The Andromeda Strain

by Michael Crichton

There is something sad, foolish, and human in the image of Shawn leaning against a boulder, propping his arms on it, and holding the binoculars to his eyes. Though cumbersome, the binoculars would at least feel comfortable and familiar in his hands. It would be one of the last familiar sensations before his death.

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.

According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable.

A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.

Yet underlying the uniqueness of each crisis is a disturbing sameness. A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability, they seem predestined. This is not true of all crises, but it is true of sufficiently many to make the most hardened historian cynical and misanthropic.

These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.

Leavitt had offered to give Hall the files on Wildfire and to keep him up to date on the project. At first, Hall politely took the files, but it soon became clear that he was not bothering to read them, and so Leavitt stopped giving them to him. If anything, this pleased Hall, who preferred not to have his desk cluttered.

“Return when we signal you.” “Yes sir.” “And should anything happen to us—” “I proceed directly to Wildfire,” the pilot said, his voice dry. “Correct.” The pilot knew what that meant. He was being paid according to the highest Air Force pay scales: he was drawing regular pay plus hazardous-duty pay, plus non-wartime special-services pay, plus mission-over-hostile-territory pay, plus bonus airtime pay. He would receive more than a thousand dollars for this day’s work, and his family would receive an additional ten thousand dollars from the short-term life insurance should he not return. There was a reason for the money: if anything happened to Burton and Stone on the ground, the pilot was ordered to fly directly to the Wildfire installation and hover thirty feet above ground until such time as the Wildfire group had determined the correct way to incinerate him, and his airplane, in midair.

Roy O. Thompson, who lived alone. From his greasy coveralls they assumed he ran the town gas station. Roy had apparently filled his bathtub with water, then knelt down, stuck his head in, and held it there until he died. When they found him his body was rigid, holding himself under the surface of the water; there was no one else around, and no sign of struggle. “Impossible,” Stone said. “No one can commit suicide that way.”

A satellite or manned capsule lands in a major neutralist urban center. (New Delhi was the example.) The Cautery will entail American intervention with nuclear weapons to prevent further spread of disease. According to the scenarios, there were seventeen possible consequences of American-Soviet interaction following the destruction of New Delhi. Twelve led directly to thermonuclear war.

On the cover of the file was stenciled WILDFIRE, and underneath, an ominous note: THIS FILE IS CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET. Examination by unauthorized persons is a criminal offense punishable by fines and imprisonment up to 20 years and $20,000. When Leavitt gave him the file, Hall had read the note and whistled. “Don’t you believe it,” Leavitt said. “Just a scare?” “Scare, hell,” Leavitt said. “If the wrong man reads this file, he just disappears.” “Nice.”

The voice said softly, “Do you wish something, sir?” “I’d like to know your name, please.” “Will that be all, sir?” “Yes, I believe so.” “Will that be all, sir?” He waited. The light clicked off. He slipped into his shoes and was about to leave when a male voice said, “This is the answering-service supervisor, Dr. Hall. I wish you would treat the project more seriously.” Hall laughed. So the voice responded to comments, and taped his replies. It was a clever system. “Sorry,” he said, “I wasn’t sure how the thing worked. The voice is quite luscious.” “The voice,” said the supervisor heavily, “belongs to Miss Gladys Stevens, who is sixty-three years old. She lives in Omaha and makes her living taping messages for SAC crews and other voice-reminder systems.”

Each time Manchek saw a wreck, he was astonished. Somehow, one never got used to the idea of the sprawl, the mess—the destructive force of a large metal object striking the earth at thousands of miles an hour. He always expected a neat, tight little clump of metal, but it was never that way.

Biology, as George Wald had said, was a unique science because it could not define its subject matter. Nobody had a definition for life. Nobody knew what it was, really. The old definitions—an organism that showed ingestion, excretion, metabolism, reproduction, and so on—were worthless. One could always find exceptions.

The group had finally concluded that energy conversion was the hallmark of life. All living organisms in some way took in energy—as food, or sunlight—and converted it to another form of energy, and put it to use. (Viruses were the exception to this rule, but the group was prepared to define viruses as nonliving.)

Like many intelligent men, Stone took a rather suspicious attitude toward his own brain, which he saw as a precise and skilled but temperamental machine. He was never surprised when the machine failed to perform, though he feared those moments, and hated them. In his blackest hours, Stone doubted the utility of all thought, and all intelligence. There were times when he envied the laboratory rats he worked with; their brains were so simple. Certainly they did not have the intelligence to destroy themselves; that was a peculiar invention of man.

“The President doesn’t trust scientists,” Robertson said. “He doesn’t feel comfortable with them.” “It’s your job to make him comfortable,” Stone said, “and you haven’t been doing it.”

The biologist R. A. Janek has said that “increasing vision is increasingly expensive.” He meant by this that any machine to enable men to see finer or fainter details increased in cost faster than it increased in resolving power.

Obviously the Andromeda Strain showed a predilection for cerebral vasculature. It was impossible to say why, but it was known that the cerebral vessels are peculiar in several respects. For instance, under circumstances in which normal body vessels dilate or contract—such as extreme cold, or exercise—the brain vasculature does not change, but maintains a steady, constant blood supply to the brain. In exercise, the blood supply to muscle might increase five to twenty times. But the brain always has a steady flow: whether its owner is taking an exam or a nap, chopping wood or watching TV. The brain receives the same amount of blood every minute, hour, day.

One is reminded of Montaigne’s acerbic comment: “Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves.” Certainly the Wildfire team was under severe stress, but they were also prepared to make mistakes. They had even predicted that this would occur. What they did not anticipate was the magnitude, the staggering dimensions of their error. They did not expect that their ultimate error would be a compound of a dozen small clues that were missed, a handful of crucial facts that were dismissed.