The Andromeda Strain Part 3

But there was none, only a click as the connection was automatically broken. The line was dead; he hung up and sighed. It was all very unsatisfying.

Manchek expected to be called back within a few minutes by Was.h.i.+ngton; he expected to receive many calls in the next few hours, and so remained at the phone. Yet he received no calls, for he did not know that the process he had initiated was automatic. Once mobilized, the Wildfire Alert would proceed ahead, and not be recalled for at least twelve hours.

Within ten minutes of Manchek's call, the following message clattered across the scrambled maximum-security cable Five minutes later, there was a second cable which named units of the nation: the men on the Wildfire team: ***

=UNIT=.

TOP SECRET.

CODE FOLLOWS.

AS.

CBW 9/9/234/435/6778/90.

PULG COORDINATES DELTA 8997.

MESSAGE FOLLOWS.

AS.

WILDFIRE ALERT HAS BEEN CALLED. REPEAT WILDFIRE ALERT HAS BEEN CALLED. COORDINATES TO READ NASA/AMC/NSC COMB DEC. TIME OF COMMAND TO READ LL-59-07 ON DATE.

FURTHER NOTATIONS.

AS.

PRESS BLACKFACE POTENTIAL DIRECTIVE 7-L2 ALERT STATUS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

END MESSAGE.

=== DISENGAGE.

This was an automatic cable. Everything about it, including the announcement of a press blackout and a possible directive 7-12, was automatic, and followed from Manchek's call.

=UNIT=.

TOP SECRET.

CODE FOLLOWS.

AS.

MESSAGE FOLLOWS AS THE FOLLOWING MALE AMERICAN CITIZENS ARE BEING PLACED ON ZED KAPPA STATUS. PREVIOUS TOP SECRET CLEARANCE HAS BEEN CONFIRMED. THE NAMES ARE+.

STONE, JEREMY ..81.

LEAVITT, PETER ..04.

BURTON, CHARLES .L51.

CHRISTIANSENKRIKECANCEL THIS LINE CANCEL.

TO READ AS.

KIRKE, CHRISTIAN.142.

HALL, MARK.L77.

ACCORD THESE MEN ZED KAPPA STATUS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

END MESSAGE END MESSAGE.

In theory, this cable was also quite routine; its purpose was to name the five members who were being given Zed Kappa status, the code for "OK" status. Unfortunately, however, the machine misprinted one of the names, and failed to reread the entire message. (Normally, when one of the printout units of a secret trunk line miswrote part of a message, the entire message was rewritten, or else it was reread by the computer to certify its corrected form.) The message was thus open to doubt. In Was.h.i.+ngton and elsewhere, a computer expert was called in to confirm the accuracy of the message, by what is called "reverse tracing." The Was.h.i.+ngton expert expressed grave concern about the validity of the message since the machine was printing out other minor mistakes, such as "L" when it meant "1."

The upshot of all this was that the first two names on the list were accorded status, while the rest were not, pending confirmation.

Allison Stone was tired. At her home in the hills overlooking the Stanford campus, she and her husband, the chairman of the Stanford bacteriology department, had held a party for fifteen couples, and everyone had stayed late. Mrs. Stone was annoyed: she had been raised in official Was.h.i.+ngton, where one's second cup of coffee, offered pointedly without cognac, was accepted as a signal to go home. Unfortunately, she thought, academics did not follow the rules. She had served the second cup of coffee hours ago, and everybody was still there.

Shortly before one a.m., the doorbell rang. Answering it, she was surprised to see two military men standing side by side in the night. They seemed awkward and nervous to her, and she a.s.sumed they were lost; people often got lost driving through these residential areas at night.

"May I help you?"

"I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am," one said politely. "But is this the residence of Dr. Jeremy Stone?"

"Yes," she said, frowning slightly. "It is."

She looked beyond the two men, to the driveway. A blue military sedan was parked there. Another man was standing by the car; he seemed to be holding something in his hand.

"Does that man have a gun?" she said.

"Ma'am," the man said," we must see Dr. Stone at once.

It all seemed strange to her, and she found herself frightened. She looked across the lawn and saw a fourth man, moving up to the house and looking into the window. In the pale light streaming out onto the lawn, she could distinctly see the rifle in his hands.

"What's going on?"

"Ma'am, we don't want to disturb your party. Please call Dr. Stone to the door."

"I don't know if--"

"Otherwise, we will have to go get him," the man said.

She hesitated a moment, then said, "Wait here."

She stepped back and started to close the door, but one man had already slipped into the hall. He stood near the door, erect and very polite, with his hat in his hand. "I'll just wait here, ma'am," he said, and smiled at her.

She walked back to the party, trying to show nothing to the guests. Everyone was still talking and laughing; the room was noisy and dense with smoke. She found Jeremy in a corner, in the midst of some argument about riots. She touched his shoulder, and he disengaged himself from the group.

"I know this sounds funny," she said, "but there is some kind of Army man in the hall, and another outside, and two others with guns out on the lawn. They say they want to see you."

For a moment, Stone looked surprised, and then he nodded. "I'll take care of it," he said. His att.i.tude annoyed her; he seemed almost to be expecting it.

