A for Andromeda

Four Anticipation

No-one ever went to Thorness for fun. The quickest way from London took twelve hours, by air to Aberdeen and then by fast diesel across the Highlands to Gairloch on the west coast. Thorness was the first station north of Gairloch, but there was nothing there but a small decaying village, the wild rocky coast and the moors. The Research Establishment covered a headland facing out to the wide gap of water between the Isle of Skye and the Isle of Lewis, and was fenced in to the landward side by tall link wiring topped with barbed wire. The entrance was flanked by guard-huts and guards, and the fence and cliff-top were patrolled by soldiers with dogs. To seaward lay the grey Atlantic water, an island inhabited by birds, and an occasional Royal Naval patrol launch. It was all green and grey and brown and prone to clouds, and, apart from periodical noises from inside the camp, it was a silent place.

It was raining when Reinhart and Fleming arrived. A black staff car driven by a young woman in green uniform met them at the station and splashed along the open moorland road to the gates of the camp. There they were checked in by a sergeant of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who phoned the Director to let him know they were on the way.

The main offices were in a long, narrow one-storey building standing in the middle of the open compound. Although it was new and modern in design, it still had something of the traditional, bleak look of a barracks; but the inside of the Director’s office was a very different matter. The ebony floor shone, the lights were hooded by white streamlined shapes, windows were curtained to the floor and maps and charts on the walls were framed in polished wood. The Director’s desk was wide and beautiful: behind it sat a man with a narrow, lined face, and on it stood a small plaque stating, in neat black letters, DR. F. T. N. GEERS.

He greeted them with politeness but without enthusiasm, and with a patently false deprecation of what he was doing.

“You’ll find it a very dull place here,” he said, offering them cigarettes out of the polished nose-cap of a rocket. “We know each other by repute, of course.”

Reinhart sat warily on one of the visitors’ chairs, which were so low that he could hardly see the Director behind his desk.

“We’ve corresponded, I think, over missile tracking.” He had to crane up to speak; it was obviously done on purpose. Fleming regarded the arrangement and smiled.

A physicist by training, Geers had for years been a senior scientific executive on defence projects and was now more like a commanding officer than a scientist. Somewhere beneath the martinet’s uniform a disappointed research man lay hidden, but this only made him more envious of other people’s work and more irritated by the mass of day-to-day detail that fell upon him.

“It’s about time you got your job behind barbed wire, from all I hear.” He was peevish, but able; he had plans worked out for them. “It’s going to be difficult, of course. We can’t give you unlimited facilities.”

“We don’t ask—” began Reinhart.

Fleming interrupted. “The priorities have been fixed, I understood.”

Geers gave him a sharp, cold look and flicked ash into a tray made from a piston casting.

“You’ll have certain hours set aside on the main computer. You’ll have your own work-block and living-quarters for your team. They’ll be within our perimeter and you’ll be under our surveillance, but you’ll have passes and you’ll be free to come and go as you wish. Major Quadring is in charge of our security, and I’m in charge of all research projects.”

“Not ours,” said Fleming, without looking at Reinhart.

“Mine are more mundane but more immediate tasks.” Geers, so far as possible, tried to avoid Fleming and addressed himself to the Professor. “Yours is a Ministry of Science affair—more idealistic, though perhaps a little hit and miss.”

There was a framed photograph, on one corner of his desk, of his wife and two small children.

“I wonder how they get on?” Fleming said to Reinhart when they left.

It was still pouring outside. One of Geers’s assistants led them round the compound, across the wet grass, along concrete paths between rows of low bunker-like buildings half buried in the ground, and up to the launching area at the top of the headland.

“It’s quite calm here to-day,” he said, as they bent their heads against the sweeping rain. “It can blow a gale as soon as look at you.”

Several small rockets rested on their tilted racks, swathed in nylon covers, pointing out to sea, and one larger one stood vertical on the main launching pad, looking heavy and earthbound lashed to its scaffold.

“We don’t go in for the really big stuff here. These are all interceptors; a lot of ability packed into a little space. It’s all highly classified, of course. We don’t encourage visitors in the normal way.”

