Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“If that’s what you really want,” he said.

“The alternative,” said Reinhart, more to Dawnay and himself than to Fleming, “is to pack up and hand over. We haven’t much choice, have we?”

Judy kept as far from Fleming as she could, and when she did see him he was usually with Christine. Everything had changed since Bridger died; even the early burst of spring weather was soon ended, leaving a grey pall of gloom over the camp and over herself. With an additional pang she realised that Christine was likely to take not only her place but Dennis Bridger’s as well in Fleming’s life, working and thinking with him as she herself had never been able to do. She thought at first that she would not be able to bear it and, going over Geers’s head, wrote direct to Whitehall begging to be removed. The only result was another lecture from Geers.

“Your job here has hardly begun, Miss Adamson.”

“But the Bridger business is over!”

“Bridger may be, but the business isn’t.” He seemed quite unaware of her distress. “Intel have had enough to whet their appetite, and now they’ve lost him they’ll be looking for someone else—perhaps one of his friends.”

“You think Dr. Fleming would sell out?” she asked scornfully.

“Anyone might, if we let them.”

In the event it was Fleming, not Judy, who reported the first move from Intel.

He, Christine and Dawnay had found a way of securing the contact plates of an encephalograph on to what seemed to be the head of Cyclops, and Christine had helped him to link them by cable to the high-voltage terminals of the computer. They added a transformer to the racks below the display panel and ran the circuit through there, so that the current reaching Cyclops had only about the strength of a torch battery. All the same, the effect was alarming. When the first connection was made the creature went completely rigid and the control display lamps of the computer jammed full on. After a little, however, both the creature and the machine appeared to adjust themselves; data processing went on steadily, although nothing was printed out, and Cyclops floated quietly in his tank, gazing out of the port-hole with his single eye.

All this had taken several days, and Christine had been left in charge of the linked control room and laboratory with instructions to call Dawnay and Fleming if anything fresh happened. Dawnay took some hard-earned rest, but Fleming visited the computer building from time to time to check up and to see Christine. He found her increasingly strung-up as days went by, and by the end of a week she had become so nervy that he tackled her about it.

“Look—you know I’m dead scared of this whole business, but I didn’t know you were.”

“I’m not,” she said. They were in the control room, watching the lights flickering steadily on the panel. “But it gives me an odd feeling.”

“What does?”

“That business with the terminals, and...” She hesitated and glanced nervously towards the other room. “When I’m in there I feel that eye watching me all the time.”

“It watches all of us.”

“No. Me particularly.”

Fleming grinned. “I don’t blame it. I look at you myself.”

“I thought you were otherwise occupied.”

“I was.” He half raised his hand to touch her, then changed his mind and walked away to the door. “Take care of yourself.”

He walked down the cliff path to the beach, where he could be quiet and alone and think. It was a grey, empty afternoon, the tide was out and the sand lay like dull grey slate between the granite headlands. He wandered out to the sea’s edge, head down, hands in pockets, trying to work through in his mind what was going on inside the computer. He walked slowly back to the rocky foreshore, too deep in his thoughts to notice a squat, bald man sitting on a boulder smoking a miniature cigar.

“One moment, sir, please.” The guttural voice took him by surprise.

“Who are you?”

The bald man took a card from his breast pocket and held it out.

“I can’t read,” said Fleming.

The bald man smiled. “You, however, are Dr. Fleming.”

“And you?”

“It would mean nothing.” The bald man was slightly out of breath.

“How did you get here?”

“Around the headland. You can, at low tide, but it is quite a scramble.” He produced a silver case of cigarillos. “Smoking?”

Fleming ignored it. “What do you want?”

“I come for a walk.” He shrugged and put the case back in his pocket. He seemed to be recovering his breath. “You often come here yourself.”

“This is private.”

“Not the foreshore. In this free country the foreshore is...” He shrugged again. “My name is Kaufmann. You have not heard it?”

“No.”

“Your friend Herr Doktor Bridger—”

“My friend Bridger is dead!”

“I know. I heard.” Kaufmann inhaled his small cigar. “Very sad.”

“Did you know Dennis Bridger?” Fleming asked, perplexed and suspicious.

“Oh yes. We had been associated for some time.”

“Do you work for—?” The light dawned and he tried to remember the name.

“Intel? Yes.”

Kaufmann smiled up at Fleming and blew out a little wraith of smoke.

Fleming took his hands from his pockets.

“Get out.”

“Excuse?”

“If you’re not off this property in five minutes, I shall call the guards.”

“No, please.” Kaufmann looked hurt. “This was so happy a chance meeting you.”

“And so happy for Bridger?”

“No-one was more sorry than I. He was also very useful.”

“And very dead.” Fleming looked at his wristwatch. “It’ll take me five minutes to climb the cliff. When I get to the top I shall tell the guards.”

He turned to go, but Kaufmann called him back.

“Dr. Fleming! You have much more lucrative ways of spending the next five minutes. I am not suggesting you do anything underhand.”

“That’s dandy, isn’t it?” said Fleming, keeping his distance.

“We were thinking, rather, you might like to transfer from government service to honourable service with us. I believe you are not too happy here.”

“Let’s lay this on the line shall we, my herr friend?” Fleming walked back and stood looking down at him. “Maybe I don’t love the government, maybe I’m not happy. But even if I hated their guts and I was on my last gasp and there was no-one else in the world to turn to, I’d rather drop dead before I came to you.”

Then he turned away and climbed up the cliff path without looking back.

He went straight to Geers’s office and found the Director dictating reports into a tape-machine.

“What did you tell him?” asked Geers when Fleming had reported.

“Do you mind!” A look of disgust came over Fleming’s face. “It’s bad enough keeping it out of the hands of babes and sucklings, without feeding it to sharks.”

He left the office wondering why he had bothered; but in fact it was one of the few actions that told in his favour during the coming months.

Patrols were set on the beach, concertina wire was staked down from the headlands into the sea, Quadring’s security staff did a comb-out of the surrounding district, and nothing more was heard of Intel for a long time. The experiment in the computer building continued without any tangible result until after Dawnay came back from her holiday; and then, one morning, the computer suddenly started printing-out. Fleming locked himself up in his but with the print-out, and after about a hundred hours’ work he telephoned for Reinhart.

From what he could make out, the computer was asking an entirely new set of questions, all concerning the appearance, dimensions and functions of the body. It was possible, as Fleming said, to reduce any physical form to mathematical terms and this, apparently, was what it was asking for.