“Don’t mind me, dear,” said Dawnay neutrally, and strolled away to the far corner of the room. Geers sat back at his desk and looked at Judy with an air of businesslike dismissal.
“We’re making a trade agreement.”
“With Intel?” The horrifying absurdity of the whole thing crowded in on her: a vision of the piled-up madness of the past months and years. She gaped at him across the polished desk, until she could find words. “I was put on this job because we didn’t trust them. Dr. Bridger was hounded to his death—by me among other people—because he...”
“The climate’s changed.”
She looked at his smug, prim face and lost her temper entirely. “Politicians enjoy such convenient weather!”
“That will be enough,” Geers snapped.
Dawnay rustled quietly in her corner. “The child’s right, you know, and we scientists get a bit jaundiced about it from time to time. We’re at the mercy of the elements. We can’t cheat.”
“I’m a scientist too,” Geers said pettishly.
“Was.” The word slipped out before Judy could stop it. She waited for the explosion, but Geers somehow kept it under control. He went icy.
“It isn’t, strictly speaking, your business. What the Government needs now is world markets. When the girl Andromeda burnt her hands, she worked out a synthesis for Professor Dawnay’s lab people. Have you seen her hands?”
“I saw them burnt.”
“There’s no sign of a burn now. No scar tissue, nothing. Overnight.”
“And that’s what you’re selling to Intel?”
“Through Intel. To anyone who needs it.”
She tried to think what was wrong with this, and then realised. “Why not through the World Health Organisation?”
“We’re not contemplating wholesale charity. We’re contemplating a reasonable trade balance.”
“So you don’t care who you shake hands with?” she asked with disgust. She felt completely reckless now, and turned on Dawnay. “Are you part of this?”
Dawnay hesitated. “The enzyme’s not quite in a state to market yet. We need a more refined formula. Andre—the girl—is preparing the data for computing.” They had all got into the habit of calling her Andre.
“So the whole station’s working for Intel?”
“I hope not,” said Dawnay, and it sounded as though perhaps she was on her side.
Geers cut in.
“Look, Madeleine, this is enough.”
“Then I won’t waste your time.” Judy moved to the door. “But I am not part of it, and nor is Dr. Fleming.”
“We know how Fleming stands,” said Geers sardonically.
“And you know where I stand too,” Judy told him, and banged out.
Her instinct was to go straight to Fleming, but she could not quite face the risk of another snub. In fact, it was Dawnay who went to see him, on her way from the office block to the computer at the end of the day. She found him in his chalet, watching the Prime Minister’s broadcast on television.
“Come in,” he said flatly, and made room for her on the foot of his bed.
She looked at the flickering blue screen and tried to believe in the confident, elderly, sportive, civilised face and the slow, drawling voice of the Prime Minister.
Fleming sat, and watched and listened with her.
“Not since the halcyon days of Queen Victoria,” the disembodied face announced, “has this country held such a clear lead in the fields of industry, technology and—above all—security as that which we now have within our grasp...”
She felt her attention wandering. “I’m sorry if I interrupted.”
“You didn’t.” He made a grimace at the television. “Turn the old idiot off.”
He rose and switched off the set himself and then mixed her a drink. “Social call?”
“I was just going across to the computer building when I saw a light in your window. Thanks.” She took the glass from him.
“Working overtime?” he asked.
She lifted her glass and looked at him over the top of it. “Dr. Fleming, I’ve said some pretty uncharitable things about you in the past.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“About your attitude.”
“I was wrong, wasn’t I? The Prime Minister says so. Wrong and out.” He spoke more in sorrow than anger, and poured himself a small drink.
“I wonder,” said Dawnay. “I’m beginning to wonder.”
He did not answer, and she added, “Judy Adamson’s beginning to wonder too.”
“That’ll be a big help,” he snorted.
“She put up quite a fight with Geers this afternoon. I must say it made me think.” She took a sip and swallowed it slowly, looking quietly across her glass and turning over the position in her mind. “It seems fair enough to make use of what we’ve got—of what you gave us.”
“Don’t rub that in.”
“And yet I don’t know. There’s something corrupting about that sort of power. You can see it acting on the folk here, and on the government.” She nodded to the television set. “As if perfectly ordinary, sensible people are being possessed by a determination that isn’t their own. I think we’ve both felt it. And yet, it all seems harmless enough.”
“Does it?”
She told him about the enzyme production. “It’s beneficial. It regenerates cells, simply. It’ll affect everything, from skin-grafting to ageing. It’ll be the biggest medical aid since antibiotics.”
“A godsend to millions.”
When she got on to the Intel proposition he hardly reacted. “Where is it all leading?” she asked. She did not really expect an answer, but she got one.
“A year ago that machine had no power outside its own building, and even there we were in charge of it.” He spoke without passion as if reiterating an old truth. “Now it has the whole country dependent on it. What happens next? You heard, didn’t you? We shall go ahead, become a major force in the world again, and who’s going to be the power behind that throne?”
He indicated the television, as she had done; then he seemed to tire of the conversation. He wandered across to his record-player and switched it on.
“Could you have controlled it?” Dawnay was unwilling to let the subject go.
“Not latterly.”
“What could you have done?”
“Fouled it up as much as possible.” He began to sort out a record among a pile of L.P.s. “It knows that, now it has its creature to inform on me. It had me pushed out. ‘You can’t win,’ she told me.”
“She said that?”
Fleming nodded, and Dawnay frowned into her half-empty glass. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s inevitable. Perhaps it’s evolution.”
“Look—” he put down the record and swung round to her. “I can foresee a time when we’ll create a higher form of intelligence to which, in the end, we’ll hand over. And it’ll probably be an inorganic form, like that one. But it’ll be something we’ve created ourselves, and we can design it for our own good, or for good as we understand it. This machine hasn’t been programmed for our good; or, if it has, something’s gone wrong with it.”
She finished her drink. There was possibility in what he said—more than possibility, a sort of sane logic which she had missed lately. As an empirical scientist, she felt there must be some way in which it could be tested.
“Could anyone tell, except you?” she asked.
Fleming shook his head. “None of that lot.”
“Could I tell?”
“You?”
“I have access to it.”
He immediately lost interest in the record. His face lit up as if she had switched on some circuit inside him. “Yes—why not? We could try a little experiment.” He picked up from his table the pad with the negatived name-code on it. “Have you somebody over there can feed this in?”