A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “Your job here has hardly begun, Miss Adamson.”

  “But the Bridger business is over!”

  “Bridger may be, but the business isn’t.” He seemed quite unaware of her distress. “Intel have had enough to whet their appetite, and now they’ve lost him they’ll be looking for someone else — perhaps one of his friends.”

  “You think Dr. Fleming would sell out?” she asked scornfully.

  “Anyone might, if we let them.”

  In the event it was Fleming, not Judy, who reported the first move from Intel.

  He, Christine and Dawnay had found a way of securing the contact plates of an encephalograph on to what seemed to be the head of Cyclops, and Christine had helped him to link them by cable to the high-voltage terminals of the computer. They added a transformer to the racks below the display panel and ran the circuit through there, so that the current reaching Cyclops had only about the strength of a torch battery. All the same, the effect was alarming. When the first connection was made the creature went completely rigid and the control display lamps of the computer jammed full on. After a little, however, both the creature and the machine appeared to adjust themselves; data processing went on steadily, although nothing was printed out, and Cyclops floated quietly in his tank, gazing out of the port-hole with his single eye.

  All this had taken several days, and Christine had been left in charge of the linked control room and laboratory with instructions to call Dawnay and Fleming if anything fresh happened. Dawnay took some hard-earned rest, but Fleming visited the computer building from time to time to check up and to see Christine. He found her increasingly strung-up as days went by, and by the end of a week she had become so nervy that he tackled her about it.

  “Look — you know I’m dead scared of this whole business, but I didn’t know you were.”

  “I’m not,” she said. They were in the control room, watching the lights flickering steadily on the panel. “But it gives me an odd feeling.”

  “What does?”

  “That business with the terminals, and...” She hesitated and glanced nervously towards the other room. “When I’m in there I feel that eye watching me all the time.”

  “It watches all of us.”

  “No. Me particularly.”

  Fleming grinned. “I don’t blame it. I look at you myself.”

  “I thought you were otherwise occupied.”

  “I was.” He half raised his hand to touch her, then changed his mind and walked away to the door. “Take care of yourself.”

  He walked down the cliff path to the beach, where he could be quiet and alone and think. It was a grey, empty afternoon, the tide was out and the sand lay like dull grey slate between the granite headlands. He wandered out to the sea’s edge, head down, hands in pockets, trying to work through in his mind what was going on inside the computer. He walked slowly back to the rocky foreshore, too deep in his thoughts to notice a squat, bald man sitting on a boulder smoking a miniature cigar.

  “One moment, sir, please.” The guttural voice took him by surprise.

  “Who are you?”

  The bald man took a card from his breast pocket and held it out.

  “I can’t read,” said Fleming.

  The bald man smiled. “You, however, are Dr. Fleming.”

  “And you?”

  “It would mean nothing.” The bald man was slightly out of breath.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Around the headland. You can, at low tide, but it is quite a scramble.” He produced a silver case of cigarillos. “Smoking?”

  Fleming ignored it. “What do you want?”

  “I come for a walk.” He shrugged and put the case back in his pocket. He seemed to be recovering his breath. “You often come here yourself.”

  “This is private.”

  “Not the foreshore. In this free country the foreshore is...” He shrugged again. “My name is Kaufmann. You have not heard it?”

  “No.”

  “Your friend Herr Doktor Bridger —”

  “My friend Bridger is dead!”

  “I know. I heard.” Kaufmann inhaled his small cigar. “Very sad.”

  “Did you know Dennis Bridger?” Fleming asked, perplexed and suspicious.

  “Oh yes. We had been associated for some time.”

  “Do you work for —?” The light dawned and he tried to remember the name.

  “Intel? Yes.”

  Kaufmann smiled up at Fleming and blew out a little wraith of smoke.

  Fleming took his hands from his pockets.

  “Get out.”

  “Excuse?”

  “If you’re not off this property in five minutes, I shall call the guards.”

  “No, please.” Kaufmann looked hurt. “This was so happy a chance meeting you.”

  “And so happy for Bridger?”

  “No-one was more sorry than I. He was also very useful.”

  “And very dead.” Fleming looked at his wristwatch. “It’ll take me five minutes to climb the cliff. When I get to the top I shall tell the guards.”

  He turned to go, but Kaufmann called him back.

  “Dr. Fleming! You have much more lucrative ways of spending the next five minutes. I am not suggesting you do anything underhand.”

  “That’s dandy, isn’t it?” said Fleming, keeping his distance.

  “We were thinking, rather, you might like to transfer from government service to honourable service with us. I believe you are not too happy here.”

  “Let’s lay this on the line shall we, my herr friend?” Fleming walked back and stood looking down at him. “Maybe I don’t love the government, maybe I’m not happy. But even if I hated their guts and I was on my last gasp and there was no-one else in the world to turn to, I’d rather drop dead before I came to you.”

  Then he turned away and climbed up the cliff path without looking back.

