A for Andromeda

Seven Analysis

General Vandenberg by this time had his allied headquarters accommodated in a bomb-proof bunker under the Ministry of Defence. His functions as co-ordinator had gradually expanded until he was now virtual director of local air strategy. However little they liked this, Her Majesty’s Government submitted to it in the face of an international situation growing steadily worse: the operations room next to his private office was dominated by a wall-map of the world showing traces of an alarming number of orbital satellites of unknown potentiality. As well as the American and Russian vehicles, some of which certainly carried nuclear armament, there was an increasing traffic put up by other powers whose relations with each other and with the West were often near sparking-point. Public morality thinned like the atmosphere as men and machines rose higher, and year by year the uneasy truce which was supposed to control the upper air and the spaces above it came nearer to falling into anarchy.

Vandenberg, through the Ministry of Defence, now had call on all local establishments, including Thorness. He rode gently but with determination, and watched carefully what went on. When he received reports of Bridger’s death, he sent for Osborne.

Osborne’s position was now very different from what it had been in the early days of Bouldershaw Fell. Far from representing a ministry in the ascendant, he and Ratcliff now had to bow before the wishes of the war men, contriving as best they could to keep some say in their own affairs. Not that Osborne was easily ruffled. He stood before Vandenberg’s desk as immaculate and suave as ever.

“Sit down.” Vandenberg waved him to a chair. “Rest your feet.”

They went over the circumstances of Bridger’s death move by move as though they were playing a game of chess; the general probing, and Osborne on the defensive but denying nothing and making no excuses.

“You have to admit,” said Vandenberg at the end of it, “your Ministry’s snarled it up good and hard.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

Vandenberg pushed back his chair and went to look at his wall-map.

“We can’t afford to play schools, Osborne. We could use that machine. It’s built on military premises, with military aid. We could use it in the public interest.”

“What the hell do you think Reinhart’s doing?” Osborne was eventually ruffled. “I’m sure your people would like to get your hands on it. I’m sure we all seem anarchistic to you because we haven’t got drilled minds. I know there’s been a tragedy. But they’re doing something vitally important up there.”

“And we’re not?”

“You can’t suddenly stop them in their tracks.”

“Your Cabinet would say we can.”

“Have you asked them?”

“No. But they would.”

“At least—” Osborne calmed down again—“at least let us finish this present project, if we give you certain guarantees.”

As soon as he was back in his own office he telephoned Reinhart.

“For heaven’s sake patch up some sort of a truce with Geers,” he told him.

Reinhart’s meeting with the Director was depressingly similar to Osborne’s with Vandenberg, but Reinhart was a better strategist than Geers. After two grinding hours they sent for Judy.

“We’ve got to strengthen the security here, Miss Adamson.”

“You don’t expect me—?” She broke off.

Geers glinted at her through his spectacles and she turned for understanding to Reinhart.

“My position here would be intolerable. Everyone trusted me, and now I turn out to be a security nark.”

“I always knew that,” said Reinhart gently. “And Professor Dawnay has guessed. She accepts it.”

“Dr. Fleming doesn’t.”

“He wasn’t meant to,” said Geers.

“He accepted me as something else.”

“Everyone knows you had a job to do,” Reinhart looked unhappily at his fingers. “And everyone respects it.”

“I don’t respect it.”

“I beg your pardon?” Geers took off his glasses and blinked at her as if she had gone out of focus. She was trembling.

“I’ve hated it from the start. It was perfectly clear that everyone here was perfectly trustworthy, except Bridger.”

“Even Fleming?”

“Dr. Fleming’s worth ten of anyone else I’ve met! He needs protecting from his own indiscretion, and I’ve tried to do that. But I will not go on spying on him.”

“What does Fleming say?” Reinhart asked.

“He doesn’t talk to me since...”

“Where is he?” asked Geers.

“Drinking, I suppose.”

“Still on that, is he?” Geers raised his eyes to display hopelessness, and the gesture made Judy suddenly, furiously angry.

