A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  Judy took a deep breath.

  “I didn’t kill Bridger.”

  “Didn’t you? Didn’t you put your gang on him?”

  “I tried to warn you.”

  “You tried to fool me! You made love to me —”

  “I didn’t! Only once. I’m only human. I had a job —”

  “You had a filthy job, and you did it marvellously.”

  “I never spied on you. Bridger was different.”

  “Dennis Bridger was my oldest friend and my best helper.”

  “He was betraying you.”

  “Betraying!” He looked at her briefly and then moved away and started sorting a collection of old bottles and glasses from a cupboard. “Take your official clichés somewhere else. Half this thing was Dennis’s. It was the work of his mind, and mine; it didn’t belong to you, or your bosses. If Dennis wanted to sell his own property, good luck to him. What business was it of yours?”

  “I told you I didn’t like what I had to do. I told you not to trust me. Do you think I haven’t...”

  Judy’s voice shook in spite of her.

  “Oh, stop snivelling,” said Fleming. “And get out.”

  “I’ll get out if you’ll go and see Professor Dawnay.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “You can’t! They’ve got this horrible thing.” Judy put out a hand and held desperately on to his sleeve, but he shook her off and walked across to the door.

  “Good-bye.” He turned the handle and opened it.

  “You can’t walk out now.”

  “Good-bye,” he said quietly, waiting for her to go.

  She stood for a moment, trying to think of something else to say, and at that moment Reinhart appeared in the doorway.

  “Hallo, John.” He looked from one to the other of them. “Hallo, Miss Adamson.”

  She walked out between them without speaking, blinking her eyes to stop herself from crying. Reinhart turned after her as she went, but Fleming shut the door.

  “Did you know about that woman?”

  “Yes.”

  Reinhart walked across to the bed and sat down on it. He looked old and tired.

  “You couldn’t have told me?” Fleming said accusingly.

  “No, John, I couldn’t.”

  “Well.” Fleming opened drawers and shut them again, to make sure they were empty. “You can hire someone you can trust in my place.”

  The Professor looked round the room.

  “Can I have a drink?” He stroked the tiny fingers of one hand across his forehead to revive himself. The second interview with Geers had not been easy. “What makes you think I don’t trust you?”

  “Nobody trusts us, do they?” Fleming rooted about among the discarded bottles. “Nobody takes a blind bit of notice what we say.”

  “They take notice of what we do.”

  “Brandy be all right?” Fleming found a drop in the bottom of a flask, and slopped it into a tumbler. “Oh yes, we’re very useful mechanics. But when it comes to the meaning of it — having an idea of what it’s about — they don’t want to know.”

  He held the glass out.

  “Have you a drop of water?” Reinhart asked.

  “That we can do.”

  “And you?” Reinhart nodded to the bottle.

  Fleming shook his head.

  “They think they’ve just got a convenient windfall,” he said, running water from his wash-basin tap. “And when we say this is the beginning of something much bigger they treat us like criminal lunatics. They put their watch-dogs on us — or their watch-bitches.”

  “There’s no need to take it out on the girl.” Reinhart took the glass and drank.

  “I’m not taking it out on anyone! If they can’t see that what we picked up by a sheer fluke is going to change all our lives, then let them find out in their own way. With any luck they’ll foul it up and nothing will come of it.”

  “Something has come of it.”

  “Dawnay’s monster?”

  “You know about that?”

  “It’s a sub-program, merely — an extension of the machine.” Fleming looked into an empty cupboard, but his attention was beginning to drift. “Dawnay thinks the machine’s given her power to create life; but she’s wrong. It’s given itself the power.”

  “Then you must stay and control it, John.”

  “It’s not my job.” He slammed the cupboard door. “I wish to God I’d never started it!”

  “But you did. You have a responsibility.”

  “To whom? To people who won’t listen to me?”

  “I listen to you.”

  “All right.” He roamed round the room, picking up oddments and throwing them into the waste-paper basket. “I’ll tell you what you’re up against: and then I go.”

  “If you’ve anything constructive to say —” The drink had put some strength back into Reinhart’s voice.

  “Look —” Fleming came to rest at the end of the bed and bent over it with his hands on the board at its end, leaning his weight on his arms and concentrating, at last, not on the room, but on what he was saying. “You’re all so busy asking ‘What?’ — ‘What have we got?’, ‘What does it do?’ — no-one except me asks ‘Why?’. Why does an alien intelligence two hundred light-years away take the trouble to start this?”

  “We can’t tell that, can we?”

  “We can make deductions.”

  “Guesses.”

  “All right — if you don’t want to think it out!”

  He straightened up and let his arms flop down to his sides. Reinhart sipped his brandy and waited for him. After a minute Fleming relaxed and grinned at him a little sheepishly.

  “You old devil!” He sat down beside the Professor on the bed. “It’s a logical intelligence, wherever and whatever it is. It sends out a set of instructions, in absolute terms, which postulate a piece of technology, which we interpret as this computer. Why? Do you think they said: ‘Now, here’s an interesting piece of technical information. We’ll radio it out to the rest of the universe — they might find it useful’?”

