A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “Really?” Christine looked from him to Reinhart.

  “Really.”

  Reinhart remained silent, but something had happened to him; he was no longer dejected and his eyes twinkled and were alert. The rest of them stood in a silent thoughtful group while Christine sat down to the input teletype and Bridger adjusted settings on the control desk.

  “Now,” he said. He was even quieter than Fleming, and Judy could not decide whether he was jealous or apprehensive or merely trying, like the others, to work it out.

  Christine tapped rapidly at the keyboard and the computer hummed steadily behind its metal panelling. It really did seem to be all around them — massive, impassive and waiting.

  Dawnay looked at the rows of blue cabinets, the rhythmically oscillating lights with less awe then Judy felt, but with interest. “Questions and answers — do you believe that?”

  “If you were sitting up among the stars, you couldn’t ask us directly what we know. But this chap could.” Fleming indicated the computer control racks. “If it’s designed and programmed to do it for them.”

  Dawnay turned to Reinhart again.

  “If Dr. Fleming’s on the right line, you really have something tremendous.”

  “Fleming has an instinct for it,” said Reinhart, watching Christine.

  When she had finished typing, nothing happened. Bridger fiddled with the control desk knobs while the others waited. Fleming looked puzzled.

  “What’s up, Dennis?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could be wrong,” said Judy.

  “We haven’t been yet.”

  As Fleming spoke the lamps on the display panel started to flicker, and a moment later the output printer went into action with a clatter. They gathered round it watching the wide white streamer of paper inching up over its roller, covered in lines of figures.

  One of the long low cupboards in Geers’s office was a cocktail cabinet. The Director stood four glasses on top and produced a bottle of gin from the lower shelf.

  “What Reinhart and his people are doing is terribly exciting.” He was wearing his second-best suit but his best manner for Dawnay’s benefit. “A little set-back yesterday, but I gather it’s all right now.”

  Dawnay, submerged in one of the armchairs, looked up and caught Reinhart’s eye. Geers went on talking as he sprinkled bitters into one of the glasses.

  “We’ve nothing but ironmongery here, really, out in this wilderness. We do a good deal of the country’s rocketry, of course, and there’s a lot of complex stuff goes into that, but I wouldn’t mind changing into some old clothes and getting back to lab work. Is that pink enough?”

  He placed the filled glass on his desk on a level with Dawnay’s ear. Its base was tucked into a little paper mat to prevent it from marking the polish.

  “Fine, thanks.” Dawnay could just see it and reach it without getting up. Geers reached into the cabinet for another bottle.

  “And sherry for you, Reinhart?” Sherry was poured. “One gets so stuck behind an executive desk. Cheers.... Nice to see you again, Madeleine. What have you been up to?”

  “D.N.A., chromosomes, the origin of life caper.” Dawnay spoke gruffly. She put her glass back on the desk and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke down her nose like a man. “I’ve got into a bit of a cul-de-sac. I was just going away to think when I met Ernest.”

  “Stay and think here.” Geers gave her a nice smile and then switched it off. “Where’s Fleming got to?”

  “He’ll be over in a minute,” said Reinhart.

  “You’ve a bright boy, though an awkward one.” Geers informed him. “In fact you’ve a bit of an awkward squad altogether, haven’t you?”

  “We’ve also got results.” Reinhart was unruffled. “It’s started printing out.”

  Geers raised his eyebrows.

  “Has it indeed? What’s it printing?”

  They told him.

  “Very odd. Very odd indeed. And what happened when you fed it back?”

  “A whole mass of figures came out.”

  “What are they?”

  “No idea. We’ve been going over them, but so far...” Reinhart shrugged.

  Fleming walked in with a perfunctory sort of knock.

  “This the right party?”

  “Come in, come in,” said Geers, as if to a promising but gauche student. “Thirsty?”

  “When am I not?”

  Fleming was carrying the print-out sheets. He threw them down on the desk to take his drink.

  “Any joy?” Reinhart asked.

  “Not a crumb. There’s something wrong with him, or wrong with us.”

  “Is that the latest?” asked Geers, straightening the papers and bending over them to look. “You’ll have to do a lot of analysis on this, won’t you? If we can help in any way —”

  “It ought to be simple.” Fleming was subdued and preoccupied as though he was trying to see something just beyond him. “I’m sure there ought to be something quite easy. Something we’d recognise.”

  “There was a section here —” Reinhart took the sheets and shuffled through them. “Seems vaguely familiar. Have another look at that lot, Madeleine.”

  Madeleine looked.

  “What sort of thing do you expect?” Geers asked Fleming, as he poured a drink.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what the game is yet.”

  “You wouldn’t be interested in the carbon atom, would you?” Dawnay looked up out of her chair with a faint smile.

  “The carbon atom!”

  “It’s not expressed the way we’d put it; but, yes, it could be a description of the structure of carbon.” She blew smoke out of her nose. “Is that what you meant, Ernest?”

  Reinhart and Geers bent over the sheets again.

  “I’m a bit rusty, of course,” said Geers.

  “But it could be, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it could be. I wonder if there’s anything else.”

