Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“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 Christine, 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.

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.”