A for Andromeda Read online

  “That’s to-morrow,” remarked Vandenberg. “Are you walking up?”

  “I’m going a day early to meet Reinhart.” He stuffed the folder into his brief case. “Can I give you a lift to the top of Whitehall?”

  “That would be a Christian deed.”

  They were wary of each other, but polite — almost old-fashioned. As he rose, Vandenberg asked casually:

  “Do you have an operational date for it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “This grows a little serious.”

  “The stars can wait. They’ve waited for a long time.”

  “So have the Defence Co-ordination Committee.”

  Osborne gave a shrug of sophisticated impatience. He might have been a Greek arguing with a Roman.

  “Reinhart will undertake military programmes as and when he can. That’s the arrangement.”

  “If there’s an emergency...”

  “If there’s an emergency.”

  “You read the newspapers?”

  “I can never get beyond the magazine section these days.”

  “You should try the news pages. If there’s an emergency we’ll need all the ears we can grow this side of the Atlantic.” Vandenberg nodded to an artist’s impression of the radio-telescope on the wall of the office. “It’s not a kid’s toy to us.”

  “It’s not a kid’s toy to them, either,” said Osborne.

  After they had gone, Fleming phoned through from Bouldershaw Fell; but it was too late.

  Judy arrived at the radio-telescope just before Osborne and Reinhart, and had a quiet chat to Harries in the hall.

  “What about Bridger?”

  Harries tried to look as though he were polishing a door-handle.

  “Two or three visits to a back-street bookie in Bradford. Apart from that, nothing.”

  “We’d better watch him.”

  “I’m watching him.”

  When Osborne and Reinhart arrived, they took her into the control room with them. The place was quiet and almost empty; only Harvey sat tinkering at the desk, surrounded by a litter of papers and cigarette-ends and empty drinking-cups. Reinhart clucked at it like a disturbed hen.

  “You’ll have to keep this place clean.”

  “Will they be able to swing the focus for the Minister?” Osborne asked.

  “I hope so. We haven’t tested the tracking apparatus.”

  Reinhart pottered round busily while Harvey tried to attract his attention.

  “You look as if you’ve been up all night, Harvey.”

  “I have, sir. So have Dr. Fleming and Dr. Bridger.”

  “Struck a snag?”

  “Not exactly, sir. We’ve been tracking.”

  “On whose instruction?”

  “Dr. Fleming’s.” Harvey was quite casual about it. “We’re lining up again now.”

  “Why wasn’t I told?” Reinhart turned to Osborne and Judy. “Did you know about this?”

  Judy shook her head.

  “Fleming appears to make his own rules,” observed Osborne.

  “Where is he?” Reinhart demanded.

  “In through there.” Harvey pointed to the equipment room. “With Dr. Bridger.”

  “Then ask him to spare me a minute.”

  While Harvey spoke into a microphone on the desk, Reinhart paced to and fro on his small feet.

  “What were you tracking?” he asked.

  “A source in Andromeda.”

  “M.31?”

  “Not M.31, sir.”

  “What then?”

  “Another signal near there. An interrupted signal.”

  “Have you heard it before?”

  “No, sir.”

  When Fleming came in he was tired and unshaven, sober but very excited in a subdued way. He held in his hand a bunch of papers from a line-printer. This time Reinhart made no allowances.

  “I gather you’ve taken over the telescope.”

  Fleming stopped and blinked at them.

  “I beg your pardon, gentlemen. I didn’t have time to fill in the proper forms in triplicate.” He turned to Osborne. “I did telephone your office, but you’d gone.”

  “What have you been doing?” asked Reinhart.

  Fleming told them, throwing the papers down on the desk in front of them.

  “— And that’s the message.”

  Reinhart looked at him curiously.

  “You mean signal.”

  “I said message. Dots and dashes — wasn’t it, Harvey?”

  “It did sound like that.”

  “It went on all night,” said Fleming. “It’s below the horizon now, but we can try again this evening.”

