A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  A FOR ANDROMEDA

  Originality, excitement, pace, and scientific accuracy — readers who appreciate these elements in science fiction will enjoy thoroughly this outstanding novel of adventure. A for Andromeda is the product of a very successful collaboration between an astrophysicist of world-wide reputation and a talented dramatist whose work for British television has received the highest critical recognition.

  The scene is set ten years from now. A new radio-telescope picks up from the constellation of Andromeda, two hundred light-years away, a complex series of signals which prove to be a program for a giant computer. Someone in outer space is trying to communicate, using a supremely clever yet entirely logical method.

  When the necessary computer is built and begins to relay the information it receives from Andromeda, the project assumes a vital importance: politically, militarily, and commercially. For scientists find themselves possessing knowledge previously unknown to man, knowledge of such a nature that the security of human life itself is threatened.

  As a seven-part serial on BBC television, this story established popularity records. The last several installments doubled BBC's audience, reaching 80 per cent of the viewing audience of Great Britain.

  A FOR ANDROMEDA

  A NOVEL OF TOMORROW

  FRED HOYLE

  JOHN ELLIOT

  HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

  THIS BOOK IS BASED ON THE BBC TELEVISION SERIAL OF THE SAME NAME AND IS PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION

  A FOR ANDROMEDA. Copyright © 1962 by Professor Fred Hoyle and John Elliot. All rights reserved. The events and characters described in this book are all entirely fictitious. No part may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages for the purposes of a review.

  One

  ARRIVAL

  LIGHT was soaking out of the sky when they drove up to Bouldershaw Fell. Judy sat beside Professor Reinhart in the back of the staff car as it slid up the road from Bouldershaw town to the open moor; she peered hopefully out of the windows, but they were nearly at the crest of the hill before they could see the radio-telescope.

  Suddenly it stood in front of them: three huge pillars curving together at the top to form a triangular arch, dark and stark against the ebbing sky. Hollowed out of the ground between the uprights lay a concrete bowl the size of a sports arena, and above, suspended from the top of the arch, a smaller metal bowl looked downwards and pointed a long antenna at the ground. The size of the whole thing did not strike the eye at first; it simply looked out of proportion to the landscape. Only when the car had drawn up and parked beneath it did Judy begin to realise how big it was. It was quite unlike anything else she had seen — as completely and intensely itself as a piece of sculpture.

  Yet, for all its strangeness, there was nothing particularly sinister about the tall, looming structure to warn them of the extraordinary and disastrous future that was to emerge from it.

  Out of the car, they stood for a moment with the soft, sweet air filling their heads and lungs, and gazed up at the three huge pylons, at the metal reflector that glistened high above them, and at the pale sky beyond. Around them a few low buildings and smaller arrays of aerials were scattered about on the empty moor-top, enclosed by a wire-link fence. There was no sound but the wind in the pylons and the curlews calling, and they could almost feel the great concrete-and-metal ear beside them straining to listen to the stars.

  Then the Professor led the way to the main building — a low stone-faced affair with a half-finished entrance and a newly-laid approach. Men were putting in gateposts and direction notices and painting them: it all looked very new and sharp against the soft, dark hilltop.

  “There’s all sorts of subsidiary gubbins,” said the Professor, with a small delicate wave of his hand. “This houses the main control room.”

  He was a man in his sixties, small, neat and cosy, like a family doctor.

  “It’s quite a baby,” said Judy.

  “Baby? It’s the biggest baby I’ve ever given birth to. A ten years’ labour.”

  He twinkled at her and his small black shoes pattered up the steps into the control building.

  The entrance hall had an unfinished but at the same time familiar look: inevitable pegboard ceiling, inevitable composition floor, plain colour-washed brick walls and fluorescent lighting. There was a wall telephone and a drinking fountain; there were two small doors in the side walls, and there were double doors facing the entrance; and that was about all. A faint hissing noise came from behind the double doors. When the Professor opened them the hissing became louder. It sounded like atmospherics from a radio.

  As they went through the double doors a man in a cleaner’s brown coat came out. His eye met Judy’s for a moment, but when she parted her lips he looked away.

  “Good-evening, Harries,” said the Professor.

  The room they entered was the control room, the centre of the observatory. At the far end an observation window gave a view of the gigantic sculpture outside, and facing the window was a massive metal desk, like an organ console, fitted with panels of buttons, lights and switches. Several young men were working at the desk, referring from time to time to the two computers which stood in tall metal cases on each side of it. One side wall was covered with enlargements of optical-telescope photographs of stars, and the other was two-thirds glass partition behind which more young men could be seen working at equipment in an inner room.

  “The opening ceremony will be in here,” said Reinhart.

  “Where does the Minister break the champagne bottle, or cut the ribbon, or whatever he does?”

  “At the desk. He presses a button on the control desk to start it.”

  “It isn’t working yet?”

  “Not yet. We’re running acceptance tests.”

