A for Andromeda

Three Acceptance

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.”

Judy wandered into the computer hall and watched the machines clicking and flickering away. Each machine had its own attendant: neuter-looking young men and women in identical overalls. In the centre was a long table where calculations from the computers were assembled in piles of punched cards or coils of tape or long screeds of paper from the output printers. The volume of figures they handled was prodigious, and it all seemed utterly unrelated to flesh and blood—a convocation of machinery, talking its own language.

Judy had learnt a little of what the team were doing. The message from Andromeda had continued for many weeks without repeating itself, and then had gone back to the beginning and started all over again. This had enabled them to fill in most of the gaps in the first transmission; as the earth was turning, they were only able to receive it during the hours that the western hemisphere was facing the Andromeda constellation, and for twelve hours out of every twenty-four the source went below their horizon. When the message began again, the rotation of the earth was in a different phase to it, so that part of the lost passages could now be received; and by the end of the third repeat they had it all. The staff at Bouldershaw Fell went on monitoring, but there was no deviation. Whatever the source was, it had one thing to say and went on saying it.

No-one concerned now doubted that it was a message. Even Air Commodore Watling’s department referred to it as “the Andromeda broadcast” as if its source and identity were beyond doubt. The work on it they catalogued as Project A. It was a very long message, and the dots and dashes, when resolved into understandable arithmetic, added up to many million long groups of figures. Conversion into normal forms would have taken a lifetime without the computers, and took a good many months with them. Each machine had to be instructed what to do with the information given it; and this, Judy learnt, was called programming. A program consisted of a set of calculations fed in on punched cards, which set the machine to do the job required. The group of figures to be analysed—the data—was then put in, and the machine gave the answer in a matter of seconds. This process had to be repeated for every fresh consideration of every group of figures. Fortunately, the smaller computers could be used for preparing material for the larger ones, and all the machines possessed, as well as input, control, calculating and output units, a reasonable memory storage, so that new answers could be based on the experience of earlier ones.

It was Reinhart—kind, tolerant, wise, tactful Reinhart—who explained most of it to Judy. After the affair at Bouldershaw Fell he came to accept her with more grace, and to show that he liked her and felt sorry for her. Although he was deeply and precariously involved in the inter-departmental diplomacy which kept them going, his particular qualities of leadership were very apparent at this time. Somehow he kept Fleming on the rails and the authorities at bay and still had time to listen to everyone’s ideas and problems; and all the while he remained discreetly in the background, hopping from issue to issue like some quiet, dainty, highly intelligent bird.

He would take Judy by the arm and talk to her quite simply about what they were doing, as though he had all the time and all the knowledge in the world. But there came a point in the understanding of computation where he had to hand over to Fleming, and Fleming went on alone. Computers, Judy realised, were Fleming’s first and great love, and he communicated with them by a sort of intuitive magic.

It was not that there was anything cranky about him; he simply had a superhuman fluency in their language. He swam in binary mathematics like a fish in the sea, and made short cuts which it took Bridger and Christine many hours of solid plodding to check. But they never found him wrong.

One day, just before Bridger was due to leave, Reinhart took him and Fleming aside for a longer session than usual and at the end of it went straight to the Ministry. The following morning the Professor and Fleming went back to Whitehall together.

“Are we all met?”

Osborne’s rather equine voice neighed down the length of the conference room. About twenty people stood round the long table, talking in groups. Blotters, notepads and pencils had been laid out for them on the polished mahogany and at intervals down the centre of the table were silver trays bearing water-jugs and glasses. At the end was one larger blotter, with tooled leather corners, for the Top Man.

Vandenberg and Watling were in one group, Fleming and Reinhart in another, and a respectful circle of civil servants in charcoal-grey suits surrounded one dazzling matron in a flowered costume. Osborne surveyed them expertly and then nodded to the youngest charcoal-suited man who stood by the door. The young man disappeared into the corridor and Osborne took his place by the head of the table.

