A for Andromeda

Nine Acceleration

The girl, as Geers had predicted, was fully grown by the end of four months. She remained most of the time in an oxygen tent, although she was learning to breathe naturally for increasing periods. By the end of the first month she was off drip feeds and on to a bottle. Beyond this, nothing was done to stimulate her mind and she lay inert as a baby, staring at the ceiling. Geers grew slightly apprehensive as growth continued, but she stopped at five foot seven inches, by which time she was a fully developed young woman.

“Quite a good-looking young woman, too,” Hunter said, with a lick of his lips.

Geers allowed no-one but Hunter, Dawnay and their assistants to see her. He sent daily confidential reports to the Ministry of Defence and was visited twice by the Director-General of Research, with whom he made plans for her future. Extreme precautions were taken to keep her existence secret; a day and night guard was mounted on the computer and laboratory block and everyone who had to know was sworn to silence. Apart from Reinhart, whom Osborne told privately, and a handful of senior officials and politicians in London, no-one outside the research team at Thorness knew anything about her.

Fleming, in Geers’s opinion, was the most doubtful quantity in the whole group, and Judy was given specific instructions to watch him. They had literally hardly spoken since the previous spring. He had made one surly, half-hearted attempt to apologise but she had cut him short, and since then when they met in the camp they ignored each other. At least, she told herself, she had not been spying on him—the fact that he had dissociated himself from Dawnay’s experiment, to which she had been assigned after Bridger’s death, had meant he was no longer primarily her concern. Whatever pangs of conscience she had about the past were hidden under the anaesthetic of a sort of listless apathy. But now it was different. Screwing up all her determination, she went to find him in the computer room, her legs feeling curiously flabby beneath her. She handed him her letter of instruction.

“Would you read this?” she said, without any preliminary.

He glanced at it and handed it back to her. “It’s on Ministry of Defence paper—you read it. I’m choosy what I touch.”

“They’re concerned about the security of the new creature,” she said stiffly, withdrawing in the face of his attack.

Fleming laughed.

“It amuses you?” she asked. “I’m to be responsible for its safety.”

“And who’s to be responsible for yours?”

“John!” Judy’s face reddened. “Do we always have to be on opposite sides of the fence?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said with something between sympathy and indifference. “I’m afraid I don’t dig your precious creature.”

“It’s not mine. I’m doing my job. I’m not your enemy.”

“No. You’re just the sort of girl who gets pushed about.” He looked helplessly around the room. “Oh I’ve had my say!”

She made a last attempt to reach him. “It seems a long time since we went sailing.”

“It is a long time.”

“We’re the same people.”

“In a different world.” He moved as if he wanted to get away.

“It’s the same world, John.”

“O.K., you tell them that.”

Hunter came past. “We’re getting her out.”

“Who?” Fleming turned from Judy with relief.

“The little girl—out of her oxygen tent.”

“Are we allowed?” asked Judy.

“This is a special occasion—coming-out party.” Hunter gave her a stale, sexy smile and walked away into the other room.

Fleming looked sourly after him.

“Full-size live monster given away with each packet.”

Judy surprised herself by giggling. She felt they were suddenly about a mile closer.

“I detest that man. He’s so condescending.”

“I hope he kills her,” said Fleming. “He’s probably a bad enough doctor.”

They went through to the laboratory together. Hunter was superintending opening the bottom end of the oxygen tent, watched by Dawnay. Under the tent was a narrow trolley-bed which two assistants drew gently forward. The rest stood round as the bed slid out with the full-grown girl-creature on it: first her feet, covered by a sheet, then her body, also covered. She was lying on her back, and as her face was revealed Judy gave a gasp. It was a strong and beautiful face with high cheek-bones and wide, Baltic features. Her long, pale hair was strewn out on the pillow, her eyes were shut and she was breathing peacefully as if asleep. She looked like a purified, blonde version of Christine.

“It’s Christine!” Judy whispered. “Christine.”

“It can’t be,” said Hunter brusquely.

“There is a superficial resemblance,” Dawnay admitted.

Hunter cut across her. “We did an autopsy on the other girl. Besides, she was a brunette.”

Judy turned to Fleming.

“Is this some horrible kind of practical joke?”

He shook his head. “Don’t let it fool you. Don’t let it fool any of you. Christine’s dead. Christine was only a blueprint.”

