A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “I detest that man. He’s so condescending.”

  “I hope he kills her,” said Fleming. “He’s probably a bad enough doctor.”

  They went through to the laboratory together. Hunter was superintending opening the bottom end of the oxygen tent, watched by Dawnay. Under the tent was a narrow trolley-bed which two assistants drew gently forward. The rest stood round as the bed slid out with the full-grown girl-creature on it: first her feet, covered by a sheet, then her body, also covered. She was lying on her back, and as her face was revealed Judy gave a gasp. It was a strong and beautiful face with high cheek-bones and wide, Baltic features. Her long, pale hair was strewn out on the pillow, her eyes were shut and she was breathing peacefully as if asleep. She looked like a purified, blonde version of Christine.

  “It’s Christine!” Judy whispered. “Christine.”

  “It can’t be,” said Hunter brusquely.

  “There is a superficial resemblance,” Dawnay admitted.

  Hunter cut across her. “We did an autopsy on the other girl. Besides, she was a brunette.”

  Judy turned to Fleming.

  “Is this some horrible kind of practical joke?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t let it fool you. Don’t let it fool any of you. Christine’s dead. Christine was only a blueprint.”

  No-one spoke for a moment while Dawnay took the girl’s pulse and stooped down to look at her face. The eyes opened and looked vaguely up at the ceiling.

  “What does it mean?” asked Judy. She remembered seeing Christine dead, and yet this was something inescapably like her, living.

  “It means,” said Fleming, as though answering all of them, “that it took a human being and made a copy. It got a few things wrong — the colour of the hair, for instance — but by and large it did a pretty good job. You can turn the human anatomy into figures, and that’s what it did; and then got us to turn them back again.”

  Hunter looked at Dawnay and signalled to the assistants to wheel the trolley into a neighbouring bay.

  “It gave us what we wanted, anyway,” said Dawnay.

  “Did it? It’s the brain that counts: it doesn’t matter about the body. It hasn’t made a human being — it’s made an alien creature that looks like one.”

  “Dr. Geers has told us your theory,” said Hunter, moving away in the wake of the girl on the bed.

  Dawnay hesitated for a moment before going after them.

  “You may be right,” she said. “In which case it’ll be all the more interesting.”

  Fleming controlled himself with an obvious effort. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “We’re going to educate it — her.”

  Fleming turned and walked out of the laboratory, back to the computer room, with Judy following.

  “What’s bad about it?” she asked. “Everyone else...”

  He turned on her. “Whenever a higher intelligence meets a lower one, it destroys it. That’s what’s bad. Iron Age man destroyed the Stone Age; the Palefaces beat the Indians. Where was Carthage when the Romans were through with it?”

  “But is that bad, in the long run?”

  “It’s bad for us.”

  “Why should this —?”

  “The strong are always ruthless with the weak.”

  She laid a hand tentatively on his sleeve. “Then the weak had better stick together.”

  “You should have thought of that earlier,” he said.

  Judy knew better than to push him further; she went back to her own life, leaving him with his preoccupations and doubts.

  There was no early spring that year. The hard grey weather went on to the end of April, matching the grey sunless mood of the camp. Apart from Dawnay’s experiment, nothing was going well. Geers’s permanent staff and missile development teams worked under strain with no outstanding success; there were more practice firings than ever but nothing really satisfactory came of them. After each abortive attempt the grey wrack of Atlantic cloud settled back on the promontory as if to show that nothing would ever change or ever improve.

  Only the girl creature bloomed, like some exotic plant in a hothouse. One bay of Dawnay’s laboratories was set up as a nursing block with living quarters for the girl. Here she was waited on and prepared for her part like a princess in a fairy tale. They called her Andromeda, after the place of her origin, and taught her to eat and drink and sit up and move. At first she was slow to learn to use her body — she had, as Dawnay said, none of the normal child’s instincts for physical development — but soon it became clear that she could absorb knowledge at a prodigious rate. She never had to be told a fact twice. Once she understood the possibilities of anything she mastered it without hesitation or effort.

  It was like this with speech. To begin with she appeared to have no awareness of it: she had never cried as a baby cries, and she had to be taught like a deaf child by being made conscious of the vibrations of her vocal cords, and their effects. But as soon as she understood the purpose of it she learnt language as fast as it was spelt out to her. Within weeks she was a literate, communicating person.

  Within weeks, too, she had learnt to move as a human being, a little stiffly, as if her body was working from instructions and not from its own desire, but gracefully and without any kind of awkwardness. Most of the time she was confined to her own suite, though she was taken every day, when it was not actually raining, out to the moors in a closed car and allowed to walk in the fresh air under armed escort and out of sight of any other eyes from either inside or outside the camp.

  She never complained, whatever was done to her. She accepted the medical checks, the teaching, the constant surveillance, as though she had no will or wishes of her own. In fact, she showed no emotions at all except those of hunger before a meal and tiredness at the end of the day, and then it was physical, never mental tiredness. She was always gentle, always submissive, and very beautiful. She behaved, indeed, like someone in a dream.

