A for Andromeda

Five Atoms

Judy left him at first light and went back to her own chalet. By midday the first contingent from London had arrived and was being entertained in the mess. She moved between the charcoal-grey suits distributing information sheets and feeling fresh and alive and happy. Fleming was at the computer building with Bridger and Christine, inputting the final section of data. Reinhart and Osborne were closeted with Geers.

Vandenberg, Watling, Mrs. Tate-Allen and the faithful and unspeaking Newby came on the two o’clock train and were met by the two best cars. The Minister was due to arrive by helicopter at three—a typically odd and showy whim which was politely passed over without comment by the rest of the party.

By that time the rain had cleared and a guard of honour was drawn up beside the parade-ground in the middle of the camp. Reinhart and Major Quadring waited with them, Quadring wearing his best battle-dress with clean medal-ribbons, Reinhart clutching a bedraggled plastic mac.

The other guests and hosts assembled in the porch of the new computer building and looked hopefully at the sky. Osborne made whinnying, diplomatic conversation.

“I don’t expect you knew the British Isles extended so far north, eh General?” This to Vandenberg, who showed signs of restlessness and potential umbrage. “Eh Geers?”

Geers wore a new suit and stood unyieldingly in front of the others, very much the Director.

“Have they hatched a swan or an ugly duckling?” Mrs. Tate-Allen asked him.

“I wouldn’t know. We only have time for practical work.”

“Isn’t this practical?” Osborne enquired.

Watling said, “I used to fly over here in the war.”

“Really?” said Vandenberg, without interest.

“North Atlantic patrols. When I was in Coastal.”

But nobody heard him: the helicopter had arrived. It hovered like a flustered bird over the parade-ground and then sank down on its hydraulic legs. Its rotors sliced the air for a minute and then stopped. The door opened, the Right Honourable James Ratcliff climbed down, the guard presented arms, Quadring saluted and Reinhart tripped forward on his dainty feet, shook hands and led the Minister to the assembled company in the porch. Ratcliff looked very well and newly bathed. He shook hands with Geers and beamed and smirked at the rest.

“How do you do, Doctor? It’s very good of you to harbour our little piece of equipment in your midst.”

Geers was transformed.

“We’re honoured, sir, to have work like this,” he said with his best smile. “Pure research among us rude mechanicals.”

Osborne and Reinhart exchanged glances.

“Shall we go in?” asked Osborne.

“Yes, indeed.” The Minister smiled on all. “Hallo Vandenberg, nice of you to come.”

Geers stepped forward and grasped the door handle.

“Shall I?” He looked challengingly at Reinhart.

“Do,” said Reinhart.

“It’s this way, Minister.” And Geers shepherded them in.

The lights were all working now in the computer room and Geers did the honours of display with some pride. Reinhart and Osborne left him to it and Fleming watched sourly from the control desk. Geers introduced Bridger and Christine and—quite casually—Fleming.

“You know Dr. Fleming, Minister, who designed it.”

“The designers are in the constellation of Andromeda,” said Fleming.

Ratcliff laughed as if this was a very good joke.

“Well, you’ve done a pretty big job. I see why you all wanted so much money.”

The party moved on. Mrs. Tate-Allen was much impressed by the neon lamps; the men in charcoal suits studied blue-painted cabinets of equipment with baffled interest, and Fleming was forced to fall in at the rear with Osborne.

“There’s no business like show business.”

“It’s a compliment in fact,” said Osborne. “They entrust it to you: the knowledge, the investment, the power.”

“Bigger fools they.”

But Osborne did not agree. After they had been round the memory cylinder, the whole group gathered in front of the control desk.

“Well?” said Ratcliff.

Fleming picked up a sheet of figures from the desk.

“These,” he said, so quietly that hardly anyone could hear him. “These are the end groups of the data found in the message.”

Reinhart repeated it for him, took the paper and explained, “We’re now going to pass these in through the input console and trigger the whole machine off.”

He passed the sheet to Christine who sat down at the teletype machine and started tapping the keys. She looked very deft and pretty: people admired. When she had finished, Fleming and Bridger threw switches and pressed buttons on the control desk and waited. The Minister waited. A steady hum came from the back of the computer, otherwise there was silence. Somebody coughed.