No-one spoke for a moment while Dawnay took the girl’s pulse and stooped down to look at her face. The eyes opened and looked vaguely up at the ceiling.

“What does it mean?” asked Judy. She remembered seeing Christine dead, and yet this was something inescapably like her, living.

“It means,” said Fleming, as though answering all of them, “that it took a human being and made a copy. It got a few things wrong—the colour of the hair, for instance—but by and large it did a pretty good job. You can turn the human anatomy into figures, and that’s what it did; and then got us to turn them back again.”

Hunter looked at Dawnay and signalled to the assistants to wheel the trolley into a neighbouring bay.

“It gave us what we wanted, anyway,” said Dawnay.

“Did it? It’s the brain that counts: it doesn’t matter about the body. It hasn’t made a human being—it’s made an alien creature that looks like one.”

“Dr. Geers has told us your theory,” said Hunter, moving away in the wake of the girl on the bed.

Dawnay hesitated for a moment before going after them.

“You may be right,” she said. “In which case it’ll be all the more interesting.”

Fleming controlled himself with an obvious effort. “What are you going to do with it?”

“We’re going to educate it—her.”

Fleming turned and walked out of the laboratory, back to the computer room, with Judy following.

“What’s bad about it?” she asked. “Everyone else...”

He turned on her. “Whenever a higher intelligence meets a lower one, it destroys it. That’s what’s bad. Iron Age man destroyed the Stone Age; the Palefaces beat the Indians. Where was Carthage when the Romans were through with it?”

“But is that bad, in the long run?”

“It’s bad for us.”

“Why should this—?”

“The strong are always ruthless with the weak.”

She laid a hand tentatively on his sleeve. “Then the weak had better stick together.”

“You should have thought of that earlier,” he said.

Judy knew better than to push him further; she went back to her own life, leaving him with his preoccupations and doubts.

There was no early spring that year. The hard grey weather went on to the end of April, matching the grey sunless mood of the camp. Apart from Dawnay’s experiment, nothing was going well. Geers’s permanent staff and missile development teams worked under strain with no outstanding success; there were more practice firings than ever but nothing really satisfactory came of them. After each abortive attempt the grey wrack of Atlantic cloud settled back on the promontory as if to show that nothing would ever change or ever improve.

Only the girl creature bloomed, like some exotic plant in a hothouse. One bay of Dawnay’s laboratories was set up as a nursing block with living quarters for the girl. Here she was waited on and prepared for her part like a princess in a fairy tale. They called her Andromeda, after the place of her origin, and taught her to eat and drink and sit up and move. At first she was slow to learn to use her body—she had, as Dawnay said, none of the normal child’s instincts for physical development—but soon it became clear that she could absorb knowledge at a prodigious rate. She never had to be told a fact twice. Once she understood the possibilities of anything she mastered it without hesitation or effort.

It was like this with speech. To begin with she appeared to have no awareness of it: she had never cried as a baby cries, and she had to be taught like a deaf child by being made conscious of the vibrations of her vocal cords, and their effects. But as soon as she understood the purpose of it she learnt language as fast as it was spelt out to her. Within weeks she was a literate, communicating person.

Within weeks, too, she had learnt to move as a human being, a little stiffly, as if her body was working from instructions and not from its own desire, but gracefully and without any kind of awkwardness. Most of the time she was confined to her own suite, though she was taken every day, when it was not actually raining, out to the moors in a closed car and allowed to walk in the fresh air under armed escort and out of sight of any other eyes from either inside or outside the camp.

She never complained, whatever was done to her. She accepted the medical checks, the teaching, the constant surveillance, as though she had no will or wishes of her own. In fact, she showed no emotions at all except those of hunger before a meal and tiredness at the end of the day, and then it was physical, never mental tiredness. She was always gentle, always submissive, and very beautiful. She behaved, indeed, like someone in a dream.

Geers and Dawnay arranged for her education at a pace which packed the whole of a university syllabus into something which more resembled a summer-school. Once she had grasped the basis of denary arithmetic, she had no further difficulty with mathematics. She might have been a calculating machine; she whipped through figures with the swift logic of a ready-reckoner, and she was never wrong. She seemed capable of holding the most complex progressions in her head without any sense of strain. For the rest, she was filled up with facts like an encyclopaedia. Geers and the teachers who were sent up to Thorness in an endless and academically-impressive procession—not to instruct her directly, for she was too secret, but to guide her instructors—laid out the foundations of a general, unspecialised level of knowledge, so that by the end of her summer-course, and of the summer, she knew as much about the world, in theory, as an intelligent and perceptive school leaver. All she lacked was any sense of human experience or any spontaneous attitude to life. Although she was alert and reasonably communicative, she might just as well have been walking and talking in her sleep, and that, in fact, is the impression which she gave.

