A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “And now,” put in Vandenberg, “you’ve written off another body.”

  “That’s just an excuse!” Reinhart rose to his small feet and confronted the other man across the desk. “You want us out of it because you want the equipment. You trump up any kind of case —”

  Vandenberg sighed. “It’s the way it goes. I don’t expect you to understand our viewpoint.”

  “You don’t make it easy.”

  Geers snapped his brief case shut and switched on a small smile. “The truth is, Reinhart, they want you back at Bouldershaw Fell.”

  Reinhart regarded him with distaste.

  “Bouldershaw Fell? They won’t even let me in there.”

  Geers looked enquiringly at the General, who gave him a nod to go on.

  “The Cabinet have taken us into their confidence,” he said with an air of importance.

  “This is top secret, you understand,” said Vandenberg.

  “Then perhaps you’d better not tell me.” Reinhart stood stiffly, like a small animal at bay.

  “You’ll have to know,” said Geers. “You’ll be involved. The Government have sent out a Mayday—an S.O.S. They want you all working on defence.”

  “Regardless of what we’re doing?”

  “It’s a Cabinet decision.” Osborne addressed the carpet. “We’ve made the best terms we can.”

  Vandenberg stood up and walked across to the wall-map.

  “The Western powers are deeply concerned.” He also avoided looking at Reinhart. “Because of traces we’ve been picking up.”

  “What traces?”

  “Notably from your own radio-telescope. It’s the only thing we have with high enough definition. It’s giving us tracks of a great many vehicles in orbit.”

  “Terrestrial?” Reinhart looked across at the trajectories traced on the map. “Is that what you’re all worried about?”

  “Yeah. Someone on the other side of the globe is pushing them up fast, but they’re out of range of our early warning screen. The U. N. Space Agency has no line on them, nor has the Western Alliance. No-one has.”

  Geers finished it for him. “So they want you to handle it.”

  “But that isn’t my field.” Reinhart stood firm in front of the desk. “I’m an astronomer.”

  “What you’re doing now is your field?” Vandenberg asked. “It develops from it — from an astronomical source.”

  No-one answered him for a moment.

  “Well, that’s what the Cabinet wants,” said Osborne finally.

  “And the work at Thorness?”

  Vandenberg turned to him. “Your team — what’s left of it — will answer to Dr. Geers.”

  “Geers!”

  “I am Director of the Station.”

  “But you don’t know the first thing —” Reinhart checked himself.

  “I’m a physicist.” said Geers. “I was, at least. I expect I can soon brush it up.”

  Reinhart looked at him contemptuously. “You’ve always wanted this, haven’t you?”

  “It’s not my choice!” said Geers angrily.

  “Gentlemen!” Osborne neighed reprovingly.

  Vandenberg moved heavily back to his desk. “Let’s not make this a personality problem.”

  “And Dawnay and Fleming’s work?” Reinhart demanded.

  “I shan’t ditch them,” said Geers. “We shall need some of the computer time, but that can be arranged —”

  “If you ditch me.”

  “There’s no kind of slur on you, Ernest,” Osborne said. “As you’ll see from the next Honours’ List.”

  “Oh damn the Honours’ List!” Reinhart’s small fingers dug into his palms. “What Dawnay and Fleming are at is the most important research project we’ve ever had in this country. That’s all my concern.”

  Geers looked at him glintingly through his spectacles. “We’ll do what we can for them, if they behave themselves.”

  “There are going to be some changes here, Miss Adamson.”

  Judy was in Geers’s office, facing Dr. Hunter, the Medical Superintendent of the Station. He was a big bony man who looked far more military than medical.

  “Professor Dawnay is going to start a new experiment, but not under Professor Reinhart’s direction. Reinhart is out of it.”

  “Then who —?” she left the question in the air. She disliked him and did not wish to be drawn by him.

  “I shall be responsible for administering it.”

  “You?”

  Hunter was possibly used to this type of insult; it raised only a small sneer on his large, unsubtle face.

  “Of course, I’m only a humble doctor. The ultimate authority will lie with Dr. Geers.”

  “Supposing Professor Dawnay objects?”

  “She doesn’t. She’s not really interested in how it’s organised. What we have to do is put things on a tidy footing for her. Dr. Geers will have the final jurisdiction over the computer and I shall help him with the biological experiments. Now you —” he picked up a paper from the Director’s desk — “you were seconded to the Ministry of Science. Well, you can forget that. You’re back with us. I shall need you to keep our side of the business secure.”

  “Professor Dawnay’s programme?”

  “Yes. I think we are going to achieve a new form of life.”

  “A new form of life?”

  “It takes your breath, doesn’t it?”

  “What sort of form?”

  “We don’t know yet, but when we do know we must keep it to ourselves, mustn’t we?” He gave her a sort of bedroom leer. “We’re privileged to be midwives to a great event.”

  “And Dr. Fleming?” she asked, looking straight in front of her.

  “He’s staying on, at the request of the Ministry of Science; but I really don’t think there’s much left for him to do.”

