Early in February, Dawnay reported the emergence of a living embryo, apparently human.
Hunter hurried over to the lab building to see it. He passed Fleming as he went through the computer room, but said nothing to him; Fleming had kept to his own side of the business, as he had promised, and made no effort to help with the bio-chemistry. In the laboratory, Hunter found Dawnay bending over a small oxygen tent, surrounded by equipment and a number of her assistants.
“Is it living?”
“Yes.” Dawnay straightened and looked up at him.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s a baby.”
“A human baby?”
“I would say so, though I doubt if Fleming would.” She gave a smile of satisfaction. “And it’s a girl.”
“I can hardly believe—” Hunter peered down into the oxygen tent. “May I look?”
“There’s nothing much to see; only a bundle wrapped up.”
Under the perspex cover of the tent was something which could have been human, but its body was tightly wrapped in a blanket and its face hidden by a mask. A rubber tube disappeared down by its neck into the blanket.
“Breathing?”
“With help. Pulse and respiration normal. Weight, six and a half pounds. When I first came here, I’d never have believed...” She broke off, suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by emotion. When she continued, it was in a softer voice. “All the alchemy of making gold come true. Of making life.” She tapped the rubber tubing and resumed her usual gruff way of speaking. “We’re feeding her intravenously. You may find she’s no instinct for normal suckling. You’ll have to teach her.”
“You’ve landed us quite a job,” said Hunter, not unmoved but anxious already about formal responsibilities.
“I’ve landed you human life, made by human beings. It took nature two thousand million years to do a job like that: it’s taken us fourteen months.”
Hunter’s official bedside manner returned to him. “Let me be the first to congratulate you.”
“You make it sound like a normal birth,” said Dawnay, managing to sniff and smile at the same time.
The little creature in the tent seemed to thrive on its intravenous food. It grew approximately half an inch a day, and was obviously not going to go through the usual childhood of a human being. Geers reported to the Director-General of Research at the Ministry of Defence that at the present rate it should reach full adult stature in between three to four months.
Official reaction to the whole event was a mixture of pride and secrecy. The Director-General sent for a full report and classified it in a top-secret category. He passed it on to the Minister of Defence who communicated it, in summary, to an astonished and bewildered Prime Minister. The Cabinet was told in terms of strictest confidence and Ratcliff returned to his office at the Ministry of Science shaken and unsure what to do next. After considering for a long time, he told Osborne who wrote to Fleming calling for an independent report.
Fleming replied in two words: “Kill it!”
In due course he was summoned to Geers’s office and asked to account for himself.
“I hardly see,” said Geers, his eyes screwed up narrow behind his spectacles, “that this is anything to do with you.”
Fleming thumped his fist on the huge desk.
“Am I or am I not still a member of the team?”
“In a sense.”
“Then perhaps you’ll listen to me. It may look like a human being, but it isn’t one. It’s an extension of the machine, like the other creature, only more sophisticated.”
“Is this theory based on anything?”
“It’s based on logic. The other creature was a first shot, a first attempt to produce an organism like us and therefore acceptable to us. This is a better shot, based on more information. I’ve worked on that information; I know how deliberate it is.”
Geers allowed his eyes to open a little. “And having achieved this miracle, you suggest we kill it?”
“If you don’t now you’ll never be able to. People will come to think of it as human. They’ll say we’re murdering it. It’ll have us—the machine will have us—where it wants us.”
“And if we don’t choose to take your advice?”
“Then keep it away from the computer.”
Geers sat silent for a moment, his spectacles glinting. Then he rose to end the interview.
“You are only here on sufferance, Fleming, and out of courtesy to the Minister of Science. The judgement in this case rests not with you but with me. We shall do what I think best, and we shall do it here.”
Nine
Acceleration
The girl, as Geers had predicted, was fully grown by the end of four months. She remained most of the time in an oxygen tent, although she was learning to breathe naturally for increasing periods. By the end of the first month she was off drip feeds and on to a bottle. Beyond this, nothing was done to stimulate her mind and she lay inert as a baby, staring at the ceiling. Geers grew slightly apprehensive as growth continued, but she stopped at five foot seven inches, by which time she was a fully developed young woman.
“Quite a good-looking young woman, too,” Hunter said, with a lick of his lips.
Geers allowed no-one but Hunter, Dawnay and their assistants to see her. He sent daily confidential reports to the Ministry of Defence and was visited twice by the Director-General of Research, with whom he made plans for her future. Extreme precautions were taken to keep her existence secret; a day and night guard was mounted on the computer and laboratory block and everyone who had to know was sworn to silence. Apart from Reinhart, whom Osborne told privately, and a handful of senior officials and politicians in London, no-one outside the research team at Thorness knew anything about her.
Fleming, in Geers’s opinion, was the most doubtful quantity in the whole group, and Judy was given specific instructions to watch him. They had literally hardly spoken since the previous spring. He had made one surly, half-hearted attempt to apologise but she had cut him short, and since then when they met in the camp they ignored each other. At least, she told herself, she had not been spying on him—the fact that he had dissociated himself from Dawnay’s experiment, to which she had been assigned after Bridger’s death, had meant he was no longer primarily her concern. Whatever pangs of conscience she had about the past were hidden under the anaesthetic of a sort of listless apathy. But now it was different. Screwing up all her determination, she went to find him in the computer room, her legs feeling curiously flabby beneath her. She handed him her letter of instruction.
“Would you read this?” she said, without any preliminary.
He glanced at it and handed it back to her. “It’s on Ministry of Defence paper—you read it. I’m choosy what I touch.”
“They’re concerned about the security of the new creature,” she said stiffly, withdrawing in the face of his attack.
Fleming laughed.
“It amuses you?” she asked. “I’m to be responsible for its safety.”
“And who’s to be responsible for yours?”
“John!” Judy’s face reddened. “Do we always have to be on opposite sides of the fence?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said with something between sympathy and indifference. “I’m afraid I don’t dig your precious creature.”
“It’s not mine. I’m doing my job. I’m not your enemy.”
“No. You’re just the sort of girl who gets pushed about.” He looked helplessly around the room. “Oh I’ve had my say!”