“You’re right,” Dawnay admitted to Fleming. “She hasn’t got a brain, she’s got a calculator.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” He looked across at the slim, fair girl who was sitting reading at the table in what had been made her room. It was one of his rare visits to Dawnay’s premises. The laboratory had been gutted and turned into a set of rooms that might have come out of a design brochure, with the girl as one of the fitments.
“She’s not fallible,” said Dawnay. “She doesn’t forget. She never makes a mistake. Already she knows more than most people do.”
Fleming frowned. “And you’ll go on stuffing information into her until she knows more than you.”
“Probably. The people in charge of us have plans for her.”
Geers’s plan was fairly obvious. The pressing problems of defence machinery remained unsolved in spite of the use they had made of the new computer. The main difficulty was that they did not really know how to use it. They took it out of Fleming’s hands for several hours a day, and managed to get a great deal of calculation done very quickly by it; but they had no means of tapping its real potential or of using its immense intellect to solve problems that were not put to it in terms of figures. If, as Fleming considered, the creatures evolved with the machine’s help had an affinity with it, then it should be possible to use one of them as an agent. The original monster was obviously incapable of making any communication of human needs to the computer, but the girl was another matter. If she could be used as an intermediary, something very exciting might be done.
The Minister of Defence had no objection to the idea and, although Fleming warned Osborne, as he had warned Geers, Osborne carried no weight with the men in power. Fleming could only stand by and watch the machine’s purpose being unwittingly fulfilled by people who would not listen to him. He himself had nothing but a tortuous strand of logic on which to depend. If he was wrong, he was wrong all the way from the beginning, and the way of life was not what he thought. But if he was right they were heading for calamity.
He was, in fact, in the computer-room when Geers and Dawnay first brought the girl in.
“For God’s sake!” He looked from Geers to Dawnay in a last, hopeless appeal.
“We’ve all heard what you think, Fleming,” Geers said.
“Then don’t let her in.”
“If you want to complain, complain to the Ministry.”
He turned back to the doorway. Dawnay shrugged her shoulders; it seemed to her that Fleming was making a great deal of fuss about nothing.
Geers held the door open as Andromeda came in, escorted by Hunter who walked beside and slightly behind her as though they were characters out of Jane Austen. Andromeda moved stiffly, but was thoroughly wide awake, her face calm, her eyes taking in everything. It was all somehow formal and unreal, as if a minuet were about to begin.
“This is the control-room of the computer,” said Geers as she stood looking around her. He sounded like a kind but firm parent. “You remember I told you about it?”
“Why should I forget?”
Although she spoke in a slow stilted way, her voice, like her face, was strong and attractive.
Geers led her across the room. “This is the input unit. The only way we can give information to the computer is by typing it in here. It takes a long time.”
“It must do.” She examined the keyboard with a sort of calm interest.
“If we want to hold a conversation with it,” Geers went on, “the best we can do is select something from the output and feed it back in.”
“That is very clumsy,” she said slowly.
Dawnay came and stood by her other side. “Cyclops in the other room can input direct by that co-axial cable.”
“Is that what you wish me to do?”
“We want to find out,” said Geers.
The girl looked up and found Fleming staring at her. She had not taken him in before, and gazed back expressionlessly at him.
“Who is that?”
“Doctor Fleming,” said Dawnay. “He designed the computer.”
The girl walked stiffly across to him and held out her hand.
“How do you do?” She spoke as if repeating a lesson.
Fleming ignored her hand and continued staring at her. She looked unblinkingly back at him and, after a minute, dropped her arm.
“You must be a clever man,” she said flatly.
Fleming laughed. “Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Laugh—that is the word?”
Fleming shrugged. “People laugh when they’re happy and cry when they’re sad. Sometimes we laugh when we’re unhappy.”
“Why?” She went on gazing at his face. “What is happy or sad?”
“They’re feelings.”
“I do not feel them.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
“Why do you have them?”
“Because we’re imperfect.” Fleming returned her stare as though it were a challenge.
Geers fidgeted impatiently.
“Is it working all right, Fleming? There’s nothing on the display panel.”
“Which is the display panel?” she asked, turning away.
Geers showed her and she stood looking at the rows of unlit bulbs while Geers and Dawnay explained it, and the use of the terminals, to her.
“We’d like you to stand between them,” he said.
She walked deliberately towards the panel, and as she approached it the lamps started to blink. She stopped.
“It’s all right,” said Dawnay.
Geers took the guards from the terminals and urged the girl forward, while Fleming watched, tense, without saying anything. She went reluctantly, her face strained and set. When she reached the panel, she stood there, a terminal a few inches from each side of her head, and the lights began flashing faster. The room was full of the hum of the computer’s equipment. Slowly, without being told, she put her hands up towards the plates.
“You’re sure it’s neutralised?” Geers looked anxiously at Fleming.
“It neutralises itself.”
As the girl’s hands touched the metal plates, she shivered. She stood with her face blank, as if entranced, and then she let go and swayed back unsteadily. Dawnay and Geers caught her and helped her to a chair.
“Is she all right?” asked Geers.
Dawnay nodded. “But look at that!”
The lights on the panel were all jammed solidly on and the computer hum grew louder than it had been before.
“What’s happened?”
“It speaks to me,” said the girl. “It knows about me.”
“What does it say?” asked Dawnay. “What does it know about you? How does it speak?”
“We... we communicate.”
Geers looked uncomfortably puzzled. “In figures?”
“You could express it in figures,” she said, staring blindly before her. “It would take a very long time to explain.”
“And can you communicate—?” Dawnay was interrupted by a loud explosion from the next room. The display panel went blank, the hum stopped.
“Whatever’s happened?” asked Geers.
Fleming turned without answering him and went quickly through to the first lab bay, where the creature and its tank were housed. Smoke was rising from the contact wires above the tank. When he pulled them out, the ends were blackened and lumps of charred tissue hung from them. He looked into the tank, and his mouth set into a thin line.
“What’s happened to it?” Dawnay hurried in, followed by Geers.
“It’s been electrocuted.” Fleming dangled the harness in front of her. “There’s been another blow-out and it’s been killed.”