  Judy stood by the doorway taking it in. She was the sort of good-looking young woman who is more often called handsome than pretty, with a fresh complexion, an alert, intelligent face and a very positive, slightly ungainly, way of standing. She might have been a nurse, or an officer in the Services, or simply the product of a good hockey-playing school. She had rather large hands and deep blue eyes. Under one arm she held a bundle of papers and pamphlets which she pulled out and looked at, as if they might explain what she saw.

  “It’s the biggest radio-telescope, well — anywhere.” The Professor smiled happily round the room. “It’s not as big as an interferometer, of course, but you can steer it. You can shift your focus by the small reflector up top, and by that means you can track a source across the sky.”

  “I gathered from these,” Judy tapped her papers, “that there are other radio-telescopes operating in the same way.”

  “There are. There were in nineteen-sixty, when we started this — and that’s several years ago. But they haven’t our sensitivity.”

  “Because this is bigger?”

  “Not entirely. Also because we’ve better receiving equipment. That should give us a higher signal-to-noise ratio. It’s all housed in there.”

  He pointed a small, delicate finger to the room behind the glass panel.

  “You see, all you pick up from most astronomical sources — radio stars for instance — is a very faint electrical signal, and it’s mixed up with all kinds of noise, from the atmosphere, from interstellar gas, from heaven knows what — well, heaven indeed.”

  He spoke in a precise, matter-of-fact tenor voice; he might have been a doctor discussing a cold. The sense of achievement, of imagination, was all hidden.

  “You can hear sources other people can’t?” asked Judy.

  “Hope to. That’s the idea. But don’t as
k me how. There’s a team evolved it.” He looked modestly down at his little feet. “Doctors Fleming and Bridger.”

  “Bridger?” Judy looked up sharply.

  “Fleming’s the real brains. John Fleming.” He called politely across the room. “John!”

  One of the young men detached himself from the group at the control desk and wandered towards them.

  He said, “Hi!” to the Professor and ignored Judy.

  “If you have a moment, John. Dr. Fleming. Miss Adamson.”

  The young man glanced at Judy, then called across to the control desk.

  “Turn that flaming noise down!”

  “What is it?” Judy asked.

  The atmospherics reduced themselves to a faint hissing.

  The young man shrugged.

  “Interstellar hiss, mainly. The universe is full of electrically charged matter. What we pick up is an electrical emission from these charges, which we get as noise.”

  “The background music of the universe,” Reinhart added.

  “You can keep that, Prof.,” said the young man, with a sort of friendly contempt. “Keep it for Jacko’s press handouts.”

  “Jacko’s not coming back.”

  Fleming looked faintly surprised, and Judy frowned as if she had mislaid some piece of information.

  “Who?” she asked the Professor.

  “Jackson, your predecessor.” He turned to Fleming. “Miss Adamson’s our new press officer.”

  Fleming regarded her without relish. “Well, they come and go, don’t they? Inheriting Jacko’s spheres?”

  “What are they?”

  “Dear young lady, you’ll soon find out.”

  “I’m showing her the layout for Thursday,” the Professor said. “The official opening. She’ll be looking after the press.”

  Fleming had a dark, thoughtful face which was less surly than preoccupied; but he seemed tired and bitter. He grumbled away in a thick Midland accent.

  “Oh yes — the Official Opening! All the coloured lights will be working. The stars will sing ‘Rule Britannia’ in heavenly chorus, and I’ll be round at the pub.”

  “You’ll be here, John, I hope.” The Professor sounded slightly irritated. “Meanwhile, perhaps you’d show Miss Adamson round.”

  “Not if you’re busy,” said Judy in a small, hostile voice.

  Fleming looked at her with interest for the first time.

  “How much do you know about it?”

  “Very little yet.” She tapped her papers. “I’m relying on these.”

  Fleming turned wearily to the room and spread an arm wide.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen, is the largest and newest radio-telescope in the world — not to say the most expensive. It has a resolution of fifteen to twenty times greater than any existing equipment and is, of course, a miracle of British science. Not to say engineering. The pick-up elements” — he pointed out of the window — “are steerable so as to be capable of tracking the course of a celestial body across the heavens. Now you can tell them everything, can’t you?”

  “Thank you,” said Judy icily. She looked at the Professor, but he seemed only a little embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry we worried you, John,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it. It’s a pleasure. Any time.”

  The Professor turned his kindly general-practitioner’s attention to Judy.

  “I’ll show you myself.”

  “You do want it operating by Thursday, don’t you?” said Fleming. “For His Ministership.”

  “Yes, John. It’ll be all right?”

  “It’ll look all right. The brass won’t know if it’s working. Nor the news touts.”

  “I should like it to be working.”

  “Yeh.”

  Fleming turned away and walked back to the control desk.

  Judy waited for an explosion, or at least some sign of affront, from the Professor, but he only nodded his head as if over a diagnosis.

  “You can’t push a boy like John. You may wait months for an idea. Years. It’s worth it if it’s a good one, and it generally is with him.” He looked wistfully at Fleming’s receding back: sloppy, casual, with untidy hair and clothes. “We depend on the young, you know. He’s done all the low-temperature design, he and Bridger. The receivers are based on low-temperature equipment and that’s not my subject. There’s a hand-out on it somewhere.” He nodded vaguely at her bundle of papers. “We’ve run him a bit ragged, I’m afraid.”

