by Fred Hoyle
Osborne knew all the names, and the Minister gave a gracious inclination of his head or lift of his hand to each one. The flowered prima-donna turned out to be a Mrs. Tate-Allen from the Treasury, who represented the grants committee. When they got to Fleming the ministerial reaction changed.
“Ah — Fleming. No more indiscretions, I hope.”
Fleming scowled the length of the table at him.
“I’ve had my mouth shut, if that’s what you mean.”
“It is.” Ratcliff smiled charmingly and passed on to Watling.
“We’ll try not to take too much of each other’s time, shall we?” He raised his fine Roman head and looked down the table to Reinhart. “You have some more news for us, Professor?”
Reinhart coughed diffidently on to his little white hand.
“Dr. Fleming here has made an analysis.”
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Tate-Allen beamed, “but I don’t think Mr. Newby here is entirely in the picture.”
Mr. Newby was a small, thin man who looked used to humiliation.
“Oh, well,” said Ratcliff, “perhaps you’d fill in the background, Osborne.”
Osborne filled it in.
“And now?”
Twenty pairs of eyes, including the Minister’s, turned to Fleming.
“We know what it is,” said Fleming.
“Well done!” said Mrs. Tate-Allen.
“What is it?”
Fleming looked levelly at the Minister.
“It’s a computer program,” he said quietly.
“A computer program? Can you be sure about that?”
Fleming merely nodded. Everyone else talked.
“Please!” said Osborne, banging his fist on the table. The hubbub subsided. Mrs. Tate-Allen held up a blue-gloved hand.
“I’m afraid, Minister, some of us don’t know what a computer program is.”
Fleming explained, while Reinhart and Osborne sat back and breathed relief. The boy was behaving well.
“Have you tried it in a computer?” asked Mrs. Tate-Allen.
“We’ve used computers to break it down. We’ve nothing that’ll take all of it.” He tapped the papers in front of him. “This is simply vast.”
“If you had access to a bigger computer —” Osborne suggested.
“It isn’t only size. It is, in fact, more than just a program.”
“What is it then?” Vandenberg asked, settling more comfortably into his chair. It was going to be a long business.
“It’s in three sections.” Fleming arranged his papers as if that would make it clearer. “The first part is a design — or rather, it’s a mathematical requirement which can be interpreted as a design. The second part is the programme proper, the order code as we call it. The third and last part is data — information sent for the machine to work on.”
“I’d be glad of an opportunity...” Vandenberg extended a hand and the papers were passed to him. “I don’t say you’re wrong. I’d like our signals people to check your methodology.”
“You do that,” said Fleming. There was a respectful hush as the papers were handed up the table, but Mrs. Tate-Allen evidently felt that some comment was required.
“I must say, this is very interesting.”
“Interesting!” Fleming looked explosive. Reinhart laid a restraining hand on his sleeve. “It’s the most important thing that’s happened since the evolution of the brain.”
“All right, John,” said Reinhart. The Minister passed it over.
“What do you want to do next?”
“Build a computer that’ll handle it.”
“Are you seriously proposing,” the Minister spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, as though they were chocolates out of an assorted box, “that some other beings, in some distant part of the galaxy, who have never had any contact with us before, have now conveniently sent us the design and programme for the kind of electronic machine —”
“Yes,” said Fleming.
The Minister sailed on: “Which we happen to possess on this earth?”
“We don’t possess one.”
“We possess the type, if not the model. Is it likely?”
“It’s what happened.”
Fleming made a dubious impression on the meeting. They had often seen it before: dedicated young scientists, obstinate and peevish, impatient of committee processes, and yet to be treated with great patience because they might have something valuable on them. These easily caricaturable officials were not fools; they were used to assessing people and situations. Much would depend on what Vandenberg and Osborne and Reinhart thought. Ratcliff enquired of the Professor.
“Arithmetic’s universal,” said Reinhart. “Electronic computing may well be.”
“It may be the only form of computing, in the last analysis,” put in Fleming.
Vandenberg looked up from the papers.
“I wonder —”
“Look,” Fleming interrupted. “The message is being repeated all the time. If you’ve a better idea, you go and work on it.”
Reinhart glanced uneasily across at Osborne, who was watching the state of play like a scorer at a cricket match.
“You can’t use an existing machine?” Osborne asked.
“I said!”
“It seems a reasonable enough question,” the Minister observed mildly. Fleming turned on him passionately.
“This programme is simply enormous. I don’t think you realise.”
“Just explain, John,” Reinhart said.
Fleming took a breath and continued more calmly. “If you want a computer to play you a decent game of draughts, it has to be able to accept a programme of around five thousand order groups. If you want it to play chess — and you can; I’ve played chess with computers — you have to feed in about fifteen thousand orders. To handle this material,” he waved towards the papers in front of Vandenberg, “you need a computer that can take in a thousand million, or, more accurately, tens of thousands of millions of numbers, before it can even start work on the data.”
