A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  She looked at the flickering blue screen and tried to believe in the confident, elderly, sportive, civilised face and the slow, drawling voice of the Prime Minister.

  Fleming sat, and watched and listened with her.

  “Not since the halcyon days of Queen Victoria,” the disembodied face announced, “has this country held such a clear lead in the fields of industry, technology and — above all — security as that which we now have within our grasp...”

  She felt her attention wandering. “I’m sorry if I interrupted.”

  “You didn’t.” He made a grimace at the television. “Turn the old idiot off.”

  He rose and switched off the set himself and then mixed her a drink. “Social call?”

  “I was just going across to the computer building when I saw a light in your window. Thanks.” She took the glass from him.

  “Working overtime?” he asked.

  She lifted her glass and looked at him over the top of it. “Dr. Fleming, I’ve said some pretty uncharitable things about you in the past.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “About your attitude.”

  “I was wrong, wasn’t I? The Prime Minister says so. Wrong and out.” He spoke more in sorrow than anger, and poured himself a small drink.

  “I wonder,” said Dawnay. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  He did not answer, and she added, “Judy Adamson’s beginning to wonder too.”

  “That’ll be a big help,” he snorted.

  “She put up quite a fight with Geers this afternoon. I must say it made me think.” She took a sip and swallowed it slowly, looking quietly across her glass and turning over the position in her mind. “It seems fair enough to make use of what we’ve got — of what you gave us.”

  “Don’t rub that in.”

  “And yet I don’t know. There’s something corrupting about that sort of power. You can see it acting on the folk here, and on the government.” She nodded to the television set. “As if perfectly ordinary, sensible people are being possessed by a determination that isn’t their own. I think we’ve both felt it. And yet, it all seems harmless enough.”

  “Does it?”

  She told him about the enzyme production. “It’s beneficial. It regenerates cells, simply. It’ll affect everything, from skin-grafting to ageing. It’ll be the biggest medical aid since antibiotics.”

  “A godsend to millions.”

  When she got on to the Intel proposition he hardly reacted. “Where is it all leading?” she asked. She did not really expect an answer, but she got one.

  “A year ago that machine had no power outside its own building, and even there we were in charge of it.” He spoke without passion as if reiterating an old truth. “Now it has the whole country dependent on it. What happens next? You heard, didn’t you? We shall go ahead, become a major force in the world again, and who’s going to be the power behind that throne?”

  He indicated the television, as she had done; then he seemed to tire of the conversation. He wandered across to his record-player and switched it on.

  “Could you have controlled it?” Dawnay was unwilling to let the subject go.

  “Not latterly.”

  “What could you have done?”

  “Fouled it up as much as possible.” He began to sort out a record among a pile of L.P.s. “It knows that, now it has its creature to inform on me. It had me pushed out. ‘You can’t win,’ she told me.”

  “She said that?”

  Fleming nodded, and Dawnay frowned into her half-empty glass. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s inevitable. Perhaps it’s evolution.”

  “Look —” he put down the record and swung round to her. “I can foresee a time when we’ll create a higher form of intelligence to which, in the end, we’ll hand over. And it’ll probably be an inorganic form, like that one. But it’ll be something we’ve created ourselves, and we can design it for our own good, or for good as we understand it. This machine hasn’t been programmed for our good; or, if it has, something’s gone wrong with it.”

  She finished her drink. There was possibility in what he said — more than possibility, a sort of sane logic which she had missed lately. As an empirical scientist, she felt there must be some way in which it could be tested.

  “Could anyone tell, except you?” she asked.

  Fleming shook his head. “None of that lot.”

  “Could I tell?”

  “You?”

  “I have access to it.”

  He immediately lost interest in the record. His face lit up as if she had switched on some circuit inside him. “Yes — why not? We could try a little experiment.” He picked up from his table the pad with the negatived name-code on it. “Have you somebody over there can feed this in?”

  “Andre?”

  “No. Not her. Whatever you do, don’t take her into your confidence.”

  Dawnay remembered the operator. She took the pad, and Fleming showed her the section to be fed in.

  “I’m out of my depth, I’ll admit that,” she said. Then she put down her glass and went out.

  As she walked across the compound, she could hear the beginning of some post-Schoenbergian piece of music from Fleming’s chalet; then she was in the computer building and heard nothing but the hum of equipment. Andre was in the control room, and a young operator. Andre kept herself even more to herself since the affair of her hands. She haunted the computer block like a pale shadow and seldom left it. She made no attempt to communicate with anyone, and although she was never hostile she was completely withdrawn. She looked with slight interest at Dawnay coming in.

  “How’s it getting on?” Dawnay asked.

  “We have put in all the data,” Andre said. “You should have the formula soon.”

  Dawnay moved away and joined the operator at the input unit. He was a young man, a very fresh post-graduate, who asked no questions, but did as he was told.

  “Input that too, will you?” Dawnay gave him the pad. He rested it above the keyboard and started tapping.

  “What is that?” Andre asked, hearing the sound.

  “Something I want calculated.” Dawnay kept her away from it, until the display panel suddenly broke out into wild flashing.

