“We’ve corresponded, I think, over missile tracking.” He had to crane up to speak; it was obviously done on purpose. Fleming regarded the arrangement and smiled.
A physicist by training, Geers had for years been a senior scientific executive on defence projects and was now more like a commanding officer than a scientist. Somewhere beneath the martinet’s uniform a disappointed research man lay hidden, but this only made him more envious of other people’s work and more irritated by the mass of day-to-day detail that fell upon him.
“It’s about time you got your job behind barbed wire, from all I hear.” He was peevish, but able; he had plans worked out for them. “It’s going to be difficult, of course. We can’t give you unlimited facilities.”
“We don’t ask—” began Reinhart.
Fleming interrupted. “The priorities have been fixed, I understood.”
Geers gave him a sharp, cold look and flicked ash into a tray made from a piston casting.
“You’ll have certain hours set aside on the main computer. You’ll have your own work-block and living-quarters for your team. They’ll be within our perimeter and you’ll be under our surveillance, but you’ll have passes and you’ll be free to come and go as you wish. Major Quadring is in charge of our security, and I’m in charge of all research projects.”
“Not ours,” said Fleming, without looking at Reinhart.
“Mine are more mundane but more immediate tasks.” Geers, so far as possible, tried to avoid Fleming and addressed himself to the Professor. “Yours is a Ministry of Science affair—more idealistic, though perhaps a little hit and miss.”
There was a framed photograph, on one corner of his desk, of his wife and two small children.
“I wonder how they get on?” Fleming said to Reinhart when they left.
It was still pouring outside. One of Geers’s assistants led them round the compound, across the wet grass, along concrete paths between rows of low bunker-like buildings half buried in the ground, and up to the launching area at the top of the headland.
“It’s quite calm here to-day,” he said, as they bent their heads against the sweeping rain. “It can blow a gale as soon as look at you.”
Several small rockets rested on their tilted racks, swathed in nylon covers, pointing out to sea, and one larger one stood vertical on the main launching pad, looking heavy and earthbound lashed to its scaffold.
“We don’t go in for the really big stuff here. These are all interceptors; a lot of ability packed into a little space. It’s all highly classified, of course. We don’t encourage visitors in the normal way.”
The main computer was an impressive affair, housed in a big laboratory building. It was an American importation, three times the size of anything they had used before. The duty staff gave Fleming a timetable with his sessions marked on it; they seemed friendly enough though not particularly interested. There was also an empty office building for their own use, and a number of pre-fabricated chalets for living-quarters—small and bare but clean and fitted out with service furniture.
They squelched in their sodden shoes across to the personnel area and were shown the senior staff mess and lounge, the shop, laundry and garage, the cinema and post office. The camp was completely self-supporting: there was nothing to go out for but views of heather and sky.
For the first two or three months only the basic unit moved up: Fleming, Bridger, Christine, Judy and a few junior assistants. Their offices bulged with calculations, plans, blue-prints and odd pieces of experimental lash-up equipment. Fleming and Bridger had long all-night sessions over wiring circuits and electronic components, and slowly the building filled up with more and more research and design assistants and with draughtsmen and engineers.
Early the following spring a firm of Glasgow contractors appeared on the site and festooned the area with boards saying MACINTYRE & SONS. A building for the new super-computer, as Fleming’s brain-child was called, was put up inside the perimeter but away from the rest of the camp, and lorry-loads of equipment arrived and disappeared inside it.
The permanent staff viewed all this with lively but detached interest and went on with their own projects. Every week or so there would be a roar and a flash from the launching pads as another quarter of a million pounds of tax-payers’ money went off into the air. The moorland sheep and cattle would stampede in a half-hearted sort of way, and there would be a few days of intense activity inside the plotting rooms. Apart from that it was as quiet as an undiscovered land and, when the rain lifted, incredibly beautiful.
The junior members of Reinhart’s team mixed in happily with the defence scientists and the soldiers guarding them, eating and drinking and going on excursions together and sailing together in small boats on the bay; but Bridger and Fleming walked on their own and were known as the heavenly twins. When they were not either in the computer building or the offices they were usually in one or other of their huts, working. Occasionally Fleming shut himself up with a problem and Bridger took a motor-boat out to the bird island, Thorholm, with a pair of field-glasses.
Reinhart operated from London, paying periodic visits but mostly orbiting round Whitehall, pushing through plans, permits, budgets and the endless reports required by the government. Somehow everything they wanted they got fast and there were few delays. Osborne, Reinhart said modestly, was a past master.
Only Judy was at a loose end. Her office was apart from the others, in the main administrative block, and her living quarters were with the women defence scientists. Fleming, though perfectly amiable, had no time to spend with her; Bridger and Christine went to some lengths to miss her. She managed to keep a general tally on what was going on, and she allowed some of the army officers to take her about, but otherwise there was nothing. During the long winter evenings she took to tapestry and clay modelling and acquired a reputation for being arty, but in reality she was just bored.
When the new computer was nearly finished, Fleming gave her a conducted tour of it. His own attitude was a mixture of deprecation and awe; he could be completely wrong about it, or it could be something unimaginable and uncanny. The chief impression he gave was of fatigue; he was desperately tired now, and tiredly desperate. The machine itself was indeed something. It was so big that instead of being housed in a room, the control room was built inside it.
“We’re like Jonah in the belly of the whale,” he told her, pointing to the ceiling. “The cooling unit’s up there—a helium liquefier. There’s a constant flow of liquid helium round the core.”
Inside the heavy double fire-doors was an area the size of a ballroom, with a ceiling-high wall of equipment dividing it across the centre. Facing that, and with its back to the doors, was the main control desk, with a sort of glorified typing desk on one side and a printing machine on the other. Both the typing desk and the printer were flanked by associated tape decks and punch-card equipment. The main lights were not yet working: there was only a single bulb on the control desk and a number of riggers’ lamps hanging from the equipment rack. The room was semi-underground and had no windows. It was like a cave of mystery.
“All that,” said Fleming, pointing to the wall of equipment facing them, “is the control unit. This is the input console.”
He showed her the teletype keyboard, the magnetic tape scanner and the punched-card unit. “He was intended to have some sort of sensory magnetic system, but we’ve modified it to scan transcript. Easier for mortals with eyes.”
“He?”
Fleming looked at her oddly.
“I call him ‘he’ because he gives me the sense of a mind. Of a person almost.”