The Andromeda Strain

12. The Conference

"TIME TO WAKE UP, SIR."

Mark Hall opened his eyes. The room was lit with a steady, pale fluorescent light. He blinked and rolled over on his stomach.

"Time to wake up, Sir."

It was a beautiful female voice, soft and seductive. He sat up in bed and looked around the room: he was alone.

"Hello?"

"Time to wake up, Sir."

"Who are you?"

"Time to wake up, Sir."

He reached over and pushed a button on the nightstand by his bed. A light went off. He waited for the voice again, but it did not speak.

It was, he thought, a hell of an effective way to wake a man up. As he slipped into his clothes, he wondered how it worked. It was not a simple tape, because it worked as a response of some sort. The message was repeated only when Hall spoke.

To test his theory, he pushed the nightstand button again. 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."

"Oh," Hall said.

He left the room and walked down the corridor to the cafeteria. As he walked, he began to understand why submarine designers had been called in to plan Wildfire. Without his wristwatch, he had no idea of the time, or even whether it was night or day. He found himself wondering whether the cafeteria would be crowded, wondering whether it was dinner time or breakfast time.

As it turned out, the cafeteria was almost deserted. Leavitt was there; he said the others were in the conference room. He pushed a glass of dark-brown liquid over to Hall and suggested he have breakfast.

"What's this?" Hall said.

"Forty-two-five nutrient. It has everything needed to sustain the average seventy-kilogram man for eighteen hours."

Hall drank the liquid, which was syrupy and artificially flavored to taste like orange juice. It was a strange sensation, drinking brown orange juice, but not bad after the initial shock. Leavitt explained that it had been developed for the astronauts, and that it contained everything except air-soluble vitamins.

"For that, you need this pill," he said.

Hall swallowed the pill, then got himself a cup of coffee from a dispenser in the corner. "Any sugar?"

Leavitt shook his head. "No sugar anywhere here. Nothing that might provide a bacterial growth medium. From now on, we're all on high-protein diets. We'll make all the sugar we need from the protein breakdown. But 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."

"I don't mind dunking myself in all those foul baths," Hall said. "I don't mind being irradiated. But I'll be goddammed-"

"The idea," Leavitt said, "is that you be as nearly sterile as possible on Level V. We have sterilized your skin and mucous membranes of the respiratory tract as best we can. But we haven't done a thing about the GI tract yet."

"Yes," Hall said, "but suppositories?"

"You'll get used to it. We're all taking them for the first four days. Not, of course, that they'll do any good," he said, with the familiar wry, pessimistic look on his face. He stood. "Let's go to the conference room. Stone wants to talk about Karp."

"Who?"

"Rudolph Karp."

Rudolph Karp was a Hungarian-born biochemist who came to the United States from England in 1951. He obtained a position at the University of Michigan and worked steadily and quietly for five years. Then, at the suggestion of colleagues at the Ann Arbor observatory, Karp began to investigate meteorites with the intent of determining whether they harbored life, or showed evidence of having done so in the past. He took the proposal quite seriously and worked with diligence, writing no papers on the subject until the early 1960's, when Calvin and Vaughn and Nagy and others were writing explosive papers on similar subjects.

The arguments and counter-arguments were complex, but boiled down to a simple substrate: whenever a worker would announce that he had found a fossil, or a proteinaceous hydrocarbon, or other indication of life within a meteorite, the critics would claim sloppy lab technique and contamination with earth-origin matter and organisms.

Karp, with his careful, slow techniques, was determined to end the arguments once and for all. He announced that he had taken great pains to avoid contamination: each meteorite he examined had been washed in twelve solutions, including peroxide, iodine, hypertonic saline and dilute acids. It was then exposed to intense ultraviolet light for a period of two days. Finally, it was submerged in a germicidal solution and placed in a germ-free, sterile isolation chamber; further work was done within the chamber.

Karp, upon breaking open his meteorites, was able to isolate bacteria. He found that they were ring-shaped organisms, rather like a tiny undulating inner tube, and he found they could grow and multiply. He claimed that, while they were essentially similar to earthly bacteria in structure, being based upon proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, they had no cell nucleus and therefore their manner of propagation was a mystery.

Karp presented his information in his usual quiet, unsensational manner, and hoped for a good reception. He did not receive one; instead, he was laughed down by the Seventh Conference of Astrophysics and Geophysics, meeting in London in 1961. He became discouraged and set his work with meteorites aside; the organisms were later destroyed in an accidental laboratory explosion on the night of June 27, 1963.

Karp's experience was almost identical to that of Nagy and the others. Scientists in the 1960's were not willing to entertain notions of life existing in meteorites; all evidence presented was discounted, dismissed, and ignored.

A handful of people in a dozen countries remained intrigued, however. One of them was Jeremy Stone; another was Peter Leavitt. It was Leavitt who, some years before, had formulated the Rule of 48. The Rule of 48 was intended as a humorous reminder to scientists, and referred to the massive literature collected in the late 1940's and the 1950's concerning the human chromosome number.

For years it was stated that men had forty-eight chromosomes in their cells; there were pictures to prove it, and any number of careful studies. In 1953, a group of American researchers announced to the world that the human chromosome number was forty-six. Once more, there were pictures to prove it, and studies to confirm it. But these researchers also went back to reexamine the old pictures, and the old studies- and found only forty-six chromosomes, not forty-eight.

Leavitt's Rule of 48 said simply, "All Scientists Are Blind." And Leavitt had invoked his rule when he saw the reception Karp and others received. Leavitt went over the reports and the papers and found no reason to reject the meteorite studies out of hand; many of the experiments were careful, well-reasoned, and compelling.

He remembered this when he and the other Wildfire planners drew up the study known as the Vector Three. Along with the Toxic Five, it formed one of the firm theoretical bases for Wildfire.

The Vector Three was a report that considered a crucial question: If a bacterium invaded the earth, causing a new disease, where would that bacterium come from?

After consultation with astronomers and evolutionary theories, the Wildfire group concluded that bacteria could come from three sources.

The first was the most obvious- an organism, from another planet or galaxy, which had the protection to survive the extremes of temperature and vacuum that existed in space. There was no doubt that organisms could survive- there was, for instance, a class of bacteria known as thermophilic that thrived on extreme heat, multiplying enthusiastically in temperatures as high as 70deg C. Further, it was known that bacteria had been recovered from Egyptian tombs, where they had been sealed for thousands of years. These bacteria were still viable.

The secret lay in the bacteria's ability to form spores, molding a hard calcific shell around themselves. This shell enabled the organism to survive freezing or boiling, and, if necessary, thousands of years without food. It combined all the advantages of a space suit with those of suspended animation.

There was no doubt that a spore could travel through space. But was another planet or galaxy the most likely source of contamination for the earth?

Here, the answer was no. The most likely source was the closest source- the earth itself.

The report suggested that bacteria could have left the surface of the earth eons ago, when life was just beginning to emerge from the oceans and the hot, baked continents. Such bacteria would depart before the fishes, before the primitive mammals, long before the first ape-man. The bacteria would head up into the air, and slowly ascend until they were literally in space. Once there, they might evolve into unusual forms, perhaps even learning to derive energy for life directly from the sun, instead of requiring food as an energy source. These organisms might also be capable of direct conversion of energy to matter.

Leavitt himself suggested the analogy of the upper atmosphere and the depths of the sea as equally inhospitable environments, but equally viable. In the deepest, blackest regions of the oceans, where oxygenation was poor, and where light never reached, life forms were known to exist in abundance. Why not also in the far reaches of the atmosphere? True, oxygen was scarce. True, food hardly existed. But if creatures could live miles beneath the surface, why could they not also live five miles above it?

And if there were organisms out there, and if they had departed from the baking crust of the earth long before the first men appeared, then they would be foreign to man. No immunity, no adaptation, no antibodies would have been developed. They would be primitive aliens to modern man, in the same way that the shark, a primitive fish unchanged for a hundred million years, was alien and dangerous to modern man, invading the oceans for the first time.

The third source of contamination, the third of the vectors, was at the same time the most likely and the most troublesome. This was contemporary earth organisms, taken into space by inadequately sterilized spacecraft. Once in space, the organisms would be exposed to harsh radiation, weightlessness, and other environmental forces that might exert a mutagenic effect, altering the organisms.

So that when they came down, they would be different.

Take up a harmless bacteria- such as the organism that causes pimples, or sore throats- and bring it back in a new form, virulent and unexpected. It might do anything. It might show a preference for the aqueous humor of the inner eye, and invade the eyeball. It might thrive on the acid secretions of the stomach. It might multiply on the small currents of electricity afforded by the human brain itself, drive men mad.

This whole idea of mutated bacteria seemed farfetched and unlikely to the Wildfire people. It is ironic that this should be the case, particularly in view of what happened to the Andromeda Strain. But the Wildfire team staunchly ignored both the evidence of their own experience- that bacteria mutate rapidly and radically- and the evidence of the Biosatellite tests, in which a series of earth forms were sent into space and later recovered.

Biosatellite II contained, among other things, several species of bacteria. It was later reported that the bacteria had reproduced at a rate twenty to thirty times normal. 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.

Stone reviewed the information quickly, then handed each of them a cardboard file. "These files," he said, "contain a transcript of autoclock records of the entire flight of Scoop VII. Our purpose in reviewing the transcript is to determine, if possible, what happened to the satellite while it was in orbit."

Hall said, "Something happened to it?"

Leavitt explained. "The satellite was scheduled for a six-day orbit, since the probability of collecting organisms is proportional to time in orbit. After launch, it was in stable orbit. Then, on the second day, it went out of orbit.

Hall nodded.

"Start," Stone said, "with the first page."

Hall opened his file.

AUTOCLOCK TRANSCRIPT

PROJECT: SCOOP VII

LAUNCHDATE:

ABRIDGED VERSION. FULL TRANSCRIPT

STORED VAULTS 179-99,

VDBG COMPLEX EPSILON.

HOURS MIN SEC PROCEDURE

T MINUS TIME

0002 01 05 Vandenberg Launch pad Block 9, Scoop Mission Control, reports systems check on schedule.

0001 39 52 Scoop MC holds for fuel check reported from Ground Control.

STOP CLOCK STOP CLOCK. REALTIME LOSS 12 MINUTES.

0001 39 52 Count resumed. Clock corrected.

0000 41 12 Scoop MC holds 20 seconds for Launch pad Block 9 check. Clock not stopped for built-in hold.

000030 00 Gantry removed.

000024 00 Final craft systems check.

000019 00 Final capsule systems check.

000013 00 Final systems checks read as negative.

000007 12 Cable decoupling.

000001 07 Stat-link decoupling.

000000 05 Ignition.

000000 04 Launch pad Block 9 clears all systems.

000000 00 Core clamps released. Launch.

T PLUS TIME

000000 06 Stable. Speed 6 fps. Smooth EV approach.

000000 09 Tracking reported.

000000 11 Tracking confirmed.

000000 27 Capsule monitors at g 1.9. Equipment check clear.

0000 01 00 Launch pad Block 9 clears rocket and capsule systems for orbit.

"No point in dwelling on this," Stone said. "It is the record of a perfect launch. There is nothing here, in fact, nothing for the next ninety-six hours of flight, to indicate any difficulty on board the spacecraft. Now turn to page 10."

They all turned.

TRACK TRANSCRIPT CONT'D

SCOOP VII

LAUNCHDATE:

ABRIDGED VERSION

HOURS MIN SEC PROCEDURE

10 12 Orbital check stable as reported by Grand Bahama Station.

009634 19 Orbital check stable as reported by Sydney.

009647 34 Orbital check stable as reported by Vdbg.

0097 04 12 Orbital check stable but system malfunction reported by Kennedy Station.

0097 05 18 Malfunction confirmed.

0097 07 22 Malfunction confirmed by Grand Bahama. Computer reports orbital instability.

0097 34 54 Sydney reports orbital instability.

0097 39 02 Vandenberg computations indicate orbital decay.

0098 27 14 Vandenberg Scoop Mission Control orders radio reentry.

009912 56 Reentry code transmitted.

0099 13 13 Houston reports initiation of reentry. Stabilized flight path.

"What about voice communication during the critical period?"

"There were linkups between Sydney, Kennedy, and Grand Bahama, all routed through Houston. Houston had the big computer as well. But in this instance, Houston was just helping out; all decisions came from Scoop Mission Control in Vandenberg. We have the voice communication at the back of the file. It's quite revealing."

TRANSCRIPT OF VOICE COMMUNICATIONS SCOOP MISSION CONTROL VANDENBERG AFB HOURS 0096:59 TO 0097:39

THIS IS A CLASSIFIED TRANSCRIPT.

IT HAS NOT BEEN ABRIDGED OR EDITED.

HOURS MIN SEC COMMUNICATION

0096 59 00 HELLO KENNEDY THIS IS SCOOP MISSION CONTROL. AT THE END OF 96 HOURS OF FLIGHT TIME WE HAVE STABLE ORBITS FROM ALL STATIONS. DO YOU CONFIRM.

0097 00 00 1 think we do, Scoop. Our check is going through now. Hold this line open for a few minutes, fellows.

