The Andromeda Strain Part 22

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 a.n.a.logous. 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 ma.s.s. 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 s.e.x 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 a.s.sumptions, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 cla.s.sification as bacterial strain end message MESSAGE FROM CENTRAL CODES FOLLOWS.

UNDERSTAND REQUEST FOR BACTERIAL CLa.s.sIFICATION.

OPENING NEW CATEGORY CLa.s.sIFICATION 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.

CLa.s.sIFICATION 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.

CLa.s.sIFICATION 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."

"Pa.s.s 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 d.a.m.ned 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.

DAY 4.

Spread

22. The a.n.a.lysis

WITH THE NEW PRESSURES OF TIME, THE RESULTS of spectrometry and amino-acid a.n.a.lysis, previously of peripheral interest, suddenly became matters of major concern. It was hoped that these a.n.a.lyses would tell, in a rough way, how foreign the Andromeda organism was to earth life forms.

It was thus with interest that Leavitt and Burton looked over the computer printout, a column of figures written on green paper: Ma.s.s SPECTROMETRY DATA OUTPUT PRINT.

PERCENTAGE OUTPUT SAMPLE 1 - BLACK OBJECT UNIDENTIFIED ORIGIN.

[Diagram of chemistry of the rock from H to Br]

ALL HEAVIER METALS SHOW ZERO CONTENT.

SAMPLE 2 - GREEN OBJECT UNIDENTIFIED ORIGIN.

[Diagram of chemistry of green object]