Geers peered into the tank and recoiled in distaste.
“What did you do to the controls?” he demanded.
Fleming threw down the charred remains of the wires. “I did nothing. The computer knows how to adjust its own voltages—it knows how to burn tissue—it knows how to kill.”
“But why?” asked Geers.
They all looked, by instinct, to the doorway from the computer-room. The girl was standing there.
“Because it was her.” Fleming walked across to her grimly, his jaw stuck out. “You’ve just told it, haven’t you? It knows it has a better slave now. It doesn’t need that poor creature any more. That’s what it said, isn’t it?”
She looked levelly back at him. “Yes.”
“You see!” He swung round to Geers. “You’ve got a killer. Bridger may have been an accident; so may Christine, though I’d call it manslaughter. But this was pure, deliberate murder.”
“It was only a primitive creature,” said Geers.
“And it was redundant!” He turned back to the girl. “Yes?”
“It was in the way,” she answered.
“And the next time it could be you who are in the way—or me, or any or all of us!”
She still showed no flicker of expression. “We were only eliminating unwanted material.”
“We?”
“The computer and myself.” She touched her fingers to her head.
Fleming screwed up his eyes.
“You’re the same, aren’t you? A shared intelligence.”
“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I understand—”
“Then understand this!” Fleming’s voice rose with excitement and he pushed his face close up to her. “This is a piece of information: it is wrong to murder!”
“Wrong? What is ‘wrong’?”
“You were talking about killing earlier on,” said Geers.
“Oh God!” said Fleming wildly. “Is there no sane person anywhere?”
He stared for a moment more at Andromeda, and then he went, half-running, out of the room.
Bouldershaw Fell looked much as it had done when Reinhart first took Judy to see it. Grass and heather had grown over the builders’ scars on the surrounding moor, and black streaks ran down the walls of the buildings where gutters had overflowed in winter storms; but the triple arch was still poised motionless over its great bowl, and inside the main observatory block the equipment and staff continued their quiet, methodical work. Harvey was still in charge of the control desk, the banks of steering and calculating equipment still stood to each side of him, flanking the wide window, and the photographs of stars still hung on the walls, though less fresh and new than they had been.
The only sign of the grim business that preoccupied them all was a huge glazed wall-map of the world on which the tracks of orbital missiles were marked in chinagraph. It betrayed what the outward calm of the place concealed—the anguish and fever with which they watched the threats in the sky above them remorselessly grow and grow. Reinhart referred to it as the Writing on the Wall, and worked day and night with the observatory team, plotting each new trace as it swung into orbit and sending increasingly urgent and sombre reports to Whitehall.
Nearly a hundred of the sinister, unidentified missiles had been tracked during the past months, and their launching area had been defined to within a triangle several hundred miles in extent in the ocean between Manchuria, Vladivostok and the northern island of Japan. None of the neighbouring countries admitted to them. As Vandenberg said, they could belong to any of three of our fellow-members of the United Nations.
Vandenberg paid frequent visits to the telescope and had long and fruitless conferences with Reinhart. All they could really tell from their findings was that these were propelled vehicles launched from about forty degrees north by between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty east, and that they travelled across Russia, Western Europe and the British Isles at a speed of about sixteen thousand miles an hour at a height between three hundred and fifty and four hundred miles. After crossing Britain they mostly passed over the North Atlantic and Greenland and the polar north of Canada, presumably joining up their trajectory in the same area of the North China Sea. Whatever route they took, they were deflected to pass over England or Scotland: they were obviously steerable and obviously aimed very deliberately at this small target. Although nothing certain was known of their size or shape, they emitted a tracking signal and they were clearly large enough to carry a nuclear charge.
“I don’t know what the point of them is,” Reinhart admitted. He was obsessed by them. However unhappy he was at the way things had gone at Thorness, he was by now fully occupied with this new and terrifying turn of events.
Vandenberg had cogent and reasonable theories. “Their point is that someone in the East wants us to know they have the technical edge on us. They flaunt these over our heads to show the world we’ve no way of retaliating. A new form of sabre-rattling.”
“But why always over this country?”
Vandenberg looked slightly sorry for the Professor. “Because you’re small enough—and important enough—to be a kind of hostage. This island’s always been a good target.”
“Well,” Reinhart nodded to the map on the wall. “There’s your evidence. Aren’t the West going to take it to the Security Council?”
Vandenberg shook his head. “Not until we can negotiate from strength. They’d love us to run squealing to the U.N. and admit our weakness. Then they’d have us. What we need first is some means of defence.”
Reinhart looked sceptical. “What are you doing about it?”
“We’re going as fast as we can. Geers has a theory—”
“Oh, Geers!”
“Geers has a theory,” Vandenberg ignored the interruption, “that if we can work this girl creature in harness with your computer, we may get some pretty quick thinking.”
“What was my computer,” said Reinhart sourly. “I wish you joy.”
The night after Vandenberg left, Fleming appeared. Reinhart was working late, trying to fix the origin of ground signals which made the satellites change course in orbit, when he heard the exhaust crackle of Fleming’s car outside. It was a little like coming home for Fleming; the familiar room, Harvey at the control desk, the small neat father-figure of the Professor waiting for him. Of the three men, Fleming looked the most worn.
“It seems so sane here.” He gazed around the large, neat room. “Calm and clean.”
Reinhart smiled. “It’s not very sane at the moment.”
“Can we talk?”
Reinhart led him over to a couple of easy chairs which had been set for visitors, with a little table, in a back corner of the observatory.
“I told you on the phone, John, there’s nothing I can do. They’re going to use the creature as an aid to the computer for Geers’s missile work.”
“Which is just what it wants.”
Reinhart shrugged. “I’m out of it now.”
“We’re all out of it. I’m only hanging on by the skin of my teeth. All this about being able to pull out the plug—well, we can’t any more, can we?” Fleming fiddled nervously with a box of matches he had taken out to light their cigarettes. “It’s in control of itself now. It’s got its protectors—its allies. If this thing that looks like a woman had arrived by space-ship, it would have been annihilated by now. It would have been recognised for what it was. But because it’s been planted in a much subtler way, because it’s been given human form, it’s accepted on face value. And it’s a pretty face. It’s no use appealing to Geers or that lot: I’ve tried. Prof., I’m scared.”