0097 03 31 Hello, Scoop MC. This is Kennedy. We have a stable orbit confirmation for you on the last passby. Sorry about the delay but there is an instrument snag somewhere here.

0097 03 34 KENNEDY PLEASE CLARIFY. IS YOUR SNAG ON THE GROUND OR ALOFT.

0097 03 39 I am sorry we have no tracer yet. We think it is on the ground.

0097 04 12 Hello, Scoop MC. This is Kennedy. We have a preliminary report of system malfunction aboard your spacecraft. Repeat we have a preliminary report of malfunction in the air. Awaiting confirmation.

0097 04 15 KENNEDY PLEASE CLARIFY SYSTEM INVOLVED.

0097 04 18 I'm sorry they haven't given me that. I assume they are waiting for final confirmation of the malfunction.

0097 04 21 DOES YOUR ORBITAL CHECK AS STABLE STILL-HOLD.

0097 04 22 Vandenberg, we have confirmed your orbital check as stable. Repeat the orbit is stable.

0097 05 18 Ah, Vandenberg, I am afraid we also confirm readings consistent with system malfunction on board your spacecraft. These include the stationary rotor elements and spanner units going to mark twelve. I repeat mark twelve.

0097 05 30 HAVE YOU RUN CONSISTENCY CHECK ON YOUR COMPUTERS.

0097 05 35 Sorry fellows but our computers check out. We read it as a real malfunction.

0097 05 45 HELLO, HOUSTON. OPEN THE LINE TO SYDNEY, WILL YOU. WE WANT CONFIRMATION OF DATA.

0097 05 51 Scoop Mission Control, This is Sydney Station. We confirm our last reading. There was nothing wrong with the spacecraft on its last passby here.

0097 06 12 OUR COMPUTER CHECK INDICATES NO SYSTEMS MALFUNCTION AND GOOD ORBITAL STABILITY ON SUMMATED DATA. WE QUESTION KENNEDY GROUND INSTRUMENT FAILURE.

0097 06 18 This is Kennedy, Scoop MC. We have run repeat checkouts at this end. Our reading of system malfunction remains. Have you got something from Bahama.

0097 06 23 NEGATIVE, KENNEDY. STANDING BY.

0097 06 36 HOUSTON, THIS IS SCOOP MC. CAN YOUR PROJECTION GROUP GIVE US ANYTHING.

0097 06 46 Scoop, at this time we cannot. Our computers have insufficient data. They still read stable orbit with all systems going.

0097 07 22 Scoop MC, this is Grand Bahama Station. We report passby of your craft Scoop Seven according to schedule. Preliminary radar fixes were normal with question of increased transit times. Please hold for systems telemetry.

0097 07 25 HOLDING, GRAND BAHAMA.

0097 07 29 Scoop MC, we are sorry to say we confirm Kennedy observations, Repeat, we confirm Kennedy observations of systems malfunction. Our data are on the trunk to Houston. Can they be routed to you as well. station.

0097 07 34 NO, WE WILL WAIT FOR HOUSTON'S PRINTOUT. THEY HAVE LARGER PREDICTIVE BANKING UNITS.

0097 07 36 Scoop MC, Houston has the Bahama Data. It is going through the Dispar Program. Give us ten seconds.

0097 07 47 Scoop MC, this is Houston. The Dispar Program confirms systems malfunction. Your vehicle is now in unstable orbit with increased transit time of zero point three seconds per unit of arc. We are analyzing orbital parameters at this time. Is there anything further you wish as interpreted data.

0097 07 59 NO, HOUSTON. SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE DOING BEAUTIFULLY.

0097 08 10 Sorry, Scoop. Bad break.

0097 08 18 GET US THE DECAY RATIOS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. COMMAND WISHES TO MAKE A DECISION ON INSTRUMENTATION TAKEDOWN WITHIN THE NEXT TWO ORBITS.

0097 08 32 Understand, Scoop. Our condolences here.

0097 11 35 Scoop, Houston Projection Group has confirmed orbital instability and decay ratios are now being passed by the data trunk to your station.

0097 11 44 HOW DO THEY LOOK, HOUSTON.

0097 11 51 Bad.

0097 11 59 NOT UNDERSTOOD. PLEASE REPEAT.

0097 12 07 Bad: B as in broken, A as in awful, D as in dropping.

0097 12 15 HOUSTON, DO YOU HAVE A CAUSATION. THAT SATELLITE HAS BEEN IN EXCELLENT ORBIT FOR NEARLY ONE HUNDRED HOURS. WHAT HAPPENED TO IT.

0097 12 29 Beats us. We wonder about collision. There is a good wobble component to the new orbit.

0097 12 44 HOUSTON, OUR COMPUTERS ARE WORKING THROUGH THE TRANSMITTED DATA. WE AGREE A COLLISION. HAVE YOU GUYS GOT SOMETHING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

0097 13 01 Air Force Skywatch confirms our report that we have nothing around your baby, Scoop.

0097 13 50 HOUSTON, OUR COMPUTERS ARE READING THIS AS A RANDOM EVENT. PROBABILITIES GREATER THAN ZERO POINT SEVEN NINE.

0097 15 00 We can add nothing. Looks reasonable. Are you going to bring it down.

0097 15 15 WE ARE HOLDING ON THAT DECISION, HOUSTON. WE WILL NOTIFY AS SOON AS IT IS MADE.

0097 17 54 HOUSTON, OUR COMMAND GROUP HAS RAISED THE QUESTION OF WHETHER*************************.

0097 17 59 [reply from Houston deleted]

0097 18 43 [Scoop query to Houston deleted]

0097 19 03 [reply from Houston deleted]

0097 19 11 AGREE, HOUSTON. WE WILL MAKE OUR DECISION AS SOON AS WE HAVE FINAL CONFIRMATION OF ORBITAL SHUTDOWN FROM SYDNEY. IS THIS ACCEPTABLE.

0097 19 50 Perfectly, Scoop. We are standing by.

0097 24 32 HOUSTON, WE ARE REWORKING OUR DATA AND NO LONGER CONSIDER THAT********IS LIKELY.

0097 24 39 Roger, Scoop.

0097 29 13 HOUSTON, WE ARE STANDING BY FOR SYDNEY.

0097 34 54 Scoop Mission Control, this is Sydney Station. We have just followed the passby of your vehicle. Our initial readings confirm a prolonged transit time. It is quite striking at this time.

0097 35 12 THANK YOU, SYDNEY.

0097 35 22 Bit of nasty luck, Scoop. Sorry.

0097 39 02 THIS IS SCOOP MISSION CONTROL TO ALL STATIONS. OUR COMPUTERS HAVE JUST CALCULATED THE ORBITAL DECAY FOR THE VEHICLE AND WE FIND IT TO BE COMING DOWN AS A PLUS FOUR. STANDBY FOR THE FINAL DECISION AS TO WHEN WE WILL BRING IT DOWN.

Hall said, "What about the deleted passages?"

"Major Manchek at Vandenberg told me," Stone said, "that they had to do with the Russian craft in the area. The two stations eventually concluded that the Russians had not, either accidentally or purposely, brought down the Scoop satellite. No one has since suggested differently."

They nodded.

"It's tempting," Stone said. "The Air Force maintains a watchdog facility in Kentucky that tracks all satellites in earth orbit. It has a dual function, both to follow old satellites known to be in orbit and to track new ones. There are twelve satellites in orbit at this time that cannot be accounted for; in other words, they are not ours, and are not the result of announced Soviet launches. It is thought that some of these represent navigation satellites for Soviet submarines. Others are presumed to be spy satellites. But the important thing is that Russian or not, there are a hell of a lot of satellites up there. As of last Friday, the Air Force reported five hundred and eighty-seven orbiting bodies around the earth. This includes some old, nonfunctioning satellites from the American Explorer series and the Russian Sputnik series. It also includes boosters and final stages- anything in stable orbit large enough to reflect back a radar beam."

"That's a lot of satellites."

"Yes, and there are probably many more. The Air Force thinks there is a lot of junk out there- nuts, bolts, scraps of metal- all in more or less stable orbit. No orbit, as you know, is completely stable. Without frequent corrections, any satellite will eventually decay out and spiral down to earth, burning up in the atmosphere. But that may be years, even decades, after the launch. In any event, the Air Force estimates that the total number of individual orbiting objects could be anything up to seventy-five thousand."

"So a collision with a piece of junk is possible."

"Yes. Possible."

"How about a meteor?"

"That is the other possibility, and the one Vandenberg favors. A random event, most likely a meteor."

"Any showers these days?"

"None, apparently. But that does not rule out a meteor collision."

Leavitt cleared his throat. "There is still another possibility."

Stone frowned. He knew that Leavitt was imaginative, and that this trait was both a strength and a defect. At times, Leavitt could be startling and exciting; at others, merely irritating. "It's rather farfetched," Stone said, "to postulate debris from some extragalactic source other than-"

"I agree," Leavitt said. "Hopelessly farfetched. No evidence for it whatever. But I don't think we can afford to ignore the possibility."

A gong sounded softly. A lush female voice, which Hall now recognized as that of Gladys Stevens of Omaha, said softly, "You may proceed to the next level, gentlemen."

13. Level V

LEVEL V WAS PAINTED A QUIET SHADE OF BLUE, AND they all wore blue uniforms. Burton showed Hall around.

"This floor," he said, "is like all the others. It's circular. Arranged in a series of concentric circles, actually. We're on the outer perimeter now; this is where we live and work. Cafeteria, sleeping rooms, everything is out here. Just inside is a ring of laboratories. And inside that, sealed off from us, is the central core. That's where the satellite and the two people are now."

"But they're sealed off from us?"

"Yes."

"Then how do we get to them?"

"Have you ever used a glove box?" Burton asked.

Hall shook his head.

Burton explained that glove boxes were large clear plastic boxes used to handle sterile materials. The boxes had holes cut in the sides, and gloves attached with an airtight seal. To handle the contents, you slipped your hands into the gloves and reached into the box. But your fingers never touched the material, only the gloves.

"We've gone one step further," Burton said. "We have whole rooms that are nothing more than glorified glove boxes. Instead of a glove for your hand, there's a whole plastic suit, for your entire body. You'll see what I mean."

They walked down the curved corridor to a room marked CENTRAL CONTROL. Leavitt and Stone were there, working quietly. Central Control was a cramped room, stuffed with electronic equipment. One wall was glass, allowing the tails, were considered particularly trying. Many a scientist workers to look into the adjacent room.

Through the glass, Hall saw mechanical hands moving the capsule to a table and setting it down. Hall, who had never seen a capsule before, watched with interest. It was smaller than he had imagined, no more than a yard long; one end was seared and blackened from the heat of reentry.

The mechanical hands, under Stone's direction, opened the little scoop-shaped trough in the side of the capsule to expose the interior.

"There," Stone said, taking his hands from the controls. The controls looked like a pair of brass knuckles; the operator slipped his own hands into them and moved his hands as he wanted the mechanical hands to move.

"Our next step," he said, "is to determine whether there is still anything in the capsule which is biologically active. Suggestions?"

"A rat," Leavitt said. "Use a black Norway."

The black Norway rat was not black at all; the name simply designated a strain of laboratory animal, perhaps the most famous strain in all science. Once, of course, it had been both black and Norwegian; but years of breeding and countless generations had made it white, small, and docile. The biological explosion had created a demand for genetically uniform animals. In the last thirty years more than a thousand strains of "pure" animals had been evolved artificially. In the case of the black Norwegian, it was now possible for a scientist anywhere in the world to conduct experiments using this animal and be assured that other scientists elsewhere could repeat or enlarge upon his work using virtually identical organisms.

"Follow with a rhesus," Burton said. "We will want to get onto primates sooner or later. The others nodded. Wildfire was prepared to conduct experiments with monkeys and apes, as well as smaller, cheaper animals. A monkey was exceedingly difficult to work with: the little primates were hostile, quick, intelligent. Among scientists, the New World monkeys, with their prehensile tails, were considered particularly trying. Many scientists had engaged three or four lab assistants to hold down a monkey while he administered an injection- only to have the prehensile tail whip up, grasp the syringe, and fling it across the room.

The theory behind primate experimentation was that these animals were closer biologically to man. In the 1950's, several laboratories even attempted experiments on gorillas, going to great trouble and expense to work with these seemingly most human of animals. However, by 1960 it had been demonstrated that of the apes, the chimpanzee was biochemically more like man than the gorilla. (On the basis of similarity to man, the choice of laboratory animals is often surprising. For example, the hamster is preferred for immunological and cancer studies, since his responses are so similar to man's, while for studies of the heart and circulation, the pig is considered most like man.)

Stone put his hands back on the controls, moving them gently. Through the glass, they saw the black metal fingers move to the far wall of the adjoining room, where several caged lab animals were kept, separated from the room by hinged airtight doors. The wall reminded Hall oddly of an automat.

The mechanical hands opened one door and removed a rat in its cage, brought it into the room, and set it down next to the capsule. The rat looked around the room, sniffed the air, and made some stretching movements with its neck. A moment later it flopped over onto its side, kicked once, and was still.

