Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

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.

Reinhart operated from London, paying periodic visits but mostly orbiting round Whitehall, pushing through plans, permits, budgets and the endless reports required by the government. Somehow everything they wanted they got fast and there were few delays. Osborne, Reinhart said modestly, was a past master.

Only Judy was at a loose end. Her office was apart from the others, in the main administrative block, and her living quarters were with the women defence scientists. Fleming, though perfectly amiable, had no time to spend with her; Bridger and Christine went to some lengths to miss her. She managed to keep a general tally on what was going on, and she allowed some of the army officers to take her about, but otherwise there was nothing. During the long winter evenings she took to tapestry and clay modelling and acquired a reputation for being arty, but in reality she was just bored.

When the new computer was nearly finished, Fleming gave her a conducted tour of it. His own attitude was a mixture of deprecation and awe; he could be completely wrong about it, or it could be something unimaginable and uncanny. The chief impression he gave was of fatigue; he was desperately tired now, and tiredly desperate. The machine itself was indeed something. It was so big that instead of being housed in a room, the control room was built inside it.

“We’re like Jonah in the belly of the whale,” he told her, pointing to the ceiling. “The cooling unit’s up there—a helium liquefier. There’s a constant flow of liquid helium round the core.”

Inside the heavy double fire-doors was an area the size of a ballroom, with a ceiling-high wall of equipment dividing it across the centre. Facing that, and with its back to the doors, was the main control desk, with a sort of glorified typing desk on one side and a printing machine on the other. Both the typing desk and the printer were flanked by associated tape decks and punch-card equipment. The main lights were not yet working: there was only a single bulb on the control desk and a number of riggers’ lamps hanging from the equipment rack. The room was semi-underground and had no windows. It was like a cave of mystery.

“All that,” said Fleming, pointing to the wall of equipment facing them, “is the control unit. This is the input console.”

He showed her the teletype keyboard, the magnetic tape scanner and the punched-card unit. “He was intended to have some sort of sensory magnetic system, but we’ve modified it to scan transcript. Easier for mortals with eyes.”

“He?”

Fleming looked at her oddly.

“I call him ‘he’ because he gives me the sense of a mind. Of a person almost.”

She had lived so long on the fringe of it that she had grown used to the idea. She had forgotten the shiver that went through her at Bouldershaw Fell when the message first came to them out of space. There had been so many alarms and excursions that the issue had become clouded, and in any case the message itself had been reduced to mundane terms of buildings and wiring and complicated man-made equipment. But standing there beside Fleming, who seemed not only tired but possessed and driven on by some kind of compulsion from outside, it was impossible not to sense an obscure, alien power lurking in the dim room. It merely touched her and passed away. It did not live in her brain as it seemed to live in his, but it made her shiver again.

“And this is the output unit,” said Fleming, who did not appear to notice what she had felt. “His normal thought processes are in binary arithmetic, but we make him print out in denary so that we can read it straight off.”

The wall of equipment in front of them was broken by a facia of display panels.

“What’s that?” asked Judy, pointing to an array of several hundred tiny neon bulbs set in rows between two perspex-sheathed metal plates that stood out at right-angles from the cabinet.

“That’s all the control unit. The lamps are simply a progress display device. They show the state of data going through the machine.”

“Has any gone through yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“You seem sure it will all work.”

“I’d never considered it not doing. It would be pointless for them to send a design for something that didn’t work.” The certainty in his voice was not simply his personal arrogance; there was the effect of something else speaking through him.

“If you understand it right.”

“Yes, I understand it. Most of it.” He waved a hand at the sheathed metal plates. “I don’t quite know what those are for. They’re electric terminals with about a thousand volts between them, which is why we put safety covers on. They were in the design and I expect we’ll learn how to use them. They’re probably some sort of sensing apparatus.”