A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “Really, Dr. Bridger!” Kaufmann laughed. “You have no finesse.”

  The intercom buzzed. Kaufmann picked up the phone.

  “Kaufmann.... Ja, ja.... Das ist Felix?...”

  They did two more turns round the park and then dropped Bridger off a few hundred yards from the Institute. Judy watched his return but he said nothing to her. He thoroughly distrusted her anyhow.

  Half an hour later the taxi which had followed Kaufmann’s car drew up at a telephone box and Harries stepped out. His leg was still strapped and he moved stiffly, but he considered himself fit for work. He paid the driver and limped across to the phone box. As the taxi drove away another car drew up and waited for him.

  The phone was answered by Watling’s P.A., a bored Lieutenant from the Household Cavalry, the Ministry of Defence being, by that time, what was called “integrated.”

  “I see. Well, you’d better come round and report.”

  As he hung up, Watling swept in, brisk and bothered from another meeting with Osborne.

  “Jabber, jabber, jabber. That’s all they do.” He slung his brief case on to a chair. “Anything new?”

  “Harries has been on.”

  “And?”

  Watling took possession of his desk, a severe metal table in a severe concrete room with fire instructions on the door. The P.A. raised a cavalry-trained eyebrow.

  “He says Bridger has been seen with a Known Person.”

  “Who? You can ditch the jargon.”

  “Kaufmann, sir.”

  “Kaufmann?”

  “Intel. The international cartel people.”

  Watling stared at the blank wall facing him. There were still a number of large cosmopolitan cartels in spite of the anti-trust laws and the administration of the Common Market. They were not palpably illegal but they were extremely powerful and in some cases they had very nearly a stranglehold over European trade. At a time when the West was liable to boycott by any or all of the countries it depended on for raw materials, there was a frightening amount of scope for unscrupulous trading agencies, and Intel was generally known and disliked for its lack of scruple. Anything which found its way into its hands was likely to be sold profitably in another capital the next time the market was good.

  “Any more?”

  “No. They did two or three circuits in Kaufmann’s mobile gin-palace and then landed back at base.”

  Watling stroked his chin as he fitted pieces of thought neatly and methodically together.

  “You think that’s what he was up to at Bouldershaw?”

  “Harries thinks so.”

  “Which is why Harries was hauled off and pranged and dumped?”

  “Partly.”

  “Well, they’re the last people we want genned up on this.”

  Once anything got into the hands of Intel it was extremely difficult to trace. They had a perfectly legal organisation in London, registered offices in Switzerland and branches over at least three continents. Information slipped along their private wires like quicksilver and there was very little that could be done about it. There were no search warrants for that kind of operation. By the time you were ransacking a Piccadilly office, the thing you had lost was being swapped for manganese or bauxite behind some very unsympathetic frontier. Nothing was sacred, or safe.

  “I suppose Bridger’ll go on feeding ’em stuff,” he said.

  “He’s supposed to be pulling out,” his P.A. reminded him.

  “I doubt if he will now. They’ll have crossed his palm.” He sighed. “Anyway, he’d get it all from Fleming. They’re thick as condensed soup.”

  “You think Fleming’s in it?”

  “Ach!” Watling pushed his chair back and gave the thing up. “He’s just a hopeless innocent. He’ll blow the gaff to anyone to show. how independent he is. Look at what happened last time. And now we’re going to have them in our midst.”

  “How so?”

  “How so? You ought to write a phrasebook. They’re moving into W.D. quarters, that’s how so. The whole boiling. Fleming wants to build his super-computer at the Rocket Research Establishment at Thorness.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s Top Secret.”

  “Yes, sir.” The P.A. looked languidly discreet. “Has it been agreed?”

  “It will be. I can smell a nonsense when I’m down-wind of it. Vandenberg’s furious. So are all the Allies, I wouldn’t wonder. But Reinhart’s all for it and so’s Osborne, and so’s their Minister. And so will the Cabinet be, I expect.”