  Fleming and Dawnay received the news of Reinhart’s removal almost without comment. Dawnay was completely engrossed in what she was doing and Fleming was isolated and solitary. The only person he might have talked to was Judy, and he avoided her. Although he and Dawnay were working closely together, they still mistrusted each other and they never spoke freely about anything except the experiment. Even on that, he found it hard to convince her about any basic thesis.

  “I suppose,” she said, as they stood by the output printer checking fresh screeds of figures, “I suppose all this is the information Cyclops has been feeding in.”

  “Some of it. Plus what the machine learnt from Christine when it had her on the hooks.”

  “What could it learn?”

  “Remember I said it must have a quicker way of getting information about us?”

  “I remember your being impatient.”

  “Not only me. In those few seconds before the fuses blew, I should think it got more physiological data than you could work through in a lifetime.”

  Dawnay gave one of her little dry sniffs and left him to pursue his own thoughts. He picked up a piece of insulated wire and wandered over to the control unit, where he stood in front of the winking display panel, thoughtfully holding one bared end of the wire in each hand. Reaching up to one of the terminals, he hooked an end of the wire over it, then, holding the wire by the insulation, he advanced the other end slowly towards the opposite terminal.

  “What are you trying to do?” Dawnay came quickly across the room to him. “You’ll arc it.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fleming. He touched the bare end of wire on to the terminal. “You see.” There was no more than a tiny spark as the two metal surfaces met.

  Fleming dropped the wire and stood for a few seconds, thinking. Then he slowly raised his own hands to the terminals, as Christine had done.

  Dawnay stepped forward to stop him. “For heaven’s sake!”

  “It’s all right.” Fleming touched the two terminals simultaneously, and nothing happened. He stood there, arms outstretched, grasping the metal plates, while Dawnay watched him with a mixture of scepticism an
d fear.

  “Haven’t you had enough death?”

  “He has.” He lowered his arms. “He’s learnt. He didn’t know the effect of high voltages on organic tissue until he got Christine up on there. He didn’t know it would damage himself, either. But now that he does know he takes precautions. If you try to short across those electrodes, he’ll reduce the voltage. Have a go.”

  “No thanks. I’ve had enough of your quaint ideas.”

  Fleming looked at her hard.

  “You’re not simply up against a piece of equipment, you know. You’re up against a brain, and a damn good one.”

  When she did not answer, he walked out.

  In spite of the pressure of defence work, Geers did find time and means to help Dawnay. He was the kind of man who fed on activity like a locust; to have a multiplicity of things under his control satisfied the inner craving of his mind and took the place, perhaps, of the creative genius that had eluded him. He arranged for yet more equipment and facilities to be put at her disposal and reported her progress with growing pride. He would do better than Reinhart.

  A new laboratory was added to the computer block to house a huge and immensely complicated D.N.A. synthesiser, and during the following weeks newly-designed X-ray crystallographic equipment and chemical synthesis units were installed to manufacture phosphate components, deoxyribose, adenine, thymine, cytosine, tyrosin and other ingredients needed for making D.N.A. molecules, the seeds of life. Within a few months they had a D.N.A. helix of some five billion nucleotide code letters under construction, and by the end of the year they had made a genetic unit of fifty chromosomes, similar to but slightly more than the genetic requirement for man.

  Early in February, Dawnay reported the emergence of a living embryo, apparently human.

  Hunter hurried over to the lab building to see it. He passed Fleming as he went through the computer room, but said nothing to him; Fleming had kept to his own side of the business, as he had promised, and made no effort to help with the bio-chemistry. In the laboratory, Hunter found Dawnay bending over a small oxygen tent, surrounded by equipment and a number of her assistants.

  “Is it living?”

  “Yes.” Dawnay straightened and looked up at him.

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s a baby.”

  “A human baby?”

  “I would say so, though I doubt if Fleming would.” She gave a smile of satisfaction. “And it’s a girl.”

  “I can hardly believe —” Hunter peered down into the oxygen tent. “May I look?”

  “There’s nothing much to see; only a bundle wrapped up.”

  Under the perspex cover of the tent was something which could have been human, but its body was tightly wrapped in a blanket and its face hidden by a mask. A rubber tube disappeared down by its neck into the blanket.

  “Breathing?”

  “With help. Pulse and respiration normal. Weight, six and a half pounds. When I first came here, I’d never have believed...” She broke off, suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by emotion. When she continued, it was in a softer voice. “All the alchemy of making gold come true. Of making life.” She tapped the rubber tubing and resumed her usual gruff way of speaking. “We’re feeding her intravenously. You may find she’s no instinct for normal suckling. You’ll have to teach her.”

  “You’ve landed us quite a job,” said Hunter, not unmoved but anxious already about formal responsibilities.

  “I’ve landed you human life, made by human beings. It took nature two thousand million years to do a job like that: it’s taken us fourteen months.”

  Hunter’s official bedside manner returned to him. “Let me be the first to congratulate you.”

  “You make it sound like a normal birth,” said Dawnay, managing to sniff and smile at the same time.