It had happened with astonishing speed. Hall could hardly believe it had happened at all.

"My God," Stone said. "What a time course."

"That will make it difficult," Leavitt said.

Burton said, "We can try tracers…"

"Yes. We'll have to use tracers on it," Stone said. "How fast are our scans?"

"Milliseconds, if necessary."

"It will be necessary."

"Try the rhesus, " Burton said. "You'll want a post on it, anyway."

Stone directed the mechanical hands back to the wall, opening another door and withdrawing a cage containing a large brown adult rhesus monkey. The monkey screeched as it was lifted and banged against the bars of its cage.

Then it died, after flinging one hand to its chest with a look of startled surprise.

Stone shook his head. "Well, at least we know it's still biologically active. Whatever killed everyone in Piedmont is still there, and still as potent as ever. " He sighed. "If potent is the word."

Leavitt said, "We'd better start a scan of the capsule."

"I'll take these dead animals," Burton said, "and run the initial vector studies. Then I'll autopsy them."

Stone worked the mechanical hands once more. He picked up the cages that held the rat and monkey and set them on a rubber conveyor belt at the rear of the room. Then he pressed a button on a control console marked AUTOPSY. The conveyor belt began to move.

Burton left the room, walking down the corridor to the autopsy room, knowing that the conveyor belt, made to carry materials from one lab to another, would have automatically delivered the cages.

Stone said to Hall, "You're the practicing physician among us. I'm afraid you've got a rather tough job right now."

"Pediatrician and geriatrist?"

"Exactly. See what you can do about them. They're both in our miscellaneous room, the room we built precisely for unusual circumstances like this. There's a computer linkup there that should help you. The technician will show you how it works."

14. Miscellaneous

HALL OPENED THE DOOR MARKED MISCELLANEOUS, thinking to himself that his job was indeed miscellaneous- keeping alive an old man and a tiny infant. Both of them vital to the project, and both of them, no doubt, difficult to manage.

He found himself in another small room similar to the control room he had just left. This one also had a glass window, looking inward to a central room. In the room were two beds, and on the beds, Peter Jackson and the infant. But the incredible thing was the suits: standing upright in the room were four clear plastic inflated suits in the shape of men. From each suit, a tunnel ran back to the wall.

Obviously, one would have to crawl down the tunnel and then stand up inside the suit. Then one could work with the patients inside the room.

The girl who was to be his assistant was working in the room, bent over the computer console. She introduced herself as Karen Anson, and explained the working of the computer.

"This is just one substation of the Wildfire computer on the first level," she said. "There are thirty substations throughout the laboratory, all plugging into the computer. Thirty different people can work at once."

Hall nodded. Time-sharing was a concept he understood. He knew that as many as two hundred people had been able to use the same computer at once; the principle was that computers operated very swiftly- in fractions of a second while people operated slowly, in seconds or minutes. One person using a computer was inefficient, because it took several minutes to punch in instructions, while the computer sat around idle, waiting. Once instructions were fed in, the computer answered almost instantaneously. This meant that a computer was rarely "working," and by permitting a number of people to ask questions of the computer simultaneously, you could keep the machine more continuously in operation.

"If the computer is really backed up, " the technician said, "there may be a delay of one or two seconds before you get your answer. But usually it's immediate. What we are using here is the MEDCOM program. Do you know it?"

Hall shook his head.

"It's a medical-data analyzer," she said. "You feed in information and it will diagnose the patient and tell you what to do next for therapy, or to confirm the diagnosis."

"Sounds very convenient."

"It's fast," she said. "All our lab studies are done by automated machines. So we can have complex diagnoses in a matter of minutes."

Hall looked through the glass at the two patients. "What's been done on them so far?"

"Nothing. At Level I, they were started on intravenous infusions. Plasma for Peter Jackson, dextrose and water for the baby. They both seem well hydrated now, and in no distress. Jackson is still unconscious. He has no pupillary signs but is unresponsive and looks anemic."

Hall nodded. "The labs here can do everything?"

"Everything. Even assays for adrenal hormones and things like partial thromboplastin times. Every known medical test is possible."

"All right. We'd better get started."

She turned on the computer. "This is how you order laboratory tests," she said. "Use this light pen here, and check off the tests you want. Just touch the pen to the screen."

She handed him a small penlight, and pushed the START button.

The screen glowed.

MEDCOM PROGRAM

LAB/ANALYS

CK/JGG/1223098

BLOOD:

COUNTS RBC

RETIC

PLATES

WBC

DIFF

HEMATOCRIT

HEMOGLOBIN

INDICES MCV

MCHC:

PROTIME PTT

SED

RATE

CHEMISTRY:

K

NA

CO2

ENZYMES:

AMYLASE

CHOLINESTERASE

LIPASE

PHOSPHATASE,ACID

ALKALINE

LDH

SGOT

SGPT

PROTEIN:

ALB

GLOB

FIBRIN

TOTAL FRACTION

DIAGNOSTICS:

CHOLEST

CREAT

GLUCOSE

PBI

BEI

I

IBC

NPN

BUN

BILIRU, DIFF

CEPH/FLOC

THYMOL/TURB

BSP

PULMONARY:

TVC

TV

IC

IRV

ERV

MBC

STERIOD:

ALDO

L7-OH

17-KS

ACTH

VITS

A

ALL

B

C

E

K

URINE:

SP

GR

PH

PROT

GLUC

KETONE

ALL ELECTROLYTES

ALL STERIODS

ALL INORGANICS

CATECHOLS

PORPHYRINS

UROBIL

5-HIAA

Hall stared at the list. He touched the tests he wanted with the penlight; they disappeared from the screen. He ordered fifteen or twenty, then stepped back.

The screen went blank for a moment, and then the following appeared:

TESTS ORDERED WILL REQUIRE FOR EACH SUBJECT

20 CC WHOLE BLOOD

LO CC OXALATED BLOOD

L2 CC CITRATED BLOOD

15 CC URINE

The technician said, "I'll draw the bloods if you want to do physicals. Have you been in one of these rooms before?"

Hall shook his head.

"It's quite simple, really. We crawl through the tunnels into the suits. The tunnel is then sealed off behind us."

"Oh? Why?"

"In case something happens to one of us. In case the covering of the suit is broken- the integrity of the surface is ruptured, as the protocol says. In that case, bacteria could spread back through the tunnel to the outside."

"So we're sealed off."

"Yes. We get air from a separate system- you can see the thin lines coming in over there. But essentially you're isolated from everything, when you're in that suit. I don't think you need worry, though. The only way you might possibly break your suit is to cut it with a scalpel, and the gloves are triple-thickness to prevent just such an occurrence."

She showed him how to crawl through, and then, imitating her, he stood up inside the plastic suit. He felt like some kind of giant reptile, moving cumbersomely about, dragging his tunnel like a thick tail behind him.

After a moment, there was a hiss: his suit was being sealed off. Then another hiss, and the air turned cold as the special line began to feed air in to him.

The technician gave him his examining instruments. While she drew blood from the child, taking it from a scalp vein, Hall turned his attention to Peter Jackson.

An old man, and pale: anemia. Also thin: first thought, cancer. Second thought, tuberculosis, alcoholism, some other chronic process. And unconscious: he ran through the differential in his mind, from epilepsy to hypoglycernic shock to stroke.

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.

He checked Jackson's blood pressure. It was low, 85/50. Pulse fast at 110. Temperature 97.8. Respiration's 30 and deep.

He went over the body systematically, beginning with the head and working down. When he produced pain- by pressing on the nerve through the supra-orbital notch, just below the eyebrow- the man grimaced and moved his arms to push Hall away.

Perhaps he was not unconscious after all. Perhaps just stuporous. Hall shook him.

"Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson."

The man made no response. And then, slowly, he seemed to revive. Hall shouted his name in his ear and shook him hard.

Peter Jackson opened his eyes, just for a moment, and said, "Go…away…"

Hall continued to shake him, but Jackson relaxed, going limp, his body slipping back to its unresponsive state. Hall gave up, returning to his physical examination. The lungs were clear and the heart seemed normal. There was sm., tenseness of the abdomen, and Jackson retched once, bringing up some bloody drooling material. Quickly, Hall did a basolyte test for blood: it was positive. He did a rectal exam and tested the stool. It was also positive for blood.

He turned to the technician, who had drawn all the bloods and was feeding the tubes into the computer analysis apparatus in one corner.

"We've got a GI bleeder here," he said. "How soon will the results be back?"

She pointed to a TV screen mounted near the ceiling. "The lab reports are flashed back as soon as they come in. They are displayed there, and on the console in the other room. The easy ones come back first. We should have hematocrit in two minutes."

Hall waited. The screen glowed, the letters printing out:

JACKSON, PETER LABORATORY ANALYSES

TEST: NORMAL: VALUE

HEMATOCRIT: 38-54: 21

"Half normal," Hall said. He slapped an oxygen mask on Jackson's face, fixed the straps, and said, "We'll need at least four units. Plus two of plasma."

"I'll order them."

"To start as soon as possible."

She went to phone the blood bank on Level II and asked them to hurry on the requisition. Meantime, Hall turned his attention to the child.

It had been a long time since he had examined an infant, and he had forgotten how difficult it could be. Every time he tried to look at the eyes, the child shut them tightly. Every time he looked down the throat, the child closed his mouth. Every time he tried to listen to the heart, the child shrieked, obscuring all heart sounds.

Yet he persisted, remembering what Stone had said. These two people, dissimilar though they were, nonetheless represented the only survivors of Piedmont. Somehow they had managed to beat the disease. That was a link between the two, between the shriveled old man vomiting blood and the pink young child, howling and screaming.

At first glance, they were as different as possible; they were at opposite ends of the spectrum, sharing nothing in common.

And yet there must be something in common.

It took Hall half an hour to finish his examination of the child. At the end of that time he was forced to conclude that the infant was, to his exam, perfectly normal. Totally normal. Nothing the least bit unusual about him.

Except that, somehow, he had survived.

15. Main Control

STONE SAT WITH LEAVITT IN THE MAIN CONTROL room, looking into the inner room with the capsule. Though cramped, main control was complex and expensive: it had cost $2,000,000, the most costly single room in the Wildfire installation. But it was vital to the functioning of the entire laboratory.

Main control served as the first step in scientific examination of the capsule. Its chief function was detection-the room was geared to detect and isolate microorganisms. According to the Life Analysis Protocol, there were three main steps in the Wildfire program: detection, characterization, and control. First the organism had to be found. Then it had to be studied and understood. Only then could ways be sought to control it.

Main control was set up to find the organism.

Leavitt and Stone sat side by side in front of the banks of controls and dials. Stone operated the mechanical hands, while Leavitt manipulated the microscopic apparatus. Naturally it was impossible to enter the room with the capsule and examine it directly. Robot-controlled microscopes, with viewing screens in the control room, would accomplish this for them.

An early question had been whether to utilize television or some kind of direct visual linkup. Television was cheaper and more easily set up; TV image-intensifiers were already in use for electron microscopes, X-ray machines, and other devices. However, the Wildfire group finally decided that a TV screen was too imprecise for their needs; even a double-scan camera, which transmitted twice as many lines as the usual TV and gave better image resolution, would be insufficient. In the end, the group chose a fiber optics system in which a light image was transmitted directly through a snakelike bundle of glass fibers and then displayed on the viewers. This gave a clear, sharp image.

Stone positioned the capsule and pressed the appropriate controls. A black box moved down from the ceiling and began to scan the capsule surface. The two men watched the viewer screens:

"Start with five power," Stone said. Leavitt set the controls. They watched as the viewer automatically moved around the capsule, focusing on the surface of the metal. They watched one complete scan, then shifted up to twenty-power magnification. A twenty-power scan took much longer, since the field of view was smaller. They still saw nothing on the surface: no punctures, no indentations, nothing that looked like a small growth of any kind.

"Let's go to one hundred," Stone said. Leavitt adjusted the controls and sat back. They were beginning what they knew would be a long and tedious search. Probably they would find nothing. Soon they would examine the interior of the capsule; they might find something there. Or they might not. In either case, they would take samples for analysis, plating out the scrapings and swabs onto growth media.

Leavitt glanced from the viewing screens to look into the room. The viewer, suspended from the ceiling by a complex arrangement of rods and wires, was automatically moving in slow circles around the capsule. He looked back to the screens.

There were three screens in main control, and all showed exactly the same field of view. In theory, they could use three viewers projecting onto three screens, and cover the capsule in one third the time. But they did not want to do that- at least not now. Both, men knew that their interest and attention would fatigue as the day wore on. No matter how hard they tried, they could not remain alert all the time. But if two men watched the same image, there was less chance of missing something.

The surface area of the cone-shaped capsule, thirty-seven inches long and a foot in diameter at the base, was just over 650 square inches. Three scans, at five, twenty, and one hundred power, took them slightly more than two hours. At the end of the third scan, Stone said, "I suppose we ought to proceed with the 440 scan as well."

"But?"

"I am tempted to go directly to a scan of the interior. If we find nothing, we can come back outside and do a 440."

"I agree."

"All right," Stone said. "Start with five. On the inside."