The main computer was an impressive affair, housed in a big laboratory building. It was an American importation, three times the size of anything they had used before. The duty staff gave Fleming a timetable with his sessions marked on it; they seemed friendly enough though not particularly interested. There was also an empty office building for their own use, and a number of pre-fabricated chalets for living-quarters—small and bare but clean and fitted out with service furniture.

They squelched in their sodden shoes across to the personnel area and were shown the senior staff mess and lounge, the shop, laundry and garage, the cinema and post office. The camp was completely self-supporting: there was nothing to go out for but views of heather and sky.

For the first two or three months only the basic unit moved up: Fleming, Bridger, Christine, Judy and a few junior assistants. Their offices bulged with calculations, plans, blue-prints and odd pieces of experimental lash-up equipment. Fleming and Bridger had long all-night sessions over wiring circuits and electronic components, and slowly the building filled up with more and more research and design assistants and with draughtsmen and engineers.

Early the following spring a firm of Glasgow contractors appeared on the site and festooned the area with boards saying MACINTYRE & SONS. A building for the new super-computer, as Fleming’s brain-child was called, was put up inside the perimeter but away from the rest of the camp, and lorry-loads of equipment arrived and disappeared inside it.

The permanent staff viewed all this with lively but detached interest and went on with their own projects. Every week or so there would be a roar and a flash from the launching pads as another quarter of a million pounds of tax-payers’ money went off into the air. The moorland sheep and cattle would stampede in a half-hearted sort of way, and there would be a few days of intense activity inside the plotting rooms. Apart from that it was as quiet as an undiscovered land and, when the rain lifted, incredibly beautiful.

The junior members of Reinhart’s team mixed in happily with the defence scientists and the soldiers guarding them, eating and drinking and going on excursions together and sailing together in small boats on the bay; but Bridger and Fleming walked on their own and were known as the heavenly twins. When they were not either in the computer building or the offices they were usually in one or other of their huts, working. Occasionally Fleming shut himself up with a problem and Bridger took a motor-boat out to the bird island, Thorholm, with a pair of field-glasses.

Reinhart operated from London, paying periodic visits but mostly orbiting round Whitehall, pushing through plans, permits, budgets and the endless reports required by the government. Somehow everything they wanted they got fast and there were few delays. Osborne, Reinhart said modestly, was a past master.

Only Judy was at a loose end. Her office was apart from the others, in the main administrative block, and her living quarters were with the women defence scientists. Fleming, though perfectly amiable, had no time to spend with her; Bridger and Christine went to some lengths to miss her. She managed to keep a general tally on what was going on, and she allowed some of the army officers to take her about, but otherwise there was nothing. During the long winter evenings she took to tapestry and clay modelling and acquired a reputation for being arty, but in reality she was just bored.

When the new computer was nearly finished, Fleming gave her a conducted tour of it. His own attitude was a mixture of deprecation and awe; he could be completely wrong about it, or it could be something unimaginable and uncanny. The chief impression he gave was of fatigue; he was desperately tired now, and tiredly desperate. The machine itself was indeed something. It was so big that instead of being housed in a room, the control room was built inside it.

“We’re like Jonah in the belly of the whale,” he told her, pointing to the ceiling. “The cooling unit’s up there—a helium liquefier. There’s a constant flow of liquid helium round the core.”

Inside the heavy double fire-doors was an area the size of a ballroom, with a ceiling-high wall of equipment dividing it across the centre. Facing that, and with its back to the doors, was the main control desk, with a sort of glorified typing desk on one side and a printing machine on the other. Both the typing desk and the printer were flanked by associated tape decks and punch-card equipment. The main lights were not yet working: there was only a single bulb on the control desk and a number of riggers’ lamps hanging from the equipment rack. The room was semi-underground and had no windows. It was like a cave of mystery.

“All that,” said Fleming, pointing to the wall of equipment facing them, “is the control unit. This is the input console.”

