A for Andromeda

by Fred Hoyle

  “An unstuffed shirt?”

  He grinned. “Hat, brief case and rolled umbrella will do. Oh, and an overcoat. Meanwhile you get an extra pass for him. O.K.?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good girl.” He put his arm round her again and kissed her.

  She enjoyed it and then leant back to ask him, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He kissed her once more, then pushed himself away from her. “I’m going to turn in, it’s been a hell of a day. You’d better get out of here — I need some sleep.”

  He grinned again and she squeezed his hand and went out, light-footed, singing inside herself.

  Fleming undressed dreamily, working out plans and fantasies in his mind. He fell into bed, and almost as soon as he turned the light out he was asleep.

  After Reinhart’s and Judy’s departure, the camp was quiet. It was a dark night; clouds were blowing in from the north-east, bringing with them a current of cold air and a prospect of snow, and covering the full moon. But the moon shone through for a few moments at a time, and by its light a slim, pale figure let itself out of a window at the back of the computer block and began to move, ghost-like, across the camp. None of the sentries saw it, let alone recognised it as the girl Andre, and she made her way stealthily between the huts to Fleming’s chalet, her face set and a double-strand coil of insulated wire in her hand.

  A little light fell from the window into Fleming’s room, for he had drawn back the curtain before he went to bed. He did not stir when the door opened very quietly and Andre inched in. She was barefoot and very careful, and her hands were sheathed in a pair of thick rubber gloves. After making sure that Fleming slept, she knelt down by the wall beside his bed and inserted the two wires at one end of her coil into a power-point on the skirting, wedged them tight and switched on the current. She held the other end of the coil out from her, the two wires grasped separately between thumb and finger an inch or so down the insulation and the bare live ends extended, and stood up and advanced slowly towards Fleming. The chances of his surviving a full charge were slight, for he was asleep and she could count on being able to keep the contacts on him for long enough to stop his heart.

  She made no sound as she moved the ends of the wires towards his eyes. There was no reason why he should wake; but suddenly, for some unknown reason, he did. All he could see was a silhouetted figure standing over him, and more from instinct than reason, he flexed one leg under the bedclothes and kicked out with all his might through his sheet and blanket.

  He caught her in the midriff, and she fell back across the room with a sort of sick grunt. He fumbled for his bedlight and switched it on. For a moment it dazzled him; he sat up confused and panting while the girl struggled to her knees, still holding the ends of wire; then, as he took in what was happening, he leapt out of bed, pulled the ends of flex out of the wall-socket and turned to her. But by this time she was on her feet and half-way out of the room.

  “No you don’t!” He threw himself at the door.

  She side-stepped and, with her hands behind her, backed across to the table where he had had his supper. For a moment it looked as if she was going to give in; then without warning she lunged out at him with her right hand, and there was a breadknife in it.

  “You bitch!” He caught her wrist, twisted the knife out of it and threw her down.

  She gasped and lay writhing, holding her wrenched wrist with the other hand and staring up at him, not so much in fury as in desperation.

  He stooped and picked up the knife keeping his eye on her all the time.

  “All right — kill me.” There was fear in her face now, and in her voice. “It won’t do you any good.”

  “No?” His own voice was shaking and he was panting hard.

  “It’ll delay things a little, that’s all.” She watched intently as he opened a drawer and slid the knife into it. This seemed to encourage her, and she sat up.

  “Why do you want me out of the way?” he asked.

  “It was the next thing to be done. I warned you.”

  “Thanks.” He shuffled round, buttoning up his pyjamas, pushing his feet into a pair of slippers, calming down.

  “Everything you do is predictable.” She seemed collected again already. “There’s nothing you can think of that won’t be countered.”

  “What’s the next thing now?”

  “If you go away, go right away and don’t interfere —”

  He cut across her. “Get up.” She looked at him in surprise.

  “Get up.” He waited while she got to her feet and then pointed to a chair. “Sit down there.”

  She gave him another puzzled look, and then sat. He went and stood over her.

  “Why do you only do what the machine wants?”

  “You’re such children,” she told him. “You think we’re slave and master, the machine and me, but we’re both slaves. We’re containers which you’ve made, for something you don’t understand.”

  “Do you?” asked Fleming.

  “I can see the difference between our intelligence and yours. I can see that ours is going to take over and yours is going to die. You think you’re the height and crown of things, the last word —” She broke off and massaged her wrist where he had twisted it.

  “I don’t think that,” he said. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Not badly. You’re more intelligent than most; but not enough — you’ll go down with the dinosaurs. They ruled the earth once.”

  “And you?”

  She smiled, and it was the first time he had seen her do so. “I’m the missing link.”

  “And if we break you?”

  “They make another one.”

  “And if we break the machine?”

  “The same.”

  “And if we destroy you both, and the message and all our work on it, so that there’s nothing left? The message has ended — did you know?” She shook her head. Her confirmation of all he feared came flooding in on him, and also the realisation of how to stop it. “Your friends up there have got tired of talking to us. You’re on your own now, you and the computer. Suppose we break the pair of you?”

  “You’ll keep a higher intelligence off the earth, for a while.”

