“What traces?”
“Notably from your own radio-telescope. It’s the only thing we have with high enough definition. It’s giving us tracks of a great many vehicles in orbit.”
“Terrestrial?” Reinhart looked across at the trajectories traced on the map. “Is that what you’re all worried about?”
“Yeah. Someone on the other side of the globe is pushing them up fast, but they’re out of range of our early warning screen. The U. N. Space Agency has no line on them, nor has the Western Alliance. No-one has.”
Geers finished it for him. “So they want you to handle it.”
“But that isn’t my field.” Reinhart stood firm in front of the desk. “I’m an astronomer.”
“What you’re doing now is your field?” Vandenberg asked. “It develops from it—from an astronomical source.”
No-one answered him for a moment.
“Well, that’s what the Cabinet wants,” said Osborne finally.
“And the work at Thorness?”
Vandenberg turned to him. “Your team—what’s left of it—will answer to Dr. Geers.”
“Geers!”
“I am Director of the Station.”
“But you don’t know the first thing—” Reinhart checked himself.
“I’m a physicist.” said Geers. “I was, at least. I expect I can soon brush it up.”
Reinhart looked at him contemptuously. “You’ve always wanted this, haven’t you?”
“It’s not my choice!” said Geers angrily.
“Gentlemen!” Osborne neighed reprovingly.
Vandenberg moved heavily back to his desk. “Let’s not make this a personality problem.”
“And Dawnay and Fleming’s work?” Reinhart demanded.
“I shan’t ditch them,” said Geers. “We shall need some of the computer time, but that can be arranged—”
“If you ditch me.”
“There’s no kind of slur on you, Ernest,” Osborne said. “As you’ll see from the next Honours’ List.”
“Oh damn the Honours’ List!” Reinhart’s small fingers dug into his palms. “What Dawnay and Fleming are at is the most important research project we’ve ever had in this country. That’s all my concern.”
Geers looked at him glintingly through his spectacles. “We’ll do what we can for them, if they behave themselves.”
“There are going to be some changes here, Miss Adamson.”
Judy was in Geers’s office, facing Dr. Hunter, the Medical Superintendent of the Station. He was a big bony man who looked far more military than medical.
“Professor Dawnay is going to start a new experiment, but not under Professor Reinhart’s direction. Reinhart is out of it.”
“Then who—?” she left the question in the air. She disliked him and did not wish to be drawn by him.
“I shall be responsible for administering it.”
“You?”
Hunter was possibly used to this type of insult; it raised only a small sneer on his large, unsubtle face.
“Of course, I’m only a humble doctor. The ultimate authority will lie with Dr. Geers.”
“Supposing Professor Dawnay objects?”
“She doesn’t. She’s not really interested in how it’s organised. What we have to do is put things on a tidy footing for her. Dr. Geers will have the final jurisdiction over the computer and I shall help him with the biological experiments. Now you—” he picked up a paper from the Director’s desk—“you were seconded to the Ministry of Science. Well, you can forget that. You’re back with us. I shall need you to keep our side of the business secure.”
“Professor Dawnay’s programme?”
“Yes. I think we are going to achieve a new form of life.”
“A new form of life?”
“It takes your breath, doesn’t it?”
“What sort of form?”
“We don’t know yet, but when we do know we must keep it to ourselves, mustn’t we?” He gave her a sort of bedroom leer. “We’re privileged to be midwives to a great event.”
“And Dr. Fleming?” she asked, looking straight in front of her.
“He’s staying on, at the request of the Ministry of Science; but I really don’t think there’s much left for him to do.”
Fleming and Dawnay received the news of Reinhart’s removal almost without comment. Dawnay was completely engrossed in what she was doing and Fleming was isolated and solitary. The only person he might have talked to was Judy, and he avoided her. Although he and Dawnay were working closely together, they still mistrusted each other and they never spoke freely about anything except the experiment. Even on that, he found it hard to convince her about any basic thesis.
“I suppose,” she said, as they stood by the output printer checking fresh screeds of figures, “I suppose all this is the information Cyclops has been feeding in.”
“Some of it. Plus what the machine learnt from Christine when it had her on the hooks.”
“What could it learn?”
“Remember I said it must have a quicker way of getting information about us?”
“I remember your being impatient.”
“Not only me. In those few seconds before the fuses blew, I should think it got more physiological data than you could work through in a lifetime.”
Dawnay gave one of her little dry sniffs and left him to pursue his own thoughts. He picked up a piece of insulated wire and wandered over to the control unit, where he stood in front of the winking display panel, thoughtfully holding one bared end of the wire in each hand. Reaching up to one of the terminals, he hooked an end of the wire over it, then, holding the wire by the insulation, he advanced the other end slowly towards the opposite terminal.
“What are you trying to do?” Dawnay came quickly across the room to him. “You’ll arc it.”
“I don’t think so,” said Fleming. He touched the bare end of wire on to the terminal. “You see.” There was no more than a tiny spark as the two metal surfaces met.
Fleming dropped the wire and stood for a few seconds, thinking. Then he slowly raised his own hands to the terminals, as Christine had done.
Dawnay stepped forward to stop him. “For heaven’s sake!”
“It’s all right.” Fleming touched the two terminals simultaneously, and nothing happened. He stood there, arms outstretched, grasping the metal plates, while Dawnay watched him with a mixture of scepticism and fear.
“Haven’t you had enough death?”
“He has.” He lowered his arms. “He’s learnt. He didn’t know the effect of high voltages on organic tissue until he got Christine up on there. He didn’t know it would damage himself, either. But now that he does know he takes precautions. If you try to short across those electrodes, he’ll reduce the voltage. Have a go.”
“No thanks. I’ve had enough of your quaint ideas.”
Fleming looked at her hard.
“You’re not simply up against a piece of equipment, you know. You’re up against a brain, and a damn good one.”
When she did not answer, he walked out.
In spite of the pressure of defence work, Geers did find time and means to help Dawnay. He was the kind of man who fed on activity like a locust; to have a multiplicity of things under his control satisfied the inner craving of his mind and took the place, perhaps, of the creative genius that had eluded him. He arranged for yet more equipment and facilities to be put at her disposal and reported her progress with growing pride. He would do better than Reinhart.
A new laboratory was added to the computer block to house a huge and immensely complicated D.N.A. synthesiser, and during the following weeks newly-designed X-ray crystallographic equipment and chemical synthesis units were installed to manufacture phosphate components, deoxyribose, adenine, thymine, cytosine, tyrosin and other ingredients needed for making D.N.A. molecules, the seeds of life. Within a few months they had a D.N.A. helix of some five billion nucleotide code letters under construction, and by the end of the year they had made a genetic unit of fifty chromosomes, similar to but slightly more than the genetic requirement for man.