“All right, Dennis?” Fleming asked.

Then the display lamps began to flicker.

It was very effective at first. Explanations were given: it showed the progress of the data through the machine; as soon as it had finished its calculations it would print out its finding on that wide roll of paper there....

But nothing happened; an hour later they were still waiting. At five o’clock the Minister climbed unsmiling into his helicopter, rose into the sky and was carried southwards. At six o’clock the remaining visitors drove to the station to catch the evening train for Aberdeen, accompanied by a tight-lipped and crestfallen Reinhart. At eight o’clock Bridger and Christine went off duty.

Fleming stayed on in the empty control-room, listening to the hum of the equipment and gazing at the endlessly flashing panel. As soon as she could, Judy joined him and sat with him at the control desk. He didn’t speak, even to swear or complain, and she could think of nothing adequate to say.

The hands of the clock on the wall moved round to ten, and then the lamps on the panel stopped flickering. Fleming sighed and moved to get up to go. Judy touched his sleeve with her finger-tips to suggest some sort of comfort. He turned to kiss her, and as he did so the output printer clattered into life.

Reinhart stopped overnight in Aberdeen, where a Scottish Universities seminar was taking place. The seminar was an excuse; he did not want to spend the rest of the journey face to face with the politely condescending company from London. His one consolation was that he met an old friend, Madeleine Dawnay, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh. She was perhaps the best biochemist in the country, immensely capable and reassuring and with all the charm, her students said, of a test-tube-full of dried skin. They talked for a long time, and then he went off to his hotel bedroom and worried.

In the morning he had a telegram from Thorness: FULL HOUSE. ACES ON KINGS. COME QUICK. FLEMING. He cancelled his plane reservation to London, bought a new railway ticket and set off north-west again, taking Dawnay with him.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“I hope to heaven it means something’s happened. The damn thing cost several million and I thought last night we were going to be the laughing-stock of Whitehall.”

He did not know quite why he was taking her. Possibly to give himself some moral support.

When he telephoned the camp from Thorness station to ask for a car and an extra pass, his call was put straight through to Quadring’s office.

“Damn scientists,” said Quadring to his orderly. “They’re in and out as if it were a fairground.”

He took the pass the orderly had written and walked down the corridor to Geers’s office. In the ordinary way he was a pleasant enough character, but Judy had been in to report the affair of the shooting and he was on edge and tetchy.

“I wonder if you’d sign this, sir?” He put the pass down on Geers’s desk.

“Who is it?”

“Someone Professor Reinhart’s bringing in.”

“Have you checked him?”

“It’s a ‘her’ actually.”

“What’s her name?” Geers squinted down at the card through his bifocals.

“Professor Dawnay.”

“Dawnay! Madeleine Dawnay?” He looked with new interest. “You don’t have to worry about her. I was at Manchester with her, before she moved on.”

He smiled reminiscently as he signed the pass. Quadring shuffled uneasily.

“It’s not easy keeping track of these Ministry of Science bods.”

“As long as they stick to their own building.” Geers handed the pass back.

“They don’t.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Bridger for one. He goes out in his boat a lot to the island.”

“He’s a bird-watcher.”

“We think it’s something else. My own guess is he takes papers with him.”

“Papers?” Geers looked up sharply with a glint of spectacles. “Have you any proof?”

“No.”

“Well then—”

“Would it be possible to have him searched at the landing-jetty?”

“Suppose he hadn’t got anything?”

“I’d be surprised.”

“And we’d look pretty foolish, wouldn’t we?” Geers took off his glasses and stared discomfortingly at the major. “And if he was up to something we’d put him on his guard.”

“He is up to something.”

“Then get some facts to go on.”

“I don’t see how I can.”

“You’re responsible for the security of this establishment.”

“Yes, sir.”

Geers gave it his full attention for a moment.

“What about Miss Adamson?”

Quadring told him.

“Nothing since?”

“Not that we can see, sir.”