At last he had the meeting with him: this was a glimpse of a brain they could respect.
“It’s surely a matter of assembling enough units,” Osborne said.
Fleming shook his head.
“It isn’t just size; it needs a new conception. There’s no equipment on earth...” He searched his mind for an example, and they waited attentively until he found one. “Our newest computers still work in microseconds. This is a machine that must operate in milli-microseconds, otherwise we’d all be old men by the time it got round to processing the whole of the vast quantity of data. And it would need a memory — probably a low temperature memory — at least with the capacity of the human brain, and far more efficiently controlled.”
“Is this proven?” asked Ratcliff.
“What do you expect? We have to get the means to prove it first. Whatever intelligence sent this message is way ahead of us. We don’t know why they sent it, or to whom. But it’s something we couldn’t do. We’re just homo sapiens, plodding along. If we want to interpret it —” He paused. “If...”
“This is theory, isn’t it?”
“It’s analysis.”
The Minister appealed once more to Reinhart.
“Do you think it could be proved?”
“I can prove it,” said Fleming.
“I was asking the Professor.”
“I can prove it by making a computer that will handle it,” said Fleming, undeterred. “That’s what’s intended.”
“Is that realistic?”
“It’s what the message is asking for.”
The Minister began to lose patience. He drummed his square fingers on the table.
“Professor?”
Reinhart considered, not so much what he believed, but what to say.
“It would take a long time.”
“But it’s what is wanted?”
“Possibly.”
“I shall need the best available computer to
work with,” said Fleming, as though it were all agreed. “And the whole of our present team.”
Osborne looked anguished; the issue was very doubtful still, to anyone who knew, and the Minister showed signs of taking offence.
“We can make available university computers,” he said, in tones that suggested matters of mere routine.
Fleming’s patience suddenly snapped.
“University nothing! Do you think universities have the best equipment in this day and age?” He pointed across the table at Vandenberg. “Ask your military friend where the only really decent computer in the country is.”
A small frozen pause: the meeting looked at the American general.
“I’ll need notice of that question.”
“You won’t, ’cause I’ll tell you. It’s at the rocket research establishment at Thorness.”
“That’s engaged on defence work.”
“Of course it is,” said Fleming contemptuously.
Vandenberg did not reply. This young man was the Minister’s problem. The meeting waited while Ratcliff drummed his fingers on the tooled leather and Osborne totted up the score, not very hopefully. His master was undoubtedly impressed but not convinced: Fleming, like most men of sincerity, was a bad advocate; he had had his chance and more or less thrown it away. If the Minister did nothing, the whole thing would remain a piece of university theory. If he took action, he would have to negotiate with the military: he would have to convince not only the Minister of Defence but also Vandenberg’s Allied committee that the effort was worth the candle. Ratcliff took his time. He liked to have people waiting for him.
“We could make a claim,” he said at last. “It would be a Cabinet matter.”
For some time after the meeting there was nothing for the team to do. Reinhart and Osborne took negotiations forward step by prudent step, but Fleming could go no further. Bridger cleared up his remaining work, Christine sat quietly in the office checking and rechecking the ground they had already been over; but Fleming turned his back on the whole thing, and took Judy with him.
“It’s no good fiddling around until they’ve made up their minds,” he told her and dragged her off to help him enjoy himself. Not that he made passes at her. He simply enjoyed having her around and was affectionate and surprisingly pleasant company. The mainspring of his discontent, she discovered, was irreverence of pomposity and humbug. When they got in the way of his job he was sour and sometimes violent, but when he put work behind him they became merely targets for his particular brand of bitten-off salted humour.
“Britain is sinking slowly in the west,” he remarked once, when she asked him about the general state of things, and dismissed it with a grin. When she tried to apologise for her outburst at Bouldershaw Fell, he simply smacked her across the bottom.
“Forgive and forget, that’s me,” he said, and bought her a drink. She endured a good deal for his pleasure: he loved modern music, which she did not understand; he loved driving fast, which frightened her; and he loved looking at Westerns, which frightened her even more. He was deeply tired and restless. They rushed from cinema to concert, from concert to a long drive, from a long drive to a long drink, and by the end of it he was worn out. At least he seemed happy, although she was not. She felt she was sailing under false colours.
They only went occasionally to the little office in the Institute, and when they were there Fleming flirted with Christine. Not that Judy could blame him. He took no notice of her in any other way, and she was astonishingly pretty. She was, as she confided to Bridger, “In love with his brain,” but she seemed not particularly to relish being hugged and pinched. She went on stolidly with her work. She did enquire, however, about Thorness.
“Have you ever been there, Dr. Fleming?”
“Once.”
“What’s it like?”
“Remote and beautiful, like you. Also high-powered, soulless, clueless — not like you.”