"Well, if you knew about this, you might have told--"

"I didn't," he said. "I'll explain later."

He walked out to the hallway, where the officer was still waiting. She followed her husband.

Stone said, "I am Dr. Stone."

"Captain Morton," the man said. He did not offer to shake hands. "There's a fire, sir."

"All right," Stone said. He looked down at his dinner jacket. "Do I have time to change?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

To her astonishment, Allison saw her husband nod quietly. "All right."

He turned to her and said, "I've got to leave." His face was blank and expressionless, and it seemed to her like, a nightmare, his face like that, while he spoke. She was confused, and afraid.

"When will you be back?"

"I'm not sure. A week or two. Maybe longer."

She tried to keep her voice low, but she couldn't help it, she was upset. "What is it?" she said. "Are you under arrest?"

"No," he said, with a slight smile. "It's nothing like that. Make my apologies to everyone, will you?"

"But the guns--"

"Mrs. Stone," the military man said, "it's our job to protect your husband. From now on, nothing must be allowed to happen to him."

"That's right," Stone said. "You see, I'm suddenly an important person. " He smiled again, an odd, crooked smile, and gave her a kiss.

And then, almost before she knew what was happening, he was walking out the door, with Captain Morton on one side of him and the other man on the other. The man with the rifle wordlessly fell into place behind them; the man by the car saluted and opened the door.

Then the car lights came on, and the doors slammed shut, and the car backed down the drive and drove off into the night. She was still standing by the door when one of her guests came up behind her and said, "Allison, are you all right?"

And she turned, and found she was able to smile and say, "Yes, it's nothing. Jeremy had to leave. The lab called him: another one of his late-night experiments going wrong."

The guest nodded and said, "Shame. It's a delightful party."

In the car, Stone sat back and stared at the men. He recalled that their faces were blank and expressionless. He said, "What have you got for me?"

"Got, sir?"

"Yes, dammit. What did they give you for me? They must have given you something."

"Oh. Yes sir."

He was handed a slim file. Stenciled on the brown cardboard cover was PROJECT SUMMARY: SCOOP.

"Nothing else?" Stone said.

"No sir."

Stone sighed. He had never heard of Project Scoop before; the file would have to be read carefully. But it was too dark in the car to read; there would be time for that later, on the airplane. He found himself thinking back over the last five years, back to the rather odd symposium on Long Island, and the rather odd little speaker from England who had, in his own way, begun it all.

In the summer of 1962, J. J. Merrick, the English biophysicist, presented a paper to the Tenth Biological Symposium at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The paper was ent.i.tled "Frequencies of Biologic Contact According to Speciation Probabilities." Merrick was a rebellious, unorthodox scientist whose reputation for clear thinking was not enhanced by his recent divorce or the presence of the handsome blond secretary he had brought with him to the symposium. Following the presentation of his paper, there was little serious discussion of Merrick's ideas, which were summarized at the end of the paper.

I must conclude that the first contact with extraterrestrial life will be determined by the known probabilities of speciation. It is an undeniable fact that complex organisms are rare on earth, while simple organisms flourish in abundance. There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates, and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man.

With this frequency of speciation goes a corresponding frequency in numbers. Simple creatures are much more common than complex organisms. There are three billion men on the earth, and that seems a great many until we consider that ten or even one hundred times that number of first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the bacteria can be contained within a large flask.

All available evidence on the origin of life points to an evolutionary progression from simple to complex life forms. This is true on earth. It is probably true throughout the universe. Shapley, Merrow, and others have calculated the number of viable planetary systems in the near universe. My own calculations, indicated earlier in the paper, consider the relative abundance of different organisms throughout the universe.

My aim has been to determine the probability of contact between man and another life form. That probability is as follows:

FORM: PROBABILITY.

Unicellular organisms or less (naked genetic in formation): .7840 Multicellular organisms, simple: .1940 Multicellular organisms, complex but lacking coordinated central nervous system: .0140 Multicellular organisms with integrated organ systems including nervous system: .0018 Multicellular organisms with complex nervous system capable of handling 7+ data (human capability): .0002 TOTAL: 1.0000.

These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.

Later, Merrick himself considered the possibility that the first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the moon by the first men to go there.This idea was received with amus.e.m.e.nt by the a.s.sembled scientists.

One of the few who took it seriously was Jeremy Stone. At the age of thirty-six, Stone was perhaps the most famous person attending the symposium that year. He was professor of bacteriology at Berkeley, a post he had held since he was thirty, and he had just won the n.o.bel Prize.

The list of Stone's achievements-- disregarding the particular series of experiments that led to the n.o.bel Prize-- is astonis.h.i.+ng. In 1955, he was the first to use the technique of multiplicative counts for bacterial colonies. In 1957, he developed a method for liquid-pure suspension. In 1960, Stone presented a radical new theory of operon activity in E. coli and S. tabuh, and developed evidence for the physical nature of the inducer and repressor substances. His 1958 paper on linear viral transformations opened broad new lines of scientific inquiry, particularly among the Pasteur Inst.i.tute group in Paris, which subsequently won the n.o.bel Prize in 1966.