The Andromeda Strain
"I was awake way past my bedtime. My arms were numb from propping up my head . . . I was very likely disturbing my wife's sleep. But I was well into Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain. And he had me convinced it was all really happening."
New York Times
"Michael Crichton has no peer at venturing off to the fringes of scientific research and dreaming up a yarn that will frighten readers."
Orlando Sentinel
"A terrific novelist . . . He could make most readers lose sleep all night and call in sick the next day."
San Francisco Chronicle
"The master of the high-concept techno-thriller . . . he has a facile command for detail in easy-to-grasp metaphors . . . He has a knack for plotting at megahertz speed."
Chicago Sun-Times
"A winner . . . filled with gut-tightening tension."
San Antonio Express-News
Gripping . . . edifying . . . What an amazing imagination."
New York Newsday
"CRICHTON IS A MASTER STORYTELLER"
Detroit News
"Brims with authority, moves at white-hot speed. Disconnect the doorbell, take the phone off the hook. Once you start this gripper of a novel, you'll tolerate no interruption."
Buffalo News(NY)
"[Crichton] has perfected the fusion of thriller with science fiction."
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"He likes to immediately hit readers between the eyes with plots involving breathtaking technology, then keep them on the edge of their litery seats with a breathless series of near-disasters."
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Crichton excels at mixing science and storytelling, incorporating the former seamlessly into the latter."
Raleigh News and Observer
"Michael Crichton isn't for scaredy-babies . . . he carouses through the landscape of scientific development, presenting one frightening possibility after another."
New York Daily News
"TERRIFYING."
Library Journal
"Science fiction, which once frightened because it seemed so far out, now frightens because it seems so near. The Andromeda Strain is as matter-of-fact as the skull-and-crossbones instructions on a bottle of poison—and just as chillingly effective."
Life
"Impressive . . . A splendidly proficient craftsman . . . The wellsprings of his curiosity [never] run dry."
Washington Times
"An expert at predicting some of the more troubling aspects of the modern zeitgeist . . . The very possibility of his premise lingers in your imagination. Michael Crichton has become a master at making the incredible credible."
Greensboro News & Record
"Crichton has proven he knows how to rachet up the fear factor."
Denver Post
"He is a master at blending edge-of-the-chair adventure with a scientific seminar, educating his readers as he entertains them."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"He is without peer."
Chattanooga Times
Books by Michael Crichton
Fiction
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN
THE TERMINAL MAN
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
EATERS OF THE DEAD
CONGO
SPHERE
JURASSIC PARK
RISING SUN
DISCLOSURE
THE LOST WORLD
AIRFRAME
PREY
STATE OF FEAR
NEXT
PIRATE LATITUDES
Nonfiction
FIVE PATIENTS
JASPER JOHNS
ELECTRONIC LIFE
TRAVELS
This book was previously published in mass market by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.; it has also been published in mass market November 2003 and in trade paperback February 2007 by Avon Books, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, New York 10022-5299
Copyright © 1969 by Centesis Corporation
ISBN 978-0-06-170315-7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper paperbacks, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
First Harper paperback printing: November 2008
First Avon Books trade paperback printing: February 2007
First Avon Books mass market printing: November 2003
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Printed in the United States of America
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10 9 8 7
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
for
A.C.D., M.D.,
who first proposed
the problem
The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated.
—Jeremy Stone
Increasing vision is increasingly expensive.
—R. A. Janek
CONTENTS
Books
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
DAY 1:
1. The Country of Lost Borders
2. Vandenberg
3. Crisis
4. Alert
DAY 2: Piedmont
5. The Early Hours
6. Piedmont
7. "An Unusual Process"
8. Directive 7-12
9. Flatrock
10. Stage I
11. Decontamination
DAY 3: Wildfire
12. The Conference
13. Level V
14. Miscellaneous
15. Main Control
16. Autopsy
17. Recovery
18. The Noon Conference
19. Crash
20. Routine
21. The Midnight Conference
DAY 4: Spread
22. The Analysis
23. Topeka
24. Evaluation
25. Willis
26. The Seal
27. Scared to Death
28. The Test
29. Three Minutes
DAY 5: Resolution
30. The Last Day
Epilogue
References
About the Author
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK RECOUNTS the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis.
