Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

“But is that bad, in the long run?”

“It’s bad for us.”

“Why should this—?”

“The strong are always ruthless with the weak.”

She laid a hand tentatively on his sleeve. “Then the weak had better stick together.”

“You should have thought of that earlier,” he said.

Judy knew better than to push him further; she went back to her own life, leaving him with his preoccupations and doubts.

There was no early spring that year. The hard grey weather went on to the end of April, matching the grey sunless mood of the camp. Apart from Dawnay’s experiment, nothing was going well. Geers’s permanent staff and missile development teams worked under strain with no outstanding success; there were more practice firings than ever but nothing really satisfactory came of them. After each abortive attempt the grey wrack of Atlantic cloud settled back on the promontory as if to show that nothing would ever change or ever improve.

Only the girl creature bloomed, like some exotic plant in a hothouse. One bay of Dawnay’s laboratories was set up as a nursing block with living quarters for the girl. Here she was waited on and prepared for her part like a princess in a fairy tale. They called her Andromeda, after the place of her origin, and taught her to eat and drink and sit up and move. At first she was slow to learn to use her body—she had, as Dawnay said, none of the normal child’s instincts for physical development—but soon it became clear that she could absorb knowledge at a prodigious rate. She never had to be told a fact twice. Once she understood the possibilities of anything she mastered it without hesitation or effort.

It was like this with speech. To begin with she appeared to have no awareness of it: she had never cried as a baby cries, and she had to be taught like a deaf child by being made conscious of the vibrations of her vocal cords, and their effects. But as soon as she understood the purpose of it she learnt language as fast as it was spelt out to her. Within weeks she was a literate, communicating person.

Within weeks, too, she had learnt to move as a human being, a little stiffly, as if her body was working from instructions and not from its own desire, but gracefully and without any kind of awkwardness. Most of the time she was confined to her own suite, though she was taken every day, when it was not actually raining, out to the moors in a closed car and allowed to walk in the fresh air under armed escort and out of sight of any other eyes from either inside or outside the camp.

She never complained, whatever was done to her. She accepted the medical checks, the teaching, the constant surveillance, as though she had no will or wishes of her own. In fact, she showed no emotions at all except those of hunger before a meal and tiredness at the end of the day, and then it was physical, never mental tiredness. She was always gentle, always submissive, and very beautiful. She behaved, indeed, like someone in a dream.

Geers and Dawnay arranged for her education at a pace which packed the whole of a university syllabus into something which more resembled a summer-school. Once she had grasped the basis of denary arithmetic, she had no further difficulty with mathematics. She might have been a calculating machine; she whipped through figures with the swift logic of a ready-reckoner, and she was never wrong. She seemed capable of holding the most complex progressions in her head without any sense of strain. For the rest, she was filled up with facts like an encyclopaedia. Geers and the teachers who were sent up to Thorness in an endless and academically-impressive procession—not to instruct her directly, for she was too secret, but to guide her instructors—laid out the foundations of a general, unspecialised level of knowledge, so that by the end of her summer-course, and of the summer, she knew as much about the world, in theory, as an intelligent and perceptive school leaver. All she lacked was any sense of human experience or any spontaneous attitude to life. Although she was alert and reasonably communicative, she might just as well have been walking and talking in her sleep, and that, in fact, is the impression which she gave.

“You’re right,” Dawnay admitted to Fleming. “She hasn’t got a brain, she’s got a calculator.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” He looked across at the slim, fair girl who was sitting reading at the table in what had been made her room. It was one of his rare visits to Dawnay’s premises. The laboratory had been gutted and turned into a set of rooms that might have come out of a design brochure, with the girl as one of the fitments.

“She’s not fallible,” said Dawnay. “She doesn’t forget. She never makes a mistake. Already she knows more than most people do.”

Fleming frowned. “And you’ll go on stuffing information into her until she knows more than you.”

“Probably. The people in charge of us have plans for her.”

Geers’s plan was fairly obvious. The pressing problems of defence machinery remained unsolved in spite of the use they had made of the new computer. The main difficulty was that they did not really know how to use it. They took it out of Fleming’s hands for several hours a day, and managed to get a great deal of calculation done very quickly by it; but they had no means of tapping its real potential or of using its immense intellect to solve problems that were not put to it in terms of figures. If, as Fleming considered, the creatures evolved with the machine’s help had an affinity with it, then it should be possible to use one of them as an agent. The original monster was obviously incapable of making any communication of human needs to the computer, but the girl was another matter. If she could be used as an intermediary, something very exciting might be done.

The Minister of Defence had no objection to the idea and, although Fleming warned Osborne, as he had warned Geers, Osborne carried no weight with the men in power. Fleming could only stand by and watch the machine’s purpose being unwittingly fulfilled by people who would not listen to him. He himself had nothing but a tortuous strand of logic on which to depend. If he was wrong, he was wrong all the way from the beginning, and the way of life was not what he thought. But if he was right they were heading for calamity.

He was, in fact, in the computer-room when Geers and Dawnay first brought the girl in.

“For God’s sake!” He looked from Geers to Dawnay in a last, hopeless appeal.

“We’ve all heard what you think, Fleming,” Geers said.

“Then don’t let her in.”

“If you want to complain, complain to the Ministry.”

He turned back to the doorway. Dawnay shrugged her shoulders; it seemed to her that Fleming was making a great deal of fuss about nothing.

Geers held the door open as Andromeda came in, escorted by Hunter who walked beside and slightly behind her as though they were characters out of Jane Austen. Andromeda moved stiffly, but was thoroughly wide awake, her face calm, her eyes taking in everything. It was all somehow formal and unreal, as if a minuet were about to begin.

“This is the control-room of the computer,” said Geers as she stood looking around her. He sounded like a kind but firm parent. “You remember I told you about it?”

“Why should I forget?”

Although she spoke in a slow stilted way, her voice, like her face, was strong and attractive.

Geers led her across the room. “This is the input unit. The only way we can give information to the computer is by typing it in here. It takes a long time.”

“It must do.” She examined the keyboard with a sort of calm interest.

“If we want to hold a conversation with it,” Geers went on, “the best we can do is select something from the output and feed it back in.”