“You’re right,” Dawnay admitted to Fleming. “She hasn’t got a brain, she’s got a calculator.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” He looked across at the slim, fair girl who was sitting reading at the table in what had been made her room. It was one of his rare visits to Dawnay’s premises. The laboratory had been gutted and turned into a set of rooms that might have come out of a design brochure, with the girl as one of the fitments.

“She’s not fallible,” said Dawnay. “She doesn’t forget. She never makes a mistake. Already she knows more than most people do.”

Fleming frowned. “And you’ll go on stuffing information into her until she knows more than you.”

“Probably. The people in charge of us have plans for her.”

Geers’s plan was fairly obvious. The pressing problems of defence machinery remained unsolved in spite of the use they had made of the new computer. The main difficulty was that they did not really know how to use it. They took it out of Fleming’s hands for several hours a day, and managed to get a great deal of calculation done very quickly by it; but they had no means of tapping its real potential or of using its immense intellect to solve problems that were not put to it in terms of figures. If, as Fleming considered, the creatures evolved with the machine’s help had an affinity with it, then it should be possible to use one of them as an agent. The original monster was obviously incapable of making any communication of human needs to the computer, but the girl was another matter. If she could be used as an intermediary, something very exciting might be done.

The Minister of Defence had no objection to the idea and, although Fleming warned Osborne, as he had warned Geers, Osborne carried no weight with the men in power. Fleming could only stand by and watch the machine’s purpose being unwittingly fulfilled by people who would not listen to him. He himself had nothing but a tortuous strand of logic on which to depend. If he was wrong, he was wrong all the way from the beginning, and the way of life was not what he thought. But if he was right they were heading for calamity.

He was, in fact, in the computer-room when Geers and Dawnay first brought the girl in.

“For God’s sake!” He looked from Geers to Dawnay in a last, hopeless appeal.

“We’ve all heard what you think, Fleming,” Geers said.

“Then don’t let her in.”

“If you want to complain, complain to the Ministry.”

He turned back to the doorway. Dawnay shrugged her shoulders; it seemed to her that Fleming was making a great deal of fuss about nothing.

Geers held the door open as Andromeda came in, escorted by Hunter who walked beside and slightly behind her as though they were characters out of Jane Austen. Andromeda moved stiffly, but was thoroughly wide awake, her face calm, her eyes taking in everything. It was all somehow formal and unreal, as if a minuet were about to begin.

“This is the control-room of the computer,” said Geers as she stood looking around her. He sounded like a kind but firm parent. “You remember I told you about it?”

“Why should I forget?”

Although she spoke in a slow stilted way, her voice, like her face, was strong and attractive.

Geers led her across the room. “This is the input unit. The only way we can give information to the computer is by typing it in here. It takes a long time.”

“It must do.” She examined the keyboard with a sort of calm interest.

“If we want to hold a conversation with it,” Geers went on, “the best we can do is select something from the output and feed it back in.”

“That is very clumsy,” she said slowly.

Dawnay came and stood by her other side. “Cyclops in the other room can input direct by that co-axial cable.”

“Is that what you wish me to do?”

“We want to find out,” said Geers.

The girl looked up and found Fleming staring at her. She had not taken him in before, and gazed back expressionlessly at him.

“Who is that?”

“Doctor Fleming,” said Dawnay. “He designed the computer.”

The girl walked stiffly across to him and held out her hand.

“How do you do?” She spoke as if repeating a lesson.

Fleming ignored her hand and continued staring at her. She looked unblinkingly back at him and, after a minute, dropped her arm.

“You must be a clever man,” she said flatly.

Fleming laughed. “Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Laugh—that is the word?”

Fleming shrugged. “People laugh when they’re happy and cry when they’re sad. Sometimes we laugh when we’re unhappy.”

“Why?” She went on gazing at his face. “What is happy or sad?”

“They’re feelings.”

“I do not feel them.”

“No. You wouldn’t.”

“Why do you have them?”

“Because we’re imperfect.” Fleming returned her stare as though it were a challenge.

Geers fidgeted impatiently.

