From time to time one of the girls from the office would telephone an order through. Mort would spend a lot of time telling the girl how beautiful and clever she was; but then, when he ceased dripping charm and giggling softly, he would hang up the telephone and say: “Must go up to the office and check that sheila out one day.”
    Then one day the pattern changed. There was a timid knock on the door of the shed and one of the girls from the office stood there, shyly offering an order form.
 “They want this right away, Mr Decker,” she said breathlessly.

“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 the blueprint.”
    Meanwhile the Herald persisted with its wonderful habit of serialising books and this time landed on a real beauty—the science fiction work A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot. The BBC made it into a television series which I am astonished to admit I never saw—how did it get by me? Moreover, I never will, since it is amongst the many fine BBC programs made in this period of which, due to funding cuts and the limits of the technology of the time, no copy exists. It was apparently brilliant and, in addition, the dual Christine/Andromeda role was played by an eye-catching young lass named Julie Christie.
    The tale concerns the message from deep space, picked up by a British radio telescope and translated by the genius hero Fleming. It turns out to be deadly, but also instructions on how to create life. Following the blueprint, they first make a monster, but at the second try come up with a beautiful woman, named Andromeda from where the message originated 2.5 million years ago. Fleming falls in love with his creation, but at the same time realises that she is a threat to all humanity. He fights to protect what ultimately he must destroy before it gets us all.
    Great story. Great detail on radio telescopy and the cosmos as it was thought to be in 1962. And this from a man who was famous mostly for being proven wrong! Hoyle proposed the ‘solid state’ universe and argued against proponents of an explosive origin.

He derided his opponents publickly, shrieking to a large audience: "They think it all started with... with... some sort of Big Bang!'

That the phrase stuck was the measure of his humiliation. But he wrote one of the great original pieces of science fiction.