Leavitt worked the controls. This time, it could not be done automatically; the viewer was programmed to follow the contours of any regularly shaped object, such as a cube, a sphere, or a cone. But it could not probe the interior of the capsule without direction. Leavitt set the lenses at five diameters and switched the remote viewer to manual control. Then he directed it down into the scoop opening of the capsule.

Stone, watching the screen, said, "More light."

Leavitt made adjustments. Five additional remote lights came down from the ceiling and clicked on, shining into the scoop.

"Better?"

"Fine."

Watching his own screen, Leavitt began to move the remote viewer. It took several minutes before he could do it smoothly; it was difficult to coordinate, rather like trying to write while you watched in a mirror. But soon he was scanning smoothly.

The five-power scan took twenty minutes. They found nothing except a small indentation the size of a pencil point. At Stone's suggestion, when they began the twenty-power scan they started with the indentation.

Immediately, they saw it: a tiny black fleck of jagged material no larger than a grain of sand. There seemed to be bits of green mixed in with the black.

Neither man reacted, though Leavitt later recalled that he was "trembling with excitement. I kept thinking, if this is it, if it's really something new, some brand new form of life…"

However, all he said was, "Interesting."

"We'd better complete the scan at twenty power," Stone said. He was working to keep his voice calm, but it was clear that he was excited too.

Leavitt wanted to examine the fleck at higher power immediately, but he understood what Stone was saying. They could not afford to jump to conclusions- any conclusions. Their only hope was to be grindingly, interminably thorough. They had to proceed methodically, to assure themselves at every point that they had overlooked nothing.

Otherwise, they could pursue a course of investigation for hours or days, only to find it ended nowhere, that they had made a mistake, misjudged the evidence, and wasted time.

So Leavitt did a complete scan of the interior at twenty power. He paused, once or twice, when they thought they saw other patches of green, and marked down the coordinates so they could find the areas later, under higher magnification. Half an hour passed before Stone announced he was satisfied with the twenty-power scan.

They took a break for caffeine, swallowing two pills with water. The team had agreed earlier that amphetamines should not be used except in times of serious emergency; they were stocked in the Level V pharmacy, but for routine purposes caffeine was preferred.

The aftertaste of the caffeine pill was sour in his mouth as Leavitt clicked in the hundred-power lenses, and began the third scan. As before, they started with the indentation, and the small black fleck they had noted earlier.

It was disappointing: at higher magnification it appeared no different from their earlier views, only larger. They could see, however, that it was an irregular piece of material, dull, looking like rock. And they could see there were definitely flecks of green mined on the jagged surface of the material.

"What do you make of it?" Stone said.

"If that's the object the capsule collided with," Leavitt said, "it was either moving with great speed, or else it is very heavy. Because it's not big enough-"

"To knock the satellite out of orbit otherwise. I agree. And yet it did not make a very deep indentation."

"Suggesting?"

Stone shrugged. "Suggesting that it was either not responsible for the orbital change, or that it has some elastic properties we don't yet know about."

"What do you think of the green?"

Stone grinned. "You won't trap me yet. I am curious, nothing more."

Leavitt chuckled and continued the scan. Both men now felt elated and inwardly certain of their discovery. They checked the other areas where they had noted green, and confirmed the presence of the patches at higher magnification.

But the other patches looked different from the green on the rock. For one thing, they were larger, and seemed somehow more luminous. For another, the borders of the patches seemed quite regular, and rounded.

"Like small drops of green paint, spattered on the inside of the capsule," Stone said.

"I hope that's not what it is."

"We could probe," Stone said.

"Let's wait for 440."

Stone agreed. By now they had been scanning the capsule for nearly four hours, but neither man felt tired. They watched closely as the viewing screens blurred for a moment, the lenses shifting. When the screens came back into focus, they were looking at the indentation, and the black fleck with the green areas. At this magnification, the surface irregularities of the rock were striking- it was like a miniature planet, with jagged peaks and sharp valleys. It occurred to Leavitt that this was exactly what they were looking at: a minute, complete planet, with its life forms intact. But he shook his head, dismissing the thought from his mind. Impossible.

Stone said, "If that's a meteor, it's damned funny-looking."

"What bothers you?"

"That left border, over there." Stone pointed to the screen. "The surface of the stone- if it is stone- is rough everywhere except on that left border, where it is smooth and rather straight."

"Like an artificial surface?"

Stone sighed. "If I keep looking at it," he said, "I might start to think so. Let's see those other patches of green."

Leavitt set the coordinates and focused the viewer. A new image appeared on the screens. This time, it was a close-up of one of the green patches. Under high magnification the borders could be seen clearly. They were not smooth, but slightly notched: they looked almost like a gear from the inside of a watch.

"I'll be damned," Leavitt said.

"It's not paint. That notching is too regular."

As they watched, it happened: the green spot turned purple for a fraction of a second, less than the blink of an eye. Then it turned green once more.

"Did you see that?"

"I saw it. You didn't change the lighting?"

"No. Didn't touch it."

A moment later, it happened again: green, a flash of purple, green again.

"Amazing."

"This may be-"

And then, as they watched, the spot turned purple and remained purple. The notches disappeared; the spot had enlarged slightly, filling in the V-shaped gaps. It was now a complete circle. It became green once more.

"It's growing," Stone said.

They worked swiftly. The movie cameras were brought down, recording from five angles at ninety-six frames per second. Another time-lapse camera clicked off frames at half-second intervals. Leavitt also brought down two more remote cameras, and set them at different angles from the original camera.

In main control, all three screens displayed different views of the green spot.

"Can we get more power? More magnification?" Stone said.

"No. You remember we decided 440 was the top."

Stone swore. To obtain higher magnification, they would have to go to a separate room, or else use the electron microscopes. In either case, it would take time.

Leavitt said, "Shall we start culture and isolation?"

"Yes. Might as well."

Leavitt turned the viewers back down to twenty power. They could now see that there were four areas of interest, three isolated green patches, and the rock with its indentation. On the control console, he pressed a button marked CULTURE, and a tray 4t the side of the room slid out, revealing stacks of circular, plastic-covered petri dishes. Inside each dish was a thin layer of growth medium.

The Wildfire project employed almost every known growth medium. The media were jellied compounds containing various nutrients on which bacteria would feed and multiply. Along with the usual laboratory standbys- horse and sheep blood agar, chocolate agar, simplex, Sabourad's medium- there were thirty diagnostic media, containing various sugars and minerals. Then there were forty-three specialized culture media, including those for growth of tubercule bacilli and unusual fungi, as well as the highly experimental media, designated by numbers: ME-997, ME-423, ME-A12, and so on.

With the tray of media was a batch of sterile swabs. Using the mechanical hands, Stone picked up the swabs singly and touched them to the capsule surface, then to the media. Leavitt punched data into the computer, so that they would know later where each swab had been taken. In this manner, they swabbed the outer surface of the entire capsule, and went to the interior. Very carefully, using high viewer magnification, Stone took scrapings from the green spots and transferred them to the different media.

Finally, he used fine forceps to pick up the rock and move it intact to a clean glass dish.

The whole process took better than two hours. At the end of that time, Leavitt punched through the MAXCULT computer program. This program automatically instructed the machine in the handling of the hundreds of petri dishes they had collected. Some would be stored at room temperature and pressure, with normal earth atmosphere. Others would be subjected to heat and cold; high pressure and vacuum; low oxygen and high oxygen; light and dark. Assigning the plates to the various culture boxes was a job that would take a man days to work out. The computer could do it in seconds.

When the program was running, Stone placed the stacks of petri dishes on the conveyor belt. They watched as the dishes moved off to the culture boxes.

There was nothing further they could do, except wait twenty-four to forty-eight hours, to see what grew out.

"Meantime," Stone said, "we can begin analysis of this piece of rock- if it actually is rock. How are you with an EM?"

"Rusty," Leavitt said. He had not used an electron microscope for nearly a year.

"Then I'll prepare the specimen. We'll also want mass spectrometry done. That's all computerized. But before we do that, we ought to go to higher power. What's the highest light magnification we can get in Morphology?"

"A thousand diameters."

"Then let's do that first. Punch the rock through to Morphology."

Leavitt looked down at the console and pressed MORPHOLOGY. Stone's mechanical hands placed the glass dish with the rock onto the conveyor belt.

They looked at the wall clock behind them. It showed 1100 hours; they had been working for eleven straight hours.

"So far," Stone said, "so good."

Leavitt grinned, and crossed his fingers.

16. Autopsy

BURTON WAS WORKING IN THE AUTOPSY room. He was nervous and tense, still bothered by his memories of Piedmont. 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.

According to the protocol, he was required to carry out autopsies on dead animals, but he was also in charge of preliminary vector experiments. In all fairness, Burton was not the man to do this work; Leavitt would have been better suited to it. But it was felt that Leavitt was more useful working on preliminary isolation and identification.

So the vector experiments fell to Burton.

They were reasonably simple and straightforward, designed to answer the question of how the disease was transmitted. Burton began with a series of cages, lined up in a row. Each had a separate air supply; the air supplies could be interconnected in a variety of ways.

Burton placed the corpse of the dead Norway rat, which was contained in an airtight cage, alongside another cage containing a living rat. He punched buttons; air was allowed to pass freely from one cage to the other.

The living rat flopped over and died.

Interesting, he thought. Airborne transmission. He hooked up a second cage with a live rat, but inserted a Millipore filter between the living and dead rat cages. This filter had perforations 100 angstroms in diameter- the size of a small virus.

He opened the passage between the two cages. The rat remained alive.

He watched for several moments, until he was satisfied. Whatever it was that transmitted the disease, it was larger than a virus. He changed the filter, replacing it with a larger one, and then another still larger. He continued in this way until the rat died.

The filter had allowed the agent to pass. He checked it: two microns in diameter, roughly the size of a small cell. He thought to himself that he had just learned something very valuable indeed: the size of the infectious agent.

This was important, for in a single simple experiment he had ruled out the possibility that a protein or a chemical molecule of some kind was doing the damage. At Piedmont, he and Stone had been concerned about a gas, perhaps a gas released as waste from the living organism.

Yet, clearly, no gas was responsible. The disease was transmitted by something the size of a cell that was very much bigger than a molecule, or gas droplet.

The next step was equally simple- to determine whether dead animals were potentially infectious.

He took one of the dead rats and pumped the air out of its cage. He waited until the air was fully evacuated. In the pressure fall, the rat ruptured, bursting open. Burton ignored this.

When he was sure all air was removed, he replaced the air with fresh, clean, filtered air. Then he connected the cage to the cage of a living animal.

Nothing happened.

Interesting, he thought. Using a remotely controlled scalpel, he sliced open the dead animal further, to make sure any organisms contained inside the carcass would be released into the atmosphere.

Nothing happened. The live rat scampered about its cage happily.

The results were quite clear: dead animals were not infectious. That was why, he thought, the buzzards could chew at the Piedmont victims and not die. Corpses could not transmit the disease; only the bugs themselves, carried in the air, could do so.

Bugs in the air were deadly.

Bugs in the corpse were harmless.

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.

Most people, when they thought of bacteria, thought of diseases. Yet the fact was that only 3 percent of them produced human disease; the rest were either harmless or beneficial. In the human gut, for instance, there were a variety of bacteria that were helpful to the digestive process. Man needed them, and relied upon them.

In fact, man lived in a sea of bacteria. They were everywhere- on his skin, in his ears and mouth, down his lungs, in his stomach. Everything he owned, anything he touched, every breath he breathed, was drenched in bacteria. Bacteria were ubiquitous. Most of the time you weren't aware of it.

And there was a reason. Both man and bacteria had gotten used to each other, had developed a kind of mutual immunity. Each adapted to the other.

And this, in turn, for a very good reason. It was a principle of biology that evolution was directed toward increased reproductive potential. A man easily killed by bacteria was poorly adapted; he didn't live long enough to reproduce.

A bacteria that killed its host was also poorly adapted. Because any parasite that kills its host is a failure. It must die when the host dies. The successful parasites were those that could live off the host without killing him.

And the most successful hosts were those that could tolerate the parasite, or even turn it to advantage, to make it work for the host.

"The best adapted bacteria," Burton used to say, "are the ones that cause minor diseases, or none at all. You may carry the same single cell of Strep. viridians on your body for sixty or seventy years. During that time, you are growing and reproducing happily; so is the Strep. You can carry Staph. aureus around, and pay only the price of some acne and pimples. You can carry tuberculosis for many decades; you can carry syphilis for a lifetime. These last are not minor diseases, but they are much less severe than they once were, because both man and organism have adapted."

It was known, for instance, that syphilis had been a virulent disease four hundred years before, producing huge festering sores all over the body, often killing in weeks. But over the centuries, man and the spirochete had learned to tolerate each other.

Such considerations were not so abstract and academic as they seemed at first. In the early planning of Wildfire, Stone had observed that 40 per cent of all human disease was caused by microorganisms. Burton had countered by noting that only 3 per cent of all microorganisms caused disease. Obviously, while much human misery was attributable to bacteria, the chances of any particular bacteria being dangerous to man were very small. This was because the process of adaptation- of fitting man to bacteria- was complex.