“Is it working all right, Fleming? There’s nothing on the display panel.”

“Which is the display panel?” she asked, turning away.

Geers showed her and she stood looking at the rows of unlit bulbs while Geers and Dawnay explained it, and the use of the terminals, to her.

“We’d like you to stand between them,” he said.

She walked deliberately towards the panel, and as she approached it the lamps started to blink. She stopped.

“It’s all right,” said Dawnay.

Geers took the guards from the terminals and urged the girl forward, while Fleming watched, tense, without saying anything. She went reluctantly, her face strained and set. When she reached the panel, she stood there, a terminal a few inches from each side of her head, and the lights began flashing faster. The room was full of the hum of the computer’s equipment. Slowly, without being told, she put her hands up towards the plates.

“You’re sure it’s neutralised?” Geers looked anxiously at Fleming.

“It neutralises itself.”

As the girl’s hands touched the metal plates, she shivered. She stood with her face blank, as if entranced, and then she let go and swayed back unsteadily. Dawnay and Geers caught her and helped her to a chair.

“Is she all right?” asked Geers.

Dawnay nodded. “But look at that!”

The lights on the panel were all jammed solidly on and the computer hum grew louder than it had been before.

“What’s happened?”

“It speaks to me,” said the girl. “It knows about me.”

“What does it say?” asked Dawnay. “What does it know about you? How does it speak?”

“We... we communicate.”

Geers looked uncomfortably puzzled. “In figures?”

“You could express it in figures,” she said, staring blindly before her. “It would take a very long time to explain.”

“And can you communicate—?” Dawnay was interrupted by a loud explosion from the next room. The display panel went blank, the hum stopped.

“Whatever’s happened?” asked Geers.

Fleming turned without answering him and went quickly through to the first lab bay, where the creature and its tank were housed. Smoke was rising from the contact wires above the tank. When he pulled them out, the ends were blackened and lumps of charred tissue hung from them. He looked into the tank, and his mouth set into a thin line.

“What’s happened to it?” Dawnay hurried in, followed by Geers.

“It’s been electrocuted.” Fleming dangled the harness in front of her. “There’s been another blow-out and it’s been killed.”

Geers peered into the tank and recoiled in distaste.

“What did you do to the controls?” he demanded.

Fleming threw down the charred remains of the wires. “I did nothing. The computer knows how to adjust its own voltages—it knows how to burn tissue—it knows how to kill.”

“But why?” asked Geers.

They all looked, by instinct, to the doorway from the computer-room. The girl was standing there.

“Because it was her.” Fleming walked across to her grimly, his jaw stuck out. “You’ve just told it, haven’t you? It knows it has a better slave now. It doesn’t need that poor creature any more. That’s what it said, isn’t it?”

She looked levelly back at him. “Yes.”

“You see!” He swung round to Geers. “You’ve got a killer. Bridger may have been an accident; so may Christine, though I’d call it manslaughter. But this was pure, deliberate murder.”

“It was only a primitive creature,” said Geers.

“And it was redundant!” He turned back to the girl. “Yes?”

“It was in the way,” she answered.

“And the next time it could be you who are in the way—or me, or any or all of us!”

She still showed no flicker of expression. “We were only eliminating unwanted material.”

“We?”

“The computer and myself.” She touched her fingers to her head.

Fleming screwed up his eyes.

“You’re the same, aren’t you? A shared intelligence.”

“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I understand—”

“Then understand this!” Fleming’s voice rose with excitement and he pushed his face close up to her. “This is a piece of information: it is wrong to murder!”

“Wrong? What is ‘wrong’?”

“You were talking about killing earlier on,” said Geers.

“Oh God!” said Fleming wildly. “Is there no sane person anywhere?”

He stared for a moment more at Andromeda, and then he went, half-running, out of the room.

Bouldershaw Fell looked much as it had done when Reinhart first took Judy to see it. Grass and heather had grown over the builders’ scars on the surrounding moor, and black streaks ran down the walls of the buildings where gutters had overflowed in winter storms; but the triple arch was still poised motionless over its great bowl, and inside the main observatory block the equipment and staff continued their quiet, methodical work. Harvey was still in charge of the control desk, the banks of steering and calculating equipment still stood to each side of him, flanking the wide window, and the photographs of stars still hung on the walls, though less fresh and new than they had been.

