A for Andromeda Read online

  “I’m going to bale out.” Fleming looked up at him. “The design’s finished. There’s nothing more for me to do here.”

  “There’s everything for you to do!”

  “I’d rather move on.”

  “How about that?”

  They listened for a moment to the speaker. Bridger’s nose twitched.

  “Could be anything,” he said off-handedly.

  “But I’ve an idea what.”

  “What?”

  “It could be a set of instructions.”

  “All right, you work on it.”

  “We’ll work on it together.”

  At that moment Judy broke in on them. She marched across from the door, her high heels clicking on the flooring like a guardsman’s, her face set and furious. She could hardly wait to get to them before she spoke.

  “Which of you told the press?”

  Fleming stared at her in amazement. She turned to Bridger.

  “Someone has leaked the information — all the information — to the press.”

  Fleming clicked his tongue deprecatingly.

  Judy gave him a blazing look and turned back to Bridger.

  “It wasn’t Professor Reinhart and it wasn’t me. It wasn’t Harvey or the other boys — they don’t know enough. So it must be one of you.”

  “Q.E.D.” said Fleming. She ignored him.

  “How much did they pay you, Dr. Bridger?”

  “I —”

  Bridger stopped.

  Fleming got up and barged his way between them. “Is it your business?” he asked her.

  “Yes. I —”

  “Well, what are you?” He pushed his face close up to her and she realised that his breath smelt of drink again.

  “I —” she faltered, “I’m the press officer. I’m carrying the can. I’ve just had the biggest rocket of all time.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Bridger.

  “Is that all you can say?” Her voice rose unsteadily.

  “Do yourself a favour, will you?” Fleming stood with his legs apart, swaying, and grinning contemptuously down on her. “Take your talons out of my friend Dennis.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I told them.”

  “You!” She stepped back as if she had been slapped in the face. “Were you drunk?”

  “Yes,” said Fleming and turned his back on her. He walked to the door of the recording room and then looked round. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d been sober.”

  As he went out of the door he called back at her: “And they didn’t pay me!”

  Judy stood for a moment without hearing or seeing. The loudspeaker hissed and crackled, fluorescent lighting shone down on the sparse angular furniture. Outside the window, the arch of the telescope reared up into a darkening sky: only three evenings ago she had come to it, uninitiated and uninvolved... She became aware of Bridger standing beside her, offering her a cigarette.

  “Lost an idol, Miss Adamson?”

  Judy, as press officer, had to report to Osborne, and Osborne reported to his Minister. Nothing was heard of Harries, and his disappearance was not announced. The press were persuaded that the whole thing was either a mistake or a hoax. After a series of painful meetings between ministers, the Ministry of Defence were able to assure General Vandenberg and his masters that nothing of the kind would occur again: they would take full responsibility. The search for Harries was intensified, and Fleming was summoned to London.

  At first it seemed possible that Fleming was shielding Bridger, but it was soon established that he had in fact told the whole story over drinks in the Lion to an agency reporter called Jenkins. Although Bridger tendered his resignation, he had three months’ notice to work out and he was left in charge of Bouldershaw Fell while Fleming was absent. The message continued to come in, and was printed out in a code of 0 and 1.

  Fleming himself seemed quite unmoved by the commotion around him. He took all the printed sheets with him in the train to London and studied them hour after hour, making notes and calculations in the margin and on odd letters and envelopes that he found in his pockets. He appeared to be hardly aware of anything else. He dressed and ate absent-mindedly, he drank little; he burned with intense preoccupation and excitement. He ignored Judy, and hardly looked at the newspapers.

  When he arrived at the Ministry of Science, he was shown up to Osborne’s room, where Osborne was waiting for him with Reinhart and a stiff, middle-aged man with grey hair and impatient blue eyes. Osborne rose and shook hands.

  “Dr. Fleming.” He was very formal.

  “Hi,” said Fleming.

  “You don’t know Air Commodore Watling, Security Section, Ministry of Defence.”

  The stiff man bowed and looked at him without warmth.

  Fleming shifted and turned enquiringly to Reinhart.

  “Hallo John,” said Reinhart, in a small, restrained voice, and looked down self-consciously at his fingers.

  “Have a seat, Dr. Fleming.”

  Osborne indicated a chair facing the others, but Fleming stared from one to another of them before he sat, as though he were waking up in a strange place.

  “Is this a court of enquiry?”

  There was a small silence. Watling lit a cigarette.

  “You were advised there was a security barrier on your work?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That it was confidential.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why —?”

  “I don’t go for gagging scientists.”

  “Take it easy, John,” Reinhart said soothingly.

  Watling went on to another tack.

  “You’ve seen the papers?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Half the world believes little green men with feelers are about to land in our back gardens.”

  Fleming smiled, feeling the ground firmer beneath him.

  “Do you?”

  “I’m in possession of the facts.”

  “The facts are what I gave the press. The straight scientific facts. How was I to know they’d distort them?”