  “Then we can’t keep ’em out?”

  “We can watch ’em. We’d better keep Harries on it for one.”

  “They’ve their own security staff at Thorness. Army,” the P.A. added with pride.

  The Air Commodore sniffed. “Harries can work in with them.”

  “Harries wants to come off it.”

  “Why?”

  “He says he’s sure they’ve rumbled him.”

  “How? Pardon.” Watling flashed a smile at him. “How so?”

  “Well, they beat him up at Bouldershaw. They probably think he’s on to something bigger than this.”

  “He probably is. Where is he now?”

  “Tailing them. He’s coming in later to report.”

  But Harries did not report later, or at all. Judy and Fleming found his corpse the following morning, under the tonneau cover of Fleming’s car.

  When Judy had been sick and they had both been to the police station and the body had been taken away and dealt with, they went back to the office to find a message for Fleming to go straight round to the Ministry of Science. Judy, waiting with Christine, was interviewed by Watling and felt frightened and miserable. Christine went on with her work, only stopping to give Judy two aspirin with the air of one who dispenses charity regardless of merit.

  Before he left for the Ministry, Fleming had kissed Judy on the cheek. She smiled queasily at him.

  “Why should they dump it on me?” he said.

  “They didn’t dump it on you. They dumped it on me, as a warning.”

  She went to the Ladies and was sick again.

  Fleming came back before lunch cock-o’-hoop and bubbling. He pulled Christine out of her chair and held her to him.

  “It’s through!”

  “Through?” Judy remained dazed at the other side of the room.

  “Authority in triplicate from Air Commodore Jet-Propelled’s superior officers. They’ve opened wide their pearly barbed wire stockade.”

  “Thorness?” Christine asked, pushing him away.

  Fleming bounced his behind on to the trestle table. “We’re graciously allowed in to use their beautiful, beautiful taxpayers’ equipment hitherto reserved for playing soldiers.”

  “When?” asked Judy.

  Fleming slid off the table and went across and hugged her.

  “As soon as we’re ready. Priority A on the big computer — barring what is laughingly called a national emergency. We’re excused morning parades, we shall be issued with passes, we shall have our fingers printed, our brains washed and our hair searched for small animals. And we shall build the marvel of the age.” He left Judy and held out his arms to Christine. “You and I, darling! We’ll teach ’em, won’t we? ‘Is it proven?’ asks His Ministership. We’ll prove ’em! ‘Come the four corners of the world in arms, and we will shock them’ — as the lady said in the strip club. Oh — and Silver-wings is coming to give us our marching-orders.”

  He started singing “Silver wings among the gold,” and took them both out to a lunch which Judy could not eat. There was no sign of Bridger.

  Watling called back in the afternoon, composed but severe, like a visiting headmaster. He made the three of them sit down while he lectured them.

  “What happened to Harries followed directly from his work with you.”

  “But he was a lab cleaner!”

  “He was Military Intelligence.”

  “Oh!”

  This was news to Chri
stine, and to Fleming. He reacted with a kind of savage flippancy.

  “Ours, as they say?”

  “Ours.”

  “Charming.”

  “Don’t flatter yourselves that this was all on account of what you’re doing. You’re not that important yet.” The girls sat and listened while Watling turned his attention exclusively on Fleming. “Harries probably ran into something else when he was covering for you.”

  “Why was he covering for us if we’re not important?”

  “People — other people — don’t know whether it’s important or not. They know something’s on, thanks to you opening your mouth. It may or may not be of great strategic value.”

  “Do you know who killed Harries?” Fleming asked quietly. His own share in the death had perhaps come home to him.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s something.”

  “And we know who paid them to.”

  “Then you’re home and dry.”

  “Except that we won’t be allowed to touch them,” said Watling stiffly. “For diplomatic reasons.”

  “Charming again.”

  “It isn’t a particularly charming world.” He looked round at them as if performing an unpleasant duty. He was a modest and unpompous man who disliked preaching. “You people who’ve been living a quiet, sheltered life in your laboratories have got to understand something: you’re on ops now.”

