A for Andromeda Read online

  She could act the part without difficulty: she looked so honest, so forthright, so much a team member. She had only to sit back and listen and learn. It was the people she met who discomforted her; they had their own world and their own values. Who was she to judge them or be party to their judging? When Harries nodded and sauntered away to do what was needed, she despised both him and herself.

  The Professor left soon afterwards and handed her over to John Fleming.

  “Perhaps you’d drop her at the Lion when you go back to Bouldershaw. She’s staying there.”

  They went out on to the steps to see the old man off.

  “He is rather sweet,” said Judy.

  Fleming grunted. “Tough as old nails.”

  He took a hip-flask from his pocket and drank out of it. Then he handed it to her. When she refused he took another swig himself, and she watched him standing in the light of the porch, his head thrown back, his Adam’s apple working up and down as he gulped. There was something desperately keyed-up about him; perhaps, as Reinhart had said, they had run him ragged. But there was something else besides — a feeling of a dynamo permanently charging inside him.

  “Play bowls?” He seemed to have forgotten his earlier indifference to her. Perhaps the drink. “There’s an alley down at Bouldershaw. Come and join our rustic sports.”

  She hesitated.

  “Oh come along now! I’m not going to leave you at the mercy of these mad astronomers.”

  “Aren’t you an astronomer?”

  “Do you mind! Cryogenics, computers, that’s really my stuff. Not this airy-fairy nonsense.”

  They walked across to the small concrete apron where his car was parked. A red beacon light shone on top of the telescope, and in the dark sky behind it stars began to show. Some could be seen through the tall arches of the pylons, as though they had already been netted by man. When they reached the car, Fleming looked back and up.

  “I’ve an idea,” he said, and his voice was quieter, quite gentle and no longer aggressive. “I’ve an idea we’ve got to the breakaway stage in the physical sciences.”

  He started to unclip the tonneau cover from his car, a small open sports, while she moved round to the other side.

  “Let me help you.”

  He hardly seemed to notice.

  “Some moment, somewhere along the perimeter of our knowledge, we’re going to go — wham! — clean through. Right out into new territory. And it might be here, on this stuff.” He bundled the tonneau cover in behind the seat. “’Philosophy is written in that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe.’ Who wrote that?”

  “Churchill?”

  “Churchill!” He laughed. “Galileo! ‘It is written in mathematical language.’ That’s what Galileo said. Any good for a press hand-out?”

  She looked at him, uncertain how to take it. He opened the door for her.

  “Let’s go.”

  The road dropped down to Lancashire on one side and into Yorkshire on the other. On the Yorkshire side it ran down a long valley, where every few miles a tall old brick mill stood over the river, until they came to the town of Bouldershaw. Fleming drove too fast, and grumbled.

  “They get on my wick... Flogging Ministers’ Opening!... The old Prof. sweating on the Honours List; the Ministry bunch all needling and nagging. All it is, really, is a piece of lab equipment. Because it’s big and costs the earth, it becomes public property. I don’t blame the old man. He’s caught up in it. He’s stuck his neck out and he’s got to show results.”

  “Well, won’t it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “I thought it was your equipment.”

  “Mine and Dennis Bridger’s.”

  “Where is Dr. Bridger?”

  “Down at the alley. Waiting for us with a lane booked, I hope. And a flask.”

  “You’ve got one flask.”

  “What good’s one? They’re dry, these places.”

  As they swung down the dark winding road, he started telling her about Bridger and himself. Both had been students at Birmingham University, and research fellows at the Cavendish. Fleming was a theorist, Bridger a practical man, a development mathematician and engineer. Bridger was a career scientist; he was set to make the most he could out of his particular line. Fleming was a pure research man who did not give a damn about anything except the facts. But they both despised the academic system into which they grew up, and they stuck together. Reinhart had winkled them out, several years ago, to work on his new telescope. As he was, perhaps, the most distinguished and respected astro-physicist in the western world, and a born leader of teams and picker of talents, they had gone along with him without hesitation, and he had backed and encouraged and generally fathered them throughout the long and tortuous business of development.

  It was easy to see, when Fleming talked, the mutual trust that tied him to the older man, behind his surliness. Bridger, on the other hand, was bored and restless. He had done his part. And they had, as Fleming said without modesty or conceit, given the old boy the most fabulous piece of equipment on earth.

  He did not ask about Judy, and she kept quiet. He waited in the bar of the Lion while she went to her room. By the time they reached the bowling alley he was pretty much the worse for wear.

  The bowling alley was a converted cinema which stood out in a wash of neon and floodlighting against the dark old mill-town. Its clientele seemed to have come from somewhere other than the cobbled streets. They were mostly young. They wore jeans and soda-jerks’ jackets, crew-cuts, and blouses with slogans on them. It was difficult to imagine them at home in the old terraced houses, the grimy Yorkshire valleys. Their native voices were drowned under a flood of music and the rumble and clatter of bowls and skittles on the wooden planking of the lanes. There were half-a-dozen lanes with ten pins at one end of each and, at the other, a rack of bowls, a scoring table, a bench and a quartet of players. When a bowl pitched down and scored a strike, an automatic gate picked up the skittles again and returned the bowl to the rack at the players’ end. Except in the concentrated, athletic moment of bowling, the players seemed uninterested in the game, lounging around and talking and drinking Coca Cola out of bottles. It was more transatlantic than the cinema had been: as though the American way of life had burst out through the screen and possessed the auditorium. But that, Fleming remarked, was just bloody typical of the way things are generally.

