual to draw on hidden strength. She needed no assistance to sit before the sensory panel. Almost instantly the machine began operating, the master screen producing the familiar pattern of wave forms which the output printer translated into figures.
Fleming stood behind her as she gazed enthralled at the interminable pattern. 'It's the high speed information between the equation groups which contains the real message,'
she said. 'It tells about the planet from which the data came.'
Fleming watched the screen. He could identify the wave forms which were the electronic versions of figures, but the occasional surges of angular blobs of light which intervened were meaningless to him. He had always imagined them to be the normal pick-up by the sensitive selenium cells of stray currents in the machine's framework.
'What does all this gibberish tell you?' he asked.
Andre's eyes never left the screen while she began to explain.
'That it has been through all this. It knows what must happen, what has happened in other planets where intelligences have only developed as far as yours. You endlessly repeat a pattern until it wipes itself out.'
'Or the world gets too hot and does the job for us?' he suggested.
Andre nodded. 'Life of a biological creature begins very simply.' She talked slowly as if paraphrasing a complicated mass of information. 'But after a few thousand centuries it all becomes so complicated that the human animal can no longer cope. One crack - a war perhaps - and the whole fabric crashes down. Millions are killed or die off. Very few survive.'
'Who start again,' he finished for her.
She swung round to look straight at him. 'In about one hundred and thirty years from now there will be a war. Your civilisation will be destroyed. It's all exactly predictable. So can the period before recovery be calculated. Just over a thousand years. The cycle will then repeat itself. Unless something better happens.'
'As has happened on some planet in Andromeda?'
'Yes,' she replied. 'The species changed, adapted itself in time. Now it can intervene for earth people.'
He had to take his eyes off her; off the dazzling, ever-faster moving patterns on the screen. He felt sick at the way she talked about 'earth people' as if she was some alien creature.
He walked down the aisle, the whole length of the computer, and back again. Its cloying warmth reached out to him despite the air conditioning. Then he made his decision.
'All right,' he said firmly. 'Let's try to learn from it. Let's discover what we can and then tell people so they can decide what they think best.'
She made a gesture of impatience. 'That's not enough,' she said. 'We've got to take power. That's how we're meant to use the message to help us. Not to destroy the people here but to help them, and in the end they will hand the power over to us. It's all been calculated.'
The simple directness of her faith exasperated him because he knew it was an emotion too strong for him to destroy.