KEN ANDREWS was a tall, sparse, rather wild-looking individual. He had dark, flashing eyes, a mop of almost completely unruly dark hair, which hung first to the left and then to the right, like a floating voter unable to make up his mind which party to support. Andrews, unlike the unruliness of his hair, was a man who had made his mind up on a variety of things. He knew where he stood, at least, he thought he did, and right or wrong, he was prepared to defend his views, religious, political and scientific, to the best of his ability.
His ability was considerable. He argued with a wild, passionate fervour. He was something of a cross between Cuba’s Castro, and the prophet Elijah; something like a cross between Lenin and Thomas Aquinas—it had produced an interesting character, a larger-than-life character, a man who was almost too good to be true, a man who was human, but broadly human. Andrews never ‘came into a room’. Andrews always made an entrance! He made an entrance now as he flung open the door of the scanning department.
Outside, the great bowl-shaped radar device moved like the stiff neck of some Brobdingnagian who had been sitting in a gargantuan draught for too long. Andrews was showering sheets of paper like a bridesmaid throwing confetti. He had all the eccentricities of a top scientist. He was more like a music-hall scientist than any real life scientist had any right to be, yet Andrews was—with all his affectations, and all his eccentricities—a man who knew his science inside out and back to front. He could do it upside down, sideways, standing on his head; he even thought out calculations in his bath.
Bath was a rare experience for Andrews, he was a man so concerned with his mind that he hardly had any time to spare for his body. He looked on the body as a nuisance; it was just something inefficient which housed the mind.
Andrews would have been far happier as a robot—he had often said so. It would have been very nice to go in for a monthly ‘grease up’ and check, instead of having to stop so frequently to eat and drink, and to otherwise attend to the calls of nature when they arose.
The technician sitting in front of the screen when Andrews crashed in was a young man and very nervous withal. He regarded Andrews as a kind of god of the research station, an impression which Andrews himself, needless to say, had done nothing to dissipate!
There were two schools of thought among the technicians about Andrews, you either thought that he was the biggest fake since Barnum and Bailey, and let him get on with it while you grinned quietly up your sleeve at his weird antics, affectations and eccentricities, or else you took him at face value and accepted him for what he was, thus you regarded him with an awe usually only accorded to divinity, pagan divinity, at that.
If Andrews did see himself as a kind of god of the research station, he didn’t see himself as a civilised god. He was very definitely a barbarian tribal deity in his own little way. The research staff were his tribe, the research station was his tribal reserve.
The nervous young technician rejoiced in the name of Bill Forrester—at that moment he wasn’t rejoicing in anything, he was just hoping Andrews wasn’t going to find too much fault …
But Andrews was too engrossed in the showers of papers he was peeling off the pad in his hands and throwing away. He suddenly threw away a piece that he immediately realised he wanted. He began foraging about on the floor like a wild boar looking for truffles. Bill Forrester immediately left the screen and began probing among the papers on the floor.
“Which piece were you looking for, sir?”
“If I b—— well knew, I wouldn’t be looking for it, would I?” roared Andrews. “I just thought I saw a calculation on one of the sheets that I wanted to check!”
“Yes, sir!” choked Forrester. Forrester held up various pieces for Andrews’ inspection.
“Is it here, sir?”
“No, no, no!” stormed Andrews. “Not those! Those are rubbish! Wait a minute—that bit there!”
Forrester handed across a sheet.
“Not that! The other sheet! Thunder and tarnation, why am I surrounded by imbeciles?”
“This piece, sir?” suggested Forrester with a quaver in his voice.
“Yes, that piece!” stormed Andrews again. “Yes, that’s the one! But I have an experiment I want to see to. I shall want the full use of the screen for a few moments. Go on, go and get yourself a cup of coffee, or a nice bottle of arsenic, or something! Go and play with the high voltage, go anywhere! Do anything! Just get out of my way!”
“Can I assist you at all, sir?”
“No, you fool! Except by poisoning yourself. Go and ask one of the truck drivers to back over you!”
Forrester fled from the irate presence of the fanatical Andrews.
Ken flung showers of paper in the air again, and then hurled his body down in front of the screen. He moved the superstructure exasperatedly with quick, impatient fingers. He had stopped swearing now that there was no one to swear at and contented himself with tutting loudly under his breath.
“Surrounded by imbeciles!” he muttered to himself over and over again, “surrounded by pathetic, lamb-brained imbeciles! What’s the use? What’s the use of anything?”
The Signal
THE complex formulae in Andrews’ hand turned themselves into a practical experiment as he turned the radar direction finder first one way and then another. Every few seconds he would scrawl down some information, or flip the switch which would record the signal on the screen.
“Right,” he kept muttering under his breath, “Right, that’s odd—very, very odd indeed.” A low humming sound began to emanate from the screen in front of him.
The humming grew louder; an oscillation set in; the frequency shortened. The humming travelled up the scale. There was a sequence, a signal, in the noise.
“What the devil?” ejaculated Andrews. His bright, fanatical eyes opened wider still. This was beyond even his wildest dreams. He told himself that this was the sort of thing that only happened in science fiction novels. This was something that had no right to happen, this was something beyond the bounds of reason, beyond the bounds of common sense. But then, Andrews himself was a man who was far beyond the bounds of reason, far beyond the bounds of common sense! Andrews was a man to whom ordinary, urbane society was an anathema. If something looked like disturbing society, Andrews regarded that something, not as an enemy of the established society of which he had no part, but rather as an enemy of his own personal enemy. If it hit society it didn’t hit him, because Andrews had never identified himself with society.
He was a social misfit, an outcast, a self-exiled, Byronic hero. The Byronic hero was tall, dark, rather cadaverous-looking, and had a past. Andrews was tall, dark, too wild and excitable to be really cadaverous, but there was about him that peculiar, flashing, intensity of expression which could have equated him with a rather romantic, Gothic vampire, in fact, once, during his college days he had appeared as a male vampire, to the delight of his fellow male students, and the shrill, squealing horror of the equally delighted female members of the fraternity—if such a paradoxical contradiction in nomenclature can be permitted: the word ‘fraternity’ having a wider sense in that context than is normally accepted by the general reader.
But Andrews’ mind was a long way from his college days at that moment. It was a long way from the rest of his environment. His one thought, as he stared at that screen in front of him—and he didn’t even see it as a screen, he wasn’t conscious of it as something on to which an image is projected, was for the image on the screen on which his consciousness was entirely riveted. When a phenomena is experienced, we perceive it partly with the senses, partly with the brain. The phenomena of perception itself takes place in the mind, rather than with the ph. . .
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