As in most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and foolishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly everyone involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of unaccountable stupidity. It is therefore impossible to write about the events without offending some of the participants.
However, I think it is important that the story be told. This country supports the largest scientific establishment in the history of mankind. New discoveries are constantly being made, and many of these discoveries have important political or social overtones. In the near future, we can expect more crises on the pattern of Andromeda. Thus I believe it is useful for the public to be made aware of the way in which scientific crises arise, and are dealt with.
In researching and recounting the history of the Andromeda Strain, I received the generous help of many people who felt as I did, and who encouraged me to tell the story accurately and in detail.
My particular thanks must go to Major General Willis A. Haverford, United States Army; Lieutenant Everett J. Sloane, United States Navy (Ret.); Captain L. S. Waterhouse, United States Air Force (Vandenberg Special Projects Division); Colonel Henley Jackson and Colonel Stanley Friedrich, both of Wright Patterson; and Murray Charles of the Pentagon Press Division.
For their help in elucidating the background of the Wildfire Project, I must thank Roger White, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Houston MSQ; John Roble, NASA Kennedy Complex 13; Peter J. Mason, NASA Intelligence (Arlington Hall); Dr. Francis Martin, University of California (Berkeley) and the President's Science Advisory Council; Dr. Max Byrd, USIA; Kenneth Vorhees, White House Press Corps; and Professor Jonathan Percy of the University of Chicago (Genetics Department).
For their review of relevant chapters of the manuscript, and for their technical corrections and suggestions, I wish to thank Christian P. Lewis, Goddard Space Flight Center; Herbert Stanch, Avco, Inc.; James P. Baker, Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Carlos N. Sandos, California Institute of Technology; Dr. Brian Stack, University of Michigan; Edgar Blalock, Hudson Institute; Professor Linus Kjelling, the RAND Corporation; Dr. Eldredge Benson, National Institutes of Health.
Lastly, I wish to thank the participants in the Wildfire Project and the investigation of the so-called Andromeda Strain. All agreed to see me and, with many, my interviews lasted over a period of days. Furthermore, I was able to draw upon the transcripts of their debriefing, which are stored in Arlington Hall (Substation Seven) and which amounted to more than fifteen thousand pages of typewritten manuscript. This material, stored in twenty volumes, represents the full story of the events at Flatrock, Nevada, as told by each of the participants, and I was thus able to utilize their separate viewpoints in preparing a composite account.
This is a rather technical narrative, centering on complex issues of science. Wherever possible, I have explained the scientific questions, problems, and techniques. I have avoided the temptation to simplify both the issues and the answers, and if the reader must occasionally struggle through an and passage of technical detail, I apologize.
I have also tried to retain the tension and excitement o events in these five days, for there is an inherent drama in the story of Andromeda, and if it is a chronicle of stupid, deadly blunders, it is also a chronicle of heroism and intelligence.
M.C.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 1969
DAY 1
Contact
1. The Country of Lost Borders
A MAN WITH BINOCULARS. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.
Lieutenant Roger Shawn must have found the binoculars difficult. The metal would be cold, and he would be clumsy in his fir parka and heavy gloves. His breath, hissing out into the moonlit air, would have fogged the lenses. He would be forced to pause to wipe them frequently, using a stubby gloved finger.
He could not have known the futility of this action. Binoculars were worthless to see into that town and uncover its secrets. He would have been astonished to learn that the men who finally succeeded used instruments a million times more powerful than binoculars.
There is something sad, foolish, and human in the image of Shawn leading against a boulder, propping his arms on it, and holding the binoculars to his eyes. Though cumbersome, the binoculars would at least feel comfortable and familiar in his hands. It would be one of the last familiar sensations before his death.
We can imagine, and try to reconstruct, what happened from that point on.
Lieutenant Shawn swept over the town slowly and methodically. He could see it was not large, just a half-dozen wooden buildings, set out along a single main street. It was very quiet: no lights, no activity, no sound carried by the gentle wind.
He shifted his attention from the town to the surrounding hills. They were low, dusty, and blunted, with scrubby vegetation and an occasional withered yucca tree crusted in snow. Beyond the hills were more hills, and then the flat expanse of the Mojave Desert, trackless and vast. The Indians called it the Country of Lost Borders.
