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 STRAIN

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 NSC-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."