“This is private.”
“Not the foreshore. In this free country the foreshore is...” He shrugged again. “My name is Kaufmann. You have not heard it?”
“No.”
“Your friend Herr Doktor Bridger—”
“My friend Bridger is dead!”
“I know. I heard.” Kaufmann inhaled his small cigar. “Very sad.”
“Did you know Dennis Bridger?” Fleming asked, perplexed and suspicious.
“Oh yes. We had been associated for some time.”
“Do you work for—?” The light dawned and he tried to remember the name.
“Intel? Yes.”
Kaufmann smiled up at Fleming and blew out a little wraith of smoke.
Fleming took his hands from his pockets.
“Get out.”
“Excuse?”
“If you’re not off this property in five minutes, I shall call the guards.”
“No, please.” Kaufmann looked hurt. “This was so happy a chance meeting you.”
“And so happy for Bridger?”
“No-one was more sorry than I. He was also very useful.”
“And very dead.” Fleming looked at his wristwatch. “It’ll take me five minutes to climb the cliff. When I get to the top I shall tell the guards.”
He turned to go, but Kaufmann called him back.
“Dr. Fleming! You have much more lucrative ways of spending the next five minutes. I am not suggesting you do anything underhand.”
“That’s dandy, isn’t it?” said Fleming, keeping his distance.
“We were thinking, rather, you might like to transfer from government service to honourable service with us. I believe you are not too happy here.”
“Let’s lay this on the line shall we, my herr friend?” Fleming walked back and stood looking down at him. “Maybe I don’t love the government, maybe I’m not happy. But even if I hated their guts and I was on my last gasp and there was no-one else in the world to turn to, I’d rather drop dead before I came to you.”
Then he turned away and climbed up the cliff path without looking back.
He went straight to Geers’s office and found the Director dictating reports into a tape-machine.
“What did you tell him?” asked Geers when Fleming had reported.
“Do you mind!” A look of disgust came over Fleming’s face. “It’s bad enough keeping it out of the hands of babes and sucklings, without feeding it to sharks.”
He left the office wondering why he had bothered; but in fact it was one of the few actions that told in his favour during the coming months.
Patrols were set on the beach, concertina wire was staked down from the headlands into the sea, Quadring’s security staff did a comb-out of the surrounding district, and nothing more was heard of Intel for a long time. The experiment in the computer building continued without any tangible result until after Dawnay came back from her holiday; and then, one morning, the computer suddenly started printing-out. Fleming locked himself up in his but with the print-out, and after about a hundred hours’ work he telephoned for Reinhart.
From what he could make out, the computer was asking an entirely new set of questions, all concerning the appearance, dimensions and functions of the body. It was possible, as Fleming said, to reduce any physical form to mathematical terms and this, apparently, was what it was asking for.
“For instance,” he told Reinhart and Dawnay when they sat down together to work on it, “it wants to know about hearing. There’s a lot here about audio frequencies, and it’s obviously asking how we make sounds and how we hear them.”
“How could it know about speech?” Dawnay inquired.
“Because its creature can see us using our mouths to communicate and our ears to listen. All these questions arise from your little monster’s observation. He can probably feel speech vibrations, too, and now that he’s wired to the machine he can transmit his observations to it.”
“You assume.”
“How else do you account for this?”
“I don’t see how we can analyse the whole human structure,” Reinhart said.
“We don’t have to. He keeps making intelligent guesses, and all we have to do is feed back the ones that are right. It’s the old game. I can’t think, though, why it hasn’t found some quicker method by now. I’m sure it’s capable of it. Perhaps the creature hasn’t come up to expectations.”
“Do you want to try it?” Reinhart asked Dawnay.
“I’ll try anything,” she said.
So the next stage of the project went forward, while Christine stayed with the computer, taking readings and inputting the results. She seemed all the time in a state of nervous tension, but said nothing.
“Do you want to move over to something else?” Fleming asked her when they were alone together one evening in the computer building.
“No. It fascinates me.”
Fleming looked at her pensive and rather beautiful face. He no longer flirted with her as he used to before he was interested, when she was just a girl in the lab. Pushing his hands into his pockets, he turned from her and left the building. When he had gone she walked across the control room to the laboratory bay. It took her an effort to go through into the room where the tank was, and she stood for a moment in the doorway, her face strained, bracing herself. There was no sound except for the steady mains hum of the computer, but when she came within range of the port-hole in the side of the tank the creature began to move about, thumping against the tank walls and slopping fluid out of the open top.
“Steady,” she said aloud. “Steady on.”
She bent down mechanically and looked in through the porthole: the eye was there looking steadily back at her, but the creature was becoming more and more agitated, threshing about with the fringes of its body like a jellyfish. Christine passed a hand across her forehead; she was slightly dizzy from bending down, but the eye held her as if mesmerically. She stayed there for a long minute, and then for another, growing incapable of thought. Slowly, as if of its own volition, her right hand moved up the side of the tank and her fingers sought the wire leading in to the encephalograph cable. They touched the wire and tingled as the slight current ran through them.
The moment she touched the wire, the creature grew quiet. It still looked steadfastly at her but no longer moved. The whole building was utterly quiet except for the hum of the computer. She straightened slowly, as if in a trance, still holding the wire. Her fingers ran along it until they touched the sheath of the cable and then closed on that, sliding it through the hollow of her hand. The cable was only loosely rigged; it looped across from the tank to the wall of the laboratory and was slung along the wall from pieces of tape tied to nails at intervals of a few yards. As her hand felt its way along the cable, she walked stiffly across to the wall and along beside it to the doorway to the computer room. Her eyes were open, but fixed and unseeing. The cable disappeared into a hole drilled in the wooden facing of the doorpost and she seemed at a loss when she could follow it no further. Then she raised her other hand and gripped the cable again on the other side of the doorway.
Her right hand dropped and she went through into the other room, holding the cable with her left. She worked her way slowly along the wall to the end of the rack of control equipment, breathing in a deep, laboured way as if asleep and troubled by a dream. At the centre of the racks of equipment the cable ran into the transformer below the control panel. The panel lights flashed steadily with a sort of hypnotic rhythm and her eyes became fixed on them as they had been on the eye of the creature. She stood in front of the panel for a few moments as though she were going to move no further; then, slowly, her left hand let go of the cable. Her right hand lifted again and with the fingers of both she grasped the high tension wires that ran from the transformer up to the two terminals beside her head. These wires were insulated to a point just below the terminals where their cores were bared and clamped on to the jutting-out plates. Her hands moved up them slowly, inch by inch.