The only sign of the grim business that preoccupied them all was a huge glazed wall-map of the world on which the tracks of orbital missiles were marked in chinagraph. It betrayed what the outward calm of the place concealed—the anguish and fever with which they watched the threats in the sky above them remorselessly grow and grow. Reinhart referred to it as the Writing on the Wall, and worked day and night with the observatory team, plotting each new trace as it swung into orbit and sending increasingly urgent and sombre reports to Whitehall.

Nearly a hundred of the sinister, unidentified missiles had been tracked during the past months, and their launching area had been defined to within a triangle several hundred miles in extent in the ocean between Manchuria, Vladivostok and the northern island of Japan. None of the neighbouring countries admitted to them. As Vandenberg said, they could belong to any of three of our fellow-members of the United Nations.

Vandenberg paid frequent visits to the telescope and had long and fruitless conferences with Reinhart. All they could really tell from their findings was that these were propelled vehicles launched from about forty degrees north by between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty east, and that they travelled across Russia, Western Europe and the British Isles at a speed of about sixteen thousand miles an hour at a height between three hundred and fifty and four hundred miles. After crossing Britain they mostly passed over the North Atlantic and Greenland and the polar north of Canada, presumably joining up their trajectory in the same area of the North China Sea. Whatever route they took, they were deflected to pass over England or Scotland: they were obviously steerable and obviously aimed very deliberately at this small target. Although nothing certain was known of their size or shape, they emitted a tracking signal and they were clearly large enough to carry a nuclear charge.

“I don’t know what the point of them is,” Reinhart admitted. He was obsessed by them. However unhappy he was at the way things had gone at Thorness, he was by now fully occupied with this new and terrifying turn of events.

Vandenberg had cogent and reasonable theories. “Their point is that someone in the East wants us to know they have the technical edge on us. They flaunt these over our heads to show the world we’ve no way of retaliating. A new form of sabre-rattling.”

“But why always over this country?”

Vandenberg looked slightly sorry for the Professor. “Because you’re small enough—and important enough—to be a kind of hostage. This island’s always been a good target.”

“Well,” Reinhart nodded to the map on the wall. “There’s your evidence. Aren’t the West going to take it to the Security Council?”

Vandenberg shook his head. “Not until we can negotiate from strength. They’d love us to run squealing to the U.N. and admit our weakness. Then they’d have us. What we need first is some means of defence.”

Reinhart looked sceptical. “What are you doing about it?”

“We’re going as fast as we can. Geers has a theory—”

“Oh, Geers!”

“Geers has a theory,” Vandenberg ignored the interruption, “that if we can work this girl creature in harness with your computer, we may get some pretty quick thinking.”

“What was my computer,” said Reinhart sourly. “I wish you joy.”

The night after Vandenberg left, Fleming appeared. Reinhart was working late, trying to fix the origin of ground signals which made the satellites change course in orbit, when he heard the exhaust crackle of Fleming’s car outside. It was a little like coming home for Fleming; the familiar room, Harvey at the control desk, the small neat father-figure of the Professor waiting for him. Of the three men, Fleming looked the most worn.

“It seems so sane here.” He gazed around the large, neat room. “Calm and clean.”

Reinhart smiled. “It’s not very sane at the moment.”

“Can we talk?”

Reinhart led him over to a couple of easy chairs which had been set for visitors, with a little table, in a back corner of the observatory.

“I told you on the phone, John, there’s nothing I can do. They’re going to use the creature as an aid to the computer for Geers’s missile work.”

“Which is just what it wants.”

Reinhart shrugged. “I’m out of it now.”

“We’re all out of it. I’m only hanging on by the skin of my teeth. All this about being able to pull out the plug—well, we can’t any more, can we?” Fleming fiddled nervously with a box of matches he had taken out to light their cigarettes. “It’s in control of itself now. It’s got its protectors—its allies. If this thing that looks like a woman had arrived by space-ship, it would have been annihilated by now. It would have been recognised for what it was. But because it’s been planted in a much subtler way, because it’s been given human form, it’s accepted on face value. And it’s a pretty face. It’s no use appealing to Geers or that lot: I’ve tried. Prof., I’m scared.”

“We’re all scared,” Reinhart said. “The more we find out about the universe the more frightening it is.”

“Look.” Fleming leaned forward earnestly. “Let’s use our heads. That machine—that brain-child of some other world—has written off its own one-eyed monster. It’s written off Christine. It’ll write me off if I get in its way.”

