“Yes.”
“It’s probably pretty primitive, but it’s the next step. Dawnay thinks she’s using that machine, but it’s using her!”
“The next step to what?” Reinhart asked casually.
“I don’t know. Some sort of take-over.”
“Of us?”
“That’s the only possible point.”
Reinhart rose and, walking slowly and thoughtfully across the room, put his empty glass down with the others.
“I don’t know, John.”
Fleming appeared to understand his uncertainty.
“The first explorers must have seemed harmless enough to the native tribes.” He spoke gently. “Kind old missionaries with ridiculous topees, but they finished up as their rulers.”
“You may be right.” Reinhart smiled at him gratefully; it was like old times, with both of them thinking the same way. “It seems an odd sort of missionary.”
“This creature of Dawnay’s: what sort of brain has it?” Reinhart shrugged and Fleming went on, “Does it think like us, or does it think like the machine?”
“If it thinks at all.”
“If it has an eye, it has nerve-centres—it certainly has a brain. What kind of brain?”
“Probably primitive too.”
“Why?” Fleming demanded. “Why shouldn’t the machine produce an extension of its own intelligence: a sub-computer that functions the same way, except that it’s dependent on an organic body?”
“What would be the value?”
“The value of an organic body? A machine with senses? A machine with an eye?”
“You won’t persuade anyone else,” said Reinhart.
“You needn’t rub that in.”
“You’ll have to stay with it, John.”
“To do what?”
“To control it.” Reinhart spoke flatly: he had made the decision some hours before.
Fleming shook his head.
“How can we? It’s cleverer than we are.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t want any part of it.”
“That would suit it, according to your theory.”
“If you don’t believe me—”
Reinhart half raised a little hand. “I’m prepared to.”
“Then destroy it. That’s the only safe thing.”
“We’ll do that if necessary,” Reinhart said, and he walked to the door as if the matter were settled.
Fleming swung round to him.
“Will you? Do you really think you’ll be able to? Look what happened when I tried to stop it: Dawnay threw me out. And if you try to they’ll throw you out.”
“They want to throw me out anyhow.”
“They want what?” Fleming looked as if he had been hit.
“The powers that be want us all out of the way,” Reinhart said. “They just want to know we’re breaking up and they’ll move in.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“They think they know better how to use it. But as long as we’re here, John, we can pull out the plug. And we will, if it comes to it.” He looked from Fleming’s troubled face to the cases lying on the floor. “You’d better unpack those things.”
The meeting between Fleming and Dawnay was electrically charged, but nothing dramatic happened. Fleming was quiet enough, and Dawnay treated him with a kind of tolerant amusement.
“Welcome the wandering boy,” she said, and led him off to see the thing in the tank.
The creature floated peacefully in the middle of its nutrient bath; it had found the porthole and spent most of its time gazing out with its one huge lidless eye. Fleming stared back at it, but it gave no sign of registering what it saw.
“Can it communicate?”
“My dear boy,” Dawnay spoke as though she were humouring a very young student. “We’ve hardly had time to learn anything about him.”
“It has no vocal cords or anything?”
“No.”
“Um.” Fleming straightened up and looked in the top of the tank. “It might be a feeble attempt at a man.”
“A man? It doesn’t look like a man.”
Fleming strolled through to the computer room, where Christine was watching the display panel.
“Anything printing out?”
“No. Nothing.” Christine looked puzzled. “But there’s obviously something going on.”
The display lamps were winking steadily: it seemed that the machine was working away by itself without producing results.
For the next two or three days nothing happened, and then Fleming laid a magnetic coil from the machine round the tank. He did not—in fact, he could not—explain why he did it, but immediately the computer display began flashing wildly. Christine ran in from the laboratory.
“Cyclops is terribly excited! He’s threshing about in his tank.”
They could hear the bumping and slopping of the creature and its fluid from the other room. Fleming disconnected the coil and the bumping stopped. When they reconnected the coil, the creature reacted again, but still nothing came through on the output printer. Reinhart came over to see how they were getting on, and he and Dawnay and Fleming went over the routine once more; but they could make nothing of it.
The next day Fleming got them together again.
“I want to try an experiment,” he said.
He walked across to the display panel and stood with his back to it, between the two mysterious terminals which they had never used. After a minute he took the perspex safety-guards off the terminals and stood between them again. Nothing happened.
“Would you stand here a moment?” he asked Reinhart, and moved away to let the Professor take his place. “Mind you don’t touch them. There’s a thousand volts or more across there.”
Reinhart stood quite still with his head between the terminals and his back to the display panel.
“Feel anything?”
“A very slight—” Reinhart paused. “A sort of dizziness.”
“Anything else?”
“No”
Reinhart stepped away from the computer.
“All right now?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can’t feel anything now.”
Fleming repeated the experiment with Dawnay, who felt nothing.
“Different people’s brains give off different amounts of electrical discharge,” she said. “Mine’s obviously low, so’s Fleming’s. Yours must be higher, Ernest, because it induces a leak across the terminals. You try, Christine.”
Christine looked frightened.
“It’s all right,” said Fleming. “Stand with your head between those things, but don’t touch them or they’ll roast you.”
Christine took her place where the others had stood. For a moment it seemed to have no effect on her, then she went rigid, her eyes closed and she fell forward in a dead faint. They caught her and pulled her into a chair, and Dawnay lifted up her eyelids to examine her eyes.
“She’ll be all right. She’s only fainted.”
“What happened?” asked Reinhart. “Did she touch one?”
“No,” Fleming said. “All the same, I’d better put the guards back on.” He did so, and stood thinking while Dawnay and Reinhart revived Christine, ducking her head between her legs and dabbing her forehead with cold water.
“If there’s a regular discharge between those terminals and you introduce the electrical field of a working brain into it...”