“Aheeem!” he whinnied. The others shuffled into their places, Vandenberg—at Osborne’s invitation—at the right of the top chair. Fleming, accompanied by Reinhart, sat obstinately at the far end. There was a little silence and then the door opened and James Robert Ratcliff, Minister of Science, walked in. He waved an affable hand at one or two juniors who started to rise—“Sit down, dear boy, sit down!”—and took his seat behind the tooled leather. He had a distinguished, excessively well-groomed grey head and healthy pink-and-white face and fingers. The fingers were very strong, square and capable: one could imagine him taking large handfuls of things. He smiled genially upon the company.

“Good-morning, lady and gentlemen. I hope I’m not late.”

The more nervous shook their heads and muttered “No.”

“How are you, General?” Ratcliff turned, slightly Caesarlike, to Vandenberg.

“Old and ailing,” said Vandenberg, who was neither.

Osborne coughed. “Shall I go round the table for you?”

“Thank you. There are several fresh faces.”

Osborne knew all the names, and the Minister gave a gracious inclination of his head or lift of his hand to each one. The flowered prima-donna turned out to be a Mrs. Tate-Allen from the Treasury, who represented the grants committee. When they got to Fleming the ministerial reaction changed.

“Ah—Fleming. No more indiscretions, I hope.”

Fleming scowled the length of the table at him.

“I’ve had my mouth shut, if that’s what you mean.”

“It is.” Ratcliff smiled charmingly and passed on to Watling.

“We’ll try not to take too much of each other’s time, shall we?” He raised his fine Roman head and looked down the table to Reinhart. “You have some more news for us, Professor?”

Reinhart coughed diffidently on to his little white hand.

“Dr. Fleming here has made an analysis.”

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Tate-Allen beamed, “but I don’t think Mr. Newby here is entirely in the picture.”

Mr. Newby was a small, thin man who looked used to humiliation.

“Oh, well,” said Ratcliff, “perhaps you’d fill in the background, Osborne.”

Osborne filled it in.

“And now?”

Twenty pairs of eyes, including the Minister’s, turned to Fleming.

“We know what it is,” said Fleming.

“Well done!” said Mrs. Tate-Allen.

“What is it?”

Fleming looked levelly at the Minister.

“It’s a computer program,” he said quietly.

“A computer program? Can you be sure about that?”

Fleming merely nodded. Everyone else talked.

“Please!” said Osborne, banging his fist on the table. The hubbub subsided. Mrs. Tate-Allen held up a blue-gloved hand.

“I’m afraid, Minister, some of us don’t know what a computer program is.”

Fleming explained, while Reinhart and Osborne sat back and breathed relief. The boy was behaving well.

“Have you tried it in a computer?” asked Mrs. Tate-Allen.

“We’ve used computers to break it down. We’ve nothing that’ll take all of it.” He tapped the papers in front of him. “This is simply vast.”

“If you had access to a bigger computer—” Osborne suggested.

“It isn’t only size. It is, in fact, more than just a program.”

“What is it then?” Vandenberg asked, settling more comfortably into his chair. It was going to be a long business.

“It’s in three sections.” Fleming arranged his papers as if that would make it clearer. “The first part is a design—or rather, it’s a mathematical requirement which can be interpreted as a design. The second part is the programme proper, the order code as we call it. The third and last part is data—information sent for the machine to work on.”

“I’d be glad of an opportunity...” Vandenberg extended a hand and the papers were passed to him. “I don’t say you’re wrong. I’d like our signals people to check your methodology.”

“You do that,” said Fleming. There was a respectful hush as the papers were handed up the table, but Mrs. Tate-Allen evidently felt that some comment was required.

“I must say, this is very interesting.”

“Interesting!” Fleming looked explosive. Reinhart laid a restraining hand on his sleeve. “It’s the most important thing that’s happened since the evolution of the brain.”

“All right, John,” said Reinhart. The Minister passed it over.

“What do you want to do next?”

“Build a computer that’ll handle it.”

“Are you seriously proposing,” the Minister spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, as though they were chocolates out of an assorted box, “that some other beings, in some distant part of the galaxy, who have never had any contact with us before, have now conveniently sent us the design and programme for the kind of electronic machine—”

“Yes,” said Fleming.

The Minister sailed on: “Which we happen to possess on this earth?”

“We don’t possess one.”