  “You obviously don’t think so.”

  “Because where there’s intelligence, there’s will. And where there’s will there’s ambition. Supposing this was an intelligence which wanted to spread itself?”

  “It’s as good a theory as the next.”

  “It’s the only logical theory!” Fleming banged his fist on his thigh. “What does it do? It puts out a message that can be picked up and interpreted and acted upon by other intelligences. The technique we use doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter what make of radio set you buy — you get the same programmes. What matters is, we accept their programme: a programme which uses arithmetical logic to adapt itself to our conditions, or any other conditions for that matter. It knows the bases of life: it finds out which ours is. It finds out how our brains work, how our bodies are built, how we get our information — we tell it about our nervous system and our sensory organs. So then it makes a creature with a body and a sensory organ — an eye. It’s got an eye, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s probably pretty primitive, but it’s the next step. Dawnay thinks she’s using that machine, but it’s using her!”

  “The next step to what?” Reinhart asked casually.

  “I don’t know. Some sort of take-over.”

  “Of us?”

  “That’s the only possible point.”

  Reinhart rose and, walking slowly and thoughtfully across the room, put his empty glass down with the others.

  “I don’t know, John.”

  Fleming appeared to understand his uncertainty.

  “The first explorers must have seemed harmless enough to the native tribes.” He spoke gently. “Kind old missionaries with ridiculous topees, but they finished up as their rulers.”

  “You may be right.” Reinhart smiled at him gratefully; it was like old times, with both of them thinking the same way. “It seems an odd sort
of missionary.”

  “This creature of Dawnay’s: what sort of brain has it?” Reinhart shrugged and Fleming went on, “Does it think like us, or does it think like the machine?”

  “If it thinks at all.”

  “If it has an eye, it has nerve-centres — it certainly has a brain. What kind of brain?”

  “Probably primitive too.”

  “Why?” Fleming demanded. “Why shouldn’t the machine produce an extension of its own intelligence: a sub-computer that functions the same way, except that it’s dependent on an organic body?”

  “What would be the value?”

  “The value of an organic body? A machine with senses? A machine with an eye?”

  “You won’t persuade anyone else,” said Reinhart.

  “You needn’t rub that in.”

  “You’ll have to stay with it, John.”

  “To do what?”

  “To control it.” Reinhart spoke flatly: he had made the decision some hours before.

  Fleming shook his head.

  “How can we? It’s cleverer than we are.”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “That would suit it, according to your theory.”

  “If you don’t believe me —”

  Reinhart half raised a little hand. “I’m prepared to.”

  “Then destroy it. That’s the only safe thing.”

  “We’ll do that if necessary,” Reinhart said, and he walked to the door as if the matter were settled.

  Fleming swung round to him.

  “Will you? Do you really think you’ll be able to? Look what happened when I tried to stop it: Dawnay threw me out. And if you try to they’ll throw you out.”

  “They want to throw me out anyhow.”

  “They want what?” Fleming looked as if he had been hit.

  “The powers that be want us all out of the way,” Reinhart said. “They just want to know we’re breaking up and they’ll move in.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “They think they know better how to use it. But as long as we’re here, John, we can pull out the plug. And we will, if it comes to it.” He looked from Fleming’s troubled face to the cases lying on the floor. “You’d better unpack those things.”

  The meeting between Fleming and Dawnay was electrically charged, but nothing dramatic happened. Fleming was quiet enough, and Dawnay treated him with a kind of tolerant amusement.

  “Welcome the wandering boy,” she said, and led him off to see the thing in the tank.

  The creature floated peacefully in the middle of its nutrient bath; it had found the porthole and spent most of its time gazing out with its one huge lidless eye. Fleming stared back at it, but it gave no sign of registering what it saw.

  “Can it communicate?”

  “My dear boy,” Dawnay spoke as though she were humouring a very young student. “We’ve hardly had time to learn anything about him.”

  “It has no vocal cords or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Um.” Fleming straightened up and looked in the top of the tank. “It might be a feeble attempt at a man.”

  “A man? It doesn’t look like a man.”

  Fleming strolled through to the computer room, where Christine was watching the display panel.

  “Anything printing out?”

  “No. Nothing.” Christine looked puzzled. “But there’s obviously something going on.”

  The display lamps were winking steadily: it seemed that the machine was working away by itself without producing results.

  For the next two or three days nothing happened, and then Fleming laid a magnetic coil from the machine round the tank. He did not — in fact, he could not — explain why he did it, but immediately the computer display began flashing wildly. Christine ran in from the laboratory.

  “Cyclops is terribly excited! He’s threshing about in his tank.”

  They could hear the bumping and slopping of the creature and its fluid from the other room. Fleming disconnected the coil and the bumping stopped. When they reconnected the coil, the creature reacted again, but still nothing came through on the output printer. Reinhart came over to see how they were getting on, and he and Dawnay and Fleming went over the routine once more; but they could make nothing of it.

  The next day Fleming got them together again.

