A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “You know what we found.” She avoided his eyes.

  “Are you?”

  “Yes,” she said, and walked away to stand beside Quadring.

  They let Bridger get right to the top of the path, lugging the heavy canister from the cave. As his head came up over the edge, Fleming shouted to him:

  “Dennis!”

  One of the soldiers clamped his hand over Fleming’s mouth, but by that time Bridger had seen them. Before Quadring could get on to him, he dropped the canister and ran.

  He ran fast for a man in sea-boots, along the path at the edge of the cliff. Quadring and the soldiers pounded after him. Fleming ran after them, and Judy after him. It was like a stag-hunt in the cold, early light. They could not see where Bridger was going. He got to the end of the headland, and then turned and slipped. His wet rubber boots flailed at the grass at the edge, and then he was over. Five seconds later, he was a broken body on the rocks at the sea’s edge.

  Fleming joined the soldiers on the cliff-top, looking down. As Judy came up to him he turned away without speaking and walked slowly back towards the camp. He still had a splinter of glass from the microscope in his finger. Stopping for a moment, he pulled it out, and then walked on.

  Seven

  ANALYSIS

  GENERAL Vandenberg by this time had his allied headquarters accommodated in a bomb-proof bunker under the Ministry of Defence. His functions as co-ordinator had gradually expanded until he was now virtual director of local air strategy. However little they liked this, Her Majesty’s Government submitted to it in the face of an international situation growing steadily worse: the operations room next to his private office was dominated by a wall-map of the world showing traces of an alarming number of orbital satellites of unknown potentiality. As well as the American and Russian vehicles, some of which certainly carried nuclear armament, there was an increasing traffic put up by other powers whose relations with each other and with the West were often near sparking-point. Public morality thinned like the atmosphere as men and machines rose higher, and year by year the uneasy truce which was supposed to control the upper air and the spaces above it came nearer to falling into anarchy.

  Vandenberg, through the Ministry of Defence, now had call on all local establishments, including Thorness. He rode gently but with determination, and watched carefully what went on. When he received reports of Bridger’s death, he sent for Osborne.

  Osborne’s position was now very different from what it had been in the early days of Bouldershaw Fell. Far from representing a ministry in the ascendant, he and Ratcliff now had to bow before the wishes of the war men, contriving as best they could to keep some say in their own affairs. Not that Osborne was easily ruffled. He stood before Vandenberg’s desk as immaculate and suave as ever.

  “Sit down.” Vandenberg waved him to a chair. “Rest your feet.”

  They went over the circumstances of Bridger’s death move by move as though they were playing a game of chess; the general probing, and Osborne on the defensive but denying nothing and making no excuses.

  “You have to admit,” said Vandenberg at the end of it, “your Ministry’s snarled it up good and hard.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  Vandenberg pushed back his chair and went to look at his wall-map.

  “We can’t afford to play schools, Osborne. We could use that machine. It’s built on military premises, with military aid. We could use it in the public interest.”

  “What the hell do you think Reinhart’s doing?” Osborne was eventually ruffled. “I’m sure your people would like to get your hands on it. I’m sure we all seem anarchistic to you because we haven’t got drilled minds. I know there’s been a tragedy. But they’re doing something vitally important up there.”

  “And we’re not?”

  “You can’t suddenly stop them in their tracks.”

  “Your Cabinet would say we can.”

  “Have you asked them?”

  “No. But they would.”

  “At least —” Osborne calmed down again — “at least let us finish this present project, if we give you certain guarantees.”

  As soon as he was back in his own office he telephoned Reinhart.

  “For heaven’s sake patch up some sort of a truce with Geers,” he told him.

  Reinhart’s meeting with the Director was depressingly similar to Osborne’s with Vandenberg, but Reinhart was a better strategist than Geers. After two grinding hours they sent for Judy.

  “We’ve got to strengthen the security here, Miss Adamson.”

  “You don’t expect me —?” She broke off.

  Geers glinted at her through his spectacles and she turned for understanding to Reinhart.

  “My position here would be intolerable. Everyone trusted me, and now I turn out to be a security nark.”

  “I always knew that,” said Reinhart gently. “And Professor Dawnay has guessed. She accepts it.”

  “Dr. Fleming doesn’t.”

  “He wasn’t meant to,” said Geers.

  “He accepted me as something else.”

  “Everyone knows you had a job to do,” Reinhart looked unhappily at his fingers. “And everyone respects it.”

  “I don’t respect it.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Geers took off his glasses and blinked at her as if she had gone out of focus. She was trembling.

  “I’ve hated it from the start. It was perfectly clear that everyone here was perfectly trustworthy, except Bridger.”

  “Even Fleming?”

  “Dr. Fleming’s worth ten of anyone else I’ve met! He needs protecting from his own indiscretion, and I’ve tried to do that. But I will not go on spying on him.”

  “What does Fleming say?” Reinhart asked.

  “He doesn’t talk to me since...”

  “Where is he?” asked Geers.

  “Drinking, I suppose.”

  “Still on that, is he?” Geers raised his eyes to display hopelessness, and the gesture made Judy suddenly, furiously angry.