  They found Bridger, a narrow, pointed man about Fleming’s age, bowling on a lane with a curvy girl in a vermilion blouse and tight, bright yellow drainpipes. Her bosom and hair were swept up as high as they would go, her face was made up like a ballet dancer’s, and she moved like something in a Hollywood chorus; but when she opened her mouth all Yorkshire came out of it. She bowled with a good deal of muscular skill, and came back and leant on Bridger, sucking a finger.

  “Ee, I got a bit o’ skin off.”

  “This is Grace.” Bridger seemed slightly ashamed of her. He was prematurely lined and nervous, mousily dressed in dull sports clothes like a post office assistant on Saturday morning. He shook hands tentatively with Judy, and when she said “I’ve heard of you,” he gave her a quick, anxious look.

  “Miss Adamson,” said Fleming, pouring some whisky into Bridger’s Coke, “Miss Adamson is our new eager-beaver — lady-beaver — P.R.O.”

  “What’s your other name, love?” inquired the girl.

  “Judy.”

  “You haven’t got a bit of sticking-plaster?”

  “Oh, ask at the desk!” said Bridger impatiently.

  “One of your team?” Judy asked Fleming.

  “Local talent. Dennis’s. I’ve no time.”

  “Pity,” she said. But he appeared not to hear. Taking another swig from the flask, he addressed himself unsteadily to the bowling. Bridger turned confidentially to her.

  “What have you heard about me?”

  “Only that you’d been working with Dr. Fleming.”

 
“It isn’t my cup.” He looked aggrieved; the point of his nose twitched like a rabbit’s. “I could get five times my salary in industry.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “As soon as that lot on the hill’s working, I’m away.” He glanced across at Fleming, conspiratorially, then back at her. “Old John will stay, looking for the millennium. And before he’s found anything, he’ll be old. Old and respected. And poor.”

  “And possibly happy.”

  “John’ll never be happy. He thinks too much.”

  “Who drinks too much?” Fleming lurched back to them and marked up his score.

  “You do.”

  “All right — I drink too much. Brother, you’ve got to have something to hold on to.”

  “What’s wrong with the railings?” asked Bridger, twitching his nose.

  “Look —” Fleming slumped down on to the bench beside them. “You’re going to walk along those railings, and then you’ll take another pace and they won’t be there. We were talking about Galileo — why? Because he was the Renaissance. He and Copernicus and Leonardo da Vinci. That was when they said ‘Wham!’ and knocked down all the railings and had to stand on their own feet in the middle of a great big open universe.”

  He heaved himself up and took another of the heavy bowls from the rack. His voice rose above the din of the music and bowling.

  “People have put up new fences, further out. But this is another Renaissance! One day, when nobody’s noticing, when everybody’s talking about politics and football, and money —” he loomed over Bridger, “then suddenly every fence we know is going to get knocked down — wham! — like that!”

  He made a great sweep with the bowl and knocked the bottles of Coke off the scoring table.

  “Oi! Careful, you great clot!” Bridger leapt to his feet and started picking up the bottles and mopping at the spilt drink with his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Miss Adamson.”

  Fleming threw back his head and laughed.

  “Judy — her name is Judy.”

  Bridger, down on his knees, rubbed away at the stain on Judy’s skirt.

  “I’m afraid it’s gone on you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Judy was not looking at him. She was gazing up at Fleming, puzzled and entranced. Then the Tannoy went. “Doctor Fleming — telephone call, please.”

  Fleming came back after a minute, shaking his head to clear it. He pulled Bridger up from the bench.

  “Come on, Dennis boy. We’re wanted.”

  Harvey was alone in the control-room, sitting at the desk adjusting the receiver tune. The window in front of him was dark as a black-board, and the room was quiet except for a constant low crackle of sound from the loudspeaker. From outside — nothing, until the noise of Fleming’s car.

  Fleming and Bridger came pushing in through the swing doors and stood, blinking, in the light. Fleming focused blearily on Harvey. “What is it?”

  “Listen.” Harvey held up a hand, and they stood listening.

  In among the crackle and whistles and hiss from the speaker came a faint single note, broken but always continuing.

  “Morse code,” said Bridger.

  “It’s not in groups.”

  They listened again.

  “Short and long,” said Bridger. “That’s what it is.”

  “Where’s it coming from?” Fleming asked.

  “Somewhere in Andromeda. We were sweeping through —”

  “How long’s it been going on?”

  “About an hour. We’re over the peak now.”

  “Can you move the reflector?”

  “I expect so.”

  “We’re not supposed to,” said Bridger. “We’re not supposed to start tracking tests yet.”

  Fleming ignored him.

  “Is the servo equipment manned?” he asked.

  “Yes, Dr. Fleming.”