“What do you expect him to take to, after what’s happened? Bingo?” She turned again, with faint hope, to Reinhart. “I’ve grown very fond of—of all of them. I admire them.”

“My dear girl, I’m in no position...” Reinhart avoided her eyes. “It’s probably as well it is out in the open.”

Judy found she was standing to attention. She faced Geers.

“Can I be relieved?”

“No.”

“Then may I have a different assignment?”

“No.”

“Then may I resign my commission?”

“Not during a state of National Emergency.” Geers’s eyes, she noticed, were set too close together. They stared straight at her, expressionless with authority. “If it weren’t for your very good record, I’d say you were immature for this job. As it is, I think you’re merely unsettled by exposure to the scientific mind, especially such an ebullient and irresponsible mind as Fleming’s.”

“He’s not irresponsible.”

“No?”

“Not about important things.”

“The important things at this establishment are the means of survival. We’re under very great pressure.”

“To the military, all things are military,” said Reinhart icily. He walked across the room and looked out of the window, his little hands clasped uneasily behind his back. “It’s a bleak place here, you know. We all feel the strain of it.”

For some time after this outburst Geers was unusually agreeable. He did everything he possibly could for Dawnay, rushing through new equipment to replace what Fleming had damaged and generally identifying himself with what she was doing. Reinhart fought hard to retain his foothold and Judy went back to her duty with a sort of glum despair. She even screwed up her courage to see Fleming, but his room was empty and so were the three whisky bottles by his bed. With one exception, he spoke to no-one in the days that followed Bridger’s death.

Dawnay had gone straight back to work, with Christine to help her with the relatively simple calculations needed from the computer. Within a week they had another successful synthesis, and they were watching it, late in the evening, in the repaired microscope, when the door of the laboratory was pushed open and Fleming stood unsteadily inside.

Dawnay straightened up and looked at him. He wore no jacket or tie, his shirt was crumpled and dirty and he had seven days’ growth of stubble round his jaw. He might have been on the verge of delirium tremens.

“What do you want?”

He gave her a glazed stare and swayed a step forward into the room.

“Keep out of here, please.”

“I see you’ve new equipment,” he said thickly, with a fatuous twitching smile.

“That’s right. Now will you leave us?”

“Bridger’s dead.” He smiled stupidly at her.

“I know.”

“You go on as though nothing had happened.” It was difficult to understand what he said. “But he’s dead. He won’t come back any more.”

“We’ve all heard, Dr. Fleming.”

He swayed another pace into the room. “What you doing here?”

“This is private. Will you please go?” She got up and advanced grimly towards him. He stood blinking at her, the smile fading from his face.

“He was my oldest friend. He was a fool, but he was my—”

“Dr. Fleming,” she said quietly. “Will you go, or do I call the guards?”

He looked at her for a moment, as if trying to see her through mist, then shrugged and shuffled out. She followed him to the door and locked it behind him.

“We can do without that,” she said to Christine.

Fleming found his way back to his hut, took an unfinished bottle of whisky from his desk drawer and poured it down the sink. Then he fell on to his bed and slept for twenty-four hours. The following evening he shaved and bathed and started to pack.

The new experiment grew fantastically. Within a few hours Dawnay had to transfer it from its microscope slide to a small nutrient bath, and the following morning it had to be moved into a larger bath. It continued to double itself during the whole of the day that Fleming slept, and by the evening Dawnay was forced to appeal for help to Geers, who took over the problem with a proprietary air and caused his workshop wing to build a deep, electrically-heated tank with a drip-feed channel into its open top and an inspection window in the middle of its front panel. Towards dawn the new creature was lifted by four assistants from its outgrown bath and placed in the tank.

In its new environment it grew to about the size of a sheep and then stopped. It seemed perfectly healthy and harmless, but it was not pretty.

Reinhart came to a decision that morning and went to see Dawnay. She was in her laboratory still, checking the feed control at the top of the tank. He hovered around until she had finished.

“Is it still alive?”

“And kicking.” Apart from looking pale and taut around the eyes and mouth, she showed no sign of tiredness. “A day and a half since it was a smear on a slide: I told you there was no reason an organism shouldn’t grow as fast as you like if you can get enough food into it.”