“We possess the type, if not the model. Is it likely?”

“It’s what happened.”

Fleming made a dubious impression on the meeting. They had often seen it before: dedicated young scientists, obstinate and peevish, impatient of committee processes, and yet to be treated with great patience because they might have something valuable on them. These easily caricaturable officials were not fools; they were used to assessing people and situations. Much would depend on what Vandenberg and Osborne and Reinhart thought. Ratcliff enquired of the Professor.

“Arithmetic’s universal,” said Reinhart. “Electronic computing may well be.”

“It may be the only form of computing, in the last analysis,” put in Fleming.

Vandenberg looked up from the papers.

“I wonder—”

“Look,” Fleming interrupted. “The message is being repeated all the time. If you’ve a better idea, you go and work on it.”

Reinhart glanced uneasily across at Osborne, who was watching the state of play like a scorer at a cricket match.

“You can’t use an existing machine?” Osborne asked.

“I said!”

“It seems a reasonable enough question,” the Minister observed mildly. Fleming turned on him passionately.

“This programme is simply enormous. I don’t think you realise.”

“Just explain, John,” Reinhart said.

Fleming took a breath and continued more calmly. “If you want a computer to play you a decent game of draughts, it has to be able to accept a programme of around five thousand order groups. If you want it to play chess—and you can; I’ve played chess with computers—you have to feed in about fifteen thousand orders. To handle this material,” he waved towards the papers in front of Vandenberg, “you need a computer that can take in a thousand million, or, more accurately, tens of thousands of millions of numbers, before it can even start work on the data.”

At last he had the meeting with him: this was a glimpse of a brain they could respect.

“It’s surely a matter of assembling enough units,” Osborne said.

Fleming shook his head.

“It isn’t just size; it needs a new conception. There’s no equipment on earth...” He searched his mind for an example, and they waited attentively until he found one. “Our newest computers still work in microseconds. This is a machine that must operate in milli-microseconds, otherwise we’d all be old men by the time it got round to processing the whole of the vast quantity of data. And it would need a memory—probably a low temperature memory—at least with the capacity of the human brain, and far more efficiently controlled.”

“Is this proven?” asked Ratcliff.

“What do you expect? We have to get the means to prove it first. Whatever intelligence sent this message is way ahead of us. We don’t know why they sent it, or to whom. But it’s something we couldn’t do. We’re just homo sapiens, plodding along. If we want to interpret it—” He paused. “If...”

“This is theory, isn’t it?”

“It’s analysis.”

The Minister appealed once more to Reinhart.

“Do you think it could be proved?”

“I can prove it,” said Fleming.

“I was asking the Professor.”

“I can prove it by making a computer that will handle it,” said Fleming, undeterred. “That’s what’s intended.”

“Is that realistic?”

“It’s what the message is asking for.”

The Minister began to lose patience. He drummed his square fingers on the table.

“Professor?”

Reinhart considered, not so much what he believed, but what to say.

“It would take a long time.”

“But it’s what is wanted?”

“Possibly.”

“I shall need the best available computer to work with,” said Fleming, as though it were all agreed. “And the whole of our present team.”

Osborne looked anguished; the issue was very doubtful still, to anyone who knew, and the Minister showed signs of taking offence.

“We can make available university computers,” he said, in tones that suggested matters of mere routine.

Fleming’s patience suddenly snapped.

“University nothing! Do you think universities have the best equipment in this day and age?” He pointed across the table at Vandenberg. “Ask your military friend where the only really decent computer in the country is.”

A small frozen pause: the meeting looked at the American general.

“I’ll need notice of that question.”

“You won’t, ’cause I’ll tell you. It’s at the rocket research establishment at Thorness.”

“That’s engaged on defence work.”

“Of course it is,” said Fleming contemptuously.

Vandenberg did not reply. This young man was the Minister’s problem. The meeting waited while Ratcliff drummed his fingers on the tooled leather and Osborne totted up the score, not very hopefully. His master was undoubtedly impressed but not convinced: Fleming, like most men of sincerity, was a bad advocate; he had had his chance and more or less thrown it away. If the Minister did nothing, the whole thing would remain a piece of university theory. If he took action, he would have to negotiate with the military: he would have to convince not only the Minister of Defence but also Vandenberg’s Allied committee that the effort was worth the candle. Ratcliff took his time. He liked to have people waiting for him.

