'Don't kid yourself, and don't just take my word for it.
Everyone accepts her as an attractive girl. But a very special girl. Dawnay built her, but she was only the artisan. The design came from the computer, and it saw to it that she was tailor-made for its purpose. She absorbs knowledge from the computer, and the machine needs her to programme it, or rather, did do so.'
'Did?'
'She's gone.'
'You mean she's disappeared?'
Quadring looked into the dark congealed mess in the bowl of his pipe. 'That's exactly what I do mean.'
Pennington laughed, a little too loudly. 'Perhaps she didn't exist! I mean, I don't think one can really believe in a manufactured human being with a mental rapport with a computer.'
'We service types aren't paid to think,' said Quadring.
'Right now our job is to find her, and whoever destroyed the computer. It could hardly have been an outside job. It was done too expertly and quickly. The building was burning nicely by the time the patrols called me and had bashed through the locked doors and plied their extinguishers. Anyway, there wasn't a lot of point. The computer had been well and truly damaged with an axe before the arson. Security checks have told us one thing so far: the girl - she's called Andre, after Andromeda, the star or whatever it is that's alleged to have transmitted the dope for the computer - is missing, along, with a scientist named John Fleming.'
'Anything known about him ?'
'He's marked with a query on the files.' Nothing definite.
But he's the usual sort of bright young genius who thinks he knows better than the Establishment. The story is that he'd fallen for the girl. And she sort, of depended on him for advice the computer didn't or wouldn't give. They were certainly always together - at work and off it.'
'So they might be together now?'
'Exactly. At first light, if the mist clears, you and your boys start looking. Some half-asleep guard down at the jetty thinks he saw a man and a woman get in a boat and head out to sea just before the alarm siren started.'
'They could have landed anywhere along the coast by now,' Pennington said.
'Not in that boat. It's known it hadn't more than a gallon of petrol. It's just a little outboard effort for pottering along the promontory to check the defences. They'd make one of the islets off the coast, no farther.'
'What about a rendezvous out at sea?'
Quadring glanced at his companion. 'A snatch by our old friend a Foreign Power?' He shrugged. 'It could be. The Navy got the alarm along with you. Destroyers and aircraft by now will have started combing the Western approaches and away up North for two innocent-looking fishing trawlers and blatantly neutral tramps. But our radar watch would have picked up anything bigger than a rowing boat.
'My bet is they'll find nothing. Maybe you won't either.
But with this sort of weather a little open boat isn't exactly healthy. The island makes the best of some poor bets.'
Quadring stood up and looked through the window.
'Time to get moving,' he said. 'And I've a tricky report to write on my incompetence to date.'
There was an almost imperceptible lifting of the blackness of the sky when Pennington walked across to the parking lot.
The men were smoking and talking in undertones. Pennington told them briefly that a couple of suspected saboteurs, a man and a girl, were believed to have escaped by boat either to land farther up the coast or on one of the islands in the vicinity.
'They're wanted alive - not dead,' he finished. 'So no rough stuff. They're not believed to be armed, and there's no real reason why they should be unpleasant. The girl is - er a particularly vital witness. We'll get down to the jetty and arrange sweep and search routine from there.'
They had to hang around at the water's edge for another half hour for daylight. The mist began slowly to lift like a vast curtain, exposing first the grey sullen sea and then, a couple of miles out, the lower slopes of the nearest island with patches of snow still smudged against the northern sides.
Their landing was an anti-climax. Pennington was in the leading amphibian when he saw the figure of a man standing motionless on the shingle beach of the island. He didn't move when the vehicle lumbered out of the water and pulled up beside him.
'My name's Fleming,' he muttered. 'I expected you.'
He was a tallish, well-built man in his early thirties with a handsome but haggard face. His hair was wet and matted with sand, and his clothes torn and muddy. He stood quite still, as if exhausted.
'You must consider yourself under arrest,' Pennington said. 'And the girl who came with you?'
Fleming continued to stare out to sea. 'I lost contact with her when I was looking for shelter. She wandered off. There are footmarks. They end at a cave entrance. There's a deep pool inside.'
'She - she's killed herself?' Pennington demanded, mystified.
Fleming rounded on him. 'They killed her. The whole damned circus which used her.' He became calmer. 'She was hurt, badly hurt. If she slipped into that water she wouldn't have had a chance. Her hands - well, her hands were -'
'We'll dive in the pool; drag it,' said Pennington.
Fleming looked at him with something like pity. 'You do that,' he said. 'Your bosses will demand their pound of flesh, drowned if they can't have it alive.'
Pennington called to a Marine. 'Take Dr Fleming back to the mainland. Hand him over to Major Quadring. Tell the Major we're staying here to search the island.'
The direct line between Thorness and the Ministry of Science in Whitehall had been busy since the news of the disaster to the computer had been flashed to the duty officer just after midnight. :
The Minister himself had arrived at his office at the unheard-of hour of 9 a.m. He used a side door in case some observant reporter got the idea of a crisis. Rather to his annoyance, he found his Personal and Private Secretary, Brian Fothergill, already there, looking his usual calm and elegant self.
'Good morning, Minister,' he said affably. 'A nasty morning.
The roads were quite icy.'
'To hell with the icy roads,' the Minister muttered pettishly.
'What I want is some information about this Thorness business. Defence woke me at five. I didn't worry the P.M.
for an hour. He took it badly, very badly. He's arranging a Cabinet for eleven. We must have useful material for him, Fothergill. If not a solution. I suppose we're still in as much of a fog as that bloody place in the Highland mists? Fothergill delicately laid a neatly typed sheet of quarto on the Minister's desk. 'Not completely, sir,' he murmured, 'as you will gather from this precis of the position. It's a preliminary, of course, all that I've been able to compile in the' - he glanced at his wafer-thin wrist watch - 'seventy-five minutes since I inaugurated an investigation.'
'For God's sake,' snapped the Minister irritably, 'drop that ghastly jargon. What you mean is that you've been nagging everyone for something to put down here. I hope you got the whole crew out of their beds.'
The Minister read quickly through the report. 'Good, good,' he nodded, 'as far as it goes. Which actually means bad, bad. Not your fault, Brian,' he added hurriedly. 'You are to be congratulated on the energy with which you have gone round in circles. But there are features of interest.'
He re-read the report.
'The computer's gone. The girl's gone. The months of recording of the Andromeda equations by the radio-telescope at Bouldershaw Fell have gone. Somebody named Fleming whom I recall as an untidy and self-opinionated upstart has gone too. He gave me the impression when I met him that he drank. Which probably means he womanises too. I suspect that there's the usual tawdry sexual undercurrent in this debacle. However, that's a matter for M.I.6 and their confreres at the Yard. They must find them. More interesting is this note that our colleague Osborne visited Thorness yesterday evening.'