A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “No. They’ll go out through the lab entrance.”

  “Good.” He started copying numbers from the sheets on to the pad. “What is that?”

  “A shortened formula for the creature.”

  “Andromeda?”

  “Call her whatever amuses you.” He scribbled on. “This is what the machine calls her. Not a formula, really — a naming tag.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Re-arrange it slightly.”

  “You’re not going to do any damage?”

  He laughed at her. “You’d better go on with your conducted tour; this’ll take time.”

  “I shall warn the guards.”

  “Warn whom you like.”

  She hesitated, then gave it up and went to rejoin the party. When she had gone he checked the figures and walked over with the pad to the input unit.

  “I’ll give you something to think about!” he said aloud to the machine, and sat down and started tapping the message in.

  He had hardly finished when Andromeda came back.

  “I thought you were going to see the rocketry.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It is not interesting.”

  The lamps on the display panel started to flash faster, and suddenly there was a fantastic clatter from the output unit as the printer began to work furiously.

  Andromeda looked up in surprise. “What is happening?”

  Fleming went quickly to the printer and read the figures as they were banged out on to the paper.

  He smiled. “Your friend seems to have lost his temper.”

  She crossed the room and looked over his shoulder.

  “This is nonsense.”

  “Exactly.”

  The printer stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving them in silence.

  “What have you been doing?” the girl asked. She read the figures through uncomprehendingly. “This doesn’t mean anything.”

  Fleming grinned at her. “No. He’s flipped for a moment. I think he’s psychologically disturbed.”

  “What have you done to it?” She started towards the terminals, but he stopped her.

  “Come away from there.”

  She halted uncertainly. “What have you done?”

  “Only given him a little information.”

  Looking around, she saw the pad on top of the input keys. She went slowly over to it and read it.

  “That’s my name-tag — reversed!”

  “Negatived,” said Fleming.

  “It’ll think I’m dead!”

  “That’s what I meant him to think.”

  She looked up at him, puzzled. “Why?”

  “I thought I’d let him know he couldn’t have it all his own way.”

  “That was very foolish.”

  “He seems to value you highly,” he said scornfully.

  She turned away towards the terminals. “I must tell it I’m alive.”

  “No!” He seized hold of her by the arms.

  “I must. It thinks I’m dead, and I must tell it I’m not.”

  “Then I shall tell it you are. I can play this game until it doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going.”

  He let go one arm and picked up the pad from the keyboard.

  “Give me that.” She pulled her other arm free. “You can’t win, you know.” She turned away again, and as Fleming moved to stop her she suddenly shouted at him. “Leave me alone! Go away! Go out of here!”

  They stood facing each other, both trembling, as if neither could move. Then Fleming took hold of her firmly with both hands and drew her towards him.

  He sniffed at her in surprise. “You’re wearing scent!”

  “Let go of me. I shall call the guards.”

  Fleming started to laugh. “Open your mouth, then.”

  She parted her lips and he put a kiss on them. Then he held her at arms’ length and examined her.

  “Nice or nasty?”

  “Leave me alone, please.” Her voice was uncertain. She looked at him in a confused way, and then down, but he still held her.

  “Who do you belong to?”

  “I belong where my brain tells me.”

  “Then tell it this —” He kissed her again, sensuously but dispassionately, for a long time.

  “Don’t,” she begged, pulling her lips away. He held her close to him and spoke gently.

  “Don’t you like the taste of lips? Or the taste of food, or the smell and feel of the fresh air outside, or the hills beyond the wire with sunshine and shadows on them and larks singing? And the company of human beings?”

  She shook her head slowly. “They’re not important.”

  “Aren’t they?” He spoke with his mouth close to her. “They weren’t allowed for by whatever disembodied intelligence up there you owe allegiance to, but they’re important to organic life, as you’ll find out.”

  “Anything can be allowed for,” she said.

  “But they weren’t in the calculations.”

  “They can be put in.” She looked up at him. “You can’t beat us, Dr. Fleming. Stop trying before you get hurt.”

  He let go of her. “Am I likely to get hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should you warn me?”

  “Because I like you,” she said, and he half smiled at her.

  “You’re talking like a human being.”

  “Then it’s time I stopped. Please go now.”

  He stood obstinately, but there was a note of pleading in her voice that had never been there before, and an expression of unhappiness on her face. “Please... Do you want me to be punished?”

  “By whom?”

  “Who do you think?” She glanced at the computer control racks.

  Fleming was taken off-guard: this was something he had never thought of.

  “Punished? That’s a new one.” He put the pad of figures in his pocket and went to the door. In the doorway he turned back to deliver a last shot. “Who do you belong to?”

  She watched him go and then turned reluctantly towards the display panel, and walked slowly, compulsively, up to it. She raised her hands to communicate with the terminals, then hesitated. Her face was strained, but she raised them again and touched the plates. For a moment all that happened was that the lights blinked faster, as the machine digested the information she gave it. Then the voltage meter below the panel suddenly peaked.