"Most bacteria," Burton observed, "simply can't live within a man long enough to harm him. Conditions are, one way or another, unfavorable. The body is too hot or too cold, too acid or too alkaline, there is too much oxygen or not enough. Man's body is as hostile as Antarctica to most bacteria."

This meant that the chances of an organism from outer space being suited to harm man were very slim. Everyone recognized this, but felt that Wildfire had to be constructed in any event. Burton certainly agreed, but felt in an odd way that his prophecy had come true.

Clearly, the bug they had found could kill men. But it was not really adapted to men, because it killed and died within the organism. It could not be transmitted from corpse to corpse. It existed for a second or two in its host, and then died with it.

Satisfying intellectually, he thought.

But practically speaking they still had to isolate it, understand it, and find a cure.

Burton already knew something about transmission, and something about the mechanism of death: clotting of the blood. The question remained- How did the organisms get into the body?

Because transmission appeared to be airborne, contact with skin and lungs seemed likely. Possibly the organisms burrowed right through the skin surface. Or they might be inhaled. Or both.

How to determine it?

He considered putting protective suitings around an experimental animal to cover all but the mouth. That was possible, but it would take a long time. He sat and worried about the problem for an hour.

Then he hit upon a more likely approach.

He knew that the organism killed by clotting blood. Very likely it would initiate clotting at the point of entrance into the body. If skin, clotting would start near the surface. If lungs, it would begin in the chest, radiating outward.

This was something he could test. By using radioactively tagged blood proteins, and then following his animals with scintillometer scans, he could determine where in the body the blood first clotted.

He prepared a suitable animal, choosing a rhesus monkey because its anatomy was more human than a rat's. He infused the radioactive tagging substance, a magnesium isotope, into the monkey and calibrated the scanner. After allowing equilibration, he tied the monkey down and positioned the scanner overhead.

He was now ready to begin.

The scanner would print out its results on a series of human block outlines. He set the computer printing program and then exposed the rhesus to air containing the lethal microorganism.

Immediately, the printout began to clatter out from the computer:

[graphic of disease spread in human body]

It was all over in three seconds. The graphic printout told him what he needed to know, that clotting began in the lungs and spread outward through the rest of the body.

But there was an additional piece of information gained. Burton later said, "I had been concerned that perhaps death and clotting did not coincide- or at least did not coincide exactly. It seemed impossible to me that death could occur in three seconds, but it seemed even more unlikely that the total blood volume of the body-five quarts-could solidify in so short a period. I was curious to know whether a single crucial clot might form, in the brain, perhaps, and the rest of the body clot at a slower pace."

Burton was thinking of the brain even at this early stage of his investigation. In retrospect, it is frustrating that he did not follow this line of inquiry to its logical conclusion. He was prevented from doing this by the evidence of the scans, which told him that clotting began in the lungs and progressed up the carotid arteries to the brain one or two seconds later.

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

It was a simple test, not part of the regular Wildfire Protocol. Burton knew that death coincided with blood clotting. If clotting could be prevented, could death be avoided?

He took several rats and injected them with heparin, an anticoagulating drug- preventing blood-clot formation. Heparin was a rapid-acting drug widely used in medicine; its actions were thoroughly understood. Burton injected the drug intravenously in varying amounts, ranging from a low-normal dose to a massively excessive dose.

Then he exposed the rats to air containing the lethal organism.

The first rat, with a low dose, died in five seconds. The others followed within a minute. A single rat with a massive dose lived nearly three minutes, but he also succumbed in the end.

Burton was depressed by the results. Although death was delayed, it was not prevented. The method of symptomatic treatment did not work.

He put the dead rats to one side, and then made his crucial mistake.

Burton did not autopsy the anticoagulated rats.

Instead, he turned his attention to the original autopsy specimens, the first black Norway rat and the first rhesus monkey to be exposed to the capsule. He performed a complete autopsy on these animals, but discarded the anticoagulated animals.

It would be forty-eight hours before he realized his error.

The autopsies he performed were careful and good; he did them slowly, reminding himself that he must overlook nothing. He removed the internal organs from the rat and monkey and examined each, removing samples for both the light and electron microscopes.

To gross inspection, the animals had died of total, intravascular coagulation. The arteries, the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and spleen- all the blood-containing organs- were rock-hard, solid. This was what he had expected.

He carried his tissue slices across the room to prepare frozen sections for microscopic examination. As each section was completed by his technician, he slipped it under the microscope, examined it, and photographed it.

The tissues were normal. Except for the clotted blood, there was nothing unusual about them at all. He knew that these same pieces of tissue would now be sent to the microscopy lab, where another technician would prepare stained sections, using hematoxylin-eosin, periodic acid-Schiff, and Zenker-formalin stains. Sections of nerve would be stained with Nissl and Cajal gold preparations. This process would take an additional twelve to fifteen hours. He could hope, of course, that the stained sections would reveal something more, but he had no reason to believe they would.

Similarly, he was unenthusiastic about the prospects for electron microscopy. The electron microscope was a valuable tool, but occasionally it made things more difficult, not easier. The electron microscope could provide great magnification and clear detail-but only if you knew where to look. It was excellent for examining a single cell, or part of a cell. But first you had to know which cell to examine. And there were billions of cells in a human body.

At the end of ten hours of work, he sat back to consider what he had learned. He drew up a short list:

1. The lethal agent is approximately 1 micron in size. Therefore it is not a gas or molecule, or even a large protein or virus. It is the size of a cell, and may actually be a cell of some sort.

2. The lethal agent is transmitted by air. Dead organisms are not infectious.

3. The lethal agent is inspired by the victim, entering the lungs. There it presumably crosses over into the bloodstream and starts coagulation.

4. The lethal agent causes death through coagulation. This occurs within seconds, and coincides with total coagulation of the entire body vascular system.

5. Anticoagulant drugs do not prevent this process.

6. No other pathologic abnormalities are known to occur in the dying animal.

Burton looked at his list and shook his head. Anticoagulants might not work, but the fact was that something s the process. There was a way that it could be done. He knew that.

Because two people had survived.

17. Recovery

AT 1147 HOURS, MARK HALL WAS BENT OVER THE computer, staring at the console that showed the laboratory results from Peter Jackson and the infant. The computer was giving results as they were finished by the automated laboratory equipment; by now, nearly all results were in.

The infant, Hall observed, was normal. The computer did not mince words:

SUBJECT CODED- INFANT- SHOWS ALL LABORATORY VALUES WITHIN NORMAL LIMITS

However, Peter Jackson was another problem entirely. His results were abnormal in several respects.

SUBJECT CODED JACKSON, PETER

LABORATORY VALUES NOT WITHIN NORMAL LIMITS FOLLOW

TEST: NORMAL: VALUE

HEMATOC: 38-54: 21 INITIAL

25 REPEAT

29 REPEAT

33 REPEAT

37 REPEAT

BUN: 10-20: 50

COUNTS RETIC: 1: 6

BLOOD SMEAR SHOWS MANY IMMATURE ERYTHROCYTE FORMS

TEST: NORMAL: VALUE

PRO TIME: L2: 12

BLOOD PH: 7.40: 7.31

SGOT: 40: 75

SED RATE: 9: 29

AMYLASE: 70-200: 450

Some of the results were easy to understand, others were not. The hematocrit, for example, was rising because Jackson was receiving transfusions of whole blood and packed red cells. The BUN, or blood urea nitrogen, was a test of kidney function and was mildly elevated, probably because of decreased blood flow.

Other analyses were consistent with blood loss. The reticulocyte count was up from 1 to 6 per cent. Jackson had been anemic for some time. He showed immature red-cell forms, which meant that his body was struggling to replace lost blood, and so had to put young, immature red cells into circulation.

The prothrombin time indicated that while Jackson was bleeding from somewhere in his gastrointestinal tract, he had no primary bleeding problem: his blood clotted normally.

The sedimentation rate and SGOT were indices of tissue destruction. Somewhere in Jackson's body, tissues were dying off.

But the pH of the blood was a bit of a puzzle. At 7.31, it was too acid, though not strikingly so. Hall was at a loss to explain this. So was the computer.

SUBJECT CODED JACKSON, PETER

DIAGNOSTIC PROBABILITIES

1. ACUTE AND CHRONIC BLOOD LOSS ETIOLOGY GASTROINTESTINAL.884 NO OTHER STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT SOURCES.

2. ACIDOSIS ETIOLOGY UNEXPLAINED FURTHER DATA REQUIRED SUGGEST HISTORY

Hall read the printout and shrugged. The computer might suggest he talk to the patient, but that was easier said than done. Jackson was comatose, and if he had ingested anything to make his blood acid, they would not find out until he revived.

On the other hand, perhaps he could test blood gases. He turned to the computer and punched in a request for blood gases.

The computer responded stubbornly.

PATIENT HISTORY PREFERABLE TO LABORATORY ANALYSES

Hall typed in: "Patient comatose."

The computer seemed to consider this, and then flashed back:

PATIENT MONITORS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH COMA - EEG SHOWS ALPHA WAVES DIAGNOSTIC OF SLEEP

"I'll be damned," Hall said. He looked through the window and saw that Jackson was, indeed, stirring sleepily. He crawled down through the tunnel to his plastic suit and leaned over the patient.

"Mr. Jackson, wake up…"

Slowly, he opened his eyes and stared at Hall. He blinked, not believing.

"Don't be frightened," Hall said quietly. "You're sick, and we have been taking care of you. Do you feel better?"

Jackson swallowed, and nodded. He seemed afraid to speak. But the pallor of his skin was gone; his cheeks had a slight pinkish tinge; his fingernails were no longer gray.

"How do you feel now?"

"Okay… Who are you?

"I am Dr. Hall. I have been taking care of you. You were bleeding very badly. We had to give you a transfusion."

He nodded, accepting this quite calmly. Somehow, his manner rung a bell for Hall, who said, "Has this happened to you before?"

"Yes," he said. "Twice."

"How did it happen before?"

"I don't know where I am," he said, looking around the room. "Is this a hospital? Why are you wearing that thing?"

"No, this isn't a hospital. It is a special laboratory in Nevada."

"Nevada?" He closed his eyes and shook his head. "But I'm in Arizona…"

"Not now. We brought you here, so we could help you."

"How come that suit?"

"We brought you from Piedmont. There was a disease in Piedmont. You are now in an isolation chamber."

"You mean I'm contagious?"

"Well, we don't know for sure. But we must-"

"Listen," he said, suddenly trying to get up, "this place gives me the creeps. I'm getting out of here. I don't like it here."

He struggled in the bed, trying to move against the straps. Hall pushed him back gently.

"Just relax, Mr. Jackson. Everything will be all right, but you must relax. You've been a sick man."

Slowly, Jackson lay back. Then: "I want a cigarette."

"I'm afraid you can't have one."

"What the hell, I want one."

"I'm sorry, smoking is not allowed."

"Look here, young fella, when you've lived as long as I have you'll know what you can do and what you can't do. They told me before. None of that Mexican food, no liquor, no butts. I tried it for a spell. You know how that makes a body feel? Terrible, just terrible."

"Who told you?"

"The doctors."

"What doctors?"

"Those doctors in Phoenix. Big fancy hospital, all that shiny equipment and all those shiny white uniforms. Real fancy hospital. I wouldn't have gone there, except for my sister. She insisted. She lives in Phoenix, you know, with that husband of hers, George. Stupid ninny. I didn't want no fancy hospital, I just wanted to rest up, is all. But she insisted, so I went."

"When was this?"

"Last year. June it was, or July."

"Why did you go to the hospital?"

"Why does anybody go to the hospital? I was sick, dammit."

"What was your problem?"

"This damn stomach of mine, same as always."

"Bleeding?"

"Hell, bleeding. Every time I hiccoughed I came up with blood. Never knew a body had so much blood in it."

"Bleeding in your stomach?"

"Yeah. Like I said, I had it before. All these needles stuck in you-" he nodded to the intravenous lines- "and all the blood going into you. Phoenix last year, and then Tucson the year before that. Now, Tucson was a right nice place. Right nice. Had me a pretty little nurse and all." Abruptly, he closed his mouth. "How old are you, son, anyhow? You don't seem old enough to be a doctor.

"I'm a surgeon," Hall said.

"Surgeon! Oh no you don't. They kept trying to get me to do it, and I kept saying, Not on your sweet life. No indeedy. Not taking it out of me."

"You've had an ulcer for two years?"

"A bit more. The pains started out of the clear blue. Thought I had a touch of indigestion, you know, until the bleeding started up."

A two-year history, Hall thought. Definitely ulcer, not cancer.

"And you went to the hospital?"

"Yep. Fixed me up fine. Warned me off spicy foods and hard stuff and cigarettes. And I tried, sonny, I sure did. But it wasn't no good. A man gets used to his pleasures.

"So in a year, you were back in the hospital."

"Yeah. Big old place in Phoenix, with that stupid ninny George and my sister visiting me every day. He's a book-learning fool, you know. Lawyer. Talks real big, but he hasn't got the sense God gave a grasshopper's behind."