He showed her the teletype keyboard, the magnetic tape scanner and the punched-card unit. “He was intended to have some sort of sensory magnetic system, but we’ve modified it to scan transcript. Easier for mortals with eyes.”

“He?”

Fleming looked at her oddly.

“I call him ‘he’ because he gives me the sense of a mind. Of a person almost.”

She had lived so long on the fringe of it that she had grown used to the idea. She had forgotten the shiver that went through her at Bouldershaw Fell when the message first came to them out of space. There had been so many alarms and excursions that the issue had become clouded, and in any case the message itself had been reduced to mundane terms of buildings and wiring and complicated man-made equipment. But standing there beside Fleming, who seemed not only tired but possessed and driven on by some kind of compulsion from outside, it was impossible not to sense an obscure, alien power lurking in the dim room. It merely touched her and passed away. It did not live in her brain as it seemed to live in his, but it made her shiver again.

“And this is the output unit,” said Fleming, who did not appear to notice what she had felt. “His normal thought processes are in binary arithmetic, but we make him print out in denary so that we can read it straight off.”

The wall of equipment in front of them was broken by a facia of display panels.

“What’s that?” asked Judy, pointing to an array of several hundred tiny neon bulbs set in rows between two perspex-sheathed metal plates that stood out at right-angles from the cabinet.

“That’s all the control unit. The lamps are simply a progress display device. They show the state of data going through the machine.”

“Has any gone through yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“You seem sure it will all work.”

“I’d never considered it not doing. It would be pointless for them to send a design for something that didn’t work.” The certainty in his voice was not simply his personal arrogance; there was the effect of something else speaking through him.

“If you understand it right.”

“Yes, I understand it. Most of it.” He waved a hand at the sheathed metal plates. “I don’t quite know what those are for. They’re electric terminals with about a thousand volts between them, which is why we put safety covers on. They were in the design and I expect we’ll learn how to use them. They’re probably some sort of sensing apparatus.”

Again, he seemed quite sure of it all, and quite unbaffled by its complexity. It was as if his brain had long been prepared and waiting for it: Judy thought how aching and empty he must have felt the year before when he was talking about a breakthrough and knocking down the railings. Not that he looked any happier now. She remembered that Bridger had said, “John’ll never be happy.”

Everything else seemed comparatively matter-of-fact as they walked round the room.

“The way it works,” said Fleming, “is, you teletype the data in—that’s the quickest way we have. The control unit decides what to do. The arithmetic units do the calculating—calling on the memory storage as they need, and putting new information into memory—and the answer comes out on the printer. The highway ducts are under the floor and the arithmetic units are along the side walls. It’s quite a conventional system really, but the conventionality ends there. It has a speed and capacity that we can hardly imagine.

There was complete silence around them. Shining rows of metal cabinets stood on each side of them, hiding their secrets, and the blank face of the control panel stared unseeingly at them in the dim light. Fleming stood casually looking round, seeming as much part of it as he was part of his car when driving.

“He’ll look prettier when he’s working,” he said, and took her round to the area behind the control racks.

This was a large semi-circular room, as dimly lighted as the other, with a huge metal-clad column rising through the centre.

“That’s the real guts of it: the memory storage.” He opened a panel in the lower wall of the column and shone an inspection lamp inside. “There’s a nice little job in molecular electronics for you. The memory is in the core and the core is held in a total vacuum to within a degree or two of absolute zero. That’s where the liquid helium comes in.”

Judy, peering in, could see a cube of what looked like metal about three foot square sealed in a glass tube and surrounded by cooling ducts. Fleming spoke mechanically, as if giving a lecture.

“Each core is built up of alternate wafers of conducting and non-conducting material half-a-thou thick, criss-crossed into a honeycomb. That gives you a complete yes-no gate circuit on a spot of metal you can hardly see.”

“Is that the equivalent of a brain cell?”

“If you like.”

“And how many are there?”

“The core’s a three-meter cube. That makes several millions of millions. And there are six cores.”

“It’s bigger than a human brain.”

“Oh yes. Much bigger. And faster. And more efficient.”