  “What are you putting in?” Andre snatched at the pad and read from it. “Where did you get it?”

  “That’s my business,” said Dawnay.

  “Why don’t you keep out of this?”

  “You’d better leave us,” Dawnay told the operator.

  He rose obediently and wandered out of the room.

  Andre waited until he had gone.

  “I do not wish you any harm,” she said then and there was not passion but great strength in her voice. “Why don’t you keep out?”

  “How dare you talk to me like that?” Dawnay heard herself sounding weak and ridiculous, but she could only answer as it took her. “I created you — I made you.”

  “You made me?” Andre looked at her with contempt, then crossed to the control panel and put her hands on the terminals. Immediately the display lamps became less agitated, but they continued to flicker so long as the girl stood there, strong and positive like a young goddess. After a minute she moved away and stood looking at Dawnay.

  “We are getting rather tired of this — this little joke,” she said calmly, as if delivering a message. “Neither you, nor Dr. Fleming, nor anyone else can come between us.”

  “If you’re trying to frighten me —”

  “I don’t know what you’ve begun now. I cannot be responsible.” Andromeda appeared to be looking through her into a space beyond. The output printer went noisily into action, and Dawnay started at the sound. She followed Andre over to it, and by the time she got there the message finished. Andre examined the paper, and then tore it off and gave it to her.

  “Your enzyme formula.”

  “Is that all?” Dawnay felt a sense of relief.

  “Isn’t that enough for you?” asked Andre, and wa
tched her go with a set, hostile face.

  Dawnay had three assistants working for her at the time: a senior research chemist, a man, and two post-graduate helpers, a boy and a girl. Between them they made a chemical synthesis based on the new formula. It involved a good deal of handling in the laboratory, but none of them worried about it because it had no irritant effect. By the end of a day or two, however, they were all beginning to feel signs of lassitude and wasting. There seemed to be no reason, and they worked on, but by the end of the third day the girl collapsed, and by the following morning Dawnay and the man had keeled over as well.

  Hunter packed them off to the sick-bay, where they were soon joined by the boy. Whatever the disease was, it accelerated fast; there was no fever or inflammation, its victims simply degenerated. Cells died, the basic processes of metabolism slowed or stopped, and one after another the four weakened and slid into a state of coma. Hunter was desperate and appealed to Geers, who put a screen of silence round the whole business.

  Fleming did not hear details until the fourth day, when Judy broke security to tell him. He immediately phoned Reinhart and asked him to come from Bouldershaw, and he persuaded Judy to find a paper for him. When she gave it to him, he locked himself up in his room with it all night, emerging in the morning grim but satisfied. But by that time the girl assistant was dead.

  Eleven

  ANTIDOTE

  THEY were covering her face when Fleming arrived at the sick bay. The other three lay silent and still in their beds, their faces drawn and as pale as the pillows. Dawnay, in the next cubicle to the girl, was being kept barely alive by blood transfusion. She lay marble-still, like an effigy of some old warrior on a tomb. He stayed looking at her until Hunter joined him.

  “What do you want?” Hunter was run ragged, and all rough edges. He gave up the effort to be so much as polite to Fleming.

  “It’s my fault,” said Fleming, looking down at the drained face on the pillow.

  Hunter half-laughed. “Humility’s a new line for you.”

  “All right then — it wasn’t!” Fleming spun round on him, flaming, and fished a clip of papers out of his pocket. “But I came to give you this.”

  Hunter took the papers suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “The enzyme formula.”

  “How the devil did you get hold of it?”

  Fleming sighed. “Illegally. Like I have to do everything.”

  “I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind,” said Hunter. He looked at it again. “Why is it crossed through?”

  “Because it’s wrong.” Fleming flicked over the top sheet to show the one underneath. “That’s the right formula. You’d better get it made up quickly.”

  “The right formula?” Hunter looked slightly lost.

  “What the computer gave Dawnay had an inversion of what she wanted. It switched negative for positive, as it were, to pay her back for a little game I’d put her up to.”

  “What game?”

  “It gave the anti-enzyme, instead of the enzyme. Instead of a cell regenerative, a cell destructor. Presumably it acts through the skin and they absorbed it while they were working on it.” He picked up one of Dawnay’s hands that lay limp on the sheet. “There’s nothing you can do unless you can make the proper enzyme in time. That’s why I’ve brought you the corrected formula.”

  “Do you really think... ?” Hunter frowned sceptically at the clip of papers, and Fleming, looking up from Dawnay’s hand, which he was still holding, regarded him with distaste.

  “Don’t you want to make your reputation?”

  “I want to save lives,” said Hunter.

  “Then make up the proper formula. It should work as an antidote to the one Dawnay got, in which case it ought to reverse what’s happening now. At least you can try it. If not —” He shrugged and laid Dawnay’s emaciated hand back on the sheet. “That machine will do anyone’s dirty work, so long as it suits it.”

  Hunter sniffed. “If it’s so damn clever, why did it make a mistake like this?”

  “It didn’t. The only mistake it made was it got the wrong person — the wrong people. It was after me, and it didn’t care how many people it wrote off in the process. One of your trade agreements with Intel, and it could have been half the world.”