"And they wanted to operate in Phoenix?"

"Sure they did. No offense, sonny, but any doctor'll operate on you, give him half a chance. It's the way they think. I just told them I'd gone this far with my old stomach, and I reckoned Id finish the stretch with it."

"When did you leave the hospital?"

"Must have been early August sometime. First week, or thereabouts."

"And when did you start smoking and drinking and eating the wrong foods?"

"Now don't lecture me, sonny," Jackson said. "I'v6 been living for sixty-nine years, eating all the wrong foods and doing all the wrong things. I like it that way, and if I can't keep it up, well then the hell with it."

"But you must have had pain," Hall said, frowning.

"Oh, sure, it kicked up some. Specially if I didn't eat. But I found a way to fix that.

"Yes?"

"Sure. They gave me this milk stuff at the hospital, and wanted me to keep on with it. Hundred times a day, in little sips. Milk stuff. Tasted like chalk. But I found a better thing."

"What was that?"

"Aspirin," Jackson said.

"Aspirin?"

"Sure. Works real nice."

"How much aspirin did you take?"

"Fair bit, toward the end. I was doing a bottle a day. You know them bottles it comes in?"

Hall nodded. No wonder the man was acid. Aspirin was acetylsalicylic acid, and if it was taken in sufficient quantities, it would acidify you. Aspirin was a gastric irritant, and it could exacerbate bleeding.

"Didn't anybody tell you aspirin would make the bleeding worse?" he asked.

"Sure," Jackson said. "They told me. But I didn't mind none. Because it stopped the pains, see. That, plus a little squeeze."

"Squeeze?"

"Red-eye. You know."

Hall shook his head. He didn't know.

"Sterno. Pink lady. You take it, see, and put it in cloth, and squeeze it out…"

Hall sighed. "You were drinking Sterno," he said.

"Well, only when I couldn't get nothing else. Aspirin and squeeze, see, really kills that pain."

"Sterno isn't only alcohol. It's methanol, too."

"Doesn't hurt you, does it?" Jackson asked, in a voice suddenly concerned.

"As a matter of fact, it does. It can make you go blind, and it can even kill you."

"Well, hell, it made me feel better, so I took it," Jackson said.

"Did this aspirin and squeeze have any effect on you? On your breathing?"

"Well, now you mention it, I was a tad short of breath. But what the hell, I don't need much breath at my age."

Jackson yawned and closed his eyes.

"You're awful full of questions, boy. I want to sleep now."

Hall looked at him, and decided the man was right. It would be best to proceed slowly, at least for a time. He crawled back down the tunnel and out to the main room. He turned to his assistant:

"Our friend Mr. Jackson has a two-year history of ulcer. We'd better keep the blood going in for another couple of units, then we can stop and see what's happening. Drop an NG tube and start icewater lavage."

A gong rang, echoing softly through the room.

"What's that?"

"The twelve-hour mark. It means we have to change our clothing. And it means you have a conference."

"I do? Where?"

"The CR off the dining room."

Hall nodded, and left.

In delta sector, the computers hummed and clicked softly, as Captain Arthur Morris punched through a new program on the console. Captain Morris was a programmer; he had been sent to delta sector by the command on Level I because no MCN messages had been received for nine hours. It was possible, of course, that there had been no priority transmissions; but it was also unlikely.

And if there had been unreceived MCN messages, then the computers were not functioning properly. Captain Morris watched as the computer ran its usual internal check program, which read out as all circuits functioning.

Unsatisfied, he punched in the CHECKLIM program, a more rigorous testing of the circuit banks. It required 0.03 seconds for the machine to come back with its answer: a row of five green lights blinked on the console. He walked over to the teleprinter and watched as it typed:

MACHINE FUNCTION ON ALL CIRCUITS WITHIN RATIONAL INDICES

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.

18. The Noon Conference

ACCORDING TO PROTOCOL, THE TEAM MET EVERY twelve hours for a brief conference, at which results were summarized and new directions planned. In order to save time the conferences were held in a small room off the cafeteria; they could eat and talk at the same time.

Hall was the last to arrive. He slipped into a chair behind his lunch- two glasses of liquid and three pills of different colors- just as Stone said, "We'll hear from Burton first."

Burton shuffled to his feet and in a slow, hesitant voice outlined his experiments and his results. He noted first that he had determined the size of the lethal agent to be one micron.

Stone and Leavitt looked at each other. The green flecks they had seen were much larger than that; clearly, infection could be spread by a mere fraction of the green fleck.

Burton next explained his experiments concerning airborne transmission, and coagulation beginning at the lungs. He finished with his attempts at anticoagulation therapy.

"What about the autopsies?" Stone said. "What did they show?"

"Nothing we don't already know. The blood is clotted throughout. No other demonstrable abnormalities at the light microscope level."

"And clotting is initiated at the lungs?"

"Yes. Presumably the organisms cross over to the bloodstream there- or they may release a toxic substance, which crosses over. We may have an answer when the stained sections are finished. In particular, we will be looking for damage to blood vessels, since this releases tissue thromboplastin, and stimulates clotting at the site of the damage."

Stone nodded and turned to Hall, who told of the tests carried out on his two patients. He explained that the infant was normal to all tests and that Jackson had a bleeding ulcer, for which he was receiving transfusions.

"He's revived," Hall said. "I talked with him briefly."

Everyone sat up.

"Mr. Jackson is a cranky old goat of sixty-nine who has a two-year history of ulcer. He's bled out twice before: two years ago, and again last year. Each time he was warned to change his habits; each time he went back to his old ways, and began bleeding again. At the time of the Piedmont contact, e was treating his problems with his own regimen: a bottle of aspirin a day and some Sterno on top of it. He says this left him a little short of breath."

"And made him acidotic as hell," Burton said.

"Exactly."

Methanol, when broken down by the body, was converted to formaldehyde and formic acid. In combination with aspirin, it meant Jackson was consuming great quantities of acid. The body had to maintain its acid-base balance within fairly narrow limits or death would occur. One way to keep the balance was to breathe rapidly, and blow off carbon dioxide, decreasing carbonic acid in the body.

Stone said, "Could this acid have protected him from the organism?"

Hall shrugged. "Impossible to say."

Leavitt said, "What about the infant? Was it anemic?"

"No," Hall said. "But on the other hand, we don't know for sure that it was protected by the same mechanism. It might have something entirely different."

"How about the acid-base balance of the child?"

"Normal," Hall said. "Perfectly normal. At least it is now."

There was a moment of silence. Finally Stone said, "Well, you have some good leads here. The problem remains to discover what, if anything, that child and that old man have in common. Perhaps, as you suggest, there is nothing in common. But for a start, we have to assume that they were protected in the same way, by the same mechanism."

Hall nodded.

Burton said to Stone, "And what have you found in the capsule?"

"We'd better show you," Stone said.

"Show us what?"

"Something we believe may represent the organism," Stone said.

The door said MORPHOLOGY. Inside, the room was partitioned into a place for the experimenters to stand, and a glass-walled isolation chamber further in. Gloves were provided so the men could reach into the chamber and move instruments about.

Stone pointed to the glass dish, and the small fleck of black inside it.

"We think this is our 'meteor,' " he said. "We have found something apparently alive on its surface. There were also other areas within the capsule that may represent life. We've brought the meteor in here to have a look at it under the light microscope."

Reaching through with the gloves, Stone set the glass dish into an opening in a large chrome box, then withdrew his hands.

"The box," he said, "is simply a light microscope fitted with the usual image intensifiers and resolution scanners. We can go up to a thousand diameters with it, projected on the screen here."

Leavitt adjusted dials while Hall and the others stared at the viewer screen.

"Ten power," Leavitt said.

On the screen, Hall saw that the rock was jagged, blackish, dull. Stone pointed out green flecks.

"One hundred power."

The green flecks were larger now, very clear.

"We think that's our organism. We have observed it growing; it turns purple, apparently at the point of mitotic division."

"Spectrum shift?"

"Of some kind."

"One thousand power," Leavitt said.

The screen was filled with a single green spot, nestled down in the jagged hollows of the rock. Hall noticed the surface of the green, which was smooth and glistening, almost oily.

"You think that's a single bacterial colony?"

"We can't be sure it's a colony in the conventional sense," Stone said. "Until we heard Burton's experiments, we didn't think it was a colony at all. We thought it might be a single organism. But obviously the single units have to be a micron or less in size; this is much too big. Therefore it is probably a larger structure- perhaps a colony, perhaps something else."

As they watched, the spot turned purple, and green again. "It's dividing now," Stone said. "Excellent."

Leavitt switched on the cameras.

"Now watch closely."

The spot turned purple and held the color. It seemed to expand slightly, and for a moment, the surface broke into fragments, hexagonal in shape, like a tile floor.

"Did you see that?"

"It seemed to break up."

"Into six-sided figures."

"I wonder," Stone said, "whether those figures represent single units."

"Or whether they are regular geometric shapes all the time, or just during division?"

"We'll know more," Stone said, "after the EM." He turned to Burton. "Have you finished your autopsies?"

"Yes."

"Can you work the spectrometer?"

"I think so."

"Then do that. It's computerized, anyway. We'll want an analysis of samples of both the rock and the green organism."

"You'll get me a piece?"

"Yes." Stone said to Leavitt: "Can you handle the AA analyzer? "

"Yes."

"Same tests on that."

"And a fractionation?"

"I think so," Stone said. "But you'll have to do that by hand."

Leavitt nodded; Stone turned back to the isolation chamber and removed a glass dish from the light microscope. He set it to one side, beneath a small device that looked like a miniature scaffolding. This was the microsurgical unit.

Microsurgery was a relatively new skill in biology- the ability to perform delicate operations on a single cell. Using microsurgical techniques, it was possible to remove the nucleus from a cell, or part of the cytoplasm, as neatly and cleanly as a surgeon performed an amputation.

The device was constructed to scale down human hand movements into fine, precise miniature motions. A series of gears and servomechanisms carried out the reduction; the movement of a thumb was translated into a shift of a knife blade millionths of an inch.

Using a high magnification viewer, Stone began to chip away delicately at the black rock, until he had two tiny fragments. He set them aside in separate glass dishes and proceeded to scrape away two small fragments from the green area.

Immediately, the green turned purple, and expanded.

"It doesn't like you," Leavitt said, and laughed.

Stone frowned. "Interesting. Do you suppose that's a nonspecific growth response, or a trophic response to injury and irradiation? "

"I think," Leavitt said, "that it doesn't like to be poked at."

"We must investigate further," Stone said.

19. Crash

FOR ARTHUR MANCHEK, THERE WAS A CERTAIN kind of horror in the telephone conversation. He received it at home, having just finished dinner and sat down in the living room to read the newspapers. He hadn't seen a newspaper in the last two days, he had been so busy with the Piedmont business.

When the phone rang, he assumed that it must be for his wife, but a moment later she came in and said, "It's for you. The base."

He had an uneasy feeling as he picked up the receiver. "Major Manchek speaking."

"Major, this is Colonel Burns at Unit Eight." Unit Eight was the processing and clearing unit of the base. Personnel checked in and out through Unit Eight, and calls were transmitted through it.

"Yes, Colonel?"

"Sir, we have you down for notification of certain contingencies. " His voice was guarded; he was choosing his words carefully on the open line. "I'm informing you now of an RTM crash forty-two minutes ago in Big Head, Utah."

Manchek frowned. Why was he being informed of a routine training-mission crash? It was hardly his province.

"What was it?"

"Phantom, Sir. En route San Francisco to Topeka."

"I see," Manchek said, though he did not see at all.

"Sir, Goddard wanted you to be informed in this instance so that you could join the post team."

"Goddard? Why Goddard?" For a moment, as he sat there in the living room, staring at the newspaper headline absently- NEW BERLIN CRISIS FFARED- he thought that the colonel meant Lewis Goddard, chief of the codes section of Vandenberg. Then he realized he meant Goddard Spaceflight Center, outside Washington. Among other things, Goddard acted as collating center for certain special projects that fell between the province of Houston and the governmental agencies in Washington.

"Sir," Colonel Burns said, "the Phantom drifted off its flight plan forty minutes out of San Francisco and passed through Area WF."

Manchek felt himself slowing down. A kind of sleepiness came over him. "Area WF?"

"That is correct, Sir.

"When?"

"Twenty minutes before the crash."

"At what altitude?"

"Twenty-three thousand feet, Sir."

"When does the post team leave?"

"Half an hour, Sir, from the base."

"All right," Manchek said. "I'll be there."

He hung up and stared at the phone lazily. He felt tired; he wished he could go to bed. Area WF was the designation for the cordoned-off radius around Piedmont, Arizona.

They should have dropped the bomb, he thought. They should have dropped it two days ago.

At the time of the decision to delay Directive 7-12, Manchek had been uneasy. But officially he could not express an opinion, and he had waited in vain for the Wildfire team, now located in the underground laboratory, to complain to Washington. He knew Wildfire had been notified; he had seen the cable that went to all security units; it was quite explicit.

Yet for some reason Wildfire had not complained. Indeed, they had paid no attention to it whatever.