Lieutenant Shawn found himself shivering in the wind. It was February, the coldest month, and it was after ten. He walked back up the road toward the Ford Econovan, with the large rotating antenna on top. The motor was idling softly; it was the only sound he could hear. He opened the rear doors and climbed into the back, shutting the doors behind him.
He was enveloped in deep-red light: a night light, so that he would not be blinded when he stepped outside. In the red light the banks of instruments and electronic equipment glowed greenly.
Private Lewis Crane, the electronics technician, was there, also wearing a parka. He was hunched over a map, making calculations with occasional reference to the instruments before him.
Shawn asked Crane if he were certain they had arrived at the place, and Crane confirmed that they had. Both men were tired: they had driven all day from Vandenberg in search of the latest Scoop satellite. Neither knew much about the Scoops, except that they were a series of secret capsules intended to analyze the upper atmosphere and then return. Shawn and Crane had the job of finding the capsules once they had landed.
In order to facilitate recovery, the satellites were fitted with electronic beepers that began to transmit signals when they came down to an altitude of five miles.
That was why the van had so much radio-directional equipment. In essence, it was performing its own triangulation. In Army parlance it was known as single-unit triangulation, and it was highly effective, though slow. The procedure was simple enough: the van stopped and fixed its position, recording the strength and direction of the radio beam from the satellite. Once this was done, it would be driven in the most likely direction of the satellite for a distance of twenty miles. Then it would stop and take new coordinates. In this way, a series of triangulation points could be mapped, and the van could proceed to the satellite by a zigzag path, stopping every twenty miles to correct any error. The method was slower than using two vans, but it was safer—the Army felt that two vans in an area might arouse suspicion.
For six hours, the van had been closing on the Scoop satellite. Now they were almost there.
Crane tapped the map with a pencil in a nervous way and announced the name of the town at the foot of the hill: Piedmont, Arizona. Population forty-eight; both men laughed over that, though they were both inwardly concerned. The Vandenberg ESA, or Estimated Site of Arrival, had been twelve miles north of Piedmont. Vandenberg computed this site on the basis of radar observations and 1410 computer trajectory projections. The estimates were not usually wrong by more than a few hundred yards.
Yet there was no denying the radio-directional equipment, which located the satellite beeper directly in the center of town. Shawn suggested that someone from the town might have seen it coming down—it would be glowing with the heat—and might have retrieved it, bringing it into Piedmont.
This was reasonable, except that a native of Piedmont who happened upon an American satellite fresh from space would have told someone—reporters, police, NASA, the Army, someone.
But they had heard nothing.
Shawn climbed back down from the van, with Crane scrambling after him, shivering as the cold air struck him. Together, the two men looked out over the town.
It was peaceful, but completely dark. Shawn noticed that the gas station and the motel both had their lights doused. Yet they represented the only gas station and motel for miles.
And then Shawn noticed the birds.
In the light of the full moon he could see them, big birds, gliding in slow circles over the buildings, passing like black shadows across the face of the moon. He wondered why he hadn't noticed them before, and asked Crane what he made of them.
Crane said he didn't make anything of them. As a joke, he added, "Maybe they're buzzards."
"That's what they look like, all right," Shawn said.
Crane laughed nervously, his breath hissing out into the night. "But why should there be buzzards here? They only come when something is dead."
Shawn lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter, protecting the flame from the wind. He said nothing, but looked down at the buildings, the outline of the little town. Then he scanned the town once more with binoculars, but saw no signs of life or movement.
At length, he lowered the binoculars and dropped his cigarette onto the crisp snow, where it sputtered and died.
He turned to Crane and said, "We'd better go down and have a look."
2. Vandenberg
THREE HUNDRED MILES AWAY, in the large, square, windowless room that served as Mission Control for Project Scoop, Lieutenant Edgar Comroe sat with his feet on his desk and a stack of scientific-journal articles before him. Comroe was serving as control officer for the night; it was a duty he filled once a month, directing the evening operations of the skeleton crew of twelve. Tonight, the crew was monitoring the progress and reports of the van coded Caper One, now making its way across the Arizona desert.