  “There won’t be anything else,” Fleming said. He seemed very sure, and no longer preoccupied. “Take it from the beginning. Think of the hydrogen question. He’s asking us what form of life we belong to. All these other figures are other possible ways of making living creatures. But we don’t know anything about them, because life on this earth is based on the carbon atom.”

  “Well, it’s a theory,” said Reinhart. “What do we do now? Feed back the figures relating to carbon?”

  “If we want him to know what stuff we’re made of. He won’t forget.”

  “Aren’t you presupposing an intelligence?” said Geers, who had no time for fancy stuff.

  “Look.” Fleming turned to him. “The message we picked up did two things. It stipulated a design. It then gave us a lot of basic information to feed into the computer when we’d built it. We didn’t know what that information was at the time, but we’re beginning to know now. With what was in the original program, and what we tell him, he can learn anything he likes about us. And he can learn to act upon it. If that’s not an intelligence, I don’t know what is.”

  “It’s a very useful machine,” Dawnay said.

  Fleming turned on her. “Just because it doesn’t have protoplasm, no chemist can imagine it as a thinking agency!”

  Dawnay sniffed.

  “What are you afraid of, John?” Reinhart asked.

  “Its purpose. It hasn’t been put here for fun. It hasn’t been put here for our benefit.”

  “You’ve a neurosis about it,” said Dawnay.

  “You think so?”

  “You’ve been given a windfall; use it.” She appealed to Reinhart. “If you use Dr. Fleming’s method and feed back the carbon formula, you may get something else. You may build up to more complicated structures, and you’ve got a marvellous calculating machine to handle them. That’s all it is. Apply it.”

  “John?” Reinhart turned to Fleming.

  “You can count me out.”

  “Would you like to tackle it, Ma
deleine?” said the Professor.

  “Why don’t you?” she asked him.

  “It is a long step from astronomy to bio-synthesis. If your university can spare you....”

  “We can accommodate you.” Geers, when he moved, moved in quickly. “You said you were at a dead end.”

  Dawnay considered.

  “Would you work with me, Dr. Fleming?”

  Fleming shook his head. “There’s something needs thinking out first — before we start at all.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ve gone as far as I want. Further, in fact, to show I could deliver the goods. But for me the road ends here.”

  Reinhart opened his mouth to speak, but Fleming turned away.

  “All right,” Reinhart said. “Will you tackle it, Madeleine?”

  They made the rest of the arrangements when Fleming had gone.

  Dawnay moved in the following week and set to work on the computer, with Bridger and Christine helping her and Geers now full of enthusiasm and attention. Fleming returned to London and Judy saw nothing of him; being a serving officer tied by oath, she had to stay where she was ordered. In a way it was a relief to be free of their equivocal relationship. After their one night in his chalet she had kept him, as far as possible, at arm’s length, for she was torn between the instinct of being in love and the feeling that she did not want him to take her for something other than she was. At least while he was away she did not have to report on him — only on Bridger, and that she minded less.

  Bridger gave no clue to any of them. Judy kept away from the moor and Quadring’s patrols found nothing. Bridger himself grew steadily more miserable and withdrawn. He worked competently but without enthusiasm, spending his spare time watching the late migrations from the Thorholm nestings.

  Autumn darkened into winter. Back in London, Fleming settled down to check the entire message and all his original calculations. Monitoring of the signal went on from Bouldershaw Fell, but it was now only routine. The code was always the same; Fleming could find nothing in all his workings to give him a line on what he feared.

  At Thorness Dawnay made better progress.

  “The boy was right about one thing,” she told Reinhart. “The question and answer business. We fed in the carbon atom figures and immediately it began to print out stuff on the structure of protein molecules.”

  When she fed that back, it started asking more questions. It offered the formulas of a variety of different structures based on proteins, and it clearly wanted to be given more information about them. Dawnay set her department at Edinburgh to work. Between them they put back into the machine everything they knew about cell formation. By the New Year it had given them the molecular structure of haemoglobin.

  “Why haemoglobin?” asked Judy, who had followed her to Edinburgh in an attempt to understand what was happening.

  “The haemoglobin in the blood carries the electricity supply to your brain.”

  “He offered you that as one of a set of alternatives?” Reinhart asked. They had all three met in Dawnay’s study in one of the old grey university buildings because she had told them she wanted a Ministry decision.

  “Yes,” she said. “As before. And we fed that one back.”

  “So now it knows what our brains run on.”

  “It knows a great deal more than that by now.”

  Reinhart stroked his chin with his little fingers.

  “Why does it want to?”

  “You’re under Fleming’s influence, aren’t you?” Dawnay said reprovingly. “It doesn’t ‘want to know’ anything. It calculates logical responses from information which we give it, and from what it already possesses. Because it’s a calculating machine.”

  “Is that all?” Judy, from what little she knew, shared Reinhart’s doubts.

  “Let’s try to be scientific about it, shall we?” Dawnay said. “Not mystical.”

  “Professor Reinhart, do you... ?”

