“Hold on,” said Dawnay impatiently. “I think she’s coming round.”
“Oh, she’ll be O.K.” Fleming looked thoughtfully at the panel and the two sheathed contacts that stuck out from it. “It’ll change the current between them—modulate it. The brain will feel a reaction; there could be some pick-up, it could work both ways.”
“What are you talking about?” Reinhart asked.
“I’m talking about these!” Fleming flared up with excitement. “I think I know what they’re for. They’re a means of inputting and picking up from the machine.”
Dawnay looked doubtful. “This is just a neurotic young woman. Probably a good subject for hypnosis.”
“Maybe.”
Christine came round and blinked.
“Hallo.” She smiled at them vaguely. “Did I faint?”
“I’ll say you did,” said Dawnay. “You must have a hell of an electrical aura.”
“Have I?”
Reinhart gave her a glass of water. Fleming turned to her and grinned.
“You’ve just done a great service to science.” He nodded to the terminals. “You’d better keep away from between there.”
He turned back to Reinhart.
“The real point is that if you have the right sort of brain—not a human one—one that works in a way designed by the machine—then you have a link. That’s how it’s meant to communicate. Our way of feeding back questions as answers is terribly clumsy. All this business of printers—”
“Are you saying it can thought-read?” Dawnay asked scornfully.
“I’m saying two brains can communicate electrically if they’re of the right sort. If you get your creature and push his head between those terminals—”
“I don’t see how we can do that.”
“It’s what it wants! That’s why it’s restless—why they’re both restless. They want to get in touch. The creature’s in the machine’s electromagnetic field, and the machine knows the logical possibilities of it. That’s what he’s been working out, without telling us.”
“You can’t drag Cyclops out of his nutrient bath,” Dawnay said. “He’ll die.”
“That must have been thought of.”
“You could rig up an electro-encephalograph,” said Reinhart. “The kind they use for mental analysis. Put a set of electric pads on Cyclops’s head and run a co-axial cable from there to the terminals to carry the information. You’ll have to put it through a transformer, or you’ll electrocute him.”
“What does that do?” Dawnay looked at him sceptically.
“It puts the computer in touch with its sub-intelligence,” said Fleming.
“To serve what purpose?”
“To serve its purpose.” He turned away from them and paced up the room.
Dawnay waited for Reinhart to speak, but the old man stood obstinately, frowning down at his hands.
“Feeling better now?” he asked Christine.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Do you think you could rig up something like that?”
“I think so.”
“Dr. Fleming will help you. Won’t you, John?”
Fleming stood at the far end of the room, the banks of equipment rising massively behind him.
“If that’s what you really want,” he said.
“The alternative,” said Reinhart, more to Dawnay and himself than to Fleming, “is to pack up and hand over. We haven’t much choice, have we?”
Eight
Agony
Judy kept as far from Fleming as she could, and when she did see him he was usually with Christine. Everything had changed since Bridger died; even the early burst of spring weather was soon ended, leaving a grey pall of gloom over the camp and over herself. With an additional pang she realised that Christine was likely to take not only her place but Dennis Bridger’s as well in Fleming’s life, working and thinking with him as she herself had never been able to do. She thought at first that she would not be able to bear it and, going over Geers’s head, wrote direct to Whitehall begging to be removed. The only result was another lecture from Geers.
“Your job here has hardly begun, Miss Adamson.”
“But the Bridger business is over!”
“Bridger may be, but the business isn’t.” He seemed quite unaware of her distress. “Intel have had enough to whet their appetite, and now they’ve lost him they’ll be looking for someone else—perhaps one of his friends.”
“You think Dr. Fleming would sell out?” she asked scornfully.
“Anyone might, if we let them.”
In the event it was Fleming, not Judy, who reported the first move from Intel.
He, Christine and Dawnay had found a way of securing the contact plates of an encephalograph on to what seemed to be the head of Cyclops, and Christine had helped him to link them by cable to the high-voltage terminals of the computer. They added a transformer to the racks below the display panel and ran the circuit through there, so that the current reaching Cyclops had only about the strength of a torch battery. All the same, the effect was alarming. When the first connection was made the creature went completely rigid and the control display lamps of the computer jammed full on. After a little, however, both the creature and the machine appeared to adjust themselves; data processing went on steadily, although nothing was printed out, and Cyclops floated quietly in his tank, gazing out of the port-hole with his single eye.
All this had taken several days, and Christine had been left in charge of the linked control room and laboratory with instructions to call Dawnay and Fleming if anything fresh happened. Dawnay took some hard-earned rest, but Fleming visited the computer building from time to time to check up and to see Christine. He found her increasingly strung-up as days went by, and by the end of a week she had become so nervy that he tackled her about it.
“Look—you know I’m dead scared of this whole business, but I didn’t know you were.”
“I’m not,” she said. They were in the control room, watching the lights flickering steadily on the panel. “But it gives me an odd feeling.”
“What does?”
“That business with the terminals, and...” She hesitated and glanced nervously towards the other room. “When I’m in there I feel that eye watching me all the time.”
“It watches all of us.”
“No. Me particularly.”
Fleming grinned. “I don’t blame it. I look at you myself.”
“I thought you were otherwise occupied.”
“I was.” He half raised his hand to touch her, then changed his mind and walked away to the door. “Take care of yourself.”
He walked down the cliff path to the beach, where he could be quiet and alone and think. It was a grey, empty afternoon, the tide was out and the sand lay like dull grey slate between the granite headlands. He wandered out to the sea’s edge, head down, hands in pockets, trying to work through in his mind what was going on inside the computer. He walked slowly back to the rocky foreshore, too deep in his thoughts to notice a squat, bald man sitting on a boulder smoking a miniature cigar.
“One moment, sir, please.” The guttural voice took him by surprise.
“Who are you?”
The bald man took a card from his breast pocket and held it out.
“I can’t read,” said Fleming.
The bald man smiled. “You, however, are Dr. Fleming.”
“And you?”
“It would mean nothing.” The bald man was slightly out of breath.
“How did you get here?”
“Around the headland. You can, at low tide, but it is quite a scramble.” He produced a silver case of cigarillos. “Smoking?”
Fleming ignored it. “What do you want?”
“I come for a walk.” He shrugged and put the case back in his pocket. He seemed to be recovering his breath. “You often come here yourself.”