  He sighed, and took her off on a conducted tour of the building. He showed her the wall photographs of the night sky, telling her the names and identity of the great radio stars, the main sources of the sounds we hear from the universe. “This,” he explained, pointing to the photographs, “is not a star at all, but two whole galaxies colliding; and this, a star exploding.”

  “And this?”

  “The Great Nebula in Andromeda. M.31 we call it, just to confuse it with the motorway.”

  “It’s in the Andromeda constellation?”

  “No. It’s way, way out beyond that. It’s a whole galaxy in itself. Nothing’s simple, is it?”

  She looked at the white spiral of stars and agreed.

  “You get a signal from it?”

  “A hiss. Like you heard.”

  Near the wall was a large perspex sphere with a small dark ball at its centre and other white ones set around it like the electrons in a physicist’s model of the atom.

  “Jacko’s spheres!” The Professor twinkled. “Or Jacko’s folly, they call it. It’s a display of things in orbit near the earth. All these white units represent satellites, ballistic missiles and so on. Ironmongery. That’s the earth, in the middle.”

  The Professor waved it daintily aside.

  “A gimmick, I think you’d call it. Jacko thought it would interest our government visitors. We have to keep tabs, of course, on what’s happening near the earth, but it’s a waste of a machine like this. Still, the military ask us to, and we don’t get the sort of money we need unless we can tap the defence budget.” He sounded as though he was being naughty and enjoyed it. He made one of his small, manicured gestures to take in the room and the huge thing outside. “Twenty-five millions or more, this has cost.”

  “So there’s a military interest?”

  “Yes. But it’s my establishment — or rather, the Ministry of Science’s. Not your Ministry’s.”

  “I’m on your staff now.”

  “Not at my request.” His manner stiffened, as it had not done when Fleming was rude to him; Fleming, after all, was one of his own.

  “Does anyone else know why I’m here?” Judy asked him.

  “I’ve told no-one.”

  He steered her away from the subject and into the other room, where he went carefully over the receiving apparatus and the communications equipment.

  “We’re simply a link in a chain of observatories all round the world, though not the weakest link.” He looked around with a kind of pure pleasure at the switchboards and wires and racks of equipment. “I didn’t feel an old man when we started to put all this together, but I do now. You have an idea and you think: ‘That’s what we must do’, and it just seems the next step. Quite a small step, possibly. Then you start: design, research, committees, building, politics. An hour of your life here, a month there. Let’s hope it’ll work. Ah, here’s Whelan! He understands all about this part of it.”

  Judy was introduced to a pasty-faced young man with an Australian voice who held on to her hand as though it was something he had lost.

  “Haven’t we met before somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so.” She stared at him candidly with large blue eyes, but he would not be put off.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  She wavered and looked around for help. Harries, the cleaner, was standing across the room, and when she looked at him he shook his head very slightly. She turned back to Whelan.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

  “Mayb
e at Woomera....”

  The Professor piloted her back into the main control-room.

  “What was his name?”

  “Whelan.”

  She made a note on her pad. The party at the control desk had split up, leaving only one young man who was sitting in the duty engineer’s seat checking the panels. The Professor led her across to him.

  “Hallo, Harvey.”

  The young man looked up and half rose from his seat.

  “Good-evening, Professor Reinhart.” At least he was polite.

  Judy looked out of the window to the great piece of gadgetry beyond and the empty moorland and the sky, now growing dark purple.

  “You know the principle of the thing?” Harvey asked her. “Any radio emission from the sky strikes the bowl and is reflected to the aerial, and received and recorded on the equipment in there.” He pointed through the glass partition.

  Judy did not look for fear of seeing Whelan, but Harvey — keen, dogged and toneless — was soon directing her attention to something else. “This bank of computers works out the azimuth and elevation of whatever source you want to focus on to it and keeps it following. There’s a servo link arrangement....”

  Eventually Judy managed to escape to the hall and have a moment alone with Harries.

  “Get Whelan moved,” she said.

  She had left her suitcase at the hotel in the town and driven on up the hill with very little idea of what to expect. She had visited a good many service establishments and served as security officer in a number of them, from Fylingdales to Christmas Island. Whelan, she knew, had met her on a rocket range in Australia. She had worked with Harries on a tour of duty at Malvern. She did not think of herself as a spy, and the idea of informing on her own colleagues struck her as an unpleasant business; but the Home Office had asked for her, or at least for someone, to be transferred from the Ministry of Defence security section to the Ministry of Science, and an assignment was an assignment. Before, the people she worked with had always known what she was, and she had thought of her duty as protecting them. This time they themselves were suspect and she was to be palmed off on them as a public relations stooge who could nose around and ask questions without putting them on their guard. Reinhart knew, and disliked it. She disliked it herself. But a job was a job and this — she was told — was important.