  “Well, try to track it.”

  “No, listen John.” Bridger put an ineffectual hand on Fleming’s sleeve.

  “It may be a sputnik or something,” said Harvey.

  “Is there anything new up?” Fleming disengaged himself from Bridger.

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Someone could have put something fresh into orbit —” Bridger started, but Fleming cut him off.

  “Dennis —” He tried to think clearly. “Go and get this on to a recorder, will you? There’s a good chap. Get it on a printer too.”

  “Hadn’t we better check?”

  “Check after.”

  Fleming walked carefully out into the hall, bent his face over the drinking fountain and sluiced it with water. When he returned, fresh and shining and remarkably sober, he found Bridger already setting up in the equipment room and Harvey phoning the duty engineer. There was a dip in the lights as the electric motors started. The metal reflector high up outside swung silently and invisibly, its movement compensating for the motion of the earth. The sound from the speaker grew a little louder.

  “That the best you can get?”

  “It’s not a very strong signal.”

  “Hm.” Fleming opened a drawer in the control desk and fished out a catalogue. “Have its galactic co-ordinates shifted at all?”

  “Hard to say. I wasn’t tracking. But they couldn’t have shifted very much.”

  “So it’s not in orbit?”

  “I’d say not.” Harvey bent anxiously over the faders on his desk. “Could it be some ham bouncing morse code off the moon?”

  “Doesn’t really sound like morse code, and the moon isn’t up.”

  “Or off Mars, or Venus. I hope I haven’t brought you out on a wild goose chase.”

  “Andromeda, you said?”

  Harvey nodded.

  Fleming turned the pages of the catalogue, reading and listening. He became quiet and gentle again as he had been earlier with Judy at the car. He looked like a studious small boy.

  “You’re holding it?”

  “Yes, Dr. Fleming.”

  Fleming walked across to the desk and flicked on the intercom.

  “Getting it, Dennis?”

  “Yes.” Bridger’s voice came tinnily back. “But it doesn’t make sense.”

  “It may by morning. I’m going to try to get some idea of the distance.”

  Fleming flicked back the key and crossed, book in hand, to the astronomical charts on the back wall.

  They worked for a while with the sounds from space the only noise in the room, Fleming checking the source and Harvey holding it with the great silent telescope outside.

  “What do you think?” Harvey asked at last.

  “I think it’s coming from a long way out.”

  After that they simply worked and listened, and the signal went on and on and on, endlessly.

  Two

  ANNOUNCEMENT

  IN the late nineteen-sixties, when these things happened, the Ministry of Science was moved into a new glass-walled building near Whitehall. It was elegantly furnished and staffed, as if to prove that technology was on a par with the arts, and the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Michael Osborne, was one of the most cultivated of its many cultivated servants. Although he wore tweeds in the office, they were the smoothest and most formal of tweeds. He seldom sat at his huge desk — more often in one of the low easy chairs by the low marble-topped coffee-table.

  He sprawled there, decoratively, the morning after the message had started to come through at Bouldershaw Fell, talking with General Charles G. Vandenberg of the U.S. Air Force. The light from the venetian blinds fell across him in neat lines.

  England by that time was something like the advance headquarters of a besieged land: an area consisting of Western Europe and North America. Pressure from the East, and from Africa and Asia, had pushed western civilisation up into one corner of the globe, with America north of Panama a fairly secure centre and Western Europe an embattled salient. Not that anyone was officially at war with anyone else; but economic sanctions and the threat of bombs and mis
siles gripped the remains of the old world in a fairly acute state of siege. The lifeline across the Atlantic was maintained almost entirely by the Americans, and American garrisons in Britain, France and Western Germany held on with the same desperate tenuousness as the Roman legions in the third and fourth centuries.

  Protocol insisted that Britain and her neighbours were still sovereign states, but in fact initiative was fast slipping out of their hands. Although General Vandenberg was modestly styled representative of the Defence Co-ordination Committee, he was, in effect, air commander of a friendly but dominant occupying power to whom this country was one square on a large chess-board.

  An ex-bomber-boy, bull-necked and square-headed, he still looked brash and youthful in middle age; but there was nothing brash about his manner. He was a New Englander, quietly spoken and civilised, and he talked with authority, as if he knew more about the world than most of the people in it.

  They were speaking about Whelan. A note about him hung limply from Osborne’s hand.

  “I can’t do anything now.”

  “There is a kind of priority —”

  Osborne heaved himself up out of his chair and called his secretary through the intercom on his desk.

  “The Defence Co-ordination Committee have a low boiling-point,” Vandenberg observed.

  “You can tell them we’ll cope.”

  Osborne gave the note to the secretary as she came in.

  “Get someone to look after that, will you?”

  She took it and put a folder of papers on his desk. She was young and pretty and wore what looked like a cocktail dress: the civil service had moved on.

  “Your papers for Bouldershaw.”

  “Thanks. Is my car here?”

  “Yes, Mr. Osborne.”

  He opened the folder and read:

  “The Minister’s party will arrive at Bouldershaw Fell at 3.15 p.m. and will be received by Professor Reinhart.”