  “On what?” asked Fleming.

  “Operations. If this idea of yours comes off, it’ll give us a very valuable piece of property.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  “The country.”

  “Ah yes, of course.”

  Watling ignored him. He had heard plenty about Fleming’s attitude to the Establishment.

  “Even if it doesn’t work, it’ll attract attention. Thorness is an important place and people will go to great lengths to find out what’s going on there. This is why I’m warning you — all of you.” He fixed them in turn with his brisk blue eyes. “You’re not in the university any more — you’re in the jungle. It may just look like stuffy old officialdom, with a lot of smooth talk and platitudinous statements by politicians and government servants like me, but it’s a jungle all the same. I can assure you of that. Secrets are bought and sold, ideas are stolen, and sometimes people get hurt. That’s how the world’s business is done. Please remember it.”

  When he had gone, Fleming returned to the computers and Judy went down to Whitehall to get her next instructions. Bridger drifted in later in the day, anxious and looking for Fleming.

  “Dennis” — Fleming bounced back in from the computer hall — “We’re off!”

  “Off?”

  “Thorness. We’re cooking with gas.”

  “Oh, good,” said Bridger flatly.

  “The Minister of Science hath prevailed. Mankind is about to take a small step forward into the jungle, according to our uniformed friends. Why don’t you change your mind? Join the happy throng.”

  “Yes. Thank you, John.” Bridger looked down at his feet and twitched his nose in an agony of shyness. “That’s what I came to see you about. I have changed my mind.”

  By the time Judy reached Osborne, Osborne knew.

  Four

  ANTICIPATION

  NO-ONE ever went to Thorness for fun. The quickest way from London took twelve hours, by air to Aberdeen and then by fast diesel across the Highlands to Gairloch on the west coast. Thorness was the first station north of Gairloch, but there was nothing there but a small decaying village, the wild rocky coast and the moors. The Research Establishment covered a headland facing out to the wide gap of water between the Isle of Skye and the Isle of Lewis, and was fenced in to the landward side by tall link wiring topped with barbed wire. The entrance was flanked by guard-huts and guards, and the fence and cliff-top were patrolled by soldiers with dogs. To seaward lay the grey Atlantic water, an island inhabited by birds, and an occasional Royal Naval patrol launch. It was all green and grey and brown and prone to clouds, and, apart from periodical noises from inside the camp, it was a silent place.

  It was raining when Reinhart and Fleming arrived. A black staff car driven by a young woman in green uniform met them at the station and splashed along the open moorland road to the gates of the camp. There they were checked in by a sergeant of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who phoned the Director to let him know they were on the way.

  The main offices were in a long, narrow one-storey building standing in the middle of the open compound. Although it was new and modern in design, it still had something of the traditional, bleak look of a barracks; but the inside of the Director’s office was a very different matter. The ebony floor shone, the lights were hooded by white streamlined shapes, windows were curtained to the floor and maps and charts on the walls were framed in polished wood. The Director’s desk was wide and beautiful: behind it sat a man with a narrow, lined face, and on it stood a small plaque stating, in neat black letters, DR. F. T. N. GEERS.

  He greeted them with politeness but without enthusiasm, and with a patently false deprecation of what he was doing.

  “You’ll find it a very dull place here,” he said, offering them cigarettes out of the polished nose-cap of a rocket. “We know each other by repute, of course.”

  Reinhart sat warily on one of the visitors’ chairs, which were so low that he could hardly see the Director behind his desk.

  “We’ve corresponded, I think, over missile tracking.” He had to crane up to speak; it was obviously done on purpose. Fleming regarded the arrangement and smiled.

  A physicist by training, Geers had for years been a senior scientific executive on defence projects and was now more like a commanding officer than a scientist. Somewhere beneath the martinet’s uniform a disappointed research man lay hidden, but this only made him more envious of other people’s work and more irritated by the mass of day-to-day detail that fell upon him.

