A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  Reinhart operated from London, paying periodic visits but mostly orbiting round Whitehall, pushing through plans, permits, budgets and the endless reports required by the government. Somehow everything they wanted they got fast and there were few delays. Osborne, Reinhart said modestly, was a past master.

  Only Judy was at a loose end. Her office was apart from the others, in the main administrative block, and her living quarters were with the women defence scientists. Fleming, though perfectly amiable, had no time to spend with her; Bridger and Christine went to some lengths to miss her. She managed to keep a general tally on what was going on, and she allowed some of the army officers to take her about, but otherwise there was nothing. During the long winter evenings she took to tapestry and clay modelling and acquired a reputation for being arty, but in reality she was just bored.

  When the new computer was nearly finished, Fleming gave her a conducted tour of it. His own attitude was a mixture of deprecation and awe; he could be completely wrong about it, or it could be something unimaginable and uncanny. The chief impression he gave was of fatigue; he was desperately tired now, and tiredly desperate. The machine itself was indeed something. It was so big that instead of being housed in a room, the control room was built inside it.

  “We’re like Jonah in the belly of the whale,” he told her, pointing to the ceiling. “The cooling unit’s up there — a helium liquefier. There’s a constant flow of liquid helium round the core.”

  Inside the heavy double fire-doors was an area the size of a ballroom, with a ceiling-high wall of equipment dividing it across the centre. Facing that, and with its back to the doors, was the main control desk, with a sort of glorified typing desk on one side and a printing machine on the other. Both the typing desk and the printer were flanked by associated tape decks and punch-card equipment. The main lights were not yet working: there was only a single bulb on the control desk and a number of riggers’ lamps hanging from the equipment rack. The room was semi-underground and had no windows. It was like a cave of mystery.

  “All that,” said Fleming, pointing to the wall of equipment facing them, “is the control unit. This is the input console.”

  He showed her the teletype keyboard, the magnetic tape scanner and the punched-card unit. “He was intended to have some sort of sensory magnetic system, but we’ve modified it to scan transcript. Easier for mortals with eyes.”

  “He?”

  Fleming looked at her oddly.

  “I call him ‘he’ because he gives me the sense of a mind. Of a person almost.”

  She had lived so long on the fringe of it that she had grown used to the idea. She had forgotten the shiver that went through her at Bouldershaw Fell when the message first came to them out of space. There had been so many alarms and excursions that the issue had become clouded, and in any case the message itself had been reduced to mundane terms of buildings and wiring and complicated man-made equipment. But standing there beside Fleming, who seemed not only tired but possessed and driven on by some kind of compulsion from outside, it was impossible not to sense an obscure, alien power lurking in the dim room. It merely touched her and passed away. It did not live in her brain as it seemed to live in his, but it made her shiver again.

  “And this is the output unit,” said Fleming, who did not appear to notice what she had felt. “His normal thought processes are in binary arithmetic, but we make him print out in denary so that we can read it straight off.”

  The wall of equipment in front of them was broken by a facia of display panels.

  “What’s that?” asked Judy, pointing to an array of several hundred tiny neon bulbs set in rows between two perspex-sheathed metal plates that stood out at right-angles from the cabinet.

  “That’s all the control unit. The lamps are simply a progress display device. They show the state of data going through the machine.”

  “Has any gone through yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “You seem sure it will all work.”

  “I’d never considered it not doing. It would be pointless for them to send a design for something that didn’t work.” The certainty in his voice was not simply his personal arrogance; there was the effect of something else speaking through him.

  “If you understand it right.”

  “Yes, I understand it. Most of it.” He waved a hand at the sheathed metal plates. “I don’t quite know what those are for. They’re electric terminals with about a thousand volts between them, which is why we put safety covers on. They were in the design and I expect we’ll learn how to use them. They’re probably some sort of sensing apparatus.”

  Again, he seemed quite sure of it all, and quite unbaffled by its complexity. It was as if his brain had long been prepared and waiting for it: Judy thought how aching and empty he must have felt the year before when he was talking about a breakthrough and knocking down the railings. Not that he looked any happier now. She remembered that Bridger had said, “John’ll never be happy.”

  Everything else seemed comparatively matter-of-fact as they walked round the room.

  “The way it works,” said Fleming, “is, you teletype the data in — that’s the quickest way we have. The control unit decides what to do. The arithmetic units do the calculating — calling on the memory storage as they need, and putting new information into memory — and the answer comes out on the printer. The highway ducts are under the floor and the arithmetic units are along the side walls. It’s quite a conventional system really, but the conventionality ends there. It has a speed and capacity that we can hardly imagine.

  There was complete silence around them. Shining rows of metal cabinets stood on each side of them, hiding their secrets, and the blank face of the control panel stared unseeingly at them in the dim light. Fleming stood casually looking round, seeming as much part of it as he was part of his car when driving.

  “He’ll look prettier when he’s working,” he said, and took her round to the area behind the control racks.