  He went straight to Geers’s office and found the Director dictating reports into a tape-machine.

  “What did you tell him?” asked Geers when Fleming had reported.

  “Do you mind!” A look of disgust came over Fleming’s face. “It’s bad enough keeping it out of the hands of babes and sucklings, without feeding it to sharks.”

  He left the office wondering why he had bothered; but in fact it was one of the few actions that told in his favour during the coming months.

  Patrols were set on the beach, concertina wire was staked down from the headlands into the sea, Quadring’s security staff did a comb-out of the surrounding district, and nothing more was heard of Intel for a long time. The experiment in the computer building continued without any tangible result until after Dawnay came back from her holiday; and then, one morning, the computer suddenly started printing-out. Fleming locked himself up in his but with the print-out, and after about a hundred hours’ work he telephoned for Reinhart.

  From what he could make out, the computer was asking an entirely new set of questions, all concerning the appearance, dimensions and functions of the body. It was possible, as Fleming said, to reduce any physical form to mathematical terms and this, apparently, was what it was asking for.

  “For instance,” he told Reinhart and Dawnay when they sat down together to work on it, “it wants to know about hearing. There’s a lot here about audio frequencies, and it’s obviously asking how we make sounds and how we hear them.”

  “How could it know about speech?” Dawnay inquired.

  “Because its creature can see us using our mouths to communicate and our ears to listen. All these questions arise from your little monster’s observation. He can probably feel speech vibrations, too, and now that he’s wired to the machine he can transmit his observations to it.”

  “You assume.”

  “How else do you account for this?”

  “I don’t see how we can analyse the whole human structure,” Reinhart said.

  “We don’t have to. He keeps making intelligent guesses, and all we have
to do is feed back the ones that are right. It’s the old game. I can’t think, though, why it hasn’t found some quicker method by now. I’m sure it’s capable of it. Perhaps the creature hasn’t come up to expectations.”

  “Do you want to try it?” Reinhart asked Dawnay.

  “I’ll try anything,” she said.

  So the next stage of the project went forward, while Christine stayed with the computer, taking readings and inputting the results. She seemed all the time in a state of nervous tension, but said nothing.

  “Do you want to move over to something else?” Fleming asked her when they were alone together one evening in the computer building.

  “No. It fascinates me.”

  Fleming looked at her pensive and rather beautiful face. He no longer flirted with her as he used to before he was interested, when she was just a girl in the lab. Pushing his hands into his pockets, he turned from her and left the building. When he had gone she walked across the control room to the laboratory bay. It took her an effort to go through into the room where the tank was, and she stood for a moment in the doorway, her face strained, bracing herself. There was no sound except for the steady mains hum of the computer, but when she came within range of the port-hole in the side of the tank the creature began to move about, thumping against the tank walls and slopping fluid out of the open top.

  “Steady,” she said aloud. “Steady on.”

  She bent down mechanically and looked in through the porthole: the eye was there looking steadily back at her, but the creature was becoming more and more agitated, threshing about with the fringes of its body like a jellyfish. Christine passed a hand across her forehead; she was slightly dizzy from bending down, but the eye held her as if mesmerically. She stayed there for a long minute, and then for another, growing incapable of thought. Slowly, as if of its own volition, her right hand moved up the side of the tank and her fingers sought the wire leading in to the encephalograph cable. They touched the wire and tingled as the slight current ran through them.

  The moment she touched the wire, the creature grew quiet. It still looked steadfastly at her but no longer moved. The whole building was utterly quiet except for the hum of the computer. She straightened slowly, as if in a trance, still holding the wire. Her fingers ran along it until they touched the sheath of the cable and then closed on that, sliding it through the hollow of her hand. The cable was only loosely rigged; it looped across from the tank to the wall of the laboratory and was slung along the wall from pieces of tape tied to nails at intervals of a few yards. As her hand felt its way along the cable, she walked stiffly across to the wall and along beside it to the doorway to the computer room. Her eyes were open, but fixed and unseeing. The cable disappeared into a hole drilled in the wooden facing of the doorpost and she seemed at a loss when she could follow it no further. Then she raised her other hand and gripped the cable again on the other side of the doorway.

  Her right hand dropped and she went through into the other room, holding the cable with her left. She worked her way slowly along the wall to the end of the rack of control equipment, breathing in a deep, laboured way as if asleep and troubled by a dream. At the centre of the racks of equipment the cable ran into the transformer below the control panel. The panel lights flashed steadily with a sort of hypnotic rhythm and her eyes became fixed on them as they had been on the eye of the creature. She stood in front of the panel for a few moments as though she were going to move no further; then, slowly, her left hand let go of the cable. Her right hand lifted again and with the fingers of both she grasped the high tension wires that ran from the transformer up to the two terminals beside her head. These wires were insulated to a point just below the terminals where their cores were bared and clamped on to the jutting-out plates. Her hands moved up them slowly, inch by inch.