  “It’s about time you got your job behind barbed wire, from all I hear.” He was peevish, but able; he had plans worked out for them. “It’s going to be difficult, of course. We can’t give you unlimited facilities.”

  “We don’t ask —” began Reinhart.

  Fleming interrupted. “The priorities have been fixed, I understood.”

  Geers gave him a sharp, cold look and flicked ash into a tray made from a piston casting.

  “You’ll have certain hours set aside on the main computer. You’ll have your own work-block and living-quarters for your team. They’ll be within our perimeter and you’ll be under our surveillance, but you’ll have passes and you’ll be free to come and go as you wish. Major Quadring is in charge of our security, and I’m in charge of all research projects.”

  “Not ours,” said Fleming, without looking at Reinhart.

  “Mine are more mundane but more immediate tasks.” Geers, so far as possible, tried to avoid Fleming and addressed himself to the Professor. “Yours is a Ministry of Science affair — more idealistic, though perhaps a little hit and miss.”

  There was a framed photograph, on one corner of his desk, of his wife and two small children.

  “I wonder how they get on?” Fleming said to Reinhart when they left.

  It was still pouring outside. One of Geers’s assistants led them round the compound, across the wet grass, along concrete paths between rows of low bunker-like buildings half buried in the ground, and up to the launching area at the top of the headland.

  “It’s quite calm here to-day,” he said, as they bent their heads against the sweeping rain. “It can blow a gale as soon as look at you.”

  Several small rockets rested on their tilted racks, swathed in nylon covers, pointing out to sea, and one larger one stood vertical on the main launching pad, looking heavy and earthbound lashed to its scaffold.

  “We don’t go in for the really big stuff here. These are all interceptors; a lot of ability packed into a little space. It’s all highly classified, of course. We don’t encourage
visitors in the normal way.”

  The main computer was an impressive affair, housed in a big laboratory building. It was an American importation, three times the size of anything they had used before. The duty staff gave Fleming a timetable with his sessions marked on it; they seemed friendly enough though not particularly interested. There was also an empty office building for their own use, and a number of pre-fabricated chalets for living-quarters — small and bare but clean and fitted out with service furniture.

  They squelched in their sodden shoes across to the personnel area and were shown the senior staff mess and lounge, the shop, laundry and garage, the cinema and post office. The camp was completely self-supporting: there was nothing to go out for but views of heather and sky.

  For the first two or three months only the basic unit moved up: Fleming, Bridger, Christine, Judy and a few junior assistants. Their offices bulged with calculations, plans, blue-prints and odd pieces of experimental lash-up equipment. Fleming and Bridger had long all-night sessions over wiring circuits and electronic components, and slowly the building filled up with more and more research and design assistants and with draughtsmen and engineers.

  Early the following spring a firm of Glasgow contractors appeared on the site and festooned the area with boards saying MACINTYRE & SONS. A building for the new super-computer, as Fleming’s brain-child was called, was put up inside the perimeter but away from the rest of the camp, and lorry-loads of equipment arrived and disappeared inside it.

  The permanent staff viewed all this with lively but detached interest and went on with their own projects. Every week or so there would be a roar and a flash from the launching pads as another quarter of a million pounds of tax-payers’ money went off into the air. The moorland sheep and cattle would stampede in a half-hearted sort of way, and there would be a few days of intense activity inside the plotting rooms. Apart from that it was as quiet as an undiscovered land and, when the rain lifted, incredibly beautiful.

  The junior members of Reinhart’s team mixed in happily with the defence scientists and the soldiers guarding them, eating and drinking and going on excursions together and sailing together in small boats on the bay; but Bridger and Fleming walked on their own and were known as the heavenly twins. When they were not either in the computer building or the offices they were usually in one or other of their huts, working. Occasionally Fleming shut himself up with a problem and Bridger took a motor-boat out to the bird island, Thorholm, with a pair of field-glasses.