  This was a large semi-circular room, as dimly lighted as the other, with a huge metal-clad column rising through the centre.

  “That’s the real guts of it: the memory storage.” He opened a panel in the lower wall of the column and shone an inspection lamp inside. “There’s a nice little job in molecular electronics for you. The memory is in the core and the core is held in a total vacuum to within a degree or two of absolute zero. That’s where the liquid helium comes in.”

  Judy, peering in, could see a cube of what looked like metal about three foot square sealed in a glass tube and surrounded by cooling ducts. Fleming spoke mechanically, as if giving a lecture.

  “Each core is built up of alternate wafers of conducting and non-conducting material half-a-thou thick, criss-crossed into a honeycomb. That gives you a complete yes-no gate circuit on a spot of metal you can hardly see.”

  “Is that the equivalent of a brain cell?”

  “If you like.”

  “And how many are there?”

  “The core’s a three-meter cube. That makes several millions of millions. And there are six cores.”

  “It’s bigger than a human brain.”

  “Oh yes. Much bigger. And faster. And more efficient.”

  He closed the door-panel and said no more about it. She tried to imagine how it would really work, but the effort was as far beyond her as the understanding of matter; it was too vast and unfamiliar to visualise. She congratulated him and went away. He looked, for a moment, lonely and haunted but made no attempt to stop her. Then he started checking figures again.

  Dennis Bridger was not captivated in the same way. He did his work stolidly and morosely, and made no discernible attempt to follow up his contacts with Intel. Major Quadring and his security people kept a careful eye on him; periodic checks were made on all staff leaving the main gates, to see that they were not taking out documents or other classified material, but Bridger did nothing at all to arouse their suspicion. His only recreation was vi
siting the off-shore island of Thorholm, from which he would return with gulls’ and gannets’ eggs and endearing photographs of puffins. Whatever inducement Kaufmann had given him to stay on did not seem to involve him in anything.

  Geers regarded the whole team with suspicion. He was never obstructive, but a state of hostility existed between him and them. It was clear he would feel in some way satisfied if the experiment failed. However, as the super-computer neared completion, and the interest of his staff and his superiors in it increased, he took care to identify himself with any possible success. It was he who suggested that there should be a formal, though necessarily private, opening, and the Minister of Science — foiled of his unveiling of Bouldershaw Fell the previous year — allowed himself to be persuaded to cut a ribbon in Scotland. Fleming tried to put off the opening for as long as possible, but it was finally fixed for a day in October, by which time the new computer was due to be programmed and ready to receive its data. General Vandenberg and a couple of dozen Whitehall officials told their secretaries to make notes in their diaries.

  Judy, at last, had something to do. There would be no press, but there were arrangements to be made with the various ministries, and plans for the visit to be worked out with Geers’s staff. She saw little of Fleming. When she had finished her work she would go for long, solitary walks across the moors in the blustery weather of early autumn.

  About a week before the opening, she saw a white yacht standing out to sea. It was a big, ocean-going yacht, a long way off. From the camp, it was hidden behind the island of Thorholm, it could only be seen from further along the coast. Judy noticed it as she walked back by the cliff-top path in the afternoon.

  The following afternoon it was still there, and Judy, walking along the path between the cliff edge and the heather, thought she could see the blink of an aldis lamp signalling from it. This in itself would not have made her curious, had she not suddenly heard the sound of a car engine from the moor above her. By instinct, she dodged down behind a gorse bush and waited. It was a powerful but smooth engine that purred expensively as it ticked over.

  The next thing Judy noticed was that the signalling had stopped. A moment or two later the engine revved and she could hear a car drive heavily away. After it had gone some distance, she got up and walked to the top of the path. Where it came to the cliff-top, it met a rough cart-track which wound away inland to join the main road in a valley between the hills. A large, shining car was disappearing round the first bend, behind a coppice of firs. Judy stared after it: there was something familiar about it.

  She said nothing to Quadring, but went there again next day. There was no yacht and no car. The landscape was empty and silent except for the gulls. The next day it rained, and after that she was too busy with the Minister’s visit to go out at all. By tea-time on the day before the opening, she had everything fixed — drivers laid on to collect the party from the station, a landing-crew provided for the Minister’s helicopter, drinks and sandwiches in the Director’s office, a timetable of the tour agreed with Reinhart and the others. Fleming was surly and withdrawn; Judy herself had a headache.

  The sun came out about four o’clock, so she put on a wind-cheater and went out. As she walked along the cliff-path the ground all round her steamed and, far below, the green waves slopped against the rocks in the freshening wind and threw up lace edges of foam that sparkled in the sunlight.

  There was no yacht, and again no car where the path met the track at the cliff-top; but there were tyre-marks, recent ones made after the rain. Judy was thinking about this when she became aware of another distant noise. This time it was an outboard motor and it came from the far side of the island, a couple of miles away. Straining her eyes against the sun, she watched the tiny distant shape of a boat edge out from behind the island, making for the bay below the camp at Thorness. It was Bridger’s boat, and she could just see one person — presumably Bridger — in it.