Very odd.

And now there was a crash. He lit his pipe and sucked on it, considering the possibilities. Overwhelming was the likelihood that some green trainee had daydreamed, gone off his flight plan, panicked, and lost control of the plane. It had happened before, hundreds of times. The post team, a group of specialists who went out to the site of the wreckage to investigate all crashes, usually returned a verdict of "Agnogenic Systems Failure." It was military doubletalk for crash of unknown cause; it did not distinguish between mechanical failure and pilot failure, but it was known that most systems failures were pilot failures. A man could not afford to daydream when he was running a complex machine at two thousand miles an hour. The proof lay in the statistics: though only 9 per cent of flights occurred after the pilot had taken a leave or weekend pass, these flights accounted for 27 per cent of casualties.

Manchek's pipe went out. He stood, dropping the newspaper, and went into the kitchen to tell his wife he was leaving.

"This is movie country," somebody said, looking at the sandstone cliffs, the brilliant reddish hues, against the deepening blue of the sky. And it was true, many movies had been filmed in this area of Utah. But Manchek could not think of movies now. As he sat in the back of the limousine moving away from the Utah airport, he considered what he had been told.

During the flight from Vandenberg to southern Utah, the post team had heard transcripts of the flight transmission between the Phantom and Topeka Central. For the most part it was dull, except for the final moments before the pilot crashed.

The pilot had said: "Something is wrong."

And then, a moment later, "My rubber air hose is dissolving. It must be the vibration. It's just disintegrating to dust."

Perhaps ten seconds after that, a weak, fading voice said, "Everything made of rubber in the cockpit is dissolving."

There were no further transmissions.

Manchek kept hearing that brief communication, in his mind, over and over. Each time, it sounded more bizarre and terrifying.

He looked out the window at the cliffs. The sun was setting now, and only the tops of the cliffs were lighted by fading reddish sunlight; the valleys lay in darkness. He looked ahead at the other limousine, raising a small dust cloud as it carried the rest of the team to the crash site.

"I used to love westerns," somebody said. "They were all shot out here. Beautiful country."

Manchek frowned. It was astonishing to him how people could spend so much time on irrelevancies. Or perhaps it was just denial, the unwillingness to face reality.

The reality was cold enough: the Phantom had strayed into Area WF, going quite deep for a matter of six minutes before the pilot realized the error and pulled north again. However, once in WF, the plane had begun to lose stability. And it had finally crashed.

He said, "Has Wildfire been informed?"

A member of the group, a psychiatrist with a crew cut- all post teams had at least one psychiatrist- said, "You mean the germ people?"

"Yes."

"They've been told," somebody else said. "It went out on the scrambler an hour ago."

Then, thought Manchek, there would certainly be a reaction from Wildfire. They could not afford to ignore this.

Unless they weren't reading their cables. It had never occurred to him before, but perhaps it was possible- they weren't reading the cables. They were so absorbed in their work, they just weren't bothering.

"There's the wreck," somebody said. "Up ahead."

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.

The wreckage of the Phantom was scattered over two square miles of desert. Standing next to the charred remnants of the left wing, he could barely see the others, on the horizon, near the right wing. Everywhere he looked, there were bits of twisted metal, blackened, paint peeling. He saw one with a small portion of a sign still intact, the stenciled letters clear: DO NOT. The rest was gone.

It was impossible to make anything of the remnants. The fuselage, the cockpit, the canopy were all shattered into a million fragments, and the fires had disfigured everything.

As the sun faded, he found himself standing near the remains of the tail section, where the metal still radiated heat from the smoldering fire. Half-buried in the sand he saw a bit of bone; he picked it up and realized with horror that it was human. Long, and broken, and charred at one end, it had obviously come from an arm or a leg. But it was oddly clean- there was no flesh remaining, only smooth bone.

Darkness descended, and the post team took out their flashlights, the half-dozen men moving among, smoking metal, flashing their yellow beams of light about.

It was late in the evening when a biochemist whose name he did not know came up to talk with him.

"You know," the biochemist said, "it's funny. That transcript about the rubber in the cockpit dissolving."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, no rubber was used in this airplane. It was all a synthetic plastic compound. Newly developed by Ancro; they're quite proud of it. It's a polymer that has some of the same characteristics as human tissue. Very flexible, lots of applications. "

Manchek said, "Do you think vibrations could have caused the disintegration."

"No," the man said. "There are thousands of Phantoms flying around the world. They all have this plastic. None of them has ever had this trouble."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that I don't know what the hell is going on," the biochemist said.

20. Routine

SLOWLY, THE WILDFIRE INSTALLATION SETTLED into a routine, a rhythm of work in the underground chambers of a laboratory where there was no night or day, morning or afternoon. The men slept when they were tired, awoke when they were refreshed, and carried on their work in a number of different areas.

Most of this work was to lead nowhere. They knew that, and accepted it in advance. As Stone was fond of saying, scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and your instruments, but in the end your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

Burton stood in the room that housed the spectrometer along with several other pieces of equipment for radioactivity assays, ratio-density photometry, thermocoupling analysis, and preparation for X-ray crystallography.

The spectrometer employed in Level V was the standard Whittington model K-5. Essentially it consisted of a vaporizer, a prism, and a recording screen. The material to be tested was set in the vaporizer and burned. The light from its burning then passed through the prism, where it was broken down to a spectrum that was projected onto a recording screen. Since different elements gave off different wavelengths of light as they burned, it was possible to analyze the chemical makeup of a substance by analyzing the spectrum of light produced.

In theory it was simple, but in practice the reading of spectrometrograms was complex and difficult. No one in this Wildfire laboratory was trained to do it well. Thus results were fed directly into a computer, which performed the analysis. Because of the sensitivity of the computer, rough percentage compositions could also be determined.

Burton placed the first chip, from the black rock, onto the vaporizer and pressed the button. There was a single bright burst of intensely hot light; he turned away, avoiding the brightness, and then put the second chip onto the lamp. Already, he knew, the computer was analyzing the light from the first chip.

He repeated the process with the green fleck, and then checked the time. The computer was now scanning the self-developing photographic plates, which were ready for viewing in seconds. But the scan itself would take two hours- die electric eye was very slow.

Once the scan was completed, the computer would analyze results and print the data within five seconds.

The wall clock told him it was now 1500 hours- three in the afternoon. He suddenly realized he was tired. He punched in instructions to the computer to wake him when analysis was finished. Then he went off to bed.

In another room, Leavitt was carefully feeding similar chips into a different machine, an amino-acid analyzer. As he did so, he smiled slightly to himself, for he could remember how it had been in the old days, before AA analysis was automatic.

In the early fifties, the analysis of amino acids in a protein might take weeks, or even months. Sometimes it took years. Now it took hours- or at the very most, a day- and it was fully automatic.

Amino acids were the building blocks of proteins. There were twenty-four known amino acids, each composed of a half-dozen molecules of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Proteins were made by stringing these amino acids together in a line, like a freight train. The order of stringing determined the nature of the protein- whether it was insulin, hemoglobin, or growth hormone. All proteins were composed of the same freight cars, the same units. Some proteins had more of one kind of car than another, or in a different order. But that was the only difference. The same amino acids, the same freight cars, existed in human proteins and flea proteins.

That fact had taken approximately twenty years to discover.

But what controlled the order of amino acids in the protein? The answer turned out to be DNA, the genetic-coding substance, which acted like a switching manager in a freightyard.

That particular fact had taken another twenty years to discover.

But then once the amino acids were strung together, they began to twist and coil upon themselves; the analogy became closer to a snake than a train. The manner of coiling was determined by the order of acids, and was quite specific: a protein had to be coiled in a certain way, and no other, or it failed to function.

Another ten years.

Rather odd, Leavitt thought. Hundreds of laboratories, thousands of workers throughout the world, all bent on discovering such essentially simple facts. It had all taken years and years, decades of patient effort.

And now there was this machine. The machine would not, of course, give the precise order of amino acids. But it would give a rough percentage composition: so much valine, so much arginine, so much cystine and proline and leucine. And that, in turn, would give a great deal of information.

Yet it was a shot in the dark, this machine. Because they had no reason to believe that either the rock or the green organism was composed even partially of proteins. True, every living thing on earth had at least some proteins- but that didn't mean life elsewhere had to have it.

For a moment, he tried to imagine life without proteins. It was almost impossible: on earth, proteins were part of the cell wall, and comprised all the enzymes known to man. And life without enzymes? Was that possible?

He recalled the remark of George Thompson, the British biochemist, who had called enzymes "the matchmakers of life." It was true; enzymes acted as catalysts for all chemical reactions, by providing a surface for two molecules to come together and react upon. There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of enzymes, each existing solely to aid a single chemical reaction. Without enzymes, there could be no chemical reactions.

Without chemical reactions, there could be no life.

Or could there?

It was a long-standing problem. Early in planning Wildfire, the question had been posed: How do you study a form of life totally unlike any you know? How would you even know it was alive?

This was not an academic matter. 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.)

For the next meeting, Leavitt was asked to prepare a rebuttal to the definition. He pondered it for a week, and returned with three objects: a swatch of black cloth, a watch, and a piece of granite. He set them down before the group and said, "Gentleman, I give you three living things."

He then challenged the team to prove that they were not living. He placed the black cloth in the sunlight; it became warm. This, he announced, was an example of energy conversion-radiant energy to heat.

It was objected that this was merely passive energy absorption, not conversion. It was also objected that the conversion, if it could be called that, was not purposeful. It served no function.

"How do you know it is not purposeful?" Leavitt had demanded.

They then turned to the watch. Leavitt pointed to the radium dial, which glowed in the dark. Decay was taking place, and light was being produced.

The men argued that this was merely release of potential energy held in unstable electron levels. But there was growing confusion; Leavitt was making his point.

Finally, they came to the granite. "This is alive," Leavitt said. "It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. We have a lifespan of sixty or seventy years. We cannot see what is happening to this rock for the same reason that we cannot make out the tune on a record being played at the rate of one revolution every century. And the rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark."

He held up his watch.

His point was clear enough, and they revised their thinking in one important respect. They conceded that it was possible that they might not be able to analyze certain life forms. It was possible that they might not be able to make the slightest headway, the least beginning, in such an analysis.

But Leavitt's concerns extended beyond this, to the general problem of action in uncertainty. He recalled reading Talbert Gregson's "Planning the Unplanned" with close attention, poring over the complex mathematical models the author had devised to analyze the problem. It was Gregson's conviction that:

All decisions involving uncertainty fall within two distinct categories- those with contingencies, and those without. The latter are distinctly more difficult to deal with.

Most decisions, and nearly all human interaction, can be incorporated into a contingencies model. For example, a President may start a war, a man may sell his business, or divorce his wife. Such an action will produce a reaction; the number of reactions is infinite but the number of probable reactions is manageably small. Before making a decision, an individual can predict various reactions, and he can assess his original, or primary-mode, decision more effectively.

But there is also a category which cannot be analyzed by contingencies. This category involves events and situations which are absolutely unpredictable, not merely disasters of all sorts, but those also including rare moments Of discovery and insight, such as those which produced the laser, or penicillin. Because these moments are unpredictable, they cannot be planned for in any logical manner. The mathematics are wholly unsatisfactory.

We may only take comfort in the fact that such situations, for ill or for good, are exceedingly rare.

Jeremy Stone, working with infinite patience, took a flake of the green material and dropped it into molten plastic. The plastic was the size and shape of a medicine capsule. He waited until the flake was firmly imbedded, and poured more plastic over it. He then transferred the plastic pill to the curing room.

Stone envied the others their mechanized routines. The preparation of samples for electron microscopy was still a delicate task requiring skilled human hands; the preparation of a good sample was as demanding a, craft as that ever practiced by an artisan- and took almost as long to learn. Stone had worked for five years before he became proficient at it.

The plastic was cured in a special high-speed processing unit, but it would still take five hours to harden to proper consistency. The curing room would maintain a constant temperature of 61 deg C. with a relative humidity of 10 per cent.

Once the plastic was hardened, he would scrape it away, and then flake off a small bit of green with a microtome. This would go into the electron microscope. The flake would have to be of the right thickness and size, a small round shaving 1,500 angstroms in depth, no more.

Only then could he look at the green stuff, whatever it was, at sixty thousand diameters magnification.

That, he thought, would be interesting.

In general, Stone believed the work was going well. They were making fine progress, moving forward in several promising lines of inquiry. But most important, they had time. There was no rush, no panic, no need to fear.

The bomb had been dropped on Piedmont. That would destroy airborne organisms, and neutralize the source of infection. Wildfire was the only place that any further infection could spread from, and Wildfire was specifically designed to prevent that. Should isolation be broken in the lab, the areas that were contaminated would automatically seal off. Within a half-second, sliding airtight doors would close, producing a new configuration for the lab.

This was necessary because past experience in other laboratories working in so-called axenic, or germ-free, atmospheres indicated that contamination occurred in 15 per cent of cases. The reasons were usually structural- a seal burst, a glove tore, a seam split- but the contamination occurred, nonetheless.