  Geers and Dawnay arranged for her education at a pace which packed the whole of a university syllabus into something which more resembled a summer-school. Once she had grasped the basis of denary arithmetic, she had no further difficulty with mathematics. She might have been a calculating machine; she whipped through figures with the swift logic of a ready-reckoner, and she was never wrong. She seemed capable of holding the most complex progressions in her head without any sense of strain. For the rest, she was filled up with facts like an encyclopaedia. Geers and the teachers who were sent up to Thorness in an endless and academically-impressive procession — not to instruct her directly, for she was too secret, but to guide her instructors — laid out the foundations of a general, unspecialised level of knowledge, so that by the end of her summer-course, and of the summer, she knew as much about the world, in theory, as an intelligent and perceptive school leaver. All she lacked was any sense of human experience or any spontaneous attitude to life. Although she was alert and reasonably communicative, she might just as well have been walking and talking in her sleep, and that, in fact, is the impression which she gave.

  “You’re right,” Dawnay admitted to Fleming. “She hasn’t got a brain, she’s got a calculator.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” He looked across at the slim, fair girl who was sitting reading at the table in what had been made her room. It was one of his rare visits to Dawnay’s premises. The laboratory had been gutted and turned into a set of rooms that might have come out of a design brochure, with the girl as one of the fitments.

  “She’s not fallible,” said Dawnay. “She doesn’t forget. She never makes a mistake. Already she knows more than most people do.”

  Fleming frowned. “And you’ll go on stuffing information into her until she knows more than you.”

  “Probably. The people in charge of us have plans for her.”

  Geers’s plan was fairly obvious. The pressing problems of defence machinery remained unsolved in spite of the use they had made of the new computer. The
main difficulty was that they did not really know how to use it. They took it out of Fleming’s hands for several hours a day, and managed to get a great deal of calculation done very quickly by it; but they had no means of tapping its real potential or of using its immense intellect to solve problems that were not put to it in terms of figures. If, as Fleming considered, the creatures evolved with the machine’s help had an affinity with it, then it should be possible to use one of them as an agent. The original monster was obviously incapable of making any communication of human needs to the computer, but the girl was another matter. If she could be used as an intermediary, something very exciting might be done.

  The Minister of Defence had no objection to the idea and, although Fleming warned Osborne, as he had warned Geers, Osborne carried no weight with the men in power. Fleming could only stand by and watch the machine’s purpose being unwittingly fulfilled by people who would not listen to him. He himself had nothing but a tortuous strand of logic on which to depend. If he was wrong, he was wrong all the way from the beginning, and the way of life was not what he thought. But if he was right they were heading for calamity.

  He was, in fact, in the computer-room when Geers and Dawnay first brought the girl in.

  “For God’s sake!” He looked from Geers to Dawnay in a last, hopeless appeal.

  “We’ve all heard what you think, Fleming,” Geers said.

  “Then don’t let her in.”

  “If you want to complain, complain to the Ministry.”

  He turned back to the doorway. Dawnay shrugged her shoulders; it seemed to her that Fleming was making a great deal of fuss about nothing.

  Geers held the door open as Andromeda came in, escorted by Hunter who walked beside and slightly behind her as though they were characters out of Jane Austen. Andromeda moved stiffly, but was thoroughly wide awake, her face calm, her eyes taking in everything. It was all somehow formal and unreal, as if a minuet were about to begin.

  “This is the control-room of the computer,” said Geers as she stood looking around her. He sounded like a kind but firm parent. “You remember I told you about it?”

  “Why should I forget?”

  Although she spoke in a slow stilted way, her voice, like her face, was strong and attractive.

  Geers led her across the room. “This is the input unit. The only way we can give information to the computer is by typing it in here. It takes a long time.”

  “It must do.” She examined the keyboard with a sort of calm interest.

  “If we want to hold a conversation with it,” Geers went on, “the best we can do is select something from the output and feed it back in.”

  “That is very clumsy,” she said slowly.

  Dawnay came and stood by her other side. “Cyclops in the other room can input direct by that co-axial cable.”

  “Is that what you wish me to do?”

  “We want to find out,” said Geers.

  The girl looked up and found Fleming staring at her. She had not taken him in before, and gazed back expressionlessly at him.

  “Who is that?”

  “Doctor Fleming,” said Dawnay. “He designed the computer.”

  The girl walked stiffly across to him and held out her hand.

  “How do you do?” She spoke as if repeating a lesson.

  Fleming ignored her hand and continued staring at her. She looked unblinkingly back at him and, after a minute, dropped her arm.

  “You must be a clever man,” she said flatly.

  Fleming laughed. “Why do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Laugh — that is the word?”

  Fleming shrugged. “People laugh when they’re happy and cry when they’re sad. Sometimes we laugh when we’re unhappy.”

  “Why?” She went on gazing at his face. “What is happy or sad?”

  “They’re feelings.”

  “I do not feel them.”

  “No. You wouldn’t.”

  “Why do you have them?”

  “Because we’re imperfect.” Fleming returned her stare as though it were a challenge.

  Geers fidgeted impatiently.

  “Is it working all right, Fleming? There’s nothing on the display panel.”