He closed the door-panel and said no more about it. She tried to imagine how it would really work, but the effort was as far beyond her as the understanding of matter; it was too vast and unfamiliar to visualise. She congratulated him and went away. He looked, for a moment, lonely and haunted but made no attempt to stop her. Then he started checking figures again.

Dennis Bridger was not captivated in the same way. He did his work stolidly and morosely, and made no discernible attempt to follow up his contacts with Intel. Major Quadring and his security people kept a careful eye on him; periodic checks were made on all staff leaving the main gates, to see that they were not taking out documents or other classified material, but Bridger did nothing at all to arouse their suspicion. His only recreation was visiting the off-shore island of Thorholm, from which he would return with gulls’ and gannets’ eggs and endearing photographs of puffins. Whatever inducement Kaufmann had given him to stay on did not seem to involve him in anything.

Geers regarded the whole team with suspicion. He was never obstructive, but a state of hostility existed between him and them. It was clear he would feel in some way satisfied if the experiment failed. However, as the super-computer neared completion, and the interest of his staff and his superiors in it increased, he took care to identify himself with any possible success. It was he who suggested that there should be a formal, though necessarily private, opening, and the Minister of Science—foiled of his unveiling of Bouldershaw Fell the previous year—allowed himself to be persuaded to cut a ribbon in Scotland. Fleming tried to put off the opening for as long as possible, but it was finally fixed for a day in October, by which time the new computer was due to be programmed and ready to receive its data. General Vandenberg and a couple of dozen Whitehall officials told their secretaries to make notes in their diaries.

Judy, at last, had something to do. There would be no press, but there were arrangements to be made with the various ministries, and plans for the visit to be worked out with Geers’s staff. She saw little of Fleming. When she had finished her work she would go for long, solitary walks across the moors in the blustery weather of early autumn.

About a week before the opening, she saw a white yacht standing out to sea. It was a big, ocean-going yacht, a long way off. From the camp, it was hidden behind the island of Thorholm, it could only be seen from further along the coast. Judy noticed it as she walked back by the cliff-top path in the afternoon.

The following afternoon it was still there, and Judy, walking along the path between the cliff edge and the heather, thought she could see the blink of an aldis lamp signalling from it. This in itself would not have made her curious, had she not suddenly heard the sound of a car engine from the moor above her. By instinct, she dodged down behind a gorse bush and waited. It was a powerful but smooth engine that purred expensively as it ticked over.

The next thing Judy noticed was that the signalling had stopped. A moment or two later the engine revved and she could hear a car drive heavily away. After it had gone some distance, she got up and walked to the top of the path. Where it came to the cliff-top, it met a rough cart-track which wound away inland to join the main road in a valley between the hills. A large, shining car was disappearing round the first bend, behind a coppice of firs. Judy stared after it: there was something familiar about it.

She said nothing to Quadring, but went there again next day. There was no yacht and no car. The landscape was empty and silent except for the gulls. The next day it rained, and after that she was too busy with the Minister’s visit to go out at all. By tea-time on the day before the opening, she had everything fixed—drivers laid on to collect the party from the station, a landing-crew provided for the Minister’s helicopter, drinks and sandwiches in the Director’s office, a timetable of the tour agreed with Reinhart and the others. Fleming was surly and withdrawn; Judy herself had a headache.

The sun came out about four o’clock, so she put on a wind-cheater and went out. As she walked along the cliff-path the ground all round her steamed and, far below, the green waves slopped against the rocks in the freshening wind and threw up lace edges of foam that sparkled in the sunlight.

There was no yacht, and again no car where the path met the track at the cliff-top; but there were tyre-marks, recent ones made after the rain. Judy was thinking about this when she became aware of another distant noise. This time it was an outboard motor and it came from the far side of the island, a couple of miles away. Straining her eyes against the sun, she watched the tiny distant shape of a boat edge out from behind the island, making for the bay below the camp at Thorness. It was Bridger’s boat, and she could just see one person—presumably Bridger—in it.

