He looked up and glanced blandly at Fothergill. 'Where is Osborne? Missing, I presume?'
Fothergill permitted himself a moment's hesitation before he replied. 'No, sir, I have located him. He caught the overnight sleeper which arrived at Euston half an hour ago. I took it upon myself to request his immediate presence here in your name.'
'Quite right. And I'll put him through the hoop. These civil servants in the permanent jobs think themselves unanswerable to anyone.' The Minister cleared his throat. He realised he was infringing convention in openly criticising the Department's Permanent Under Secretary to a junior.
'That will be all, Fothergill, for the moment. Show Osborne in as soon as he arrives. And don't let me be late for that 11 o'clock Cabinet. I shall need you at 10.30 to take my memorandum.'
Fothergill faded noiselessly away. The Minister had time to ascertain a few more facts before Osborne was announced.
As a senior civil servant the Under Secretary was permitted, even encouraged, to keep in personal contact with the Thorness project. But why this visit on the previous day? And why, as the Thorness guard room record book showed, had he signed in a visitor, name not given?
The thought of some espionage scandal directly affecting the Ministry of Science built up his fury to a zenith by the time Osborne entered immediately after he had knocked.
The Minister glowered at him. 'Who was this chap you took to Thorness with you?' he asked without preamble.
'An assistant,' Osborne answered shortly.
The Minister was determined to keep his temper if he could. 'Why did you take him?' he demanded. 'What did you need an assistant for on this nocturnal visit?'
Osborne seemed to discover something of tremendous interest on the Minister's desk. 'It is essential for him to be in the picture,' he murmured.
The Minister got up from his chair and crossed to the window. He felt uneasy at the calmness of this man, and knew that there would be little chance of getting at the truth unless he could disturb his calm. Right now the only person in danger of losing his temper was himself.
'He didn't leave a bomb, I suppose?'
He knew it was the wrong approach. Whatever unethical views Osborne might hold, he wasn't the kind to help in violence. 'All right, of course he didn't,' he went on hastily.
'But you know what this means, don't you?'
He moved from the window and confronted Osborne.
'We've lost our national capital, all of it. The computer's gone. The girl's gone. Even the original message which the Bouldershaw telescope picked up has gone. There's no chance of starting again. From being a first class power, with the know-how for unassailable defence plus all the potential for industrial supremacy we're now relegated to a second-rate power; third-rate in fact.'
Osborne turned his gaze from the desk and looked mildly at his inquisitor. His silence infuriated the Minister still more .
'Once in a million years,' he pointed out, 'or probably longer, a planet gets a Christmas present from another planet. And what does some dam' fool do? They go and burn it.'
Once again he crossed to the window and looked down on the traffic in Whitehall.
'Were they fools?'
Osborne's comment was not more than a murmured question.
'We'll be back on American aid by the end of the year,'
the Minister retorted.
'At least America's a boss you can understand,' Osborne suggested. 'This Andromeda information we had to take on its face value. The results seemed splendid. But who understood what it was all about? From somewhere in that dying and half-dead spiral nebula of Andromeda comes a briefing that makes no sense to anyone but a computer - and a freak girl; and maybe one honest-to-God human scientist.'
'You mean Fleming,' the Minister said.
Osborne ignored him. 'Given that an intelligence in some recess of space sends us a stream of technical data which enables us obediently to make an anthropomorphic creature to run its machine, who's honestly going to believe that the whole business is for our benefit and not theirs?'
The Minister lighted a cigarette. He could not help but be a little impressed with the argument. 'Is that what Fleming thought?' he asked.
'That it was an attempted take-over? Yes. I'm not saying he did blow the computer to pieces, but if he did I for one don't blame him. I thank God it didn't fall into anyone else's hands.'
The Minister was a simple-minded man. He disliked arguments about ethics. People were better off when they only did what they were told. 'My country right or wrong, my mother drunk or sober' was a motto he had heard when he was a boy. He thought it rather good.
'Whose side are you on, Osborne?'
Osborne gave him a bland smile. 'The losing one, usually, Minister.'
His chief snorted in disgust. 'I had hoped you would have had something useful to contribute. I was wrong. Perhaps Geers has bestirred himself enough to discover what the hell's been going on at the place he's supposed to be the director of.'
The Minister switched on his intercom and told a secretary to get Thorness on the line. Osborne took it as a gesture of dismissal. He walked slowly from the office. He was privately rather surprised that he was still a free man. Never before in his precisely-planned and sedate career as a civil servant had he allowed his feelings to colour his sense of duty. Yet, in view of what had happened, he felt no regret whatever. He had, in fact, helped Fleming, and he was only concerned that no one should be able to prove it.
As he returned down the corridor to his own office he permitted himself a smile of amusement at a mental picture of Geers on this morning of crisis.
Geers was a careerist. As Director of Thorness he was the fair-haired glory boy of the Ministries of Defence and Science. He had adroitly swung over to enthusiasm for the Dawnay Experiment after several days of obstinate obstruction in favour of rocketry. Geers was a man who knew which side his bread was buttered. He had virtually achieved the pleasurable miracle of having it buttered on both sides.
But away up in Scotland Geers was now presenting the picture of a victimised and harassed autocrat. Despite the frantic messages to his quarters during the night he had dressed as slowly and as carefully as usual, his shirt collar uncomfortably stiff and his tie pulled tight into a small neat knot. But the impression of dignified pomposity which he considered essential for a key man in the nation's scientific technocracy was marred by the hunted look in his tired eyes behind their glasses, the black sheen of an inadequate shave, and the nervous tautness of his mouth.
He sat at his vast stainless steel desk, bereft of papers, but festooned with telephones, and glared at the visitors he had summoned - Fleming and Dawnay.
Madeleine Dawnay sat in the one easy chair near the window.
Her rather mannish face was parchment yellow and her eyes were dull with fatigue and illness. She had pulled her dressing gown tightly round her emaciated body, missing the even warmth of the sick bay. Gratefully she sipped from a cup of coffee Geers' secretary had brought her.
Her eyes moved thoughtfully from Geers to Fleming, who lolled against the office partition. She said nothing, despite the glance of appeal Geers made to her.
'I've got the whole of Whitehall round my neck,' Geers said plaintively. 'The Minister of Defence is on the blower every five minutes, and half the senior staff at Science are badgering me, and I don't even know what happened.'
Dawnay put her coffee carefully on the window sill. The slight physical action seemed an effort. 'I don't know what's happened either,' she said quietly.
'Osborne arrived at the station just after ten. With someone else. The public relations girl took them to the computer room. God knows why, but then I'm only the Director here.