Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“What sort of form?”

“We don’t know yet, but when we do know we must keep it to ourselves, mustn’t we?” He gave her a sort of bedroom leer. “We’re privileged to be midwives to a great event.”

“And Dr. Fleming?” she asked, looking straight in front of her.

“He’s staying on, at the request of the Ministry of Science; but I really don’t think there’s much left for him to do.”

Fleming and Dawnay received the news of Reinhart’s removal almost without comment. Dawnay was completely engrossed in what she was doing and Fleming was isolated and solitary. The only person he might have talked to was Judy, and he avoided her. Although he and Dawnay were working closely together, they still mistrusted each other and they never spoke freely about anything except the experiment. Even on that, he found it hard to convince her about any basic thesis.

“I suppose,” she said, as they stood by the output printer checking fresh screeds of figures, “I suppose all this is the information Cyclops has been feeding in.”

“Some of it. Plus what the machine learnt from Christine when it had her on the hooks.”

“What could it learn?”

“Remember I said it must have a quicker way of getting information about us?”

“I remember your being impatient.”

“Not only me. In those few seconds before the fuses blew, I should think it got more physiological data than you could work through in a lifetime.”

Dawnay gave one of her little dry sniffs and left him to pursue his own thoughts. He picked up a piece of insulated wire and wandered over to the control unit, where he stood in front of the winking display panel, thoughtfully holding one bared end of the wire in each hand. Reaching up to one of the terminals, he hooked an end of the wire over it, then, holding the wire by the insulation, he advanced the other end slowly towards the opposite terminal.

“What are you trying to do?” Dawnay came quickly across the room to him. “You’ll arc it.”

“I don’t think so,” said Fleming. He touched the bare end of wire on to the terminal. “You see.” There was no more than a tiny spark as the two metal surfaces met.

Fleming dropped the wire and stood for a few seconds, thinking. Then he slowly raised his own hands to the terminals, as Christine had done.

Dawnay stepped forward to stop him. “For heaven’s sake!”

“It’s all right.” Fleming touched the two terminals simultaneously, and nothing happened. He stood there, arms outstretched, grasping the metal plates, while Dawnay watched him with a mixture of scepticism and fear.

“Haven’t you had enough death?”

“He has.” He lowered his arms. “He’s learnt. He didn’t know the effect of high voltages on organic tissue until he got Christine up on there. He didn’t know it would damage himself, either. But now that he does know he takes precautions. If you try to short across those electrodes, he’ll reduce the voltage. Have a go.”

“No thanks. I’ve had enough of your quaint ideas.”

Fleming looked at her hard.

“You’re not simply up against a piece of equipment, you know. You’re up against a brain, and a damn good one.”

When she did not answer, he walked out.

In spite of the pressure of defence work, Geers did find time and means to help Dawnay. He was the kind of man who fed on activity like a locust; to have a multiplicity of things under his control satisfied the inner craving of his mind and took the place, perhaps, of the creative genius that had eluded him. He arranged for yet more equipment and facilities to be put at her disposal and reported her progress with growing pride. He would do better than Reinhart.

A new laboratory was added to the computer block to house a huge and immensely complicated D.N.A. synthesiser, and during the following weeks newly-designed X-ray crystallographic equipment and chemical synthesis units were installed to manufacture phosphate components, deoxyribose, adenine, thymine, cytosine, tyrosin and other ingredients needed for making D.N.A. molecules, the seeds of life. Within a few months they had a D.N.A. helix of some five billion nucleotide code letters under construction, and by the end of the year they had made a genetic unit of fifty chromosomes, similar to but slightly more than the genetic requirement for man.

Early in February, Dawnay reported the emergence of a living embryo, apparently human.

Hunter hurried over to the lab building to see it. He passed Fleming as he went through the computer room, but said nothing to him; Fleming had kept to his own side of the business, as he had promised, and made no effort to help with the bio-chemistry. In the laboratory, Hunter found Dawnay bending over a small oxygen tent, surrounded by equipment and a number of her assistants.

“Is it living?”

“Yes.” Dawnay straightened and looked up at him.

“What’s it like?”

“It’s a baby.”

“A human baby?”

“I would say so, though I doubt if Fleming would.” She gave a smile of satisfaction. “And it’s a girl.”

“I can hardly believe—” Hunter peered down into the oxygen tent. “May I look?”

“There’s nothing much to see; only a bundle wrapped up.”

Under the perspex cover of the tent was something which could have been human, but its body was tightly wrapped in a blanket and its face hidden by a mask. A rubber tube disappeared down by its neck into the blanket.

“Breathing?”

“With help. Pulse and respiration normal. Weight, six and a half pounds. When I first came here, I’d never have believed...” She broke off, suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by emotion. When she continued, it was in a softer voice. “All the alchemy of making gold come true. Of making life.” She tapped the rubber tubing and resumed her usual gruff way of speaking. “We’re feeding her intravenously. You may find she’s no instinct for normal suckling. You’ll have to teach her.”

“You’ve landed us quite a job,” said Hunter, not unmoved but anxious already about formal responsibilities.

“I’ve landed you human life, made by human beings. It took nature two thousand million years to do a job like that: it’s taken us fourteen months.”

Hunter’s official bedside manner returned to him. “Let me be the first to congratulate you.”

“You make it sound like a normal birth,” said Dawnay, managing to sniff and smile at the same time.

The little creature in the tent seemed to thrive on its intravenous food. It grew approximately half an inch a day, and was obviously not going to go through the usual childhood of a human being. Geers reported to the Director-General of Research at the Ministry of Defence that at the present rate it should reach full adult stature in between three to four months.

Official reaction to the whole event was a mixture of pride and secrecy. The Director-General sent for a full report and classified it in a top-secret category. He passed it on to the Minister of Defence who communicated it, in summary, to an astonished and bewildered Prime Minister. The Cabinet was told in terms of strictest confidence and Ratcliff returned to his office at the Ministry of Science shaken and unsure what to do next. After considering for a long time, he told Osborne who wrote to Fleming calling for an independent report.

Fleming replied in two words: “Kill it!”

In due course he was summoned to Geers’s office and asked to account for himself.

“I hardly see,” said Geers, his eyes screwed up narrow behind his spectacles, “that this is anything to do with you.”

Fleming thumped his fist on the huge desk.

“Am I or am I not still a member of the team?”

“In a sense.”

“Then perhaps you’ll listen to me. It may look like a human being, but it isn’t one. It’s an extension of the machine, like the other creature, only more sophisticated.”