She saw no more. There was a whistle and a crack beside her and a splinter of rock fell away from the cliff-face by her head. She did not wait to examine the bullet scar on the rock; she simply ran. Another bullet whistled close to her as she pelted headlong down the path, and then she was round the first turn of the cliff and out of range. She ran as far as she could, walked for a bit and then ran again. Long before she got back to camp the sun had set behind a bank of cloud. The wind rose and blew the day away. She shivered, and her legs were shaking.

She felt safer when she got through the main gates, but terribly lonely. Quadring’s office was closed. There was no-one else she could talk to, and she did not want to meet Bridger in the mess. Dusk was falling as she walked between the chalets in the living-quarters, and suddenly she found herself at Fleming’s. She could not bear to be outside a moment longer. She knocked once at the door and walked straight in.

Fleming was lying on his bed listening to a recording of Webern on a high-fidelity set he had rigged for himself. Looking up, he saw Judy standing in the doorway, panting, her face flushed, her hair blown about.

“Very spectacular. What’s it in aid of?” He was half way through a bottle of Scotch.

Judy shut the door behind her. “John—”

“Well, what?”

“I’ve been shot at.”

“Phui.” He put down his glass and swung his feet to the floor.

“I have! Just now, up on the moors.”

“You mean whistled at.”

“I was standing at the top of the cliff when suddenly a bullet went close past me and smacked into the rock. I jumped back and another one—”

“Some of the brown jobs at target practice. They’re all rotten shots.” Fleming walked over to the record-player and switched it off. He was quite steady, quite sober in spite of the whisky.

“There was no-one,” said Judy. “No-one at all.”

“Then they weren’t bullets. Here, have a drink and calm yourself down.” He foraged for a glass for her.

“They were bullets,” Judy insisted, sitting on the bed. “Someone with a telescopic sight.”

“You’re really in a state, aren’t you?” He found a glass, half-filled it and handed it to her. “Why should anyone want to take pot shots at you?”

“There could be reasons.”

“Such as?”

Judy looked down into her glass.

“Nothing that makes any sense.”

“What were you doing on the cliffs?”

“Just looking at the sea.”

“What was on the sea?”

“Doctor Bridger’s boat. Nothing else.”

“Why were you so interested in Dennis’s boat?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Are you suggesting that he shot at you?”

“No. It wasn’t him.” She held the footboard of the bed to stop her hand from trembling. “Can I stay here a bit? Till I get over the shakes.”

“Do what you like. And drink that up.”

She took a mouthful of the undiluted whisky and felt it stinging her mouth and throat. From the quietness outside came a long low howl, and a piece of guttering on the but shook.

“What was that?”

“The wind,” said Fleming as he stood watching her.

She could feel the spirit moving down, glowing, into her stomach. “I don’t like this place.”

“Nor do I,” he said.

They drank in the silence broken only by the wind moaning round the camp buildings. The sky outside the window was almost dark, with blacker clouds blowing raggedly in from over the sea. She lowered her glass and looked Fleming in the eyes.

“Why does Doctor Bridger go to the island?” She never felt inclined to call Bridger by his first name.

“He goes bird-watching. You know jolly well he goes bird-watching.”

“Every evening?”

“Look, when I’m flaked out at the end of the day I go sailing.” This was true. Navigating a fourteen-footer was Fleming’s one outside activity. Not that he did it very often; and he did it alone, not with the camp sailing club. “Except when I’m really flaked, like now.”

He picked up the bottle by its neck and stood frowning, thinking of Dennis Bridger. “He goes snooping on sea-birds.”

“Always on the island?”

“That’s where they are,” he said impatiently. “There’s masses of stuff out there—gannets, guillemots, fulmars... Have some more of this.”

She let him pour some more into her glass. Her head was humming a little.

“I’m sorry I burst in.”

“Don’t mind me.” He rumpled her already tangled hair in his affectionate, unpredatory way. “I can do with a bit of company in this dump. Specially when it’s a sweet, sweet girl.”

“I’m not in the least sweet.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t like what I am.” Judy looked away from him, down at her glass again. “I don’t like what I do.”

