Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“He’s getting pretty big.” Dawnay switched the magnification. “Look—it’s beginning to divide!”

The cell elongated into two lobes which stretched and broke apart, and then each lobe broke again into new cells.

“It’s reproducing!” Dawnay leant back and watched the screen. Her face was puckered with fatigue and happiness. “We’ve made life. We’ve actually made a reproductive cell. Look—there it goes again... How about that, Dr. Fleming?”

Fleming was standing up and watching the screen intently.

“How are you going to stop it?”

“I’m not going to stop it. I want to see what it does.”

“It’s developing into quite a coherent structure.” Reinhart observed.

Fleming clenched his fists upon the table. “Kill it.”

“What?” Dawnay looked at him in mild surprise.

“Kill it while you can.”

“It’s perfectly well under control.”

“Is it? Look at the way it’s growing.” Fleming pointed at the rapidly doubling mass of cells on the screen.

“That’s all right. You could grow an amoeba the size of the earth in a week if you could feed it fast enough.”

“This isn’t an amoeba.”

“It’s remarkably like one.”

“Kill it!” Fleming looked round at their anxious unyielding faces, and then back at the screen. He picked up the heavy container in which the tea had been brought and smashed it down on the viewing plate of the miscroscope. A clatter of metal and glass rang through the hushed room. The viewing panel went dead.

“You young fool!” Dawnay almost cried.

“John—what are you doing?” Reinhart moved forward to stop him, but too late. Fleming pulled the splintered remains of the slide out of the microscope, threw them to the floor and ground his heel into them.

“You’re mad! All mad! All blind raving mad!” he shouted at them, and ran to the door.

He ran out through the computer room, along the entrance corridor and on to the porch. There he stood for a minute, panting, while the cold air hit him in the face. To come into the open at the pale beginning of day, after a night in the concentration of Dawnay’s room, was like waking from a nightmare. He took several gulps of air and strode off across the grass to the headland, trying to clear his brain and his lungs.

In the distance, he could hear an outboard motor.

He changed direction and walked furiously towards the spot where the path from the jetty reached the top of the cliff. The sound of the boat came steadily nearer in the growing light, drawing him like a magnet; but at the cliff-top he stumbled upon Quadring, Judy and two soldiers who were lying in wait on the grass. He drew up short.

“What the devil’s going on?” He gazed at them wildly and uncomprehendingly.

Quadring stood up, binoculars swinging from his chest.

“Get back. Get away from here.”

The motor had stopped. The boat was gliding into the quay below them. Judy started to scramble to her feet, but Quadring motioned her down.

“Go away John, please!” she said in an agonised voice.

“Go away? Go away? What the hell’s everyone up to?”

“Be quiet,” ordered Quadring. “And keep back from the edge.”

“We’re waiting for Dennis Bridger,” Judy said.

“For Dennis?” He was in a state of shock and only took in slowly what was happening.

“I’d push off,” Quadring advised him. “Unless you want to witness his arrest.”

“His arrest?” Fleming pivoted slowly from Quadring back to Judy as the meaning dawned on him.

“You are all mad!”

“Keep back and keep quiet,” said Quadring.

Fleming moved towards the edge of the cliff, but on a nod from Quadring the two soldiers took an elbow each and pulled him back. He stood pinioned between them, frustrated and desperate. Cold sweat trickled down his face, and all he could see was Judy.

“Are you in on this?”

“You know what we found.” She avoided his eyes.

“ Are you?”

“Yes,” she said, and walked away to stand beside Quadring.

They let Bridger get right to the top of the path, lugging the heavy canister from the cave. As his head came up over the edge, Fleming shouted to him:

“Dennis!”

One of the soldiers clamped his hand over Fleming’s mouth, but by that time Bridger had seen them. Before Quadring could get on to him, he dropped the canister and ran.

He ran fast for a man in sea-boots, along the path at the edge of the cliff. Quadring and the soldiers pounded after him. Fleming ran after them, and Judy after him. It was like a stag-hunt in the cold, early light. They could not see where Bridger was going. He got to the end of the headland, and then turned and slipped. His wet rubber boots flailed at the grass at the edge, and then he was over. Five seconds later, he was a broken body on the rocks at the sea’s edge.

Fleming joined the soldiers on the cliff-top, looking down. As Judy came up to him he turned away without speaking and walked slowly back towards the camp. He still had a splinter of glass from the microscope in his finger. Stopping for a moment, he pulled it out, and then walked on.

General Vandenberg by this time had his allied headquarters accommodated in a bomb-proof bunker under the Ministry of Defence. His functions as co-ordinator had gradually expanded until he was now virtual director of local air strategy. However little they liked this, Her Majesty’s Government submitted to it in the face of an international situation growing steadily worse: the operations room next to his private office was dominated by a wall-map of the world showing traces of an alarming number of orbital satellites of unknown potentiality. As well as the American and Russian vehicles, some of which certainly carried nuclear armament, there was an increasing traffic put up by other powers whose relations with each other and with the West were often near sparking-point. Public morality thinned like the atmosphere as men and machines rose higher, and year by year the uneasy truce which was supposed to control the upper air and the spaces above it came nearer to falling into anarchy.

Vandenberg, through the Ministry of Defence, now had call on all local establishments, including Thorness. He rode gently but with determination, and watched carefully what went on. When he received reports of Bridger’s death, he sent for Osborne.

Osborne’s position was now very different from what it had been in the early days of Bouldershaw Fell. Far from representing a ministry in the ascendant, he and Ratcliff now had to bow before the wishes of the war men, contriving as best they could to keep some say in their own affairs. Not that Osborne was easily ruffled. He stood before Vandenberg’s desk as immaculate and suave as ever.

“Sit down.” Vandenberg waved him to a chair. “Rest your feet.”

They went over the circumstances of Bridger’s death move by move as though they were playing a game of chess; the general probing, and Osborne on the defensive but denying nothing and making no excuses.

“You have to admit,” said Vandenberg at the end of it, “your Ministry’s snarled it up good and hard.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

Vandenberg pushed back his chair and went to look at his wall-map.

“We can’t afford to play schools, Osborne. We could use that machine. It’s built on military premises, with military aid. We could use it in the public interest.”

“What the hell do you think Reinhart’s doing?” Osborne was eventually ruffled. “I’m sure your people would like to get your hands on it. I’m sure we all seem anarchistic to you because we haven’t got drilled minds. I know there’s been a tragedy. But they’re doing something vitally important up there.”