“But it’s stopped growing now?” Reinhart peered respectfully into the inspection port, through which he could see a dark form moving in the murk of the tank.

“It seems to have a pre-determined size and shape,” Dawnay said, picking up a set of X-rays and handing them to him. “There’s nothing much to see from there. There’s no bone formation. It’s like a great jelly, but it’s got this eye and some sort of cortex—which looks like a very complicated nerve ganglia.”

“No other features?” Reinhart held up the X-rays and squinted at them.

“Possibly some rudimentary attempt at a pair of legs, though you could hardly call them more than a division of tissue.”

Reinhart put down the plates and frowned.

“How does it feed?”

“Takes it in through the skin. It lives in nutrient fluid and absorbs straight into its body cells. Very simple, very efficient.”

“And the computer?”

Dawnay looked surprised.

“What about the computer?”

“Has it reacted at all?”

“How could it?”

“I don’t know.” Reinhart frowned at her anxiously. “Has it?”

“No. It’s been entirely quiet.”

The Professor walked into the computer control room and back again, his head down, his gaze on his neat shoecaps as they twinkled before him. It was as yet early morning and very quiet. He clasped his hands behind him and spoke without looking up at Dawnay.

“I want Fleming back on this.”

Dawnay did not answer for a moment, then she said: “It’s perfectly under control.”

“Whose control?”

“Mine.”

He looked up at her with an effort.

“We’re on borrowed time, Madeleine. The people here want us out.”

“In the middle of this?”

“No. The Ministry have fought for that, but we’ve got to work as a team and show results.”

“Good grief! Aren’t those results?” Dawnay pointed a short, bony finger at the tank. “We’re in the middle of the biggest thing of the century—we’re making life!”

“I know,” Reinhart said, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. “But where is it taking us?”

“We’ve a lot to find out.”

“And we can’t afford any more accidents.”

“I can manage.”

“You’re not on your own, Madeleine.” Reinhart spoke with a kind of soft tenseness. “We’re all involved in this.”

“I can manage,” she repeated.

“You can’t divorce it from its origin—from the computer.”

“Of course I can’t. But Christine understands the computer, and I have her.”

“She understands the basic arithmetic, but there’s a higher logic, or so I think. Only Fleming understands that.”

“I’m not having John Fleming reeling in here, breaking up my work and my equipment.” Dawnay’s voice rose.

Reinhart regarded her quietly. He was still tense, but with a determination which had carried him a long way.

“We can’t all do what we want entirely.” He spoke so brusquely that Dawnay looked at him again in surprise. “I’m still in charge of this programme—just. And I will be so long as we work as a team and make sense. That means having Fleming here.”

“Drunk or sober?”

“Good God, Madeleine, if we can’t trust each other, who can we trust?”

Dawnay was about to protest, and then stopped.

“All right. So long as he behaves himself and sticks to his own side of the job.”

“Thank you, my dear.” Reinhart smiled.

When he left the laboratory he went straight to Geers.

“But Fleming has notified me that he’s leaving,” Geers said. “I’ve just sent Miss Adamson over to the computer to make sure he doesn’t deliver a parting shot.”

Fleming, however, was not at the computer. Judy stood in the control room, hesitating, when Dawnay came out to her.

“Hallo. Want to see Cyclops?”

“Why do you call it Cyclops?”

“Because of his physical characteristics.” Dawnay seemed completely relaxed. “Don’t they educate girls nowadays? Come along, he’s in here.”

“Must I?”

“Not interested?”

“Yes, but—”

Judy felt dazed. She had not taken in the progress of the experiment. For the past two days she had thought of almost nothing but Fleming and Bridger and her own hopeless position, and so far as she had any image at all of Dawnay’s creation, it was microscopic and unrelated to her own life. She followed the older woman through into the laboratory without thinking and without expecting anything.

The tank confused her slightly. It was something she had not reckoned with.

“Look inside,” said Dawnay.