It was assumed that, if Fleming were allowed to go there, she would go too. Watling had looked over her antecedents and found them impeccable. Father and mother Flemstad had fled from Lithuania when the Russian armies rolled over it towards the end of the Hitler war, and Christine had been born and brought up in England. Her parents had become naturalised British citizens before they died and she had been subjected to every possible check.
Dennis Bridger’s activities seemed a good deal more interesting. As the date of his departure drew near, he received an increasing number of unexplained long-distance telephone calls which appeared to worry him a good deal, although he never talked about them. One morning, alone in the office with Judy, he seemed more harassed than usual. When the telephone rang he seized it practically out of her hand. It was obviously a summons; he made some sort of excuse and left the office. Judy watched him from the window as he walked across the precinct to the roadway where a very large, very expensive car was waiting for him.
As he approached, the driver’s door opened and an immensely tall chauffeur stepped out wearing the sort of livery that one associated with a coupé de ville of the nineteen twenties, a pale mustard high-buttoned cross-over tunic, breeches and polished leather leggings.
“Dr. Bridger?”
He had on dark glasses and he spoke with a soft, indeterminate foreign accent. The car was shining and monstrously beautiful, like a new aircraft without wings. Twin radio masts sprung from its tail fins to above the height of a man — even that man. The whole outfit was quite absurdly larger than life.
The chauffeur held open the door to the back of the car while Bridger got in. There was an immensely wide seat, a deeply carpeted floor, blue-glazed windows and, on the far side of the seat, a short stocky man with a completely bald head.
The short man extended a hand with a ring on it.
“I am Kaufmann.”
The chauffeur returned to his place in front of the glass partition and they moved off.
“You do not mind if we drive around?” There was no mistaking Kaufmann’s accent: he was German, prosperous and tough. “There is so much tittle-tattle if one is seen in places.”
There was a small buzz by his ear. He picked up an ivory telephone receiver that lay across a rack in front of him. Bridger could see the chauffeur speaking into a microphone by the steering-wheel.
“Ja.” Kaufmann listened for a moment and then turned and looked out of the rear window. “Ja, Egon, I see. Go in a circle, then, yes? Und Stuttgart... the call for Stuttgart.”
He replaced the phone and turned to Bridger.
“My chauffeur says we are being followed by a taxi.” Bridger looked round nervously. Kaufmann laughed, or at least he showed his teeth. “Not to worry. There are always taxis in London. He will see we go nowhere. What is important is I have my call to Stuttgart.” He produced a silver case containing miniature cigars. “Smoking?”
“No thank you.”
“You send me a telex message to Geneva.” Kaufmann helped himself to a cigarillo. “Some months ago.”
“Yes.”
“Since then, we do not hear from you.”
“I changed my mind.” Bridger twitched anxiously.
“And now, perhaps, comes the time to change it back. We have been very puzzled, you know, these past few months.” He was serious but agreeable and relaxed. Bridger looked guiltily out of the back window again.
“Do not worry, I tell you. It is looked after.” He held a jewelled silver lighter to the end of his cigarillo and inhaled. “There really was a message?”
“Yes.”
“From a planet?”
“A very distant planet.”
“Somewhere in Andromeda?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that is a comfortable way away.”
“What is this —?” Bridger twitched his nose as the cigar smoke drifted up it.
“What is this about? I come to that. In America — I was in America at the time — there was great excitement. Everyone was very alarmed. And in Euro
pe — everywhere. Then your government say: ‘Nothing. It is nothing. We will tell you later.’ And so on. And people forget; months go by and gradually people forget. There are other things to worry about. But there is something?”
“Not officially.”
“No, no — officially there is nothing. We have tried, but everywhere is a blank wall. Everybody’s lips are sealed.”
“Including mine.”
They were by now half-way round Regent’s Park. Bridger looked at his watch.
“I have to get back this afternoon.”
“You are working for the British Government?” Kaufmann made it sound like a piece of polite conversation.
“I’m part of their team,” said Bridger.
“Working on the message?”
“Why should that interest you?”
“Anything of importance interests us. And this may be of great importance.”
“It might. It might not.”
“But you are going on with the work? Please, do not look so secretive. I am not trying to pump you.”
“I’m not going on with it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to stay for ever in government service.”
They drove past the zoo and down towards Portland Place. Kaufmann puffed contentedly at his cigar while Bridger waited. As they turned west into Marylebone Kaufmann said:
“You would like something more lucrative? With us?”
“I did think so,” Bridger said, blinking at his feet.
“Until your little fracas in Bouldershaw?”
“You knew about that?” Bridger looked at him sharply. “At Oldroyd’s?”
“Naturally I knew.”
He was very affable, almost sweet. Bridger studied his shoes again.
“I didn’t want any trouble.”
“You should not be so easy put off,” said Kaufmann. “At the same time, you must not lead people towards us. We may be busy with something else.”
They turned north again, up Baker Street.
“I think you should stay where you are,” he said. “But you should keep in touch with me.”
“How much?”
Kaufmann opened his eyes wide.
“Excuse?”
“If you want me to give you information.”