“Then get out of its way,” said Reinhart wearily. “If you’re in danger get out of its way now.”

“Danger!” Fleming snorted. “Do you think I want to die in some horrible way, like Dennis Bridger, for the sake of the government or Intel? But I’m only the next on the list. If I’m forced out, or if I’m killed, what comes afterwards?”

“It’s a question of what comes first at the moment.” Reinhart sounded like a doctor with a hopeless case. “I can’t help you, John.”

“What about Osborne?”

“He doesn’t hold the reins now.”

“He could get his Minister to go to the P.M.”

“The P.M.?”

“He’s paid, isn’t he?”

Reinhart shook his head. “You’ve nothing to show, John.”

“I’ve some arguments.”

“I doubt if any of them are in a mood to listen.” Reinhart waved a small hand towards the wall map. “That’s what we’re worried about at the moment.”

“What’s that all in aid of?”

Reinhart told him. Fleming sat listening, tense and miserable, his fingers crushing the matchbox out of shape.

“We can’t always be in front, can we?” He pushed away the Professor’s explanations. “At least we can come to terms with human beings.”

“What sort of terms?” Reinhart asked.

“It doesn’t matter what sort of terms—compared with what we’re likely to be up against. A bomb is a quick death for a civilisation, but the slow subjugation of a planet...” his voice trailed away.

The Prime Minister was in his oak-panelled room in the House of Commons. He was a sporty-looking old gentleman with twinkling blue eyes. He sat at the middle of one side of the big table that half-filled the room, listening to the Minister for Defence. Sunlight streamed gently in through the mullioned windows. There was a knock at the door and the Defence Minister frowned; he was a keen young man who did not like being interrupted.

“Ah, here comes the science form.” The Prime Minister smiled genially as Ratcliff and Osborne were shown in. “You haven’t met Osborne, have you Burdett?”

The Defence Minister rose and shook hands perfunctorily.

The Prime Minister motioned them to sit down.

“Isn’t it a splendid day, gentlemen? I remember it was like this at Dunkirk time. The sun always seems to smile on national adversity.” He turned to Burdett. “Would you bully-off for us, dear boy?”

“It’s about Thorness,” said Burdett to Ratcliff. “We want to take over the computer altogether—and everything associated with it. It’s been agreed in principle, hasn’t it? And the P.M. and I think the time has come.”

Ratcliff looked at him without love. “You’ve access to it already.”

“We need more than that now, don’t we, sir?” Burdett appealed to the Prime Minister.

“We need our new interceptor, gentlemen, and we need it quickly.” Behind the amiable, lazy, rather old-world manner lay more than a hint of firmness and grasp of business. “In nineteen-forty we had Spitfires, but at the moment neither we nor our allies in the West have anything to touch the stuff that’s coming over.”

“And no prospect of anything,” Burdett put in, “by conventional means.”

“We could co-operate, couldn’t we,” Ratcliff asked Osborne, “in developing something?”

Burdett was not one to waste time. “We can handle it ourselves if we take over your equipment at Thorness entirely, and the girl.”

“The creature?” Osborne raised a well-disciplined eyebrow, but the Prime Minister twinkled reassuringly at him.

“Dr. Geers is of the opinion that if we use this curiously derived young lady to interpret our requirements to the computer and to translate its calculations back to us we could solve a lot of our problems very quickly.”

“If you can trust its intentions.”

The Prime Minister looked interested. “I don’t quite follow you.”

“One or two of our people have doubts about its potential,” said Ratcliff, more in hope than conviction. No minister likes losing territory, even if he has to use dubious arguments to retain it.

The Prime Minister waved him aside. “Oh yes, I’ve heard about that.”

“Up to now, sir, this creature has been under examination by our team,” Osborne said. “Professor Dawnay—”

“Dawnay could stay.”

“In a consultative role,” Burdett added swiftly.

“And Dr. Fleming?” asked Ratcliff.

The Prime Minister turned again to Burdett. “Fleming would be useful, wouldn’t he?”

Burdett frowned. “We shall need complete control and very tight security.”

Ratcliff tried his last card. “Do you think she’s up to it, this girl?”

“I propose to ask her,” said the Prime Minister. He pressed a small bell-push on the table and a young gentleman appeared almost immediately in the doorway. “Ask Dr. Geers to bring his lady-friend in, will you?”