Judy looked down in through the open top of the big tank, quite unprepared for what she was going to see. The creature was not unlike an elongated jellyfish, without limbs or tentacles but with a vague sort of bifurcation at one end and an enlargement that might be a head at the other. It floated in liquid, a twitching, quivering mass of protoplasm, its surface greeny-yellow, slimy and glistening. And in the middle of what might be its head was set—huge, lidless and colourless—an eye.

Judy felt violently sick and then panic-stricken. She turned away retching and stared at Dawnay as if she too were something in a nightmare, then she clamped her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.

She ran straight across the compound to Fleming’s hut, flung the door open and went inside.

Fleming was pushing some last things into a hold-all, his cases packed and standing on the floor. He looked across coldly at her as she stood panting and heaving in the doorway.

“Not again,” he said.

“John!” She could hardly speak at first. Her head was turning and singing and her throat felt full of phlegm. “John, you must come.”

“Come where?” He looked at her with blank hostility. The toll of the past week still showed in his pale skin and the dark pouches under his eyes, but he was calm and kempt and clearly again in full charge of himself.

Judy tried to steady her voice.

“To the lab.”

“For you?” It was a quiet sneer.

“Not for me. They’ve made something terrible. A sort of creature.”

“Why don’t you tell M.I.5?”

“Please.” Judy went up to him; she felt completely defenceless but she did not care what he said or did to her. He turned away to go on with his packing. “Please, John! Something horrible’s happening. You’ve got to stop it.”

“Don’t tell me what to do and what not to do,” he said.

“They’ve got this thing. This monstrous-looking thing with an eye. An eye!”

“That’s their problem.” He pushed an old sweater into the top of the bag and pulled the strings together to close it.

“John—you’re the only one...”

He pulled the bag off his bed and brushed past her with it to stack it with his cases. “Who’s fault’s that?”

Judy took a deep breath.

“I didn’t kill Bridger.”

“Didn’t you? Didn’t you put your gang on him?”

“I tried to warn you.”

“You tried to fool me! You made love to me—”

“I didn’t! Only once. I’m only human. I had a job—”

“You had a filthy job, and you did it marvellously.”

“I never spied on you. Bridger was different.”

“Dennis Bridger was my oldest friend and my best helper.”

“He was betraying you.”

“Betraying!” He looked at her briefly and then moved away and started sorting a collection of old bottles and glasses from a cupboard. “Take your official clichés somewhere else. Half this thing was Dennis’s. It was the work of his mind, and mine; it didn’t belong to you, or your bosses. If Dennis wanted to sell his own property, good luck to him. What business was it of yours?”

“I told you I didn’t like what I had to do. I told you not to trust me. Do you think I haven’t...”

Judy’s voice shook in spite of her.

“Oh, stop snivelling,” said Fleming. “And get out.”

“I’ll get out if you’ll go and see Professor Dawnay.”

“I’m leaving.”

“You can’t! They’ve got this horrible thing.” Judy put out a hand and held desperately on to his sleeve, but he shook her off and walked across to the door.

“Good-bye.” He turned the handle and opened it.

“You can’t walk out now.”

“Good-bye,” he said quietly, waiting for her to go.

She stood for a moment, trying to think of something else to say, and at that moment Reinhart appeared in the doorway.

“Hallo, John.” He looked from one to the other of them. “Hallo, Miss Adamson.”

She walked out between them without speaking, blinking her eyes to stop herself from crying. Reinhart turned after her as she went, but Fleming shut the door.

“Did you know about that woman?”

“Yes.”

Reinhart walked across to the bed and sat down on it. He looked old and tired.

“You couldn’t have told me?” Fleming said accusingly.

“No, John, I couldn’t.”

“Well.” Fleming opened drawers and shut them again, to make sure they were empty. “You can hire someone you can trust in my place.”

The Professor looked round the room.

“Can I have a drink?” He stroked the tiny fingers of one hand across his forehead to revive himself. The second interview with Geers had not been easy. “What makes you think I don’t trust you?”