  Andromeda gave a cry of pain and tried to pull her hands away from the plates, but the current held her fast. The voltage needle dropped, only to swing up again, and she cried out again... And then a third time and a fourth and over and over and over...

  Once more it was Judy who found her. She came in a few minutes later, looking for Fleming, and saw to her horror the girl lying crumpled on the floor, where Christine had been.

  “Oh no!” The words jerked out of her, and she ran forward and turned the body over. Andromeda was still alive. She moaned as Judy touched her, and curled away, whimpering quietly and nursing her hands together. Judy raised the blonde head and rested it in her lap and then took the hands and opened them. They were black with burning, except where the red flesh lay bare down to the bone.

  Judy let them go gently. “How did it happen?”

  Andromeda groaned again and opened her eyes.

  Judy said to her, “Your hands.”

  “We can easily mend them.” The girl’s voice was hardly audible.

  “What happened?”

  “Something went wrong, that’s all.”

  Judy left her and telephoned Dr. Hunter.

  From that moment events moved with almost cataclysmic speed. Hunter put a temporary dressing on Andromeda’s hands and tried to persuade her to move into the station’s sick bay, but she refused to leave the computer until she had seen Madeleine Dawnay.

  “It will be quicker in the end,” she told them. Although she was suffering from shock, she went sturdily through Dawnay’s papers until she found the section she was looking for. Hunter ha
d given her local shots to ease the pain in her hands, and with these and the bandages she fumbled a good deal, but she pulled out the sheets she wanted and shuffled them across to Dawnay. They were concerned with enzyme production in the D.N.A. formula.

  “What do we do with these?” Dawnay looked at them doubtfully.

  “Get an isolated tissue formula,” said Andromeda, and took the papers back to the computer. She was weak and pale and could hardly walk. Dawnay, Hunter and Judy watched anxiously as she stood again between the terminals and put out her swathed hands; but this time there was no disaster, and after a little the machine started printing-out.

  “It’s an enzyme formula. You can make it up quite easily.” She indicated the printer-paper to Dawnay and then turned to Hunter. “I should like to lie down now, please. The enzyme can be applied to my hands on a medicated base when Professor Dawnay has prepared it, but it should be as soon as possible.”

  She was ill for several days, and Hunter dressed her hands with an ointment containing the formula, when Dawnay had made it up. The healing was miraculous: new tissue — soft natural flesh, not the hard tissue of scarring — filled in the wounds in a matter of hours, and formed a fresh layer of pale pink skin across her palms. By the time she recovered from the effects of the electric shocks, her hands were remade.

  Hunter, meanwhile, had reported to Geers and Geers had sent for Fleming. The Director, not yet certain of the outcome of the accident, was sick and thin-lipped with worry, his brief season of fellowship gone.

  “So you decide to throw it off balance!” He flung the words across his desk at Fleming and pounded his fist on the polished wood. “You don’t consult anyone — you’re too clever. So clever, the machine goes wrong and damn near kills the girl.”

  “If you won’t even listen to what happened.” Fleming’s voice rose to match his, but Geers interrupted.

  “I know what happened.”

  “Were you there? She knew she was going to be punished. She should have had me thrown out, she should have wiped out what I’d put into the computer; but she didn’t — not soon enough. She hesitated and warned me and let me go, then she went and touched the communication terminals —”

  “I thought you’d gone,” Geers reminded him.

  “Of course I’d gone. I’m telling you what happened inevitably: she let the machine know that she was alive, that it had been given false information, that the source of the information was around and she hadn’t stopped it. So it punished her by giving her a series of electric shocks. It knows how to do that now; it learnt on Christine.”

  The Director listened with thinly disguised impatience. “You’re guessing,” he said at the end.

  “It’s not guesswork, Geers. It was bound to happen, only I didn’t realise in time.”

  “Have you your pass?” Geers looked at him glintingly through his spectacles. “To the computer building.”

  Fleming sniffed and rummaged in his pocket. “You can’t fault me on that one. It’s quite in order.”

  He handed it across the desk. Geers took it, examined it, and slowly tore it up.

  “What’s that in aid of?”

  “We can’t afford you, Fleming. Not any more.”

  Fleming banged the desk in his turn. “I’m staying on the station.”

  “Stay where you like; but your association with the computer is over. I’m sorry.”

  Geers felt better with Fleming out of the way, and better still when he heard of Andromeda’s recovery. He got all the facts he could from Dawnay and Hunter about the enzyme, and then got through on his direct line to Whitehall. The reaction was as he thought. He sent for Andromeda and questioned her and seemed well pleased.

  Fleming a year or two back would have hit the bottle, but this time he had no appetite even for that. The same compulsion that had held him to the computer tied him to the compound; even though there was nothing he could now do, no part he could have in the project, he remained on the station, solitary and uncertain and given to long walks and lying on his bed. It was deep winter, but calm and grey, as though something dramatic were being withheld.

  About a week after the accident — or punishment, as Fleming thought of it — he was returning from a walk on the moors when he saw an enormous and extravagantly shining car outside Geers’s office, and as he passed it a short, square man with a bald head got out.