  Judy looked at Osborne, but got no help from him.

  “What about the opening?” she asked diffidently.

  “Oh, to hell with the opening!” Fleming turned on her. “This is something! This is a voice from a thousand million, million miles away.”

  “A voice?” Her own voice sounded weak and unreal.

  “It’s taken two hundred light-years to reach us. The Minister can wait a day, can’t he?”

  Reinhart seemed to have recovered himself. He looked up at Fleming with amusement.

  “Unless it’s a satellite.”

  “It’s not a satellite!”

  Reinhart wandered over to Jacko’s folly.

  “Before you get too excited, John, let’s check on the ironmongery in orbit.”

  “We have.”

  Reinhart turned to Osborne.

  “You haven’t heard of anything new going up?”

  “No.”

  “Look,” said Fleming, “if it were a satellite it wouldn’t have stayed put all night, in the middle of the Andromeda constellation.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t the Great Nebula?”

  “We located that separately, didn’t we, Harvey?”

  Harvey nodded, but Reinhart still looked unconvinced.

  “It could have been pattern interference — anything.”

  “I know a message when I meet one!” Fleming said. “Besides, there’s something about this message I’ve never seen before. Between the groups of dots and dashes there’s a fantastic amount of fast, detailed stuff. We’ll have to lash up special receiving gear to record that.”

  He keyed down the intercom and called Bridger to come from the other room, then he picked up the papers and pushed them into Reinhart’s hand. “Have a look! Ten years or more people have been waiting for this. Ten centuries for that matter.”

  “Is it intelligible?” asked Osborne in his detached civil-servant’s voice, high and whinnying.

  “Yes!”

  “You can decypher it?”

  “For heaven’s sake! Do you think the cosmos is populated by Boy Scouts sending morse code?”

  Bridger came in looking pale and twitchy, but his presence seemed to calm Fleming and he confirmed Fleming’s reports.

  “It could be from a very distant probe,” Osborne suggested.

  Fleming ignored him.

  Judy plucked up her courage. “Or another planet?”

  “Yes!”

  “Mars or somewhere?”

  Fleming shrugged: “Probably a planet going round some star in Andromeda.”

  “Signalling to us?”

  Reinhart handed the papers to Osborne.

  “It’s certainly a coherent form of dots and dashes.”

  “Then why has no-one else picked it up?”

  “Because no-one else has got equipment like this. If we hadn’t given you a thundering good piece of circuitry, you wouldn’t be getting it now.”

  Osborne sat down on a corner of the control desk, looking at the papers in a dazed sort of way.

  “If some sentient being is trying to communicate... No, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s possible.” Reinhart glanced down at his small delicate fingers, as if this were something he would prefer not to talk about. “If there are other creatures —”

  Fleming interrupted hi
m: “Not creatures — another intelligence. It doesn’t have to be little green men. It doesn’t have to be organic at all; just an intelligence.”

  Judy shuddered, then pulled herself together. “Why do I shiver?”

  “For the same reason I do,” said Fleming.

  Osborne came out of his daze.

  “For the same reason everyone will, if it is an astronomical source.”

  They decided in the end to listen for it again that night. The message had not stopped, merely faded as the rotation of the earth had swung the telescope away from it. The chances were that it would still be going on. Once he had accepted the possibility, Reinhart became calm and businesslike. He and Fleming and Bridger spread out the papers and examined them.

  “You know what it might be?” Fleming said. “Binary arithmetic.”

  “What’s that?” asked Judy.

  “It’s arithmetic expressed entirely by the figures 0 and 1, instead of the figures 1 to 10, which we normally use and which we call denary. 0 and 1, you see, could be dot and dash. Or dash could equal 0 and dot 1. The system we use is arbitrary, but the binary system is basic; it’s based on positive and negative, yes and no, dot and dash — it’s universal. Strewth.” He turned on her with his eyes bloodshot and feverish with strain and excitement. “’Philosophy is written in mathematical language!’ Remember? We’re going — Wham! — clean through on this!”