  Reinhart looked uncomfortable. “Fleming would say it wants to know what sort of intelligence it’s up against — what sort of computers we are, how big our brains are, how we feed them, what sort of beings we house them in.”

  “Young Fleming’s emotionally disturbed, if you ask me,” said Dawnay. She waved her hand towards shelves piled with folders of paper. “We’ve got so much now we can hardly see daylight, but I’ve an idea what it’s all about, which is why I wanted you. I think it’s given us the basic plan of a living cell.”

  “A what?”

  “Not that it’s any good to us. We have this huge amount of numbers. It’s far too complex for us ever to understand fully.”

  “Why should it be?”

  “Look at the size of it! We can recognise odd bits — odd bits of chromosome structure and so on — but it would take years to analyse it all.”

  “If that’s what you’re meant to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Reinhart stroked his chin again. His fingers, Judy noticed, had little dimples on them. There was something very comforting and humane about him, even when he was out of his depth in theory.

  “I want to talk to Fleming and Osborne,” he said.

  He got them together, eventually, in Osborne’s office. By that time he had all the facts at his fingertips and he wanted action. Fleming looked older and slack, as though the elastic inside him had run down. His face was pouchy and his eyes bloodshot.

  Osborne sat back elegantly and listened to Reinhart.

  “Professor Dawnay’s come up with what appears to be the detailed chromosome structure of a cell.”

  “A living cell?”

  “Yes. It’s something we’ve never known before: the order in which the nucleic acid molecules are arranged.”

  “So you could actually build one up?”

  “If we can use the computer as a control, and if we can make a chemical device to act on the instructions as they come up — in fact, if we can make a D.N.A. synthesiser — then I think we can begin to build living tissue.”

  “That’s what the biologists have been after for years, isn’t it?”

  “You really want to let it make a living organism?” Fleming asked.

  “Dawnay wants to try,” said Reinhart. “Fleming doesn’t. What do we do?”

  “Why don’t you?” Osborne asked Fleming quite casually, as though it was a matter of passing interest.

  “Because we’re being pushed into this by a form of compulsion,” said Fleming wearily. “I’ve been saying that ever since the day we built the damn thing, and I can find nothing to make me think otherwise. Madeleine Dawnay imagines you can just use it as a piece of lab equipment: she’s a cheerful optimist. If she wants to play with D.N.A. synthesis, let her stay in her university and do it. Don’t let her use the computer. Or, if you must, at least wipe the memory first.”

  “Reinhart?” Osborne turned languidly to the Professor. Whatever impression Fleming had made on him did not show.

  “I don’t know,” said Reinhart. “I simply don’t know. It comes from an alien intelligence, but —”

  “’We can always pull out the plug’?” Fleming quoted for him. “Look, we built it to prove the content of the message. Right? Well, we’ve done that. We operated it to discover its purpose. Now we know that too.”

  “Do we?”

  “I do! It’s an intellectual fifth column from another world — from another form of existence. It’s got the seeds of life in it, and also the seeds of destruction.”

  “Have you any grounds at all for saying that?” asked Osborne.

  “No tangible grounds.”

  “Then how can we —?”

  “All right, go on!” Fleming heaved himself up and made for the door. “Go on and see what happens — but don’t come crying to me!”

  Six

  ALERT

  FOR all that, he went to Thorness in the spring — he said, to visit Judy, but in fact from morbid curiosity. He kept away from the computer block but Judy an
d Bridger, separately, told him what was happening. A new bay added to the building was filled by Dawnay with elaborate laboratory equipment, including a chemical synthesiser and an electron microscope. As well as Christine, she had several postgraduate students of her own at work on the project, and all the money she could reasonably need. Reinhart and Osborne between them had got substantial backing.

  “And what about you?” Fleming asked Judy.

  They sat on the cliff-top, inside the camp, above the jetty.

  “I go round with the seasons.” She smiled at him tenderly but warily. She was shocked by the change in him, by his blotchiness and general deterioration, and the look of utter defeat that hung about him. She longed to hold him and to give herself to him. At the same time she wanted to keep him away at the distance of their original friendship, which seemed to her the limit to which she could honourably go so long as she was acting a part of which she was ashamed. She had even tried to resign her commission when she heard he was coming back, but it had not been allowed. She knew too much by now to be released, and far too much to be able to tell him the truth.

  Bridger had stayed in the camp, working all winter, and had made no suspicious move; but Kaufmann’s car had been seen several times in the neighbourhood and the tall, improbably-dressed chauffeur had been watching arrivals and departures at the station and on at least one occasion had telephoned Bridger. After this Bridger had looked more unhappy than ever and had taken to having copies of the computer’s output retyped for his own use. Judy had not spotted that, but Quadring had. Nothing had come of it, however. The white yacht had not reappeared, and indeed could hardly have been expected to during a winter of gales and blizzards and wild storm-swept seas. Early in the spring Naval patrols were stepped up and reinforced by helicopters, and the yacht, if it ever had anything to do with it, was scared away. But if security was increasing, so was the value of the information, and there was a general feeling among Judy’s superiors that the stakes were rising.