Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“Is this theory based on anything?”

“It’s based on logic. The other creature was a first shot, a first attempt to produce an organism like us and therefore acceptable to us. This is a better shot, based on more information. I’ve worked on that information; I know how deliberate it is.”

Geers allowed his eyes to open a little. “And having achieved this miracle, you suggest we kill it?”

“If you don’t now you’ll never be able to. People will come to think of it as human. They’ll say we’re murdering it. It’ll have us—the machine will have us—where it wants us.”

“And if we don’t choose to take your advice?”

“Then keep it away from the computer.”

Geers sat silent for a moment, his spectacles glinting. Then he rose to end the interview.

“You are only here on sufferance, Fleming, and out of courtesy to the Minister of Science. The judgement in this case rests not with you but with me. We shall do what I think best, and we shall do it here.”

The girl, as Geers had predicted, was fully grown by the end of four months. She remained most of the time in an oxygen tent, although she was learning to breathe naturally for increasing periods. By the end of the first month she was off drip feeds and on to a bottle. Beyond this, nothing was done to stimulate her mind and she lay inert as a baby, staring at the ceiling. Geers grew slightly apprehensive as growth continued, but she stopped at five foot seven inches, by which time she was a fully developed young woman.

“Quite a good-looking young woman, too,” Hunter said, with a lick of his lips.

Geers allowed no-one but Hunter, Dawnay and their assistants to see her. He sent daily confidential reports to the Ministry of Defence and was visited twice by the Director-General of Research, with whom he made plans for her future. Extreme precautions were taken to keep her existence secret; a day and night guard was mounted on the computer and laboratory block and everyone who had to know was sworn to silence. Apart from Reinhart, whom Osborne told privately, and a handful of senior officials and politicians in London, no-one outside the research team at Thorness knew anything about her.

Fleming, in Geers’s opinion, was the most doubtful quantity in the whole group, and Judy was given specific instructions to watch him. They had literally hardly spoken since the previous spring. He had made one surly, half-hearted attempt to apologise but she had cut him short, and since then when they met in the camp they ignored each other. At least, she told herself, she had not been spying on him—the fact that he had dissociated himself from Dawnay’s experiment, to which she had been assigned after Bridger’s death, had meant he was no longer primarily her concern. Whatever pangs of conscience she had about the past were hidden under the anaesthetic of a sort of listless apathy. But now it was different. Screwing up all her determination, she went to find him in the computer room, her legs feeling curiously flabby beneath her. She handed him her letter of instruction.

“Would you read this?” she said, without any preliminary.

He glanced at it and handed it back to her. “It’s on Ministry of Defence paper— you read it. I’m choosy what I touch.”

“They’re concerned about the security of the new creature,” she said stiffly, withdrawing in the face of his attack.

Fleming laughed.

“It amuses you?” she asked. “I’m to be responsible for its safety.”

“And who’s to be responsible for yours?”

“John!” Judy’s face reddened. “Do we always have to be on opposite sides of the fence?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said with something between sympathy and indifference. “I’m afraid I don’t dig your precious creature.”

“It’s not mine. I’m doing my job. I’m not your enemy.”

“No. You’re just the sort of girl who gets pushed about.” He looked helplessly around the room. “Oh I’ve had my say!”

She made a last attempt to reach him. “It seems a long time since we went sailing.”

“It is a long time.”

“We’re the same people.”

“In a different world.” He moved as if he wanted to get away.

“It’s the same world, John.”

“O.K., you tell them that.”

Hunter came past. “We’re getting her out.”

“Who?” Fleming turned from Judy with relief.

“The little girl—out of her oxygen tent.”

“Are we allowed?” asked Judy.

“This is a special occasion—coming-out party.” Hunter gave her a stale, sexy smile and walked away into the other room.

Fleming looked sourly after him.

“Full-size live monster given away with each packet.”

Judy surprised herself by giggling. She felt they were suddenly about a mile closer.

“I detest that man. He’s so condescending.”

“I hope he kills her,” said Fleming. “He’s probably a bad enough doctor.”

They went through to the laboratory together. Hunter was superintending opening the bottom end of the oxygen tent, watched by Dawnay. Under the tent was a narrow trolley-bed which two assistants drew gently forward. The rest stood round as the bed slid out with the full-grown girl-creature on it: first her feet, covered by a sheet, then her body, also covered. She was lying on her back, and as her face was revealed Judy gave a gasp. It was a strong and beautiful face with high cheek-bones and wide, Baltic features. Her long, pale hair was strewn out on the pillow, her eyes were shut and she was breathing peacefully as if asleep. She looked like a purified, blonde version of Christine.

“It’s Christine!” Judy whispered. “Christine.”

“It can’t be,” said Hunter brusquely.

“There is a superficial resemblance,” Dawnay admitted.

Hunter cut across her. “We did an autopsy on the other girl. Besides, she was a brunette.”

Judy turned to Fleming.

“Is this some horrible kind of practical joke?”

He shook his head. “Don’t let it fool you. Don’t let it fool any of you. Christine’s dead. Christine was only a blueprint.”

No-one spoke for a moment while Dawnay took the girl’s pulse and stooped down to look at her face. The eyes opened and looked vaguely up at the ceiling.

“What does it mean?” asked Judy. She remembered seeing Christine dead, and yet this was something inescapably like her, living.

“It means,” said Fleming, as though answering all of them, “that it took a human being and made a copy. It got a few things wrong—the colour of the hair, for instance—but by and large it did a pretty good job. You can turn the human anatomy into figures, and that’s what it did; and then got us to turn them back again.”

Hunter looked at Dawnay and signalled to the assistants to wheel the trolley into a neighbouring bay.

“It gave us what we wanted, anyway,” said Dawnay.

“Did it? It’s the brain that counts: it doesn’t matter about the body. It hasn’t made a human being—it’s made an alien creature that looks like one.”

“Dr. Geers has told us your theory,” said Hunter, moving away in the wake of the girl on the bed.

Dawnay hesitated for a moment before going after them.

“You may be right,” she said. “In which case it’ll be all the more interesting.”

Fleming controlled himself with an obvious effort. “What are you going to do with it?”

“We’re going to educate it—her.”

Fleming turned and walked out of the laboratory, back to the computer room, with Judy following.

“What’s bad about it?” she asked. “Everyone else...”

He turned on her. “Whenever a higher intelligence meets a lower one, it destroys it. That’s what’s bad. Iron Age man destroyed the Stone Age; the Palefaces beat the Indians. Where was Carthage when the Romans were through with it?”