She made a last attempt to reach him. “It seems a long time since we went sailing.”
“It is a long time.”
“We’re the same people.”
“In a different world.” He moved as if he wanted to get away.
“It’s the same world, John.”
“O.K., you tell them that.”
Hunter came past. “We’re getting her out.”
“Who?” Fleming turned from Judy with relief.
“The little girl—out of her oxygen tent.”
“Are we allowed?” asked Judy.
“This is a special occasion—coming-out party.” Hunter gave her a stale, sexy smile and walked away into the other room.
Fleming looked sourly after him.
“Full-size live monster given away with each packet.”
Judy surprised herself by giggling. She felt they were suddenly about a mile closer.
“I detest that man. He’s so condescending.”
“I hope he kills her,” said Fleming. “He’s probably a bad enough doctor.”
They went through to the laboratory together. Hunter was superintending opening the bottom end of the oxygen tent, watched by Dawnay. Under the tent was a narrow trolley-bed which two assistants drew gently forward. The rest stood round as the bed slid out with the full-grown girl-creature on it: first her feet, covered by a sheet, then her body, also covered. She was lying on her back, and as her face was revealed Judy gave a gasp. It was a strong and beautiful face with high cheek-bones and wide, Baltic features. Her long, pale hair was strewn out on the pillow, her eyes were shut and she was breathing peacefully as if asleep. She looked like a purified, blonde version of Christine.
“It’s Christine!” Judy whispered. “Christine.”
“It can’t be,” said Hunter brusquely.
“There is a superficial resemblance,” Dawnay admitted.
Hunter cut across her. “We did an autopsy on the other girl. Besides, she was a brunette.”
Judy turned to Fleming.
“Is this some horrible kind of practical joke?”
He shook his head. “Don’t let it fool you. Don’t let it fool any of you. Christine’s dead. Christine was only a blueprint.”
No-one spoke for a moment while Dawnay took the girl’s pulse and stooped down to look at her face. The eyes opened and looked vaguely up at the ceiling.
“What does it mean?” asked Judy. She remembered seeing Christine dead, and yet this was something inescapably like her, living.
“It means,” said Fleming, as though answering all of them, “that it took a human being and made a copy. It got a few things wrong—the colour of the hair, for instance—but by and large it did a pretty good job. You can turn the human anatomy into figures, and that’s what it did; and then got us to turn them back again.”
Hunter looked at Dawnay and signalled to the assistants to wheel the trolley into a neighbouring bay.
“It gave us what we wanted, anyway,” said Dawnay.
“Did it? It’s the brain that counts: it doesn’t matter about the body. It hasn’t made a human being—it’s made an alien creature that looks like one.”
“Dr. Geers has told us your theory,” said Hunter, moving away in the wake of the girl on the bed.
Dawnay hesitated for a moment before going after them.
“You may be right,” she said. “In which case it’ll be all the more interesting.”
Fleming controlled himself with an obvious effort. “What are you going to do with it?”
“We’re going to educate it—her.”
Fleming turned and walked out of the laboratory, back to the computer room, with Judy following.
“What’s bad about it?” she asked. “Everyone else...”
He turned on her. “Whenever a higher intelligence meets a lower one, it destroys it. That’s what’s bad. Iron Age man destroyed the Stone Age; the Palefaces beat the Indians. Where was Carthage when the Romans were through with it?”
“But is that bad, in the long run?”
“It’s bad for us.”
“Why should this—?”
“The strong are always ruthless with the weak.”
She laid a hand tentatively on his sleeve. “Then the weak had better stick together.”
“You should have thought of that earlier,” he said.
Judy knew better than to push him further; she went back to her own life, leaving him with his preoccupations and doubts.
There was no early spring that year. The hard grey weather went on to the end of April, matching the grey sunless mood of the camp. Apart from Dawnay’s experiment, nothing was going well. Geers’s permanent staff and missile development teams worked under strain with no outstanding success; there were more practice firings than ever but nothing really satisfactory came of them. After each abortive attempt the grey wrack of Atlantic cloud settled back on the promontory as if to show that nothing would ever change or ever improve.
Only the girl creature bloomed, like some exotic plant in a hothouse. One bay of Dawnay’s laboratories was set up as a nursing block with living quarters for the girl. Here she was waited on and prepared for her part like a princess in a fairy tale. They called her Andromeda, after the place of her origin, and taught her to eat and drink and sit up and move. At first she was slow to learn to use her body—she had, as Dawnay said, none of the normal child’s instincts for physical development—but soon it became clear that she could absorb knowledge at a prodigious rate. She never had to be told a fact twice. Once she understood the possibilities of anything she mastered it without hesitation or effort.
It was like this with speech. To begin with she appeared to have no awareness of it: she had never cried as a baby cries, and she had to be taught like a deaf child by being made conscious of the vibrations of her vocal cords, and their effects. But as soon as she understood the purpose of it she learnt language as fast as it was spelt out to her. Within weeks she was a literate, communicating person.
Within weeks, too, she had learnt to move as a human being, a little stiffly, as if her body was working from instructions and not from its own desire, but gracefully and without any kind of awkwardness. Most of the time she was confined to her own suite, though she was taken every day, when it was not actually raining, out to the moors in a closed car and allowed to walk in the fresh air under armed escort and out of sight of any other eyes from either inside or outside the camp.
She never complained, whatever was done to her. She accepted the medical checks, the teaching, the constant surveillance, as though she had no will or wishes of her own. In fact, she showed no emotions at all except those of hunger before a meal and tiredness at the end of the day, and then it was physical, never mental tiredness. She was always gentle, always submissive, and very beautiful. She behaved, indeed, like someone in a dream.
Geers and Dawnay arranged for her education at a pace which packed the whole of a university syllabus into something which more resembled a summer-school. Once she had grasped the basis of denary arithmetic, she had no further difficulty with mathematics. She might have been a calculating machine; she whipped through figures with the swift logic of a ready-reckoner, and she was never wrong. She seemed capable of holding the most complex progressions in her head without any sense of strain. For the rest, she was filled up with facts like an encyclopaedia. Geers and the teachers who were sent up to Thorness in an endless and academically-impressive procession—not to instruct her directly, for she was too secret, but to guide her instructors—laid out the foundations of a general, unspecialised level of knowledge, so that by the end of her summer-course, and of the summer, she knew as much about the world, in theory, as an intelligent and perceptive school leaver. All she lacked was any sense of human experience or any spontaneous attitude to life. Although she was alert and reasonably communicative, she might just as well have been walking and talking in her sleep, and that, in fact, is the impression which she gave.