“Hm.” He closed the legs of his spectacles with a snap that dismissed the matter. “If you’re going over to the computer building you might give Professor Dawnay her pass.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then send someone. And give her my regards. In fact, if they’re through at a reasonable hour they might look in for a sherry.”

“Very good, sir.” Quadring backed gingerly away from the desk.

“And Fleming, I suppose, if he’s with them.”

“Yes, sir.”

He got as far as the door. Geers was looking wistfully at the ceiling, thinking of Madeleine Dawnay.

“I wish we did more primary research ourselves. One gets tired of development work.”

Quadring made his escape.

In the end it was Judy who took the pass. Dawnay was in the computer control-room, being shown round by Reinhart and Bridger while Christine tried to raise Fleming on the camp phone. Judy handed over the pass and was introduced.

“Public Relations? Well, I’m glad they let girls do something,” said Dawnay in a brisk, male voice. She looked hard but not unkindly at everyone. Reinhart fluttered a little; he seemed unusually nervous.

“What did John want?”

“I don’t know,” Judy told him. “At least, I don’t quite follow it.”

“He sent me a telegram.”

After a minute Fleming hurried in.

“Ah, there you are.”

Reinhart pounced on him.

“What’s happened?”

“Are we alone?” Fleming asked, looking coolly at Dawnay.

Reinhart introduced them irritably and fidgeted from one tiny foot to the other while she quizzed Fleming about the computer.

“Madeleine’s fully in the picture.”

“She’s lucky. I wish I were.” Fleming fished from his pocket a folded sheet of paper and handed it to the Professor.

“What’s this?” Reinhart opened it.

Fleming watched him with amusement, like a small boy playing a trick on a grown-up. The paper bore several lines of typed figures.

“When did it print this?” Reinhart asked.

“Last night, after you’d all gone. Judy and I were here.”

“You didn’t tell me.” Bridger edged in reproachfully.

“You’d gone off.”

Reinhart frowned at the figures. “It means something to you?”

“Don’t you recognise it?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“Isn’t it the relative spacings of the energy levels in the hydrogen atom?”

“Is it?” Reinhart handed the paper to Dawnay.

“You mean,” Bridger asked, “it suddenly came out with that?”

“Yes. It could be.” Dawnay read slowly through the figures. “They look like the relative frequencies. What an extraordinary thing.”

“The whole business is a little out of the ordinary,” said Fleming.

Dawnay read through the figures again, and nodded.

“I don’t see the point.” Judy wondered if she was being unusually obtuse.

“It looks as if someone out there,” Dawnay pointed up to the sky, “has gone to a lot of trouble to tell us what we already know about hydrogen.”

“If that’s really all.” Judy looked at Fleming, who said nothing.

Madeleine Dawnay turned to Reinhart. “Bit of a disappointment.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Fleming said quietly. “It’s a starting point. The thing is, do we want to go on?”

“How can you go on?” Dawnay asked.

“Well, hydrogen is the common element of the universe. Yes? So this is a piece of very simple universal information. If we don’t recognise it, there’s no point in the machine continuing. If we do, then he can proceed to the next question.”

“What next question?”

“We don’t know yet. But this, I bet you, is the first move in a long, long game of questions and answers.” He took the paper from her and handed it to Christine. “Push this into the intake.”

“Really?” Christine looked from him to Reinhart.

“Really.”

Reinhart remained silent, but something had happened to him; he was no longer dejected and his eyes twinkled and were alert. The rest of them stood in a silent thoughtful group while Christine sat down to the input teletype and Bridger adjusted settings on the control desk.

“Now,” he said. He was even quieter than Fleming, and Judy could not decide whether he was jealous or apprehensive or merely trying, like the others, to work it out.

Christine tapped rapidly at the keyboard and the computer hummed steadily behind its metal panelling. It really did seem to be all around them—massive, impassive and waiting.

Dawnay looked at the rows of blue cabinets, the rhythmically oscillating lights with less awe then Judy felt, but with interest. “Questions and answers—do you believe that?”