“We could make a claim,” he said at last. “It would be a Cabinet matter.”

For some time after the meeting there was nothing for the team to do. Reinhart and Osborne took negotiations forward step by prudent step, but Fleming could go no further. Bridger cleared up his remaining work, Christine sat quietly in the office checking and rechecking the ground they had already been over; but Fleming turned his back on the whole thing, and took Judy with him.

“It’s no good fiddling around until they’ve made up their minds,” he told her and dragged her off to help him enjoy himself. Not that he made passes at her. He simply enjoyed having her around and was affectionate and surprisingly pleasant company. The mainspring of his discontent, she discovered, was irreverence of pomposity and humbug. When they got in the way of his job he was sour and sometimes violent, but when he put work behind him they became merely targets for his particular brand of bitten-off salted humour.

“Britain is sinking slowly in the west,” he remarked once, when she asked him about the general state of things, and dismissed it with a grin. When she tried to apologise for her outburst at Bouldershaw Fell, he simply smacked her across the bottom.

“Forgive and forget, that’s me,” he said, and bought her a drink. She endured a good deal for his pleasure: he loved modern music, which she did not understand; he loved driving fast, which frightened her; and he loved looking at Westerns, which frightened her even more. He was deeply tired and restless. They rushed from cinema to concert, from concert to a long drive, from a long drive to a long drink, and by the end of it he was worn out. At least he seemed happy, although she was not. She felt she was sailing under false colours.

They only went occasionally to the little office in the Institute, and when they were there Fleming flirted with Christine. Not that Judy could blame him. He took no notice of her in any other way, and she was astonishingly pretty. She was, as she confided to Bridger, “In love with his brain,” but she seemed not particularly to relish being hugged and pinched. She went on stolidly with her work. She did enquire, however, about Thorness.

“Have you ever been there, Dr. Fleming?”

“Once.”

“What’s it like?”

“Remote and beautiful, like you. Also high-powered, soulless, clueless—not like you.”

It was assumed that, if Fleming were allowed to go there, she would go too. Watling had looked over her antecedents and found them impeccable. Father and mother Flemstad had fled from Lithuania when the Russian armies rolled over it towards the end of the Hitler war, and Christine had been born and brought up in England. Her parents had become naturalised British citizens before they died and she had been subjected to every possible check.

Dennis Bridger’s activities seemed a good deal more interesting. As the date of his departure drew near, he received an increasing number of unexplained long-distance telephone calls which appeared to worry him a good deal, although he never talked about them. One morning, alone in the office with Judy, he seemed more harassed than usual. When the telephone rang he seized it practically out of her hand. It was obviously a summons; he made some sort of excuse and left the office. Judy watched him from the window as he walked across the precinct to the roadway where a very large, very expensive car was waiting for him.

As he approached, the driver’s door opened and an immensely tall chauffeur stepped out wearing the sort of livery that one associated with a coupé de ville of the nineteen twenties, a pale mustard high-buttoned cross-over tunic, breeches and polished leather leggings.

“Dr. Bridger?”

He had on dark glasses and he spoke with a soft, indeterminate foreign accent. The car was shining and monstrously beautiful, like a new aircraft without wings. Twin radio masts sprung from its tail fins to above the height of a man—even that man. The whole outfit was quite absurdly larger than life.

The chauffeur held open the door to the back of the car while Bridger got in. There was an immensely wide seat, a deeply carpeted floor, blue-glazed windows and, on the far side of the seat, a short stocky man with a completely bald head.

The short man extended a hand with a ring on it.

“I am Kaufmann.”

The chauffeur returned to his place in front of the glass partition and they moved off.

“You do not mind if we drive around?” There was no mistaking Kaufmann’s accent: he was German, prosperous and tough. “There is so much tittle-tattle if one is seen in places.”

There was a small buzz by his ear. He picked up an ivory telephone receiver that lay across a rack in front of him. Bridger could see the chauffeur speaking into a microphone by the steering-wheel.