  “Dr. Fleming!” The bald man raised a hand to stop and greet him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I hope you do not mind,” said Kaufmann.

  Fleming looked to see who was around. “Get out,” he said.

  “Please Herr Doktor, do not be embarrassed.” Kaufmann smiled at him. “I am quite official. A.1 at Lloyds. I do not compromise you.”

  “You didn’t compromise Bridger either, I suppose?” Fleming jerked his head towards the main gate. “That’s the exit.”

  Kaufmann smiled again, and pulled out his case of cigarillos. “Smoking?”

  “Slightly,” Fleming said, “at the edges. I am not interested in anything you have to offer. Try the next door house.”

  “I do that.” Kaufmann laughed and stuck a small cigar between his teeth before they closed. “I do just that. I stop you, Herr Doktor, to tell you that I shall not bother you any more. I have other means, much better, much more honest.”

  He smiled again, lit his cigar and walked without hesitation into the vestibule of Geers’s office.

  Fleming ran over to the security block, but Quadring was out somewhere, and so was Judy. Finally he got hold of Judy on the telephone, but by the time she reached Geers’s office, the Director was just showing Kaufmann out. The two men seemed to be on most cordial terms, and Geers was smoking one of the cigarillos.

  “Businesswise,” Kaufmann was saying, “the process is immaterial. We are not curious; it is the result, yes?”

  “We deal in results here.” Geers had his number one smile switched on. He held out a hand. “Auf Wiedersehen.”

  Judy watched while Kaufmann shook hands and walked back to his car. As the Director turned to go back into his office she said, “Can I speak to you for a minute?”

  Geers flicked his smile off. “I’m rather busy.”

  “This is important. You know who he is?”

  “His name is Kaufmann.”

  “Intel.”

  “That’s right.” Geers’s fingers itched at the door handle.

  “It was Kaufmann whom Dr. Bridger was selling —” Judy started, but Geers cut her short.

  “I know all about the Bridger case.”

  Behind his voice Judy could hear the car driving away. Somehow it made what she felt seem terribly urgent: she had to batter it into him.

  “It was Intel. They were taking secrets...”

  Geers edged into his doorway. “They’re not taking secrets from me,” he said haughtily.

  “But —” She followed him in uninvited, and found Dawnay waiting quietly in the office. She felt suddenly thrown and mumbled an apology to the older woman.

  “Don’t mind me, dear,” said Dawnay neutrally, and strolled away to the far corner of the room. Geers sat back at his desk and looked at Judy with an air of businesslike dismissal.

  “We’re making a trade agreement.”

  “With Intel?” The horrifying absurdity of the whole thing crowded in on her: a vision of the piled-up madness of the past months and years. She gaped at him across the polished desk, until she could find words. “I was put on this job because we didn’t trust them. Dr. Bridger was hounded to his death — by me among other people — because he...”

  “The climate’s changed.”

  She looked at his smug, prim face and lost her temper entirely. “Politicians enjoy such convenient weather!”

  “That will be enough,” Geers snapped.

  Dawnay rustled quietly in her corner. “The child’s right, you know, and we scientists get a bit jaundiced about it from time to time. We’re at the mercy of the elemen
ts. We can’t cheat.”

  “I’m a scientist too,” Geers said pettishly.

  “Was.” The word slipped out before Judy could stop it. She waited for the explosion, but Geers somehow kept it under control. He went icy.

  “It isn’t, strictly speaking, your business. What the Government needs now is world markets. When the girl Andromeda burnt her hands, she worked out a synthesis for Professor Dawnay’s lab people. Have you seen her hands?”

  “I saw them burnt.”

  “There’s no sign of a burn now. No scar tissue, nothing. Overnight.”

  “And that’s what you’re selling to Intel?”

  “Through Intel. To anyone who needs it.”

  She tried to think what was wrong with this, and then realised. “Why not through the World Health Organisation?”

  “We’re not contemplating wholesale charity. We’re contemplating a reasonable trade balance.”

  “So you don’t care who you shake hands with?” she asked with disgust. She felt completely reckless now, and turned on Dawnay. “Are you part of this?”

  Dawnay hesitated. “The enzyme’s not quite in a state to market yet. We need a more refined formula. Andre — the girl — is preparing the data for computing.” They had all got into the habit of calling her Andre.

  “So the whole station’s working for Intel?”

  “I hope not,” said Dawnay, and it sounded as though perhaps she was on her side.

  Geers cut in.

  “Look, Madeleine, this is enough.”

  “Then I won’t waste your time.” Judy moved to the door. “But I am not part of it, and nor is Dr. Fleming.”

  “We know how Fleming stands,” said Geers sardonically.

  “And you know where I stand too,” Judy told him, and banged out.

  Her instinct was to go straight to Fleming, but she could not quite face the risk of another snub. In fact, it was Dawnay who went to see him, on her way from the office block to the computer at the end of the day. She found him in his chalet, watching the Prime Minister’s broadcast on television.

  “Come in,” he said flatly, and made room for her on the foot of his bed.