“That makes two of us.” Fleming looked over her head towards the window. “I don’t like what I do either.”

“I thought you were completely taken up in it?”

“I was, but now it’s finished I don’t know. I’ve been trying to get myself sloshed on this, but I can’t.” He looked down at her in a confused way, not at all as he had done in the computer. “Perhaps you’re what I need.”

“John—”

“What?”

“Don’t trust me too much.”

Fleming grinned. “You up to something shady?”

“Not as far as you’re concerned.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, pushing up her chin with his hand. “You’ve an honest face.”

He kissed her forehead lightly, not very seriously.

“No.” She turned her head aside. He dropped his hand and turned away from her, as if his attention had moved to something else. The wind howled again.

“What are you going to do about this shooting?” he asked after a pause.

She shivered in spite of the warmth inside her, and he put a hand on her shoulder.

“Sometimes at night,” he said, “I lie and listen to the wind and think about that chap over there.”

“What chap?”

He nodded in the direction of the computer, the new computer which he had made.

“He hasn’t a body, not an organic body that can breathe and feel like ours. But he’s a better brain.”

“It’s not a person.” She pulled Fleming down on to the bed so that they were sitting side by side. She felt, for once, much older than him.

“We don’t know what it is, do we?” said Fleming. “Whoever sent ye olde message didn’t distribute a design like this for fun. They want us to start something right out of our depth.”

“Do you think they know about us?”

“They know there are bound to be other intelligences in the universe. It just happens to be us.”

Judy took hold of one of his hands.

“You needn’t go further with it than you want.”

“I hope not.”

“All you’re doing is building a computer.”

“With a mental capacity way beyond ours.”

“Is that really true?”

“A man is a very inefficient thinking machine.”

“You’re not.”

“We all are. All computers based on a biological system are inefficient.”

“The biological system suits me,” she said. Her speech and vision were beginning to blur.

Fleming gave her a short, bear-like hug.

“You’re just a sexy piece.”

He got up, yawned and stretched and switched on the light. Feeling a sudden loosening of tension, she lolled back on the bed.

“You need a holiday,” she told him, slurrily.

“Maybe.”

“You’ve been at it for months now without a break. That thing.” She pointed towards the window.

“It had to be ready for his Ministership.”

“If it did get out of control, you could always stop it.”

“Could we? It was operational over a month ago. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“We’ve been feeding in the order code so that the data can all be in by the time the gentry arrive.”

“Did anything happen?”

“Nothing at first, but there was a small part of the order code I ignored. It arranged things so that when you switch on the current the first surge of electricity automatically sets the program working: at its own selected starting point. I deliberately left that out of the design because I didn’t want him to have it all his own way, and he was furious.”

Judy looked at him sceptically.

“That’s nonsense.”

“All right, he registered disturbance. Without any warning, before we’d even started putting in data, he started to print out the missing section of the code. Over and over and over—telling me to put it in. He was very cross.” He gazed earnestly into her unbelieving face. “I switched him off for a bit and then started feeding in the data. He was quiet after that. But he was designed to register disturbance. God knows what else he was designed for!”

She lay looking at him, not focusing.

“We shall put the last of the data in to-morrow,” he went on. “Then heaven knows what’ll happen. We get a message from two hundred light-years away—do you think all it gives us is a handy little ready-reckoner? Well, I don’t. Nor do the people who killed Harries and shot at you and are probably tailing Dennis and me.”

She started to interrupt him, but thought better of it.

“Remember?” he asked. “Remember I talked about a breakthrough?”

“Distinctly.” She smiled.

“The kind of breakthrough you get once in a thousand years. I’ll lay you any odds...”

He turned to the window and looked out, lost in some unthinkable speculation.

“You could always switch it off.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps we could switch it off.”

It was pitch black outside, with driving rain, and the wind continued to howl.

“It’s dark,” he said. He drew the curtain across and turned back to her with the same haunted look in his eyes that she had seen before.

“That makes two of us who are scared,” she said.

“I’ll see you back to your hut if you like.” He looked down at her and smiled. “Or you could spend the night here.”