“Ja.” Kaufmann listened for a moment and then turned and looked out of the rear window. “Ja, Egon, I see. Go in a circle, then, yes? Und Stuttgart... the call for Stuttgart.”

He replaced the phone and turned to Bridger.

“My chauffeur says we are being followed by a taxi.” Bridger looked round nervously. Kaufmann laughed, or at least he showed his teeth. “Not to worry. There are always taxis in London. He will see we go nowhere. What is important is I have my call to Stuttgart.” He produced a silver case containing miniature cigars. “Smoking?”

“No thank you.”

“You send me a telex message to Geneva.” Kaufmann helped himself to a cigarillo. “Some months ago.”

“Yes.”

“Since then, we do not hear from you.”

“I changed my mind.” Bridger twitched anxiously.

“And now, perhaps, comes the time to change it back. We have been very puzzled, you know, these past few months.” He was serious but agreeable and relaxed. Bridger looked guiltily out of the back window again.

“Do not worry, I tell you. It is looked after.” He held a jewelled silver lighter to the end of his cigarillo and inhaled. “There really was a message?”

“Yes.”

“From a planet?”

“A very distant planet.”

“Somewhere in Andromeda?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that is a comfortable way away.”

“What is this—?” Bridger twitched his nose as the cigar smoke drifted up it.

“What is this about? I come to that. In America—I was in America at the time—there was great excitement. Everyone was very alarmed. And in Europe—everywhere. Then your government say: ‘Nothing. It is nothing. We will tell you later.’ And so on. And people forget; months go by and gradually people forget. There are other things to worry about. But there is something?”

“Not officially.”

“No, no—officially there is nothing. We have tried, but everywhere is a blank wall. Everybody’s lips are sealed.”

“Including mine.”

They were by now half-way round Regent’s Park. Bridger looked at his watch.

“I have to get back this afternoon.”

“You are working for the British Government?” Kaufmann made it sound like a piece of polite conversation.

“I’m part of their team,” said Bridger.

“Working on the message?”

“Why should that interest you?”

“Anything of importance interests us. And this may be of great importance.”

“It might. It might not.”

“But you are going on with the work? Please, do not look so secretive. I am not trying to pump you.”

“I’m not going on with it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to stay for ever in government service.”

They drove past the zoo and down towards Portland Place. Kaufmann puffed contentedly at his cigar while Bridger waited. As they turned west into Marylebone Kaufmann said:

“You would like something more lucrative? With us?”

“I did think so,” Bridger said, blinking at his feet.

“Until your little fracas in Bouldershaw?”

“You knew about that?” Bridger looked at him sharply. “At Oldroyd’s?”

“Naturally I knew.”

He was very affable, almost sweet. Bridger studied his shoes again.

“I didn’t want any trouble.”

“You should not be so easy put off,” said Kaufmann. “At the same time, you must not lead people towards us. We may be busy with something else.”

They turned north again, up Baker Street.

“I think you should stay where you are,” he said. “But you should keep in touch with me.”

“How much?”

Kaufmann opened his eyes wide.

“Excuse?”

“If you want me to give you information.”

“Really, Dr. Bridger!” Kaufmann laughed. “You have no finesse.”

The intercom buzzed. Kaufmann picked up the phone.

“Kaufmann.... Ja, ja.... Das ist Felix?...”

They did two more turns round the park and then dropped Bridger off a few hundred yards from the Institute. Judy watched his return but he said nothing to her. He thoroughly distrusted her anyhow.

Half an hour later the taxi which had followed Kaufmann’s car drew up at a telephone box and Harries stepped out. His leg was still strapped and he moved stiffly, but he considered himself fit for work. He paid the driver and limped across to the phone box. As the taxi drove away another car drew up and waited for him.

The phone was answered by Watling’s P.A., a bored Lieutenant from the Household Cavalry, the Ministry of Defence being, by that time, what was called “integrated.”

“I see. Well, you’d better come round and report.”

As he hung up, Watling swept in, brisk and bothered from another meeting with Osborne.

“Jabber, jabber, jabber. That’s all they do.” He slung his brief case on to a chair. “Anything new?”

“Harries has been on.”