  “Then that’s what we have to do.”

  She looked up at him steadily. “You can’t.”

  “We can try.”

  She shook her head again, slowly and as if regretfully. “Go away. Live the sort of life you want to, while you can. You can’t do anything else.”

  “Unless you help me.” He returned her look and held it, as he had done before in the computer building. “You’re not just a thinking machine, you’re made in our likeness.”

  “No!”

  “You have senses — feelings. You’re three parts human being, tied by compulsion to something that’s set to destroy us. All you have to do, to save us and free yourself, is change the setting.” He took her by the shoulders, as if to shake her, but she shrugged his hands off.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you want to, three-quarters of you —”

  She stood up and moved away from him.

  “Three-quarters of me is an accident. Don’t you think I suffer enough as it is? Don’t you think I get punished for even listening to you?”

  “Will you be punished for to-night?”

  “Not if you go away.” She moved towards the door hesitantly, as if expecting him to stop her, but he let her go. “I was sent to kill you.”

  She was very pale and beautiful, standing in the dark doorway, and she spoke without passion or satisfaction. He looked at her grimly.

  “Well, the chips are down,” he said.

  There was a small lean-to café by Thorness station, and Judy left Fleming there while she met the train from Aberdeen. It was only the following evening: Reinhart had been quick. Fleming went into the little back room which had been reserved for them, and waited. It was a sad and cheerless little room domi
nated by an old farmhouse table and a set of chairs and walled with dilapidated and badly-painted weatherboards which carried discoloured cola and mineral-water ads. He helped himself to a swig from his pocket-flask. He could hear the rising wind moaning outside, and then the diesel thrumming up from the south. It stopped, palpitating noisily, in the station, and after a minute or two there was a whistle and a hoot on its siren and it drew away, leaving a silence out of which came the sound of the wind again, and of footsteps on the gravel outside the café.

  Judy led Reinhart and Osborne into the room. They were all heavily muffled in winter clothes, and Osborne carried a sizeable suitcase.

  “It’s blowing up for a blizzard, I think,” he said, putting the case down. He looked unhappy and thoroughly out of his element. “Can we talk in here?”

  “It’s all ours,” Judy said. “I fixed the man.”

  “And the duty operator?” asked Reinhart.

  “I fixed him too. He knows what to do and he’ll keep his mouth shut for us.”

  Reinhart turned to Fleming. “How is Madeleine Dawnay?”

  “She’ll pull through. So will the boy. The enzyme works all right.”

  “Well, thank God for that.” Reinhart unbuttoned his coat. He looked no worse for his journey; in fact, the activity seemed to have refreshed him.

  Osborne appeared to be the most dispirited of them. “What do you want to do with the computer?” he asked Fleming.

  “Try to uncork it, or else —”

  “Or else what?”

  “That’s what we want to find out. It’s either deliberately malevolent, or it’s snarled up. Either it was programmed to work the way it does, or something’s gone wrong with it. I think the first; I always have done.”

  “You’ve never been able to prove it.”

  “What about Dawnay?”

  “We need something more tangible than that.”

  “Osborne will go to the Minister,” put in Reinhart. “He’ll go to the Prime Minister if necessary. Won’t you?”

  “If I have evidence,” said Osborne.

  “I’ll give you evidence! It had another go at killing me last night.”

  “How?”

  Fleming told them. “In the end I forced the truth out of her. You ought to try it sometime — you’d believe it then.”

  “We need something more scientific.”

  “Then give me a few hours with it.” He looked at Judy. “Have you brought me a pass?”

  Judy produced three passes from her handbag and handed one to each of them. Fleming read the one she had given him, and grinned. “So I’m an official of the Ministry? That’ll be the day.”

  “I’ve forsworn my good name for that,” said Osborne unhappily. “It’s only for an examination. No direct action.”

  Fleming stopped grinning. “You want to tie both my hands behind my back?”

  “You realise the risk I’m running?” Osborne said.

  “Risk! You should have been in my hut last night.”

  “I wish I had been, then I might be more certain where I stood. This country, young man, depends on that machine —”

  “Which I made.”

  “It means more to us, potentially, than the steam engine, or atomic power, or anything.”

  “Then it’s all the more important —” Fleming began.

  “I know! Don’t preach at me. Do you think I’d be here at all if I didn’t believe it was important and if I didn’t value your opinion very highly? But there are ways and ways.”

  “You know of a better way?”

  “Of checking — no. But that’s as far as it must go. A man in my position —”

  “What is your position?” asked Fleming. “The noblest Roman of them all?”

  Osborne sighed. “You have your pass.”

  “You’ve got what you asked for, John,” said Reinhart.

  Fleming picked up the suitcase and put it on the table. He opened it and, taking out a dark smooth-cloth overcoat, a black homberg and a briefcase, dressed himself for the part. They were all right for a dark night, but they hardly went with his face.

  “You look more like a scarecrow than a civil servant,” said Reinhart, smiling.

  Judy tried not to giggle. “They won’t examine you too closely if you’re with me.”

  “You realise you’ll be shot for this?” said Fleming affectionately.

  “Not unless we’re found out.”