“If you were sitting up among the stars, you couldn’t ask us directly what we know. But this chap could.” Fleming indicated the computer control racks. “If it’s designed and programmed to do it for them.”

Dawnay turned to Reinhart again.

“If Dr. Fleming’s on the right line, you really have something tremendous.”

“Fleming has an instinct for it,” said Reinhart, watching Christine.

When she had finished typing, nothing happened. Bridger fiddled with the control desk knobs while the others waited. Fleming looked puzzled.

“What’s up, Dennis?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could be wrong,” said Judy.

“We haven’t been yet.”

As Fleming spoke the lamps on the display panel started to flicker, and a moment later the output printer went into action with a clatter. They gathered round it watching the wide white streamer of paper inching up over its roller, covered in lines of figures.

One of the long low cupboards in Geers’s office was a cocktail cabinet. The Director stood four glasses on top and produced a bottle of gin from the lower shelf.

“What Reinhart and his people are doing is terribly exciting.” He was wearing his second-best suit but his best manner for Dawnay’s benefit. “A little set-back yesterday, but I gather it’s all right now.”

Dawnay, submerged in one of the armchairs, looked up and caught Reinhart’s eye. Geers went on talking as he sprinkled bitters into one of the glasses.

“We’ve nothing but ironmongery here, really, out in this wilderness. We do a good deal of the country’s rocketry, of course, and there’s a lot of complex stuff goes into that, but I wouldn’t mind changing into some old clothes and getting back to lab work. Is that pink enough?”

He placed the filled glass on his desk on a level with Dawnay’s ear. Its base was tucked into a little paper mat to prevent it from marking the polish.

“Fine, thanks.” Dawnay could just see it and reach it without getting up. Geers reached into the cabinet for another bottle.

“And sherry for you, Reinhart?” Sherry was poured. “One gets so stuck behind an executive desk. Cheers.... Nice to see you again, Madeleine. What have you been up to?”

“D.N.A., chromosomes, the origin of life caper.” Dawnay spoke gruffly. She put her glass back on the desk and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke down her nose like a man. “I’ve got into a bit of a cul-de-sac. I was just going away to think when I met Ernest.”

“Stay and think here.” Geers gave her a nice smile and then switched it off. “Where’s Fleming got to?”

“He’ll be over in a minute,” said Reinhart.

“You’ve a bright boy, though an awkward one.” Geers informed him. “In fact you’ve a bit of an awkward squad altogether, haven’t you?”

“We’ve also got results.” Reinhart was unruffled. “It’s started printing out.”

Geers raised his eyebrows.

“Has it indeed? What’s it printing?”

They told him.

“Very odd. Very odd indeed. And what happened when you fed it back?”

“A whole mass of figures came out.”

“What are they?”

“No idea. We’ve been going over them, but so far...” Reinhart shrugged.

Fleming walked in with a perfunctory sort of knock.

“This the right party?”

“Come in, come in,” said Geers, as if to a promising but gauche student. “Thirsty?”

“When am I not?”

Fleming was carrying the print-out sheets. He threw them down on the desk to take his drink.

“Any joy?” Reinhart asked.

“Not a crumb. There’s something wrong with him, or wrong with us.”

“Is that the latest?” asked Geers, straightening the papers and bending over them to look. “You’ll have to do a lot of analysis on this, won’t you? If we can help in any way—”

“It ought to be simple.” Fleming was subdued and preoccupied as though he was trying to see something just beyond him. “I’m sure there ought to be something quite easy. Something we’d recognise.”

“There was a section here—” Reinhart took the sheets and shuffled through them. “Seems vaguely familiar. Have another look at that lot, Madeleine.”

Madeleine looked.

“What sort of thing do you expect?” Geers asked Fleming, as he poured a drink.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the game is yet.”

“You wouldn’t be interested in the carbon atom, would you?” Dawnay looked up out of her chair with a faint smile.

“The carbon atom!”

“It’s not expressed the way we’d put it; but, yes, it could be a description of the structure of carbon.” She blew smoke out of her nose. “Is that what you meant, Ernest?”

Reinhart and Geers bent over the sheets again.

“I’m a bit rusty, of course,” said Geers.