  “We’d better put off the opening,” said Osborne. “We don’t want this in the Social Gazette.”

  “Why not?”

  Osborne looked pained. Nothing in his world was as simple as that; nothing could be said or done without permission. On his files, what happened at Bouldershaw Fell was one small part of an intricately complex pattern of arrangements, and behind them loomed everything that Vandenberg stood for. Everything had to be weighed and considered with caution.

  “What do I tell the press?” Judy asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Are we a secret society or something?” Fleming regarded him with contempt, but Osborne managed to sound at the same time official and reasonable.

  “You can’t throw this kind of undigested information about. There are other people to consult, and besides there might be a panic: space-ships, saucers, bug-eyed monsters. Every idiot in the country will be seeing them. Or it may be someone up to something. Nothing must appear in the press, Miss Adamson.”

  They left Fleming seething, went to the Professor’s office to telephone the Ministry, and drove away.

  At the Lion at Bouldershaw the press had already begun to arrive to cover the opening ceremony. Judy piloted Reinhart and Osborne round by the back door to a small room where they were given dinner rather late and were able to dodge the growing phalanx of scientific correspondents living it up in the lounge. Osborne made covert dashes to the phone box between each course and came back each time looking more harassed and depressed.

  “What did the Minister say?”

  “He said — ask Vandenberg.”

  They ate through some tepid meat and he went off again.

  “What did Vandenberg say?”

  “What did you imagine he’d say? ‘Keep quiet about it.’”

  Judy was to tell the press, the next morning, that the opening had been cancelled because of a technical hitch, nothing more. Any other statement would be made from London to the Fleet Street desks. They contrived to slip out again, unnoticed, by the back door.

  Half an hour later, Fleming’s car pulled up outside and Fleming, tired and thirsty, disappeared into the lounge.

  The message was picked up again that evening. It went on all through the night and was recorded by Fleming and Bridger in turns, not only the audible dots and dashes, but the high speed part of the message as well. The next morning Dennis Bridger went down by himself to Bouldershaw and Harries followed him. After leaving his car in the Town Hall car park Bridger walked down a cobbled side-street to the lower part of the town. Harries followed him on foot at a distance of one street corner. With a raincoat in place of his overall, Harries looked more like an Irish gunman than a lab cleaner and he was careful not to let Bridger see him. Harries himself did not notice a couple of men standing on the pavement on the opposite side of the road to a small doorway marked JAS. OLDROYD, TURF ACCOUNTANT. There were a number of people around; two men talking were not conspicuous.

  Bridger turned in at the doorway and entered a narrow dark passage with stairs with linoleum treads running up to the floor above and a door with a frosted glass panel near the foot of the staircase. When he closed the outer door, the noise of the street was sealed off, leaving the passage as solitary as a crypt. The door with the frosted glass bore the same lettering for Jas. Oldroyd. It also said Knock and Enter; Bridger did so.

  Inside, Jas. Oldroyd was having a late breakfast at his desk. An elderly man in rolled-up sleeves and a dim colourless cardigan, he was sopping up fried egg with a piece of bread on the end of a fork when Bridger walked in. There was no-one else in the office, yet the small room seemed full, with a litter of papers, telephones, an adding machine, a ticker-tape and a teleprinter. Several tradesmen’s calendars hung on the walls, torn off at different months, but there was a prominent, very accurate clock. Mr. Oldroyd looked up from his web of old litter and new equipment and eyed Bridger for a moment.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  Bridger nodded towards the teleprinter machine.

  “O.K.?”

  Mr. Oldroyd put the piece of egg-soaked bread in his mouth by way of answer and Bridger set to work on the telex.

  “How’s business?” he asked as he switched it on and dialled a number. It sounded like a stock greeting between old acquaintances.

  “Chancy,” said Mr. Oldroyd. “Horses ’ave no sense of responsibility. If they’re not bunchin’ they’re crawlin’, like t’ruddy buses.”