  Osborne did not enjoy the pleasantries; if they were hiding strain in the others, he did not realise it, he had more than enough strain himself.

  “Let’s get it over, shall we?” He pushed back the cuff of his overcoat to look at his watch.

  “We have to wait till it’s dark and the day shift have gone off,” said Judy.

  Fleming burrowed under his coat and brought out the flask. “How about one for the raid?”

  It was snowing hard by the time they reached the camp, not a soft fall, but a fury of stinging, frozen particles thrown by a wind from the north. The two sentries outside the computer block had turned up the collars of their greatcoats, although they stood in a little haven of shelter under the porch of the doorway. They peered out, through the white that turned into blackness, at the four approaching figures.

  Judy went forward and presented the passes, while the three men hung back.

  “Good evening. This is the Ministry party.”

  “M’am.” One of the sentries, with a lance-corporal’s stripe on his greatcoat sleeve, saluted and examined the passes.

  “Okeydoke,” he said, and handed them back.

  “Anyone inside?” Judy asked him.

  “Only the duty operator.”

  “We shall only be a few minutes,” Reinhart said, coming forward.

  The sentries opened the door and stood aside while Judy went in, followed by Reinhart and Osborne with Fleming between them.

  “What about the girl?” asked Reinhart, when they were well down the corridor.

  “She’s not due in to-night,” said Judy. “We took care of that.”

  It was a long corridor, with two right-angle corners in it, and the doors to the computer-room were at the end, well out of sight and sound of the main entrance. When Judy opened one of the doors and led them in, they found the control-room full of light, but empty except for a young man who sat reading at the desk. He stood up as they came in.

  “Hallo,” he said to Judy. “It went all right?”

  It was the very young assistant. He seemed to be enjoying the situation.

  “You’d better have your passes.” Judy returned Reinhart’s and Osborne’s to them, and handed Fleming’s to the operator. Fleming took off his homberg and stuck it on the boy’s head.

  “What the top people are wearing.”

  “You needn’t make a pantomime of it,” said Osborne, and kept an uneasy eye on the door while the operator was rigged out with Fleming’s overcoat and brief case. Even with the collar turned up he was clearly different from the man who came in, but, as Judy said, it was not a night for seeing clearly, and with her to reassure them the sentries would probably do no more than count heads.

  As soon as the boy was ready, Osborne opened the door.

  “We depend on you to do the right thing,” he said to Fleming. “You have a test check?”

  Fleming pulled a familiar pad from his pocket and waited for them all to go.

  “I’ll be back,” said Judy. “As soon as I’ve seen them past the sentries.”

  Fleming seemed surprised. “You won’t, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Osborne told him. “It’s one of the conditions.”

  “I don’t want anyone —”

  “Don’t be a fool, John,” said Reinhart, and they left him.

  He went over to the control unit and glared at it, half laughing at himself out of sheer strain, then got down to work at the input unit, tapping in figures from the pad he had brought with him. He had nearly finished it when Judy came back.

&nbs
p; “What are you doing?” she asked. She was strung too, in spite of the relief of having got the decoy past the sentries.

  “Trying to cook it.” He tapped out the last group. “Same old naming-tag lark’ll do for a start.”

  It took the computer a few moments to react, then the display lamps started flashing violently. They waited, listening for the clatter of the printer, but what they heard was footsteps approaching down the corridor. Judy stood rooted and paralysed until Fleming took her arm and pulled her into the darkness of the lab bay from where they could see through the half-open doorway without being seen. The footsteps came to a stop beyond the far entrance of the control-room. They could see the handle of one of the double doors turn, then the door opened and Andre stepped in from the corridor.

  Judy gave a tiny gasp, which was drowned by the hum of the computer, and Fleming’s grip tightened warningly on her arm. From where they stood they could see Andre close the door and walk slowly forward towards the control racks. The flashing and humming of the machine seemed to puzzle her, and a few feet short of the display panel she stood stock still. She was wearing an old grey anorak with the hood down, and she looked particularly beautiful and uncompromising under the stark lamps; but her face was strained and after a few moments the muscles round her mouth and temples began to work under the mounting tension of her nerves. She moved forward, slowly and reluctantly, towards the panel, and then stopped again, as if she could feel from there a premonition of some violent reaction — as though she knew the signs and yet was magnetised by the machine.

  Her face now was glistening with sweat. She took another step forward and raised her hands slowly towards the terminals. Judy, for all her hatred, felt herself aching to go to her, but Fleming held her back. Before their eyes, the girl reached up slowly and fearfully and touched the contact plates.

  Her first scream and Judy’s rang out together. Fleming clapped his hand over Judy’s mouth, but Andre’s screaming went on and on, falling to a whimper as the voltage needle dipped, then rising again when it peaked.

  “For God’s sake,” Judy mouthed into Fleming’s hand. She struggled to break away, but he held her until Andre’s cries stopped and the machine, sensing possibly that she no longer responded, let go its grip and she slithered to the floor. Judy tore herself free and ran over to her, but this time there was no groaning, no breathing, no sign of life. The eyes she looked into were glazed and the mouth hung senselessly open.