by Fred Hoyle
Fred Hoyle & John Elliot
Andromeda Breakthrough
CHAPTER ONE
OUTLOOK UNSETTLED
The alarm signal buzzed quietly but insistently above Captain Pennington's head, a discreet echo of the bell jangling outside the guard room across the parade ground of the headquarters unit No. 173 Marine Commando.
Pennington groped for the bedlight switch and sat up. He stared uncomprehendingly at the vibrating clapper arm.
In every officer's room were these little buzzers. They were painted red; they existed for No. 1 alert. It was accepted that a No. 1 would in reality mean only one thing: notification of the seven minutes the ballistics people had worked out as the breathing space before World War Three came and went.
Captain Pennington heaved himself out of bed. He was conscious of running feet as the Marine Commandos observed their long-taught procedure. The bedside phone rang as he was struggling into his denims.
'Major Quadring,' came the abrupt, clipped voice. 'Sorry about the panic measures. Orders from Whitehall. It's not the big thing, so ease up. But it's bad enough. Thorness.
Major fire. Probably sabotage. Can't be sure that the trouble isn't sea-borne. Hence the S.O.S. to your boys.'
'Thorness!' Pennington repeated. 'But that's the kingpin-'
'Exactly. Save your mental reactions till later. Get over here within an hour. Four groups, with amphibians and frogmen, of course. I'll be at the gates to get you through.
Tell your men not to fool around. The guards here won't be waiting to ask questions.'
The phone clicked dead. Pennington checked his assault kit and ran from the officers barrack hut into a night of soft-falling snow. He could make out shadowy figures of the men already standing to by their trucks and amphibious vehicles, the engines ticking over. Not a light showed.
'Right,' he called loudly through the darkness. 'You'll be glad to know that this isn't it. Nor is it just a dummy run.
Some real bother at the rocket station down at Thorness. I know no more than you, though we're going because there's probably a sea job to do. You can, of course, use headlights.
I'll set the rate; we ought to average fifty. Keep the intercom channel open till I order otherwise. Carry on!'
A Land-Rover wheeled round and stopped beside him. He got in. Orders snapped out and the Marines got aboard their trucks. Pennington nodded to his driver and they roared through the gates.
They had a forty-five mile run from their base to the lonely promontory nosing into the Atlantic on which Thorness had been built as the nerve centre of Britain's rocket testing range. The whole area had been cleared of civilians, and the twisting, undulating road straightened and levelled for the articulated rocket carriers and fuel tankers. Pennington made the trip in precisely 55 minutes.
The main gates between the barbed-wire-festooned chain link fencing were shut. Guards with automatic guns stood under the floodlights. Dobermann Pincher dogs sat, immovable and alert, beside them. At the sound of the convoy Major Quadring came out of the concrete guard post with an N.C.O. Quadring was a lithe officer of middle-age, smartly dressed and unruffled. After a glimpse at the Commando identity marks on Pennington's vehicle he gave orders for the gates to be opened.
'Pull into the parking bay to the left,' he said as Pennington jumped down. 'Tell your chaps to relax, but to remain with the vehicles. Then come on in here. I'll put you in the picture. Over a cup of char - laced, of course.'
Beyond the floodlights at the entrance a double necklace of lamps edging the main road of the camp strung away into the misty night. The snow had stopped and what had fallen was melting into slush, so that the ground was dark, and the shapes of the camp buildings were dark, too, except where emergency lights were shining at windows.
Faintly inside the compound there was another smudge of light, where mobile lamps were trained on the main computer building, and a heavier pall - which was smoke - hung, smelling sulphurous, among the mist. Quadring led Pennington across the concrete into the guard hut.
Only in the light of the unshaded bulb of the guard room was it evident that Quadring was a worried man. His face was grey with fatigue and strain, and he tipped an over-liberal portion of rum into his own mug of tea.
'I'm sorry about a sortie on a night like this to this Godforsaken place. I think Whitehall and Highland Zone overdid it a bit with that No. 1 alarm and excursion, but then I'm only a simple soldier. They know better than I what's involved, though even to my un-technical mind this is a bloody business.'