  “It’s not your job to assess these things, Dr. Fleming.” Osborne had installed himself elegantly and judicially behind his desk. “Which is why you were told not to interfere. I warned you myself.”

  “So?” Fleming was bored already.

  “We’ve had to send a full report to the Defence Co-ordination Committee,” said Watling severely. “And the Prime Minister is making a statement to the United Nations.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  “It’s not the sort of position we like to be in, but our hand has been forced and we have to allay fear.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Our hand has been forced by you.”

  “Am I supposed to grovel?” Fleming began to be angry as well as bored. “What I do with my own discoveries is my own affair. It’s still a free country, isn’t it?”

  “You are part of a team, John,” Reinhart said, not looking at him.

  Osborne leaned coaxingly forward across his desk.

  “All we need, Dr. Fleming, is a personal statement.”

  “How will that help?”

  “Anything which will reassure people will help.”

  “Particularly if you can discredit your informant.”

  “This isn’t personal, John,” said Reinhart.

  “Isn’t it? Then why am I here?” Fleming looked contemptuously round at them. “When I’ve made a statement to say I was talking out of the back of my head — what happens then?”

  “I’m afraid...” Reinhart studied his fingers again.

  “I’m afraid we’ve given Professor Reinhart no choice,” said Watling.

  “They want you to leave the team,” Reinhart told him.

  Fleming got up and thought for a moment, while they waited for an outburst.

  “Well, it’s easy, isn’t it?” he said at last, smoothly.

  “I don’t want to lose you
, John.” Reinhart made a small, deprecating movement with his tiny hands.

  “No, of course not. There’s one snag.”

  “Oh?”

  “You can’t go any further without me.”

  They were prepared for that. There were other people, Osborne pointed out.

  “But they don’t know what it is, do they?”

  “Do you?”

  Fleming nodded and smiled.

  Watling sat up even straighter. “You mean, you’ve decyphered it?”

  “I mean, I know what it is.”

  “You expect us to believe that?”

  Osborne obviously did not, nor Watling; but Reinhart was unsure. “What is it, John?”

  “Do I stay with it?”

  “What is it?”

  Fleming grinned. “It’s a do-it-yourself kit; and it isn’t of human origin. I’ll prove it to you.”

  He dug into his briefcase for his papers.

  Three

  ACCEPTANCE

  THE new Institute of Electronics was housed in what had once been a Regency square and was now a pedestrian precinct surrounded by tall concrete-and-glass buildings with mosaic faces. The Institute possessed several floors of computing equipment, and after intensive lobbying Reinhart was able to gain Fleming a reprieve and install him and the rest of the team there with access to the equipment. Bridger, nearing the end of his contract, was given a young assistant named Christine Flemstad, and Judy — to her and everyone else’s disgust — was sent along with them.

  “What,” Fleming demanded, “is the point of a P.R.O. if we’re so damn top-secret we have to stand on a ladder to brush our own teeth?”

  “I’m supposed to learn, if you’ll let me. So that when it is released...”

  “You’ll be au fait?”

  “Do you mind?” Judy spoke tentatively, as though she, not Fleming, had been to blame before. She felt bound to him in an inexplicable way.

  “I should worry!” said Fleming. “The more sex the better.”

  But, as he had said at Bouldershaw, he had no time. He spent all his days, and most of the night, breaking down the enormous mass of data from the telescope into comprehensible figures. Whatever deal he had made — or Reinhart had made for him — had sobered him and intensified his work. He drove Bridger and the girl with solid and unrelenting determination and suffered patiently all manner of supervision and routine. Nominally, Reinhart was in charge, and he took all his results obediently to him; but the defence people were never far away, and he even managed to be polite to Watling, whom they called “Silver-wings.”

  The rest of the team were less happy. There was a distinct coolness between Bridger and Judy. Bridger, in any case, was anxious to be gone, and the girl Christine was openly in the running to succeed him. She was young and pretty with something of Fleming’s single-mindedness, and she patently regarded Judy as a hanger-on. As soon as she had an opportunity, she fought.

  Shortly after they moved down from Bouldershaw, Harries had turned up: Watling revealed this on one of his visits to the unit. Harries had been set on at the bookie’s, bundled into a car, beaten up and dumped in a disused mill, where he had nearly died. He had crawled around with a broken leg, unable to get out, living on water from a dripping tap and some chocolate he had in his pocket, until after three days he had been discovered by a rat-catcher. He did not return to them, and Watling told only Judy the details. She kept them to herself, but tried to sound Christine on Bridger’s background.

  “How long have you known him?”

  They were in a small office off the main computer hall, Christine working at a trestle table littered with punched input cards, Judy pacing about and wishing she had a chair of her own.

  “I was one of his research students at Cambridge.” In spite of her Baltic parentage, about which Judy knew, Christine spoke like any English university girl.

  “Did you know him well?”

  “No. If you want his academic references...”

  “I only wondered...”

  “What?”

  “If he ever behaved — oddly.”

  “I didn’t have to wear a barbed wire girdle.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He never asked you to help him do anything, on the side?”