“And?”

Watling took possession of his desk, a severe metal table in a severe concrete room with fire instructions on the door. The P.A. raised a cavalry-trained eyebrow.

“He says Bridger has been seen with a Known Person.”

“Who? You can ditch the jargon.”

“Kaufmann, sir.”

“Kaufmann?”

“Intel. The international cartel people.”

Watling stared at the blank wall facing him. There were still a number of large cosmopolitan cartels in spite of the anti-trust laws and the administration of the Common Market. They were not palpably illegal but they were extremely powerful and in some cases they had very nearly a stranglehold over European trade. At a time when the West was liable to boycott by any or all of the countries it depended on for raw materials, there was a frightening amount of scope for unscrupulous trading agencies, and Intel was generally known and disliked for its lack of scruple. Anything which found its way into its hands was likely to be sold profitably in another capital the next time the market was good.

“Any more?”

“No. They did two or three circuits in Kaufmann’s mobile gin-palace and then landed back at base.”

Watling stroked his chin as he fitted pieces of thought neatly and methodically together.

“You think that’s what he was up to at Bouldershaw?”

“Harries thinks so.”

“Which is why Harries was hauled off and pranged and dumped?”

“Partly.”

“Well, they’re the last people we want genned up on this.”

Once anything got into the hands of Intel it was extremely difficult to trace. They had a perfectly legal organisation in London, registered offices in Switzerland and branches over at least three continents. Information slipped along their private wires like quicksilver and there was very little that could be done about it. There were no search warrants for that kind of operation. By the time you were ransacking a Piccadilly office, the thing you had lost was being swapped for manganese or bauxite behind some very unsympathetic frontier. Nothing was sacred, or safe.

“I suppose Bridger’ll go on feeding ’em stuff,” he said.

“He’s supposed to be pulling out,” his P.A. reminded him.

“I doubt if he will now. They’ll have crossed his palm.” He sighed. “Anyway, he’d get it all from Fleming. They’re thick as condensed soup.”

“You think Fleming’s in it?”

“Ach!” Watling pushed his chair back and gave the thing up. “He’s just a hopeless innocent. He’ll blow the gaff to anyone to show. how independent he is. Look at what happened last time. And now we’re going to have them in our midst.”

“How so?”

“How so? You ought to write a phrasebook. They’re moving into W.D. quarters, that’s how so. The whole boiling. Fleming wants to build his super-computer at the Rocket Research Establishment at Thorness.”

“Oh?”

“That’s Top Secret.”

“Yes, sir.” The P.A. looked languidly discreet. “Has it been agreed?”

“It will be. I can smell a nonsense when I’m down-wind of it. Vandenberg’s furious. So are all the Allies, I wouldn’t wonder. But Reinhart’s all for it and so’s Osborne, and so’s their Minister. And so will the Cabinet be, I expect.”

“Then we can’t keep ’em out?”

“We can watch ’em. We’d better keep Harries on it for one.”

“They’ve their own security staff at Thorness. Army,” the P.A. added with pride.

The Air Commodore sniffed. “Harries can work in with them.”

“Harries wants to come off it.”

“Why?”

“He says he’s sure they’ve rumbled him.”

“How? Pardon.” Watling flashed a smile at him. “How so?”

“Well, they beat him up at Bouldershaw. They probably think he’s on to something bigger than this.”

“He probably is. Where is he now?”

“Tailing them. He’s coming in later to report.”

But Harries did not report later, or at all. Judy and Fleming found his corpse the following morning, under the tonneau cover of Fleming’s car.

When Judy had been sick and they had both been to the police station and the body had been taken away and dealt with, they went back to the office to find a message for Fleming to go straight round to the Ministry of Science. Judy, waiting with Christine, was interviewed by Watling and felt frightened and miserable. Christine went on with her work, only stopping to give Judy two aspirin with the air of one who dispenses charity regardless of merit.

Before he left for the Ministry, Fleming had kissed Judy on the cheek. She smiled queasily at him.

“Why should they dump it on me?” he said.

“They didn’t dump it on you. They dumped it on me, as a warning.”

She went to the Ladies and was sick again.

