Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

Fleming stood up.

“Good grief! I’m not going to—” He stopped himself and smiled. “Perhaps I have missed something.”

Whatever he had in mind was hidden from her. She turned to walk away.

“Wait a minute!”

“I am busy.” But she turned back to him and waited.

He walked slowly to her and looked her up and down as though mocking her.

“You want to make something of yourself, if you’re going to influence men.”

She stood still. He lifted a hand to her hair and edged it back from one side of her face. “You should push your hair back, and then we could see what you look like. Very pretty.”

She stepped away so that his hand fell from her, but she kept her eyes on him, intrigued and puzzled.

“Or you could wear scent,” he said. “Like Judy does.”

“Is that what smells?”

He nodded. “Not very exotic. Lavender water or something. But nice.”

“I do not understand you.” A small frown creased the smooth skin of her forehead. “Nice—nasty. Good—bad. There is no logical distinction.”

He still smiled. “Come here.”

She hesitated, then took a step towards him.

Quietly and deliberately he pinched her arm.

“Ow!” She stepped back with a sudden look of fear in her eyes and rubbed the place where he had hurt her.

“Nice or nasty?” he inquired.

“Nasty.”

“Because you were made to register pain.” He raised his hand again and she flinched away. “I’m not going to hurt you this time.”

She stood rigidly while he stroked her forehead, like a deer being stroked by a child, submissive but ready for flight. His fingers ran down her cheek and on to her bare neck.

“Nasty or nice?”

“Nice.” She watched him to see what he would do next.

“You’re made to register pleasure. Did you know that?” He withdrew his hand gently and moved away from her. “I doubt if you were intended to, but by giving you human form... Human beings don’t live by logic.”

“So I’ve noticed!” She was more sure of herself now, as she had been before he started speaking; but he still held all her attention.

“We live through our senses. That’s what gives us our instincts, for good or bad—our aesthetic and moral judgements. Without them we’d probably have annihilated ourselves by now.”

“You’re doing your best, aren’t you?” She looked down at her papers with a contemptuous smile. “You are like children, with your missiles and rockets.”

“Don’t count me in on that.”

“No, I don’t.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “All the same, I am going to save you. It is very simple, really.” She made a small gesture to indicate the papers she held.

Judy came in and stood, as Andromeda had done, at the doorway.

“Dr. Geers can see you.”

“Thank you.” The roles now were changed. In some unspoken way, the three of them stood in a different relationship to each other. Although Fleming still watched Andromeda, she looked back at him with a different kind of awareness.

“Do I smell nasty?” she asked.

He shrugged. “You’ll have to find out, won’t you?”

She followed Judy out of the building and walked along the concrete path with her to Geers’s office. They had nothing to say to each other, and nothing to share except a sort of wary indifference. Judy showed her into Geers’s room and left her. The Director was sitting behind his desk, telephoning.

“Yes, we’re coming along famously,” he was saying. “Only another check and we can start building.”

He put down the phone and Andromeda placed her papers on his desk, casually, as though she were bringing him a cup of tea.

“That is all you will need, Dr. Geers,” she told him.

The new missile was built and tested at Thorness. When it had been fired and recovered, and copies made, the Prime Minister sent Burdett to see Vandenberg.

The General was more than a little worried about the Thorness project. It seemed to him to be going too fast to be sound. Although his chiefs wanted action quickly, he had grave doubts about this piece of foreign technology and wanted it sent for testing to the U.S.A.; but Her Majesty’s Government unexpectedly dug its toes in.

Burdett confronted him in the underground ops room.

“Just for once we have the means to go it alone.” The young minister looked very sharp and dapper and keen in his neat blue suit and old school tie. “Of course we shall co-ordinate with you when we come to use it.”

Vandenberg grunted. “Can we know how you’ll use it?”

“We shall make an interception.”

“How?”

“Reinhart will give us our target information from Bouldershaw, and Geers’s outfit will do the firing.”

“And if it fails?”

“It won’t fail.”

The two men faced each other uncompromisingly: Burdett smooth and smiling, the General solid and tough. After a moment Vandenberg shrugged.

“This has become a very domestic affair all of a sudden.”

They left it at that, and Burdett told Geers and Reinhart to go ahead.

At Bouldershaw fresh traces were picked up nearly every day. Harvey sat behind the great window overlooking the Fell and logged them as they went over.

“ ...August 12th, 03.50 hrs., G.M.T. Ballistic vehicle number one-one-seven passed overhead on course 2697/451. Height 400 miles. Speed approx. 17,500 miles per hour... ”

The huge bowl outside, which seemed empty and still under its tall superstructure, was all the time alive and full of the reflection of signals. Every vehicle that came over gave out its own call and could be heard approaching from the other side of the globe. There were electronic scanners in the observatory which showed the path of the targets on a cathode-ray screen, while an automatic plotting and range-finding system was coupled by land-line to Thorness.

At Thorness an array of rockets was set up on the cliff-top; a “first throw” as they called it and two reserves. The three pencil-shaped missiles, with tapering noses and finned tails, stood in a row on their launching pads, glinting silver in the cold, grey light. They were surprisingly small, and very slim and rather beautiful. They looked like arrows strung and ready to fly out from all the heavy and complicated harness of firing. Each one, tanked with fuel and crammed with precise equipment, carried a small nuclear charge in its tapered head.

The ground control was operated through the computer, which in turn was directed by Andromeda and her assistants. Target signals from Bouldershaw were fed in through the control room and instantaneously interpreted and passed on to the interceptor. The flight of interception could be directed to a hair’s breadth.

Only Geers and his operational staff were allowed in the control-room at this time. Fleming and Dawnay were given monitoring facilities, as a gesture of courtesy, in another building; Andromeda took over calmly at the computer and Geers fussed anxiously and self-importantly between the launching-site, the computer building and the fire control-room. This was a small operations centre where the mechanics of take-off were supervised. A direct telephone connected him with the Ministry of Defence. Judy was kept busy by Major Quadring, double-checking everyone who came and went.

On the last day of October, Burdett conferred with the Prime Minister, and then picked up a telephone to Geers and Reinhart.

“The next one,” he said.

Reinhart and Harvey stood to for thirty-six hours before they detected a new trace. Then, in the early light, they picked up a very faint signal and the automatic linking system was put into action.

The sleepy crew at Thorness pulled themselves together, and Andromeda, who showed no sign of effort, watched as they checked the information through the computer. The optimum launching time came out at once and was communicated to the fire control-centre, and the count-down began. Very soon a trace of the target could be seen on radar screens. There was a screen in the computer-room for Andromeda, another in fire control for Geers, a third in London in the Ministry of Defence Ops Room, and a master-check at Bouldershaw, watched by Reinhart. At Bouldershaw, too, the signal from the satellite could be heard: a steady blip-blip-blip-blip which was amplified and pushed out through the speakers until it filled the observatory.