Fred Hoyle - A for Andromeda

When he arrived at the Ministry of Science, he was shown up to Osborne’s room, where Osborne was waiting for him with Reinhart and a stiff, middle-aged man with grey hair and impatient blue eyes. Osborne rose and shook hands.

“Dr. Fleming.” He was very formal.

“Hi,” said Fleming.

“You don’t know Air Commodore Watling, Security Section, Ministry of Defence.”

The stiff man bowed and looked at him without warmth.

Fleming shifted and turned enquiringly to Reinhart.

“Hallo John,” said Reinhart, in a small, restrained voice, and looked down self-consciously at his fingers.

“Have a seat, Dr. Fleming.”

Osborne indicated a chair facing the others, but Fleming stared from one to another of them before he sat, as though he were waking up in a strange place.

“Is this a court of enquiry?”

There was a small silence. Watling lit a cigarette.

“You were advised there was a security barrier on your work?”

“What does that mean?”

“That it was confidential.”

“Yes.”

“Then why—?”

“I don’t go for gagging scientists.”

“Take it easy, John,” Reinhart said soothingly.

Watling went on to another tack.

“You’ve seen the papers?”

“Some of them.”

“Half the world believes little green men with feelers are about to land in our back gardens.”

Fleming smiled, feeling the ground firmer beneath him.

“Do you?”

“I’m in possession of the facts.”

“The facts are what I gave the press. The straight scientific facts. How was I to know they’d distort them?”

“It’s not your job to assess these things, Dr. Fleming.” Osborne had installed himself elegantly and judicially behind his desk. “Which is why you were told not to interfere. I warned you myself.”

“So?” Fleming was bored already.

“We’ve had to send a full report to the Defence Co-ordination Committee,” said Watling severely. “And the Prime Minister is making a statement to the United Nations.”

“That’s all right then.”

“It’s not the sort of position we like to be in, but our hand has been forced and we have to allay fear.”

“Naturally.”

“Our hand has been forced by you.”

“Am I supposed to grovel?” Fleming began to be angry as well as bored. “What I do with my own discoveries is my own affair. It’s still a free country, isn’t it?”

“You are part of a team, John,” Reinhart said, not looking at him.

Osborne leaned coaxingly forward across his desk.

“All we need, Dr. Fleming, is a personal statement.”

“How will that help?”

“Anything which will reassure people will help.”

“Particularly if you can discredit your informant.”

“This isn’t personal, John,” said Reinhart.

“Isn’t it? Then why am I here?” Fleming looked contemptuously round at them. “When I’ve made a statement to say I was talking out of the back of my head—what happens then?”

“I’m afraid...” Reinhart studied his fingers again.

“I’m afraid we’ve given Professor Reinhart no choice,” said Watling.

“They want you to leave the team,” Reinhart told him.

Fleming got up and thought for a moment, while they waited for an outburst.

“Well, it’s easy, isn’t it?” he said at last, smoothly.

“I don’t want to lose you, John.” Reinhart made a small, deprecating movement with his tiny hands.

“No, of course not. There’s one snag.”

“Oh?”

“You can’t go any further without me.”

They were prepared for that. There were other people, Osborne pointed out.

“But they don’t know what it is, do they?”

“Do you?”

Fleming nodded and smiled.

Watling sat up even straighter. “You mean, you’ve decyphered it?”

“I mean, I know what it is.”

“You expect us to believe that?”

Osborne obviously did not, nor Watling; but Reinhart was unsure. “What is it, John?”

“Do I stay with it?”

“What is it?”

Fleming grinned. “It’s a do-it-yourself kit; and it isn’t of human origin. I’ll prove it to you.”

He dug into his briefcase for his papers.

The new Institute of Electronics was housed in what had once been a Regency square and was now a pedestrian precinct surrounded by tall concrete-and-glass buildings with mosaic faces. The Institute possessed several floors of computing equipment, and after intensive lobbying Reinhart was able to gain Fleming a reprieve and install him and the rest of the team there with access to the equipment. Bridger, nearing the end of his contract, was given a young assistant named Christine Flemstad, and Judy—to her and everyone else’s disgust—was sent along with them.

“What,” Fleming demanded, “is the point of a P.R.O. if we’re so damn top-secret we have to stand on a ladder to brush our own teeth?”

“I’m supposed to learn, if you’ll let me. So that when it is released...”

“You’ll be au fait ?”

“Do you mind?” Judy spoke tentatively, as though she, not Fleming, had been to blame before. She felt bound to him in an inexplicable way.

“I should worry!” said Fleming. “The more sex the better.”

But, as he had said at Bouldershaw, he had no time. He spent all his days, and most of the night, breaking down the enormous mass of data from the telescope into comprehensible figures. Whatever deal he had made—or Reinhart had made for him—had sobered him and intensified his work. He drove Bridger and the girl with solid and unrelenting determination and suffered patiently all manner of supervision and routine. Nominally, Reinhart was in charge, and he took all his results obediently to him; but the defence people were never far away, and he even managed to be polite to Watling, whom they called “Silver-wings.”

The rest of the team were less happy. There was a distinct coolness between Bridger and Judy. Bridger, in any case, was anxious to be gone, and the girl Christine was openly in the running to succeed him. She was young and pretty with something of Fleming’s single-mindedness, and she patently regarded Judy as a hanger-on. As soon as she had an opportunity, she fought.

Shortly after they moved down from Bouldershaw, Harries had turned up: Watling revealed this on one of his visits to the unit. Harries had been set on at the bookie’s, bundled into a car, beaten up and dumped in a disused mill, where he had nearly died. He had crawled around with a broken leg, unable to get out, living on water from a dripping tap and some chocolate he had in his pocket, until after three days he had been discovered by a rat-catcher. He did not return to them, and Watling told only Judy the details. She kept them to herself, but tried to sound Christine on Bridger’s background.

“How long have you known him?”

They were in a small office off the main computer hall, Christine working at a trestle table littered with punched input cards, Judy pacing about and wishing she had a chair of her own.

“I was one of his research students at Cambridge.” In spite of her Baltic parentage, about which Judy knew, Christine spoke like any English university girl.

“Did you know him well?”

“No. If you want his academic references...”

“I only wondered...”

“What?”

“If he ever behaved—oddly.”

“I didn’t have to wear a barbed wire girdle.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He never asked you to help him do anything, on the side?”

“Why should he?” She looked round at Judy with serious, hostile eyes. “Some of us have real work to get on with.”