  Her face was blank and drained and she began to sway as she had done on the day when Fleming first made her stand between the terminal plates. She held on tightly to the wires, her fingers inching slowly up them. Then she touched the bare cores.

  It all happened very quickly. Her body twisted as the full voltage of the current ran through it. She began to scream, her legs buckled, her head fell back and she hung from her outstretched arms as if crucified. The lamps on the display panel jammed full on, glaring into her distorted face, and a loud and insistent thumping started from the other room.

  It lasted about ten seconds. Then her scream was cut off, there was a loud explosion from the fuse-panel above her, the lights went dead, her fingers uncurled from the naked wire and she fell heavily into a crumpled heap on the floor. For a moment there was silence. The creature stopped thumping and the humming of the computer stopped as if cut with a knife. The alarm bell rang.

  The first person on the scene was Judy, who was passing the building when the alarm on the wall of the porch clanged into life. Pushing open the door, she ran wildly down the corridor and into the control room. At first she could see nothing. The strip lights in the ceiling were still on, but the control desk hid the floor in front of the control panel. Then she saw Christine’s body and, running forward, knelt down beside it.

  “Christine!”

  She turned the body over on to its back. Christine’s face stared sightlessly up at her and the hands fell limply back on to the floor: they were black and burnt through to the bone. Judy felt for the girl’s heart, but it was still.

  “Oh God!” she thought. “Why do I always have to be in at the death?”

  Reinhart was back in London when he heard the news. When he reported it to Osborne, he got a different response from what he expected; Osborne was certainly worried by it, but he seemed preoccupied with other things and took it as one blow among many. Reinhart was distressed and also puzzled: not only Osborne but everyone else he met, as he moved in and out of Whitehall offices, appeared to have something secret and heavy on their minds. He thought of going to Bouldershaw Fell, which he had not visited for a long time, to try to get away from the feeling of oppression that surrounded him, but he found immediately that the radio-telescope had been put under military control and was firmly sealed off by Ministry of Defence security. This had happened without warning during the past week while he had been at Thorness. He was furious at not being consulted and went to see Osborne, but Osborne was too busy to make appointments.

  Christine’s post mortem and autopsy reports followed in a few days. The Professor was at least spared the ordeal of explaining to her relatives, for both her parents were dead and she had no other relations in the country. Fleming sent him a short, grim letter saying that no major damage had been done to the computer and that he had a theory about Christine’s death. Then there was a longer letter telling him the blown circuit had been repaired and that the computer was working full out, transferring a fantastic amount of information to its memory storage, though what the information was Fleming did not say. Dawnay telephoned him a couple of days later to say the computer had started printing-out. A vast mass of figures was pouring out from it, and as far as she and Fleming could tell this was not in the form of questions but of information.

  “It’s a whole lot more formulae for bio-synthesis,” she said. “Fleming thinks it’s asking for a new experiment, and I think he’s right.”

  “More monsters?” Reinhart asked into the telephone.

  “Possibly. But it’s much more complicated this time. It’ll be an immense job. We shall need a lot more facilities, I’m afraid, and more money.”

  He made another attempt to see Osborne and was summoned, to his surprise, to the Ministry of Defence.

  Osborne was waiting in Vandenberg’s room when he arrived. Vandenberg and Geers were also there: it looked as though they had been talking for some time. Geers’s brief case was open on the table and a lot of papers had been splayed out from it and examined. Something harsh and unfriendly about the atmosphere of the room put the Professor on his guard.

  “Rest your feet,” said Vandenberg automatically, without smil
ing. There was a small strained pause while everyone waited for someone else to speak, then he added. “I hear you’ve written off another body.”

  “It was an accident,” said Reinhart.

  “Sure, sure. Two accidents.”

  “The Cabinet have had the results of the enquiry,” Osborne said, looking down at the carpet.

  Geers coughed nervously and started shuffling the papers together.

  “Yes?” Reinhart looked at the General and waited.

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” said Vandenberg.

  “For what?”

  Osborne looked at him for the first time. “We’ve got to accept a change of control, a general tightening-up.”

  “Why?”

  “People are starting to ask questions. Soon they’ll find you’ve got this living creature you’re experimenting on.”

  “You mean the R.S.P.C.A.? It’s not an animal. It’s just a collection of molecules we put together ourselves.”

  “That isn’t going to make them any happier.”

  “We can’t just stop in the middle —” Reinhart looked from one to another of them, trying to fathom what was in their minds. “Dawnay and Fleming are just starting on a new tack.”

  “We know that,” said Geers, tapping the papers he was putting back into his brief case.

  “Then —?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Vandenberg again. “This is the end of your road.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Osborne shifted uneasily in his chair. “I’ve done my best. We all fought as hard as we could.”

  “Fought whom?”

  “The Cabinet are quite firm.” Osborne seemed anxious to avoid details. “We’ve lost our case, Ernest. It’s been fought and lost way above our level.”