Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

Again, he seemed quite sure of it all, and quite unbaffled by its complexity. It was as if his brain had long been prepared and waiting for it: Judy thought how aching and empty he must have felt the year before when he was talking about a breakthrough and knocking down the railings. Not that he looked any happier now. She remembered that Bridger had said, “John’ll never be happy.”

Everything else seemed comparatively matter-of-fact as they walked round the room.

“The way it works,” said Fleming, “is, you teletype the data in—that’s the quickest way we have. The control unit decides what to do. The arithmetic units do the calculating—calling on the memory storage as they need, and putting new information into memory—and the answer comes out on the printer. The highway ducts are under the floor and the arithmetic units are along the side walls. It’s quite a conventional system really, but the conventionality ends there. It has a speed and capacity that we can hardly imagine.

There was complete silence around them. Shining rows of metal cabinets stood on each side of them, hiding their secrets, and the blank face of the control panel stared unseeingly at them in the dim light. Fleming stood casually looking round, seeming as much part of it as he was part of his car when driving.

“He’ll look prettier when he’s working,” he said, and took her round to the area behind the control racks.

This was a large semi-circular room, as dimly lighted as the other, with a huge metal-clad column rising through the centre.

“That’s the real guts of it: the memory storage.” He opened a panel in the lower wall of the column and shone an inspection lamp inside. “There’s a nice little job in molecular electronics for you. The memory is in the core and the core is held in a total vacuum to within a degree or two of absolute zero. That’s where the liquid helium comes in.”

Judy, peering in, could see a cube of what looked like metal about three foot square sealed in a glass tube and surrounded by cooling ducts. Fleming spoke mechanically, as if giving a lecture.

“Each core is built up of alternate wafers of conducting and non-conducting material half-a-thou thick, criss-crossed into a honeycomb. That gives you a complete yes-no gate circuit on a spot of metal you can hardly see.”

“Is that the equivalent of a brain cell?”

“If you like.”

“And how many are there?”

“The core’s a three-meter cube. That makes several millions of millions. And there are six cores.”

“It’s bigger than a human brain.”

“Oh yes. Much bigger. And faster. And more efficient.”

He closed the door-panel and said no more about it. She tried to imagine how it would really work, but the effort was as far beyond her as the understanding of matter; it was too vast and unfamiliar to visualise. She congratulated him and went away. He looked, for a moment, lonely and haunted but made no attempt to stop her. Then he started checking figures again.

Dennis Bridger was not captivated in the same way. He did his work stolidly and morosely, and made no discernible attempt to follow up his contacts with Intel. Major Quadring and his security people kept a careful eye on him; periodic checks were made on all staff leaving the main gates, to see that they were not taking out documents or other classified material, but Bridger did nothing at all to arouse their suspicion. His only recreation was visiting the off-shore island of Thorholm, from which he would return with gulls’ and gannets’ eggs and endearing photographs of puffins. Whatever inducement Kaufmann had given him to stay on did not seem to involve him in anything.

Geers regarded the whole team with suspicion. He was never obstructive, but a state of hostility existed between him and them. It was clear he would feel in some way satisfied if the experiment failed. However, as the super-computer neared completion, and the interest of his staff and his superiors in it increased, he took care to identify himself with any possible success. It was he who suggested that there should be a formal, though necessarily private, opening, and the Minister of Science—foiled of his unveiling of Bouldershaw Fell the previous year—allowed himself to be persuaded to cut a ribbon in Scotland. Fleming tried to put off the opening for as long as possible, but it was finally fixed for a day in October, by which time the new computer was due to be programmed and ready to receive its data. General Vandenberg and a couple of dozen Whitehall officials told their secretaries to make notes in their diaries.

Judy, at last, had something to do. There would be no press, but there were arrangements to be made with the various ministries, and plans for the visit to be worked out with Geers’s staff. She saw little of Fleming. When she had finished her work she would go for long, solitary walks across the moors in the blustery weather of early autumn.

About a week before the opening, she saw a white yacht standing out to sea. It was a big, ocean-going yacht, a long way off. From the camp, it was hidden behind the island of Thorholm, it could only be seen from further along the coast. Judy noticed it as she walked back by the cliff-top path in the afternoon.

The following afternoon it was still there, and Judy, walking along the path between the cliff edge and the heather, thought she could see the blink of an aldis lamp signalling from it. This in itself would not have made her curious, had she not suddenly heard the sound of a car engine from the moor above her. By instinct, she dodged down behind a gorse bush and waited. It was a powerful but smooth engine that purred expensively as it ticked over.

The next thing Judy noticed was that the signalling had stopped. A moment or two later the engine revved and she could hear a car drive heavily away. After it had gone some distance, she got up and walked to the top of the path. Where it came to the cliff-top, it met a rough cart-track which wound away inland to join the main road in a valley between the hills. A large, shining car was disappearing round the first bend, behind a coppice of firs. Judy stared after it: there was something familiar about it.

She said nothing to Quadring, but went there again next day. There was no yacht and no car. The landscape was empty and silent except for the gulls. The next day it rained, and after that she was too busy with the Minister’s visit to go out at all. By tea-time on the day before the opening, she had everything fixed—drivers laid on to collect the party from the station, a landing-crew provided for the Minister’s helicopter, drinks and sandwiches in the Director’s office, a timetable of the tour agreed with Reinhart and the others. Fleming was surly and withdrawn; Judy herself had a headache.

The sun came out about four o’clock, so she put on a wind-cheater and went out. As she walked along the cliff-path the ground all round her steamed and, far below, the green waves slopped against the rocks in the freshening wind and threw up lace edges of foam that sparkled in the sunlight.

There was no yacht, and again no car where the path met the track at the cliff-top; but there were tyre-marks, recent ones made after the rain. Judy was thinking about this when she became aware of another distant noise. This time it was an outboard motor and it came from the far side of the island, a couple of miles away. Straining her eyes against the sun, she watched the tiny distant shape of a boat edge out from behind the island, making for the bay below the camp at Thorness. It was Bridger’s boat, and she could just see one person—presumably Bridger—in it.

She saw no more. There was a whistle and a crack beside her and a splinter of rock fell away from the cliff-face by her head. She did not wait to examine the bullet scar on the rock; she simply ran. Another bullet whistled close to her as she pelted headlong down the path, and then she was round the first turn of the cliff and out of range. She ran as far as she could, walked for a bit and then ran again. Long before she got back to camp the sun had set behind a bank of cloud. The wind rose and blew the day away. She shivered, and her legs were shaking.