“You’ve got her here?” Ratcliff looked accusingly at Osborne as though it was his fault.

“Yes, dear boy.” The Prime Minister also looked at Osborne, inquiringly. “Is she, er—?”

“She looks quite normal.”

The Prime Minister gave a small sigh of relief and rose as the door reopened to admit Geers and Andromeda. “Come in, Dr. Geers. Come along in, my dear.”

Andromeda was given the chair facing him. She sat quietly with her head slightly bowed, her hands folded in her lap, like a typist coming for an interview.

“You must find this all rather strange,” said the Prime Minister soothingly.

She answered in slow, correct sentences. “Dr. Geers has explained it to me.”

“Did he explain why we brought you here?”

“No.”

“Burdett?” The Prime Minister handed over the questioning. Ratcliff looked on grumpily while Burdett sat forward on the edge of his chair, rested his elbows on the table, placed his fingers together and looked keenly at Andromeda over them.

“This country—you know about this country?”

“Yes.”

“This country is being threatened by orbital missiles.”

“We know about orbital missiles.”

“We?” Burdett looked at her even more sharply.

She remained as she was, her face empty of expression. “The computer and myself.”

“How does the computer know?”

“We share our information.”

“That is what we hoped,” said the Prime Minister.

Burdett continued. “We have interception missiles—rockets of various kinds—but nothing of the combined speed, range and accuracy to, er...” He searched around for the right piece of jargon.

“To hit them?” she asked simply.

“Exactly. We can give you full details of speed, height and course; in fact, we can give you a great deal of data, but we need it translated into practical mechanical terms.”

“Is that difficult?”

“For us, yes. What we’re after is a highly sophisticated interception weapon that can do its own instantaneous thinking.”

“I understand.”

“We should like you to work on this with us,” the Prime Minister said gently, as if asking a favour of a child. “Dr. Geers will tell you what is needed, and he will give you all facilities for actually designing weapons.”

“And Dr. Fleming,” added Ratcliff, “can help you with the computer.”

Andromeda looked up for the first time.

“We shall not need Dr. Fleming,” she said, and something about her calm, measured voice ran like a cold shadow across the sunlight.

After her return from London, Andromeda spent most of her time in the design office, a block or two away from the computer building, preparing data for the machine and sending it over for computation. Sometimes she came to communicate directly with it, with the result that long and complex calculations emerged later from the printer, which she would take away to translate into design terms. The outcome was all and more than Geers could have wished. A new guidance system and new ballistic formulas sprung ready-made from the drawing-board and when tested, they proved to come up to all specifications. The machine and the girl together could get through about a year’s development theory in a day. The results were not only elegant but obviously effective. In a very short time it would clearly be possible to construct an entirely new interceptive missile.

During duty hours Andromeda had freedom of movement within the compound and, although she disappeared, under guard, into her own quarters after work, she was soon a familiar figure in the camp. Judy put it about that she was a research senior who had been seconded by the Ministry of Defence.

The following week a communiqué was issued from 10 Downing Street:

“Her Majesty’s Government has been aware for some time of the passage of an increasing number of orbital vehicles, possibly missiles, over these islands. Although the vehicles, which are of unknown but terrestrial origin, pass over at great speed and at great height, there is no immediate cause for alarm. Her Majesty’s Government points out, however, that they constitute a deliberate infringement of our national air space, and that steps are being taken to intercept and identify them.”

Fleming listened to the telecast on the portable receiver in his hut at Thorness. He was no longer responsible for the computer, and Geers had suggested that he might be happier away from it. However, he stayed on, partly out of obstinacy and partly from a sense of impending emergency, watching the progress of Andromeda and the two young operators who had been enlisted to help her with the machine. He made no approaches to her, or to Judy, who continued to hang around with a sort of aimless watchfulness, acting as a liaison between Andromeda and the front office; but after he heard the broadcast he wandered over to the computer block with the vague idea that something ought to be done.

Judy found him sitting brooding on the swivel chair by the control desk. She had not gone near him again since the last snub, but she had watched him with concern and with a feeling of latent affection that had never left her.

She went up to the control desk and stood in front of him. “Why don’t you give it up, John?”

“That would please you, wouldn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t please me, but there’s nothing you can do here, eating your heart out.”

“It’s a nice little three-handed game, isn’t it?” He looked sardonically up at her. “I watch her and you watch me.”

“You’re not doing yourself any good.”

“Jealous?” he asked.