He refused Pennington's offer of a cigarette and began ramming tobacco into a blackened pipe. 'The sea mist has closed in like a blanket down on the coastline. You drop from the station right into cotton wool. Not a damned inch in front of your nose. It'll lift with dawn, probably with rain or sleet. I tell you, it's a nice place.
'Someone or something attacked this place about four hours ago, and destroyed its brain. Which means, if my job here is as vital as they tell me, that old Lady Britannia is stripped of power, wealth, and about everything the politicians were banking on.'
Pennington looked at him sceptically. 'Frankly sir, you're over-dramatising things, aren't you ? I mean, everyone knows Thorness is a rocket testing base, and where they run the computers which made those I.B.M. interceptions such a wow. Surely the machines aren't unique. The Yanks and the rest of N.A.T.O .... '
'The machines were unique,' Quadring answered. 'If you commandeered every computer in commercial or Government use in the country they wouldn't amount to more than a cash register compared with the scientific toy that's now a tangled mess of valves and wires and smouldering insulation.
Nor does the rocket side matter all that much.'
Pennington drained his rum and tea, easing himself on the hard wooden chair. 'Of course, I've heard some pretty bizarre accounts of the sidelines here,' he said with a grin.
'It's pub gossip. That sort of thing was bound to start rumours.'
'But nothing as good as the truth,' Quadring said. 'I've had an okay from G.D.1 to put you vaguely in the picture.
Your boozing pals in the bar parlour haven't burbled anything about the Dawnay Experiment in their cups, have they ?'
'The Dawnay Experiment?' Pennington repeated. 'No sir.'
'I'd never have believed my security was so good,' the Major grinned.
He relit his pipe and sucked gratefully at it a while.
'This Dawnay woman's a sort of de-sexed biochemical genius from Edinburgh, though I admit I found her pleasant person before she fell ill, through some infection from her own work, poor old girl. And so far as I can understand it, the computer helped her to synthesise chromosomes, which you no doubt learned when you were told about the birds and the bees being the seeds of life.
'She obviously hadn't much of a clue as to what it was all about, beyond the fact that the formulae spewed from the computer made sense. But the upshot was a human embryo.'
'Human ?'
'That's what they say. I agree it's a nice point. It grew like fun - or rather she did, for the organs of sex were there - and in four months she was 5 ft 7 ins tall and weighed 123 lb. The report is good on pointless and harmless facts.'
Pennington tried to look amused. 'Was this zombie, robot, or whatever she was, still in some sort of enlarged test tube, fixed in a clamp, or what?'
'Not a zombie by any means,' Quadrlng retorted. 'They called her human, because she looked human, behaved like a human, had human intelligence and human physical abilities. Though not, I gather, human instincts or emotions until she was taught them. In fact a rather pretty girl. I know. I've met her dozens of times.'
'The people who know about all this and have to look a
fter her must have a feeling of revulsion,' Pennington said thoughtfully. 'I mean, a thing produced in a lab... '
'Don't kid yourself, and don't just take my word for it.
Everyone accepts her as an attractive girl. But a very special girl. Dawnay built her, but she was only the artisan. The design came from the computer, and it saw to it that she was tailor-made for its purpose. She absorbs knowledge from the computer, and the machine needs her to programme it, or rather, did do so.'
'Did?'
'She's gone.'
'You mean she's disappeared?'
Quadring looked into the dark congealed mess in the bowl of his pipe. 'That's exactly what I do mean.'
Pennington laughed, a little too loudly. 'Perhaps she didn't exist! I mean, I don't think one can really believe in a manufactured human being with a mental rapport with a computer.'
'We service types aren't paid to think,' said Quadring.
