'Not much. I now know what it does.' She removed a test tube clamped vertically with its mouth over one of the tubes from the tank. 'It absorbs nitrogen. You'd find less than 3 per cent in this sample from the air just above water surface. It also takes up some oxygen, not much - but see for yourself.'
She turned to a filing cabinet and withdrew an untidy sheaf of papers. 'Just glance over those formulae, will you, John? Tell me if you've seen anything like them before.'
He studied the data in silence. 'I said it looked familiar. It still does.' He handed the papers back.
'It's another synthesis,' she murmured.
He was really alarmed. 'Not another one starting?' he exclaimed.
'No,' she reassured him. 'We worked back to this a long way. Yesterday evening I was on familiar stuff. It came out of the computer at Thorness - oh, it must have been more than a year ago, when I began the D.N.A. synthesis.'
'It's part of that?' he asked in a low voice. 'Part of the programme which constructed the girl ?'
'No. It came up quite separately.' Dawnay was firm about it. 'I based an experiment on it; one had to at that stage when we were still groping in the dark, really,' She moved to the tank and looked with despair down at the opaque, sullen fluid at the bottom.
'I actually made some of these bacteria.'
'What happened to them?'
She answered with an obvious effort. 'They seemed harmless, pointless, Another failure. I kept them in a whole range of cultures for a week. They did not die, but they did not develop. Just multiplied. So the tubes were washed out and sterilised.'
He started towards her. 'Don't you realise... ?'
'Of course I do,' she said sharply. 'The bacteria went down the sink, into the drain, from the drain to the sewer, and into the sea.'
'Which is precisely what that bloody machine intended should happen! But an ounce or so is the most it can have been. It can't have spread the way it has.'
'Not impossible,' she said. 'I've tried to fix the date more or less exactly when I abandoned that line of research. It's an academic point really. But I'm certain it is a year ago at least. With this tank fixed up I have been able to calculate the rate of growth. It's fantastic. No virus or bacteria so far known has a rate even comparable to it. And now the buildup's greater. You can envisage the sort of progression now that it's invaded all the main oceans.'
'How long,' he asked, 'will it take... ?'
She looked up at him. 'Possibly another year. Probably less. All sea water will then reach maximum saturation.'
Fleming studied the wall-graph which recorded hour by hour the nitrogen content in the air of the tank. 'It does nothing but absorb nitrogen and some oxygen?' he asked.
'Not so far as I've discovered,' she replied. 'But the sea normally absorbs nitrogen very, very slowly. Plankton and so on. Any artificial fertiliser manufacturing plant takes out in a week as much as the sea absorbs in a year. It hasn't mattered. There's plenty. But this bacteria could easily absorb all the nitrogen in the world's atmosphere. That's what's happening now. It's bringing down air pressure. In the end there'll be no nitrogen and therefore no plants.
When the pressure really drops off the scale there won't be any way for us to absorb oxygen, and then there'll be no more animals.'
'Unless - ' Fleming began.
'There's no unless.'
Fleming glanced at Abu Zeki, standing quiet and expectant in the background. 'Madeleine,' he said, 'thanks to Abu there's a chance of us getting a letter to London.'
She showed little interest. 'To say what?' she demanded.
'What it is.'
'There's no point.' She shrugged. 'But all right, if you wish. It will be a gesture, though it's too late.' She bent once more over the tank, staring down into the fluid. 'The girl was right,' she muttered. 'The computer made life. This time it's made death. So far as we're concerned that's Finis - doom in that water.'
'We'll write, all the same,' Fleming insisted. 'Lemka's cousin is ready to take the risk. Keep it short but put in every fact you know.' His voice was decisive. It stirred Dawnay a little out of her despair.
'All right, John,' she agreed.
Abu smiled, 'I'll wait till the note is ready, Professor,' he told Dawnay. 'I'll go into town for a meal. It's my normal practice. My cousin goes to the same cafe.'
Fleming moved to the door. 'Good luck, both of you,' he said with forced cheerfulness. 'Maybe we can all meet back here later this evening?'
He strode out into the hot wind, making for his own quarters.
He was glad to be by himself. It was difficult for him to play the role of optimist. And he wanted time to think.
He always thought best by himself, with a bottle of Scotch by his side.
He sent an orderly to the comissariat for a new bottle.
The boy returned in five minutes. Intel did not stint the creature comforts, the mental and spiritual dope, for its prisoners.
He skipped dinner and so he was a little drunk when he returned to the laboratory. The wind was as wild as ever, and it was already dark. There had not even been the usual brief twilight. Abu was already there with Dawnay. 'I saw my cousin,' he told Fleming. 'He took the note. I don't know, of course, how he got on at the airport, but I heard the transport take off on schedule. Just on an hour back.'
Fleming thanked him. 'It may not get through; it may be ignored at the other end, and even if it isn't we don't know what they can do if they study it and accept the truth of it.
It would take a lot of swallowing.' He flexed his arms. 'So we're still really on our own. Which means we need the girl.
Go across to sick quarters, Abu, and tell the nurse to bring her over.'
'Now?' Abu asked doubtfully.
'Now,' Fleming repeated. 'Kaufman has her dragged out whenever they want a computing job done. The nurse has to obey, poor lass.'
'What do you propose to do with her?' Dawnay asked disapprovingly.
'Use her as an ally.'
'She won't play. Anyway, she's too weak.'
'She'll have to try, won't she? She's the only thing we've got. If the computer at Thorness made a bacterium there must be an anti-bacterium. I'm not expert in your line, Madeleine, but surely that's a basic fact of biology?'
'Do you happen to know of this bug which will conveniently act in the opposite direction ?' she asked.
'The computer must.' He waved away her sarcasm. 'I realise it's not the same computer, but it managed to reconstruct the formula for the original one, or at least we and Andre made it work. We can do it again, for an antidote.'
Before Dawnay could reply Abu returned. He held the door open while the nurse brought Andre inside in her wheelchair. Fleming was accustomed to see the girl a little weaker, a little more wraithlike, every time he saw her. But he had not got used to the way she now glared at him, her eyes smouldering with resentment.
'All right, nurse,' he said without looking at Andre, 'leave her. We'll call you when it's time to take her back.'
The girl stood her ground. 'She should not be here, sir; I had just got her to sleep.'
Abu interposed. 'Please be sure it's all right.'
The nurse patted the rug around Andre's legs and reluctantly left. When the door had closed Andre asked what they wanted her for; she did little more than whisper, even that was jerky and hard to understand.
'We need another formula from the computer,' Fleming explained. 'Another bacterium or perhaps a virus. It's got to kill the first one and then work the other way round. It would have to release nitrogen held in the water.'
'And it would have to breed faster than the first one,'
Dawnay added. 'It would be another tricky piece of biosynthesis, another life-creating process. For that I need a formula.'
Andre had listened with almost horrifying intensity, looking from one to the other, hanging on every word.