“Nobody trusts us, do they?” Fleming rooted about among the discarded bottles. “Nobody takes a blind bit of notice what we say.”

“They take notice of what we do.”

“Brandy be all right?” Fleming found a drop in the bottom of a flask, and slopped it into a tumbler. “Oh yes, we’re very useful mechanics. But when it comes to the meaning of it—having an idea of what it’s about—they don’t want to know.”

He held the glass out.

“Have you a drop of water?” Reinhart asked.

“That we can do.”

“And you?” Reinhart nodded to the bottle.

Fleming shook his head.

“They think they’ve just got a convenient windfall,” he said, running water from his wash-basin tap. “And when we say this is the beginning of something much bigger they treat us like criminal lunatics. They put their watch-dogs on us—or their watch-bitches.”

“There’s no need to take it out on the girl.” Reinhart took the glass and drank.

“I’m not taking it out on anyone! If they can’t see that what we picked up by a sheer fluke is going to change all our lives, then let them find out in their own way. With any luck they’ll foul it up and nothing will come of it.”

“Something has come of it.”

“Dawnay’s monster?”

“You know about that?”

“It’s a sub-program, merely—an extension of the machine.” Fleming looked into an empty cupboard, but his attention was beginning to drift. “Dawnay thinks the machine’s given her power to create life; but she’s wrong. It’s given itself the power.”

“Then you must stay and control it, John.”

“It’s not my job.” He slammed the cupboard door. “I wish to God I’d never started it!”

“But you did. You have a responsibility.”

“To whom? To people who won’t listen to me?”

“I listen to you.”

“All right.” He roamed round the room, picking up oddments and throwing them into the waste-paper basket. “I’ll tell you what you’re up against: and then I go.”

“If you’ve anything constructive to say—” The drink had put some strength back into Reinhart’s voice.

“Look—” Fleming came to rest at the end of the bed and bent over it with his hands on the board at its end, leaning his weight on his arms and concentrating, at last, not on the room, but on what he was saying. “You’re all so busy asking ‘What?’—‘What have we got?’, ‘What does it do?’—no-one except me asks ‘Why?’. Why does an alien intelligence two hundred light-years away take the trouble to start this?”

“We can’t tell that, can we?”

“We can make deductions.”

“Guesses.”

“All right—if you don’t want to think it out!”

He straightened up and let his arms flop down to his sides. Reinhart sipped his brandy and waited for him. After a minute Fleming relaxed and grinned at him a little sheepishly.

“You old devil!” He sat down beside the Professor on the bed. “It’s a logical intelligence, wherever and whatever it is. It sends out a set of instructions, in absolute terms, which postulate a piece of technology, which we interpret as this computer. Why? Do you think they said: ‘Now, here’s an interesting piece of technical information. We’ll radio it out to the rest of the universe—they might find it useful’?”

“You obviously don’t think so.”

“Because where there’s intelligence, there’s will. And where there’s will there’s ambition. Supposing this was an intelligence which wanted to spread itself?”

“It’s as good a theory as the next.”

“It’s the only logical theory!” Fleming banged his fist on his thigh. “What does it do? It puts out a message that can be picked up and interpreted and acted upon by other intelligences. The technique we use doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t matter what make of radio set you buy—you get the same programmes. What matters is, we accept their programme: a programme which uses arithmetical logic to adapt itself to our conditions, or any other conditions for that matter. It knows the bases of life: it finds out which ours is. It finds out how our brains work, how our bodies are built, how we get our information—we tell it about our nervous system and our sensory organs. So then it makes a creature with a body and a sensory organ—an eye. It’s got an eye, hasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s probably pretty primitive, but it’s the next step. Dawnay thinks she’s using that machine, but it’s using her!”

“The next step to what?” Reinhart asked casually.

“I don’t know. Some sort of take-over.”

“Of us?”

“That’s the only possible point.”

Reinhart rose and, walking slowly and thoughtfully across the room, put his empty glass down with the others.

“I don’t know, John.”

Fleming appeared to understand his uncertainty.

