'He's got food and water?'
Aim nodded. 'Lemka will visit him regularly, or her mother.'
Fleming nodded, satisfied. 'It's good of you all,' he muttered.
'Young Doctor Neilson was kind to me,' Abu said. 'We liked him very much.'
Both men stopped abruptly. The output printer had started to work. Fleming's thoughts raced back to Andre.
'Get the nurse to take her back to bed,' he ordered. He walked across to her and put his arm around her shoulders.
'Good!' he said. 'Now rest - and hang on.'
He grabbed the paper coming from the printer, running down the short lines of figures. The details meant little to him, but the general purport was clear enough. It concerned the constituents in plasma. For ten minutes he stood watching the figures emerge. At last the motor died and the computer sank into silence.
Dawnay was working at her laboratory bench in her usual bewildering and seemingly haphazard array of apparatus.
Fleming thrust the sheets of paper before her.
'What are those?' she asked, continuing to watch some fluid drip through a filter. 'More bacterial formulae?'
'No,' said Fleming. 'Formulae for Andromeda.'
She stopped her work and looked at him wonderingly.
'Who programmed it?'
'She did. I more or less forced her. So far as I can judge it's a progression of figures that stands for the missing chemical constituents in her blood. Get it into chemical terms, and we can use it on her.'
She took the paper and slumped in a chair. 'It would take weeks of work,' she muttered, running her eye over the data.
'And I have this bigger job.' She waved her hand almost helplessly at the jumble of retorts and test tubes on the bench.
'Which Andre got for us,' he reminded her.
She was exasperated at the implied reproof. 'Let's get this straight, John,' she began in level tones. 'First you were against me creating her. Then you wanted me to kill her when she was first made. Next you demanded that she was kept away from the computer. Now-'
'I want her to live.'
'And the rest of us?' she asked him. 'Do you want us to live? How much can I take on, do you imagine? My energy's limited. There's only one of me and I'm dead tired. Sometimes I think my brain is softening.' She pulled herself together and smiled at him. 'Do you think I wouldn't try to save her if I could? But there are millions of us, John, and our lives are in the balance. I don't even know if this is going to work. Still less that, even if it does, I'll have it made in quantity in time.'
She leaned forward and held out the sheets of paper to him. He kept his hands deep in his trouser pockets, refusing to accept them. She let them fall to the floor.
He bent to pick them up and put them carefully on a clear corner of the bench. 'You'll have to talk to Gamboul,'
he said quietly. 'She won't see me and doesn't trust Abu Zeki any more. But she might listen to you. If you could persuade her to give us more freedom and more outside help .... '
Dawnay was lost in her own thoughts. 'I don't know, I just don't know,' she murmured.
Without warning there was a tremendous crack of thunder. It shook the building, making the apparatus on the bench shake and jangle. Immediately the noise died away there came the scream of wind.
'Even Gamboul must know that this weather thing isn't something she can handle, that it wasn't part of her damned programme,' Fleming said when the racket died down.
'All right,' Dawnay agreed; 'I'll try to explain to her.'
An interview was not granted until the following morning.
Gamboul sent an order for Dawnay to come to her private residence, the house which Salim had owned. From all accounts, Gamboul rarely visited the Presidential Palace any more, not even to go through the formalities of reporting the country's day-to-day activities. The President was kept a virtual prisoner. He did not seem greatly to mind; he was sick. The comparatively slight thinning of the atmosphere over Azaran was already affecting the older people. The President was suffering from bronchitis.
The Salim residence looked shabby and dilapidated. There had been some minor storm damage. No one had troubled to sweep up the rubble. The palm trees which had grown in the courtyard for more than fifty years had been broken by the wind.
An armed guard escorted Dawnay to Gamboul's office.
She could see at once how the other woman had changed.
The sensuality seemed to have drained out of Gamboul. Her face had become more beautiful in a haggard, almost aesthetic way, and there was something fanatical about her bright dark eyes. Something terrifyingly self-possessed and dedicated.
She was surprisingly friendly, asking what she could do, 'You have everything you need for our work?' she enquired.
'For yours; not for mine,' Dawnay corrected her. Then, without preamble she gave a factual and restrained report on the reasons for the state of the weather.
Gamboul listened quietly, without interrupting. She walked to the window and looked out across the city to the towering masses of cumulus beyond it over the desert.
She was quiet for a time after Dawnay had finished. 'How shall we die?' she murmured, walking back to her desk and sitting down. Dawnay explained.
Gamboul waved an expressive hand. 'That wasn't the meaning in the message,' she protested. 'It wasn't meant to happen. Everything was clear and logical. What I saw was - desolation, but not like this. And there was power too.'
'What did you learn you had to do?' Dawnay prompted.
Gamboul's mind was far away, reliving that night in front of the computer screen. 'Govern,' she muttered. 'Everyone knows that it has to be, but nobody will make the real effort.
A few have tried .... '
'Hitler? Napoleon?' Dawnay suggested.
Gamboul was not insulted. 'Yes,' she agreed. But they were not brilliant enough, or rather they did not have the help of the brain from out there. It will be necessary to sacrifice almost everything. But not like this! Not now! We're not ready!'
'How much power have you ?' Dawnay asked.
'Enough here. But this was to be only a beginning.'
'It still could be,' said Dawnay. She could see now a way of appealing to the other woman's greed and fear.
Gamboul turned sharply to her. 'What do you mean?' she demanded.
'It's possible,' Dawnay explained, 'that we may be able to find a way to save the atmosphere. Not probable, but just a chance. We're getting some help from the computer with a formula that looks like an anti-bacterium. We may be able to synthesise it. But I shall need help and equipment. If we succeed we shall have to mass produce it and then pump it into the sea all over the world.'
Gamboul gave her a look of suspicion. 'How can you produce so much?'
Carefully Dawnay explained that with organisation the serum, once made, would increase naturally, possibly at a rate faster than the bacteria already in the sea. 'Once we've bred bulk supplies we should have to send batches to all countries, where their own installations could all handle it simultaneously.'
Gamboul began laughing. It was not a pleasant sound for there was no joy in it, only overweening exultation. 'We will do it,' she said, 'but we shall not allow other governments to co-operate. Intel will build all the plant you need. Intel will offer the serum at its own price. This will give us the power I was told about. It is part of the message after all. I didn't understand. Now the world will be ours, held to ransom.'
Dawnay rose, staring at her. 'It's not for you!' she found herself shouting, too deeply shocked to care what risk she ran. 'You're mad! It isn't part of the plan!'
But Gamboul seemed not to notice; only stared back at her with glazed eyes and spoke as if to a minion receiving orders.