She shook her head impatiently. “Don’t be absurd.”

“They’re all so damn sure.” He stared reflectively across to the control equipment. “There may be something I’ve missed, about this—or about her.”

Andromeda came in to the computer room while Judy and Fleming were talking. She stood by the doorway holding a wad of papers, waiting until they had finished. She was quiet enough, but there was nothing modest about her. When she spoke to Judy and the others who worked with her she had an air of unquestioned and superior authority. She made no concessions even to Geers; she was perfectly polite but treated them all as intellectual inferiors.

“I wish to speak to Dr. Geers about these, please,” she said from the doorway.

“Now?” Judy tried to match her in quiet contempt.

“Now.”

“I’ll see if he’s free,” Judy said, and went out.

Andromeda crossed slowly to the control panel, ignoring Fleming; but something prompted him to stop her.

“Happy in your work?”

She turned and looked at him, without speaking.

He stretched back in the chair, suddenly alert.

“You’re getting quite indispensable, aren’t you?” he asked in the tone he had used to Judy.

She looked at him solemnly. She might have been a statue, with her fine carved face, her long hair, and her arms hanging limply down beside her simple, pale dress. “Please be careful what you talk about,” she said.

“Is that a threat?”

“Yes.” She spoke without emphasis, as if simply stating a fact.

Fleming stood up.

“Good grief! I’m not going to—” He stopped himself and smiled. “Perhaps I have missed something.”

Whatever he had in mind was hidden from her. She turned to walk away.

“Wait a minute!”

“I am busy.” But she turned back to him and waited.

He walked slowly to her and looked her up and down as though mocking her.

“You want to make something of yourself, if you’re going to influence men.”

She stood still. He lifted a hand to her hair and edged it back from one side of her face. “You should push your hair back, and then we could see what you look like. Very pretty.”

She stepped away so that his hand fell from her, but she kept her eyes on him, intrigued and puzzled.

“Or you could wear scent,” he said. “Like Judy does.”

“Is that what smells?”

He nodded. “Not very exotic. Lavender water or something. But nice.”

“I do not understand you.” A small frown creased the smooth skin of her forehead. “Nice—nasty. Good—bad. There is no logical distinction.”

He still smiled. “Come here.”

She hesitated, then took a step towards him.

Quietly and deliberately he pinched her arm.

“Ow!” She stepped back with a sudden look of fear in her eyes and rubbed the place where he had hurt her.

“Nice or nasty?” he inquired.

“Nasty.”

“Because you were made to register pain.” He raised his hand again and she flinched away. “I’m not going to hurt you this time.”

She stood rigidly while he stroked her forehead, like a deer being stroked by a child, submissive but ready for flight. His fingers ran down her cheek and on to her bare neck.

“Nasty or nice?”

“Nice.” She watched him to see what he would do next.

“You’re made to register pleasure. Did you know that?” He withdrew his hand gently and moved away from her. “I doubt if you were intended to, but by giving you human form... Human beings don’t live by logic.”

“So I’ve noticed!” She was more sure of herself now, as she had been before he started speaking; but he still held all her attention.

“We live through our senses. That’s what gives us our instincts, for good or bad—our aesthetic and moral judgements. Without them we’d probably have annihilated ourselves by now.”

“You’re doing your best, aren’t you?” She looked down at her papers with a contemptuous smile. “You are like children, with your missiles and rockets.”

“Don’t count me in on that.”

“No, I don’t.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “All the same, I am going to save you. It is very simple, really.” She made a small gesture to indicate the papers she held.

Judy came in and stood, as Andromeda had done, at the doorway.

“Dr. Geers can see you.”

“Thank you.” The roles now were changed. In some unspoken way, the three of them stood in a different relationship to each other. Although Fleming still watched Andromeda, she looked back at him with a different kind of awareness.

“Do I smell nasty?” she asked.

He shrugged. “You’ll have to find out, won’t you?”

She followed Judy out of the building and walked along the concrete path with her to Geers’s office. They had nothing to say to each other, and nothing to share except a sort of wary indifference. Judy showed her into Geers’s room and left her. The Director was sitting behind his desk, telephoning.

“Yes, we’re coming along famously,” he was saying. “Only another check and we can start building.”

He put down the phone and Andromeda placed her papers on his desk, casually, as though she were bringing him a cup of tea.

“That is all you will need, Dr. Geers,” she told him.