Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

The father was distant, and yet in many ways the boy worshipped him.

As an adult, James had grown up to be quite distinct from his thin, balding father. Tall and athletic, the younger Stone had a head of thick dark hair (graying now) and a quiet, driven personality. He had reached the highest level of professional success as a roboticist and artificial intelligence expert. Where his father had operated within the hallowed traditions of academia, James had become an industry darling, a perpetually single workaholic who consulted across a variety of high-tech corporations—both start-ups and venerable institutions—wielding a razor-sharp intellect to collect massive paydays.

The elder Stone passed away still a bachelor, having married (twice to the wives of his colleagues) and divorced four times. James Stone apparently decided to forgo the entire process, never marrying or having children of his own. Despite their differences, James was his father’s son in so many ways.

According to Stone, after receiving contingent approval to join the modern-day Project Wildfire early in his career, not telling his father about it was one of the hardest things he had ever done in his life.

But it’s exactly what his father would have done in his place.

THOUGH RECORDS OF the Sikorsky H-92 pilot and copilot do not exist, word of mouth indicated that they were Brazilian narcotraficantes —subjectively a pair of criminals, but objectively the best in the world at navigating the largely unpoliced cross-basin routes favored by the Colombian cartels.

The pilot did not understand why he was flying an americano , much less during the daytime; he also did not know of the huge, unmarked cash payment made to his superiors; and he was not completely sure he would make it out of this job alive.

This last concern was actually quite valid.

At Peterson AFB, the Sikorsky was under constant surveillance. An F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter had been hastily launched from just off the Pacific coast, where it was stationed aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). The carrier strike group had been dispatched under the guise of a joint American and Peruvian emergency response exercise. If the Sikorsky helicopter were to show any sign of contamination, the high-altitude fighter was one trigger word away from launching a bevy of AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air missiles.

The helicopter pilot was unaware of this information, but certainly suspected something was wrong. Wisely, he chose not to deviate from the prescribed course in the slightest—despite what was about to unfold.

“Agora, nos descemos,” the pilot said to the American. “Brace. Brace yourself.”

In the cabin, James heard the static-filled voice of the pilot over his headphones.

“Why here?” he replied, scanning the unbroken jungle below. “We need to be closer.”

“ Quarantena . Thirty miles.”

Quarantine zone. So the government had learned something since Piedmont. If the AS-2 plastiphage microparticle were airborne near the site, it could infect low-flying aircraft. In recovered cabin video, James can be seen hastily checking the rubber of the window gasket—running a finger along the soft plastic seal and examining it.

Still intact.

The second evolution of the Andromeda Strain, called AS-2, was known to dechain the polymers that made up synthetic rubber, especially the early blends synthesized before the microparticle had been studied. And although the information was classified, James Stone knew that Andromeda still permeated the nitrogen-rich mesosphere high above them.

Stone exhaled a deep breath.

If an AS-2 strain had infected the helicopter, he’d know it already. With vital engine parts disintegrating, they would have careened into the jungle and died in a crunch of metal and dirt—as had the unfortunate pilot of the F-40 Scavenger jet that had streaked over the Piedmont site after first contact. Or like the Andros V spacecraft, which had come crashing down in a fiery blaze on February 17, 1967, its tungsten-and-plastic-laminate heat shield turned to sterile dust.

Confident that his fiery demise wasn’t coming in the next few seconds, Stone turned to what lay beyond the window. Everything outside was Terra Indigena—mile after mile of government-protected land. He wondered whether the Brazilian government had even been informed of this mission.

He doubted it.

Stone caught sight of a plume of red smoke outside, rising from a clear-cut patch of jungle near a riverbank. A smallish, recently constructed maloca hut sprouted from the center of the clearing, surrounded by hacked vegetation and fallen trees.

It looked like a scar to Stone, a cigarette burn on the face of the pristine jungle.

To the pilot, however, the clearing looked like the only landing pad within five hundred miles. Flying past and gaining altitude, he wheeled the bird into a wide circle to surveil the area and alert the people below that he would be coming in for a landing.

In the audio logs, a burst of confused and frightened dialogue can be heard ricocheting between the pilot and copilot. Three seconds later, the pilot yanked the control stick and dropped the Sikorsky into a stomach-churning descent. The anomaly was barely discernible on the horizon. But for an instant, something else had been briefly visible in the treetops—still several miles away.

Stone clearly saw it, too.

“Wait!” he called over the radio. “What was that? In the trees?”

The chopper only sank faster, spiraling, rapidly losing altitude.

“Go. Now!” the pilot shouted at Stone, tapping his copilot.

The copilot climbed back into the cabin, reaching across Stone’s lap and unceremoniously yanking open the rolling side door. Shrinking back, Stone saw they were still a hundred feet up. Outside, a roaring mass of jungle canopy shuddered under the pounding rotors, and the cabin was filled with a wash of humid air.

Craning his neck, Stone was able to snatch a final, puzzling glance of the bizarre scene in the distance.

Then the Sikorsky sank below the tree line, jolting onto the ground, tires bouncing on the red mud of the clearing. As the helicopter settled, the pilot left the controls and joined his copilot in the cabin, rushing to detach Stone’s luggage where it was secured in webbed fabric. They ignored the American, shouting to one another in Portuguese, leaving the engines running and the rotors spinning.

Stone still could not quite understand what it was he had seen.

It appeared at first to be a wave of darkness washing over the tree canopy. A swarm of black shapes, thrashing like a school of salmon going upstream—a ripple of movement under the electric green foliage.

“Senhor!” shouted Stone, over the noise of the rotors. “What was that? Were they—”

Stone’s voice cut out as the pilots turned to him.

It was the naked fear on the faces of what he would later describe as “hard men” that took Stone’s breath away. And at that moment, some symmetry in the twisting shapes he had seen coalesced in his mind.

The pilot and copilot tossed out Stone’s black hard-case luggage. Stone hastily gathered his papers, snatched up his duffel bag, and got to his feet. He stood in the open doorway for a moment, a lean silhouette against the crimson sunlight outside.

Stone turned to the pilot, his voice hollow as he spoke. “Those were monkeys, weren’t they? Swinging through the upper branches in a panic. Hundreds of them. A thousand.”

The pilot said nothing, emotionless behind mirrored sunglasses. Without warning, his copilot took hold of Stone’s shoulders and roughly shoved him through the helicopter door. He tumbled out and fell to his knees on the muddy ground.