  “I want to try an experiment,” he said.

  He walked across to the display panel and stood with his back to it, between the two mysterious terminals which they had never used. After a minute he took the perspex safety-guards off the terminals and stood between them again. Nothing happened.

  “Would you stand here a moment?” he asked Reinhart, and moved away to let the Professor take his place. “Mind you don’t touch them. There’s a thousand volts or more across there.”

  Reinhart stood quite still with his head between the terminals and his back to the display panel.

  “Feel anything?”

  “A very slight —” Reinhart paused. “A sort of dizziness.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No”

  Reinhart stepped away from the computer.

  “All right now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can’t feel anything now.”

  Fleming repeated the experiment with Dawnay, who felt nothing.

  “Different people’s brains give off different amounts of electrical discharge,” she said. “Mine’s obviously low, so’s Fleming’s. Yours must be higher, Ernest, because it induces a leak across the terminals. You try, Christine.”

  Christine looked frightened.

  “It’s all right,” said Fleming. “Stand with your head between those things, but don’t touch them or they’ll roast you.”

  Christine took her place where the others had stood. For a moment it seemed to have no effect on her, then she went rigid, her eyes closed and she fell forward in a dead faint. They caught her and pulled her into a chair, and Dawnay lifted up her eyelids to examine her eyes.

  “She’ll be all right. She’s only fainted.”

  “What happened?” asked Reinhart. “Did she touch one?”

  “No,” Fleming said. “All the same, I’d better put the guards back on.” He did so, and stood thinking while Dawnay and Reinhart revived Christine, ducking her head between her legs and dabbing her forehead with cold water.

  “If there’s a regular discharge between those terminals and you introduce the electrical field of a working brain into it...”

  “Hold on,” said Dawnay impatiently. “I think she’s coming round.”

  “Oh, she’ll be O.K.” Fleming looked thoughtfully at the panel and the two sheathed contacts that stuck out from it. “It’ll change the current between them — modulate it. The brain will feel a reaction; there could be some pick-up, it could work both ways.”

  “What are you talking about?” Reinhart asked.

  “I’m talking about these!” Fleming flared up with excitement. “I think I know what they’re for. They’re a means of inputting and picking up from the machine.”

  Dawnay looked doubtful. “This is just a neurotic young woman. Probably a good subject for hypnosis.”

  “Maybe.”

  Christine came round and blinked.

  “Hallo.” She smiled at them vaguely. “Did I faint?”

  “I’ll say you did,” said Dawnay. “You must have a hell of an electrical aura.”

  “Have I?”

  Reinhart gave her a glass of water. Fleming turned to her and grinned.

  “You’ve just done a great service to science.” He nodded to the terminals. “You’d better keep away from between there.”

  He turned back to Reinhart.

  “The real point is that if you have the right sort of brain — not a human one — one that works in a way designed by the machine — then you have a link. That’s how it’s meant to communicate. Our way of feeding back questions as answers is terribly clumsy. Al
l this business of printers —”

  “Are you saying it can thought-read?” Dawnay asked scornfully.

  “I’m saying two brains can communicate electrically if they’re of the right sort. If you get your creature and push his head between those terminals —”

  “I don’t see how we can do that.”

  “It’s what it wants! That’s why it’s restless — why they’re both restless. They want to get in touch. The creature’s in the machine’s electromagnetic field, and the machine knows the logical possibilities of it. That’s what he’s been working out, without telling us.”

  “You can’t drag Cyclops out of his nutrient bath,” Dawnay said. “He’ll die.”

  “That must have been thought of.”

  “You could rig up an electro-encephalograph,” said Reinhart. “The kind they use for mental analysis. Put a set of electric pads on Cyclops’s head and run a co-axial cable from there to the terminals to carry the information. You’ll have to put it through a transformer, or you’ll electrocute him.”

  “What does that do?” Dawnay looked at him sceptically.

  “It puts the computer in touch with its sub-intelligence,” said Fleming.

  “To serve what purpose?”

  “To serve its purpose.” He turned away from them and paced up the room.

  Dawnay waited for Reinhart to speak, but the old man stood obstinately, frowning down at his hands.

  “Feeling better now?” he asked Christine.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Do you think you could rig up something like that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Dr. Fleming will help you. Won’t you, John?”

  Fleming stood at the far end of the room, the banks of equipment rising massively behind him.

  “If that’s what you really want,” he said.

  “The alternative,” said Reinhart, more to Dawnay and himself than to Fleming, “is to pack up and hand over. We haven’t much choice, have we?”

  Eight

  AGONY

  JUDY kept as far from Fleming as she could, and when she did see him he was usually with Christine. Everything had changed since Bridger died; even the early burst of spring weather was soon ended, leaving a grey pall of gloom over the camp and over herself. With an additional pang she realised that Christine was likely to take not only her place but Dennis Bridger’s as well in Fleming’s life, working and thinking with him as she herself had never been able to do. She thought at first that she would not be able to bear it and, going over Geers’s head, wrote direct to Whitehall begging to be removed. The only result was another lecture from Geers.