'But why?' she protested.
Fleming lost his temper. 'For God's sake!' he shouted.
Dawnay uttered a word of warning and with difficulty he calmed down. Then, crouching beside Andre, he slowly and patiently explained how the existing bacteria were changing the world's weather and making it impossible to breathe, the preliminary to complete destruction of all life. 'So we need just one small bug to start breeding on an even greater scale to counteract it,' he finished.
Once more she shook her head. 'It is not possible,' she whispered.
'Look,' he said urgently, 'if you can come up with one sort you can come up with another - and save us all.'
Her big eyes looked back into his. Imperceptibly they softened, the hostility lessening. 'Save you?' she managed to say aloud. 'What about me?' She tried to move her hands over her breasts and touch her face. The effort was too much and she lay back.
'If you had the strength - you'd try.' It was Dawnay who was begging her now.
'I don't know.' She shook her head weakly. 'It would take too long.'
Fleming looked over Andre's head at Dawnay. 'Would it?'
he muttered.
Involuntarily Dawnay glanced at the girl. 'I don't know,'
she said. 'She's... ' She got a grip on herself. 'If you mean would I take too long with the actual lab work, that's another matter. There are still twenty-four hours in however many days we've got left, and I don't like sleeping much.'
Both of them looked at Andre again. They were two people willing her to obey, to do the seemingly impossible.
The ghost of a smile flickered over her mouth, and she nodded.
Fleming turned to Abu. 'Get the nurse to take her back,'
he said. 'She's the only ally we've got, poor kid. Tell the nurse to have her ready for duty at the computer at 9 tomorrow morning. Try to explain that we're not sadists. Tell her how necessary it is. Frighten her a bit if you like by hinting how she'll also die if she fails us.'
Abu's persuasion - or intimidation - worked. The nurse obediently wheeled Andre into the computer block shortly after nine the next morning. The girl said her patient was too weak to move, and she would have to use the wheelchair to work while interpreting the screen.
Only Fleming was present. Dawnay felt too little hope to be able to bear to watch, and Abu remained in the main office so that he could report any approach by Kaufman or the mysteriously silent Gamboul. One of the things which would have been disquieting, if Fleming had not been so preoccupied with a greater problem, was the way Intel seemed to be leaving them to their own devices.
Andre put her hands unsteadily on the sensory controls.
The computer had hummed to activity as soon as she entered the building. But the screen brightened very slowly. Its imagery was blurred, and even when Fleming pulled the curtains over the windows across the hall the pattern was almost indistinguishable. He watched Andre raise her head to the screen; he saw how she seemed to be gripping the controls as if they yielded some supply of strength. Her effort to concentrate was pathetic. Presently she relaxed her hold. Her body slumped and her head bowed to her breast.
She began to talk thickly, sobs shaking her shoulders.
Fleming bent over her. 'I can't follow them,' he heard her say. 'Take me away from it.' And then she added, as if to herself, 'I don't want to die.'
The nurse came forward, pushing Fleming away. 'She has done enough; too much, you must not ask... ' Abruptly she grasped the chair and wheeled Andre away from the screen.
Fleming refused to move out of the way. 'Andre,' he said quietly, 'none of us wants to die, but we all will, unless some miracle starts sucking the air back out of the sea.'
She raised her head with an effort. 'You will die together.
I'll die alone.' He put out his hand to comfort her, touching hers. She moved her arm away. 'Don't touch me,' she whispered.
'I must seem horrible to you.'
'No!' he said urgently. 'You have always seemed beautiful to me. Ever since.., ever since we ran away from Thorness.
But try to think, please! Only you can help us now. I don't even know what this is doing. Is the power still with Gamboul?'
He indicated the mass of the computer ranged all around him and she nodded her head. 'Then why does she never come here?' he demanded.
Andre remained quiet, gathering her strength. 'There is no need. She has seen the message. The computer has set her on a path. She will not turn back. Nor will she come here.
She needs no more. I could not show her anything. I can hardly see it any more.' Her eyes looked askance towards the blank screen. 'I will come back when I have rested.'
Without asking permission, the nurse started to push the chair away. Fleming did not stop her this time. He watched them disappear through the exit doors and for a full minute he remained where he was, in the heavy silence of the deserted building.
Suddenly he jumped. The output printer was working. It clicked rapidly, then stopped. Once more it started. This time the keys moved slowly but they kept on. He went to the section and took hold of the short length of paper already typed.
'Pretty ropey,' he decided as he looked through it, 'but some sort of biological data, all right.'
He went to tell Dawnay. It was a triviality in itself - this preliminary analysis. But in its inference it was tremendous.
It showed that after all Andre would help, and maybe Dawnay could still achieve a miracle - if they had time.
As he stepped out of doors the fury of the wind swept over him, making him stagger. He began panting, and there was no help in the gulps of air he took. With head down and body leaning into a dry, suffocating gale, he plodded through the swirling sand to the laboratory doors. His zest and optimism had gone. Time was something they couldn't buy.
Three thousand miles away dawn was breaking over London - a London stricken with disaster. A few tin-hatted policemen stood in the middle of the wider streets well away from the buildings. The jangle of an ambulance bell occasionally penetrated the howling of the wind. Lights burned weakly on the first floor of the Ministry of Science building from the few windows which had not been blown out and boarded.
The grey light of early morning accentuated the weariness of the four men sitting around the littered table. For several hours they had not contributed a constructive idea. Discussion had really become argument, the futile criticism of over-exhausted men.
Neilson, normally reticent and co-operative, had given way to exasperation when Osborne and the Prime Minister's secretary launched into an interminable argument about departmental responsibility and finance for the expanded activity agreed upon the previous evening.
'You have a wonderful talent here,' observed Neilson, 'for plodding through routine while the heavens are falling.'
'We're tired, Professor Neilson,' said the Minister sharply.
'We can only do what we feel is best.'
'I'm sorry,' Neilson said.
The Prime Minister's secretary reached for a cigarette, found the packet empty, and hurled it into a corner. 'There's no power over half the country, and the rest is under water, or snowed up or blown down. People are dying faster than the army can bury them. If you could only give us some sort of forecast how long it's going on.'
Neilson was on the point of answering when a secretary came in, tip-toeing to Osborne.
'Something urgent for you, sir,' he said. 'Brought by a despatch rider from London airport.'
Osborne took the buff-coloured envelope and slit it open. With deliberate slowness he unfolded the flimsy paper, and read it.
At last he looked up. 'It's from Azaran,' he said, 'from Madeleine Dawnay.' He handed it to the Minister.
'You two had better see this together,' the Minister said to Neilson and the Prime Minister's secretary. 'It will save time. the Cabinet must be informed right away, of course.' He waited impatiently while the two men read the note. 'Any proposals, Neilson?' he asked.