  “Which is the display panel?” she asked, turning away.

  Geers showed her and she stood looking at the rows of unlit bulbs while Geers and Dawnay explained it, and the use of the terminals, to her.

  “We’d like you to stand between them,” he said.

  She walked deliberately towards the panel, and as she approached it the lamps started to blink. She stopped.

  “It’s all right,” said Dawnay.

  Geers took the guards from the terminals and urged the girl forward, while Fleming watched, tense, without saying anything. She went reluctantly, her face strained and set. When she reached the panel, she stood there, a terminal a few inches from each side of her head, and the lights began flashing faster. The room was full of the hum of the computer’s equipment. Slowly, without being told, she put her hands up towards the plates.

  “You’re sure it’s neutralised?” Geers looked anxiously at Fleming.

  “It neutralises itself.”

  As the girl’s hands touched the metal plates, she shivered. She stood with her face blank, as if entranced, and then she let go and swayed back unsteadily. Dawnay and Geers caught her and helped her to a chair.

  “Is she all right?” asked Geers.

  Dawnay nodded. “But look at that!”

  The lights on the panel were all jammed solidly on and the computer hum grew louder than it had been before.

  “What’s happened?”

  “It speaks to me,” said the girl. “It knows about me.”

  “What does it say?” asked Dawnay. “What does it know about you? How does it speak?”

  “We... we communicate.”

  Geers looked uncomfortably puzzled. “In figures?”

  “You could express it in figures,” she said, staring blindly before her. “It would take a very long time to explain.”

  “And can you communicate —?” Dawnay was interrupted by a loud explosion from the next room. The display panel went blank, the hum stopped.

  “Whatever’s happened?” asked Geers.

  Fleming turned without answering him and went quickly through to the first lab bay, where the creature and its tank were housed. Smoke was rising from the contact wires above the tank. When he pulled them out, the ends were blackened and lumps of charred tissue hung from them. He looked into the tank, and his mouth set into a thin line.

  “What’s happened to it?” Dawnay hurried in, followed by Geers.

  “It’s been electrocuted.” Fleming dangled the harness in front of her. “There’s been another blow-out and it’s been killed.”

  Geers peered into the tank and recoiled in distaste.

  “What did you do to the controls?” he demanded.

  Fleming threw down the charred remains of the wires. “I did nothing. The computer knows how to adjust its own voltages — it knows how to burn tissue — it knows how to kill.”

  “But why?” asked Geers.

  They all looked, by instinct, to the doorway from the computer-room. The girl was standing there.

  “Because it was her.” Fleming walked across to her grimly, his jaw stuck out. “You’ve just told it, haven’t you? It knows it has a better slave now. It doesn’t need that poor creature any more. That’s what it said, isn’t it?”

  She looked levelly back at him. “Yes.”

  “You see!” He swung round to Geers. “You’ve got a killer. Bridger may have been an accident; so may Christine, though I’d call it manslaughter. But this was pure, deliberate murder.”

  “It was only a primitive creature,” said Geers.

  “And it was redundant!” He turned back to the girl. “Yes?”

  “It was in the way,” she answered.

  “And the next time it could be you who are in the way — or
me, or any or all of us!”

  She still showed no flicker of expression. “We were only eliminating unwanted material.”

  “We?”

  “The computer and myself.” She touched her fingers to her head.

  Fleming screwed up his eyes.

  “You’re the same, aren’t you? A shared intelligence.”

  “Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I understand —”

  “Then understand this!” Fleming’s voice rose with excitement and he pushed his face close up to her. “This is a piece of information: it is wrong to murder!”

  “Wrong? What is ‘wrong’?”

  “You were talking about killing earlier on,” said Geers.

  “Oh God!” said Fleming wildly. “Is there no sane person anywhere?”

  He stared for a moment more at Andromeda, and then he went, half-running, out of the room.

  Bouldershaw Fell looked much as it had done when Reinhart first took Judy to see it. Grass and heather had grown over the builders’ scars on the surrounding moor, and black streaks ran down the walls of the buildings where gutters had overflowed in winter storms; but the triple arch was still poised motionless over its great bowl, and inside the main observatory block the equipment and staff continued their quiet, methodical work. Harvey was still in charge of the control desk, the banks of steering and calculating equipment still stood to each side of him, flanking the wide window, and the photographs of stars still hung on the walls, though less fresh and new than they had been.

  The only sign of the grim business that preoccupied them all was a huge glazed wall-map of the world on which the tracks of orbital missiles were marked in chinagraph. It betrayed what the outward calm of the place concealed — the anguish and fever with which they watched the threats in the sky above them remorselessly grow and grow. Reinhart referred to it as the Writing on the Wall, and worked day and night with the observatory team, plotting each new trace as it swung into orbit and sending increasingly urgent and sombre reports to Whitehall.

  Nearly a hundred of the sinister, unidentified missiles had been tracked during the past months, and their launching area had been defined to within a triangle several hundred miles in extent in the ocean between Manchuria, Vladivostok and the northern island of Japan. None of the neighbouring countries admitted to them. As Vandenberg said, they could belong to any of three of our fellow-members of the United Nations.