'Right now our job is to find her, and whoever destroyed the computer. It could hardly have been an outside job. It was done too expertly and quickly. The building was burning nicely by the time the patrols called me and had bashed through the locked doors and plied their extinguishers. Anyway, there wasn't a lot of point. The computer had been well and truly damaged with an axe before the arson. Security checks have told us one thing so far: the girl - she's called Andre, after Andromeda, the star or whatever it is that's alleged to have transmitted the dope for the computer - is missing, along, with a scientist named John Fleming.'
'Anything known about him ?'
'He's marked with a query on the files.' Nothing definite.
But he's the usual sort of bright young genius who thinks he knows better than the Establishment. The story is that he'd fallen for the girl. And she sort, of depended on him for advice the computer didn't or wouldn't give. They were certainly always together - at work and off it.'
'So they might be together now?'
'Exactly. At first light, if the mist clears, you and your boys start looking. Some half-asleep guard down at the jetty thinks he saw a man and a woman get in a boat and head out to sea just before the alarm siren started.'
'They could have landed anywhere along the coast by now,' Pennington said.
'Not in that boat. It's known it hadn't more than a gallon of petrol. It's just a little outboard effort for pottering along the promontory to check the defences. They'd make one of the islets off the coast, no farther.'
'What about a rendezvous out at sea?'
Quadring glanced at his companion. 'A snatch by our old friend a Foreign Power?' He shrugged. 'It could be. The Navy got the alarm along with you. Destroyers and aircraft by now will have started combing the Western approaches and away up North for two innocent-looking fishing trawlers and blatantly neutral tramps. But our radar watch would have picked up anything bigger than a rowing boat.
'My bet is they'll find nothing. Maybe you won't either.
But with this sort of weather a little open boat isn't exactly healthy. The island makes the best of some poor bets.'
Quadring stood up and looked through the window.
'Time to get moving,' he said. 'And I've a tricky report to write on my incompetence to date.'
There was an almost imperceptible lifting of the blackness of the sky when Pennington walked across to the parking lot.
The men were smoking and talking in undertones. Pennington told them briefly that a couple of suspected saboteurs, a man and a girl, were believed to have escaped by boat either to land farther up the coast or on one of the islands in the vicinity.
'They're wanted alive - not dead,' he finished. 'So no rough stuff. They're not believed to be armed, and there's no real reason why they should be unpleasant. The girl is - er a particularly vital witness. We'll get down to the jetty and arrange sweep and search routine from there.'
They had to hang around at the water's edge for another half hour for daylight. The mist began slowly to lift like a vast curtain, exposing first the grey sullen sea and then, a couple of miles out, the lower slopes of the nearest island with patches of snow still smudged against the northern sides.
Their landing was an anti-climax. Pennington was in the leading amphibian when he saw the figure of a man standing motionless on the shingle beach of the island. He didn't move when the vehicle lumbered out of the water and pulled up beside him.
'My name's Fleming,' he muttered. 'I expected you.'
He was a tallish, well-built man in his early thirties with a handsome but haggard face. His hair was wet and matted with sand, and his clothes torn and muddy. He stood quite still, as if exhausted.
'You must consider yourself under arrest,' Pennington said. 'And the girl who came with you?'
Fleming continued to stare out to sea. 'I lost contact with her when I was looking for shelter. She wandered off. There are footmarks. They end at a cave entrance. There's a deep pool inside.'
'She - she's killed herself?' Pennington demanded, mystified.
Fleming rounded on him. 'They killed her. The whole damned circus which used her.' He became calmer. 'She was hurt, badly hurt. If she slipped into that water she wouldn't have had a chance. Her hands - well, her hands were -'
'We'll dive in the pool; drag it,' said Pennington.
Fleming looked at him with something like pity. 'You do that,' he said. 'Your bosses will demand their pound of flesh, drowned if they can't have it alive.'
Pennington called to a Marine. 'Take Dr Fleming back to the mainland. Hand him over to Major Quadring. Tell the Major we're staying here to search the island.'
