Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“They want to throw me out anyhow.”

“They want what ?” Fleming looked as if he had been hit.

“The powers that be want us all out of the way,” Reinhart said. “They just want to know we’re breaking up and they’ll move in.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“They think they know better how to use it. But as long as we’re here, John, we can pull out the plug. And we will, if it comes to it.” He looked from Fleming’s troubled face to the cases lying on the floor. “You’d better unpack those things.”

The meeting between Fleming and Dawnay was electrically charged, but nothing dramatic happened. Fleming was quiet enough, and Dawnay treated him with a kind of tolerant amusement.

“Welcome the wandering boy,” she said, and led him off to see the thing in the tank.

The creature floated peacefully in the middle of its nutrient bath; it had found the porthole and spent most of its time gazing out with its one huge lidless eye. Fleming stared back at it, but it gave no sign of registering what it saw.

“Can it communicate?”

“My dear boy,” Dawnay spoke as though she were humouring a very young student. “We’ve hardly had time to learn anything about him.”

“It has no vocal cords or anything?”

“No.”

“Um.” Fleming straightened up and looked in the top of the tank. “It might be a feeble attempt at a man.”

“A man? It doesn’t look like a man.”

Fleming strolled through to the computer room, where Christine was watching the display panel.

“Anything printing out?”

“No. Nothing.” Christine looked puzzled. “But there’s obviously something going on.”

The display lamps were winking steadily: it seemed that the machine was working away by itself without producing results.

For the next two or three days nothing happened, and then Fleming laid a magnetic coil from the machine round the tank. He did not—in fact, he could not—explain why he did it, but immediately the computer display began flashing wildly. Christine ran in from the laboratory.

“Cyclops is terribly excited! He’s threshing about in his tank.”

They could hear the bumping and slopping of the creature and its fluid from the other room. Fleming disconnected the coil and the bumping stopped. When they reconnected the coil, the creature reacted again, but still nothing came through on the output printer. Reinhart came over to see how they were getting on, and he and Dawnay and Fleming went over the routine once more; but they could make nothing of it.

The next day Fleming got them together again.

“I want to try an experiment,” he said.

He walked across to the display panel and stood with his back to it, between the two mysterious terminals which they had never used. After a minute he took the perspex safety-guards off the terminals and stood between them again. Nothing happened.

“Would you stand here a moment?” he asked Reinhart, and moved away to let the Professor take his place. “Mind you don’t touch them. There’s a thousand volts or more across there.”

Reinhart stood quite still with his head between the terminals and his back to the display panel.

“Feel anything?”

“A very slight—” Reinhart paused. “A sort of dizziness.”

“Anything else?”

“No”

Reinhart stepped away from the computer.

“All right now?”

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t feel anything now.”

Fleming repeated the experiment with Dawnay, who felt nothing.

“Different people’s brains give off different amounts of electrical discharge,” she said. “Mine’s obviously low, so’s Fleming’s. Yours must be higher, Ernest, because it induces a leak across the terminals. You try, Christine.”

Christine looked frightened.

“It’s all right,” said Fleming. “Stand with your head between those things, but don’t touch them or they’ll roast you.”

Christine took her place where the others had stood. For a moment it seemed to have no effect on her, then she went rigid, her eyes closed and she fell forward in a dead faint. They caught her and pulled her into a chair, and Dawnay lifted up her eyelids to examine her eyes.

“She’ll be all right. She’s only fainted.”

“What happened?” asked Reinhart. “Did she touch one?”

“No,” Fleming said. “All the same, I’d better put the guards back on.” He did so, and stood thinking while Dawnay and Reinhart revived Christine, ducking her head between her legs and dabbing her forehead with cold water.

“If there’s a regular discharge between those terminals and you introduce the electrical field of a working brain into it...”

“Hold on,” said Dawnay impatiently. “I think she’s coming round.”

“Oh, she’ll be O.K.” Fleming looked thoughtfully at the panel and the two sheathed contacts that stuck out from it. “It’ll change the current between them—modulate it. The brain will feel a reaction; there could be some pick-up, it could work both ways.”

“What are you talking about?” Reinhart asked.

“I’m talking about these!” Fleming flared up with excitement. “I think I know what they’re for. They’re a means of inputting and picking up from the machine.”

Dawnay looked doubtful. “This is just a neurotic young woman. Probably a good subject for hypnosis.”

“Maybe.”

Christine came round and blinked.

“Hallo.” She smiled at them vaguely. “Did I faint?”

“I’ll say you did,” said Dawnay. “You must have a hell of an electrical aura.”

“Have I?”

Reinhart gave her a glass of water. Fleming turned to her and grinned.

“You’ve just done a great service to science.” He nodded to the terminals. “You’d better keep away from between there.”

He turned back to Reinhart.

“The real point is that if you have the right sort of brain—not a human one—one that works in a way designed by the machine—then you have a link. That’s how it’s meant to communicate. Our way of feeding back questions as answers is terribly clumsy. All this business of printers—”

“Are you saying it can thought-read?” Dawnay asked scornfully.

“I’m saying two brains can communicate electrically if they’re of the right sort. If you get your creature and push his head between those terminals—”

“I don’t see how we can do that.”

“It’s what it wants! That’s why it’s restless—why they’re both restless. They want to get in touch. The creature’s in the machine’s electromagnetic field, and the machine knows the logical possibilities of it. That’s what he’s been working out, without telling us.”

“You can’t drag Cyclops out of his nutrient bath,” Dawnay said. “He’ll die.”

“That must have been thought of.”

“You could rig up an electro-encephalograph,” said Reinhart. “The kind they use for mental analysis. Put a set of electric pads on Cyclops’s head and run a co-axial cable from there to the terminals to carry the information. You’ll have to put it through a transformer, or you’ll electrocute him.”

“What does that do?” Dawnay looked at him sceptically.

“It puts the computer in touch with its sub-intelligence,” said Fleming.

“To serve what purpose?”

“To serve its purpose.” He turned away from them and paced up the room.

Dawnay waited for Reinhart to speak, but the old man stood obstinately, frowning down at his hands.

“Feeling better now?” he asked Christine.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Do you think you could rig up something like that?”

“I think so.”

“Dr. Fleming will help you. Won’t you, John?”

Fleming stood at the far end of the room, the banks of equipment rising massively behind him.