Michael Crichton - The Andromeda Strain

The mechanical hands, under Stone's direction, opened the little scoop-shaped trough in the side of the capsule to expose the interior.

"There," Stone said, taking his hands from the controls. The controls looked like a pair of brass knuckles; the operator slipped his own hands into them and moved his hands as he wanted the mechanical hands to move.

"Our next step," he said, "is to determine whether there is still anything in the capsule which is biologically active. Suggestions?"

"A rat," Leavitt said. "Use a black Norway."

The black Norway rat was not black at all; the name simply designated a strain of laboratory animal, perhaps the most famous strain in all science. Once, of course, it had been both black and Norwegian; but years of breeding and countless generations had made it white, small, and docile. The biological explosion had created a demand for genetically uniform animals. In the last thirty years more than a thousand strains of "pure" animals had been evolved artificially. In the case of the black Norwegian, it was now possible for a scientist anywhere in the world to conduct experiments using this animal and be assured that other scientists elsewhere could repeat or enlarge upon his work using virtually identical organisms.

"Follow with a rhesus," Burton said. "We will want to get onto primates sooner or later. The others nodded. Wildfire was prepared to conduct experiments with monkeys and apes, as well as smaller, cheaper animals. A monkey was exceedingly difficult to work with: the little primates were hostile, quick, intelligent. Among scientists, the New World monkeys, with their prehensile tails, were considered particularly trying. Many scientists had engaged three or four lab assistants to hold down a monkey while he administered an injection- only to have the prehensile tail whip up, grasp the syringe, and fling it across the room.

The theory behind primate experimentation was that these animals were closer biologically to man. In the 1950's, several laboratories even attempted experiments on gorillas, going to great trouble and expense to work with these seemingly most human of animals. However, by 1960 it had been demonstrated that of the apes, the chimpanzee was biochemically more like man than the gorilla. (On the basis of similarity to man, the choice of laboratory animals is often surprising. For example, the hamster is preferred for immunological and cancer studies, since his responses are so similar to man's, while for studies of the heart and circulation, the pig is considered most like man.)

Stone put his hands back on the controls, moving them gently. Through the glass, they saw the black metal fingers move to the far wall of the adjoining room, where several caged lab animals were kept, separated from the room by hinged airtight doors. The wall reminded Hall oddly of an automat.

The mechanical hands opened one door and removed a rat in its cage, brought it into the room, and set it down next to the capsule. The rat looked around the room, sniffed the air, and made some stretching movements with its neck. A moment later it flopped over onto its side, kicked once, and was still.

It had happened with astonishing speed. Hall could hardly believe it had happened at all.

"My God," Stone said. "What a time course."

"That will make it difficult," Leavitt said.

Burton said, "We can try tracers…"

"Yes. We'll have to use tracers on it," Stone said. "How fast are our scans?"

"Milliseconds, if necessary."

"It will be necessary."

"Try the rhesus, " Burton said. "You'll want a post on it, anyway."

Stone directed the mechanical hands back to the wall, opening another door and withdrawing a cage containing a large brown adult rhesus monkey. The monkey screeched as it was lifted and banged against the bars of its cage.

Then it died, after flinging one hand to its chest with a look of startled surprise.

Stone shook his head. "Well, at least we know it's still biologically active. Whatever killed everyone in Piedmont is still there, and still as potent as ever. " He sighed. "If potent is the word."

Leavitt said, "We'd better start a scan of the capsule."

"I'll take these dead animals," Burton said, "and run the initial vector studies. Then I'll autopsy them."

Stone worked the mechanical hands once more. He picked up the cages that held the rat and monkey and set them on a rubber conveyor belt at the rear of the room. Then he pressed a button on a control console marked AUTOPSY. The conveyor belt began to move.

Burton left the room, walking down the corridor to the autopsy room, knowing that the conveyor belt, made to carry materials from one lab to another, would have automatically delivered the cages.

Stone said to Hall, "You're the practicing physician among us. I'm afraid you've got a rather tough job right now."

"Pediatrician and geriatrist?"

"Exactly. See what you can do about them. They're both in our miscellaneous room, the room we built precisely for unusual circumstances like this. There's a computer linkup there that should help you. The technician will show you how it works."

HALL OPENED THE DOOR MARKED MISCELLANEOUS, thinking to himself that his job was indeed miscellaneous- keeping alive an old man and a tiny infant. Both of them vital to the project, and both of them, no doubt, difficult to manage.

He found himself in another small room similar to the control room he had just left. This one also had a glass window, looking inward to a central room. In the room were two beds, and on the beds, Peter Jackson and the infant. But the incredible thing was the suits: standing upright in the room were four clear plastic inflated suits in the shape of men. From each suit, a tunnel ran back to the wall.

Obviously, one would have to crawl down the tunnel and then stand up inside the suit. Then one could work with the patients inside the room.

The girl who was to be his assistant was working in the room, bent over the computer console. She introduced herself as Karen Anson, and explained the working of the computer.

"This is just one substation of the Wildfire computer on the first level," she said. "There are thirty substations throughout the laboratory, all plugging into the computer. Thirty different people can work at once."

Hall nodded. Time-sharing was a concept he understood. He knew that as many as two hundred people had been able to use the same computer at once; the principle was that computers operated very swiftly- in fractions of a second while people operated slowly, in seconds or minutes. One person using a computer was inefficient, because it took several minutes to punch in instructions, while the computer sat around idle, waiting. Once instructions were fed in, the computer answered almost instantaneously. This meant that a computer was rarely "working," and by permitting a number of people to ask questions of the computer simultaneously, you could keep the machine more continuously in operation.

"If the computer is really backed up, " the technician said, "there may be a delay of one or two seconds before you get your answer. But usually it's immediate. What we are using here is the MEDCOM program. Do you know it?"

Hall shook his head.

"It's a medical-data analyzer," she said. "You feed in information and it will diagnose the patient and tell you what to do next for therapy, or to confirm the diagnosis."

"Sounds very convenient."

"It's fast," she said. "All our lab studies are done by automated machines. So we can have complex diagnoses in a matter of minutes."

Hall looked through the glass at the two patients. "What's been done on them so far?"

"Nothing. At Level I, they were started on intravenous infusions. Plasma for Peter Jackson, dextrose and water for the baby. They both seem well hydrated now, and in no distress. Jackson is still unconscious. He has no pupillary signs but is unresponsive and looks anemic."