“But it could be, couldn’t it?”

“Yes, it could be. I wonder if there’s anything else.”

“There won’t be anything else,” Fleming said. He seemed very sure, and no longer preoccupied. “Take it from the beginning. Think of the hydrogen question. He’s asking us what form of life we belong to. All these other figures are other possible ways of making living creatures. But we don’t know anything about them, because life on this earth is based on the carbon atom.”

“Well, it’s a theory,” said Reinhart. “What do we do now? Feed back the figures relating to carbon?”

“If we want him to know what stuff we’re made of. He won’t forget.”

“Aren’t you presupposing an intelligence?” said Geers, who had no time for fancy stuff.

“Look.” Fleming turned to him. “The message we picked up did two things. It stipulated a design. It then gave us a lot of basic information to feed into the computer when we’d built it. We didn’t know what that information was at the time, but we’re beginning to know now. With what was in the original program, and what we tell him, he can learn anything he likes about us. And he can learn to act upon it. If that’s not an intelligence, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s a very useful machine,” Dawnay said.

Fleming turned on her. “Just because it doesn’t have protoplasm, no chemist can imagine it as a thinking agency!”

Dawnay sniffed.

“What are you afraid of, John?” Reinhart asked.

“Its purpose. It hasn’t been put here for fun. It hasn’t been put here for our benefit.”

“You’ve a neurosis about it,” said Dawnay.

“You think so?”

“You’ve been given a windfall; use it.” She appealed to Reinhart. “If you use Dr. Fleming’s method and feed back the carbon formula, you may get something else. You may build up to more complicated structures, and you’ve got a marvellous calculating machine to handle them. That’s all it is. Apply it.”

“John?” Reinhart turned to Fleming.

“You can count me out.”

“Would you like to tackle it, Madeleine?” said the Professor.

“Why don’t you?” she asked him.

“It is a long step from astronomy to bio-synthesis. If your university can spare you....”

“We can accommodate you.” Geers, when he moved, moved in quickly. “You said you were at a dead end.”

Dawnay considered.

“Would you work with me, Dr. Fleming?”

Fleming shook his head. “There’s something needs thinking out first—before we start at all.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ve gone as far as I want. Further, in fact, to show I could deliver the goods. But for me the road ends here.”

Reinhart opened his mouth to speak, but Fleming turned away.

“All right,” Reinhart said. “Will you tackle it, Madeleine?”

They made the rest of the arrangements when Fleming had gone.

Dawnay moved in the following week and set to work on the computer, with Bridger and Christine helping her and Geers now full of enthusiasm and attention. Fleming returned to London and Judy saw nothing of him; being a serving officer tied by oath, she had to stay where she was ordered. In a way it was a relief to be free of their equivocal relationship. After their one night in his chalet she had kept him, as far as possible, at arm’s length, for she was torn between the instinct of being in love and the feeling that she did not want him to take her for something other than she was. At least while he was away she did not have to report on him—only on Bridger, and that she minded less.

Bridger gave no clue to any of them. Judy kept away from the moor and Quadring’s patrols found nothing. Bridger himself grew steadily more miserable and withdrawn. He worked competently but without enthusiasm, spending his spare time watching the late migrations from the Thorholm nestings.

Autumn darkened into winter. Back in London, Fleming settled down to check the entire message and all his original calculations. Monitoring of the signal went on from Bouldershaw Fell, but it was now only routine. The code was always the same; Fleming could find nothing in all his workings to give him a line on what he feared.

At Thorness Dawnay made better progress.

“The boy was right about one thing,” she told Reinhart. “The question and answer business. We fed in the carbon atom figures and immediately it began to print out stuff on the structure of protein molecules.”

When she fed that back, it started asking more questions. It offered the formulas of a variety of different structures based on proteins, and it clearly wanted to be given more information about them. Dawnay set her department at Edinburgh to work. Between them they put back into the machine everything they knew about cell formation. By the New Year it had given them the molecular structure of haemoglobin.

“Why haemoglobin?” asked Judy, who had followed her to Edinburgh in an attempt to understand what was happening.