At Wildfire, they were prepared for that eventuality. But if it did not happen, and the odds were it would not, then they could work safely here for an indefinite period. They could spend a month, even a year, working on the organism. There was no problem, no problem at all.

Hall walked through the corridor, looking at the atomic-detonator substations. He was trying to memorize their positions. There were five on the floor, positioned at intervals along the central corridor. Each was the same: small silver boxes no larger than a cigarette packet. Each had a lock for the key, a green light that was burning, and a dark-red light.

Burton had explained the mechanism earlier. "There are sensors in all the duct systems and in all the labs. They monitor the air in the rooms by a variety of chemical, electronic, and straight bioassay devices. The bioassay is just a mouse whose heartbeat is being monitored. If anything goes wrong with the sensors, the lab automatically seals off. If the whole floor is contaminated, it will seal off, and the atomic device will cut in. When that happens, the green light will go out, and the red light will begin to blink. That signals the start of the three-minute interval. Unless you lock in your key, the bomb will go off at the end of three minutes."

"And I have to do it myself?"

Burton nodded. "The key is steel. It is conductive. The lock has a system which measures the capacitance of the person holding the key. It responds to general body size, particularly weight, and also the salt content of sweat. It's quite specific, actually, for you."

"So I'm really the only one?"

"You really are. And you only have one key. But there's a complicating problem. The blueprints weren't followed exactly; we only discovered the error after the lab was finished and the device was installed. But there is an error: we are short three detonator substations. There are only five, instead of eight."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that if the floor starts to contaminate, you must rush to locate yourself at a substation. Otherwise there is a chance you could be sealed off in a sector without a substation. And then, in the event of a malfunction of the bacteriologic sensors, a false positive malfunction, the laboratory could be destroyed needlessly."

"That seems a rather serious error in planning."

"It turns out," Burton said, "that three new substations were going to be added next month. But that won't help us now. Just keep the problem in mind, and everything'll be all right."

Leavitt awoke quickly, rolling out of bed and starting to dress. He was excited: he had just had an idea. A fascinating thing, wild, crazy, but fascinating as hell.

It had come from his dream.

He had been dreaming of a house, and then of a city- a huge, complex, interconnecting city around the house. A man lived in the house, with his family; the man lived and worked and commuted within the city, moving about, acting, reacting.

And then, in the dream, the city was suddenly eliminated, leaving only the house. How different things were then! A single house, standing alone, without the things it needed- water, plumbing, electricity, streets. And a family, cut off from the supermarkets, schools, drugstores. And the husband, whose work was in the city, interrelated to others in the city, suddenly stranded.

The house became a different organism altogether. And from that to the Wildfire organism was but a single step, a single leap of the imagination…

He would have to discuss it with Stone. Stone would laugh, as usual- Stone always laughed- but he would also pay attention. Leavitt knew that, in a sense, he operated as the idea man for the team. The man who would always provide the most improbable, mind-stretching theories.

Well, Stone would at least be interested.

He glanced at the clock. 2200 hours. Getting on toward midnight. He hurried to dress.

He took out a new paper suit and slipped his feet in. The paper was cool against his bare flesh.

And then suddenly it was warm. A strange sensation. He finished dressing, stood, and zipped up the one-piece suit. As he left, he looked once again at the clock.

2210.

Oh, geez, he thought.

It had happened again. And this time, for ten minutes. What had gone on? He couldn't remember. But it was ten minutes gone, disappeared, while he had dressed- an action that shouldn't have taken more than thirty seconds.

He sat down again on the bed, trying to remember, but he could not.

Ten minutes gone.

It was terrifying. Because it was happening again, though he had hoped it would not. It hadn't happened for months, but now, with the excitement, the odd hours, the break in his normal hospital schedule, it was starting once more.

For a moment, he considered telling the others, then shook his head. He'd be all right. It wouldn't happen again. He was going to be just fine.

He stood. He had been on his way to see Stone, to talk to Stone about something. Something important and exciting.

He paused.

He couldn't remember.

The idea, the image, the excitement was gone. Vanished, erased from his mind.

He knew then that he should tell Stone, admit the whole thing. But he knew what Stone would say and do if he found out. And he knew what it would mean to his future, to the rest of his life, once the Wildfire Project was finished. Everything would change, if people knew. He couldn't ever be normal again- he would have to quit his job, do other things, make endless adjustments. He couldn't even drive a car.

No, he thought. He would not say anything. And he would be all right: as long as he didn't look at blinking lights.

Jeremy Stone was tired, but knew he was not ready for sleep. He paced up and down the corridors of the laboratory, thinking about the birds at Piedmont. He ran over everything they had done: how they had seen the birds, how they had gassed them with chlorazine, and how the birds had died. He went over it in his mind, again and again.

Because he was missing something. And that something was bothering him.

At the time, while he had been inside Piedmont itself, it had bothered him. Then he had forgotten, but his nagging doubts had been revived at the noon conference, while Hall was discussing the patients.

Something Hall had said, some fact he had mentioned, was related, in some off way, to the birds. But what was it? What was the exact thought, the precise words, that had triggered the association?

Stone shook his head. He simply couldn't dig it out. The clues, the connection, the keys were all there, but he couldn't bring them to the surface.

He pressed his hands to his head, squeezing against the bones, and he damned his brain for being so stubborn.

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.

He often argued that human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable.

There were times when he saw man, with his giant brain, as equivalent to the dinosaurs. Every schoolboy knew that dinosaurs had outgrown themselves, had become too large and ponderous to be viable. No one ever thought to consider whether the human brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, making fantastic demands on the human body in terms of nourishment and blood, was not analogous. Perhaps the human brain had become a kind of dinosaur for man and perhaps, in the end, would prove his downfall.

Already, the brain consumed one quarter of the body's blood supply. A fourth of all blood pumped from the heart went to the brain, an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more- perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them.

Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he saw nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table. No flesh and blood, no hands, no eyes, no fingers. No mouths, no sex organs- all these were superfluous.

Just brains. Sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.

Idiotic.

He shook his head, thinking that he was becoming like Leavitt, conjuring up wild and improbable schemes.

Yet, there was a sort of logical consequence to Stone's ideas. If you really feared and hated your brain, you would attempt to destroy it. Destroy your own, and destroy others.

"I'm tired," he said aloud, and looked at the wall clock. It was 2340 hours- almost time for the midnight conference.

21. The Midnight Conference

THEY MET AGAIN, IN THE SAME ROOM, IN THE SAME way. Stone glanced at the others and saw they were tired; no one, including himself, was getting enough sleep.

"We're going at this too hard," he said. "We don't need to work around the clock, and we shouldn't do so. Tired men will make mistakes, mistakes in thinking and mistakes in action. We'll start to drop things, to screw things up, to work sloppily. And we'll make wrong assumptions, draw incorrect inferences. That mustn't happen."

The team agreed to get at least six hours sleep in h c twenty-four-hour period. That seemed reasonable, Since there was no problem on the surface; the infection at Piedmont had been halted by the atomic bomb.

Their belief might never have been altered had not Leavitt suggested that they file for a code name. Leavitt stated that they had an organism and that it required a code. The others agreed.

In a corner of the room stood the scrambler typewriter. It had been clattering all day long, typing out material sent in from the outside. It was a two-way machine; material transmitted had to be typed in lowercase letters, while received material was printed out in capitals.

No one had really bothered to look at the input since their arrival on Level V. They were all too busy; besides, most of the input had been routine military dispatches that were sent to Wildfire but did not concern it. This was because Wildfire was one of the Cooler Circuit substations, known facetiously as the Top Twenty. These substations were linked to the basement of the White House and were the twenty most important strategic locations in the country. Other substations included Vandenberg, Kennedy, NORAD, Patterson, Detrick, and Virginia Key.

Stone went to the typewriter and printed out his message. The message was directed by computer to Central Codes, a station that handled the coding of all projects subsumed under the system of Cooler.

The transmission was as follows: open line to transmit

UNDERSTAND TRANSMIT STATE ORIGIN

stone project wildfire

STATE DESTINATION

central codes

UNDERSTAND CENTRAL CODES

message follows

SEND

have isolated extraterrestrial organism secondary to return of scoop seven wish coding for organism end message

TRANSMITTED

There followed a long pause. The scrambler teleprinter hummed and clicked, but printed nothing. Then the typewriter began to spit out a message on a long roll of paper.

MESSAGE FROM CENTRAL CODES FOLLOWS

UNDERSTAND ISOLATION OF NEW ORGANISM PLEASE CHARACTERIZE

END MESSAGE

Stone frowned. "But we don't know enough." However, the teleprinter was impatient:

TRANSMIT REPLY TO CENTRAL CODES

After a moment, Stone typed back: message to central codes follows cannot characterize at this time but suggest tentative classification as bacterial strain end message

MESSAGE FROM CENTRAL CODES FOLLOWS

UNDERSTAND REQUEST FOR BACTERIAL CLASSIFICATION

OPENING NEW CATEGORY CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO ICDA STANDARD REFERENCE CODE FOR YOUR ORGANISM WILL BE ANDROMEDA CODE WILL READ OUT ANDROMEDA

FILED UNDER ICDA LISTINGS AS 053.9 [UNSPECIFIED ORGANISM]

FURTHER FILING AS E866 [AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT] THIS FILING REPRESENTS CLOSEST FIT TO ESTABLISHED CATEGORIES

Stone smiled. "It seems we don't fit the established categories."

He typed back: understand coding as andromeda strain accepted end message

TRANSMITTED

"Well," Stone said, "that's that."

Burton had been looking over the sheaves of paper behind the teleprinter. The teleprinter-wrote its messages out on a long roll of paper, which fell into a box. There were dozens of yards of paper that no one had looked at.

Silently, he read a single message, tore it from the rest of the strip, and handed it to Stone.

1134/443/KK/Y-U/9

INFORMATION STATUS

TRANSMIT TO ALL STATIONS

CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET

REQUEST FOR DIRECTIVE 7-12 RECEIVED TODAY BY EXEC AND NBC-COBRA

ORIGIN VANDENBERG/WILDFIRE CORROBORATION NASA/AMC

AUTHORITY PRIMARY MANCHEK, ARTHUR, MAJOR USA

IN CLOSED SESSION THIS DIRECTIVE HAS NOT BEEN ACTED UPON FINAL DECISION HAS BEEN POSTPONED TWENTY FOUR TO FORTY EIGHT HOURS RECONSIDERATION AT THAT TIME ALTERNATIVE TROOP DEPLOYMENT ACCORDING TO DIRECTIVE 7-11 NOW IN EFFECT

NO NOTIFICATION

END MESSAGE

TRANSMIT ALL STATIONS

CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET

END TRANSMISSION

The team stared at the message in disbelief. No one said anything for a long time. Finally, Stone ran his fingers along the upper corner of the sheet and said in a low voice, "This was a 443. That makes it an MCN transmission. It should have rung the bell down here."

"There's no bell on this teleprinter," Leavitt said. "Only on Level I, at sector five. But they're supposed to notify us whenever-"

"Get sector five on the intercom," Stone said.

Ten minutes later, the horrified Captain Mortis had connected Stone to Robertson, the head of the President's Science Advisory Committee, who was in Houston.

Stone spoke for several minutes with Robertson, pressed initial surprise that he hadn't heard from earlier. There then followed a heated discussion of the President's decision not to call a Directive 7-12.

"The President doesn't trust scientists," Roberts("He doesn't feel comfortable with them."

"It's your job to make him comfortable," Stone said, "and you haven't been doing it."

"Jeremy-"

"There are only two sources of contamination," Stone said. "Piedmont, and this installation. We're adequately protected here, but Piedmont-"

"Jeremy, I agree the bomb should have been dropped."

"Then work on him. Stay on his back. Get him 7-12 as soon as possible. It may already be too late."

Robertson said he would, and would call back. Before he hung up, he said, "By the way, any thoughts about the Phantom?"

"The what?"

"The Phantom that crashed in Utah."

There was a moment of confusion before the Wildfire group understood that they had missed still another important teleprinter message.

"Routine training mission. The jet strayed over the closed zone, though. That's the puzzle."

"Any other information?"

"The pilot said something about his air hose dissolving. Vibration, or something. His last communication was bizarre."

"Like he was crazy?" Stone asked.

"Like that," Robertson said.

"Is there a team at the wreck site now?"

"Yes, we're waiting for information from them. It could come at any time."

"Pass it along," Stone said. And then he stopped. "If a 7-11 was ordered, instead of a 7-12," he said, "then you have troops in the area around Piedmont."

"National Guard, yes."

"That's pretty damned stupid," Stone said.

"Look, Jeremy, I agree-"

"When the first one dies," Stone said, "I want to know when, and how. And most especially, where. The wind there is from the east predominantly. If you start losing men west of Piedmont-"

"I'll call, Jeremy," Robertson said.

The conversation ended, and the team shuffled out of the conference room. Hall remained behind a moment, going through some of the rolls in the box, noting the messages. The majority were unintelligible to him, a weird set of nonsense messages and codes. After a time he gave up; he did so before he came upon the reprinted news item concerning the peculiar death of Officer Martin Willis, of the Arizona highway patrol.