  The little creature in the tent seemed to thrive on its intravenous food. It grew approximately half an inch a day, and was obviously not going to go through the usual childhood of a human being. Geers reported to the Director-General of Research at the Ministry of Defence that at the present rate it should reach full adult stature in between three to four months.

  Official reaction to the whole event was a mixture of pride and secrecy. The Director-General sent for a full report and classified it in a top-secret category. He passed it on to the Minister of Defence who communicated it, in summary, to an astonished and bewildered Prime Minister. The Cabinet was told in terms of strictest confidence and Ratcliff returned to his office at the Ministry of Science shaken and unsure what to do next. After considering for a long time, he told Osborne who wrote to Fleming calling for an independent report.

  Fleming replied in two words: “Kill it!”

  In due course he was summoned to Geers’s office and asked to account for himself.

  “I hardly see,” said Geers, his eyes screwed up narrow behind his spectacles, “that this is anything to do with you.”

  Fleming thumped his fist on the huge desk.

  “Am I or am I not still a member of the team?”

  “In a sense.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll listen to me. It may look like a human being, but it isn’t one. It’s an extension of the machine, like the other creature, only more sophisticated.”

  “Is this theory based on anything?”

  “It’s based on logic. The other creature was a first shot, a first attempt to produce an organism like us and therefore acceptable to us. This is a better shot, based on more information. I’ve worked on that information; I know how deliberate it is.”

  Geers allowed his eyes to open a little. “And having achieved this miracle, you suggest we kill it?”

  “If you don’t now you’ll never be able to. People will come to think of it as human. They’ll say we’re murdering it. It’ll have us — the machine will have us — where it wants us.”

  “And if we don’t choose to take your advice?”

  “Then keep it away from the computer.”

  Geers sat silent for a moment, his spectacles glinting. Then he rose to end the interview.

  “You are only here on sufferance, Fleming, and out of courtesy to the Minister of Science. The judgement in this case rests not with you but with me. We shall do what I think best, and we shall do it here.”

  Nine

  ACCELERATION

  THE girl, as Geers had predicted, was fully grown by the end of four months. She remained most of the time in an oxygen tent, although she was learning to breathe naturally for increasing periods. By the end of the first month she was off drip feeds and on to a bottle. Beyond this, nothing was done to stimulate her mind and she lay inert as a baby, staring at the ceiling. Geers grew slightly apprehensive as growth continued, but she stopped at five foot seven inches, by which time she was a fully developed young woman.

  “Quite a good-looking young woman, too,” Hunter said, with a lick of his lips.

  Geers allowed no-one but Hunter, Dawnay and their assistants to see her. He sent daily confidential reports to the Ministry of Defence and was visited twice by the Director-General of Research, with whom he made plans for her future. Extreme precautions were taken to keep her existence secret; a day and night guard was mounted on the computer and laboratory block and everyone who had to know was sworn to silence. Apart from Reinhart, whom Osborne told privately, and a handful of senior officials and politicians in London, no-one outside the research team at Thorness knew anything about her.

  Fleming, in Geers’s opinion, was the most doubtful quantity in the whole group, and Judy was given specific instructions to watch him. They had literally hardly spoken since the previous spring. He had made one surly, half-hearted attempt to apologise but she had cut him short, and since then when they met in the camp they ignored each other. At least, she told herself, she had not been spying on him — the fact that he had dissociated himself from Dawnay’s experiment, to which she had been assigned after Bridger’s death, had meant he was no longer primarily her conce
rn. Whatever pangs of conscience she had about the past were hidden under the anaesthetic of a sort of listless apathy. But now it was different. Screwing up all her determination, she went to find him in the computer room, her legs feeling curiously flabby beneath her. She handed him her letter of instruction.

  “Would you read this?” she said, without any preliminary.

  He glanced at it and handed it back to her. “It’s on Ministry of Defence paper — you read it. I’m choosy what I touch.”

  “They’re concerned about the security of the new creature,” she said stiffly, withdrawing in the face of his attack.

  Fleming laughed.

  “It amuses you?” she asked. “I’m to be responsible for its safety.”

  “And who’s to be responsible for yours?”

  “John!” Judy’s face reddened. “Do we always have to be on opposite sides of the fence?”

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said with something between sympathy and indifference. “I’m afraid I don’t dig your precious creature.”

  “It’s not mine. I’m doing my job. I’m not your enemy.”

  “No. You’re just the sort of girl who gets pushed about.” He looked helplessly around the room. “Oh I’ve had my say!”

  She made a last attempt to reach him. “It seems a long time since we went sailing.”

  “It is a long time.”

  “We’re the same people.”

  “In a different world.” He moved as if he wanted to get away.

  “It’s the same world, John.”

  “O.K., you tell them that.”

  Hunter came past. “We’re getting her out.”

  “Who?” Fleming turned from Judy with relief.

  “The little girl — out of her oxygen tent.”

  “Are we allowed?” asked Judy.

  “This is a special occasion — coming-out party.” Hunter gave her a stale, sexy smile and walked away into the other room.

  Fleming looked sourly after him.

  “Full-size live monster given away with each packet.”

  Judy surprised herself by giggling. She felt they were suddenly about a mile closer.