  “What do you expect him to take to, after what’s happened? Bingo?” She turned again, with faint hope, to Reinhart. “I’ve grown very fond of — of all of them. I admire them.”

  “My dear girl, I’m in no position...” Reinhart avoided her eyes. “It’s probably as well it is out in the open.”

  Judy found she was standing to attention. She faced Geers.

  “Can I be relieved?”

  “No.”

  “Then may I have a different assignment?”

  “No.”

  “Then may I resign my commission?”

  “Not during a state of National Emergency.” Geers’s eyes, she noticed, were set too close together. They stared straight at her, expressionless with authority. “If it weren’t for your very good record, I’d say you were immature for this job. As it is, I think you’re merely unsettled by exposure to the scientific mind, especially such an ebullient and irresponsible mind as Fleming’s.”

  “He’s not irresponsible.”

  “No?”

  “Not about important things.”

  “The important things at this establishment are the means of survival. We’re under very great pressure.”

  “To the military, all things are military,” said Reinhart icily. He walked across the room and looked out of the window, his little hands clasped uneasily behind his back. “It’s a bleak place here, you know. We all feel the strain of it.”

  For some time after this outburst Geers was unusually agreeable. He did everything he possibly could for Dawnay, rushing through new equipment to replace what Fleming had damaged and generally identifying himself with what she was doing. Reinhart fought hard to retain his foothold and Judy went back to her duty with a sort of glum despair. She even screwed up her courage to see Fleming, but his room was empty and so were the three whisky bottles by his bed. With one exception, he spoke to no-one in the days that followed Bridger’s death.

  Dawnay h
ad gone straight back to work, with Christine to help her with the relatively simple calculations needed from the computer. Within a week they had another successful synthesis, and they were watching it, late in the evening, in the repaired microscope, when the door of the laboratory was pushed open and Fleming stood unsteadily inside.

  Dawnay straightened up and looked at him. He wore no jacket or tie, his shirt was crumpled and dirty and he had seven days’ growth of stubble round his jaw. He might have been on the verge of delirium tremens.

  “What do you want?”

  He gave her a glazed stare and swayed a step forward into the room.

  “Keep out of here, please.”

  “I see you’ve new equipment,” he said thickly, with a fatuous twitching smile.

  “That’s right. Now will you leave us?”

  “Bridger’s dead.” He smiled stupidly at her.

  “I know.”

  “You go on as though nothing had happened.” It was difficult to understand what he said. “But he’s dead. He won’t come back any more.”

  “We’ve all heard, Dr. Fleming.”

  He swayed another pace into the room. “What you doing here?”

  “This is private. Will you please go?” She got up and advanced grimly towards him. He stood blinking at her, the smile fading from his face.

  “He was my oldest friend. He was a fool, but he was my —”

  “Dr. Fleming,” she said quietly. “Will you go, or do I call the guards?”

  He looked at her for a moment, as if trying to see her through mist, then shrugged and shuffled out. She followed him to the door and locked it behind him.

  “We can do without that,” she said to Christine.

  Fleming found his way back to his hut, took an unfinished bottle of whisky from his desk drawer and poured it down the sink. Then he fell on to his bed and slept for twenty-four hours. The following evening he shaved and bathed and started to pack.

  The new experiment grew fantastically. Within a few hours Dawnay had to transfer it from its microscope slide to a small nutrient bath, and the following morning it had to be moved into a larger bath. It continued to double itself during the whole of the day that Fleming slept, and by the evening Dawnay was forced to appeal for help to Geers, who took over the problem with a proprietary air and caused his workshop wing to build a deep, electrically-heated tank with a drip-feed channel into its open top and an inspection window in the middle of its front panel. Towards dawn the new creature was lifted by four assistants from its outgrown bath and placed in the tank.

  In its new environment it grew to about the size of a sheep and then stopped. It seemed perfectly healthy and harmless, but it was not pretty.

  Reinhart came to a decision that morning and went to see Dawnay. She was in her laboratory still, checking the feed control at the top of the tank. He hovered around until she had finished.

  “Is it still alive?”

  “And kicking.” Apart from looking pale and taut around the eyes and mouth, she showed no sign of tiredness. “A day and a half since it was a smear on a slide: I told you there was no reason an organism shouldn’t grow as fast as you like if you can get enough food into it.”

  “But it’s stopped growing now?” Reinhart peered respectfully into the inspection port, through which he could see a dark form moving in the murk of the tank.

  “It seems to have a pre-determined size and shape,” Dawnay said, picking up a set of X-rays and handing them to him. “There’s nothing much to see from there. There’s no bone formation. It’s like a great jelly, but it’s got this eye and some sort of cortex — which looks like a very complicated nerve ganglia.”

  “No other features?” Reinhart held up the X-rays and squinted at them.

  “Possibly some rudimentary attempt at a pair of legs, though you could hardly call them more than a division of tissue.”

  Reinhart put down the plates and frowned.

  “How does it feed?”

  “Takes it in through the skin. It lives in nutrient fluid and absorbs straight into its body cells. Very simple, very efficient.”