  She saw no more. There was a whistle and a crack beside her and a splinter of rock fell away from the cliff-face by her head. She did not wait to examine the bullet scar on the rock; she simply ran. Another bullet whistled close to her as she pelted headlong down the path, and then she was round the first turn of the cliff and out of range. She ran as far as she could, walked for a bit and then ran again. Long before she got back to camp the sun had set behind a bank of cloud. The wind rose and blew the day away. She shivered, and her legs were shaking.

  She felt safer when she got through the main gates, but terribly lonely. Quadring’s office was closed. There was no-one else she could talk to, and she did not want to meet Bridger in the mess. Dusk was falling as she walked between the chalets in the living-quarters, and suddenly she found herself at Fleming’s. She could not bear to be outside a moment longer. She knocked once at the door and walked straight in.

  Fleming was lying on his bed listening to a recording of Webern on a high-fidelity set he had rigged for himself. Looking up, he saw Judy standing in the doorway, panting, her face flushed, her hair blown about.

  “Very spectacular. What’s it in aid of?” He was half way through a bottle of Scotch.

  Judy shut the door behind her. “John —”

  “Well, what?”

  “I’ve been shot at.”

  “Phui.” He put down his glass and swung his feet to the floor.

  “I have! Just now, up on the moors.”

  “You mean whistled at.”

  “I was standing at the top of the cliff when suddenly a bullet went close past me and smacked into the rock. I jumped back and another one —”

  “Some of the brown jobs at target practice. They’re all rotten shots.” Fleming walked over to the record-player and switched it off. He was quite steady, quite sober in spite of the whisky.

  “There was no-one,” said Judy. “No-one at all.”

  “Then they weren’t bullets. Here, have a drink and calm yourself down.” He foraged for a glass for her.

  “They were bullets,” Judy insisted, sitting on the bed. “Someone with a telescopic sight.”

  “You’re really in a state, aren’t you?” He found a glass, half-filled it and handed it to her. “Why should anyone want to take pot shots at you?”

  “There could be reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  Judy looked down into her glass.

  “Nothing that makes any sense.”

  “What were you doing on the cliffs?”

  “Just looking at the sea.”

  “What was on the sea?”

  “Doctor Bridger’s boat. Nothing else.”

  “Why were you so interested in Dennis’s boat?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Are you suggesting that he shot at you?”

  “No. It wasn’t him.” She held the footboard of the bed to stop her hand from trembling. “Can I stay here a bit? Till I get over the shakes.”

  “Do what you like. And drink that up.”

  She took a mouthful of the undiluted whisky and felt it stinging her mouth and throat. From the quietness outside came a long low howl, and a piece of guttering on the but shook.

  “What was that?”

  “The wind,” said Fleming as he stood watching her.

  She could feel the spirit moving down, glowing, into her stomach. “I don’t like this place.”

  “Nor do I,” he said.

  They drank in the silence broken only by the wind moaning round the camp buildings. The sky outside the window was almost dark, with blacker clouds blowing raggedly in from over the sea. She lowered her glass and looked Fleming in the eyes.

  “Why does Doctor Bridger go to the island?” She never felt inclined to call Bridger by his first name.

  “He goes bird-watching. You know jolly well he goes bird-watching.”

  “Every evening?”

  “Look, when I’m flaked out at the end of the day I go sailing.” This was true. Navigating a fourteen-footer was Fleming’s one outside activity. Not that he
did it very often; and he did it alone, not with the camp sailing club. “Except when I’m really flaked, like now.”

  He picked up the bottle by its neck and stood frowning, thinking of Dennis Bridger. “He goes snooping on sea-birds.”

  “Always on the island?”

  “That’s where they are,” he said impatiently. “There’s masses of stuff out there — gannets, guillemots, fulmars... Have some more of this.”

  She let him pour some more into her glass. Her head was humming a little.

  “I’m sorry I burst in.”

  “Don’t mind me.” He rumpled her already tangled hair in his affectionate, unpredatory way. “I can do with a bit of company in this dump. Specially when it’s a sweet, sweet girl.”

  “I’m not in the least sweet.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t like what I am.” Judy looked away from him, down at her glass again. “I don’t like what I do.”

  “That makes two of us.” Fleming looked over her head towards the window. “I don’t like what I do either.”

  “I thought you were completely taken up in it?”

  “I was, but now it’s finished I don’t know. I’ve been trying to get myself sloshed on this, but I can’t.” He looked down at her in a confused way, not at all as he had done in the computer. “Perhaps you’re what I need.”

  “John —”

  “What?”

  “Don’t trust me too much.”

  Fleming grinned. “You up to something shady?”

  “Not as far as you’re concerned.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said, pushing up her chin with his hand. “You’ve an honest face.”

  He kissed her forehead lightly, not very seriously.