The Andromeda Strain

by Michael Crichton

By profession he was a cardiovascular physiologist, with special interest in stresses induced at high-G accelerations.

“Stoichiometrics of Oxygen-Carrying Capacity and Diffusion Gradients with Increased Arterial Gas Tensions.”

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.

“Tell him I have declared an SOE without proper authorization, and ask him to come down immediately.” Technically no one but the commander had the right to declare a state of emergency.

Manchek looked at the number he had just written, and inserted the dashes: 1–110–1010. A perfectly reasonable telephone number.

My aim has been to determine the probability of contact between man and another life form. That probability is as follows:

But his most outstanding characteristic was a sense of impatience, the feeling he conveyed to everyone around him that they were wasting his time.

Stone frowned as he watched. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew he had forgotten something, or ignored something. Some fact, some vital clue, that the birds provided and he must not overlook.

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

“That machine,” Hall said. “You’d better not let the AMA find out about it.” “We haven’t,” Leavitt said. In fact, the electronic body analyzer had been developed by Sandeman Industries in 1965, under a general government contract to produce body monitors for astronauts in space. It was understood by the government at that time that such a device, though expensive at a cost of $87,000 each, would eventually replace the human physician as a diagnostic instrument.

we won’t be getting any sugar into the gut. Quite the opposite.” He reached into his pocket. “Oh, no.” “Yes,” Leavitt said. He gave him a small capsule, sealed in aluminum foil. “No,” Hall said. “Everyone else has them. Broad-spectrum. Stop by your room and insert it before you go into the final decontamination procedures.”

The reasons were still unclear, but the results unequivocal: space could affect reproduction and growth. And yet no one in Wildfire paid attention to this fact, until it was too late.

Hall later stated that he felt foolish when the computer provided him with a differential, complete with probabilities of diagnosis. He was not at that time aware of the skill of the computer, the quality of its program.

Weeks later, in reviewing his work and his thoughts on Level V, he regretted his inability to concentrate. Because in his initial series of experiments, Burton made several mistakes.

In a sense, this was predictable. It had to do with theories of accommodation and mutual adaptation between bacteria and man. Burton had long been interested in this problem, and had lectured on it at the Baylor medical school.

So Burton lost immediate interest in the brain. And his mistake was compounded by his next experiment.

He put the dead rats to one side, and then made his crucial mistake. Burton did not autopsy the anticoagulated rats.

He looked and nodded, satisfied. He could not have known, as he stood before the teleprinter, that there was indeed a fault, but that it was purely mechanical, not electronic, and hence could not be tested on the check programs. The fault lay within the teleprinter box itself. There a sliver of paper from the edge of the roll had peeled away and, curling upward, had lodged between the bell and striker, preventing the bell from ringing. It was for this reason that no MCN transmissions had been recorded. Neither machine nor man was able to catch the error.

Stone and Leavitt left the room to check the results, delaying the biologic tests of media. This was a most unfortunate decision, for had they examined the media, they would have seen that their thinking had already gone astray, and that they were on the wrong track.