“The haemoglobin in the blood carries the electricity supply to your brain.”

“He offered you that as one of a set of alternatives?” Reinhart asked. They had all three met in Dawnay’s study in one of the old grey university buildings because she had told them she wanted a Ministry decision.

“Yes,” she said. “As before. And we fed that one back.”

“So now it knows what our brains run on.”

“It knows a great deal more than that by now.”

Reinhart stroked his chin with his little fingers.

“Why does it want to?”

“You’re under Fleming’s influence, aren’t you?” Dawnay said reprovingly. “It doesn’t ‘want to know’ anything. It calculates logical responses from information which we give it, and from what it already possesses. Because it’s a calculating machine.”

“Is that all?” Judy, from what little she knew, shared Reinhart’s doubts.

“Let’s try to be scientific about it, shall we?” Dawnay said. “Not mystical.”

“Professor Reinhart, do you... ?”

Reinhart looked uncomfortable. “Fleming would say it wants to know what sort of intelligence it’s up against—what sort of computers we are, how big our brains are, how we feed them, what sort of beings we house them in.”

“Young Fleming’s emotionally disturbed, if you ask me,” said Dawnay. She waved her hand towards shelves piled with folders of paper. “We’ve got so much now we can hardly see daylight, but I’ve an idea what it’s all about, which is why I wanted you. I think it’s given us the basic plan of a living cell.”

“A what?”

“Not that it’s any good to us. We have this huge amount of numbers. It’s far too complex for us ever to understand fully.”

“Why should it be?”

“Look at the size of it! We can recognise odd bits—odd bits of chromosome structure and so on—but it would take years to analyse it all.”

“If that’s what you’re meant to do.”

“What do you mean?”

Reinhart stroked his chin again. His fingers, Judy noticed, had little dimples on them. There was something very comforting and humane about him, even when he was out of his depth in theory.

“I want to talk to Fleming and Osborne,” he said.

He got them together, eventually, in Osborne’s office. By that time he had all the facts at his fingertips and he wanted action. Fleming looked older and slack, as though the elastic inside him had run down. His face was pouchy and his eyes bloodshot.

Osborne sat back elegantly and listened to Reinhart.

“Professor Dawnay’s come up with what appears to be the detailed chromosome structure of a cell.”

“A living cell?”

“Yes. It’s something we’ve never known before: the order in which the nucleic acid molecules are arranged.”

“So you could actually build one up?”

“If we can use the computer as a control, and if we can make a chemical device to act on the instructions as they come up—in fact, if we can make a D.N.A. synthesiser—then I think we can begin to build living tissue.”

“That’s what the biologists have been after for years, isn’t it?”

“You really want to let it make a living organism?” Fleming asked.

“Dawnay wants to try,” said Reinhart. “Fleming doesn’t. What do we do?”

“Why don’t you?” Osborne asked Fleming quite casually, as though it was a matter of passing interest.

“Because we’re being pushed into this by a form of compulsion,” said Fleming wearily. “I’ve been saying that ever since the day we built the damn thing, and I can find nothing to make me think otherwise. Madeleine Dawnay imagines you can just use it as a piece of lab equipment: she’s a cheerful optimist. If she wants to play with D.N.A. synthesis, let her stay in her university and do it. Don’t let her use the computer. Or, if you must, at least wipe the memory first.”

“Reinhart?” Osborne turned languidly to the Professor. Whatever impression Fleming had made on him did not show.

“I don’t know,” said Reinhart. “I simply don’t know. It comes from an alien intelligence, but—”

“’We can always pull out the plug’?” Fleming quoted for him. “Look, we built it to prove the content of the message. Right? Well, we’ve done that. We operated it to discover its purpose. Now we know that too.”

“Do we?”

“I do! It’s an intellectual fifth column from another world—from another form of existence. It’s got the seeds of life in it, and also the seeds of destruction.”

“Have you any grounds at all for saying that?” asked Osborne.

“No tangible grounds.”

“Then how can we—?”

“All right, go on!” Fleming heaved himself up and made for the door. “Go on and see what happens—but don’t come crying to me!”