  “And the computer?”

  Dawnay looked surprised.

  “What about the computer?”

  “Has it reacted at all?”

  “How could it?”

  “I don’t know.” Reinhart frowned at her anxiously. “Has it?”

  “No. It’s been entirely quiet.”

  The Professor walked into the computer control room and back again, his head down, his gaze on his neat shoecaps as they twinkled before him. It was as yet early morning and very quiet. He clasped his hands behind him and spoke without looking up at Dawnay.

  “I want Fleming back on this.”

  Dawnay did not answer for a moment, then she said: “It’s perfectly under control.”

  “Whose control?”

  “Mine.”

  He looked up at her with an effort.

  “We’re on borrowed time, Madeleine. The people here want us out.”

  “In the middle of this?”

  “No. The Ministry have fought for that, but we’ve got to work as a team and show results.”

  “Good grief! Aren’t those results?” Dawnay pointed a short, bony finger at the tank. “We’re in the middle of the biggest thing of the century — we’re making life!”

  “I know,” Reinhart said, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. “But where is it taking us?”

  “We’ve a lot to find out.”

  “And we can’t afford any more accidents.”

  “I can manage.”

  “You’re not on your own, Madeleine.” Reinhart spoke with a kind of soft tenseness. “We’re all involved in this.”

  “I can manage,” she repeated.

  “You can’t divorce it from its origin — from the computer.”

  “Of course I can’t. But Christine understands the computer, and I have her.”

  “She understands the basic arithmetic, but there’s a higher logic, or so I think. Only Fleming understands that.”

  “I’m not having John Fleming reeling in here, breaking up my work and my equipment.” Dawnay’s voice rose.

  Reinhart regarded her quietly. He was still tense, but with a determination which had carried him a long way.

  “We can’t all do what we want entirely.” He spoke so brusquely that Dawnay looked at him again in surprise. “I’m still in charge of this programme — just. And I will be so long as we work as a team and make sense. That means having Fleming here.”

  “Drunk or sober?”

  “Good God, Madeleine, if we can’t trust each other, who can we trust?”

  Dawnay was about to protest, and then stopped.

  “All right. So long as he behaves himself and sticks to his own side of the job.”

  “Thank you, my dear.” Reinhart smiled.

  When he left the laboratory he went straight to Geers.

  “But Fleming has notified me that he’s leaving,” Geers said. “I’ve just sent Miss Adamson over to the computer to make sure he doesn’t deliver a parting shot.”

  Fleming, however, was not at the computer. Judy stood in the control room, hesitating, when Dawnay came out to her.

  “Hallo. Want to see Cyclops?”

  “Why do you call it Cyclops?”

  “Because of his physical characteristics.” Dawnay seemed completely relaxed. “Don’t they educate girls nowadays? Come along, he’s in here.”

  “Must I?”

  “Not interested?”

  “Yes, but —”

  Judy felt dazed. She had not taken in the progress of the experiment. For the past two days she had thought of almost nothing but Fleming and Bridger and her own hopeless position, and so far as she had any image at all of Dawnay’s creation, it was microscopic and unrelated to her own life. She followed the older woman through into the laboratory without thinking and without expecting anything.

  The tank confused her slightly. It wa
s something she had not reckoned with.

  “Look inside,” said Dawnay.

  Judy looked down in through the open top of the big tank, quite unprepared for what she was going to see. The creature was not unlike an elongated jellyfish, without limbs or tentacles but with a vague sort of bifurcation at one end and an enlargement that might be a head at the other. It floated in liquid, a twitching, quivering mass of protoplasm, its surface greeny-yellow, slimy and glistening. And in the middle of what might be its head was set — huge, lidless and colourless — an eye.

  Judy felt violently sick and then panic-stricken. She turned away retching and stared at Dawnay as if she too were something in a nightmare, then she clamped her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.

  She ran straight across the compound to Fleming’s hut, flung the door open and went inside.

  Fleming was pushing some last things into a hold-all, his cases packed and standing on the floor. He looked across coldly at her as she stood panting and heaving in the doorway.

  “Not again,” he said.

  “John!” She could hardly speak at first. Her head was turning and singing and her throat felt full of phlegm. “John, you must come.”

  “Come where?” He looked at her with blank hostility. The toll of the past week still showed in his pale skin and the dark pouches under his eyes, but he was calm and kempt and clearly again in full charge of himself.

  Judy tried to steady her voice.

  “To the lab.”

  “For you?” It was a quiet sneer.

  “Not for me. They’ve made something terrible. A sort of creature.”

  “Why don’t you tell M.I.5?”

  “Please.” Judy went up to him; she felt completely defenceless but she did not care what he said or did to her. He turned away to go on with his packing. “Please, John! Something horrible’s happening. You’ve got to stop it.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do and what not to do,” he said.

  “They’ve got this thing. This monstrous-looking thing with an eye. An eye!”

  “That’s their problem.” He pushed an old sweater into the top of the bag and pulled the strings together to close it.

  “John — you’re the only one...”

  He pulled the bag off his bed and brushed past her with it to stack it with his cases. “Who’s fault’s that?”