The direct line between Thorness and the Ministry of Science in Whitehall had been busy since the news of the disaster to the computer had been flashed to the duty officer just after midnight. :
The Minister himself had arrived at his office at the unheard-of hour of 9 a.m. He used a side door in case some observant reporter got the idea of a crisis. Rather to his annoyance, he found his Personal and Private Secretary, Brian Fothergill, already there, looking his usual calm and elegant self.
'Good morning, Minister,' he said affably. 'A nasty morning.
The roads were quite icy.'
'To hell with the icy roads,' the Minister muttered pettishly.
'What I want is some information about this Thorness business. Defence woke me at five. I didn't worry the P.M.
for an hour. He took it badly, very badly. He's arranging a Cabinet for eleven. We must have useful material for him, Fothergill. If not a solution. I suppose we're still in as much of a fog as that bloody place in the Highland mists? Fothergill delicately laid a neatly typed sheet of quarto on the Minister's desk. 'Not completely, sir,' he murmured, 'as you will gather from this precis of the position. It's a preliminary, of course, all that I've been able to compile in the' - he glanced at his wafer-thin wrist watch - 'seventy-five minutes since I inaugurated an investigation.'
'For God's sake,' snapped the Minister irritably, 'drop that ghastly jargon. What you mean is that you've been nagging everyone for something to put down here. I hope you got the whole crew out of their beds.'
The Minister read quickly through the report. 'Good, good,' he nodded, 'as far as it goes. Which actually means bad, bad. Not your fault, Brian,' he added hurriedly. 'You are to be congratulated on the energy with which you have gone round in circles. But there are features of interest.'
He re-read the report.
'The computer's gone. The girl's gone. The months of recording of the Andromeda equations by the radio-telescope at Bouldershaw Fell have gone. Somebody named Fleming whom I recall as an untidy and self-opinionated upstart has gone too. He gave me the impression when I met him that he drank. Which probably means he womanises too. I suspect that there's the usual tawdry sexual undercurrent in this debacle. However, that's a matter for M.I.6 and their confreres at the Yard. They must find them. More interesting is this note that our colleague Osborne visited Thorness yesterday evening.'
He looked up and glanced blandl
y at Fothergill. 'Where is Osborne? Missing, I presume?'
Fothergill permitted himself a moment's hesitation before he replied. 'No, sir, I have located him. He caught the overnight sleeper which arrived at Euston half an hour ago. I took it upon myself to request his immediate presence here in your name.'
'Quite right. And I'll put him through the hoop. These civil servants in the permanent jobs think themselves unanswerable to anyone.' The Minister cleared his throat. He realised he was infringing convention in openly criticising the Department's Permanent Under Secretary to a junior.
'That will be all, Fothergill, for the moment. Show Osborne in as soon as he arrives. And don't let me be late for that 11 o'clock Cabinet. I shall need you at 10.30 to take my memorandum.'
Fothergill faded noiselessly away. The Minister had time to ascertain a few more facts before Osborne was announced.
As a senior civil servant the Under Secretary was permitted, even encouraged, to keep in personal contact with the Thorness project. But why this visit on the previous day? And why, as the Thorness guard room record book showed, had he signed in a visitor, name not given?
The thought of some espionage scandal directly affecting the Ministry of Science built up his fury to a zenith by the time Osborne entered immediately after he had knocked.
The Minister glowered at him. 'Who was this chap you took to Thorness with you?' he asked without preamble.
'An assistant,' Osborne answered shortly.
The Minister was determined to keep his temper if he could. 'Why did you take him?' he demanded. 'What did you need an assistant for on this nocturnal visit?'
Osborne seemed to discover something of tremendous interest on the Minister's desk. 'It is essential for him to be in the picture,' he murmured.
The Minister got up from his chair and crossed to the window. He felt uneasy at the calmness of this man, and knew that there would be little chance of getting at the truth unless he could disturb his calm. Right now the only person in danger of losing his temper was himself.
'He didn't leave a bomb, I suppose?'
He knew it was the wrong approach. Whatever unethical views Osborne might hold, he wasn't the kind to help in violence. 'All right, of course he didn't,' he went on hastily.