Fleming came back before lunch cock-o’-hoop and bubbling. He pulled Christine out of her chair and held her to him.

“It’s through!”

“Through?” Judy remained dazed at the other side of the room.

“Authority in triplicate from Air Commodore Jet-Propelled’s superior officers. They’ve opened wide their pearly barbed wire stockade.”

“Thorness?” Christine asked, pushing him away.

Fleming bounced his behind on to the trestle table. “We’re graciously allowed in to use their beautiful, beautiful taxpayers’ equipment hitherto reserved for playing soldiers.”

“When?” asked Judy.

Fleming slid off the table and went across and hugged her.

“As soon as we’re ready. Priority A on the big computer—barring what is laughingly called a national emergency. We’re excused morning parades, we shall be issued with passes, we shall have our fingers printed, our brains washed and our hair searched for small animals. And we shall build the marvel of the age.” He left Judy and held out his arms to Christine. “You and I, darling! We’ll teach ’em, won’t we? ‘Is it proven?’ asks His Ministership. We’ll prove ’em! ‘Come the four corners of the world in arms, and we will shock them’—as the lady said in the strip club. Oh—and Silver-wings is coming to give us our marching-orders.”

He started singing “Silver wings among the gold,” and took them both out to a lunch which Judy could not eat. There was no sign of Bridger.

Watling called back in the afternoon, composed but severe, like a visiting headmaster. He made the three of them sit down while he lectured them.

“What happened to Harries followed directly from his work with you.”

“But he was a lab cleaner!”

“He was Military Intelligence.”

“Oh!”

This was news to Christine, and to Fleming. He reacted with a kind of savage flippancy.

“Ours, as they say?”

“Ours.”

“Charming.”

“Don’t flatter yourselves that this was all on account of what you’re doing. You’re not that important yet.” The girls sat and listened while Watling turned his attention exclusively on Fleming. “Harries probably ran into something else when he was covering for you.”

“Why was he covering for us if we’re not important?”

“People—other people—don’t know whether it’s important or not. They know something’s on, thanks to you opening your mouth. It may or may not be of great strategic value.”

“Do you know who killed Harries?” Fleming asked quietly. His own share in the death had perhaps come home to him.

“Yes.”

“That’s something.”

“And we know who paid them to.”

“Then you’re home and dry.”

“Except that we won’t be allowed to touch them,” said Watling stiffly. “For diplomatic reasons.”

“Charming again.”

“It isn’t a particularly charming world.” He looked round at them as if performing an unpleasant duty. He was a modest and unpompous man who disliked preaching. “You people who’ve been living a quiet, sheltered life in your laboratories have got to understand something: you’re on ops now.”

“On what?” asked Fleming.

“Operations. If this idea of yours comes off, it’ll give us a very valuable piece of property.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“The country.”

“Ah yes, of course.”

Watling ignored him. He had heard plenty about Fleming’s attitude to the Establishment.

“Even if it doesn’t work, it’ll attract attention. Thorness is an important place and people will go to great lengths to find out what’s going on there. This is why I’m warning you—all of you.” He fixed them in turn with his brisk blue eyes. “You’re not in the university any more—you’re in the jungle. It may just look like stuffy old officialdom, with a lot of smooth talk and platitudinous statements by politicians and government servants like me, but it’s a jungle all the same. I can assure you of that. Secrets are bought and sold, ideas are stolen, and sometimes people get hurt. That’s how the world’s business is done. Please remember it.”

When he had gone, Fleming returned to the computers and Judy went down to Whitehall to get her next instructions. Bridger drifted in later in the day, anxious and looking for Fleming.

“Dennis”—Fleming bounced back in from the computer hall—“We’re off!”

“Off?”

“Thorness. We’re cooking with gas.”

“Oh, good,” said Bridger flatly.

“The Minister of Science hath prevailed. Mankind is about to take a small step forward into the jungle, according to our uniformed friends. Why don’t you change your mind? Join the happy throng.”

“Yes. Thank you, John.” Bridger looked down at his feet and twitched his nose in an agony of shyness. “That’s what I came to see you about. I have changed my mind.”

By the time Judy reached Osborne, Osborne knew.