“The first explorers must have seemed harmless enough to the native tribes.” He spoke gently. “Kind old missionaries with ridiculous topees, but they finished up as their rulers.”

“You may be right.” Reinhart smiled at him gratefully; it was like old times, with both of them thinking the same way. “It seems an odd sort of missionary.”

“This creature of Dawnay’s: what sort of brain has it?” Reinhart shrugged and Fleming went on, “Does it think like us, or does it think like the machine?”

“If it thinks at all.”

“If it has an eye, it has nerve-centres—it certainly has a brain. What kind of brain?”

“Probably primitive too.”

“Why?” Fleming demanded. “Why shouldn’t the machine produce an extension of its own intelligence: a sub-computer that functions the same way, except that it’s dependent on an organic body?”

“What would be the value?”

“The value of an organic body? A machine with senses? A machine with an eye?”

“You won’t persuade anyone else,” said Reinhart.

“You needn’t rub that in.”

“You’ll have to stay with it, John.”

“To do what?”

“To control it.” Reinhart spoke flatly: he had made the decision some hours before.

Fleming shook his head.

“How can we? It’s cleverer than we are.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t want any part of it.”

“That would suit it, according to your theory.”

“If you don’t believe me—”

Reinhart half raised a little hand. “I’m prepared to.”

“Then destroy it. That’s the only safe thing.”

“We’ll do that if necessary,” Reinhart said, and he walked to the door as if the matter were settled.

Fleming swung round to him.

“Will you? Do you really think you’ll be able to? Look what happened when I tried to stop it: Dawnay threw me out. And if you try to they’ll throw you out.”

“They want to throw me out anyhow.”

“They want what?” Fleming looked as if he had been hit.

“The powers that be want us all out of the way,” Reinhart said. “They just want to know we’re breaking up and they’ll move in.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“They think they know better how to use it. But as long as we’re here, John, we can pull out the plug. And we will, if it comes to it.” He looked from Fleming’s troubled face to the cases lying on the floor. “You’d better unpack those things.”

The meeting between Fleming and Dawnay was electrically charged, but nothing dramatic happened. Fleming was quiet enough, and Dawnay treated him with a kind of tolerant amusement.

“Welcome the wandering boy,” she said, and led him off to see the thing in the tank.

The creature floated peacefully in the middle of its nutrient bath; it had found the porthole and spent most of its time gazing out with its one huge lidless eye. Fleming stared back at it, but it gave no sign of registering what it saw.

“Can it communicate?”

“My dear boy,” Dawnay spoke as though she were humouring a very young student. “We’ve hardly had time to learn anything about him.”

“It has no vocal cords or anything?”

“No.”

“Um.” Fleming straightened up and looked in the top of the tank. “It might be a feeble attempt at a man.”

“A man? It doesn’t look like a man.”

Fleming strolled through to the computer room, where Christine was watching the display panel.

“Anything printing out?”

“No. Nothing.” Christine looked puzzled. “But there’s obviously something going on.”

The display lamps were winking steadily: it seemed that the machine was working away by itself without producing results.

For the next two or three days nothing happened, and then Fleming laid a magnetic coil from the machine round the tank. He did not—in fact, he could not—explain why he did it, but immediately the computer display began flashing wildly. Christine ran in from the laboratory.

“Cyclops is terribly excited! He’s threshing about in his tank.”

They could hear the bumping and slopping of the creature and its fluid from the other room. Fleming disconnected the coil and the bumping stopped. When they reconnected the coil, the creature reacted again, but still nothing came through on the output printer. Reinhart came over to see how they were getting on, and he and Dawnay and Fleming went over the routine once more; but they could make nothing of it.

The next day Fleming got them together again.

“I want to try an experiment,” he said.

He walked across to the display panel and stood with his back to it, between the two mysterious terminals which they had never used. After a minute he took the perspex safety-guards off the terminals and stood between them again. Nothing happened.

“Would you stand here a moment?” he asked Reinhart, and moved away to let the Professor take his place. “Mind you don’t touch them. There’s a thousand volts or more across there.”

Reinhart stood quite still with his head between the terminals and his back to the display panel.