  Bridger typed: KAUFMANN TELEX 21303 GENEVA. Then he became aware of a scuffling in the passage outside. A single head was silhouetted for a moment against the glazed panel of the door. Then there was a grunt and a groan, and the head was pulled away by other less distinct figures.

  Bridger glanced at Oldroyd, who appeared to have noticed nothing and was cutting the rind off a piece of curled up bacon. He went back to the printer. When he had finished typing, he stepped cautiously out into the passage. It was empty. The street door was swinging open, but in the street outside there was no sign of anything unusual. There was no-one standing opposite, no-one watching from the corner. A car driving away might or might not have had something to do with it.

  Dennis Bridger set off towards the car park, his legs shaking.

  News of the message came out through one of the wire agencies in time for the evening papers. By the time General Vandenberg called on the Minister of Science to protest, a government statement was being broadcast on television. The Minister was out. Osborne stood with Vandenberg in his senior’s office watching the newsreader mouthing earnestly out of the screen in the corner of the room.

  The government of the time was a well-sounding but purposeless coalition of talents, nicknamed the Meritocrats, a closing of ranks in time of crisis. They were able men and women with no common principle except survival. The Prime Minister was a liberal Tory, the Minister of Labour a renegade trade-unionist; key posts were held by active and ambitious younger men like the Minister of Defence, others by less capable but publicly impressive figures with a good turn of phrase, such as the Minister of Science. Party differences had been not so much sunk as mislaid: possibly it was the end of party government in this country. Nobody cared much, the whole nation was apparently sunk in hopeless apathy in the face of a world that had got beyond its control. Some remaining left-wing anti-Establishment movements caused Vichy to be chalked up occasionally on Whitehall walls, but that was the only visible sign of spirit. People went quietly about their lives and an odd silence fell over public affairs. Someone said it was so quiet you could hear a bomb
drop.

  Into this vacuum fell the news of a message from space. The newspapers inevitably got it hopelessly wrong. SPACE-MEN SCARE: IS THIS AN ATTACK? they asked. The young man on the screen earnestly read out the official statement:

  “The government this evening forcibly denied rumours of a possible invasion from space. A Ministry of Science spokesman told reporters that, while it was true that what appeared to be a message had been picked up by the new giant radio-telescope at Bouldershaw Fell, there was no reason to believe that it originated from either a space-ship or a nearby planet. If indeed the signal received was a message, it came from a very distant source.”

  There was no satisfactory explanation for the leak. Reinhart knew nothing about it and the Ministry of Defence’s security man on the spot — Harries — was unaccountably missing. The military, however, were after heads. Vandenberg produced two dossiers which he opened on the Minister’s table.

  “’Fleming, Dr. John - 1960 onwards: anti-N.A.T.O., pro-African, Aldermaston marcher, civil disobedience, nuclear disarmament.’ Do you call that reliable?”

  “He’s a scientist, not a candidate for a police commission.”

  “He’s supposed to be responsible. Look at the other.” The General riffled through the other folder, not without relish. “Bridger — Communist Party 1958 to ’63. Then he swung right round and started doing jobs for one of the international cartels. But one of the dirtiest: Intel. You could lose him anyway.”

  “Fleming won’t work without him.”

  “That figures.” The General gathered up the files. “I’d say we’re vulnerable in that area.”

  “All right,” said Osborne wearily, and picked up the Minister’s phone. He spoke into it gently, as if ordering flowers. “Bouldershaw Fell.”

  In the control room the message was coming through again. Harvey was out in the recording bay, looking after the tapes, and Fleming was alone at the control desk. They were shorthanded: Whelan had suddenly been posted away and even Harries was absent. Bridger hovered about in corners looking petulant and uneasy and twitching a good deal. Finally he faced up to the other man.

  “Look, John, this could go on for ever.”

  “Maybe.”

  The sound from the stars went on over the loudspeaker.