  “Why should he?” She looked round at Judy with serious, hostile eyes. “Some of us have real work to get on with.”

  Judy wandered into the computer hall and watched the machines clicking and flickering away. Each machine had its own attendant: neuter-looking young men and women in identical overalls. In the centre was a long table where calculations from the computers were assembled in piles of punched cards or coils of tape or long screeds of paper from the output printers. The volume of figures they handled was prodigious, and it all seemed utterly unrelated to flesh and blood — a convocation of machinery, talking its own language.

  Judy had learnt a little of what the team were doing. The message from Andromeda had continued for many weeks without repeating itself, and then had gone back to the beginning and started all over again. This had enabled them to fill in most of the gaps in the first transmission; as the earth was turning, they were only able to receive it during the hours that the western hemisphere was facing the Andromeda constellation, and for twelve hours out of every twenty-four the source went below their horizon. When the message began again, the rotation of the earth was in a different phase to it, so that part of the lost passages could now be received; and by the end of the third repeat they had it all. The staff at Bouldershaw Fell went on monitoring, but there was no deviation. Whatever the source was, it had one thing to say and went on saying it.

  No-one concerned now doubted that it was a message. Even Air Commodore Watling’s department referred to it as “the Andromeda broadcast” as if its source and identity were beyond doubt. The work on it they catalogued as Project A. It was a very long message, and the dots and dashes, when resolved into understandable arithmetic, added up to many million long groups of figures. Conversion into normal forms would have taken a lifetime without the computers, and took a good many months with them. Each machine had to be instructed what to do with the information given it; and this, Judy learnt, was called programming. A program consisted of a set of calculations fed in on punched cards, which set the machine to do the job required. The group of figures to be analysed — the data — was then put in, and the machine gave the answer in a matter of seconds. This process had to be repeated for every fresh consideration of every group of figures. Fortunately, the smaller computers could be used for preparing material for the larger ones, and all the machines possessed, as well as input, control, calculating and output units, a reasonable memory storage, so that new answers could be based on the experience of earlier ones.

  It was Reinhart — kind, tolerant, wise, tactful Reinhart — who explained most of it to Judy. After the affair at Bouldershaw Fell he came to accept her with more grace, and to show that he liked her and felt sorry for her. Although he was deeply and precariously involved in the inter-departmental diplomacy which kept them going, his particular qualities of leadership were very apparent at this time. Somehow he kept Fleming on the rails and the authorities at bay and still had time to listen to everyone’s ideas and problems; and all the while he remained discreetly in the background, hopping from issue to issue like some quiet, dainty, highly intelligent bird.

  He would take Judy by the arm and talk to her quite simply about what they were doing, as though he had all the time and all the knowledge in the world. But there came a point in the understanding of computation where he had to hand over to Fleming, and Fleming went on alone. Computers, Judy realised, were Fleming’s first and great love, and he communicated with them by a sort of intuitive magic.

  It was not that there was anything cranky about him; he simply had a superhuman fluency in their language. He swam in binary mathematics like a fish in the sea, and made short cuts which it took
Bridger and Christine many hours of solid plodding to check. But they never found him wrong.

  One day, just before Bridger was due to leave, Reinhart took him and Fleming aside for a longer session than usual and at the end of it went straight to the Ministry. The following morning the Professor and Fleming went back to Whitehall together.

  “Are we all met?”

  Osborne’s rather equine voice neighed down the length of the conference room. About twenty people stood round the long table, talking in groups. Blotters, notepads and pencils had been laid out for them on the polished mahogany and at intervals down the centre of the table were silver trays bearing water-jugs and glasses. At the end was one larger blotter, with tooled leather corners, for the Top Man.

  Vandenberg and Watling were in one group, Fleming and Reinhart in another, and a respectful circle of civil servants in charcoal-grey suits surrounded one dazzling matron in a flowered costume. Osborne surveyed them expertly and then nodded to the youngest charcoal-suited man who stood by the door. The young man disappeared into the corridor and Osborne took his place by the head of the table.

  “Aheeem!” he whinnied. The others shuffled into their places, Vandenberg — at Osborne’s invitation — at the right of the top chair. Fleming, accompanied by Reinhart, sat obstinately at the far end. There was a little silence and then the door opened and James Robert Ratcliff, Minister of Science, walked in. He waved an affable hand at one or two juniors who started to rise — “Sit down, dear boy, sit down!” — and took his seat behind the tooled leather. He had a distinguished, excessively well-groomed grey head and healthy pink-and-white face and fingers. The fingers were very strong, square and capable: one could imagine him taking large handfuls of things. He smiled genially upon the company.

  “Good-morning, lady and gentlemen. I hope I’m not late.”

  The more nervous shook their heads and muttered “No.”

  “How are you, General?” Ratcliff turned, slightly Caesarlike, to Vandenberg.

  “Old and ailing,” said Vandenberg, who was neither.

  Osborne coughed. “Shall I go round the table for you?”

  “Thank you. There are several fresh faces.”