“Feel anything?”

“A very slight—” Reinhart paused. “A sort of dizziness.”

“Anything else?”

“No”

Reinhart stepped away from the computer.

“All right now?”

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t feel anything now.”

Fleming repeated the experiment with Dawnay, who felt nothing.

“Different people’s brains give off different amounts of electrical discharge,” she said. “Mine’s obviously low, so’s Fleming’s. Yours must be higher, Ernest, because it induces a leak across the terminals. You try, Christine.”

Christine looked frightened.

“It’s all right,” said Fleming. “Stand with your head between those things, but don’t touch them or they’ll roast you.”

Christine took her place where the others had stood. For a moment it seemed to have no effect on her, then she went rigid, her eyes closed and she fell forward in a dead faint. They caught her and pulled her into a chair, and Dawnay lifted up her eyelids to examine her eyes.

“She’ll be all right. She’s only fainted.”

“What happened?” asked Reinhart. “Did she touch one?”

“No,” Fleming said. “All the same, I’d better put the guards back on.” He did so, and stood thinking while Dawnay and Reinhart revived Christine, ducking her head between her legs and dabbing her forehead with cold water.

“If there’s a regular discharge between those terminals and you introduce the electrical field of a working brain into it...”

“Hold on,” said Dawnay impatiently. “I think she’s coming round.”

“Oh, she’ll be O.K.” Fleming looked thoughtfully at the panel and the two sheathed contacts that stuck out from it. “It’ll change the current between them—modulate it. The brain will feel a reaction; there could be some pick-up, it could work both ways.”

“What are you talking about?” Reinhart asked.

“I’m talking about these!” Fleming flared up with excitement. “I think I know what they’re for. They’re a means of inputting and picking up from the machine.”

Dawnay looked doubtful. “This is just a neurotic young woman. Probably a good subject for hypnosis.”

“Maybe.”

Christine came round and blinked.

“Hallo.” She smiled at them vaguely. “Did I faint?”

“I’ll say you did,” said Dawnay. “You must have a hell of an electrical aura.”

“Have I?”

Reinhart gave her a glass of water. Fleming turned to her and grinned.

“You’ve just done a great service to science.” He nodded to the terminals. “You’d better keep away from between there.”

He turned back to Reinhart.

“The real point is that if you have the right sort of brain—not a human one—one that works in a way designed by the machine—then you have a link. That’s how it’s meant to communicate. Our way of feeding back questions as answers is terribly clumsy. All this business of printers—”

“Are you saying it can thought-read?” Dawnay asked scornfully.

“I’m saying two brains can communicate electrically if they’re of the right sort. If you get your creature and push his head between those terminals—”

“I don’t see how we can do that.”

“It’s what it wants! That’s why it’s restless—why they’re both restless. They want to get in touch. The creature’s in the machine’s electromagnetic field, and the machine knows the logical possibilities of it. That’s what he’s been working out, without telling us.”

“You can’t drag Cyclops out of his nutrient bath,” Dawnay said. “He’ll die.”

“That must have been thought of.”

“You could rig up an electro-encephalograph,” said Reinhart. “The kind they use for mental analysis. Put a set of electric pads on Cyclops’s head and run a co-axial cable from there to the terminals to carry the information. You’ll have to put it through a transformer, or you’ll electrocute him.”

“What does that do?” Dawnay looked at him sceptically.

“It puts the computer in touch with its sub-intelligence,” said Fleming.

“To serve what purpose?”

“To serve its purpose.” He turned away from them and paced up the room.

Dawnay waited for Reinhart to speak, but the old man stood obstinately, frowning down at his hands.

“Feeling better now?” he asked Christine.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Do you think you could rig up something like that?”

“I think so.”

“Dr. Fleming will help you. Won’t you, John?”

Fleming stood at the far end of the room, the banks of equipment rising massively behind him.

“If that’s what you really want,” he said.

“The alternative,” said Reinhart, more to Dawnay and himself than to Fleming, “is to pack up and hand over. We haven’t much choice, have we?”