"All more likely to be found in an old person," Hall said.

"Did Jackson have any of those things?"

Hall took a long time to answer, then finally said, "No. He has liver disease, but not significantly."

Burton sighed. "Then we're back where we started."

"Not quite. Because Jackson and the baby both survived. They didn't hemorrhage—as far as we know—they survived untouched. Completely untouched."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that they somehow prevented the primary process, which is invasion of the organism into the vessel walls of the body. The Andromeda organism didn't get to the lungs, or the brain. It didn't get anywhere."

"But why?"

"We'll know that," Hall said, "when we know why a sixty-nine-year-old Sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a two-month-old baby."

"They seem pretty much opposites," Burton said.

"They do, don't they?" Hall said. It would be hours before, he realized Burton had given him the answer to the puzzle—but an answer that was worthless.

24. Evaluation

SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE SAID that true genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." Yet it is a peculiarity of the Wildfire team that, despite the individual brilliance of team members, the group grossly misjudged their information at several points.

One is reminded of Montaigne's acerbic comment: "Men under stress are fools, and fool themselves." Certainly the Wildfire team was under severe stress, but they were also prepared to make mistakes. They had even predicted that this would occur.

What they did not anticipate was the magnitude, the staggering dimensions of their error. They did not expect that their ultimate error would be a compound of a dozen small clues that were missed, a handful of crucial facts that were dismissed.

The team had a blind spot, which Stone later expressed this way: "We were problem-oriented. Everything we did and thought was directed toward finding a solution, a cure to Andromeda. And, of course, we were fixed on the events that had occurred at Piedmont. We felt that if we did not find a solution, no solution would be forthcoming, and the whole world would ultimately wind up like Piedmont. We were very slow to think otherwise."

The error began to take on major proportions with the cultures.

Stone and Leavitt had taken thousands of cultures from the original capsule. These had been incubated in a wide variety of atmospheric, temperature, and pressure conditions. The results of this could only be analyzed by computer.

Using the GROWTH/TRANSMATRIX program, the computer did not print out results from all possible growth combinations. Instead, it printed out only significant positive and negative results. It did this after first weighing each petri dish, and examining any growth with its photoelectric eye.

When Stone and Leavitt went to examine the results, they found several striking trends. Their first conclusion was that growth media did not matter at all—the organism grew equally well on sugar, blood, chocolate, plain agar, or sheer glass.

However, the gases in which the plates were incubated were crucial, as was the light.