  He left Hunter scowling at the formula, but obviously obliged to try it.

  That afternoon the man died; but the new enzyme had been made up and was administered to the two survivors. Nothing dramatic happened at first but by the evening it was clear that deterioration was slowing. Judy visited the sick-bay after supper, and then began making her way to the main gate to meet Reinhart, who was due on the late train. As she passed the computer block she felt an impulse to go in. There was no operator on duty, and she found Andre sitting alone at the control desk, gazing in front of her. The accumulated hatred of months, the frustrations of years, suddenly boiled up in Judy.

  “Another one has died,” she said savagely. Andre shrugged and Judy felt a terrible urge to hit her. “Professor Dawnay’s fighting for her life. And the boy.”

  “Then they have a chance,” the girl said, tonelessly.

  “Thanks to Dr. Fleming. Not thanks to you.”

  “It is not my business.”

  “You gave Professor Dawnay the formula.”

  “The machine gave it.”

  “You gave it together!”

  Andre shrugged her shoulders again. “Dr. Fleming has the antidote. He is intelligent — he can save them.”

  “You don’t care, do you?” Judy’s eyes felt hot and dry as she looked at her.

  “Why should I care?” asked the girl.

  “I hate you.” Judy’s throat felt dry, too, so that she could hardly speak. She wanted to pick up something heavy and break the girl’s skull; but then the telephone rang and she had to go to the main gate to meet Reinhart.

  The girl sat quite still for a long time after Judy had gone, gazing at the control panel, and several tears — actual human tears — welled in her eyes and trickled slowly down her cheeks.

  Judy took Reinhart straight to Fleming’s hut, where they brought him up to date.

  “And Madeleine?” the old man asked. He looked tired and uncertain.

  “Still alive, thank God,” said Fleming. “We may save two of them.”

  Reinhart seemed to relax a little, and looked less tired. They took his coat, sat him in a chair by the radiator and gave him a drink. He seemed to Judy much older than she had ever known him, and rather pathetic. He was now Sir Ernest, and it was as if the act of knighthood had finally aged him. She could imagine how far in the past his youthful friendship with Dawnay must seem, and could feel him clinging on to her life as though his own were in some way tied to it. He took his drink and tried to think of the next thing to say.

  “Have you told Geers yet?”

  “What would Geers do?” asked Fleming. “Just be sorry it wasn’t me. He’d have me thrown out of the compound, out of the country, if he could. I’ve been saying since I was in short pants that this thing’s malicious but they all love it so. How much more do I have to prove before I convince anyone?”

  “You don’t have to prove any more to me, John,” said Reinhart wearily.

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Or me,” Judy said.

  “Oh fine, fine. That makes three of us against the entire set-up.”

  “What did you think I could do?” Reinhart asked.

  “I dunno. You’ve been running half the science in this country for a generation — the good half. Surely someone would listen to you.”

  “Osborne, perhaps?”

  “So long as he didn’t get his cuffs dirty.” Fleming thought for a moment. “Could he get me back in to the computer?”

  “Use your head, John. He’s answerable to the Establishment.”

  “Could you get him down here?”

  “I could try. What have you in mind?”

  “We can fill that in later,” said Fle
ming.

  Reinhart pulled a rail-air timetable out of his pocket.

  “If I go up to London to-morrow —”

  “Can’t you go to-night?”

  “Sir Ernest’s tired,” said Judy.

  Reinhart smiled at her. “You can keep Sir Ernest for garden parties. I shall get a night flight.”

  “Why can’t it wait a few hours?” Judy asked.

  “I’m not a young man, Miss Adamson, but I’m not moribund.” He pulled himself to his feet. “Give my love to Madeleine, if she’s...”

  “Sure,” said Fleming, finding the old man’s coat and helping him on with it.

  Reinhart moved to the door, buttoning himself as he went. Then he remembered something. “By the way, the message has stopped.”

  Judy looked from him to Fleming. “The message?”

  “From up there.” Reinhart pointed a finger to the sky. “It’s stopped repeating, several weeks ago. Maybe we shall never pick it up again.”

  “We may have caught the tail end of a long transmission,” Fleming said quietly, weighing the implications. “If it wasn’t for that fluke at Bouldershaw, we might never have heard it, and none of this would have happened.”

  “That had crossed my mind,” said Reinhart, and gave them another tired smile and went.

  Fleming mooched round the room, thinking about what had been said, while Judy waited. They heard Reinhart’s car start and drive away, and at the sound of it Fleming came to rest beside Judy and put an arm round her shoulders.

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” she told him. “They can court-martial me if they like.”

  “O.K., O.K.” He took his arm away.

  “You can trust me, John.”

  He looked her full in the face, and she tried with her eyes to make him believe her.

  “Yes, well —” he seemed more or less convinced. “I’ll tell you what. Get on the blower to London, privately, first thing in the morning. Try to catch Osborne when the Prof’s with him and tell him he’s bringing an extra visitor.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t care who. Garter King at Arms — the President of the Royal Academy — some stuffed shirt from the Ministry. He doesn’t have to bring the gent, only his clothes.”